Wolf in White Van

by John Darnielle

  I let people play for free in the early days. It was hard for me to imagine anybody signing up for a subscription without having gone through the first few passes, so I took out a dozen ads, some in bigger magazines, some in tiny self-published things I’d found at the comic store. The smaller ones sometimes didn’t re-set my type: they’d just shrink it a little, and when it ran, it looked just like it had when I’d stuffed it into an envelope at my desk. NEW BY-MAIL GAME—DEADLY FUTURE/IRRADIATED WORLD. FIGHT TO SURVIVE IN SEARCH OF THE TRACE ITALIAN, my copy read. PLAY FOUR TURNS FREE. SEND FOUR SELF-ADDRESSED STAMPED ENVELOPES TO: FOCUS GAMES, BOX 750-F, MONTCLAIR CA 91762. The F stood for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; if the ad ran in Analog, I’d use A. Somewhere I’d read that this was a way to keep track of which ads brought in more business, but that wasn’t why I did it. I just thought there was something cool about using different box numbers for different places, something trivially arcane.

  If you don’t get drawn in by the free turns, you’re not likely to keep playing, so I came up with the idea of putting players in classes, like when you’re a kid outside playing and you’re either a cop or a robber. But I didn’t want there to be teams, because the problem with cops and robbers had always been that there was no scope to the action. It was basically just hide and seek; I wanted to be a robber who killed his victims, or the robber with X-ray eyes, or the one who could walk through walls and ends up in a special jail designed just for him. I wanted cops and robbers to last beyond the apprehension of the suspect. If we were playing cowboys and Indians all I could think about was how the actual point of the game was for one team to murder everybody on the other, and how the winners could be riding off covered in blood, which was how they’d look when they ran across somebody who hadn’t been in the battle, and they’d have to explain themselves.

  What I came up with for the Trace was elegant, I think, and simpler in function than it felt like in play. The first two turns led directly to a fork in the road, and that branched out onto three or four different paths. Three or four in my first, crudest pass: then six paths, then eight. As many as I could stand. The hub of the third turn would be an immense wheel, and you’d pick a spoke that would determine the course of the rest of your life. I saw stars when I thought about it. Usually when people stand at an intersection like the third turn hub they’re not conscious of their position: they don’t know where, in the course of their lives, they stand.

  In the Trace you know. I made it clear in the text that this was a decisive moment, even in the original draft: You sense you’re no longer alone in the old movie house, then you hear people knocking things over out in the lobby. On the floor you crawl through the dark, from your seat in the front row toward the glowing green EXIT sign. Bits of rotting carpet flake off beneath your fingernails. You’re almost to the door down the hallway when you fall through the floor. ALL CLANS IN BIG WAYSTATION ROOM UNDERNEATH THE THEATER, I wrote excitedly in my sky-blue Mead notebook when I got the idea. ONE CLAN EACH CORNER, ONE MIDDLE OF ROOM, WARRIOR CLAN AT FURNACE?? These early drafts were always full of excited possibilities; they were written without outlines or diagrams, you can see them taking shape as they go.

  You have to lie still until the militia leaves: you can hear them upstairs, sweeping the theater, knocking stuff over, pulling down drapes. You get a few pages describing the people around you down there in the basement: how they’re dressed, whether they look friendly or smart or mean or well-armed or hungry. At the end of the turn, your choice is open: It is late and your eyes are heavy; you’ll have to sleep here. Which group will you join?

  At that point you have to boil down your decision to some descriptive term of your own choosing based on what you’ve read about the other people in the room, who’ve been sketched in groups—the ones crouched around a space heater, the ones hunched over an old road atlas. It works every time; I never have to explain. When a player writes back after the movie theater raid, I read what he says, and then I go to the files and I pick out a path. The total number of clans is infinite, but there are only sixteen paths, identified by Roman numerals, because people like the kid I used to be have always really liked Roman numerals. Beyond those are sixteen more I never assign, because they lead nowhere. They are unfinished, dead ends.

