Attention. Deficit. Disorder.

To my parents, Frank and Peggy Listi

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

—SEXTUS PROPERTIUS

Familiarity breeds contempt.

—SYRUS

A penny saved is a penny earned.

—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

You can’t take it with you.

—MOSS HART AND GEORGE S. KAUFMAN

God must love the common man, he made so many of them.

—ABRAHAM LINCOLN

God must hate the common man, he made him so common.

—PHILIP WYLIE

I’ve steered clear of God. He was an incredible sadist.

—JOHN COLLIER

There is a superstition in avoiding superstition.

—FRANCIS BACON

There’s a sucker born every minute.

—P. T. BARNUM

Man is a social animal.

—BARUCH SPINOZA

Man is a political animal.

—ARISTOTLE

Man is the measure of all things.

—PROTAGORAS

Man is a blind, witless, low-brow anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon the earth.

—IAN MCHARG

The main thing needed to make men happy is intelligence…and it can be fostered by education.

—BERTRAND RUSSELL

Learned men are the cisterns of knowledge, not the fountainheads.

—JAMES NORTHCOTE

All paid employments absorb and degrade the mind.

—ARISTOTLE

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

—DALAI LAMA

Happiness? That’s nothing more than health and a poor memory.

—ALBERT SCHWEITZER

A humanitarian is always a hypocrite.

—GEORGE ORWELL

Sisyphus was basically a happy man.

—ALBERT CAMUS

Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

What do I care about the law? Hain’t I got the power?

—CORNELIUS VANDERBILT

Reality is a crutch for people who can’t cope with drugs.

—LILY TOMLIN

Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.

—JIMI HENDRIX

There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.

—ALFRED KORZYBSKI

The no-mind not-thinks no-thoughts about no-things.

—BUDDHA

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

—CESARE PAVESE

Always be sincere, even when you don’t mean it.

—IRENE PETER

When a man has pity on all living creatures, then only is he noble.

—BUDDHA

I tend to be suspicious of people whose love of animals is exaggerated; they are often frustrated in their relationships with humans.

—YLLA

He gave her a look you could have poured on a waffle.

—RING LARDNER

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

—H. L. MENCKEN

The body of a dead enemy always smells sweet.

—AULUS VITELLIUS

Rubble is trouble.

—MUHAMMAD ALI

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

—PAUL VALÉRY

A conclusion is the place where you got tired thinking.

—MARTIN H. FISCHER

A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved.

—CHARLES F. KETTERING

The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.

—R. H. TAWNEY

This is my death…and it will profit me to understand it.

—ANNE SEXTON

I’m not afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

—WOODY ALLEN

The universe is but one vast Symbol of God.

—THOMAS CARLYLE

Taken as a whole, the universe is absurd.

—WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.

—SIR JAMES JEANS

When it is dark enough you can see the stars.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Part I

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

Part II

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

Part III

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

Part IV

1

2

3

4

5

6

Part V

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

Epilogue

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

I was at Horvak’s apartment in the Haight, a couple of blocks from Golden Gate Park, on Waller. It was late, and I was there alone. Everything was quiet.

Horvak had caught a flight to Aspen a few hours earlier. We’d passed each other in the sky. Horvak was in an idyllic mountain paradise, celebrating the holidays with family and friends. I was alone in San Francisco, waiting for a funeral. A defeated brand of envy was the only natural response.

Horvak didn’t really know Amanda. He knew her peripherally through me, but he didn’t know her well enough to mourn her. Nothing about her death was debilitating to him; none of it really affected him. Beyond the kind of standard empathy that occurs in decent people, nothing much would transpire within him on account of her passing. There would be no resonant impact. He would escape unharmed.

I’d arrived in town late that afternoon. Rented a car at SFO and followed Horvak’s instructions door to door. He’d left a key in the mailbox. I walked inside and planted myself on the couch and sat there for hours in silence. Flipping channels. Smoking cigarettes. Tending to my confusion. The television was on, but the volume was all the way down. There was a stack of bad magazines on the coffee table, and sleep wasn’t really an option. My head was swimming. I’d come to the conclusion that I had very little understanding of what anything actually meant. That right there was the extent of my knowledge.

