Wolf in White Van (8 page)

Steve said, “Fuck if I know,” and Kevin said, “I’m going to stay as high as I can,” and they bumped fists and then at the exact same moment raised their free hands flat into the air, their palms toward me. They were asking me to give them the high five. I gave them the high five. I felt like the sun had just risen inside me.

“What about you, though, dude?” said Steve. “What the fuck are you going to do?”

I knew what I was going to say; I paused for effect. “I’m going to go home and eat candy and stay high as long as I can,” I said.

Kevin and Steve said staggered
No doubts
, automatically, reflexively, but then Kevin said: “That whole court thing, though, dude. What are you going to do?” He pulled at his beer.

“Fuck ‘em,” I said. When I pronounce the letter f, I spit. Neither of them flinched. I thought a little about Carrie’s parents, to whom I usually bore no particular ill will, because I always try to put myself in the other guy’s shoes. If I had a kid who killed herself because she’d gotten confused about some game she was playing with some stranger far away, I’d hate that stranger, too. That is usually how I think. But I said it again, and I meant it. “Fuck ‘em.”

Again Steve and Kevin thunked their beer cans together. “Fuck ‘em!” they said, in near unison. I smiled my horrible smile.

8
I felt so terrible when Carrie died. Trying to explain the feeling I had is like trying to describe what you see when your eyes are bandaged: it’s not impossible, but it’s different from describing something you can actually look at, something you might see in the course of a normal day. It is trying to describe something at which you are unable to look directly.

She never wrote to me as often as Lance did; it was usually him writing the letters and signing on behalf of them both. They played as a team: L+C, two capital initials with a plus sign in between. In the margins of their letters, sometimes, or after the sign-off, she would also write something. Or if somehow Lance had been sidelined. One July, when his family took him down to Branson on vacation, for example: that was the week when Carrie sent in a turn so there’d be news for Lance when he came home.
L is on vacation so I thought if I make a move & it’s good he will be excited when he comes home so here it is I know all turns are final but please don’t let me do something stupid we have so much fun together
, she wrote. She had decided to have the two of them hide behind a dumpster until the sun
went down, because it was hot in the town through which they were passing, and the mutants who had overrun the town were carnivorous and could smell less keenly once the air got cool.

I’d sent her a little note in reply. It was both sweet and painful to me to think of how much L+C meant to each other, how their lives seemed almost made for each other. When I was in high school, I’d only ever had two girlfriends: one for almost no time at all—two weeks early in freshman year, at the way station between junior high and the new social order being established at high school—and Kimmy for even less time than that, really just an unsure day or two right before the accident. Technically, I guess, she had still been my girlfriend when she visited me in my bandages at the hospital, but those visits were of a different order. I understood a little about how good it must feel to have someone who loves you out there in the wilds of high school; for a few days I’d known what that was like, too. But what Kimmy meant to me in the aftermath was something different and higher, a singular thing in the world with no readily available points of comparison. She was just sixteen, but she had the stomach to stand near a smoking wreck.

On the Xeroxed move I took from the file cabinet, I wrote:
Good work to both of you Carrie. It’s safe behind the dumpster. Tell Lance when he gets home that you kept him from harm.
I remember feeling a little guilty, because while it’s possible to make a move that kills off your character within the game, it’s almost never possible to walk straight into a fatal trap; telling
somebody their game is over is a bad business move, and I’d known that before I ever took out the first ad. So staying put until dark was a good move, one that would advance the player painlessly toward the short-term objective of reaching the city limit unharmed; there was no real danger. But the wrong move could have delayed the team until winter, scaling hospital exteriors to get at the one uncontaminated bottle of disinfectant or a snakebite kit. There was a colony of snakes in the ditch just a few hundred yards away: she might have chosen
HEAD FOR THE DITCH
instead of
REST BY THE DUMPSTER
. So I hadn’t lied. I had just played up the bright side.

