Wolf in White Van (13 page)

“Here?” I said; it sounded like I was asking if we might have this conversation somewhere else. But my father understood me. I wanted to know if Kimmy was here, if she’d come with them, if she was OK.

“No, no, Sean,” said my dad. “We asked her parents to ask her not to come today. We want … we want to know why she keeps visiting you.”

“Friends a long time,” I said very carefully, very slowly, holding my spasming jaw as still as I could. I wanted to get the
r
in
friend
right, but I couldn’t, so I said
fend.
Who knows what
long
even came out like.

“Yes, we know,” he said. There was no mistaking his tone. “But we don’t think she’s been entirely honest with us.”

I had been waiting for this. It was almost a relief. They’d been working variants of this line from the moment I’d first regained consciousness: “Who gave you this idea?” Things like that. I had very concrete fantasy scenarios in which I taught myself to speak again, clearly and coherently, with the explicit purpose of then being able to say to my parents
I don’t know why I did it, it just happened, OK.
I didn’t know yet how fantastic a scenario that was: to be able to look at someone whose need for reason and order has become truly desperate beyond all measure and tell them that it doesn’t matter how cold it gets at night, they’re just going to have to keep digging.

“Has,” I said.

“I know you both say that, Sean,” he said.

I was still heavily medicated, and when I had to infer something, to take a few details into account and form from them a conclusion, it happened in slow motion, with great deliberation. I saw my dad getting ready to say another thing he’d been
preparing to say, some other part of the script, and I began to sense the scale of it: that he’d told himself a story and shared it with Mom, who’d written her own version of the same story, and then they’d compared versions until they’d arrived at one they could both believe in. It was my father’s job now to make me tell them their story was true.

“We know,” he went on, “that that’s your story. But we think we have a pretty clear picture of what actually happened, and anyway, Kimmy didn’t even try to live up to her end of the deal, so I really don’t get how you can expect—” I could hear his anger, trying to work out a plot point he couldn’t make fit.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said finally. “What does matter is that your mother and I …” And that was the point where I started to tune him out. When I try to recover his exact words from memory, I can only come up with composites, things that sound sewn together, unstable mixtures of what they’d decided to believe and what they couldn’t figure out, and probably some other stuff support services were telling them down on the second floor. I know the thrust of what he said involved their theory of a suicide pact, a theory that, in later years, made me feel great pity and shame: that they’d been driven to tell themselves this particular story, to settle for that—for something completely made up, an invention landed on by parents who’d found themselves in a terrible place quickly piecing together some ad-hoc narrative from random chunks of available data: comic books, movie posters, records and tapes. Sketches in my notebooks. Old toys. Things from the near side of an unbridgeable gulf. But the exact details of what he said are lost to me. When he was done, I said: “Totally wrong,”
which came out so bluntly that it made me laugh, which made him angrier.

He stood up and stayed there for a minute, silent, and then he left, and I thought about what it meant to still be alive, and then huge walls of earth began rising in formation inside me, spewing clouds of dust as they rose, right angles like dominos leaning against one another but refusing to fall, six or seven layers of ground beneath each rail buckling until they hit bedrock with a long, rolling, decisive thud, a chain reaction rippling out with great percussive power, the mud walls banding together for miles into a structure gigantic enough to be seen from space, a star-shaped beacon in the gray distance.

People bring you books, cheap paperbacks, when you’re in the hospital: this was how I found out that I hate mystery novels. I tried Ellery Queen and Nero Wolfe. They just made me nervous. My parents wouldn’t bring me my own books; they’d thrown most of my stuff away. So Kimmy brought me magazines to read. She’d sit bedside and flip through
Hit Parader
or
Circus
with me, and she brought some Robert E. Howard from the library, short stories. August Derleth. L. Sprague de Camp. Things she knew I liked.

“Mötley Crüe just got back from their tour of Japan,” she’d say. “They look like dicks. Here.” And then she’d hold the magazine up for me to see, and I’d laugh, and she’d say: “What are you laughing at, you look like a dickhead, too.” But she never asked me why I’d done it, and I’ve wondered my whole life whether that was because she understood instinctively that
it was a stupid question to ask, or because she thought maybe she understood something other people didn’t.

