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CHAPTER 5

The West Coast Tour

IN ANY CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, phone calls, text messages, or any communications from the deceased are highly prized pieces of information. Sometimes these missives and dispatches are enough in and of themselves to solve a case or to put investigators on the fast lane to identifying and interviewing key suspects.

In Elisa’s case, there were no known text messages because her phone was missing. Nor were there phone calls—besides verbal recall of the conversations with her parents while traveling—available for analysis. No friends or acquaintances from the trip immediately came forward with information except for two women who shared a room with Elisa at the Cecil Hotel. These women appear to have been impromptu roommates that Elisa met upon arriving in Los Angeles. At some point during their stay, these two roommates reported to the hotel management that Elisa was acting bizarre and they requested that she be moved to a different room. They have remained unnamed by the LAPD, and no additional information about them has been released, constituting yet another missing puzzle piece.

The Elisa Lam case presented a vexing twist: there were no apparent eyewitnesses, but there was a first-person autobiographical record left behind by the deceased. In time, these records would become just as fascinating and haunting to me as the surveillance video itself. A public memoir she left behind detailing the mercurial journey of her life from the ages of nineteen to twenty-one. In certain passages she reached back even further, summoning memories from childhood and late adolescence.

ETHER FIELDS

The last tweet on her Twitter page (@lambetes) states simply “SPEAKEASY” and is dated January 27, 2013, which is approximately five days before she disappeared. The second most recent tweet is from ten days earlier.

These tweets took me back to December of 2012. I needed more recent information and was hoping her Tumblr would have it.

Her Tumblr blog was entitled Nouvelle/Nouveau. A wall of lively media-filled thumbnails greeted me like futuristic crenellations on a digital facade. At a cursory glance, Elisa had varied and eclectic tastes in art, and her Tumblr blog contained a vast assortment of different photographs, digital images, gifs, and quotes filling up the screen.

A representation of the personality of Elisa, a young woman who no longer existed, suddenly levitated before me. A Great Gatsby reference; a book reading another book; TVs talking at a dinner party; Kurt Vonnegut slowly smiling; a rainbow threading through a family of otters; shadowy figures emerging from a misty, ethereal swamp; a fork and spoon parental unit holding their baby spork; David Lynch; Inglourious Basterds; a witchlike skeleton in robes; a gif asking, “are you expanding your mind or just going crazy?”; Waiting for Godot; “Travel with Hogwarts Express.”

One post, in particular, mesmerized me. It was a digital illustration of a body falling from a building. I remember an article I read about the horrifying history of the Cecil Hotel, one that included serial killers, murders, and a great number of suicides. A considerable number of the suicides were people jumping from the windows of their upper-floor rooms at the hotel. The falling man image posted to Elisa’s Tumblr was posted on January 31, the day she was recorded in the elevator, the day she disappeared and, presumably, died.

Her final written post appears to have been on January 29, when she wrote:

have arrived in Laland . . . and there is a monstrosity of a building next to the place I’m staying when I say monstrosity mind you I’m saying as in gaudy but then again it was built in 1928 hence the art deco theme so yes it IS classy but then since it’s LA it went on crack Fairly certain this is where Baz Luhrmann needs to film the Great Gatsby.

There was no direct text from her that was more recent, from the thirtieth or the day she disappeared.

Going backward, I read more of her writing, attempting to reverse engineer her timeline: on January 27, she gave a “shout out” to custodians and other working-class people who get “shit on”; she says “the Speakeasy was AWESOME” but that she lost a cellphone; on January 26, she posts that she’s going out that night and hopes that no “creepers” harass her; on the 24th, she summarizes her activities prior to Los Angeles, in San Diego, mentioning that she’s staying at a hostel and “reckless [ly]” told a guy there that she liked him.

Prior to that, she’s planning for her trip, which she called her “West Coast tour.” Her planned destinations include San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco. On January 12, she mentions that she would appreciate “suggestions and meet-ups.”

