Attention. Deficit. Disorder.

by Brad Listi

  She asked me if I needed a place to stay, mentioning that a bunch of people were splitting rooms at the TraveLodge over on the Redwood Highway. I told her I was okay, that I was staying at Horvak’s place. She said the name rang a bell. I told her that he went to C.U. She nodded. There was a silence. I looked out across the lawn. There was a red-winged blackbird perched on the rim of the birdbath. Nancy wasn’t standing there anymore.

  “This all feels unreal to me,” I said.

  “I can’t believe she did it,” M.J. said.

  “I don’t think anybody can.”

  “I knew she had her problems, but everyone has problems. I didn’t see this. How could I not see this?”

  “Nobody did.”

  I took a drag of my cigarette, blew a cloud of smoke at the sky, and watched it disappear.

  10.

  Later that afternoon, all of Amanda’s friends went over to Kathy McCormack’s house. Kathy was a friend of Amanda’s from childhood. Her family lived in a beautiful house on a wooded lot on Morning Sun Avenue in Mill Valley. Wells and I walked in together. The whole place was decked out in white Christmas lights. Everyone was drinking. Bottles and cans everywhere. Kathy greeted us, introduced herself, offered us beers. I took one, thanked her, opened it, and walked outside for another cigarette. I hadn’t stopped smoking since I left the church.

  The people on the back porch appeared to be intoxicated. There was a joint going around. Laughter and coughing. It almost seemed like a party.

  “Mandy would want it to be a celebration,” I heard someone say. “She wouldn’t want everyone to stand around moping. She wouldn’t want it to be sad.”

  It was nearly 5:00 p.m., and already the sun was down. It was December 23. The days are short that time of year. Amanda had killed herself the day before the winter solstice. Somehow that made sense. I finished my beer, smoked two more cigarettes, and made some sporadic small talk on the deck with a guy I didn’t know, some neo-hippie from Petaluma with a mangy beard. He was wearing a fur-lined hat with earflaps.

  “It’s a strange day,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Strange energy,” he said.

  “Really strange,” I agreed.

  “At least we got decent weather,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Amanda brought us good weather,” he said.

  A few seconds later, I stuffed my cigarette butt inside an empty beer can and walked back inside.

  People were starting to get outwardly drunk in the living room. The talking was getting louder and less coherent. The room was filling up with false confidence. I stood around in silence for a minute or two, feeling terribly awkward, and then I decided to leave. I had determined that it was safe to leave. I’d been biding my time, and now it was safe to leave. I could claim a long day and an early flight in the morning. I could walk out without having to lie. I’d done my duty. I’d done the right things, said the right things, gone to the right places. All things considered, everything had turned out fine.

  I caught Wells in the kitchen and told him I was on my way out. I asked him if he needed a ride back to the East Bay. He told me no thanks, he was going to stick around and catch a ride later. We shook hands by the stove and shared another man-hug. He programmed my contact information into his cell phone and told me he’d call me. I wished him well and went off looking for M.J. and Nancy.

  I found them upstairs in Kathy’s room. I knocked twice, lightly, and stuck my head in the door. The two of them were sitting on the bed, locked in heavy conversation. There was a bottle of red wine on the nightstand. Their eyes were red from crying, and their teeth were blue from the wine.

  “Hey,” I said. “I just wanted to say good-bye.”

  “Fencer,” Nancy said, slurring a little and patting the mattress. “Come sit down.”

  11.

  I walked over and sat down on the end of the bed, and Nancy told me the story: how Amanda had missed her period in June, the summer that we were apart, the summer before I broke up with her. How she had debated about what to do. How she had decided to have the abortion. How she had decided not to tell me. How she’d freaked out, afraid it would scare me away. How she’d had the operation in the city, at a clinic near the Embarcadero. How Nancy had driven her there, was with her the entire time. How there were protesters lining the sidewalks as they went inside, picketers screaming at them, telling them that they were baby killers, murderers, how they would rot in hell for eternity on account of their sins. How it wasn’t something I should feel responsible for. How I couldn’t have known. How Amanda didn’t want me to have to deal with it, how she just wanted it to be over and done with, how she swore Nancy to absolute secrecy.

  The news hit me strangely. My reaction was decidedly minimal. I didn’t move. I didn’t speak. There was a barely detectable feeling in my belly—a weakness, a twinge. But not much more.

  “But with everything that’s happened,” said Nancy, “I feel like it’s important to come clean.”

  “It helps things make a little more sense,” said M.J., “but it doesn’t solve anything. Not by any means.”

  “Absolutely,” said Nancy. “I’m not trying to say that this is the reason she killed herself. Not at all.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. The words fell out of my mouth weakly.

  Nancy crawled across the bed and gave me a hug. I didn’t hug her back.

  “Do her parents know?” I said.

  “No,” said M.J. “I don’t think so.”

  “We were just talking about whether we should tell them,” Nancy said. “I don’t know if it would be worth it. They’ve already been through so much.”

