Finally, after an hour, Nina said, “Hans, I have to go.”
It was almost 4 PM. Nina called the children upstairs. Cori wrapped his arms around her waist, squeezing as hard as he could. He didn’t kiss her because he had cavities and was afraid they might be contagious. Then Nina walked outside, or she didn’t. The children watched her, or they went back downstairs. She walked up the stairs along the side of the house to the street, which was level with the top floor, the rest of the house built along a hill three stories below the road. Hans watched her walk away and felt a strange mix of desire and sadness. The sun on the back of Nina’s legs, her ankles lifting from her sandals. He thought she looked magnificent. Hans thinks the only people who win in a divorce are the lawyers. He had wanted to tell her, when they were sitting on the couch, that they could wipe the slate clean. But she was so smug, so calm. Perhaps things would have been different if she had shown a little fear.
Here is where time fractures. Every unknown minute hanging like a string of question marks. Between 3:30 PM and 6:00 PM Nina said her last words, whatever they were. Maybe they weren’t words at all, just a surprised gurgle and a look of terror. Maybe she made a threat, struggled, tried to bite. Perhaps she worked her fingers between someone’s forearm and her neck, or wrapped her hands around someone’s wrist, the blood vessels surrounding her eyes exploding like fireworks as she stared into the face of her killer. Perhaps the children were downstairs playing on the computers with the sound turned up when Nina was dragged back inside, the arm across her throat locking out the scream, her blood spraying against the beam in the center of the living room. Maybe she stepped into the van parked at the top of the driveway in front of Hans’ mother’s house, pushed her hair back, took the battery out of her phone, rested her purse on the floor in front of the passenger seat, slid the key into the ignition…
The day before Hans Reiser finally takes the stand to explain his side of the story, Susan Grabowski is found dead from a heroin overdose. We used to meet at the canal when I was a runaway, and later when I was in the homes. She was one of the only girls around. She was blond and pretty but with bad skin. She wore blue jeans and rock shirts, hooded sweaters beneath denim jackets. The same things we all wore. She lived on the western edge of the city and went to the technical high school but caught buses into Rogers Park. I’d seen her only a couple of times in recent years when she showed up at readings I did in Chicago. She was chubbier, and suffering from back problems, but otherwise seemed the same. The back problems came from an injury she’d suffered on the job. The heroin took away the pain and the settlement paid for the addiction.
My friends want to know if I’m coming for Susan’s wake. After all, I was there for Mike’s funeral. I weigh the pros and cons. There’s a storm coming through the Midwest, and flights are delayed. It would have to be a quick trip, less than twenty-four hours, so as not to miss any of Hans’ testimony. It would cost money, that’s the thing. I’m putting a price tag on Susan’s life. Is she worth more or less than $400 and six hours in a plane? I tell them I’m not coming. It’s expensive to fly to Chicago, and Susan and I weren’t close anymore.
I’m tired of my old friends dying. I don’t know anyone in San Francisco who has lost four close childhood friends to drugs and suicide in the past six years. I keep wondering what it proves. It didn’t seem consequential at the time. We were just getting high and keeping each other company before moving on to other things. I remember showing up for a fight at the grammar school and gazing across a sea of blue jackets and torn jeans. There must have been forty of us, not a single child with both parents living in the same home, and whoever we were supposed to fight got a glimpse of our numbers and turned away. It was an average, middle-class neighborhood. Why did we end up at the bottom of it? Why did we have to find each other? We were supposed to turn out OK and we didn’t. There are no coincidences once you’re dealing with percentages.
Hans’ father hangs out in the vestibule the days before his son takes the stand. He was absent most of Hans’ childhood, only coming back into Hans’ life in the past ten years. He joined his son in Russia, where he says he was robbed by “a superbly conditioned crack addict.” Called to testify by the defense, he says he warned his son in the weeks after Nina disappeared that the people following him were “KGB or S/M techno-geeks, probably the latter.” During recess Hans’ father does one-armed push-ups in the courtroom. He has an awkward, wanting smile. He might as well be saying, I’m sorry but it’s not my fault. Obviously, I’m paranoid and crazy. Don’t blame me.
