Some people dream whole stories, but I get only fleeting images. A ghost in a hallway, an open hallway facing out onto some trees. Maybe an office building in California. Maybe an apartment complex. The ghost is holding his head in his hands, making a ghost sound. I’m not even sure how I know it’s a ghost; his flesh is solid. The face is held close against the ghost’s body, so from where I’m standing, I can see only the back of his head.
Sometimes I try to make my dreams mean something: to connect them to the accident, which seems like an obvious fit here, or to connect them to things going on in my life. But there’s so little to them, so little to pick apart in my dreams. A thing that’s a ghost because something tells me that’s what it is, coming toward me in a hallway of some building. No real details. Ghost, hallway, building. When I woke up, I thought about Kansas, cold Kansas where the hallways of the buildings would be tightly sealed against the weather, so unlike the open, exposed buildings of Southern California, which are the only buildings I can actually tell you anything about, because they’re the only ones I’ve ever seen with my own eyes.
Krull is a movie about a man on a quest, and it plays like something made by guileless people. Who knows the secrets of anybody’s heart, I guess: for all I know everyone involved with Krull has bodies under the floorboards and babies in the oven. But the evidence on the screen strongly suggests that these were people trying to make something fun for others to enjoy, something largely innocent, not trying to open up any windows on the abyss. For me, though, it was a hallway full of doors leading to dark places. The hearing at the courthouse had propped several of these doors ajar: bagged bits of evidence standing in for bigger questions that couldn’t be answered, timelines of meaningless afternoons that ended somewhere big and terrible. But whether they’d seen it coming or not, the abyss had eventually gotten around to claiming most of the people who made the movie, or starred in it, or underwrote its considerable budget. The abyss was general. Which I couldn’t help thinking, the whole time: I was twelve when I first saw ads for this movie running in the L.A. Times. How old does that make some of those young people on my screen now? Who’s left?
The plotline was fairly clear. This was given to me to know: that many worlds have been enslaved by the beast and his army the slayers. It aimed high; I could feel the old excited hopes, destined for disappointment but still game, rising up inside me. Everything came together: the potential letdown of the saccharine wedding at the outset suddenly ripped into vivid pieces by the electric-blue flashing doors and the slayers scaling the walls. Swords that gave off lightning when they clashed, full-screen flaring X’s in battles whose backstories hadn’t been filled in sufficiently yet, so that the central remaining image for me—then as now—was the crystal-clean desolation of the aftermath: Confusion. Sudden loss. Evaporating bodies in an emptied stone cathedral. One guy looked like somebody I used to hang out with, I thought, watching his face turn to steam. Was it JJ? Maybe. I couldn’t even get a clear picture of JJ in my mind anymore. It had been too long.
I drifted off into the sanctity of my earliest, angrier visions of the Trace Italian as the screen dimmed and flashed. A band of thieves led by the newly crowned king heading through mountains that looked identical to the ones a few miles north of my house. The quest to recover the kidnapped queen from the clutches of the beast. Distractions that killed people: kindly old wizards possessed by things that turned their eyes black and left their bodies empty shriveled husks atop the swamp. Calm marshlands from whose mists steel-clad killers rose suddenly, their muffled electronic screams grabbing hold of something inside me that was basic, primal, essential. The nearing of the goal. Dark caves. Lava streams that reminded me, and only me—but what was the difference—of the little fountain that used to flow at the center of Montclair Plaza. The battle of the king against the beast for his kingdom and its spoils. The worm left in the king’s brain, and in mine, by the few things the beast says before going down howling, felled by a magical throwing star that only the king could wield.
What the movie was really about was ambition, and what a fine thing it could come to seem, given the right light. It was about coming of age, and the rich reward waiting for those who went through it with courage. The brave and true of heart prevailed, and the usurpers got their due. One world escaped the slavemaster’s grasp. The wicked went down to perdition and the good folk prospered.
