The knot tightened in Kevin’s stomach as he drove through the Dorothea Dix campus, returning for the first time in 15 years, the macadam road cutting through large, rolling fields, lurching, then leveling when approaching Cherry and Ashby, two long-term adolescent wards he’d lived in as a teen. The knot tightened more when he looked out his window at the small brick cottage where the crazy man with silver hair and coke bottle glasses had lived. Every day at 3 p.m., the crazy man would walk past Ashby, and they would wait for him, staring out the wired screen day room window, slapping the thick wires as he passed. The crazy man would wave his arms above his head, then point at them, sometimes giving them the finger. One time, the crazy man sprinted back up the street toward his cottage.
Kevin’s two closest friends, Timmy and Lester, would laugh with him. The crazy man would walk past Ashby the next day, at the same time. “Crazy man,” they’d say to each other before returning to the pale green couch to watch People’s Court on the rabbit-eared TV. Judge Wapner would yell at the defendant and slam his gavel as they ate state-issued saltines with state peanut butter. Judge Wapner was crazy too. Crazy old man.
Kevin had seen the “Dix 306” signs lately in front yards, reminding him of his two years at Dix as a teen. The “306” stood for a legislative resolution to convert the campus into a pristine, urban park after the hospital closed, and the knot had begun to form more each day he passed the signs, tightening fully, the same feeling he’d had whenever his parents drove him back to campus after a home visit. He parked his battered Nissan pick-up in the empty Cherry building lot, backing into a space so he could see the crazy man’s cottage to his right, Cherry to his left, and Ashby in the foreground. He wondered if anyone would consider him suspicious, someone there to help one of the patients escape, or “run,” as the Dix language had referred to it back then. Did the staff still use the same language to describe patient situations? He rolled down his window and leaned his head against the headrest.
One day they’d waited for the crazy man to walk past Ashby, but he never came. Timmy and Lester had returned to the couch to watch Judge Wapner scold a woman for keying her neighbor’s car. “What’s wrong with you?” Judge Wapner had asked. “What’s wrong with people today?”
Timmy and Lester laughed, peanut butter stuck to their gums. Kevin walked out of the day room and into the hall, toward Mr. Nelson, who was sitting at the desk outside the nurses' station separating the male ward from the female ward.
“Want to shoot some hoops?” Kevin said.
“I have to fill out these charts,” he said.
Mr. Nelson, a former basketball player at Shaw University, would often shoot with him and the other boys.
“Maybe next time!” Kevin said, shooting an air jumper as he turned to walk toward his bedroom. Mr. Nelson laughed.
Kevin grabbed the slick, pavement-worn ball from his bed, a cheap, rubber Spalding from K-Mart, a Christmas present from the state. He dribbled down the stairs and opened the door leading to the parking lot. Ashby was the unlocked ward and he’d be discharged for rehabilitation in a few months, the Lithium and steady therapy subduing his bipolar disorder.
He dribbled toward the goal, which straddled the edge of the pavement and a large, hilly field. He began to shoot jumpers from behind the chalk key he’d drawn across the pavement a few days before, hitting 4 out of 10 shots. Not too bad, he thought, but he could do better. His last shot missed so badly that it clanked rim and ricocheted across the parking; as he chased the ball, he saw a red convertible passing on the road cutting between Cherry and Ashby. The convertible slowed, and the passengers, all boys his age, stared at him. Then the boy at the wheel yelled.
“Hey, what kind of shot was that?”
Kevin picked up the ball and stared at them.
“Yeah,” one of the passengers said.
The knot tightened in his throat now.
“Crazy fucker,” the driver yelled. They all laughed as the car cruised up the road.
Kevin dribbled back toward the goal, then turned around to watch them drive past the crazy man’s cottage. He wondered if they’d wait for the crazy man to step outside, and if they’d yell at him too, but instead the convertible turned around and headed back in his direction. He wanted them to wait for the crazy man to step outside.
“Hey, fucker,” one of the passengers yelled. “Didn’t you hear us the first time?”
Kevin dribbled the ball, his hands shaking. This time they had stopped in the middle of the road. He tried to yell, but the words were caught in his throat, and what came out was a squeal. “Fuck off!”
The boys all laughed. A blue Aerostar mini-van with state tags was now behind them, and they were forced to move. The driver gave Kevin the finger as he sped off.
Kevin turned back toward the goal and eyed the rim, which Mr. Nelson had always told him to do—eye the rim, square your feet. But he couldn’t shoot. He just wanted to sit down. There was a picnic table next to the goal, and he dribbled to it and just sat there, wondering what he’d done to deserve this shit. He wasn’t crazy.
