The Adderall Diaries (11 page)

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 the 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?

“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.

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.”