Elisa had been planning her trip for a while and was excited to see California. The information presented a solid travel itinerary from Elisa herself mixed in with more Tumblr madness: a man missing his head labeled “where’s your head at”; American Psycho; a demon sitting in someone’s head whispering, you suck; Carl Sagan; a tribute to weird people; David Bowie; more Fight Club; more Great Gatsby.

I began collecting Elisa’s writing into a Google document so that I could read her posts without sifting through the other Tumblr posts.

Then I remembered someone mentioning a second blog. This one, called Ether Fields, was hosted on Blogspot and took a more traditional form. My eyes swept over a post dated over six months before her death. It was titled “Worries of a twenty something” and captioned: “I spent about two days in bed hating myself.” I clicked on it to read more.

The post continued:

Why don’t I simply do the things that I know will make me feel better?

It isn’t rocket science. It isn’t that difficult. Get out of bed. Eat. See people. Talk to people. Exercise. Write. Read. If you want to do something with your life, well ok just go ahead and do something.

The post continued on for several more paragraphs in which Elisa admonished herself for various reasons.

I was about to move on to the next post when I noticed that someone had left a comment below the blog entry. Someone named Emma wrote: “You REALLY need to speak to someone in real life about what you’re going through.”

She continued on with a strenuous appeal for Elisa to seek help for depression and low self-esteem. It appears this was the only comment prior to her death because the very next comment began:

Elisa,

I don’t know you and we have never met or even knew of each other’s existence until your tragic fate. When I first heard of the news and saw your picture, I don’t know why, but I felt torn and drawn to you . . . I became obsessed in finding more about you.

The author of the comment said reading her blog was like looking in a mirror and seeing a version of himself, a reflection of his own despair. The next comment responded to Jeff telling him that it was not silly for him to write to a dead person because Elisa’s thoughts live on in the minds of those who read her blog. These comments were left one month and two months after her death, respectively.

There were many more comments. I was a bit startled by the reality that months after her death, complete strangers felt an emotional connection to Elisa and were flocking to her blog to leave digital epitaphs.

I sought out Elisa’s blogs with a specific purpose in mind: to determine if her posts revealed anything about her cause of death. But I soon got caught up in reading her thoughts and comments left by others. There was something mystifying about getting so much detail on a stranger’s life after their passing. It felt almost as if I were resurrecting her in my mind, creating a simulation of her life in which her past memories and thoughts were on a looped reanimation tour.

Elisa had decided to take a solo trip, her “West Coast tour.” But why? To discover this, I had to go back further and collate posts from both of her blogs, as well as her social media accounts. By the time I was fully locked and loaded I had before me over one hundred pages of single-spaced entries.

I proceeded to get lost in someone else’s past, a past that only existed on paper and that began to intersect and cross-pollinate with my own present and future.

THE LONELY REBEL

Elisa went to a small, competitive high school, where she received exceptional grades and was devoted to academics. She began taking grade-twelve level courses in grade eight.

Elisa loved to read. Awake and Dreaming, Lois Lowry, and all of Kit Pearson’s books had gotten her through elementary school (where, she claims, she began her adventure in being a “hermit”). Her grade seven teacher assigned The Outsiders, paving the way for a love of reading that persisted through her life.

Her English teacher, whom she described as excellent, introduced her to short stories by Asimov, Bradbury, and Atwood; an even better grade twelve English teacher inspired a love for analyzing literature and the classics (which, she says, could be referred to as “dead white guys”). She hungrily absorbed Hamlet, Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby (a book that would become an obsession for her), For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Importance of Being Earnest. She read poets like John Donne, Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Dickinson, Yeats, and Keats. Poetry, she admitted, was not her favorite. She preferred complete sentences.

Elisa wanted her education to involve “REAL discussions about life, death, love, society, humanity” and all the stuff you didn’t hear on the television.

