He started talking like he was picking up a thread I’d just set down a minute ago. “Hey, man,” he said. “I just want to say I meant to stop back by after the first time but I didn’t think your folks were too into it. I sent some books with Kimmy but they might have gotten intercepted.”
“Teague!” I said.
“Yeah, man,” he said. “I was gonna come some more but your dad, you know.”
“I don’t even remember ever seeing you after my last day at school,” I said.
“I guess not,” he said. “I was there on, like, the second day. You were in the ICU. They had you on a lot of drugs. You called me Marco. Your dad thought it was some kind of code.”
It was like talking to a character in an old movie, hearing lines read out from some earlier, remembered time.
“Out in the hallway he told me just not to come back. I wasn’t really in a place where I could fight with your dad, and he was out there pacing around in front of your door like he was itching for an excuse to go off on somebody. And, like … didn’t you guys used to go on hunting trips?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said.
“Jesus Christ, man,” he said. I wished I’d kept in touch with Teague. We could have talked. But the path from there to here consisted of infinite switchbacks in countless interlocking chains. The trail broke off from the main road almost the second the shot rang out.
“I knew your mom OK, and I thought I could probably finesse things if I tried, but—I just didn’t, is all. I didn’t really think you were going to make it,” he said, as blunt as when he was young, an old friend.
“I did, though.” It was good to see Teague, still in the world.
“Oh, I know,” he said, flipping a copy of The Dreaming Jewels out from the shelf. “I played one of your games through once. Teague’s just a nickname, you know.”
“Wait, really?” This was news.
“Yeah,” he said. “Tigger. From the Winnie-the-Pooh books. From when I was a kid.”
I played one of your games through once. I wanted to ask, but there was something special in not knowing.
“Anyway, sorry I never said anything. I guess I figured since you never let on you knew me maybe you just didn’t want to talk.”
“It was pretty hard to talk to me then,” I said.
“Aww, man,” he said. “Are you OK, though? I saw some news story.”
“Recently?”
“Yeah, yeah. Recently.”
I’d been wondering; now I knew. “Yeah,” I said. “It looked bad but it’s OK now, I guess. Blew over after a while. Just in the past couple of days. Still getting my head around it.”
As we spoke I kept digging around in my mind trying to place his last name, but Teague was just Teague. I wouldn’t have heard his last name since roll call in some unremembered class over twenty years ago.
“Keith Jones,” I said when it came to me.
“Man, don’t call me that, nobody calls me that,” he said. We wrote each other’s numbers down, but in my heart I knew this was it.
Inside the shack the first thing you learn is that the astrologer is dead. You see the body of a man in a strange costume is how the turn begins: He is lying on the floor, his face twisted into a grimace. Smart players will spend the next turn searching for protective clothing and masks; overeager players will get sick when they leave this scene, and they’ll stay sick for a while. The air inside the shack is unbreathably thick with the smell of blood and candle wax and lamp oil and empty insect bodies. Charts and notebooks lie open around the corpse in a constellation; if you marked its points and drew a line connecting them, you’d have a shape that would later help open a door deep within the Trace, but nobody will ever notice this, or learn the name of the door, which you have to say when you open it or you end up in a blind corridor that traps you for at least four turns, which would probably outrage any players who made it that far. But who knows. What it would be like to make it that far is sheer conjecture.
