A player’s first move isn’t necessarily the truest or clearest view of that person I’ll get, but it’s often the most naked, because it takes a while to situate yourself within an imaginary landscape. When you respond to the initial subscriber packet with your opening move—when you come to the bridge—you haven’t had a chance to get much sense of the game’s rhythms, so you’re awkward, halting, more likely to overplay your hand. The open path at the overpass gives way to grand schemes, huge, multipart responses, whole narratives from within the canvas newly forming inside the player’s imagination. I keep myself out of it; I interpret and react, like a flowchart responding flatly to a person who’s asking it how to live.
I did it this way for years, mechanically helping people through the chambers of my original hospital vision, occasionally even typing out fresh moves one page at a time on an IBM Selectric, my face hot with bandages, the work distracting me from my circumstances. The advent of the internet looked like it would kill off the game, and I wondered what I’d do for work, but people will surprise you. By 2003—long after most of the magazines that had served as initial points of entry had stopped publishing, the few left displaying my ads to fewer and fewer subscribers—the number of dedicated players had risen to the mid-hundreds, none of whom were at all interested in shifting their daily play over to video games or MMORPGs. My rate had risen with the times, to ten dollars a month. There were websites that scanned and posted as many moves as they could collect, but not many people interested in seeing the moves out of turn: the point was the play. And beyond all that, plenty of people had been involved too long to turn back. Their quiet fervor attracted a few new curious seekers each month, and the replacement rate was more or less constant—people sometimes grew out of the game or got frustrated with their progress, but a few more always came along to take their place. The core was committed. Their minds were made up. They meant to reach the Trace Italian. They thirsted for the security it offered, for the sanctuary of the interior.
The inside of the Trace Italian, of course, does not exist. A player can get close enough to see it: it shines in the new deserts of Kansas, gleaming in the sun or starkly rising from the winter cold. The rock walls that protect it meet in points around it, one giving way to another, for days on end. But the dungeons into which you’ll fall as you work through the pathways to its gates number in the low hundreds, and if you actually get into the entry hall, there are a few hundred more sub-dungeons before you’ll actually reach somewhere that’s truly safe. Technically, it’s possible to get to the last room in the final chamber of the Trace Italian, but no one will ever do it. No one will ever live that long.
I opened about a dozen envelopes today; the process has been the same for years. First, I open as many as I think I can take care of in one sitting. Then I stack them on the floor by the desk, letters and SASEs still inside, and I sit down next to them. It makes me feel young. And then I deal with it all: methodically, almost mindlessly sometimes, one by one until there aren’t any left. Most days it’s all Trace Italian, but some days there’ll be stragglers: maybe the Pennsylvania kids who answered an ad in a yellowing magazine they’d found at the Goodwill just to see what would happen, and who now competed against each other in an otherwise wholly abandoned game called Rise of the Sorcerers. War game fiends playing through Operation Mercury for the third or fourth time. Or one of the seven people who still play Scorpion Widow, who may well keep playing forever somehow, no matter what happens to me. Two today. Sometimes I let my mind drift out a little: I try not to get carried away, and I have to be careful, but I wonder about them, the servants of the scorpion widow—who they really are, what they’re like. If they contemplate growing old along with their subscriptions. Maybe they’ll go missing one day, stuck forever in the sands where they made their last move. Gone. Who might they be elsewhere: in their rooms, alone with pencils, working on maps. Why they play, why they’re still here. What it means to them.
I sit there reading, and reading, and reading. I take the cash or checks they send and tuck them away into a money pouch I’ll take down to the bank once a month. Some players write long letters that narrate their next move in great detail, explaining why they’re doing one thing and not another, guessing at the perils of going the wrong way; others are just a sentence, or a fragment of one. Leave silo and scope out street. Head for hills. Interrogate the traitor.
Decrypting the letters is like detective work, but it’s also like surgery: there’s a lot of connective tissue, and some of it’s wet and messy. People get invested in the game. They scatter details of their daily lives throughout their narratives; some friend who used to play the game but is gone now, God knows where—dead? lost? got too old?—will appear mid-letter, a ghost whispering an idea to the player as he writes. If Jeff were playing, he’d probably attack the guard, but I’m not Jeff, so I’m going to wait until the guard falls asleep and remove the grating in the floor of the cell. Things like that. Who’s Jeff? Did I know him? I extract the necessary information from the greater narrative, and I pull the corresponding next move from the filing cabinet.
Every move I send out begins with the same word: You. When I first wrote most of them, so long ago now that it’s incredible to think of it, I had in my mind only a single player, and of course he looked almost exactly like me: not me as I am now, but as I was before the accident. Young and fresh and frightened, and in need of refuge from the world. I was building myself a home on an imaginary planet. I hadn’t considered, then, how big the world was; how many people lived there, how different their lives were from mine. The infinite number of planets spinning in space. I have since traveled great distances, and my sense of the vast oceans of people down here on the Earth, how they drift, is keener. But you, back then, was a singular noun for me, or, at best, a theoretical plural awaiting proof.