She also participated in student council and a variety of extracurriculars, such as volleyball and cross-country running. She was diligently laying the foundation for getting accepted into a university, though she hadn’t yet decided whether she wanted to stay in Vancouver and attend the University of British Columbia or light out for a new course and attend school in a different city.

In some ways, Elisa fell into the mold of her peers. She was academic but also loved Harry Potter and a rich variety of popular culture and consumerism. In particular, fashion, which she blogged about with feverish delight. She found comfort in her two Mr. Potato Heads, named Darth Tatar and Spider Cloud, Twilight books, and orange and blue hydrangeas, the movie Drive, Reese’s pieces, a good latte, Diptyque candles, Emily the Strange T-shirts, Stars & Regina Spektor, Halo, and, above all, Tumblr. She was thrilled beyond words to find black leather Repettos for under $200.

But Elisa had an anarchistic philosophy brewing in her, a contrarian streak that at times turned her blog into a manifesto of personal rebellion and eco-feminist empowerment. She evinced a disgust for the very trends she followed, the generation she typified, and was keenly aware of the socio-emotional toxins polluting society. At one point she even wrote of wanting to visit São Paulo, Brazil, to see what it would be like to live in a country that has outlawed outdoor commercial advertising. This passage stunned me because I’ve considered the same trip for the same reason.

She wrote that “her generation is only interested in self-promotion, media only caters to sensationalism—gigantic web of marketing, national sport of hipsters, everyone branding themselves, was this the result of commercialism run amuck, capitalism so entrenched into our DNA that we have an intrinsic desire to sell ourselves.”

Perhaps as a partial result of this rebellious nature, Elisa began to feel the sting of isolation. Unlike many of her friends, she had no desire to party or drink. Since she didn’t go out with them on weekend adventures, she was labeled a prude, uninteresting, and found herself excluded from plans. And even though her high school had a large Asian population—with many second-generation students with roots in Korea and mainland China—she noticed early on that her ethnicity at times caused her to be ostracized.

Elisa also realized something about herself from a young age. She wasn’t able to pinpoint an exact event that caused it and she couldn’t trace how it had grown from the tiniest embryo of a sensation into a fully grown everyday reality, but Elisa knew that she suffered from an ailment that most of the others in her peer group did not. She called it depression because she didn’t know how else to classify it, though it made her feel like a walking cliche, so she didn’t talk about it much.

But there was no denying it. She experienced dark moods that washed over her like a storm stripping the land of its life and identifying features, torrents of negative thinking and despair that made her want to hide in bed. She’d always had a habit of hanging out under the covers. For a time, she thought it was to evade the light. But now she realized it was an early defense mechanism for avoiding the way the everyday world made her feel. It was like hibernating during deep winter, when there’s no hope for food or warmth.

Maybe this is just adolescence working its sinister magic, she had told herself. As hormones began to infect their every thoughts and actions, puberty became the dark lightning that divided her school’s social groups. The “haves and the have-nots” don’t just apply to wealth; it’s also a form of ableism that applies to physical beauty and personality.

All people experience sadness, sure, sometimes painful sadness. But did it hit them for no reason for several days at a time and essentially incapacitate them? It didn’t seem so. It seemed, rather, that most of her peers were surging into professional adulthood while she was scrambling to understand her own mind and sometimes struggling just to get out of bed.

BETRAYED

Things changed again for the worse in grade twelve. Elisa documented in her blog that she was betrayed by many of her close friends. One friend’s act of betrayal upset her so much that she wrote an angry letter and left it on the windshield of the friend’s parent’s car.

It felt like her best friends were leaving her behind, substituting other “cooler” friends in her place. This haunted her for years.

The summer before grade twelve, Elisa participated in a five-week j-explore program in Quebec. The housing was in the middle of nowhere and it was the first time she had lived away from her family. She learned a couple of truths about herself during this time. One was that she despised small-town life. She was a city girl. The quietude of rural scenes too closely approximated her own inner isolation and this overlapped with the second realization, which was that she was not good at meeting new people. She was confounded by the prospect of representing herself to strangers—and as a result, she didn’t make a single friend during the entire five weeks.