Players who’ve got their protective gear on are free to look around and loot the place, but of course the whole point is the charts. You have to read them, and then you have to remember what you’ve read, or keep your game organized enough to go back and consult them later. You should, anyway; that’s the good they can do. But even if you just read through your turn passively, READ CHARTS tries to pay you back for your effort. HOUSE OF SCORPIO SCORPIO HOUSE STONE SARDONIX COLOR GOLD, it starts. IF SCORPIO ENTERING SOUTH DOOR HIGH LIGHT ALL OTHER DOORS WEST LIGHT, ALL OTHER SCORPIO DOORS WEST LIGHT WEST. I feel my own freedom remembering this turn, what it means to find a place where the world’s shut out for good at last, where all signs point back at one another and the overall pattern’s clear if you look hard enough. HOUSE OF NEPTUNE MARSH BEAST, RIVER BEAST, CLOUD-COVER GOOD, DRY COVER AVOID/AVOID. HOUSE OF LIBRA FISH NAME SECRET, SAY W/ EYE CONTACT AT ALL DOORS IN HOUSE OF LIBRA, ALL ADMITTANCE GAIN, ALL DOORS. HOUSE OF GEMINI GEMINI HOUSE STONE CHRYSOPRASE COLOR GREEN, the chambers in the Trace outnumbering stars in the sky and all the sands on all the beaches: IF GEMINI ENTERING FROM NORTH BEAR ORCHID, MY RESEARCH INDICATES and then three lines about various kinds of orchids and where they’re from, cribbed from who knows where and saved here, forever. There are twelve charts in all; it’s one of the longest turns in the game, and I probably overdid it a little, but every time I have to triple-crease the several sheets that make up the move, I smile.
If you go north after escaping Las Vegas you can skip the astrologer shack. The jagged route east will take you to a state fairgrounds; there’s lots to do there. But most people look at the straight line on the map and follow it like a beacon, and then they get their fortunes told. I’ve had people get a little angry about the sequence once or twice, people who after receiving “You Have Arrived At The Small Shack of a Local Astrologer” feel like they deserve a little more action for their money. But when they get inside the shack their tone shifts. There’s power in thinking you’re about to meet somebody who knows what’s next for you, and there’s another level of power in seeing that person’s body on the floor, having to get the information from him somehow now that he’s no longer in any condition to give it. This latter power is the greater power, full of dark, worldly secrets that you have to go out of your way to find out about, and I consider it something to be avoided, but I force everybody’s hand all the same; if you want to avoid the astrologer you have to put in extra work. Some do manage to shrug off my cues and go around, or go past without looking, or even get so far as approaching the door but get scared off instead of intrigued by the smell. I can see how they’d think they were being warned instead of lured, but the ones who don’t go in are in some way strangers to me.
Most players just drift off eventually. Their focus wanders; their interests shift. Maybe they finish their games stealthily, like Teague had, like who-knows-who-else had over the years. Chris Haynes was different. He’d been different in his gameplay from the day of his first move; his letters appeared as the fruit of long, careful consideration, small, smooth, dense bursts of thought in flowing script, punctuation adhering to some internal rhythm that was easy to pick up on and easy to follow, grammar not quite holding together but always moving the play forward. “Sean, everybody says that’s your name so OK,” one started.
I’ve been in Lordsburg for two turns, total ghost town now, time for me to re-hit the path. If the active ingredients in the roots of the flowers around here haven’t been weakened by radiation exposure, which technically I don’t think they should have been because (A) the river, and (B) they’re flowering normally, I refer you to the text of three turns back, “a few flowers poke up near the bank of the river,” not big flowers or spectacular flowers just flowers, then my health should be back to 85% because I have been eating every root I see. Even better, flowering root plants mean it’s April? Late March, latest? So I can head north. I’m going to head north. As of last turn my choice was between a companion from an occupied schoolyard (no) or trying to wrangle a g
olf cart. I’m going golf cart. Let me know how it plays out
and then his initials, a cipher, something I could imagine him working out in grade school and holding on to all his life. CH. Write it again until every one’s exactly the same. Get so you can carve it into a desktop with a paper clip in one class period. A C whose high line arced but whose bottom line was straight, nearly the outline of a human eye but with a gap at the right, and then that tiny H inside it like an alien pupil. CH. Several times a month. CH.
I wonder if I’d remember Chris as fondly as I do if he hadn’t quit the game, but he did quit, formally, which as I say is not usually how it happens. Usually, people just seem to drift in their attention; long gaps form between their turns, and then at some point they don’t renew their subscriptions and I stop hearing from them. “Growing out of it” is the phrase that comes to mind, but this is an obviously problematic view for me, so I try not to analyze it much further than the bare facts. Something happens over time, and people stop playing. General rule. Except for Chris, who let me know why.
I got up last night at 2 am thinking about how to repair my rifle, I don’t even have a rifle except in the Trace, his final move began.
