The Adderall Diaries

by Stephen Elliott

  “It’s nice you guys are still on good terms,” I say about Lissette’s husband. She’s here with him, sharing a camping spot.

  “We’ve known each other since 1991,” she replies.

  We’d only been together a couple of weeks when I met Lissette’s husband. It was important to her that we meet because that was what honesty meant to her. I was surprised by how good looking he was. She said that he was the most important person in her life and I assured her I was comfortable being number two. But if I suggested leaving town for work or something else she would get quiet and not want to see me. Then divorce floated into their conversations and I stood panicked on street corners, terrified she would never arrive.

  I could say a few words and she would leave. It would be enough just to mention, “Since you, I’ve had girlfriends too.” But I don’t. I don’t because of the way her thighs feel. Because even though she’s not touching me back, rejecting me several times a minute, we’re leaning against each other. And finally, as the wind dies, we cross into the information tent and sit on a dust-filled couch and she lays her legs across my legs. I feel her molding over me and begin to fall asleep when she sees a boy she knows. He’s young, handsome, and thin. She kisses me on the lips and is gone.

  Toward the end of October I start to cry fairly often. I feel the first rush in my throat and my chest tightens. I cry in a carshare returning from a conference in San Jose and near my apartment or talking on the phone when a friend asks how things are going. I keep myself busy helping with a book about countries we should invade, a commentary on what it means to make the case for war. I read sad novels and do my work and feel like I’ve lost some kind of battle. Of course, I haven’t. Hans Reiser’s trial is beginning any day. I’ll stop crying soon and I’ll be happy for a while and that’s just how things will go. It’s how they always go.

  Except.

  I’m living in the Mission District again, sharing a one-bedroom apartment with a twenty-six-year-old hipster. The apartment is close to the cafés I like, and the trains. I wondered at first if I wasn’t too old to be living like this but woke one night at 2:00 AM and saw my roommate in the kitchen drinking with his buddies, and I realized this is where I belong.

  One night three friends come over. We have a pizza and set up a table with four chairs in the dining room to play bridge. My partner and I win continually, four majors, three no-trump, forty leg. Finesse the queen, lose your losers, double when it’s right. When bridge is played well it’s an elegant game. You get your cards, count your points, try to communicate in the limited language of the bid, a language without nuance or emotion and not open to interpretation. These are three of my best friends. People I met in San Francisco years ago, when I just got here. They’re not writers. They’re carpenters and engineers. They own their apartments. They’re married to brilliant, capable women, and their marriages are absurdly strong. No one I grew up with in Chicago has marriages like these.

  When they leave after three hours I clear the dishes and pull the recycling bin down to the street. I lie in bed with Stoner, by John Williams.

  What did you expect? he thought again.

  A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure—as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been.

  After a bit I place the book on the sill and look at the ceiling. I can’t go on like this, I think. The thought runs through me like electricity. On like what? It’s not like I could go see Josie and Tony in their Carolina subdivision, tell them after all these years I’ve reconsidered my choices. Ask my ex-fiancée and husband if I can move into their basement, play Nintendo with their child. I don’t even know if they have a child, but it’s a safe assumption. Josie, who was tall and thin, her pale pregnant belly stretched blue and translucent above her wiry pubic hairs. The child growing quickly. Maybe he’s six years old, or three, or one. Maybe he’s not playing Nintendo yet. Maybe he’s just a wrinkled little alien in diapers. An ugly baby, in the way most babies are, who will grow handsome and broad shouldered like both his parents. They wouldn’t welcome me into their home. That wouldn’t jibe well with their version of the American dream.

  My pillow is soaked. I go down to the street, walk along Valencia. It’s late and I don’t expect to meet anyone. The lights are still on the tennis and basketball courts in Dolores Park. The homeless sleep beneath the trees near the base of the lawn; dark masses curled quietly under bags and clothes, rusted shopping carts on guard nearby. Four Asian boys are still on the court playing two on two across from the high school. I walk to the top of the park and throw up, heaving over a bench, with a view of the Oakland Bay Bridge.

  In the morning I feel better. I write a note on my computer: be strong. I make a list of people I could have called. Girls, of course. Women who would let me come over and sleep on their couches when I need to, see me through my little episodes. It’s not a long list but it’s enough. I leave it by the side of my bed so I’ll remember it, just in case.

  Sometimes I think of this depression setting its hooks in me as a failure of my file system. I call up files I shouldn’t be thinking of. I mislabel documents and store them in a folder I’d rather bury.