I went through my plural yous now. I sent one guy off to find a brass bowl for the eventual gathering of venom from the jaw of the scorpion widow herself, and I let another sweat through a long night on the beach at Crete, waiting for Nazis. I was taking my time about it, and I knew why, even though in my head I’d told myself: I’ll just go back to my life as it was, back to the land of spectral effects. Nothing is really different now.
I have a deep need for stasis and for the most part I’ve gained it, over time. Even after the recent assaults my shield zone remained fairly strong. So I wanted to be telling myself the truth about where, in the state of play, I stood this morning. But I’d recognized a postmark going through the pile, and I’d set that one aside, knowing what it was going to be about. I try not to be dramatic about my life, no matter what turns it takes. There’s nothing down that road for me. But I took a little breath, worming the tip of my index finger in under the seal and then ripping the envelope open down the side.
Hey Focus dude. Hope everything’s cool with you. I’m just going to keep playing if that’s OK. Maybe that seems weird to you I don’t know. After all the stuff. It’s not your fault you know, it isn’t anybody’s fault. There was other stuff going on with us not just the game. It’s a whole thing you couldn’t even know about. I am glad the judge dropped the lawsuit it was bullshit anyway. OK so I pick up the shovel by the disposal unit and start digging, all right? When we dug back in Tularosa it worked out all right. Anyway let me know what I find I am pretty sure there will be some antidote there. Love, Lance
It doesn’t have anything to do with me, I thought. Just out on the edges, maybe. I am in a unique position to understand that. But back down where the old me lived, somewhere near the brain stem where everything gets basic, I could see how Lance would want to just forge forward. It seemed less crazy to me than it would have seemed to his parents. I picked out the “Dig Near Unit” move from the filing cabinet and I stuffed and sealed the envelope. I wrote getting close! over the seal. And I noticed that the envelope would be going to Lance in care of somebody else—a neighbor? a friend from school? I didn’t know; I didn’t need to know.
I let the moment sort of evaporate as I slid the stuffed envelope into the tray marked outgoing. And I thought, you know, maybe tomorrow I will go to the park, or if not tomorrow, next week. I should go to the park, just to sit in the park and look at the world. I am working too hard, not that I mind. But I need to get out more. I’ll go to the park and just sit, and see what comes up.
4 It was Teague I thought of when I first drew up the Tularosa fortune shack, and it was his face I saw when I dreamed up the astrologer inside it. I knew Teague from junior high. We’d gone to different elementary schools, but everybody in town got dumped into the same junior high. It was a scary place. Some of the kids from the other schools were bigger, meaner; you had to spend a lot of energy trying to avoid them. Teague was kind of short. His shoulders were starting to broaden, but he wore his hair long, and it opened him up to a lot of grief. Kids threw food at him when he walked through the cafeteria. He never even looked back at them.
We had Composition I together but Teague sat by himself, his head hanging low. Everybody called him Tits; they’d say it a bunch of times to try to make him look up. He’d be sitting there, eyes down, head tucked, pencil working, worlds away, when the hissing would start up. Just this through-the-teeth whispering chant, almost empty of meaning: not Teague, you suck, or Teague, fuck you, or anything. Just Tits over and over. During tests it sounded like a forest at night in the classroom. Voices rising singly or several at a time from the focused quiet. Tits. Tits. Titssss.
I didn’t call Teague Tits, because I wasn’t any more popular than he was: I was just better at staying invisible. Sometimes he and I sat together on the metal tables over by the date palm in a corner of the lunch yard. He collected these handcast metal figurines of characters from The Lord of the Rings and he’d show them to me if I asked. I’d find him sitting there combing intensely through a stack of magazines with his right hand while holding a neglected sandwich in his left. He always looked like a guy who wanted to be left alone, but we’d talked about movies a couple of times in class and I felt like we were on the same side. I’d leave a little distance between us when I sat down just in case I was reading him wrong.
One day I was working on a slab of beef jerky and leafing through a book while I ate; it was Fritz Lieber’s Swords Against Death. After a while, I noticed Teague peering over at me. He’d stopped looking at his magazines; all his attention was on me. It was like he was looking at a bug that’d been flipped over onto its back.
“What,” I said when I noticed him.
“What’s that book?” he said.
“Swords Against Death,” I said.
He looked down at the cover, which had a boat on it and a monster with a trident rising out of the ocean. “Is it supposed to spell sad?” he said after a while.
“Is it … what?” I said.
“Sad,” he said. “Swords Against Death.” He tapped his index finger on my book, three times, harder than he needed to. “Look down the left side, that spells SAD.”
“I don’t think that’s on purpose,” I said.
“It’s probably on purpose,” he said. “They put a lot of things onto the covers of books and stuff.” I didn’t know what to say to that; Teague, with his figurines and his bound notebooks bulging with sketches of imaginary mountain ranges or mysteriously numbered dodecahedrons, their lines meticulous, was someone whose opinion I valued. He wasn’t a big talker. When he spoke it carried weight.