Yellow foam poked out of the headrest’s upholstery, scratching his neck. A short, plump man with a patch of brown hair walked toward his truck, keys dangling from his waist.
“Can I help you?” the man said.
He looked into the man’s eyes, dark circles beneath them. He felt guilty, caught, a sense of shame he’d felt here as a child.
“I don’t know,” Kevin said, shielding his eyes from the sun.
The man scratched his chin.
“Well, I'm not sure you should be parked out here.”
“I know.”
“You a visitor?” the man said.
Kevin shifted in his seat. “Do you know a Mr. Nelson?”
The man’s keys chinked as he rested his arm on Kevin’s roof. “Who?
“Mr. Nelson,” Kevin said. “Used to work in Cherry and Ashby as a healthcare technician.”
“I don’t know a Mr. Nelson, sorry.”
“I was here—”
The man waved his hand. “Can’t talk about past patients.”
Kevin felt the knot in his throat now, like the day the boys in the convertible had teased him.
“When’d you start working here?”
“You should get going,” the man said.
Kevin looked toward the basketball goal in the Ashby parking lot, at the bare rim.
“Hey,” he said. “You all take donations?”
“You’ll have to contact the information line for a list of the available donation programs.”
Kevin pointed toward the goal. “Do many of the kids play on that?”
The man scratched his chin again. “Can’t talk about current or past patients.”
He thought of suggesting that the man put a chain net on the goal, as they lasted longer outdoors.
“Anything else I can help you with before you leave?”
The man slapped the pickup’s roof.
“No.”
Kevin rolled up his window. He’d let the heat come down on him while he drove through the rest of campus.
A few yards later, he stopped in the same spot where the boys in the convertible had once stopped to tease him and looked in his side view mirror at the crazy man’s cottage, at the empty driveway, but then a car horn blared, and he saw a black BMW on his bumper.
“What’s wrong with you?” Kevin said to himself. “What’s wrong with people today?”
A week after the boys in the convertible had teased Kevin, Lester ran. While a nurse drew Kevin’s blood to monitor his Lithium, he had seen Mrs. Jones, one of the 2nd shift healthcare technicians, write “ran” in red marker next to Lester’s name on the dry eraser board. The nurse, a substitute filling in for Mrs. Peters, dabbed a piece of cotton in alcohol and taped it to his arm. Mrs. Jones looked at Kevin.
“We need to talk.”
He followed Mrs. Jones down the male ward and into the conference room at the end of the ward. She pulled out a chair for him.
“Do you know anything about Lester?”
“No,” he said, looking out the wired screen window. The crazy man turned right on the sidewalk and headed toward Ashby.
“Look at me,” Mrs. Jones said.
“I don’t know anything,” he said.
“You all are close.”
“Not that close.”
The crazy man walked briskly, his arms pumping. He swatted a fly from his face, then disappeared from view. Kevin imagined Timmy watching from the day room, ready to bang the wires.
“Okay,” Mrs. Jones said.
Mrs. Jones was nice and talked with him a few times per week during what the staff called one-on-one sessions. Even conversations between patients and staff had a special name.
“Why’d he run?” Kevin said, still thinking about the crazy man.
“I don’t know,” she said.
She had short brown hair and freckles and was in her mid-twenties.
“He was going to be discharged in six months,” he said.
“I know,” she said. The hallway intercom crackled, and then a lady from McBryde—the central building—announced a PIT Major in Spruill, where the criminally insane, or those awaiting trial, were held. Mr. Nelson ran down the hall, his keys slapping his thighs. PIT stood for personal intervention technique.
“Something bothering you?” she said.
He couldn’t stop thinking of the crazy man, how the man would wave his arms above his head when they slapped the wires, or why the man would continue to walk past them everyday despite their taunts.
“No,” he said.
“It’s time for music therapy,” she said.
They walked out of the conference room and back down the male ward, passing the day room. When they passed the day room, he looked inside and saw Timmy pointing out the window. Timmy turned around to look at Kevin and laughed.
“Crazy man,” he said.
Kevin worked as a mail sorter. He’d graduated from N.C. State with a communications degree and a C+ average, but in the end it didn’t matter, because this was the job for him. Sometimes he wondered if the Postal Service knew of his hospitalization as a youth, but his psychiatrist, who he saw routinely to manage his bipolar disorder, assured him that his records were sealed. One night, he even had a nightmare about someone accusing him of slipping anthrax into envelopes in the back room. He often wondered what Timmy would say about this particular nightmare, and he thought of Timmy as he exited Dix.
