The Adderall Diaries (10 page)

The new players were tan and fat. They organized sales meetings in Vegas with cabanas near the pool and had hookers sent to their rooms on company credit cards. I was given a new title, director of emerging technologies, along with a saleswoman to help me push more search engine optimization. When we talked she put her hand on my thigh, or ran her fingers along my neck, or pressed my ankle with the toe of her shoe. She couldn’t sell anything. She didn’t seem to know what a search engine was. When someone would try to explain it to her she would gently pull the hem of her skirt over her knees.

And then I was bored with all of it. I closed my office door every day until noon while I wrote my third novel,
What It Means to Love You,
based on Nancy and Pierce, a couple I’d met when I was stripping in Chicago. The real Nancy was a runaway working as a high-priced call girl. She regularly made $2,000 a day. Pierce was older, effortlessly good looking, with a square jaw, long braided hair, and teardrops tattooed beneath his right eye. Nancy wouldn’t share her money so Pierce supplemented his income sucking cock in video booths off Halsted Street.

The last time I saw Nancy she gave me a stolen dress, which I returned to Marshall Field’s for a $600 credit. The last time I saw Pierce he was throwing bottles from the window of the studio they shared on the tenth floor of an elevator building on Belmont.

“See you later,” I said, while the cops stood around him watching him sweep up the glass. But I never did.

Between March 10, 2000, and April 14, 2000, the tech-heavy NASDAQ exchange plunged 35 percent. Other companies had already cleared out. Giant buildings south of the city sat deserted, as if no one had ever been there. Downtown was quiet, even in the middle of the day.

At work things were tense. Someone erased all the emails and documents from my computer. I led a weekly meeting but people stopped showing up. My salesgirl refused to talk to me. I was called in to discuss possible sexual harassment charges.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“You’ve never worked in a corporate environment before. It’s normal that you wouldn’t understand certain protocols. We’ll pay for you to take a class.”

Someone warned me, “I don’t know what you did…”

One weekend I broke into the COO’s email. There was a letter from my salesgirl. She wanted to meet him later and get a drink. Then she wanted to do that thing he liked. She also wanted to know when he was going to get rid of me. She was tired of me looking over her shoulder. He urged her to use the other account he’d set up, and yes, he couldn’t wait to fuck her, and no, she shouldn’t worry about me. He was going to take care of that. Everything was working fine.

The COO and the salesgirl were living together. Her résumé was fake. They’d met in a strip club. He’d left his wife and she’d left her husband. Now the plan was to push me out and take over my product. Although there wasn’t any product. The situation was like some cheap spy novel. I’ve never bothered to write about it because the characters are so black and white. The things they wanted had no lasting value. They weren’t conflicted enough to be frauds like most people; they were just liars.

It was a technology company but he had never changed his password. Same for his VP of sales and my new salesgirl. It was amazing, actually, how many people had never changed their passwords from the ones originally assigned: the original password was
welcome.
I printed the emails and took them to the human resources officer. Like most of senior management, he was new. The old-timers looking to cash in had cashed out instead and gone into retirement. A handful of companies would survive, led by Google, but the boom was bust.

HR offered me two weeks severance but I said it was going to take me longer than that to recover. The VP of sales called me in to his office and threatened to have me killed. I told my employees to watch my door and make sure it never closed. A meeting was scheduled for six at night in the boardroom on a Friday. I got the next plane to Los Angeles and went into hiding with Hart Fisher, my first publisher, in Granada Hills.

They cut me a check for $30,000 in exchange for my signature and a promise not to tell. I cashed the check. A month later the company sank permanently beneath the waves.

This would have been the time to return to Chicago, but I didn’t. When I left my fiancée I’d burned some bridge I hadn’t known existed. It was 2000. Ralph Nader was running for president. Hans Reiser was in Russia working on his file system, fulfilling a million-dollar contract with the Department of Defense. His best friend was keeping his wife company in California while he was away.

On August 19, a large search party organizes to look for Nina Reiser’s remains in the hills behind Hans’ house. A call goes through the California Office of Emergency Services. Search and rescue volunteers sign up from Alameda and Contra Costa counties. Dog handlers from around the state respond through the California Rescue Dog Association. By eight in the morning over 120 volunteers gather at a multijurisdictional, protected watershed at the base of Pinehurst Drive, below the entrance to the Redwood Recreation Area.

There are equipment trailers filled with lights and tables and generators. There are computers and desks, shade canopies, porta-potties. There’s a rescue truck, a medical van, repelling gear, a food service unit able to feed up to two hundred. The volunteers fill out cards listing their skill levels and special tools they might have. At the minimum they’ve all completed a five-week training and certification course. Many are Type Two, which means they have an additional thirty hours of training. Some are Type One, trained for mountain rescue, able to carry forty-five-pound packs three miles in forty-five minutes.

They are hikers and climbers, outdoor types, interested in finding children and campers lost in the wilderness, capable of doing emergency care up to three hours away from medical services. Some are trained to save people stuck against large walls, off belay, in places like Yosemite. Their focus is usually on rescuing the living but on this day they are looking for a body a year after the crime. The bones, if they find any, will be black, and likely scattered by animals.

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 inconsistency 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.