When Lance got home and sent in his moves, he was excited. I remember his excitement, how I could see it in the way the pencil dug into the page. I was piecing together what I knew about him while picking out clothes for the hearing. Vicky had come in to help me dress. I didn’t need her help—I can dress myself—but I was grateful. Sometimes I wondered what Vicky made of my work, since she never asked me about it and I didn’t usually volunteer much; our conversations stuck mainly to simple things like food or the weather or how we were feeling. She told me about her family sometimes. If she found me at my work she mostly left me at it.

It was difficult, that day, to remain in the moment. I wanted her to know how I felt, thinking of Lance where he was now: in a place called Casa Central, some physical rehabilitation center for adolescents. Most of his fellow patients had survived more sudden traumas than his: car accidents, house fires. His problems had a better shot at total resolution, but in the immediate present they were as bad as anybody’s. He’d spent days
down in a shallow pit without food, with only forming ice to suck for water. Now he lay on a burn recovery bed all day hoping that feeling would return to his legs from the knees down, his face salved and wrapped, everybody praying that enough attention would encourage some of the skin to grow back.

As best as I can put it together, this is what I can tell you about Lance Patterson: he was born to a couple in their mid-twenties who had been married for several years. His father worked the evening shift at some Winter Park assembly line that made parts for machines; his mother was a substitute in the grade schools. His family was a good family; they weren’t rich, but they all lived together and stayed in one place. Of course I only knew him through the mail, but I imagined him as an awkward boy with too much energy. His teachers liked him, and they told him so; I know this because he mentioned it once when he said that the other kids his age didn’t like him but his teachers were nice. He spent his afternoons after school hanging around the house, watching television and keeping himself entertained. He had a few friends, all casual, but was personally somewhat guarded; when Carrie came into his life, a corner of the world he’d only ever dreamed about was opened for him. I learned about this corner of his world when he brought her into the game, which he’d only been playing for a few months.
Is it OK if I have a partner playing with me who can just start where I’m at?
he wrote.
Can we just say I found her hiding somewhere?
I didn’t see why not; I couldn’t write a
special turn for it, but I wrote at the top of his next turn:
You have been joined by a young technician who can help you tap the aquifer.

He was not unusual in sending me bits and pieces of his life; that, in part, was what contributed to my horror at the whole situation. There might have been others like him about whom I’d never heard, people whose play had taken them into lightless hallways: What of them? They found their way out and disappeared. Or they never said anything and kept on playing. What did I know about these people, about anybody anywhere whom disaster hadn’t struck? There was Chris, he was all right. But generally the only way we ever know anything about anything is if something goes wrong. Knowing this is hard for me.

“This is a picture of a boy named Lance,” I said to Vicky, out of nowhere, while she was straightening things up. “He plays that game you always see me working on.” I felt like a man leaving a spaceship for the surface of a new planet; it is pretty rare for me to feel that sort of need so many seem to have, that irresistible desire to tell somebody else what they’re thinking. I hadn’t talked to Vicky about the lawsuit; for several reasons I tend to keep my conversations with people limited to basic, pleasant things like the weather or which kind of macaroni and cheese tastes the best.

“Oh?” said Vicky. Back in my own trauma ward days I knew several social workers who could have learned a thing or two about reflective listening from Vicky.

“Yeah,” I said. She was making my bed for me hospital style, tight corners and accordion folds. “He’s in the hospital
now but he’s been playing Trace Italian for almost three years. Him and his girlfriend. She died.”

“I’m real sorry,” she said, “to hear it.” I could see her taking the measure of me, noticing how talkative I was today. “How is he getting by, now?”

“He’s—” I looked for the word, and for a few seconds while I looked, I considered her question, the depths of understanding that seemed to have formed its words: How many people had she taken care of whose problems involved getting by or not getting by in so many hundreds of different degrees? “He’s managing,” is what I came up with. She came over and sat down beside me, getting her dressing-changing things together on a tray, and she waited for me to continue.

“He went a long time without food or enough clothes to keep him warm,” I said. “He was in a place a long way from his home and he didn’t know how cold it got there, and by the time he figured it out, it was too late. He tried to save his girlfriend, they say, but she was trying to save him, too, and she didn’t make it. They liked to read the same books together, and see the same movies and talk about them; he used to write to tell me about the things they liked to think about. I don’t think he really knows how to think a few steps ahead, you know.”

