Wolf in White Van (14 page)

15
When Tim from therapy started talking about board and care facilities, I was barely listening, but it turned out he wasn’t just ticking off the options; that was actually the plan: every week there was a meeting called discharge conference, where my parents and I would sit down with my main doctor and one of the nurses and the therapist and the social worker, and we’d talk about how I was doing. The first discharge conference I attended had been the one where the doctor said: “Realistically, we don’t know how long Sean will need to stay here.” They hadn’t thought I could hear them through the painkillers, but I could. For a long while after that, discharge conference was more of a weekly progress report, but eventually they’d start asking me questions: about my plans for after I left, about what would be different.

“Different?” I said. “Different how?”

The therapist spoke up. “Different, like how will you deal with frustration?”

I was still pretty foggy a lot of the time; I was heavily medicated. But I saw where she was going, what answer she
was looking for. I kept looking at her in silence, because I didn’t know what to say: it wasn’t really a meaningful question to me. “What will you do when things don’t go your way?” was the rephrasing she offered, meaning to clarify her point but just making it harder to explain that we were at odds in ways she wasn’t likely to accept.

“Relaxation” was what I said, because Relaxation was one of the therapy groups I got wheeled to twice a week, and it was true that I found it useful; the group leader talked everybody through inner journeys to weird places, like a lake in the forest, and you were supposed to go there in your mind and feel at peace. It worked, in a way, though I always saw other things in the forest, which I kept to myself.

“Good,” she said. “Thank you, Sean”; and so we moved on to the nurses, who talked about specifics of in-home aftercare, about having a night nurse at the very least in case of emergency, and asked my parents if they understood that changing dressings once a night was absolutely necessary for at least another twelve weeks, and so on. And then the conversation came around to someone I didn’t know, dressed in street clothes with a name tag that said
J. CAMPBELL / TRANSITIONAL LIVING.

I could tell from how he engaged my parents that they’d met before. I personally had never seen him. He didn’t really ask questions; instead he gave a presentation about the place he worked. It had twenty-four beds, two to a room, and was for people who required various levels of care in transitioning from hospitals to—his phrase
—independent living.

“After you turn eighteen, Sean,” my mother said.

I soaked up the fluorescent light of the conference room and looked at everybody sitting around the table, people who’d seen all sorts of situations. I wasn’t entirely sure what month it was anymore: were there eight months left before my birthday? Nine? I looked back at Mom, and I tried to think of a way to explain to her that I understood. That she was concerned for her son, hoping to do right by her son. But the picture she had of her son wasn’t anyone still walking the earth: that was someone who had been destroyed. His life had been real once, and had value and meant something. But all that was gone now, remade in shapes and forms she hadn’t come to understand just yet.

“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.”