Wolf in White Van

by John Darnielle

  “It’s OK, Mom,” I said.

  “I worry that you’ll be lonely,” she said; she was crying.

  “I was going to be lonely anyway,” I said, which I didn’t mean to come out the way it did, but it did, and besides, it was true.

  Lance took over the second letter from the newly formed alliance at about the halfway point, and Carrie never got it back. I’m pretty sure this was when I sort of let my guard down and let myself go, even though I knew better. Sometimes I guess you can’t help yourself. By the time Lance’s relentless scrawl started peaking at the end of the second page, he seemed to have forgotten that they were playing jointly; he talked about the interior of the game as if it were a place he’d escape from someday, and he wanted to remember to tell Carrie all about. She will freak! he said. I know she will. But OK look. Before I leave these dead guys in the dust I am going to put a mark on their masks. Just write LANCE there aren’t a lot of guys with my name anymore.

  You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter. But I remembered Chris, who’d made it seem like it was safe, like it was OK once in a while. What harm was there, if things only happened in my mind? I had a moment’s pause, though, about writing somebody’s name on a mask that now concealed the face of a corpse. Lance’s fever was infectious, a live virus, even through the page, even across the time that had elapsed between his stuffing it into an envelope and my opening it twenty-seven hundred miles away.

  But I did it anyway—I wrote Lance’s name on the mask; there was nothing to it. I drew a very crude picture of a supine body amid some broken boards, its masked face gazing out at the onlooker, LANCE on its forehead. The change was permanent for me; I didn’t rewrite the turn, but it was always different afterward, even in the otherwise unremarkable year-plus between then and the week when I learned that they’d both gone off the grid. I couldn’t remember a time when the body in the dust, whose presence compels the player to move on, hadn’t had a name knifed into its mask. It gets hard to keep track of time, tracing back to someplace and trying to be diligent about it; and I don’t even know why, really, I feel this drive for diligence or watchfulness, knowing already that there isn’t anything worth finding at the beginning, nothing that points to anything. But I keep checking anyway. Just in case.

  He ended the letter on a personal note, a tendency that persisted until the letters stopped coming. He told me about the town he lived in and what it was like in summer. Kind of dead! he said. This is kind of the only thing there is to do around here, you ever feel like you’re going crazy sometimes! This is kind of the only thing there is to do around here. I had a terrible thought, which I am ashamed to have had, and which I will probably never be able to bring myself to write down.

  Mom was crying again, trying to get my stuff together. It was time to go. They’d explained at the conference how I was going to need intensive treatment for at least the next year, and that it would be a while until they got a clear picture of how much reconstructive work would be possible. They talked about me, and my progress, in what was functionally the third person.

  It had been the final discharge conference. I was leaving at five that afternoon; they were waiting to get some bloodwork back from the lab, stuff they technically needed to have on file in case anything happened to me later. I’d hurdled all the milestones for leaving weeks ago: I could walk steadily under my own power from a wheelchair to a bed; I could see clearly ahead of me, read an eye chart; my balance was improving. They’d fine-tuned the pain management profile so I could function while awake. The question of what exactly anybody was going to do with me remained.

  A nurse’s aide wheeled me down to the conference room, a corner room with big windows and white metal blinds tilted open. Mom and Dad were already there waiting, dressed a little better than they might otherwise have been; a doctor I was pretty sure I knew—there’d been a lot of them; I was still pretty foggy a lot of the time—explained why we were there, and then the questions started. The social worker asked variants on her how-do-you-plan-to-spend-your-time question; she was trying to assess risk, it seemed really obvious. “What are your outlets?” was the way she phrased it this time.

  “Working on a game,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “What else can you do besides games?”

  “I am making my own game,” I said with some effort. I felt unexpected gratitude for the familiarity of the team. They understood me when I spoke. Outside of that small, exclusive club, no one would have been able to figure out what I was saying.

  “For other people to play?” she said. I felt my vision making overtures toward the outside physical world, sensed the expanse of it. It felt unbelievably good.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows and wrote something on the form she had on the table in front of her, nodding as she did so: not at me, but toward the nurses and the doctor. Then, still writing, not looking up: “What’s changed since you came here?”

  I thought hard; it was a good question. “I have bigger ideas,” I said. I felt very smart and proud of myself for this answer. It was true, but loose.

  “Better ideas about how to cope with situations?”

  If I’d had any front teeth, I would have bitten my lower lip hard. You could hear, in the questions they asked and how they asked them, that there were right answers, things they wanted to hear. You could also, if you thought about it, understand that this was a preview of what the outside world was going to be like for the foreseeable future.

  I weighed a few responses against one another in my head. There was a bargain to strike somewhere. You pick your battles. “Just bigger ideas,” I said.

  “What do you mean by ‘bigger’?” she said.

  I looked at everybody. I stopped caring about what they decided to do with me long enough to say bigger again, and then the doctor moved the conversation along, and I understood that all the decisions had actually already been made and this conference was only a formality.