If Hans Reiser, a strange kid with an absent father, had grown up in West Rogers Park, there is no doubt he would have been one of us. Now our numbers are thinning. We’re marginalized. Until the last shot makes its final lap through our arteries, nobody knows for sure what’s true. When we die our argument dies with us. The argument we never articulated well enough, that we were failed by our parents, and the schools, and the state. The cause of death is the missing safety net.
Nietzsche said there are no facts, only interpretations. Nina Reiser was five feet five inches tall and weighed 114 pounds. She was the mother of Cori and Lila. She met Hans through a bride service in St. Petersburg, Russia. These are facts. There are things that can be known.
I know I entered the mental hospital August 31, 1986, and was released three months later into the McCormick House, where I shared a room with Cateyes, a member of an all-black gang called the Vice Lords. These are facts. He tattooed a dagger on my left shoulder, which I later covered up with a larger, more colorful tattoo. He called himself Cateyes because of his large green eyes that pinched slightly at the corners toward his ears. But he wore thick glasses and his eyesight was getting worse. No one paid attention or cared enough to try and figure out why his sight was deteriorating. He wasn’t in touch with any family except his brother, also a gang member, also living in a state-run home.
Cateyes slept with the radio playing beneath his pillow. “I dare you to turn it off,” he said. It didn’t matter; I was too afraid to sleep. Sometimes I slept in the bathroom with the door locked.
I shook when Cateyes made a fist and jerked his shoulders sharply. “It’s OK,” Big John told me. “There’s nothing wrong with being scared.” But there was everything wrong with being scared. I lost coordination in my arms and legs. I couldn’t defend myself. I was food waiting to be eaten.
Cateyes was four years older than I was and the worst kind of inconsistent friend. Sometimes I sat with him in the homework room tutoring him in math or history as he studied for his GED. They called me Einstein in that home because I would figure out how much Night Train or Mad Dog it would take to equal a pint of vodka or a six-pack of beer. Away from the home, if there was trouble, Cateyes would protect me. Hours later, back at McCormick House, he would stand over me as I sat paralyzed on the edge of the mattress while he smacked his palm, showing off his power over me, and called out to one of the other kids, “Hey, Jerry. Come here. Check this out.”
It was the time of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, and there was construction all over the South Side where we lived. There were bunting ribbons in front of buildings and blue and white signs with the mayor’s name. Washington actually lived in the same neighborhood, just closer to the lake. Farrakhan’s mosque was also nearby. So was Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition. Jackson hosted cultural conversations at Operation PUSH headquarters. Farrakhan’s house was on Woodlawn and quiet men, wearing mirrored sunglasses and suits with bow ties, stood watch in front on the grass. But we didn’t pay attention to any of that. Every week in McCormick House we piled into the van and the staff took us to the bowling alley at the Circle Campus. We would bowl, or they would give us $2 to play quarter video games. Coming home we would stop for Polish sausages and strawberry sodas at Maxwell and Halsted. House music was rising from the ground in 1986. It was a new kind of music with pounding bass, drum machines, samples, and repetitive phrases. It was music stolen from other
music and changed, like a hot-wired car on blocks at the chop shop getting new rims and a paint job. The sound was raw and melodic and could keep you dancing for hours. It was a movement flowering in the Chicago ghetto, championed by Frankie Knuckles and Trax Records. We didn’t know we were at the center of a national storm, that our music was spreading like an oil spill toward Detroit. We listened to the beats as we drove to and from Circle Campus. One day the van began to drive away and Cateyes wasn’t inside. We were dancing to the new tunes, everybody pounding on the seats. Our favorite staff member, Kev, a former gang member himself, was driving and saying, “Do it now. Do it.” And there was Cateyes running to catch up. He was so fast, running down the middle of the street, cutting between cars. Kev kept driving. “Look at him run.”
