The alarm on the nightstand could wake a neighborhood.

It was the kind of clock sold to rock stars and linemen. Still, it could not pull Matthew Eller from the depth he’d learned to reach. His mother, Susan Eppard, bought it when the other alarms failed, when she stood in his doorway in the Michigan mornings and watched the rise and fall of his chest, unsure whether to shake him or let him be. The siren wailed. He slept on.

“He would go into a coma-like sleep where he couldn’t wake up,” Susan told InMaricopa . “I bought this sonic alarm clock that had a decibel level of a siren, and he could sleep through it.”

Later, after he moved out, she would find the empties. Zip-top bags, light as paper, their prices stamped in a font meant to seem botanical: $12, $22.

“I didn’t have a clue wha

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