Once again, she felt rejected for not going out and partying and wearing hip, sexy clothes. Everyone around her, she mused, so easily slipped into new friendships and groups, so effortlessly navigated a labyrinthine social structure she found alien and meaningless. Everyone seemed capable of wearing masks and then discarding them based on the crowd at hand.

Another source of disappointment she cites from that time is the decision she made to drop cross-country running in favor of volleyball. She called the decision a terrible one. While she didn’t consider herself particularly good at long-distance running, she felt a sense of comradery and warmth from the racing team. Later, she realized her discontinuation of running precipitated an overall dearth of exercise that probably compounded her depression.

Her volleyball coach was a “dick wad,” who apparently was notorious for racist and sexist innuendo; he gave her barely any game time, deferring to the popular grade eleven girls in which he saw more athletic potential. Finally, at the end of the season, he told her straight out that he felt guilty for this, confirming that she had essentially wasted her term on volleyball.

She left the gymnasium and burst into tears. And at that exact moment, the cross-country team trundled by during their practice. Teammates she felt guilty for abandoning saw her weeping as they ran by.

DEPRESSION

This feeling, a sense of existential despair, grew more pronounced. Reading some of her early posts, you can sense Elisa first coming to terms with depression, developing an internal vocabulary for how she would think about it.

There is no physical manifestation of my “illness.” Would I become psychotic and want to off myself? I know I wouldn’t do anything rash like actually jump off a bridge. I’m too much of a coward. Instead I’ll just lie in my bed and let the days pass by. That’s my physical manifestation, sleeping for days in bed.

Elisa probably didn’t know this, but what she was doing is actually considered a healthy way to manage depression. Verbalizing one’s depression—creating a lexicon for how it feels and what its features are and then sharing those impressions with others—is considered a crucial aspect of self-care for depressives.

In one passage, Elisa described her boyfriend trying to get her out of bed and her refusing to move.

Depression is “the most debilitating, humiliating disease I have ever been subjected to. It makes a fool of you. [It] sucks out every shard of hope or motivation that you ever had in your body, and it makes you want to destroy yourself.”

This lethargy is, of course, one of the hallmarks of severe depression, along with disrupted appetite and sleep troubles (both oversleeping and undersleeping).

Scientists have been trying for years to determine why exactly major depression alters so dramatically one’s sense of identity. While there is much to learn, what we know is that depressive events trigger major changes to the biochemistry of the brain, affecting the movement, levels, and functionality of neurotransmitters (including serotonin and norepinephrine), synapses, neurons, gene expression, hypothalamic and cortical functions, the thyroid releasing hormone (TRH), the amygdala and possibly the hypothalamus, melatonin, prolactin, body temperature, cortisol secretion, thalamus circuitry, and more.

It is difficult sometimes to differentiate what is a cause and what is an effect, but what is clear from brain scans is that an episode of severe depression can permanently alter the brain.

Elisa’s earliest references to antidepressants are vague but it appears that she sought treatment from a doctor during her later teenage years and was prescribed antidepressants. Like many people who suffer depression, at times Elisa questioned the legitimacy of the “illness” and the need for taking medication.

Part of me is still in denial that I’m not sick and this can be solved without pills. No matter the argument against, I think taking the pills is weakness. I am not strong enough, I do not have the courage or conviction to do the right thing.

And then there’s always the cynic saying depression is a made up disease so Big Pharma can make us all dependent on these pills and thus they are rich.

BETRAYAL 2.0

A big part of accepting depression involves your social network, she wrote on Formspring:

With my friends in particular, I think I have had depression for so long that I would have hoped they would have found a way to support me. It’s just really hard to take when they have absolutely no response when I say I’m having a bad day. The whole of November so far has been the shittiest in my life and my friends are busy with school and so forth (understandable) but I don’t think I ask too [much] if they could check in on me once in a while (a text message even) especially after I basically resorted them to tears after telling them how disappointed I am in them.