  To the player, of course, the path is invisible. The point of the night spent underneath the theater for the player is to find out who he is. But the people he meets down there—the clan with which he becomes identified for the rest of his life in the game—will all be killed within a turn or two, or else he’ll get separated from them in the rail yard, or they’ll all find the surface by daytime and eat cactus and go insane while the player, who wasn’t hungry, has to watch. Something will happen. When it does, he’s left with a name that he picked, a way of identifying himself. “I join the warlords,” somebody will write in response to this turn, and then the next week, in an envelope he addressed to himself, he’ll get a small card, like an old library card, on stiff mottled gray card stock: CLAN WARLORD, it will say in my weak imitation calligraphy. All rights and privileges in smaller script underneath.

  I personally don’t play. I can’t. I wouldn’t really want to, either, I guess. But I do have a card of my own, which sits in the front drawer of my desk. I’m clan seeker/digger. It’s Path IV, the one that ends up sticking to the foothills along a semi-northward pass. The first player ever to head down it wrote in and said, I go over to the seeker/diggers: he meant the group with the army bags full of tools, the ones who’d commandeered the film screen and were using it as a tarp. I wrote out a card that said CLAN SEEKER/DIGGER, but that didn’t look right, so I made him up a new one that said SCOUT, and then I kept his original card for myself. I have to admit that I like and am pretty self-satisfied with my position as the only member of this sublimated clan. The one-man clan who exists only in rough draft. The player with a clan but no path. Scepter-wielding king of the class-A seeker/diggers.

  In the metal drawers where the gears of the Trace are housed I keep a stray file that’s really only there for motivation. It holds about a dozen pages, delinquent bits and pieces from lost time before their then-unknown predicate had been identified. I could pin everything inside it to a single corkboard and hang it on the wall near my desk; I feel like that’s what most people would do. It’s good knowing it’s in the drawer, this one file, at arm’s reach but hidden away in the dark back behind the more important things.

  In it, among other things, is a list I made in the sixth grade, when I was twelve. We’d had a substitute teacher desperate to rein in the energy of the room for maybe fifteen minutes; after we came in from morning recess our desks were waiting for us with single sheets of blank lined paper on them and the words Five Things You Want To Be When You Grow Up written in colored chalk on the board, flowing cursive script three or four inches high, and QUIET TIME in big block capitals underneath. Everybody set to work; the sub strolled down the rows of desks where we sat writing in silence. As we finished we’d get up, one at a time, and put our pages in a basket on the desk, and when all of them had been handed in, she reached in and grabbed one from the pile.

  It was mine, of course; she just picked it up and started reading it out loud in her deep, dusky substitute voice. She didn’t say who it was by, or look in my direction while she read; I don’t think she’d had enough time to connect names to faces in the half-day she’d been with us. But the blood rushed to my face all the same, and I remember my anger at hearing my real dreams spoken out loud by someone else’s uncomprehending voice. “Number five, sonic hearing,” she said. “Number four, marauder. Number three, power of flight. Number two, money lender. Number one, true vision.” Some of the other kids shot laughing looks at one another. It was horrible.

  People talk sometimes about standing up for what they believe in, but when I hear people talk like that, it seems like they might as well be talking about time travel, or shape-changing at will. I felt righteousness clotting in my throa
t, hot acid: the other kids were suppressing laughter and exchanging glances; the whole thing was so funny to them they had to punch their thighs to keep from cackling out loud. None of them had actually made a true list like mine, I thought, though this was conjecture. I wanted to defend my high stations, to tell them that what they were laughing at was something real, something vast. But no one was looking directly at me; everyone was looking around to see who’d flinch, and I picked up on this just in time to join them in scanning faces around the room, pretending to hunt for the list’s author. And I kept my mouth shut, and then the sub said, “Here’s another,” and moved on to somebody else’s list, which consisted of actual occupations, things you might really become out there in the world once you got out of school. They sounded like weak things compared with my list; I kept my thoughts to myself.