I never found out whether my parents called hers and told them to keep their daughter away from me. There wasn’t a traceable moment. But her visits became less frequent, and then she was gone. I would think about it sometimes, by myself, in empty hours. What happened? Nothing happened; Kimmy visited until she didn’t feel like coming anymore, and then she stopped. I could be sad about it but I couldn’t get angry, because I couldn’t imagine being in her shoes and doing anything different. She told me, one of the last times I saw her, that she expected me to “get better,” and this made her unique among all my visitors; my family didn’t talk that way. They talked about me “coming home,” or “getting out,” but not getting better. Kimmy told me that I was going to get better. And she asked me whether I was going to do anything when I got out. “Are you going to do something when you get out?” That was how she put it. I said what teenage boys say about their plans: “I don’t know.”

Some things stick with you, great visions, and other things you never seem to learn: every few years I try to read a mystery novel or two, because they’re always there in their hundreds at the Book Exchange, constituting the greatest part of the inventory. I see them and I remember trying to learn to like them in the hospital, and so I buy two at fifty cents apiece and try again. Ngaio Marsh. Ruth Rendell. I can’t stand them, but I keep on trying. Are you going to do something when you get out? For all I knew she meant I should get out and finish the job I started; it’s a possibility. But I took her to mean
something else, and I held on to the idea as tightly as I could, focusing on it like a fixed point you stare at when trying to distract yourself from great physical pain.

Kimmy and her husband were out looking at houses. She was reading the street names out loud when she realized she was in my neighborhood. The husband was a guy she’d met at community college after high school. Paul. Nobody I knew.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“I had him drop me off,” she said. “Meeting you would be kind of intense for him.” She sounded, for just that moment, exactly as she had on the last day I’d seen her. But as we sat and talked, I could hear how she was a different person now. The change must have come gradually; an easy shift into adulthood, a softening. She told me about Paul’s job—he was a regional manager for Enterprise—and how they didn’t have any kids.

“Me neither,” I said, and she laughed, but I saw her eyes: something more going on in there. But it flickered only once, and then she snapped back to the present.

We didn’t visit long. She told me about her job, and her plans: ideas she had about opening a business, places she and Paul might move to so he could be closer to his work. She asked if I still knew anybody, and I said no, but I told her about Victory, how you get close to the people who take care of you in a weird way. I wanted to thank her for how she alone among all my friends had never let me see how sick the sight of my bandaged head must have made her feel, and I wanted to tell her I was sorry for any trouble I’d caused her back then, but I
felt like it might spoil the mood, whose easy gravity seemed worth preserving. But I ended up breaking the spell anyway when I asked about JJ.

“JJ’s dead,” she said. There are so many different kinds of ghosts.

“What—”

“He got into drugs,” she said. “Somebody shot him. That was, like, ten years ago.” I started doing math in my head.

“Nobody really knew him anymore,” she said. She took my hand in hers and gave it a squeeze like she used to do at the hospital. “We just kind of all did whatever after graduation.”

Later, talking to Mom on the phone, I mentioned how Kimmy’d come around to visit. Mom tried not to sound irritated. “What did she want?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Really,” said Mom.

“Just saying hi,” I said. I knew ahead of time that Mom wasn’t going to accept this answer, because she couldn’t understand it, but I tried it out anyway. “She was in the neighborhood,” I offered, hoping to hit the right tone so we wouldn’t get into an argument, but I did not succeed.

14
“What do you have in this bottom drawer, now, that I can’t open it and tidy it up a little?” Vicky said once. The bottom drawer is locked.

“Nothing I’m ever going to use,” I said.

“You should let me just clean the whole cabinet, honey,” she said.

“There’s really no need,” I said.

It’s almost impossible to remember the fury of assembly, that time back home when the house was a way station: when I was unwelcome there and knew it; when I was a dark presence in other people’s nearby lives, a person who made the house harder to live in. But the Trace had come home with me in bits and pieces: on Pomona Valley Hospital letterhead stationery, and in remembered scenes and phrases, fresh and vital. I wanted to make good on it before anything happened, before I got worse. Maybe I wouldn’t get worse: it was hard to predict.
Hard to predict
was another thing I’d brought home from the hospital, a phrase that had become a secret personal talisman, something I didn’t dwell on but kept nearby. I had headaches, and a pulsating ring that throbbed in my ears. I was still too weak to bear much weight. But I’d had an idle little dream in a small dead space, and the dream was now alive and hungry inside me.

It’s really just simple math, the whole of it. There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die. But it’s very hard to die, because all the turns pointing that way open up onto new ones, and you have to make the wrong choice enough times to really mean it. You have to stay focused. Very few players train
their focus on death. The path forward stops here and there as you go, each frame filled out by outlines and figures from the rich depths of my hospital ceiling, shaded by colors I’d reconstituted from the foggy memory of the visions that had preceded the event for sixteen years: all those blurred plains, now melted down into an ideally endless landscape, its key peaks judiciously spread out so as not to use them all up at once. Saving some for last when there was no last. When there was no point in saving, when no one would ever see the very last.