Social isolation from depression may have been a factor in her ill-advised solo trip to the West Coast. Elisa described herself as a “fiercely loyal friend” but felt betrayed.

Elisa describes a specific night, her nineteenth birthday, on which she was drinking with one of her best friends from high school. Evidently, this friend had, unbeknownst to Elisa, made plans to drink with her boyfriend that night. Elisa started to cry and because of her inebriation was especially emotional and infuriated. She tried to physically stop her friend from leaving, at which point the friend called her boyfriend to alter the plans so that she could stay with Elisa, who obviously needed her. But later in the evening, Elisa noticed that three of her friends had left and when she went to look for them, she noticed her best friend trying to slip out unnoticed.

I will never speak to this friend again. We were the closest friends in high school and she dumped 5 years of friendship so she could drink with a loser guy and her douchebag of a boyfriend who insulted my sister.

This and other stories suggest that many of Elisa’s friends did not always know how to help her. Despite her fierce loyalty as a friend, Elisa’s mercurial moods and depression may have isolated her from the people closest to her.

BLESS THE INTERNET

The Internet, for Elisa, was a tool in the fight against depression and loneliness. When she discovered the social blogging platform Tumblr, it was the beginning of an important relationship that she often wrote about in anthropomorphic terms. Tumblr was her best friend, sometimes her only friend, the “solace to her woes.”

She often used the Internet for research and perusing fashion blogs, but she wasn’t keen on Facebook, which felt like a facade, a social hall of mirrors where happiness would forever elude her.

She dabbled in the other platforms—Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter—but there was something about the architecture and community of Tumblr that soothed her. She became a frequent blogger and found a sense of catharsis in divulging her life with the anonymous invisible wall of faces.

Elisa used the Internet to communicate with others about depression.

“I am using this tumblr,” she said, “as a platform to record my progress to get life in order and stop lying in bed letting the depression take over my life.”

She wrote to one Tumblr user:

Oh greyface you have unfortunately become a member of the sad club. We number in the millions and we roam the internet feeling very lonely and desperately want some sort of human connection.

Bless the internet. All those who wish to find a way to express their sadness can go there and feel less alone. So many of the tumblrs I follow seem to carry the same grief as me in some way or another . . . Thanks to internet we record our lives and put it on some stage for creepers to stalk and follow so they can stop thinking about their own troubles for a moment and escape into someone else’s.

Elisa knew that while the Internet allowed her freedom and solidarity, there were dangers associated with sharing personal information online. Transparency and self-expression in the age of the Internet existed alongside a dark truth: Online followers and friends can, if they choose, use your social media posts to track your movements. Later, I would find a websleuth who had done just that with Elisa’s posts.

But the Internet was a necessary emotional outlet for Elisa. In what would prove to be a grim irony, the Internet became her haven, a place where she could be her true self. She spent much of her social life on the Internet, making it so poetically, eerily sad that that’s where she would ultimately reside in death, as a viral horror story entombed and immortalized for all to consume.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEROTONIN

I started taking antidepressants and mood stabilizers when I was eighteen, and have been on various cocktails and medleys of them since. I’m a valued customer of the pharmaceutical industry. They probably have a framed photograph of my face in the company boardrooms.

Despite my cynicism toward the Big Pharma industry, my desire to not be abjectly miserable consistently wins out over any sociopolitical protests.

The stigma over depression, mental illness, and pharmaceutical treatment has started to abate in recent years, but there is still a deep cultural scarlet letter embossing the foreheads of people who take psychiatric meds. Many of the prevailing viewpoints toward psychiatric illness have carried into the current era from “unenlightened” times, albeit they usually don’t result in outright violence.

In the ancient eras of Greece, Rome, Egypt, China, and the Middle East people commonly attributed aberrant behavior and mental activity as spirit possession. During this and even in later epochs, people exhibiting this behavior, which today we might diagnose as being symptomatic of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, were frequently tortured and executed.