Sometime after midnight, I stubbed out another cigarette and rose from the couch. I walked over to the window and pulled back the curtain. Down below, life was happening. Cars were rolling by, rattling and coughing exhaust. Christmas trees and menorahs were glowing in windows. Streetlights were shining. The fog was moving in. People were walking along the sidewalks, wrapped in hats and scarves. I wondered who they were, where they were going, what they did. I wondered what their stories were. I wondered what would happen to them. I watched them disappearing, one by one and two by two, lost in the direction of wherever it was that they were headed. And none of them even knew I was there.

2

The ancient Egyptians mummified their dead. They treated their corpses with spices, herbs, and chemicals, and then they wrapped them in cotton cloth and stuffed them inside of a wooden case. Then they put that wooden case inside of another case. Then they decorated the outer case with information about the life of the wealthy dead person. Then they painted it and adorned it with jewels. The entire contraption was then stuffed inside a coffin, which was then stuffed inside a sarcophagus.

The Parsis, a Zoroastrian religious community in India, place their dead atop twenty-foot-high stone structures called “towers of silence,” so the vultures can more easily devour them.

Australia’s Aborigines have been known to leave dead bodies in treetops.

In New Caledonia and among Borneo’s inland mountain people, dead bodies are placed erect inside the trunks of trees. The bark of the tree is then replaced over them.

The Jivaro peoples of South America inter their dead women and children under the floor. This practice dates back ten thousand years, to the rituals of urbanites in Mesopotamia.

Muslim people bathe their corpses carefully, with warm water and scented oils. Male corpses are bathed by men, and female corpses are bathed by women. Both men and women can bathe a dead child. The corpses are then wrapped in a plain cloth called a kafan, placed in a casket, and buried underground.

Jews wrap their dead in simple cloth and bury them underground too. Once the corpse is lowered underground, family members often toss a few handfuls of dirt into the hole. They might also tear a piece of their clothing, or a black ribbon, to signify their loss. This practice is called kriah, a tradition that many believe dates all the way back to Jacob’s reaction to the supposed death of Joseph.

In certain parts of Indonesia, it is customary for widows to smear themselves with fluids from the bodies of their dead husbands.

In central Asia, mourners often get masochistic, lacerating their arms and faces in honor of the deceased.

In Tanzania, young men and women of the Nyakyusa tribe customarily copulate at the site of a dead person’s grave, as a show of respect.

In some nomadic Arctic cultures, a doll of the deceased is carved from wood and treated as though it were alive. The doll is often kept for years. It is placed in positions of honor. It is taken on family outings. Food offerings are made to it. Widows have been known to sleep with the wooden doll in their beds, in remembrance of the deceased.

3

Earlier in the year, the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick and the baseball player Joe DiMaggio had died within a day of each other. Kubrick passed away on March 7, 1999. A heart attack did him in. DiMaggio died on March 8, of lung cancer and pneumonia. I learned about both deaths on the morning of March 9. My alarm clock went off, same as usual, and I heard Bob Edwards talking about their deaths on National Public Radio. I remember lying in bed, looking at the ceiling, hearing the news. I found myself feeling sad in a vague and peculiar kind of way.

Later that same day, I was driving around Boulder, running errands, headed north on Twenty-eighth Street, trying to make a left turn. Up ahead I saw two little girls standing on the side of the road, darling little Japanese girls, sisters holding hands. They darted out into the road, right in front of a guy in an Oldsmobile Cutlass. Traffic was thick, so the guy wasn’t going very fast—maybe twenty miles per hour. He slammed on his brakes, but by then, it was too late. The nose of the Olds struck the little girls, and they popped up in the air like rag dolls. One of them landed on the street. The other one landed on the hood. It was terribly surreal.