I listened to music to drown out the drone, and I sat in my wheelchair exercising my legs so they’d be able to carry me when I left. I noticed how the blue padding on the seat of the chair retained heat, which made my thighs get sweaty and then clammy as I sat in it all day. I learned to hate it, and to look forward to the slow, hard work of physical therapy. Pain woke me up several times a night, as it would continue to do for over a year and, occasionally, forever, and I taught myself to power through it on the way back to sleep, because getting medication in the middle of the night was too sad and horrible to be worth it. I closed my eyes and pictured the stronghold I’d built as it would really look out there in the physical world, in the unknown Kansan expanse: it was vivid, and beautiful if you managed to get inside it. From without, it was stark, windswept, a silo in the middle of nowhere, nearly nothing in the middle of more nothing.

I filled notebook after notebook after notebook with paragraphs describing it, indicating its parameters, the directions leading to it or away from it, the coordinates of its hidden
refuge. I annotated every page with numbers and abbreviations and self-invented legends that were hard to keep track of—which needed, eventually, a smaller notepad of their own—and some ideas that didn’t fit but still seemed cool got ported off to new notebooks, where they grew into their own games, smaller concerns, exclusive worlds for players with specific needs. Little private exorcisms that would eventually find people in need of their hidden formulas. Barbarian Zone. Crosshairs. Wolf Patrol. It was like shrapnel scattering this way and that, who knows where it lands, but I kept my sites trained on Kansas; and I told my parents at dinner one night that I didn’t need the TV in my room anymore, that they should sell it, and Dad said, “Really? Why?” because he knew I’d been watching lots of TV late at night for a while.

“Just don’t need it,” I said.

“Everything all right?” Dad said after he’d exchanged a look with Mom.

“Just too busy for TV,” I said, trying to telegraph a smile with my tone of voice, in a small nod of my head, and everybody caught the same good mood for once, a rare grace for us in those days, the sort of high note that inspired dangerous, inexplicable thoughts in me, which I kept to myself until I could get back to work.

I think about lizards that puff out their necks, or those brightly colored frogs down in the Amazon, coated with neurotoxins,
adapting to their surroundings, their needs. But my head’s not an evolutionary adaptation, so that’s not quite right. All my reshaped parts seem like they protrude now, or hang; it can’t be possible, I figure, but maybe they do, I haven’t measured. Everything looks bigger to me in the mirror now. And when people out in the world see me, something in their expressions reminds me of people looking up at buildings. Sometimes I sit by the window, but the chair by the window feels almost like a platform. The window frames my face in such a way that my head seems monstrously huge.

Still, I make a point of working there sometimes, even though, as I say, there isn’t so much work to do anymore. I thought about inventing a new game, but the Sean who built the Trace is as distant from me now as the Sean who blew his face off is from both of us. All three live in me, I guess, but those two, and God knows how many others, are like fading scents. I know they’re still there. I could find them if I needed them. But I don’t need them, and one of them survives only in bits and pieces. They certainly don’t need me. They are complete just as they are.

It’s one small thing I remember noticing in those months of building and making and drafting and plotting, something that seems less small over time: for a player to make progress, he has to pacify or destroy whoever’s in his way. Those people become part of his story: he can’t go back and breathe life into them, and whatever gains he gets from the wrecks he leaves behind are permanent in the sense that any other courses open to him beforehand will then become closed. So when I sketched the scene where a player, having been caught by warlord resource-hoarders and imprisoned in an improvised jail, could
just kill his cellmate and get everything he might otherwise have spent six turns gathering, I didn’t feel right about it: it was directly rewarding a player for attacking somebody who hadn’t done him any harm, for doing the wrong thing. It saved the player all the work while giving him all the spoils. But I saw the bigger picture: that it was true. That to the player who intended to make it to safety, no one in front of him amounted to more than some stray marks on paper, half-real figures to be tunneled under or blasted through as you headed on east toward the spires.

It’s a ghost town. I was little the first time I heard the term “ghost town”; I fell immediately in love. Coronado is still on all the maps, but to get there you’d have to crawl through Kansas forever. Still, if ever a testament is needed to the existence of the great fortress, the final stand, the place within which the search for some unnamed final shelter within the
shelter would then begin and continue on forever and forever, it’s here. This is what it looks like; these are its girders and panels. It is visible. It exists.

TRACE VISIBLE

TRACE NEARER

TRACE BREACH