“Young people can’t think ahead,” she said. She was opening up some Betadine swabs.

I laughed my little wet throat-laugh. “I know,” I said; “you know I know. I keep hoping he won’t blame himself too much for being stupid. I mean, he is a little stupid, I think, but to me that’s not a bad thing to say about a person. I’m a little
stupid but I’m all right. Lance is young and stupid though, I guess. That’s two strikes.”

“Now, now,” said Vicky.

“He likes to play video games but he hasn’t got any sensation in the pads of his fingers anymore so he can’t feel them pressing on the buttons, and he says it feels weird, so the games aren’t as fun. The first thing he thought of when his girlfriend died was what she’d want him to do, how to keep the memory of her happy in his imagination. What a sweet kid,” I said. My face stung. “They met in junior high school band; she played the flute, I guess, and he was in the drum section, and they went to the movies together a lot.” I wanted to give Lance a better biography, but all l really had at the ready were some bare bits and details: the parts he hadn’t been able to stop himself from mentioning, the pieces of himself that flew from him naturally like sparks from a torch.

“Well, he sounds like a nice boy,” said Vicky, straightening my collar for me. The sun was cresting the cypresses that line the walkway, and a clean warm light had filled the room. It’s hard not to feel good in that kind of light. I nodded, and I looked at her and felt such gratitude to have her around. I was happy to know her in my small, formal, dependent way. And I felt a ravenous grief for nice boys who are too stupid to take care of themselves, and too dumb to remember to check the surrounding brush for snakes before settling down to sleep for the night.

9
They freeze up when I open the door. You can see it happen. They’re in a sort of imagined forward motion, ready to launch into whatever pitch they’ve come to give, and then the sight of me arrests them mid-swing. Wielding this kind of power feels different from what I imagine people who crave power think they’ll get if they ever get their wish. Because this … this can’t be what people want. Or maybe it is, and I just don’t really understand how power works, I think sometimes. But then I think about it some more, and I think: Yes, I do know something about what power is, how it works. What it’s like. I do know.

“Sean Phillips?” is what the process server said, already holding up the summons in front of his face like a shield. He was in his early twenties. I don’t think anyone had warned him about adjusting his expectations. Probably he was working through a whole sheaf of cases, nameless after a few hours on the clock, one indistinguishable from the next. I assume that you end up seeing all sorts of people in the course of your workday in a job like this; in any job, really. But “all sorts of
people,” in most lives, is a spectrum with fairly narrow extremes. If your job involves knocking on doors, your parameters might begin on the far end with a man who answers his motel room door naked and dripping wet, and on the other side you might find some guy who tries to tip you when you leave. If you go out on religious work, I imagine you learn early that some people are glad to see you and other people are mad. I am different; I’m outside all that. People don’t expect to meet me. They don’t know they have expectations, but I show them by counterexample what their expectations were. I had old music from my teenage years playing loud on the stereo when the process server found himself having to decide whether to look at me or not.

I always wonder if people are afraid of me because they think I’ll do something: press my face up against them, or start making funny noises. I am always a little tempted to satisfy their fears. But I never do it; it would feel wrong; it would be wrong. I don’t need to make myself feel better by frightening people or making them squirm. When I was a child, I dreamed of powers like these, but I no longer have those dreams. I am free.

I said, “Sean Phillips last time I checked,” as clearly and lightly as I could, and I grabbed the pen from his outstretched hand. I heard him say “If you could just sign here,” but I was already ahead of him. I pictured the scene between us, how it couldn’t have been an easy combination: the door opening, me there, the loud, unpleasant music blaring away and forcing him to raise his voice for his one big line. So I signed quickly, and when he’d left, I read the summons. And then I read it again. That’s what you do when something like this starts to happen in your life: you check and recheck to see if it’s real.
And you start talking out loud to yourself, trying to explain it, seeing if you really understand. You then get angry. I did, anyway; I wanted to knock something over. Old feelings, long pressed down to where they couldn’t do any more harm, shed weight and rose inside me like vapor. They felt, to me, the way ghosts are supposed to look. They came up through the center of my body until I felt them at the back of my throat, tendriling out onto my tongue from way down in there. But they did not escape. I pressed the nail of my right index finger into the pad of my thumb rhythmically and focused on the dull sharpness bearing down while waiting for the feeling to ease.