“C’mon Cateyes!”
Cateyes jumped into the van, sweating, smiling, everybody patting him on the back and he’s singing along. He knew the music better than anybody.
I remember the crowd near Cateyes’ dresser at the end of spring as he pulled off his shirt, his skin an even brown like toffee, a few tightly curled black hairs on his chest. His body was muscular, sensual, his wide back tapering neatly to his waist. He took off his thick glasses, sat them on top of the dresser, grabbed the tip of his nose with two fingers, shook his head in disbelief. He had been caught stealing by Michael, the other white kid in the home. Michael had been through Cateyes’ things. Now we waited. Cateyes swung his fist into Michael’s mouth and the group expanded to accommodate the violence as it spilled into the hallway. I don’t remember how long the fight lasted or what happened next. I remember the punch was perfect.
Here’s a fact: Cateyes went blind. When he was too old to live in McCormick he moved into the YMCA, tapping a path around the Near West Side just past the Greyhound Station. He was given a six-month independent living allowance. Then he was homeless. Then he died. It was cancer behind his eyes. The cancer was making him blind. Already, when we were roommates, his lenses thick as Coke bottles while the cancer did its work. But nobody bothered to check. He was twenty-three.
Hans Reiser created a file system to reorganize information. There are facts, but we can present them in any order we want. Here is a fact: against his attorney’s advice Hans Reiser takes the stand. Here is another fact: Hans Reiser was the last known person to see Nina alive.
The first thing Hans did when told his estranged wife was missing was spend half an hour hosing down his driveway. The cherry blossoms and leaves covered the pavement and he stood in one place, the hose hanging limply in his hand, spraying a small circle of pavement. The next morning he went to see his lawyer. His lawyer said he needed a criminal attorney and referred him to Bill Du Bois. On September 7, forty-eight hours after Nina was reported missing, Hans met Du Bois for the first time and gave him a $5,000 retainer. The police were calling but he never answered the phone. He never returned Nina’s mother’s calls. He never called Nina to see if she’d been found. He never got the chance to say, “I’m glad you’re OK. You almost cost me $5,000.”
Hans’ testimony begins March 5, 2008, and lasts eleven days, spread over a month to allow a vacation for the judge and jury. Unlike the phone call he made to his mother during which he spoke of Nina in the past tense, on the stand he speaks of Nina in the present tense. He says, “Nina has the most beautiful voice of any woman I’ve ever met. She’s very perceptive, that’s one of her gifts. I remember thinking women like her aren’t interested in me and now I wonder if maybe I should have understood that. She said she loved me but when you look at it objectively it’s hard to come to that conclusion.”
He talks about meeting Nina. It was a time when it looked like Russia was going democratic, before they tried to return the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky to Moscow Square. He liked living with her then but she didn’t like living with him. Du Bois asks why that was and Hans says, “She wouldn’t go to bed until everything was put away. I would just sort of leave things.”
“In 2000,” Hans says, “Nina was having depression issues. There was this artist in Moscow who draws pictures of people on T-shirts. This is a real artist I’m talking about and the picture he drew of Nina was really a shock. It was an extremely neurotic, unhappy Nina that he drew.”
Hans catalogs all the things he dislikes about Nina. His anger shines through as if she left him yesterday. Nothing galls him more than how much other people liked her. “She works people,” he says. “She complimented the teachers. She even stroked their hands.” He remembers her rubbing a fat man’s stomach and saying, “There’s nothing but muscle here.”
The picture he paints is of a patient, considerate woman who enjoys making other people smile. But that’s not what Hans sees. He has no idea how he’s being perceived. He has no idea what the artist saw in Nina on the street in Moscow in 2000.