  I remember this scene because it was embarrassing to live through it, and because remembering it is a way of knowing that I am half-true to my beliefs when the time comes. I sit silently defending them and I don’t sell them out, but I put on a face that lets people think I’m on the winning team, that I’m laughing along with them instead of just standing among them. I save the best parts for myself and savor them in silence. Number three, power of flight. Number four, marauder. Enough vision to really see something. A stack of gold coins and a ledger. People want all kinds of things out of life, I knew early on. People with certain sorts of ambitions are safe in the Trace.

  So while everybody else was at the funeral I was down at the Montclair Chamber of Commerce reinstating my business license. I’m supposed to renew it once a year, but the bills they send out don’t look like much of anything so sometimes they get tossed out. When this happens I get new envelopes marked URGENT, and then I have to apply in person to have the license reinstated: renewal you can do by mail, but once they’ve put the license on hold you have to show up in person.

  People look up from what they’re doing when I enter a building. Famous people are probably quite used to this; I’m used to it, too, but sometimes, on good days, I feel like my job is to try to set them at ease. This I do by pretending everything is normal; the secret is to believe it in your heart, which comes more naturally than you’d think. So I meet their gazes gently, and I nod my head as lightly as I can, which is almost like executing a pirouette. I try to get them to find my eyes, which are still as they were on the day before the accident, and I try to hold them there as I pass. Unless they’re being gauche about it: covering their mouths with their hands like somebody in an old horror movie, or whispering loudly to somebody nearby. Then I pop open my jaw as if I were trying to dislodge a stuck seed from my back teeth, and they get to see inside my mouth.

  The window where you write the check to reinstate your business license is its own separate station at the end of a long fake-woodgrain counter where people come to pay less exotic bills: water bills, sewer bills. Business Licenses used to have its own separate room, but they had a big consolidation a few years back, and Business Licenses got moved in with the water and sewer people. I wouldn’t care, but the people ahead of me in line always get nervous when they hear my breathing, which has a wet sound that I can’t help.

  I stood in my short line trying to keep my breathing even, and when I got to the front of it I strode purposefully down past the utilities windows toward my stop, and there wouldn’t be anything else to say about the whole thing if my eye hadn’t caught a nameplate atop one of the sewer-and-water tellers’ windows as I passed: CHRIS HAYNES. The clerk behind it was young, with a weak goatee; there was no way it wasn’t him. Even in passing you could see the younger man he’d once been, the oily grease on that young man’s chubbier cheeks, the posters on his bedroom wall. He was helping a customer and he didn’t see me, and I kept my pace steady and didn’t make any gestures, but my heart leapt in my chest, and a few dark corners of my imagination were suddenly flooded with a cleansing light I knew was permanent.

  There’s an immense mosaic on the plaza, embedded in the concrete outside the doors of the Chamber of Commerce. It shows a man with a nose so long it must be a costume nose of some kind; he’s holding a dish in his outstretched palm, while a person with a headdress, who could be a man or a woman, stands opposite him, reaching into the dish with finger and thumb together in a plucking gesture. From the first time I saw this I assumed it had something to do with a native local population I didn’t know anything about. I loved that I didn’t know, that there weren’t any signs about it: the mosaic, too big and colorful to escape notice, tells no story to anyone and is seen by all. Maybe there’s a plaque explaining it elsewhere on the plaza, but I’ve never seen it, so the mystery’s intact.

  As you leave the Chamber you have to walk across the mosaic; even if you’re not looking down, its colors and shapes will bleed into your field of view. Back at the high school there used to be a superstition about an inlay in the concrete near the office, a multisided star: you weren’t supposed to step on it or something bad would happen to you, I forget what. Bad luck. People would turn and walk around it, or rear up and take a big leap across when they got to it. You wondered if anybody actually believed in it, even one person. But everybody did it anyway.

