The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott Read Free Book Online Page B

both sides, which means we’re probably right at least 50 percent of the time. He talks about torture, what we see on the news, foreign soldiers detained, humiliated, drowned. Hundreds of pictures we’ve grown used to seeing. A man standing on a crate holding two electrical wires, unsure if he’s about to be electrocuted. “That’s nothing,” Sean says. “That’s not torture.”
    Sean says he’s not into BDSM anymore and that he never did BDSM with Nina. He used to be what people refer to as a “heavy player,” which is how we know so many people in common. I’ve heard of him digging a knife in his own arm, carving RAGE, or standing naked in the middle of a room while several women strike at him with leather straps, his blood pooling at his feet. But that was before he became a Christian. Now he goes to church every week, volunteers at the soup kitchen on weekends.
    “Why should I talk to you?” he asks. “If someone was shooting at me right now, they might hit you. I don’t want any more violence.” I try to understand what he’s saying. Who are these people who would shoot at us if he talked to me, and how would they find us? I imagine diving for cover as a car streaks past, faces hidden behind scarves, guns poking from the windows, the vehicle exhaling a gusher of exhaust thick as a mudslide. He thinks people might come after him, friends perhaps of the people he killed. It’s as if the only reason he hasn’t named his victims is to protect people like me and other innocent pedestrians. It’s a bizarre rationalization, and the challenge is to figure out if he’s afraid of going to jail or if he is lying. And why. He says he’s never killed anyone who didn’t abuse him. Then he adds, “Or came after me with a gun. You have to break some eggs to make an omelet.” I try to get him to go further with this. What omelet? But he won’t say anything more about it.
    Sean says he never sought attention. This is clearly important to him, a matter of honor. He is ready to go to jail but unwilling to name the people he killed. He isn’t sure why he should talk to me and I’m not sure either and I know this could go on for a long time.
    But I’m stuck. I want information. An author looking for a story can be like a junky looking for a fix. But it’s worse than that because an author without a story isn’t even an author. I was ten or eleven when I started writing poems, which I brought to my friend’s house to read to his mother. By the time I was twelve my bedroom was covered with poetry I’d taped to the walls. When my father ripped the poetry down, I kept writing, but hid it somewhere else. It was as if I had to express every thought that came into my head. The poems became longer, turning into stories during college. At some point my nervous brain stopped pumping out information so quickly, and I started publishing what I wrote. My reasons for writing changed. I was no longer trying to express every thought, I was writing to understand myself. I rewrote my stories hundreds of times and became dependent on working through problems on the page. In my late twenties I was simultaneously awarded a fellowship for emerging writers and sold two novels I had submitted blindly to a small publisher. At that point I finally thought of myself as a writer. Other writers often called me prolific, which made me vaguely uncomfortable. It sounded more like an accusation than a compliment. Without paying attention I had become what I wrote and I worried what would happen if I became unable to write. And then one day it happened. And it happened the next day, and the day after that. And it lasted for almost two years with the exception of a vignette here or there. I’d gone silent. But now here was Sean.
    We walk for an hour. Sean’s friendly. I’m trying to decide if I like him, and I think I do. He mentions a man who was seeing an old girlfriend and how the man was giving him a hard time so Sean started surveiling