In a letter to Alameda County Supervisor Gail Steele written in June 2006, Hans recommended sweeping changes to child protective services and the court’s supervisory function in custody disputes. The court had sided consistently with Nina, awarding her full legal custody of the children. The only chance Hans had left was to rearrange the system in his favor, which was no chance at all. He wrote, “This could end up being more important than my two decades of work in computer science, if you decide to back it.” The letter is many pages long, paranoid, narcissistic. He felt unjustly punished by the state and asked rhetorically, “Does inaccurate punishment damage the psychology of those punished, and increase the likelihood of later real domestic violence?”
Under cross-exam Hans is unable to account for any of his actions following Nina’s disappearance. He either doesn’t answer or he lies. When his mother returned from Burning Man, Hans had cleaned the house, something he had never done before. He had also never cleaned the car, but this time he did. He says he cleaned the car to please his mother but then he hid the car from her and wouldn’t give it back. Then he changes his testimony to say that he cleaned the car because it smelled of spilled milk. He cleaned the car by filling it with an inch of water. He says he thought there was a drainage hole, but there wasn’t. He says there was a drainage hole in the floor of his previous car, but that turns out not to be true.
Before he was told Nina was missing, Hans showed up at his kids’ school saying he wanted to put his mother’s name on the pickup list, but she was already on the pickup list. He left the school his phone number, in case of emergency, but the number he left was wrong. On Friday, September 8, for the first time, Hans engaged in countersurveillance. He drove onto the highway, got off, got back on going the other way, slowed down, sped up, parked by the side of the road, then pulled out again. He wanted to know if he was being followed, and he was. He says he was feeling paranoid because the day before a man had approached him at the school and offered to watch his children.
On the stand he recites the license plate number of the officer who followed him five days after the murder, but can’t remember other, more basic things. He can’t remember where he was when he removed the passenger seat from the car and he can’t remember where he threw it away. He says he threw it away instead of storing it at his mother’s house because his mother was trying to get custody of Cori and Lila and he wasn’t allowed to be there. But he went there almost every day, and slept at her house at least three times that week. He also removed the rear assembly from the car and threw that away. He says he was going to fill it in with futon foam and bring his mother her new, fixed-up car, a bed on four wheels.
None of his testimony adds up. He says he didn’t call Nina to find out why she didn’t pick up the children because he wasn’t supposed to call her. But he had called her twenty-six times the month before. Once he called her three times in ten minutes. He says he withdrew $10,000 from banks and ATMs because of a new policy his credit union had instituted, charging a fee for cash advances on credit cards. But the new policy had actually gone into effect more than a year earlier. He says he was not in the habit of removing the battery from his phon
e, then admits that was a lie.
“You willfully concealed the fact that you had removed the battery from your phone?” Hora asks.
“Yes,” Hans replies. “And I feel badly about that.”
He drove almost two hours outside of Oakland to examine storage lockers big enough to hide the car and priced out a one-way U-Haul back to the city. He says he wanted to live in the storage locker, seventy-five miles away from his children and his business. He stayed in campgrounds two hours from his home and denies knowing there was a campground just a mile away from the house he lived in for thirty years. He says he was sleeping in his car and went to the campgrounds to shower. But he had a membership at 24 Hour Fitness.
He tells the jury it’s important to understand that since the divorce, Nina liked Lila more than Cori. This is the most important thing. If they understand this, they’ll understand everything. His testimony is bizarre, rambling. He objects. He answers questions he isn’t asked. He answers questions with questions, just as Sean had with me. He says, “All my life people have been doing things. Like in grade school kids would pick on me. They would chase me. I’ve been losing social interactions all my life… I can’t communicate effectively because that’s not how scientists talk. I have a habit; I have a compulsive tendency to say things that I know are true, that people do not want to be true. If you tell people things they don’t want to hear, they don’t like you for it. If you prove it, they hate you even more. I realize now all my problems were caused by not looking people in the eye. A third of the population can be vicious to me. It had been building and building. I’d been losing all these social battles. And then they took away [my children] the only important thing to me. And the facts didn’t matter. They just didn’t matter.”
The Adderall Diaries Page 15