The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott Page A

truth?
    When I stopped responding to my father he pushed further. Yes, he wrote, he had yelled quite a bit and maybe, since my room was off the kitchen, I had mistakenly thought he was yelling at me. Then the group homes became foster homes and finally I had never even been in a foster home, I wouldn’t know what one looked like, everything was the product of my imagination, a result perhaps of something that happened in the mental hospital in 1986. He was trying to obliterate me. He was stealing my past and I was trying to hold on but felt it slipping through my fingers. I started to disappear.
    In the documents from Read Mental Hospital, a doctoral psychology student writes,
Stephen experiences interpersonal rela tionships as unsatisfying and leave him with feelings of loneliness and isolation. His family system is not experienced as a haven where warmth and nurturance are demonstrated. Paternal fig ures are seen as punitive and rejecting. Maternal figures are seen in more positive light but are unavailable resulting in feeling of abandonment
(sic). That was more than twenty years ago. I get the notes my father sends through reviews or comments almost every month telling me I need to apologize to my dead mother. I hear from female writers who my father has written to. “I liked your article. I think you know my son…” Growing up he would flirt with my friends’ mothers. He once offered to get an apartment for a girlfriend of mine. “A girl that pretty shouldn’t have to work.” I see the mean reviews he leaves of my books on Amazon. And I think, I don’t need antidepressants. I have real problems.

    I’m sitting on a black chair with my feet up, staring at my psychiatrist scratching notes on the digital tablet on her lap. It costs me $75 a visit, more for the meds. Each visit is only fifteen minutes long. She has so much faith in her pills; she doesn’t know me at all. I wish we could go for a walk and I could try to explain some of it to her. I wish we could sit for three hours on top of Bernal Heights. I think she would have good advice. She’s wearing a long black dress, her hair piled in a bun on her head. She’s a nice lady. She’s getting ready to retire and the lines on her face are rivulets of empathy. I’m twitching. She’s telling me I should take antidepressants and I’m thinking of Tolstoy saying the only conclusion a reasonable person can come to is that life is meaningless. And then everything seems like a cliché.
    I pay my doctor and head outside where I’m reminded of something else: the sun greeting Meursault in Camus’
The Stranger.
Meursault fails to show remorse at his mother’s funeral and then, at the beach, takes one step forward when he knows he should take one step back, and is blinded by the light flashing off the Arab’s blade.
    I can’t find Sean but I find more than a dozen people who know him. Sean wanted to turn his dungeon studio into a church so that all the dominatrixes who worked there would be priestesses, safeguarded by laws protecting religious freedoms. “He’s like that,” someone says. “He’s always looking for an angle.”
    Several people remember Sean claiming he murdered someone as long as ten years ago.
    “Why didn’t you go to the police?” I ask one person.
    “I didn’t believe him,” that person says.
    Everybody seems to have a different opinion of Sean. They often refer to his generosity and kindness. One person says if Sean claims to have killed eight people then it’s true. Sean’s not a liar. Others caution me to keep my distance.
    “What do you mean?” I ask.
    “He’s hard to get rid of. Once he’s in your life he won’t want to go away. He sees it as a game.”
    I also hear something more disturbing. Someone says Sean called a friend just weeks before Nina disappeared. The friend described Sean as extremely agitated, saying Sean couldn’t understand how Nina could leave him and why she was refusing to see him.
    I go to Portland