Possessed (5 page)

That August, Stefan lost his position at UTSW.

Weeks later, an offer came in from a fellow Swede, Dr. Jan-Åke Gustafsson, the director of the University of Houston's new Center for Nuclear Receptors and Cell Signaling in the department of biology and biochemistry. Stefan felt flattered when Gustafsson, whose work focused on prostate-cancer research, invited him to Houston for a look at the new center, recently funded by then–Texas Governor Rick Perry. On the campus, Stefan's office would be in the ultramodern Science and Engineering Center building. Gustafsson made an offer, and Stefan accepted. At UH, Stefan agreed to a salary of $80,000, less money than he was making in Dallas, in exchange for a better title, that of a full professor. By then, the delayed NIH funding for his study had been renewed for an additional three years. While Annika remained in Dallas, going to work in another
lab, the money enabled her and Stefan to continue working together, albeit long-distance.

Despite his excitement about the new opportunity, the pending move weighed heavily on Stefan. “He was upset,” Annika remembered. “Moving to Houston was hard on him. He had his life in Dallas, his friends. He was comfortable there. He wasn't a man who liked change, and everything was changing.”

Yet the world marches on, and all wasn't staying the same in Dallas either. About that time, Stan Rich married. At the wedding Stefan, while happy for his good friend, expressed regret at his own lack of a family. “I want to meet my match, my partner,” he said.

When describing what he wanted in a woman, Stefan's blue eyes sparkled behind his glasses, and he chuckled. “I'd like a hot-blooded Latina,” he said. “Someone who will tango and dance the salsa with me, and teach me to speak Spanish.”

Such a woman waited in Stefan's future, but she would be far from a blessing.

T
he move to Houston that December 2009, would prove difficult for Stefan Andersson. After nineteen years at UTSW, his move to UH meant that he worked in a strange setting with all new people, which left him feeling uncomfortable and alone. He rented a small apartment near the Texas Medical Center, a sprawling web of high-rises and skyscrapers made up of some of the largest hospitals, medical offices, and research facilities in the world, just west of downtown Houston. But the apartment was dim and lonely, without the camaraderie of The Village.

Soon after Stefan arrived, Stan Rich contacted Stefan to say that he'd entered Alcoholics Anonymous, after becoming aware that his drinking was out of control. Over the years, he and Stefan had been great drinking buddies. There were times when they drank heavily, and Stefan appeared worried about his own habits. “Do you think I'm an alcoholic?” Stefan asked Rich one night over one of many glasses of wine.

“I don't know. Maybe you are,” Rich said. “Maybe we both are. But no. I don't think so.”

They brushed it off. “It wasn't something I was ready to face at the time,” Rich said later.

When Rich called and announced that he'd quit drinking, Stefan became quiet for just a moment, perhaps stunned, then said, “That's admirable.”

There were facts that perhaps reassured Stefan that his
drinking hadn't reached an addiction level, that while his friend might be an alcoholic, he wasn't one. The first was that every year Stefan gave it up for a month or more, during the spring when he worked out to get ready for his annual bike race in Sweden. Moreover, his drinking had never affected his work, and he kept no alcohol in the house, never drinking alone. Still, on his forays out in the evenings or afternoons when he wasn't working, Stefan nearly always had a glass of wine or a drink in his hand.

If Stefan had been inclined to honestly assess the situation, perhaps so soon after his move to Houston didn't seem to be the most appropriate time. Struggling to find a comfort zone in the city, to map out new restaurants to frequent, places to go, without his support group around him, trying to meet new people, he felt ill at ease. As he'd done in the past, Stefan relied on his trust in the field of pharmacy and went to a doctor asking for help. One prescribed Xanax to mollify Stefan's anxiety.

Attempting to settle in that spring, Stefan bought furniture, a large black-leather couch and a chair and ottoman. Arranging it in his apartment living room, he fell and hurt his back, and a doctor prescribed painkillers. At the lab, Stefan had to stand while he worked, his tailbone too sore to tolerate sitting. Neither the Xanax nor the painkillers were supposed to be taken while consuming alcohol, but Stefan continued to drink. “His life was really going through a rough patch, and he was overmedicating,” said Annika. “He seemed at a loss, out of his zone.”

In his apartment one afternoon, Stefan passed out and fell down. When he came to, shaken, he called a colleague at UH, who summoned an ambulance. At the hospital, Stefan was diagnosed with an electrolyte imbalance, one that they pegged as related to the pills and his alcohol consumption. At the urging of colleagues, Stefan signed himself into the PaRC Rehab Center at one of Houston's largest hospitals, Memorial Hermann.

For the next ninety days, Stefan participated in a
twelve-step program similar to Alcoholics Anonymous, which admits powerlessness over an addiction and seeks help from a higher power. As an atheist, Stefan couldn't ask a god he didn't believe in for help, couldn't turn his problems and his addiction over to an entity that he judged didn't exist. Instead, Stefan replaced the concept of a god in the program with something tangible, something he'd loved throughout his life: the sun.

After months of counseling and group sessions, lessons in redirecting his life, Stefan checked out of rehab with a PaRC baseball cap, one he said he'd worked hard to get. He returned to his research and his apartment. On and off, he called Stan Rich, saying that he wasn't drinking, and Stan knew that his old friend was trying. Stefan went to AA meetings, and he stayed home more at night, and told a friend that when he thought of drinking, he took out his admit report from the rehab center. “It's a sobering thing to read,” he said.

Yet after so many years of going out nightly, finding companionship in restaurants and bars, Stefan must have found it difficult. In a new city, Stefan was alone, not going to the places where he felt the most comfortable, the restaurants and bars where he could be around people and enjoy their company. Before long, Stefan told Rich that he was drinking again, but he claimed to be monitoring how much, limiting himself to two or three beers or glasses of wine an evening.