The yellow foam poking out of the headrest still scratched his neck as he stared out the window at the WRAL News building, the giant satellite dishes pointing toward the sky. While stopped at a light, he remembered one time as a patient he sat in the backseat of a blue Aerostar minivan with bright yellow state tags. The driver, Mr. Ellerbe, one of the recreation counselors, was driving him to a basketball practice at the Y, and when Mr. Ellerbe stopped at a light in this same area, a woman in the next lane pointed at Kevin, saying something to her driver. The shame from that day never left him, even though he had been discharged years ago and now sat at this light in his own truck. The light turned green, and he sped toward the beltline.
During music therapy in the Ashby basement, Kevin lay on a blue plastic mat with his eyes closed, dolphin squeals in the background and the voice of Mr. Sanders.
“Imagine yourself on vacation,” he said. “At the beach.”
Mr. Sanders, a senior at UNC, was an intern, and last week, he played the guitar as they imagined a pleasant memory.
“Breathe in and out,” he said.
Timmy laughed, and Kevin remembered Lester laughing last week when Mr. Sanders plucked his guitar. “What a fruit,” Lester had said at dinner that night.
“The waves…let them carry you away,” Timmy said. Everyone laughed, but Mr. Sanders remained calm, as if he had prepared for this kind of reaction in some college class in Chapel Hill.
“No talking,” he said. “Quiet.”
Kevin thought of his first night in Dix, when they’d made him sleep in the quiet room in Williams Building, the short-term locked adolescent ward where patients were initially screened. The room had one wired screen window, a marble floor, and bare walls. Suicide-proof. The blue plastic mat was cool against his shirt.
“Quiet,” Mr. Sanders said.
To be quiet, Kevin thought, was normal here, and he wondered if Mr. Sanders had paid attention during his brief visits. The people outside, he had always thought, were crazier than the people inside. It wasn’t noisy here. It was already quiet. Too quiet.
“The waves,” Timmy said. “Float.”
“Quiet,” Mr. Sanders said.
The dolphins still squealed and Kevin opened his eyes to see Mr. Sanders sitting Indian-style on the floor, his eyes closed. He thought of Lester getting into a car parked outside the Circle K, where he’d made his escape, traffic humming, as if nothing significant were happening, like a mental patient escaping, slipping into his girlfriend’s Trans Am.
“Float,” Timmy said, then laughing. “You’re at a deserted beach.”
Everyone laughed except for Mr. Sanders.
The day after his return to Dix, Kevin pulled into the K-Mart parking lot off Blue Ridge and Western. It was Friday night, and he had nothing better to do since breaking up with Maggie, his girlfriend of three years. His father, who was now retired and living in Asheville, had always told him that he would never settle down, that his childhood had been too rough. Kevin hadn’t spoken to his biological mother in 16 years, and the last time she had tried to call him, he’d hung up the phone. “I’m sorry,” his father would always say. Kevin never blamed his father or his biological mother, at least not consciously. Numb, he’d always thought. He just wanted quiet. He shut the driver-side door and walked across the parking lot, then through the automatic glass doors, the smell of cheap plastic and popcorn filling his nose.
In the sporting goods aisle, he fingered a package containing a chain net, the links poking through the plastic. He thought of the pavement-worn Spalding against his palm, the thud against the blacktop and Mr. Nelson guarding him. Then, he saw the boys in the convertible drive by, the boy at the wheel flipping him off and his father’s voice, You’ll never settle down. It was strange how thoughts and images would mix together in his head sometimes, and as he held the package, a pimple-faced teen with shaggy brown hair asked him if he needed a rim to go along with the net.
“No, that’s okay,” Kevin said.
“Okay,” the boy said, smiling. “Just let me know if you need anything.”
Kevin could tell the boy was new to the job, because he was trying too hard.
“Okay,” Kevin said, then turning around to walk toward the front of the store to purchase the net.
“I can ring that up back here,” the boy said.
For some reason, Kevin felt the knot in his stomach, which turned into a rush of fear, as if he were being outed, a former mental patient. Even all these years later, he still felt the secret deep inside his guts, and he rarely told people that he was bipolar.
“That’ll work,” he said, following the kid back to the register in front of the guns and knives.
“Twenty-five sixty-four,” the boy said.
“Damn,” Kevin said.
“Chains,” the boy said. “All weather.”
Kevin pulled out two twenties.
“Buying this for your son?” the boy asked.
At thirty-one, he still felt like he was too young to be a father, and whenever a teen called him “sir,” he would cringe.
“No, just a donation.”
“Oh, must be for a church,” the boy said, making change.
He felt the knot in his throat now, as if this boy were one of the teens in the convertible that day. He wanted to tell the boy that the net was actually for kids at Dorothea Dix, and that he had been there himself for two years when he was his age.
“Sir?”