  “But if it helps them find some kind of closure,” said M.J., “maybe it would be a good thing.”

  “I think I’d wait on that,” I said, running a hand through my hair.

  “I would obviously tell them that you had no idea,” Nancy said.

  “I think we should wait on that.”

  “It’s not anything we would do anytime soon,” said M.J.

  Nancy sniffled, reached for her glass, took a sip of her wine.

  I rose to my feet and told M.J. and Nancy that I’d really appreciate it if they didn’t say anything. I told them I needed time to think, that I’d like to be the one to make the decision about whether or not to say something, that it was my responsibility. I asked them to keep this information in confidence. They told me they would.

  I took a step backward toward the door, not knowing what else to say. There was nothing else to say, really. I didn’t want to say anything more, didn’t want to debate. I didn’t want to coerce, and I didn’t want to empathize or discuss.

  I just wanted to get the fuck out of there.

  Moments later, I walked out of the house, climbed into my rental car, and drove south out of Marin and across the Golden Gate Bridge, back toward Horvak’s place, completely numb. Night had settled in, and the lights of the city were shining in the distance. I rolled my window down and lit up another cigarette, turned on talk radio, and looked out across the bay. The city was alive, glowing like fire beneath the clouds.

  The fog was rolling in again.

  12.

  The Golden Gate Bridge first opened to vehicular traffic at high noon on May 28, 1937. It is approximately 1.7 miles long, and its two towers are 746 feet tall. Channel clearance is approximately 220 feet, and the cables that support the suspended roadway are 36.5 inches in diameter. More people have jumped off of the Golden Gate Bridge to their deaths than any other bridge in the world. It is a magnet for the desperate, arguably the number-one suicide destination on the planet. Depressed people with dramatic flair like to go there on their last legs, ready to cross over into the next dimension.

  In 1975, at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco, a psychiatrist named David Rosen conducted a study of people who jumped off of the Golden Gate Bridge and accidentally survived. Here is what he discovered:

&
nbsp; All these survivors, during and after their jumps, experienced mystical states of consciousness characterized by losing the sense of time and space and by feelings of spiritual rebirth and unity with other human beings, the entire universe, and God. As a result of their intimate encounter with death, some of them had a profound religious conversion; others described a reconfirmation of their previous religious beliefs. One of the survivors denied any suicide intent altogether. He saw the Golden Gate Bridge as “golden doors” through which he will pass from the material world into a new spiritual realm.

  In olden times, suicides were viewed as contagious. People who killed themselves were often buried at crossroads in the dark of night under large piles of stones. In addition, stakes were sometimes driven through their dead hearts in an effort to prevent the sickness of their spirits from infecting the living.

  Once every twenty minutes or so, somebody commits suicide in the United States of America.

  Approximately once every two weeks, somebody jumps off of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  The

  free

  fall

  takes

  about

  four

  seconds.

  Those who jump off of the Golden Gate Bridge hit the water below at a speed of roughly seventy-five miles per hour, with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch.

  In 1993, a guy named Steve Page threw his three-year-old daughter, Kellie, over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge. A few seconds later, he followed her.

  In a 1993 poll conducted by the San Francisco Examiner, 54 percent of respondents said that they did not want a suicide barrier constructed on the bridge to prevent people from doing things like that. They felt it would mar the bridge. They felt it would obstruct their view. They felt it would impinge upon people’s freedoms.

  gephyrophobia n.

  Fear of bridges or of crossing them.

  13.

  This was the second straight year that I’d lost someone during the holidays. My grandfather had died the year before, on Christmas Eve 1998. My mother’s father. We called him Granddad. He was in a hospital bed, alone, when he slipped into The Void. My grandmother had been sitting at his bedside for hours on end. Then, at about 9:00 p.m., she went home to get some rest. Granddad drifted away a couple of hours later, in the dark of night, when nobody was looking.

  A month later, each of his grandchildren received roughly $6,000 in ExxonMobil stock. Ticker symbol: XOM.

  petroleum n.

  A thick, flammable, yellow-to-black mixture of gaseous, liquid, and solid hydrocarbons that occurs naturally beneath the earth’s surface. Can be separated into fractions including natural gas, gasoline, naphtha, kerosene, fuel and lubricating oils, paraffin wax, and asphalt, and is used as raw material for a wide variety of derivative products.

  I was wary of owning an oil stock, worried it would be tantamount to owning wars and pollution. Immediately, I called Horvak out in San Francisco. Horvak was a couple of years older than me and had been working in the financial sector for Charles Schwab. With his assistance, I opened an online brokerage account and cashed out of Exxon with the push of a button. In an instant, all of my oil stock was gone, converted directly into cash. Horvak then informed me that I didn’t want to have all that cash sitting around, because cash left to generate meager interest in a savings account would be “dying cash,” on account of something called the “rate of inflation.”

  rate of inflation n.

  The rate of change of prices (as indicated by a price index) calculated on a monthly or annual basis. Also known as inflation rate.