It was too high-minded to satisfy my seething adolescent brain, whose permanent thirst for blood I’d been hoping to feed, I now realized. And I wondered why I’d want to feed a monster I’d spent much of my adult life trying to bury; but I set that question off to one side. Because the story wasn’t the point, wasn’t what was troubling me. It was the little details, the stage on which it was set, the margins. The trappings of the greater story—the props, the scenery, the special effects—those were what held me, what spoke to me. In them I recognized the guessed-at originals of my crude early visions, the ones that would grow over time. The caves, the castle, the final battleground: these were all signposts on the road to the Trace.
But the Trace that Lance and Carrie’d found did not teem with lush growth or offer breathtaking vistas. There were no swamps to pass through en route to it, and it had not terminated in any final confrontation with some immense evil made flesh, towering arrogant and glowing in the sky above them. There had been at Lance and Carrie’s sides no parties of fellow travelers, noble thieves, or inevitable tragic figures, joined together in common or disparate cause toward one victorious end. The terminus of their dreams, whose architecture may or may not have originated in me, had been a burrowing into dead earth. Its conclusion was neither climax nor punch line; it wasn’t even a conclusion at all, except for Carrie. It was a headline in The Wichita Eagle. One Dead, One Critical in Sci-Fi Game Pact. The young king with his eyes toward the open mouth of the serpent, its voice cavernous: You have chosen a paltry kingdom on an insignificant planet.
6 The worst part of the hearing was I guess the presentation of the various artifacts, the unboxing of the bits and pieces that the prosecution had rounded up preparing for trial. Testimonials and letters, various receipts. Rough ideas in fabric. These were blueprints for a case no one would ever end up making, and their imagined barbs would go no further than the fat folders in which they’d been collated; they did find a home in me, though, and lodged there, like particles in a bedridden patient’s lungs.
There was for example a postcard bought at the Flying J, a point of origin determined from receipts found in the abandoned car. It had been written at a Qdoba, though, from whose window one could see the highway, and it had then been addressed to me; they knew this because the text on the postcard said so, and also because detectives had visited the Qdoba in question in the course of their investigation, where they’d asked the manager whether he remembered some teenagers stopping through and writing a postcard either before or after or during their lunch. Naturally the manager of the Qdoba didn’t remember any particular teenagers who’d had lunch there, but he did volunteer to ask his employees whether any of them remembered anything. One of them, eventually, did remember something, or thought he did, and so the claims the postcard made for itself were allowed to be discussed without anybody arguing about it.
It was numbing, but only down to a certain level, past which there can be no numbness. Lance and Carrie had written: Got this postcard at a flying j but we’re at qdoba now. next time you hear from us we will be inside!! There was no need to reassemble the circumstances of the postcard’s purchase, its meaningless life on its way to me; it did that by itself. All that was left for me to do with it was hold it in my hands and answer a question or two: yes, the business to which this postcard is addressed is Focus Games; yes, I do business under that name; yes, I notice that there’s no stamp on the card; no, I couldn’t guess why it wasn’t stamped and sent (I wanted to guess, because I had some guesses, but my attorney had advised me against trying any of my guesses out loud). No, as I had
told them all before, I had never been to Kansas. No, I did not know why Qdoba. No, I had never eaten at such a place, or mentioned it in passing in any of my correspondences with customers. Yes, I understood why they were asking me about the Qdoba. They were asking me because it was the last place anybody had ever seen Carrie alive.
Carrie’s parents had flown in from Orlando. They’d been staying in a motel by the freeway for weeks. It was a safe bet that their lawyer would have warned them by then about what to expect from my physical appearance, but unless you work in the medical field somewhere, you can’t really be prepared to meet me, I don’t think. It is always a surprise. It’s just not a thought people can get their teeth around, having to brace themselves to meet someone at whom it will be difficult to look while he’s talking but whose speech they will strain to understand.