  My parents looked at the doctor; the doctor looked at me. The social worker looked down at her clipboard and shuffled a few papers from the bottom of her stack to the top, and she started in on Mom and Dad: Did they understood the options available to them? Did they know that if they chose to take me home the work would be hard, overwhelming sometimes? Had they done anything to make the house safer: What, specifically? “Specifically from my end,” she said, looking directly at my mother, “have the guns been locked up?”

  “There was only the one gun,” my dad said.

  I saw my mom holding herself with what still feels in memory like incredible dignity and grace. Her voice caught but she did not break. Things had been going on in the house while I’d been away, hard conversations.

  “We got rid of it,” she said. The social worker wrote something down. Dad took Mom’s hand, there on top of the long table. The questions started up again. I looked out through the window at the road that led from hideous rooms like this to a safe refuge hidden deep in the ground somewhere in Kansas.

  They had enclosed pictures of themselves, wallet-size portraits by a high school photographer. Lance was not a new player, but I felt that he was now starting off on a new adventure; I stopped to consider that, what it might mean for him. I guess no matter what your circumstances are you drift at some point from feeling like you’re one of the young people to feeling like some of them could be your own kids. I hadn’t noticed the drift; probably no one does: but I felt my eyes, where most of my expression is concentrated now, beginning to assume that hateful, condescending warmth you struggle your whole life to resist.

  In his high school portrait Lance wore a crisp gray blazer; it felt like somebody’d picked it out for him, but it suited his expression, the very intentional seriousness he projected. It was a little big on him; I remembered my mother urging me to wear something nice on picture day every year, a sweet little memory. Lance’s hair in the
picture was long and thick, and you could see the fresh brushstrokes running through it where he or somebody else had put it into place just before the sitting. Curls bunched above his ears, playful intruders into the steely look he was trying to give the camera.

  Carrie’s picture was in softer light and was set before a cloudy-blue background screen. Her elbows rested on a shelf, and she looked like she was making an effort to hold the pose. Her hair was rusty blonde; it looked dry and brittle, and a little wild. She tried hard to meet the lens directly, but ended up looking like she was staring at something on the other side of it, maybe something way off in the distance: that blank stare people get when they’re thinking too hard about how they’re going to look. I looked at their pictures next to each other, nested against the chaotic give and take of their letter; their faces looked wet. My lips twitched. It was just lamplight on the gloss, of course, or something like that. I started to tell myself a story about it, and then I made a point of not taking the story any further, and I pulled an envelope from a drawer.

  After the guy who invented Conan died a bunch of other people wrote Conan books. Some of them were by people who’d known him when he was alive; others were by fans who had their own ideas. I had a ton of these books. I could never get enough.

  I wondered, in the privacy of my thoughts, whether the things that were interesting to me would leave me isolated at Transitional Living, but I didn’t go to Transitional Living. We got as far as the walk-through and a final planning interview at the facility, and then we drove back to the hospital, we three together; there were two days left for me there, formalities. Blood tests, last visits, paperwork. I sensed the gravity of my position when we got back to my room.

  “I don’t want to go live with—with those people,” I said after they’d brought me back to my room.

  Dad looked at Mom, and Mom looked at me.

  “We can’t,” my father said, “take care of you here. At-home here, back at the house. At home we can’t take care of you.”

  “I know, Dad,” I said. “I wonder if—”

  I hadn’t given any thought at all to what I was going to say.

  “Your chair won’t even fit in the main hallway,” Dad said. “We measured.” I pictured Dad with his measuring tape in the hallway, Mom reading numbers to him. I could imagine the look on his face as he worked out numbers in his head, his lips moving maybe, simple math and its consequences. I wondered how much less I weighed now than I had a few months ago.

  “I still get physical therapy after I leave,” I said. “I’ll be walking by myself after a while.”

  “By the time you’re nineteen, Sean. They say you’ll be walking unassisted when you’re nineteen.”

  It would be a long time to keep me at home, I knew.

  “If I can find a place to live by myself, will insurance pay?” I said. I had been around for enough insurance talk to understand that this was a big part of my future picture: who would pay for it. How I’d eat. When I asked this question, Dad looked at me like he was looking at a grown-up. I felt proud.

  “They would,” he said. “If you can find work, insurance will pay for your care, but otherwise you have to be at home for them to pay. I just can’t see how you find a job with your—with your face—with your face like it is.”

  It was the first time either of them had said something so direct about how I looked, about how I was always going to look. Dad’s little pausing stutter only slowed him down a little; I felt impressed with him, proud of him. I wanted to tell him. There was no way to tell him.

  “I know I can figure something out if I can just have a little more time at home,” I said, remembering my intensive care bed in the dark, the patterns in the ceiling, the infinity I’d learned I had in my head. I imagined a quiet future in an imaginary world where nothing ever really happened but everything seemed charged with life.

  Mom looked at Dad; if she meant to convey any message to him in her look I couldn’t read it.

  “We can go home from here and talk about it for a while,” Dad said after a long minute. “We don’t have to decide anything today.”

  It was too quiet for everybody. Mom started gathering my books from the cheap nightstand with its floor-scraping wheels. Conan the Freebooter. Conan of Aquilonia. Conan of the Red Brotherhood.