  I told Horvak that I didn’t want my cash to die. Horvak told me to put my cash in a company called eBay. Ticker symbol: EBAY. Horvak had been tracking eBay and said it was a nice place to start, so in February 1999, I purchased $6,201.47 worth of eBay stock at $21.68 per share.

  As of late April 1999, the stock had more than doubled in value. The thing took off like a moon rocket. It was the easiest money I’d ever made. Horvak was out of his mind with excitement at the time, trembling with joy and fantasy. Wall Street was going bananas. Stock prices were taking off, IPOs and record highs in every direction. The tech boom was on. Everyone was an optimist, and nobody could lose.

  “You wouldn’t believe what’s happening out here,” Horvak said. “People are just throwing money around. It’s stupid. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Horvak was an animal, day-trading aggressively and making a killing. One day he made $50,000 before lunch. At that point, his portfolio was worth more than a quarter of a million bucks. He’d started out a couple of years earlier with practically nothing, and now he was relatively rich. He was planning on quitting his job in a year. He and his girlfriend, Blair, were going to go travel around the world for a long time, purchasing things.

  Blair was a hippie chick with a trust fund.

  14.

  Inspired by Horvak’s success on the open market, I sold all of my eBay shares one afternoon in late April, right before graduation, and started day-trading. The ensuing seven months were an odyssey. Evenings were spent delivering pizzas. Days were spent tracking stocks. I was averaging about four or five hours of sleep per night.

  The winning was pretty much relentless. On a typical day, Horvak called me once every hour or so to celebrate. We had brief, ecstatic conversations about numbers and the future. We discussed travel plans and entrepreneurial concepts. I babbled about making an independent feature film. Horvak fantasized about buying a small resort hotel off the coast of Honduras. He sounded like he was on uppers all the time. His mind and his mouth were going a mile a minute. He was betting big, talking about early retirement with some degree of frequency. I think he was closing in on seven figures. My portfolio was growing rapidly as well, albeit on a much smaller scale. The simplicity of the arrangement was nothing short of mind-blowing. It seemed like the easiest thing in the world.

  On an average day, I usually took a sizable nap after market close, if my adrenaline levels weren’t too high. Then, at about 9:00 p.m., I’d drive over to Fatty Jay’s for the late shift.

  Fatty Jay’s was the name of the pizza establishment that I worked for.

  I was just out of college, with a bachelor of fine arts degree in avant-garde filmmaking. All it had gotten me so far was Fatty Jay’s and day-trading.

  avant-garde n.

  A group active in the invention and application of new techniques in a given field, especially in the arts.

  adj.

  Of, relating to, or being part of an innovative group, especially one in the arts: avant-garde painters; an avant-garde theater piece.

  With my stocks performing well, I could have cashed out and quit the pizza job, no problem. I could have taken my profits and hit the road. I thought about it several times, but I could never bring myself to go through with it. Chalk it up to indecision. At that point, the end of the boom was nowhere in sight. I didn’t want to cash out too soon and risk missing out on further profits. At the same time, the stock numbers seemed unreal to me. I didn’t trust them entirely. My money was totally intangible. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

  Horvak warned me continually that the entire enterprise could come crashing down at any second. We discussed this fact ad nauseam. We were desperate to be wise, advising each other to employ a conservative approach to rabid enthusiasm. We pondered the history of the markets and encouraged each other to stay with our jobs until we got off the ride. Quitting, we felt, might jinx us. It was better, we felt, to keep working hard, lest we anger the financial gods.

  The longest I ever rode one stock was seventy-two hours. Some days I’d ride three or four stocks in a single session. My typical routine had me buying at open and cashing out sometime after midday. My goal was always a 2 percent return. If I made 5 percent, I automatically cashed out, no matter what time it was. That was the discipline. At the end of my run, I calculated the capital gains tax, set it aside in my money market account per Hor
vak’s strict instructions, and threw the rest back into the market the following morning. It was easy.

  Naturally, my good fortune astonished me; it rattled me to the point of superstition. I didn’t talk about it very much, convinced that the market would crash if I said something. Horvak was my only real confidant. I remember telling him one day that I’d never felt luckier in my whole life. I told him that, for the first time ever, I found myself wondering if someone or something was actually watching over me.

  “Maybe it’s my granddad,” I said, half kidding. “Maybe he’s supervising my investment portfolio from the next realm.”

  Horvak told me that he liked day-trading better than weed.

  15.

  A week or so after Amanda’s funeral, the year 2000 arrived. Y2K. For months, the world had been hearing about imminent danger, that Y2K was a disaster waiting to happen, that critical mainframe computer systems were sure to crash on New Year’s Day, that the global economy was in grave and utter peril. Kingpins in the federal government were urging calmness, advising citizens to exercise caution and restraint. In the weeks leading up to the big day, the more gullible elements of society had busied themselves by stocking up on food and water, batteries and duct tape, in preparation for the chaos.

  But in the end, of course, nothing much happened. Not a goddamn thing. It was total bullshit, start to finish. A dark and mysterious lie. And it was no big surprise.