I was asleep, then I was awake, and the first thing I thought about when I woke up was this rifle with the special attachment I took from the fortune-teller’s body, a body I took three turns to find and another turn to strip of anything useful to me and Sean I could smell body when I thought about this, hot New Mexico sun human body and so I don’t think I can play anymore. It’s not like I think anything’s going to happen, I’m fine, and I don’t actually have anything better to do, and it doesn’t take up too TOO much of my time? But it’s in my head now and I don’t want it anymore so I’m going free-play here, you have to let me do this.
If you are a person whose authority is generally limited to his own small life and to a series of imaginary choices that exist on a vast but comprehensible grid, it’s odd when you hear someone, across the impersonal distance of the page, pleading for your permission. I thought of this during the preparation for the trial, when I was leafing through my files and arguing with myself about burning things, or maybe ripping them to pieces and driving them out to a dumpster in a parking lot somewhere. But all that was too much drama, too much action, too much of everything: setting things on fire, heading off somewhere to hide the proof that they’d once existed. I had spent too long clearing a path that told its own story, and it was a straight path. That was its whole appeal. The path to the Trace is different from other paths; that difference is supposed to make up for something.
This new turn from you tells me what all I got by cleaning out the corpse of the fortune-teller. OK. I got silver earrings and some crystals and some old money and some vials of something that I bet are anti-infective stuff, and I got a knife with crescent moon in the handle of it. OK. I am saying that the knife is a pretty big knife that my dude has been using to skin deer. I drag his body out behind his shack and I use the knife to dig in the dirt behind the house. The dirt is a little soft because it’s near the house getting some shadow instead of out under the baking sun all day. I get tired but I clear just enough space to get this guy in. I don’t know who killed him and nobody’s ever going to know. I scoop enough dirt back on top of him to cover his body and I say out loud something about how I hope all seekers make it to where they’re going and then I take the knife and stab myself in the neck. I bleed out on top of the fortune-teller’s grave and then I’m dead and that’s my game. I am OK and I’ll be OK but this is the end and this is my story. CH.
I remember reading that turn through at my desk, the ancient, heavy wooden desk I’d gotten for thirty dollars at Goodwill, half-stripped of a deep red paint that was never going to give itself up entirely, dozens of interlocking grooves left across its top by countless ballpoint pens pushed down too hard onto unblotted paper. I remember feeling with total confidence that everything was all right with Chris, that he had made the right move. I took a piece of 8½ × 11 paper from a drawer and found an old charcoal pencil with a nice thick nub and I made out his death certificate. Chris Haynes pronounced dead this day by own hand b. ( ) d. Tularosa. I do hereby affirm the truth of this document by affixing my signature hereto, here followed by an intentionally illegible signature, county coroner, Trace Italian Kansas. It looked ragged and blunt, appropriately Old West. My signature bore no resemblance to my actual signature in the real world; I did it with my left hand. I take a lot of pride in my work.
5 When I got back from the courthouse I was pretty shaken up. The only thing I really felt like doing was lying down on the floor in the den with the television on and all the lights off. First I tried a little plain old broadcast TV: some news, and a few minutes of a cooking show, and an old episode of Family Ties. But I couldn’t focus. I was agitated; the strategies I’d developed for shutting down the several tape loops running concurrently in my head weren’t working.
The judge had dismissed the case against me without prejudice, saying he couldn’t reasonably imagine another judge looking at the same evidence and coming to a different conclusion, etcetera, but that he wanted to leave a door open in the interest of justice being served in the event of new evidence coming to light, and so on. But his tone, and his gentle manner, conveyed his true meaning to everybody in the room; he didn’t want to seem heartless, so he’d tried softening the blow. But he’d been telegraphing his punches from fairly early on: in the questions he directed to Carrie’s parents. In the silences that grew between their responses and his subsequent remarks. Even his bearing while seated, those deep-rising heavy black-robed breaths, seemed to be preparing everyone to hear his opinion.