Everything started happening fast. Suddenly, I was out of my Jeep and running across the street. I arrived at the scene, and the little girls were lying there. The younger one was wailing. The older one was trembling, in shock. Both were conscious, and there wasn’t any blood. Onlookers were rushing in from every direction. Everyone was crowding in around the girls, trying to comfort them, asking them if they were all right. I felt nauseous. I looked to my left and saw a woman standing there. By the looks of her, she was a mother. She had her hands on her head, as though she were wearing a wig and the wind might blow it away. “Oh my God,” she kept saying. “Oh my God, oh my God…”

I took my jacket off and tried to drape it over one of the little girls, the older one. I’d read somewhere that people injured in accidents should be covered with blankets or coats, to keep them warm, to treat them for shock. The little girl wanted no part of my jacket. She threw it off her shoulders, looked at me, and started bawling. She said she wanted to go home. Having all of these strange adults around her was scaring her. I backed away, holding my jacket. I felt silly—dejected, almost.

Sirens rang in the distance.

The little girl sobbed.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” someone said to her. “Help is on the way.”

“I don’t want to go to jail,” she said.

Everyone assured her that she wouldn’t be going to jail.

The woman to my left crouched down and gave her a hug.

The driver of the Oldsmobile was short and middle-aged. He was wearing a Colorado Rockies cap, standing to my right with his hands in his pockets. He looked a little bit like Al Pacino, and he was oddly calm, talking to another onlooker.

“I didn’t see ’em,” he said. “I didn’t see ’em at all. They came out of nowhere. I had no way of seeing ’em. I didn’t see a thing until they were up on my hood. I didn’t see a thing. All of a sudden I looked up, and bam, there they were. There wasn’t even a crosswalk there. I couldn’t have seen ’em.”

An ambulance arrived, followed by two fire trucks and two cop cars. The circle of onlookers opened up, and the paramedics came through. The older girl kept saying that she wanted to go home and see her mommy. The little one just sat there crying. After a while, people started to disperse. I walked back over to my truck, climbed inside, and drove away. My hands were shaking, and I drove very slowly. It was a cold wintry day, and there were giant towering clouds rolling in over the mountains. It was a very strange afternoon.

4

I dated Amanda during my sophomore year of college. She was a freshman. We started seeing each other in September of that year and kept it going all the way through the following May, at which point we parted ways for the summer. Amanda had an internship lined up back at home in the Bay Area. I was staying in Boulder to work a construction job and take summer classes.

At the moment of our parting, everything was fine. Saying goodbye seemed to bring out the best in us. We said we’d call, we said we’d write. We told each other we loved each other—the first and only time we’d ever done so. We said that we’d keep it going, but it didn’t wind up working out that way, which was my fault entirely. I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain. Somewhere along the line, I experienced a change of heart. The summer apart was no good for me. My imagination took over. I had too much time to think. I convinced myself that I wasn’t ready for anything long-term, told myself that things were getting too serious, that I was too young to be this involved. I needed time, I needed space. Felt trapped. Got nervous. Didn’t want to be tied down. At that point, Amanda was a thousand miles away. I was nineteen. I figured I’d deal with it later.

I went to visit her once that summer, on Independence Day. Amanda showed me all around the city—her favorite museums, her favorite parks, her favorite neighborhoods. She took me to her favorite café in Hayes Valley. On the night of the Fourth, we watched the fireworks from a hillside in Marin. I was feeling awful, completely phony. I wanted to tell her that I was having my doubts about continuing the relationship that night, but I didn’t go through with it. I told myself the timing wasn’t right.

When she got back to Boulder that August, I broke up with her poorly. First, I dodged her for a week. Then I returned her phone calls slowly, much more slowly than normal. It went on like this into September. We’d see each other, here and there. I slept with her a couple of times, knowing that I was going to break up with her. I pretended.

When I finally got around to telling her that I wanted to end things, it caught her completely off guard. She wept. She called me once a day for the next week, asking questions, hoping to reconcile. She wrote me a long, emotional letter and put it in my mailbox. In the letter, she told me that she didn’t understand, that she hadn’t seen it coming, that she wanted to try to fix things. She told me that I was breaking her heart.

I told myself that she was being dramatic. I called her up and we talked. It was painful and uncomfortable. I told her that I didn’t think it was in our best interests to continue dating. I told her that I just wasn’t feeling it enough, that my heart wasn’t in it all the way.

