The Adderall Diaries Read Online Free PDF Page A

out he’s been speaking with Lissette. They know each other from the dungeon. He used to be the houseboy and when one of the girls wanted to practice with her whips she would practice on him. “I hear you’re emotionally dishonest,” Sean says. That’s what Lissette told him. It’s exactly the kind of accusation she would make. Her accusations are like koans. I think,
You killed eight people and you’re accusing me of being emotionally dishonest?
    After talking for a few minutes Sean and I make plans to meet in Oakland then hang up. It’s the first I’ve heard of Lissette since our latest breakup. She knew about Sean’s confessions, but she was talking with him anyway, even as she was packing her apartment outside the financial district and moving to the fog belt on the edge of Golden Gate Park. She had left her husband and then she had left me. Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Every relationship is. She would never have left if I fought harder to keep her. She was a jealous girlfriend, and when she told me all the ways I made her unhappy, I never really understood. I probably wasn’t trying hard enough. Or I wasn’t capable.
    Lissette used to cut me. She kept a knife by my bed, a present from a client. It had a grip handle. My breathing would slow down when the blade opened my skin. I would close my eyes and feel my body lift from the mattress. It was like being on a raft. One time I was blindfolded and my chest was bleeding and I tried to kiss her while pushing up against the knife, which she held to my jugular.

    “You have no sense of self-preservation,” she said, planting kisses on my cheeks.
    It wasn’t true. I had a fantastic sense of self-preservation but it had left me for a while.
    She woke me one night two months ago in her large studio in the busiest part of San Francisco and said she thought I should leave. I said I was sorry I couldn’t make it work. I had been sleeping naked on the inside of the spoon. She was so beautiful and she looked at me the way a mother looks at a child and I loved that. I put my clothes on and bicycled home across the city. The landscape of closing bars and well-lit taquerias seemed bright, surreal, and full of smoke.
    I didn’t tell Sean about that.
    I didn’t tell Sean I found a book of mine in the used bookstore near my house. I don’t know how they got it. I self-published it years ago and then took it out of print. It was like finding an old diary. It was full of stories written in my early twenties, most of them centering on my relationship with my fiancée, Josie. The plot was: a good girl from a good family falls in love with an artist and betrays him by treating him the same way he treats her. I recognized the boy in the stories, many of them written from the girl’s perspective. I thought he was very normal for his age, a little lost. He was a boy who saw the world through narrative; people and events all had arcs. Life tapered toward a conclusion. I can see now that there is a conclusion but no arc. There’s life and death and all the barely connected things that happen in between. The boy I read about was a boy who could have settled on something and turned out OK. What he needed was a goal. Instead he went traveling because he thought he was happier when he was alone.
    Yesterday there was a tornado in Kansas. People are angry because the equipment they need is in the Middle East. I see the news in a crowded bar where I’m watching the second round of the play-offs. Utah has called a time-out and for a minute the station rolls pictures of splintered houses and turned-over cars. The governor wants to call out the National Guard but the Guardsmen are serving tours overseas. Then a solemn reporter grips the microphone. The sound is turned off so I can’t hear what he’s saying, just read the capsule summaries below the screen.
    There’s a table set up with free hot dogs. A boy in his early twenties drinks near the window. His girlfriend