  Modern file systems don’t just catalog data; they move it into the best available space. The information is continually shuffled into equal-sized digital blocks. It’s the most human part of a computer. We remember events in our lives in specific order and importance relative to our identity. Hans Reiser wanted a perfectly efficient memory tree with no wasted space. In the world he envisioned, rather than just pulling a file, you would rearrange information and create new files. It is an utterly optimistic vision, built for limitless potential. Capable of forgetting, or remembering, anything. The computer’s memory would be entirely fluid and suitable to any purpose. Instead of just naming the file, you would name everything, and store information in smaller and smaller blocks of unequal size, accessing only what you need to realize your goals. That’s why he called his company Namesys. Delete guilt, delete failure. The file system was just the beginning.

  I pop more pills, doubling my prescribed dosage. When I started taking Adderall I took five milligrams and it would last all day. Now I take twenty-five milligrams. The speed lets me lock into my own thoughts, build and rebuild my framework for understanding the world.

  “You have to be careful about not sleeping,” Roger tells me. “You can do permanent damage to your memory.” I had sent him what I’ve been writing, my “murder” book. He wants to create a special code so I can call him in an emergency but I tell him it’s not necessary. “Are you really that sad?” he asks. “No,” I say. “Not usually. Sometimes. It’s hard to write about all the boring times in between, which is what most of life is.”

  It’s Friday. There’s a party on a boat, just south of the ballpark where Barry Bonds has finished his glorious drug-addled career. The pitchers were taking drugs too. He wasn’t competing against tubby old Babe Ruth. He was competing against the new century, Roger Clemens and the pharmaceutical millennium. He wanted it more than anyone. He didn’t worry about the side effects; his home runs sailed past the bleachers, clearing the wall and landing in the tiny inlet that makes up the China Basin below downtown.

  The city has built a new train line in this area, from the ballpark to the shipyards. The University of California is expanding and all the empty lots are sectioned off, filled with bulldozers and trailers. The eastern side of the city is the only place left where any kind of development is possible. The city owns the land but we’re selling it for as much as we can get. The last of San Francisco’s poor will be pulled from the earth like weeds. Where will they go?

  The trial starts.

  BOOK 2

  The Trial

  “Then one of those things happened of which nightmares are made of.”

  —Neil Elliott, A Love Story and A Mystery,

  un
published

  “‘Everything straight lies,’ murmured the dwarf disdain fully. ‘All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.’”

  —Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

  “You’re going to be sorry for not loving me.”

  —Ricardo Zambrano to the woman

  he planned to rape and murder

  CHAPTER 7

  November; A Murder Trial Begins; Birthday Parties and Police Stations; The Children’s Doctor; Sons and Mothers; An Angry Phone Call; Cori’s Drawing; The Missing Car Seat; The Point of the Defense

  There’s a twenty-one minute video taken in 2005 of a boy’s sixth birthday party at a children’s gym in Emeryville, a shopping mall-packed landfill wedged between Oakland and Berkeley. It’s an ordinary party. A dozen children run races on rubber mats, dive headfirst into foam pools, crawl through tunnels, and flip over horse bars. The soundtrack is filled with screaming and giggling and the instructions of counselors in the background.

  Ten minutes in, the camera centers on the mother bouncing on the trampoline with the birthday boy and his younger sister. She’s barefoot, wearing a green and white print dress. She doesn’t look like a woman with two children, though maybe that’s just a stereotype. She’s gorgeous and full of energy. She doesn’t look like a murder victim and she’s nothing like a movie star. Her beauty is warm and lacking in glamour. She’s in her thirties, but there’s something younger about her. Her focus on the children is so complete it’s as if there were no one else in the entire world.

  Hours are like weeks at this age, minutes disproportionate to a world children are only starting to notice. These images are all that will last. The dress hugs the woman’s hips and floats toward her knees as she falls. The kids jump as high as they can to impress their mother. There are three men who love her. Within a year one of them will kill her. The lens tries to hold her, the viewer rising and dropping imperceptibly, the steady male gaze of the man holding the camera.

  At the end of the video all the children sit around a long table. The mother comes from behind her son with a large knife in her hand. She wraps her arm around the boy, holding him against her breast, while she cuts into the cake.

  Officer Benson was manning the desk at the Oakland police station when the mother arrived and took a seat in the open vestibule. She came every Wednesday, always early or on time, and Benson looked forward to seeing her.

  The husband arrived late with his four-year-old daughter and six-year-old son, playing with the children before surrendering them. Benson thought he was trying to antagonize her, he thought the father stood too close. He’d spent twenty-seven years on the force, enough time to recognize the messages implicit in the way a man holds his shoulders and squeezes his fists, the self-justifying set of a man’s mouth. And he could tell when a mother cared about her children and when she didn’t. He’d seen it both ways.

  The father was not a large man yet he loomed over the wife who ignored him as she zipped the children’s jackets and took their hands. It’s always like this, the late arrival, the big show, the husband like a kernel of corn shivering on a hot pan as the pretty woman with the soft accent gathers her children together and says goodbye as if nothing is wrong.

