The Adderall Diaries

by Stephen Elliott

  The volunteers are divided into teams of five or six, including a cadaver dog and handler. Each searcher has a radio and reports to two supervisors stationed at the watershed. Throughout the day, dispatch sends food and supplies. Everyone knows this will likely be the last major search for Nina’s body. The searchers are instructed to go one hundred feet from the trails and not take any risks. The fire roads are clear but most of the paths are tight and dusty. Poison oak is everywhere. The trees merge above the trails, blocking the sun. Throughout the area there are steep drops but so much growth it doesn’t seem that a body would clear without getting hung in the brush. There are places where, if a body did clear the ridge to the valley floor, it would never be found.

  In any murder there are thousands of pieces of evidence but only one body, so the searchers hope to find a clue: a scrap of clothing, a piece of jewelry, something that could narrow the area to a quadrant where a hundred men and women could comb shoulder to shoulder over every inch of dirt. They’re also looking for loose soil. Over time the earth tends to show where holes have been dug. If Nina is buried here, a square of loose earth should be visible somewhere.

  In most abduction cases the body is dumped near a roadside or off a trail and then covered in available materials within three hours of the crime. Only a small percentage of abductors give up the location of the body, even after they’ve been convicted. But usually the body appears on its own: a jogger notices something, a hiker spots an unusual pattern, a sailor sees something floating on the surface of a lake.

  The supervisors don’t get many calls. They wait anxiously. The sun is high and the sky is clear. Almost exactly the same weather as on September 3, 2006, the day Nina disappeared. The searchers cover miles through the hills, grid-searching potential plots when they find them. As the day is about to end, a dog reacts to an area twenty feet off the trail near Skyline gate. One of the supervisors, Frank Moschetti, calls the team back and sends another dog into the space without telling the handler they may have found something. The second dog has a milder reaction. Moschetti sends a third dog. That dog reacts strongly. Moschetti calls in a crew of metal detectors and they scan the ground, figuring Nina was probably wearing a ring when she was buried, but the metal detectors don’t catch anything. As the sun heads down they start turning over the dirt. They dig slowly, treating the area like an archaeological site. They get three inches below the surface when they hit hardpack. Untouched. Solid earth.

  “It’s a year after the fact and dogs can be wrong,” Moschetti says. “They’re just like people that way. Our odds of finding her after this much time has passed, based on the terrain and the number of searchers, was at most around 2 percent. Still, you have to look.”

  Following the search, Hans’ trial is delayed to the beginning of November. It’s like waiting for Godot.

  From the headlands north of San Francisco the ocean appears calm. Tankers sit like ducks on the Pacific, motoring slowly toward the Golden Gate. There used to be armaments studding these hilltops, waiting for a Japanese attack that never came; now the cannons and big guns are just bronze memorials. It’s dusk and there are few people on the hiking trail. The woods in the Oakland hills are dense, rocky, and unwelcoming. The Marin headlands are bright and open, as if they were created with a postcard in mind.

  “It’s so romantic,” Katie says, leaning in for another kiss. I run my fingers through her red hair, which falls past her shoulders in long curls. Katie is also a writer with a book of stories coming out, but she makes her living spinning advertising copy downtown.

  “I really like Josie,” Katie says, as we continue our walk. She’s been reading draft pages from this book. She went through it quickly, looking to see where I mentioned other women, then read it more slowly.

  “I thought you would.”

  Katie’s from South Carolina and, like Josie, grew up in a world based on manners and debutante balls. They both knew when it was appropriate to eat and how to give a compliment, and spent a lot of time saying hello and goodbye.

  Working toward Coyote Peak, she says, “I’ve been thinking about Hubert Selby Jr. About writing about people you hate from a place of love. Have you considered forgiving your father?”

  A jogger passes us. A woman running alone.