They were brave. My lawyer and I entered the room; she nodded her hellos to the prosecutor and the judge while I kept my head low like I always do, and then we took our seats on our side of the table. Carrie’s parents—Dave and Anna; Anna and Dave: I could never decide how to pair them in my mind—fixed me with a look that I imagine had taken some practice, but which was sincere. There was not a whole lot of anger left in it, though traces lingered here and there: in the crow’s-feet by their eyes and the bags under them, say. In the way their eyebrows didn’t rise when they nodded. But the main thing their expressions indicated was a sense of duty. It pained me to think about it.
The judge read out a few things about the nature of pretrial hearings and about what we were here to do, and then things opened up a little: it was like a refereed argument between people who weren’t allowed to address each other directly. Their lawyer stated what their case essentially amounted to—that I’d contributed to the endangerment of a minor both directly and indirectly, and that this had resulted in the death of one and the grave injury of another: manslaughter and attempted manslaughter—and mine tried politely to say that you’d have to be crazy to blame anybody besides Lance and Carrie for what they’d done.
I focused on my breathing, because I knew my lawyer was eventually going to read my statement, and I wanted her to get it over with; I’d hoped it would come out right at the beginning, so that Dave and Anna could either accept it forgivingly or reject it scornfully, and then I’d at least know where I stood. Until they’d heard what I had to say, I figured, there wasn’t really any way of seeing their hand. It was impossible for me to imagine any scenario other than those two: total understanding or total denial. Either they’d get what I meant, or they’d shut their ears to it and we’d head down our sad road together. I didn’t see a third way.
Where the railroad used to run, there’s a little less overgrowth. As you travel, you keep your eyes on the ground ahead of you, trying to make out a path. Hours turn into days. You become a human bloodhound. You notice things others didn’t as they tried and failed to walk the path that now is yours. As you progress the path becomes less clear: with every less clear point you know you’re going beyond the places where the others lost the trail. Stopping to rest, you see a spot where plants seem to grow higher. If they have followed your path faithfully, bounty hunters will be here within the hour. North lies Nebraska.
This turn came accompanied by one of my occasional bonuses, a status upgrade. It was an aluminum coin; I’d had fifty of them minted for me by one of the companies that made tokens for video games, back when there’d been a video arcade in every mall. There was a picture of a dome rising from an empty plain on one side, and on the other, it said PATHFINDER. I had only ever had to send out three of these coins over the years. Two of them were in the hands of longtime players in distant places. The other was in a plastic bag labeled EVIDENCE on the table in front of me.
I felt embarrassed when the text of the turn was read out loud at the hearing; most of Trace Italian’s latter turns were essentially first drafts, since hardly anyone ever saw them. They were turns in theory, not practice. Some were actually relics from all those long days in the hospital, formulae I’d memorized to keep myself from going insane during nights when I couldn’t sleep because of the pain in my jaw, or from days when the ringing in my ears demanded that I focus very hard on something until the sound died down. None of them were anything I’d looked at in years until Lance and Carrie’d gotten to them; they were crude artifacts to me now, or like somebody else’s work imitating mine. Given the whole thing to do over again, I might have written the late moves better, focused harder on the phrasing. But I hadn’t, and now they were cast in stone. I’d thought once or twice about revisiting them, but I didn’t have the stomach for it. Trace Italian had existed long enough to have earned self-determination. I didn’t feel like I had the right to revise it. That right belonged to the younger man who’d written the game, and that younger man was dead. Besides, there were people playing toward the latter moves; the moves had to remain as they were in case anyone ever got there. It seemed almost a moral question.
Like all turns, this one ended with the player’s options presented as an unnumbered list of possibilities in typewritten capital letters, each possible next move occupying its own line of type. When, in the hearing room, the turn was handed around the table for all to examine, I smiled a little inside. I had tried, so long ago, to limit the player’s options if he ever came to this pass. I had failed, but the effort seemed clever.