  Back home the mail had come. Two smart kids from the scavenger clan who’d cleared Tularosa a few turns before were plotting a course for Kansas. I consider it unethical to give anybody any help, and it’s usually pretty easy to stay impartial, but I really wanted these two to make it; they were the most committed players to come along in quite some time, young and excited and full of jittery asides. First night in Oklahoma and hopefully the last! they started out this time. We know we gotta keep going north we’ve got our sites on the barb wire! which was a reference to something they’d read in one of the papers they’d taken from the fortune teller’s body.

  I sent them duly north, to a gas station near a reservation where they had to sleep because it was cold. Trace Italian was mostly written over the course of a year or two. I kept adding new turns for a while, injecting detours or increasing ellipses as the need arose: I saw a few patterns developing in live play and responded with byways that would extend the lead-up to a few payoffs. Once ranks began to thin, I almost never had to write new turns; the kinds of players whose letters warranted real action were usually the first to get distracted and quit. This turn was among the newer ones, the later ones. It was an empty turn, a turn where nothing happened, and that was because it had a ghost in it, and the ghost was Chris. His initials were suffocating there amid overlapping graffiti tags on the gas station walls. REZ LIFE. CATHY TORREZ. MIKEY T. CH. JESUS IS LORD. YOU SUCK. NAG WEST SIDE. 40 CREW. Chris Haynes. Chris the digger. Dead Chris, who’d seen the future and counted himself out.

  13 It felt like so much was happening: I don’t lead a busy life. The externals of the world I’ve built are quiet and even. Even small events amount to a shift in the current. All that movement and then Kimmy knocking out of nowhere, and me answering the door with my unwashed face, my hair all messy.

  “You’re still around!” she said in that one voice, the one from the other side of something. For a minute I was an astronaut having dreams about space: letting her voice register, feeling what it’s like to be in the presence of somebody who isn’t surprised by how I look.

  “Still hanging around,” I said back, opening the door a little more to let her in, and then she did come in, just like that.

  By the window in the living room there’s a soft chair that looks out onto the walkway. In Southern California even the most modest complexes keep their landscaping up; my walkway curves on its way out to the street. There’s a sudden turn that takes you out around a small rounded hedge and some birds-of-paradise; my chair by the window is angled so that the corner of your eye catches this little flash of color and growth if you’re gazing out toward the traffic or straight down at the dull grass.

  Kimmy plopped herself down in the chair like a teenager visiting somebody’s parents’ house, and she cocked he
r head at me and said, “You look like shit,” which was an old joke of ours, I’m pretty sure. It had that old joke feel. But I couldn’t really latch on to the specifics of it, whether there was some rote response I was supposed to give back to show I remembered. But I didn’t, so I just stood there, dumb and big, looking at her, trying to figure out how I felt.

  You hear a rumbling in the Texas dust. Clouds form in the dirt. They lift and join together until it’s just dusty air everywhere, brown and dirty. You could run, but you can’t see more than a foot or two ahead at a time, and you’re coughing. You bury your face in the crook of your arm and breathe in through your sleeve.

  Your first guess is that this is an earthquake, but as the minutes pass and the rumbling grows louder you remember small quakes you used to feel in California. How long did those last? A minute at most. Never longer. And then the aftershocks. Now, beneath your feet, you feel the ground rising. There’s no other way to think of it. The ground is rising.

  You scramble back and you end up on all fours, watching as the earth cracks, like there’s a giant underneath it pushing up against the lower surface with his fingers, about to break free. And then a structure punches up through the dry earth, crown first, sharp steel. But the map indicates that you are still far from the mark. Could the map be wrong? No: as the tower rises you see symbols that bear no resemblance to the ones you know will mark the spires of the Trace Italian. Half-scratched pictures, shapes that could be letters, clusters that could be numbers. This is not the bulwark, not the housing that guards the Trace. And still it rises.