  Skulls in the Stars.

  16 They’re riding toward me now. They bear the mark of the captive on their forearms. These are men from a degraded oceanside kingdom somewhere far off, back where I come from, maybe: hunters with no personal interest in their bounty, conscripted into service by want or need. There’re two of them; one gestures toward me, his finger arrow-straight in the oncoming Kansas dawn. He has seen the tangled mass of new growth on my chest. I’m standing there shirtless, wide open, all my weapons long since traded for food or medicine, corn-stubble on the hard winter earth, the thousand kings of the strewn territories as good as dead, drained, ad hoc leather cuffs tied to sticks swinging saddle-side. They’re coming for me. There is an opening in the ground. I can stand and fight, or I can drop down. I have come too far to let myself be captured.

  It was back when I was twenty-three, I think. Maybe twenty-two. From my own perspective my life was unremarkable. The pity strangers visibly felt for me, the unmistakable physical flinches they gave off on seeing me, were like map markings suggesting some present horror. But in my own eyes I was normal. Here and there, alone, reflecting, I’d bump up against what felt like a buffer zone between me and some vast reserve of grief, but its reinforcements were sturdy enough and its construction solid enough to prevent me from really ever smelling its air, feeling its wind on my face. There must be others like me who struggle more than I do. It makes me sad to think of them.

  I got a phone call, anyway.

  “A colleague of mine has been working on this new surgical technique people are having pretty good results with,” said my old doctor. “He’s had several patients, burn patients, you know, people with really significant trauma, and they’ve been able to live a, you know, a less secluded life.”

  I put on my glasses and I looked in the mirror.

  Chris told me about the scalpel and the cyst as he prepared to launch an assault on the men in the gas masks by the overpass. Almost nobody began their play by attacking the cleanup guys; it was a nearly suicidal move. But Chris’s involvement in the game, the intensity of it, was so total from the outset that it was hard to know what to think about it. I pictured him acting out his dreams in real space, pantomiming his moves in a room somewhere before he wrote them down. I’ve got this cyst on my arm, he wrote; it’s gonna be a problem but I grabbed a scalpel off a crashed ambulance when the fallout hit. It was shocking stuff; this was his first full move.

  I actually had a scalpel in the kitchen. I saw someone use one on a cooking show once and it looked cool, and since I have to get gauze and Betadine from the medical supply store every so often, I’d picked one up the next time I went in. They didn’t blink.

  I used it once or twice to peel some oranges, and then I kept it on the desk for a while for opening letters. Using a scalpel to open my mail was a little more theatrical than I’d usually get in my daily life, the sort of thing people might imagine about me that wouldn’t turn out to be true. But really it was an accident. It sounds sad to say “It gave me something to do,” but it gave me something to do.

  It’s gone now, anyway. I sent it to Chris a few turns after he’d described his impromptu surgery. I ought not to have done this; I am pretty careful to avoid acting on the spur of the moment. But it felt like a fun and probably harmless improvisation, a tiny thing conceived of on a moment’s notice. Still, I’d had to pack it up in bubble wrap, and find the right sort of box, and sending it required a trip to the post office instead of just placing a stuffed SASE in the mail slot on the door. That so much planning was necessarily involved is troubling to me; I don’t like to think about it. I can tell this is the wrong move I don’t care!! Chris had written at the end
of that first turn. I can’t play through this with this burly knot on my arm!!! And immediately, wide-eyed, I’d seen the playfield as it must have looked to him, really letting myself take in the full view of it through what felt like his eyes.

  He never mentioned it again; I thought I understood why. It was a question of style. I put it, for the most part, out of my mind. Sometimes I’d remember when his turns would get long and intricate. I get out the scalpel to kill snakes but there aren’t any snakes actually in snake landing so I look pretty stupid, he wrote once. No you don’t, I thought before I could stop myself from thinking it. No you don’t.

  At home we worked out the mechanics of my situation, setting terms; my parents were very angry with me, and would stay angry for a long time. The air in the house would stink of blood forever; we’d breathe it as long as we lived there; new carpets didn’t really help. There was nothing anybody could do about it now. Even if I could’ve explained myself, anything that felt like an overture toward pressing the issue was visibly too painful for them to stand.

  I would take the California High School State Proficiency Exam; this was an important point to both of them. I would go to therapy weekly, all of it: physical therapy, talk therapy, the dermatologist. I’d talk to the job placement people whose contact information the social worker had sent home with the discharge papers, and if they found me work, I’d take it to save up money. Dad would work out my monthly payout with the insurance people and send it directly to me to help with rent once I’d found a place. I told them about the game I’d come up with in the hospital, how I thought it might bring in a few hundred dollars a month if people liked it; they didn’t really try to hide their doubts, but they said that if it came to something, they’d support me in it. In a canvas tote from the hospital I had the papers I’d put together framing the full expanse of the Trace. They bulged in notebooks and folders that bore the hospital’s name and its little futuristic logo, a stylized cross that doubled as a letter.