  “I don’t hate him,” I tell Katie. “It’s not the things my father did before, it’s the things he does now. He’s just a man of extreme moods. I think if I was really injured or sick he’d take care of me. Sometimes he carries jackets in the trunk of his car that he gives to homeless people.” I tell Katie I recently got a letter from a woman who has been corresponding with my father. They met on one of the dating sites. He took ten years off his age and told her he was a retired sheriff. The woman said she asked my father about me and he told her his son died in 2004. I asked her why she was telling me this and she said she needed to know the truth. She said it was driving her insane. I blocked her email address. It’s not the first note I’ve received from one of his girlfriends. My father spends all his days emailing and meeting women online. He’s spent his life this way, not online but moving from one woman to another. He cheated on my mother every chance he got, which was plenty because he tried hard. He used to meet them through personal ads and kept their pictures on the top shelf in a cabinet. That’s where I first saw the woman who would become my stepmother, smiling awkwardly, sitting cross-legged and wearing a blue bikini. I lay on the couch in the basement, holding her picture in one hand. My mother was upstairs dying and I was fantasizing about the woman sleeping with her husband. “She’s your mother’s best friend,” my father said when he started bringing her to the house.

  “I don’t want you to end up like my father,” Katie says. “He’s sixty-five years old and he still blames his dad for all his problems.”

  I nod my head. I don’t want to be like her father either, an old man who drinks until he’s numb and lays down close to $100,000 to send his daughter to an overpriced writing program so she can figure out what to do with her life. An adult who never grew up and doesn’t notice his wife is biding her time, waiting for him to die.

  When we finish the hike we drive into Sausalito. Katie tells me about her time in New York. She met a boy there and they were happy for a while. But then one day she broke up with him. She said, “I just don’t love you,” even though she did. She immediately regretted it and spent two years trying to get him back but he wouldn’t talk to her anymore. That’s what the twenties are for, those kind of mistakes. The thirties are about making compromises. I like lying in bed with Katie at night, burying my nose in her hair. She lives at the front of a small park and the sounds of the park filter through her windows. I like watching her in the morning, sliding her small, muscular body into a dress. We’ve been together almost a month now and try not to talk about it, but after a few drinks she says, “I’m just worried that I’m not fulfilling you.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that.”

  “Well,” she says. “I like sex. And we haven’t had it.”

  “That’s a bigger problem,” I concede.

  After dark Katie and I make our way back to the city, which looks like a miniature diorama in the distance, beyond the sailboats bouncing in the docks. Rounding the pier I’m struck by the image of the hill on the edge of Sausalito and all the houses facing the bay. It’s almost midnight and there are so many windows lit.

  I’ve been moving things into Katie’s. Little things: books, a razor, a clean shirt. We cook meals together and watch DVDs. We watch Stardust Memories, the train full of gorgeous people having a good time pulling out of the station, leaving Woody Allen behind. We watch season two of The Sopranos, Tony telling his doctor, “I don’t need therapy; I have life.”

  I’m sitting in her large chair with my feet up. It’s a thick, comfortable chair. I’m working on this book, which is supposed to be about a murder, but I’m not sure where I’m going with it. To write about oneself honestly one has to admit a certain inconsisten
cy and randomness that would never be tolerated in even the best of novels.

  Katie sprawls across me, crying. She’s been seeing someone else since a little before we met. She likes him and she likes me too.

  “Last night,” she says. “I was going to break up with you. But I was enjoying your company too much.”

  I keep my arms around her. I feel my stomach harden and try to look behind us into that little room where she keeps her washer/dryer. I was with her when she picked that thing up. We’d gone to the Best Buy below the highway. The store was full of bright plastics, shelves covered in gadgets nobody needed. We found help from a salesman in a blue polo. This is what couples do, I thought. We debated the merits of upright and top-load washers, taking into account space and energy savings. We asked when the delivery would arrive. It was reassuringly mundane. There would be no more girls in the park. No porn stars. No meeting women in Michigan hotel rooms who would burn me with their cigarettes. That time of my life was over.

  Beyond the laundry room is the yard with its bright garden and then the green backside of Bernal Heights rising half a mile into the sky, dogs running laps around its peak, their owners looking casually across the city to the bridge. And still, down on earth, I am on Katie’s red chair and she is crying in my shirt.

  The other day I saw Patty, an old girlfriend of mine. Actually, the first person I ever tried to have a serious sadomasochistic relationship with. It was her birthday and we had decided to get a drink together. She’s ten years older than I am and owns a high-end jewelry store in North Beach. When we first met she asked if I was OK with taller women and I told her I was. That was six years ago and we were both looking for something other than sex.