Then something happened.

That fall, as his first year in Houston drew to a close, Stefan took one of his daily constitutionals and walked the path around Hermann Park, as close to New York's Central Park as Houston has to offer, a 407-acre expanse of green situated between the Texas Medical Center and Houston's stylish Museum District, close to the stately Rice University campus. A statue of Sam Houston on horseback marked the park's entrance, pointing visitors to the Houston Zoo, an outdoor theater where the symphony performed each summer, a jogging track, playgrounds, gardens, a small lake with paddleboats, and the Museum of Natural Science. That
day, Stefan noticed a tall building, The Parklane. Next to a driveway leading to the porte cochere, a sign advertised apartments for rent.

The Parklane

A sleek thirty-five-story luxury high-rise, The Parklane rose above Hermann Park Golf Course's sixteenth hole. Inside the double glass doors at the entry, manned by round-the-clock valets, stood a glass-topped table with a large potted white orchid, atop a black-and-white-marble floor. To the right, at a large desk that matched the wood-paneled walls, sat a concierge, responsible for monitoring a high-tech security system that included pass keys to access the building and resident floors, as well as recording the comings and goings of guests and deliveries.

An impressive address in one of Houston's priciest neighborhoods, The Parklane, like The Village, was geared toward professionals, mainly childless couples and singles, offering happy hours, parlors for greeting guests or waiting for limos or taxis, a fitness center, tennis courts, a pool, a parking garage, and surveillance cameras throughout the building and the grounds.

That day, Stefan toured 18B, a one-bedroom, one-bath corner unit. On the eighteenth floor near the elevator, it was T-shaped, with the wood-floored entranceway and kitchen making a wide stem that continued onto the beige-carpeted living room, the master bedroom to the left with a full bath, and a study open to the living room on the right. The kitchen was small, but Stefan still rarely cooked, not even owning dishes or pots and pans since he'd gifted them to Annika. Instead, the place had amenities that meant more to him: nine-foot ceilings with seven-foot panoramic windows that
overlooked the golf course and the city, and two balconies with nothing impeding the rays of his beloved sun.

Stefan Andersson's move into The Parklane would mark his turning point in Houston. Overnight, his attitude toward the city changed. Never into possessions, for a man of fifty-six, Stefan had little. He brought his recently purchased black-leather furniture and placed a desk with a black-mesh chair in front of a curved corner window, then hung his three crow paintings on the living-room walls, including two above a flat-screen TV. The kitchen cabinets were bare, except for one he filled with his unused prescriptions in their original bottles, carefully organized. He had no dining-room or kitchen table, and only a single barstool near the kitchen counter. With its expansive views, the 1,211-square-foot apartment felt free, open, and bright.

Abhorring clutter, Stefan decorated the bedroom with only a bed and shelves crowded with books, nearly all nonfiction, exploring history, finances, business, or science.
“I'm a minimalist,” he told friends. “I feel better with space around me.”

Stefan smiling and happy in his apartment

(Courtesy of Annika Lindqvist)

In the months that followed, Stefan settled happily into his new home. In the mornings, he rose early to see the sun rise over the city. Then he sat at his desk on his laptop surrounded by windows and checked how the overseas financial markets had fared overnight. Sometimes he put in a buy or a sell order, or simply held to his current positions. Afterward, he drove to the University of Houston campus for a day's work in the lab. At times, there were lectures to give to medical students and PhD candidates on his research.

In the evenings and on the weekends, Stefan made Houston his own, as he'd once done with Dallas and New York. One of his first forays was to the Museum of Fine Arts—Houston, a nine-minute walk from his new apartment. There he became a member, which spurred invitations to attend parties surrounded by Picassos,
Rembrandts, and Monets, and to view special collections at cocktail gatherings that marked the openings of new exhibits. Always personable, he quickly made friends. Sometimes he talked of his sister Anneli, who'd become an art teacher and a sculptor in Sweden. In Houston, one of the most diverse cities in the nation, with consulate offices of ninety-four countries, ranging from Albania to Venezuela, Stefan hobnobbed with native Texans and transplants from across the United States. Nearly a quarter of Harris County's residents were immigrants from other countries, and at the museum, Stefan met many, the majority working in the energy business in the city known across the world as Big Oil's megacenter.

Stefan in a UH photo in the lab

(Courtesy of Staffan Larsson)

The fourth largest city in the U.S., anchoring a metropolitan area of more than 6.6 million, Houston sprawls, splitting off into neighborhoods and suburbs. For Stefan, it became more manageable after he explored the Museum District, surrounding The Parklane, and discovered restaurants and bars within walking distance. Before long, Stefan was a regular at Bodegas, a brightly decorated, Tex-Mex eatery on the first floor of an office building, just half a block from the art museum. There, Stefan claimed a barstool and ate tacos, while drinking a beer or downing a shot of tequila. On Sundays, he indulged in festive brunches in the Hotel Zsa Zsa's circular dining room, lined with plants and trellises. There he feasted on omelets or pasta, enjoying the views through windows overlooking a garden and the iconic Mecom fountain, gifted to the city by a prominent oil magnate in the sixties.

Two of Stefan's closest Houston friends were tied to his homeland, Pernilla and Anders Berkenstam. Sandy-haired with glasses, Anders had not only Sweden in common with Stefan but professions. An associate professor at the University of Houston, he had a PhD and conducted medical research at the Methodist Hospital Research Institute. With soft blond hair often pulled back, Pernilla had eyes that squinted when she smiled, rosy cheeks, and an inclination to wear a
string of pearls. The Berkenstams lived in a nearby high-rise also overlooking the park, and friends described the couple as good companions, warm sorts who enjoyed a laugh.