Kevin was looking off to the left, at the rack of basketballs, trying not to think about what he had always wanted to say, I was once a patient at Dorothea Dix Hospital.
“Sir, your change.” Kevin turned to take the change from the boy’s hands, which were cold.
“Thanks,” Kevin said, the boy eying him suspiciously.
The knot tightened hard in his stomach as he thanked the boy again and turned to walk out of the store, the glass doors opening and closing for the after-work crowd.
A few days after the latest music therapy session, with Lester still missing, Timmy and Kevin sat in the day room, waiting for the crazy man to walk past Ashby. Timmy spread state peanut butter on a state saltine with a state plastic knife. On the rabbit-eared TV Oprah discussed violent teens and their helpless parents. Timmy and Kevin laughed, then Kevin walked to the wired screen window and saw the crazy man approaching Ashby.
“Here he comes,” he said.
Timmy carried his plate to the window.
“Crazy fucker,” Timmy said, saltine crumbs in the corner of his mouth.
The crazy man pumped his arms hard, as if someone had taught him how to power walk.
“What the fuck,” Timmy said, then laughing, trying not to spit out his food.
Timmy sat his plate on top of the TV, Oprah’s voice beneath his state plate, What should parents do if their children become unmanageable?
“Let’s slap the wires hard,” Kevin said.
Timmy agreed, and they slapped the wires harder than ever before. Kevin slammed the butt of his palm so hard into the wires that he formed a dent in the screen, and Timmy slapped the wires so hard with his entire palm that he had to stop to recoup. The crazy man, now right in front of Ashby, stopped and stared at them as if this were the first time he’d heard them banging the wires as he walked past the building, provoking him. The wires felt hot against Kevin’s hands, and he became angry at the man, this crazy man who walked past their ward every day despite their taunts. This crazy man who, despite their taunts, always forgot them as soon as he finished waving his hands in the air.
“Crazy fucker,” Timmy said, now just watching the man point his finger at them.
Kevin stopped banging the wires and listened to Oprah’s voice in the background, something about a psychologist’s latest book.
“I don’t understand it,” he said to Timmy.
“What do you mean?”
“Why he keeps coming back.”
“When you’re crazy,” Timmy said, “you forget things easily.”
Kevin didn’t want to forget what it meant to be crazy, even though he knew that he wasn’t crazy. He thought of Timmy’s laugh the other day in music therapy and how Mr. Sanders sat Indian style, meditating like some kind of freak. Timmy’s laugh that day—high and sharp—was something he would never forget, even when he was discharged and tried to force himself to forget his two years as a mental patient.
“I guess I couldn’t forget anything like that,” he replied.
The crazy man walked past the edge of the building, on his way to McBryde, his arms pumping hard again, as if nothing had happened.
“Fuck it,” Timmy said, plopping back on the couch to watch the rest of Oprah.
Kevin’s palm ached.
That night, Kevin drove back to Dix to hang the chain net to the basketball goal in the Ashby parking lot. He parked in the same spot he had parked in earlier that day, the crazy man’s cottage to his right and Ashby in the foreground. The net lay in his lap, the links cold against his thigh. He stared at the goal, across the field separating Cherry from Ashby, and saw himself dribbling down the lane, Mr. Nelson on his hip.
He thought of Timmy and how hard they’d slapped the wires that day, the crazy man pointing at them, then continuing to walk as if nothing had happened. Kevin wondered if the crazy man still lived in the cottage, or if he had moved to a similar on-campus house for patients who’d needed long-term care but were allowed to live off the wards. He also wondered if the empty Cherry parking lot was an indication that Cherry was no longer in use, the hospital’s closing already begun. Mr. Sanders would want him to meditate on his moment of return, a guitar plucking in the background. Kevin laughed.
He’d read about the hospital’s imminent closing in the newspaper. Soon, he thought, there could be a Starbucks or a fancy condo complex in this very parking lot, and the crazy man’s cottage could be leveled or turned into an office. He wondered what Timmy thought of Dix’s closing, or if Timmy was even alive. Mr. Nelson had once told Kevin that Timmy would be at Dix forever, but he wondered if that was possible now and pictured Timmy in a run-down halfway house or group home. A summer breeze blew through his window, and a car passed on the road.
He didn’t know how he would hang the net without being caught, and he was surprised that someone hadn’t noticed him by now. But he didn’t care, as long as there was silence and the quietness of this place he once knew yet never forgot. The crazy man wouldn’t walk past his truck this night, and the boys in the convertible wouldn’t drive through, and there were no wires to bang and no music therapy sessions. But there was quiet and the memory that he was once crazy, and that for a few weeks after the boys in the convertible had taunted him, he’d sat on the picnic table next to the basketball goal and looked out at the street, awaiting their return.