“So why have we been sleeping together these past few weeks?” she said. “Why have you been having sex with me if you knew you were planning on ending it?”

I didn’t have an answer for that. I tried to give one anyway, stumbling my way through a stilted and embarrassed response.

Amanda told me she needed to get off the phone because she thought she was going to be sick. We hung up a few seconds later. I felt awful. I wrote her a long letter that night, apologizing, trying to iron things out and put some sort of amicable end to everything. I walked it over to her mailbox at about two in the morning.

After Amanda read the letter, we had one more phone conversation. I told her once again that I was sorry, that I really wanted for us to be friends. Amanda said, “Sure.” She sounded tired and wounded. I think she was crying. No sobs, just tears. I knew they were there by the sound of her voice. A little while later, we hung up. And after that, she stopped calling. In fact, she never called me again. Ever.

I called her one more time, a few weeks later, but hung up when I got the answering machine.

We hardly saw each other for the rest of our college days. She avoided me, I avoided her. The University of Colorado is a big school. Our circles didn’t mix much. I didn’t know how to approach her. I felt she didn’t want to be approached. I wanted her to approach me, but she never did. Maybe she felt I didn’t want to be approached either. Maybe she didn’t know how.

We never approached each other ever again.

Last I’d heard, she was dating a wealthy ski bum up in Crested Butte, and they had a good thing going. Then she was gone.

5

suicide n.

1 The act or an instance of intentionally killing oneself.

2 The destruction or ruin of one’s own interests: It is professional suicide to involve oneself in illegal practices.

3 One who commits suicide.

In imperial Rome, taking your own life was considered honorable.

In ancient Greece, convicted criminals were permitted to off themselves.

In France, suicide was illegal up until the Revolution.

In England, failed suicides were hanged right up until the nineteenth century.

Greenland has the highest per capita suicide rate in the world, with 127 out of every 100,000 people choosing to check out voluntarily. China is home to 21 percent of the world’s women. More than half of all female suicides take place there.

In the United States of America, suicide is the third-leading cause of all teenage deaths. A teenager commits suicide in the USA about once every two hours or so.

In 1997, a former music teacher named Marshall Applewhite convinced thirty-nine people to kill themselves in Southern California. Applewhite was the leader of a doomsday cult called Heaven’s Gate. He and his followers believed that a UFO was trailing the Hale-Bopp comet. They thought this UFO was four times the size of the earth and that it was on its way to pick them up; so instead of waiting around for it, they drank apple juice and vodka laced with pentobarbital and died.

The sheriff who arrived on the scene discovered all thirty-nine bodies. Resting beside each one was an overnight bag and five dollars cash.

Suicide was naturally the consistent course dictated by the logical intellect. (Is suicide the ultimate sincerity? There seems to be no way to refute the logic of suicide but by the logic of instinct.)

—William James

Back in 1993, a book called Kanzen Jisatsu Manyuaru was published in Japan. I happened to read about it in the news one day. Kanzen Jisatsu Manyuaru means “The Complete Suicide Manual.” The book offers detailed instructions on ten methods of suicide, including hanging, overdosing on drugs, electrocution, and self-immolation. It compares and contrasts the different methods in terms of pain, speed of completion, and level of disfigurement. In addition, the book offers readers tips on the best places to kill themselves, naming Aokigahara, a thick wood at the base of Mt. Fuji, as “the perfect place” to die.

In 1998, seventy-four corpses were found in the woods of Aokigahara.

The suicide rate in Japan rose by 35 percent that year alone.

Suicide prevention groups in Japan were convinced that The Complete Suicide Manual was a big part of the problem. The book’s author, Wataru Tsurumi, saw things differently. “No one ever killed themselves just because of my book,” he said. “The authorities are blaming me because they are unwilling to take responsibility for the economic, political, and social problems that are the real cause of suicides.”

In a span of roughly seven years following its publication, the book had sold about 1.2 million copies. With very little advertising or promotion, it was already in its eighty-third printing.

“This goes to show that there is a demand in society,” said a spokeswoman from the book’s publishing company.