That opinion, which carried legal force, was that there was no case here. No reason to go forward. Just several sad people and their partially wrecked lives. Once he’d spoken I was technically out of the woods. But my head: my head was all messed up. In video games you sometimes run into what they call a side quest, and if you don’t manage to figure it out you can usually just go back into the normal world of the game and continue on toward your objective. I felt like I couldn’t find my way back to the world now: like I was somebody locked in a meaningless side quest, in a stuck screen.
So I went to the kitchen and I made myself a sandwich, and I cut it up into manageable pieces so I could eat with a fork. And then I drove down to Cinema Video. I can hardly believe Cinema Video’s still in business, and I really can’t believe how many videotapes they still have in there, gathering dust against the east wall. But look down toward your feet and they’re all right there, neatly piled up in hopeful stacks on the floor. There’s a little sign taped to the wall at about knee level, green marker on canary-colored copier paper: Used Tapes $5.00.
Stacks of dusty VHS tapes automatically register to the eye as trash now, and I’d be surprised if anybody ever took much note of the sign or the hoard it pointed toward. But I got out a twenty and I brought home four: Future-Kill, Krull, Red Sonja, and Gor. It was a little bracing to carry Gor up to the counter, because when I was a kid I used to think about Gor the way some kids thought about making the football squad. It was an object of almost religious contemplation. I would scrutinize John Norman paperbacks in the Thrifty book rack like a code cracker working against the clock.
There were so many Gor books. No end to them. Marauders of Gor. Slave Girl of Gor. Priest Kings of Gor. They stared out from the same shelf as Doc Savage at the Book Exchange, but Doc Savage books were different, because you could tell the publishers wanted you to like them. Afternoons had been spent in meetings and at drawing boards coming up with the right combinations of images and cover copy, and by the time the books reached the racks, they were rich with code: images for the curious, images for the devout, all threaded together. They faced the world with action scenes promising adventure and intrigue, and the promise of triumph over fantastic adversity or final glory at its hands. Who doesn’t want to rise above the obstacles in his pathway? W
ho wouldn’t want to go down in flames? And for those of us who can’t or won’t rise above, who doesn’t at least want to hear stories about how it might be possible for some triumph to eventually happen, given enough luck?
The Gor books, by contrast, were shameful and garish. The pictures on their covers were pornographic, but in an almost dishonest way: near-nude mutants leering out into the fluorescent air of the drugstore aisle. Willingly or not, they seemed to suggest that maybe you shouldn’t actually be reading these books. And so I never did. I would stare at their covers, and maybe thumb through them a little, picking out phrases and images like a secret shoplifter. But that would be enough for me, and sometimes more than enough. I didn’t need to hear the stories the books were trying to sell me: their skins haunted and troubled me enough. But I would assemble my own stories, based on the information I had from the covers; and in my stories, there’d be winners, victors, spoils to divide, satisfying conclusions to things. Happy endings sometimes. I felt sure that the books themselves would be less kind to their characters, that whatever was actually going on inside was dark and mirthless. There was this odd, flat sort of desolation in those covers. Steam or smoke rising from a distant city, seen from a boat out on the water: grimy, vivid. It always made me feel uneasy.
I set the stack of movies down in front of the TV when I got back, and I pulled the VCR out of the closet and wired everything together. I thought about Gor, but it still had some sort of prohibitive power over me, so I turned out the lights and sat in my recliner watching Krull. It took me back. The screen throbbed in its familiar way and the darkness around it spread out to the farthest corners of the room. When the movie was over I just sat there in my chair for a while. The sun was going down outside. I nodded off and caught one of those ten-minute naps that always feel like they last longer than they really do.
I dreamed of a ghost in a hallway; the ghost was holding his own head in his hands. I know where this image came from, and I knew in the dream, too, though that didn’t make it less real or frightening. The ghost holding his own head in his hands, coming down a hallway, was a neither-common-nor-rare card in the Monsters of the World series. These were bubble gum cards with a stiff stale powdery pink slab of gum included in every pack; I used to buy them at Rexall. Kids would joke about buying the cards and throwing the gum away, but nobody actually threw the gum away, because they had paid for it. It crunched when you chewed it.
Wolf in White Van Page 4