  But this time something was wrong. Benson abandoned his desk and walked outside. The father crossed the street, opened the door to a small hatchback, and drove away. The lights went on in the minivan as the children climbed inside. The night was clear. The buildings of downtown like dark obelisks framed against the hills in the distance.

  The mother waved as she drove off. He nodded then turned back to the station. He was going to give her some advice next time she came in. He was going to tell her in all seriousness, “You better get yourself a gun.”

  “Remain seated. Court is now in session.”

  There he is, the husband, the father, Hans Reiser, sitting with his attorneys at a large table in the middle of Alameda County Courtroom Nine. No one would ever notice him walking down the street, but now he’s the center of attention. He’s small and not quite handsome, with dark curly hair and the beginning of a bald patch blossoming on his crown. His bright lips come to sharp points high on his cheeks, giving him a resemblance to Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of the Joker. Two bailiffs sit behind Hans at a small industrial desk, and behind them, after a low wall, are the sixty wooden seats of the gallery.

  He’s lost a lot of weight in the year since he was accused of killing his wife. Caught on surveillance cameras in the weeks after Nina’s disappearance, he was fat with deep rings circling his eyes. He’s changed even since I last saw him six months ago during the preliminary hearings wearing yellow prison fatigues, standing in the prisoner pen holding a box full of papers. Now his features are pronounced, as if his face has come into focus. He’s probably never looked this good.

  The room around him is high and wide with smooth wood panels slicing between slabs of white stone wrapping the walls. Decorated plates separate the top and bottom windows, which offer a view of Lake Merritt. On the left sixteen padded juror chairs sit empty; on the right is a mounted flat monitor for exhibitions of evidence. In front, framed by an American and California flag and a bronze seal of the state, sits Judge Larry J. Goodman, a veteran of capital cases. Compact, with ruddy cheeks, Goodman has a reputation for casualness, late starts, early dismissals, and two-hour lunches. Beneath his robe he wears a T-shirt and jeans. His court hears only three or four cases a year and he knows as well as anyone that if every killer in Alameda demanded a trial, the system would collapse into chaos. “If it’s a felony in Sonoma,” he’s fond of saying, “it’s a misdemeanor in Oakland.”

  Near the witness box stands a portrait of Nina Reiser holding Cori. She smiles at the photographer. The naked child seems huge against her. In the divorce filings Hans accused Nina of having an affair with the photographer. I wait for Hans to look at the picture of his wife and son but he doesn’t for a long time, working instead through the great stack of papers in front of him and occasionally arguing with his lawyers. When he does look up, one hour, two hours later, he glances at Nina’s picture but nothing happens to his face.

  William Du Bois, Hans’ lead defense attorney, stands behind Hans massaging his shoulders while they wait. Du Bois’ jacket stretches across his broad back. He wears his collar high and tight around his thick neck so he resembles a well-dressed turtle. There have been rumors that Hans will fire Du Bois and defend himself. I watch the attorney’s fingers, burrowing into the navy coat, the fabric gathering at his fingertips.

  In the hallway the reporters ask about the arguments Du Bois has been having with his client. “It’s hard defending someone so smart,” Du Bois says. “He can memorize nine thousand pages of discovery so sometimes he catches mistakes in testimony and he gets upset.” Then he adds, as if surprised he’d just thought of it, “You’d be upset too if you were falsely accused of murdering your wife.”

  The court is packed for opening statements. There are a dozen journalists and people who live nearby and have nothing better to do. There are police officers with an interest and a woman who served on a jury that District Attorney Paul Hora argued in front of before. It was his most famous case, the trial of Stuart Alexander, the Sausage King. Stuart was caught on his own security cameras executing three meat inspectors at his San Leandro plant, returning to shoot each in the head. That trial lasted seven and a half months and the killer was sentenced to death.11

  “He’s a wonderful man,” the ex-juror says.

  Hora is over six feet tall, trim and rigidly straight. He says he’s going to introduce us to someone who’s not going to testify at the trial. “She was a mother,” he tells the jury, pointing at the picture. “And she would never, ever, have abandoned those kids.” He shows pictures from the inside of her house. On the refrigerator are photographs of the children above a whiteboard detailing their lunch menu for the next seven days.

  “In 2004, after five years,” Hora explains, “she
left Hans for his best friend, Sean Sturgeon. She shouldn’t have done it. Nonetheless it happens.” In late 2005 Nina left Sean for Anthony Zografos.

  When it’s Du Bois’ turn, he takes his glasses off and pulls on the bridge of his nose. “Here we have something,” he says, squinting his eyes, showing an image from a black and white magazine advertising Eastern European women. Nina smiles above an ad for Nina5972, a university student looking for a serious relationship. You see, he seems to be saying. What kind of woman has her picture in a magazine like this? A mysterious woman, that’s who. The kind that disappears.