  On the way to the bar I told her about Katie. I said maybe I was falling in love. I said I was surprised by how comfortable I felt. I hadn’t even realized this was what I wanted. Patty responded with a story about an acquaintance of hers. He’s fifty years old and good looking for his age, with a good job near a university in Arkansas. But he’s a masochist, driven heavily by his desires, and recently he had been trying to make peace with the idea that he would probably never have an actual partner. He would spend his life alone. We were outside of a supermarket when Patty told me the story and I said I would just go inside and grab a sandwich and meet her in the bar across the street. I found my way to the deli aisle and burst into tears.

  I run my finger along Katie’s cheek. I tell Katie I’m not trying to audition to be her boyfriend. She’ll have to make up her own mind and fuck whoever she wants.

  “This is not a phase for me,” Katie says. “I don’t want to be a character in your stories. This is who I am.”

  “Hey,” I say. “Hey. I’ve been here the whole time.”

  For a moment I thought I knew the narrative. But I don’t. I never do. I’ve had too many false starts. I can see it in my own writing, this book functioning as an external memory I go over every day. Miranda doesn’t talk to me, Lissette doesn’t talk to me, Josie doesn’t talk to me. What is Katie, with her clean face and freckles and cute little running clothes doing with me anyway? Or maybe the question is, Why am I with her?

  In The White Album Joan Didion famously wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” But the point of her essay is that the stories aren’t true. I meet with two homicide officers who say Sean sounds like a liar. A forensic psychologist tells me Sean is probably a megalomaniac, trying to reclaim some of the power that was taken from him in his youth. It’s the kind of thing these people always say: cause/effect/conclusion. But what about coincidence and fate? Perhaps that’s what Didion was trying to get at but wasn’t willing to say. Perhaps it was dawning on her that we can’t assign motives to other people and the knowledge was driving her crazy.

  When I met with Sean he said, “Don’t worry. You don’t have to be afraid of me.” The threat was implicit. He would say it with this neat little smile. The smile of someone older and more experienced. Was he reclaiming power or just enjoying the attention? He said the same thing to the other news outlets that interviewed him. “Don’t worry. I haven’t killed anyone in a long time.” Sean confessed to killing eight people and the best cops in Oakland traced the lines and decided not to make the arrest. Sean is a puzzle to me. He says he’ll tell me everything I want to know after Hans’ trial is over. It’s like Rex Hoffman in The Vanishing. The criminal tells Hoffman that if he wants to know what happened to his wife, he’ll have to drink a potion. Hoffman wakes up in a coffin, buried alive.

  I’m with Katie on her couch. It’s ten or so at night. I brought home a couple of burritos and the tinfoil sits on the empty blue plates. The TV is disconnected in the center of the room. She says, “I don’t think this can work.”

  After Katie breaks up with me I catch a ride to the Burning Man Art Festival six hours outside San Francisco in the Nevada salt flats. The same festival Hans’ mother was attending the weekend Nina disappeared. Burning Man lasts for more than a week and the open playa becomes a city of thirty thousand, a giant party filled with powder, pills, music, and disposable art.

  “I wasn’t going to come back here,” I say to an old man from Tel Aviv. We’re under a shade canopy, resting our feet in the cold water of a child’s pool where people dump the melted ice from their coolers.

  “But here you are.”

  “Here I am.”

  He asks if I would like some mushrooms but I say no. I tell him the last time I was here was 2001 when I came straight from doing a story in the Middle East, hanging out with kids throwing bottles of gas at Israeli soldiers in Hebron. I spent a month in Jerusalem and the occupied territories at the height of the Second Intifada. I was full of conflict. When I got to Burning Man all the drugs and “I love yous” were too much.

  “I was there in the beginning,” the old man says. “I graduated high school just after the Six Day War in 1967. I served two years in the military as commander of a ceremonial guard for the central commander, Rehavam Ze’evi, killed many years later in his hotel.”