FORAGE FOR ROOTS
FOLLOW THE RAILROAD
WAIT FOR HUNTERS
NORTH TO NEBRASKA
When I was a child, my mind wandered a lot, and most often it would wander to the dark places, as though drawn there by instinct. It found them again now. I saw Lance and Carrie freezing in the middle of the hard Kansas night. I imagined their hunger. I remembered skimming the autopsy report: Carrie died early; her coat was thinner. What had it been like for Lance, lying in the dark, waiting to be next? The pit they’d dug for themselves: Had it bought them some time? Or had the energy they’d wasted digging shortened the time they’d had left? Does a person gasp like a dying old man when he’s dying of cold, or is it different? Did they see their nail beds going blue, and feel panic, or had their minds gone past the point of panic to that self-drugged state where everything looks cool? And why hadn’t they gotten up and run back to the highway—no energy left? Still convinced they’d find something? Did both of them want to bolt from the scene but neither one want to blink first? Their young, perfect bodies, wasted, squandered, covered in the end with wet grass they’d pulled into the pit from the surrounding plain. Trying to put it off. Children. Children in the grip of a vision whose origins lay down within my own young dreams, in the wild freedom those dreams had represented for me, in my desperation: to build and destroy and rebuild, to create mazes on blank pages.
I let the evidence bag rest flat on my upturned palms, as if it were some historical document of great value or interest. I looked at it, remembered a whole bunch of things from my own distant past, and then recalled the day the turn had come back to me in the mail with none of the options circled. Instead, in pencil, a fifth way: a mystery at the time, a bad punch line now. Of all the things that made me wince, this was the one that hit me hardest, because there was hope in it: determination, drive, all that youthful focus. Two words, one compact phrase, handwritten in one script: one person signing for two. START DIGGING. L+C.
My lawyer read my statement.
I wish I could read this to you myself instead of having somebody read it for me. It’s not like I can’t talk, but it is distracting to other people when I do. So I have written it down. I hope you both can understand.
It would be an insult to you and to the memory of your daughter for me to spend too much time dwelling on who I am and what I am like as a person. I imagine your attorneys have explained to you how I got to be the way I am. I have no children of my own. I can’t imagine what you are going through.
I spent most of my teenage years in hospitals and physical therapy rehabs. It gets so lonely livi
ng inside your own head. Because of my face I could not even wear headphones for listening to music. So I invented a world in the future and I called it the Trace Italian. It was a place where I could have adventures, and when I grew up, I wanted to share those adventures with other people. I wanted specifically to share them with people like me, but I don’t know any people like me. Most people like me are dead.
I don’t have close personal friends but my customers are like friends to me. I share in their lives a little. To them I am just a company, and that is fine. I live a little through them and the small things I learn about them. It makes my own life feel more interesting. I don’t go to conventions to meet with them or personalize my business, and I don’t answer personal mail; I don’t want to be a creep. I am only here to provide a service. I have taken pride in that service, and my work has brought me pleasure over the years, and I never, ever thought anyone could possibly come to harm from it. If I had thought someone would get hurt because of Trace Italian, I would have shut it down. I would not even have started it in the first place. Lance and Carrie played the game together and did so well that I was amazed. I thought they were just two smart kids. Anybody would have predicted a great future for them both.
I understand that you blame me and I can’t be angry about that but I ask you to look at things my way. However different I am from normal people, in the end I am just a guy trying to do his job. Trace Italian doesn’t stand for anything in the real world and I couldn’t have guessed anyone would ever think otherwise. I hardly know anything about the real world. What little I do know I got from books and movies. I did not knowingly send any young people to their deaths. I would not. I couldn’t. Please understand. It is a little strange to me, to be defending something that was supposed to have been a place where people could feel safe and have fun, where nothing ever really happens except inside our heads. But understand too that I have to defend myself and my creation that has brought pleasure to a few people over the years. The Trace is a good place. It is a place where people can go, in their imaginations. That is a good thing and while I’m sorry it went wrong for your daughter it is not wrong by itself.
Wolf in White Van Page 5