Attention. Deficit. Disorder. - Brad Listi

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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

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