  “I remember,” I say. “Israel responded by taking over the Palestinian Authority building in East Jerusalem. Then there was the Sbarro’s bombing and the next day the flattened police station in Ramallah. Maybe I have the order wrong. I was there for all of that. It was just before 9/11.”

  “In 1967,” he says, “we took Gaza from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan. My group was slightly renegade, disorganized. We didn’t bother anybody and we didn’t want to be bothered. Our job was to stand at attention, make Ze’evi look important. But I’ll tell you what, he was a fascist. He thrived on hatred. We were a small unit, just two combat jeeps with noncombat soldiers. Then we were put on an interim deployment and sent to the Jordan River where the Palestinians had been told not to graze their sheep because the sheep would cover the tracks of militants crossing the border at night. But sheep don’t understand military law and shepherds have habits. When a herd came within the forbidden zone we were to kill two sheep to teach the Palestinians a lesson. This was not some form in triplicate. This is just what we were told.

  “For one reason or another we started killing more sheep. There would be a large herd and we would think that the shepherd would not learn his lesson if we killed only two. Then we were angry with the Palestinians for some reason. And the truth is it became fun; we were all alone near a forbidden border. Killing sheep became a blood sport. We would chase them with uzis.

  “That’s how it was in the beginning. It was obvious where things were going to go.”

  I stay five nights in the desert. The day before I leave a gust of cool wind shoots into the playa. The sun has warmed the ground and a wall of dust leaps into the air. I see Lissette in the middle of the storm with a scarf wrapped over her mouth, wearing goggles and corduroy overalls. I only recognize her by the tattoos on her back, thick black vines weaving toward her shoulders. I touch her arm and we stare at each other through the haze before deciding to sit on th
e ground outside the center camp while the storm builds and we’re covered in a thick layer of alkali and sediment. I slide my hand inside her overalls, across her stomach. She tells me about her new boyfriend and her new job at a public relations firm. “I’m training for a marathon,” she says. “I only have two hours a day to see friends, between nine and eleven. It works fine because my boyfriend lives a couple of blocks away. I’m taking a few days off for the festival.”

  I don’t mention Katie. Lissette doesn’t like to hear about other women. I ask about Sean. She laughs and says a couple months ago we both called her to complain about each other within half an hour. The storm grows so we can see only a few feet in the distance. It’s like staring at a sheet of paper. I wonder if this is healthy, all this stuff from the ancient lake working its way into our lungs, and why Lissette didn’t tell me earlier about Sean’s phone call. I realize that to Lissette, Sean and I are both the same, just a couple of boys calling to complain. Lissette and I spent eighteen months together and somehow avoided really getting to know each other. We once spent four days in bed together. I never even answered the phone. It was magical actually, such perfect concentration. To only want and think of one person. To not respond to email or indulge in any distraction. To be perfectly focused until you memorize every pore and tiny hair on the tip of a person’s nose. I planned my entire existence around her, lived off her affection. Whenever we went out my only concern was to get her alone again. It was the purest, most uncomplicated emotion I’d ever felt. I was devoured by longing.

  I slide my hand over her hip; it fits perfectly. I stretch my pinkie and brush the top of her pubic hair.

  Lissette says Sean has been very nice to many people she knows. He’s generous with his money and time. He’s someone who can be counted on, almost pathologically loyal. All he wants is loyalty back. Beyond that, he’s selfless. I remember Sean inviting me to volunteer with him in the soup kitchen on Sundays. He asked if I did any volunteer work and I mentioned a tutoring center where I occasionally host panels. He said he would be delighted to volunteer with me and invited me to the shelter. Should I write about someone so conscientiously good? I never lied to Sean. I told him he wouldn’t like what I wrote and he wouldn’t have any editorial approval. And anyway, he’s the one claiming to have killed eight people. When I asked him about the family and loved ones of the people he killed he said that wasn’t his problem. How could it not be his problem? A small child sleeps at night; a length of wire slips into her father’s throat in the other room. A man leans over a waste bin, puking blood in front of his wife. When Sean talked about there being “fewer abusers on the street than before,” it was obvious he saw himself as a heroic figure. He probably wakes most days wondering how to make the world a better place. What about Lissette? Am I stealing from her, pillaging our time together for a handful of anecdotes?