So I didn’t say anything. I went back to reading, and at some point Teague just wandered off toward the water fountains. The mood was different after he left. Nothing I could point to directly, just a feeling in the air, in the movement of the wind in the palm. Dark, primitive magic. Swords Against Death.
I could pace the perimeter of the backyard if I wanted, but you feel stupid walking around a fenced yard in the middle of the day. The dermatologist’s wasn’t too far from the house, and I knew the way; Mom drove me there twice a week. Everybody was still avoiding arguments, so when I said I wanted to walk to my appointment, Mom said, “OK,” and Dad said, “You sure?” with his eyebrows raised gently. For a minute it felt almost like a normal family scene.
It was a Saturday morning; traffic was light. Just a block past the unmarked boundary between Pomona and Montclair was a place I’d been half noticing all my life, a house; there were plain houses on either side, but somebody ran a business out of this one. It stuck out. I remember seeing it from the car as a kid: this big red glowing plastic hand in the bay window, a banner reading PALMISTRY spannning the entire second-floor balcony rail. There was also a sandwich board halfway up the front walk, impossible to miss if you went by on foot. I knew its top line by heart. It said A MAP OF THE FUTURE? in rounded black letters. But you couldn’t read the smaller text underneath from the street; most of it was written in cursive, painted directly onto the board. I had been curious about it forever.
Today the banner was down, and the sandwich board had been moved up to the porch. The door to the house was open; there was a moving truck in the driveway. There had to be some people around, but I didn’t see any. Soon this place will be gone; who knows what will take its place. I thought how I’d walked past it innumerable times, wondering what it was like inside, and figured this was my last chance. So I climbed as casually as I could up the stairs to the porch, and then I’d breached the boundary, like entering a dream.
Close up I could read the rest of the board; what it actually said beneath the splash, in black letters on white primer bearing traces of visible effort, was Science of palmistry reaches back over three thousand years. That was the top line. It was followed by a dozen others, evenly spaced, nearly uniform, each headed by a small, hand-painted tricolor image of Saturn. Identify spiritual patterns using ancient techniques was one. Secrets of the Seven Minor Lines was another. Reunite a lost love. The big door, beveled glass in oak, had to be at least fifty years old, maybe eighty. Old California stuff. Its decorated oval brass handle was half-black from wear.
What happens if I go inside? I wondered; it felt like a speech bubble forming over my head. Are all the people already gone? I thought I might sneak in and steal something cool, maybe disappear before anybody knew I’d been there; I fantasized for a minute about making off with some small, secret object infused with magic power. I try to be careful about the things I think, but I was still young then, and in my rapidly forming dream scenario I could feel the mystery object in my hand, hot and dense. I was sweeping it from a glass end table in one smooth gesture. It had a deep, dark hue and hard hexagonal edges. When my vision cleared, I looked up to see some guy in painter’s pants coming down a staircase inside, carrying a cardboard box.
He was probably a mover, but he could have been one of the people who lived there. Maybe the palmist himself, who knows. But he walked down the side of the porch right past me, undistracted by my glistening folds and reconstructed arches, too busy to notice. He looked back at me and smiled once he’d loaded the box onto the truck. “None today, friend,” he said in a very neutral voice; he sounded calm and kind, but I felt afraid of him, as if some threat were implied in the deep recesses of the moment. So I went back down the steps and out to the street, imaginary eyes following my path as I went. I was still getting used to the feeling of being watched. I hated it.
Sometimes I can’t remember whether this empty exchange happened before the accident or after, even though the details as I remember them point toward “after”: the dermatologist, the place closing, the moving truck. If, for a few seconds, I entertain the idea that this scene takes place much earlier than it actually must have, something happens to me: I picture myself young and free, whole, getting gently warned off the property by the palmist or the palmist’s husband for no real reason. And then some secret forms in a distant nebula somewhere, and somehow I get news of it, and I close my eyes and fall weightless through inner space for as long as I can stand it.
I dropped the astrologer shack into the middle of the New Mexico desert;
I got the idea for it that day at the dermatologist’s office, going through old issues of National Geographic. There was a big spread about the Tularosa Basin. The pictures called out from the pages: white sands with miraculous green growth jutting up in patches, skies whose pretty clouds held some empty menace that the lens couldn’t translate fully. The Tularosa Basin was where they’d tested the atomic bomb before dropping it on Japan. I sat waiting for the secretary to call my name, gazing into these pictures of the basin, how it looked years later. When I got home that day, I took out the Trace Italian master map and sketched a little line drawing of a hut no bigger than my fingernail, and around it I drew a loose oval, its line quivering with cilia and sudden jagged outcroppings. In small capital letters I wrote TULAROSA FORTUNE SHACK HERE.
I saw Teague at the Book Exchange last week. It’s twenty years on now, but there we were, still both haunting the science fiction section, running our index fingers down the fraying spines. His hair’s shorter now but he looked more like his younger self than a lot of other people might after so much time.
Wolf in White Van Page 3