Severe depression, mania, and delusion were marks of someone whose religious faith and will were not sufficiently strong enough to ward off evil spirits; thus they were somewhat responsible for their own affliction. This idea—that people with psychiatric illness are principally to blame for their condition—is one of the social stigmata that has carried into the modern era.

Barbaric and ill-informed treatments for mental illnesses also marked the twentieth century during the age of institutionalization. Before the discovery of neurotransmitters and drugs like chlorpromazine and lithium, doctors induced horrific seizures in patients, injecting them with animal blood, castor oil, massive doses of caffeine; they experimented with sleep therapy, early barbaric forms of electroconvulsive therapy (shock therapy, or ECT), psychosurgery (including transorbital lobotomies performed with ice picks).

Depression has never felt psychological to me. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but when it strikes it feels overwhelmingly physical, chemical. My emotions are the resulting glitched interface of flawed circuits. It doesn’t matter how positive I try to be, how much yoga and meditation I do, how healthy I am—the chemicals always win. Untreated depression is like arguing with chemicals and, in the long run, I always lose.

This goes a long way toward understanding my empathy for Elisa. I understand the frustration of not being in control of your own thoughts, of wanting to be happy but instead seeing the darkest contours of your own mind on a regular, hourly basis. It’s demoralizing and exhausting. It’s like swimming with weights attached to your limbs and a bee in your mouth. Simply getting out of bed is a Herculean challenge; returning phone calls from friends becomes an existential crisis, a clinic in how to conceal a panic attack during small talk.

Your self-image is perpetually shattered as you struggle to put together the shards of your own identity. Simply holding it together for an hour can feel like sitting in the captain’s deck of the Titanic, watching the pressurized cracks lengthen as you idly wait for an oceanic wall of icy water to demolish you.

Reading Elisa’s passages on depression are heartbreaking for me. Parts of it feel as though she was describing my own internal landscape. But Elisa does a pretty incredible job at advocating for “those of us who don’t have standard-issue brain chemistry.”

“I have clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder,” she wrote. “I have a fancy piece of paper from a real doctor that says so, and I have a little bottle of pills that I have to take every day or else I want to kill myself.”

The general practitioner I went to in San Diego had me on a cocktail of Prozac, Wellbutrin, and Strattera. Prozac, the most common SSRI, works to boost and regulate your brain’s serotonin production. Wellbutrin (which, I would learn, Elisa also had taken extensively) is an “atypical” antidepressant and increases the brain’s production of dopamine; it is commonly prescribed to help people quit smoking, which was one of the reasons I took it. Strattera is an SNRI, a class of meds that works to regulate norepinephrine. It is one of the only non-stimulant ADD medications.

I remember what my very first doctor said to me about using meds to treat depression. At the time I was eighteen and concerned that antidepressants would make me less creative. He said that the goal in that case was to allow me to go to my edge without falling off the cliff. I always thought that was kind of a weird thing to say to a depressed teenager—but it makes sense.

Elisa wasn’t on any SSRIs; however, she was on an SNRI (serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor), called Effexor, or Venlafaxine, which she described as the only drug in years that had actually helped her. I tried this one for about six months. It had worked well but caused my blood pressure to rise.

The search for a compatible antidepressant is a maddening experience that can go on for years, even decades. There is simply no metric for understanding someone else’s psychiatric disorder, no diagnostic for determining how a person’s unique personality, history of trauma, genetic makeup, and neurochemistry will interact.

This is why the discovery of Elisa’s blogs marked a seismic shift in my perception of the investigation. While the surveillance tape offered a portal into her final moments, the blogs offered a portal into her final years, which, some would argue, can be just as significant in determining a cause of death.

As I dug into Elisa’s autobiographical prose, I identified with her struggle against depression and forged a powerful emotional connection to the case. At the same time, disturbing new questions arose.