There’d been bad news in the mail all week, but mixed in with it there’d been regular mail, plain mail: Stray moves from early Trace denizens, subscription renewals. Insurance statements I didn’t usually read because they always said the same thing: Your coverage continues at the level of care from the preceding period; please advise us immediately of any change in status, etcetera. Month after month. A few bills. And junk mail. Vitamin catalogs. Supplements. None of it could numb the live wires I kept grabbing every other time I split an envelope
open: Carrie dead. Lance sure to lose a foot, maybe both, maybe a hand, maybe both of those, too. Large sections of his face blackened by frostbite. His fever rendering him delirious. Fund-raisers at their parents’ churches, flyers for bake sales, clippings from Florida papers with names circled or underlined twice. And Lance and Carrie’s friends, writing to tell me either that they blamed me for what had happened, or else that they didn’t and wouldn’t no matter what anyone said; or just to tell me about what their friends were like, how they’d been in real life, how painful it was to know that all that was changed. And now this: a single page, a form, advising me in dry language that a hearing was to be held to determine where fault, if any, rested in the matter of, etcetera, wherefore my presence was required, and could be compelled if not given voluntarily, etcetera, wherefore the recipient should contact, at the following number without delay, etcetera.

My parents arranged all kinds of meetings with people back when they were running around looking for answers. I don’t remember them much, aside from a stray scene or two that stick with me like memorable sequences from otherwise forgotten films. These few short clips are interesting to me, and I can stand them now, but there was a time when I blocked them out. People trying to help you when you’re past help are raw and helpless. Nobody wins: you get nothing; they feel worse. I mainly remember the feeling among us when the hearings and meetings were finally all over: Dad growing distant, detached. Mom finding the quiet mask from which her face would never fully emerge again.

They held on to their anger until after they’d exhausted their leads; then it was gone. I don’t know what they replaced
it with. Something, I figure. I feel guilt, and sympathy, and shame, and I share it with them in letters I don’t mail, because the people who need to read those letters are also gone. They vanished into a meeting room one day and were never seen again.

I stood in the kitchen by the window reading the summons; it was so boring. The facts that had brought it into being were the stuff of nightmares, vivid and awful and real, but the thing that came to speak of them was a lifeless sequence of instructions written in a language no one alive even spoke. Nobody talks like that. People only talk like that when they can’t stand to tell you what they mean. I lead a sane and quiet life: the sun shone on the grape-candy purple jacaranda in the breezeway outside, and the oleander and the bottlebrush were in bloom down the walkway, and I felt like I had been suddenly shot out into space, the world I’d left behind terrible and frightening, only now I couldn’t breathe at all. I felt my blood quickly becoming starved of oxygen and my cells beginning to swell, and the stars around me grew brighter and then faded, and then nothing happened at all, and I stood by the window a while longer with the summons in my hand, wanting to run back to the front door to watch the process server get back into his car but knowing I’d missed him already, feeling the instinct to run to the door emerge anyway as a genuine urgency in my thin, underdeveloped legs.

The noise can’t really be blocked, just bested. Music therapists play you droning synthesizer music or classical when you’re in physical rehab; music therapists are the sweetest people; of all
the people who try to help you in the hospital, they’re the ones whose faith in their power to heal seems strongest. But it takes high-pitched sounds with a thick texture and a persistent rhythm to really make the
whoosh
go away. Bamboo flutes can’t touch it. Neither did the stuff my friends and I had all been listening to together ever since we’d started hanging out, the blues-rock stadium stuff. And that was how I got into blindly ordering strange music through the mail:
Spirit of Cimmeria
always had one or two ads for music “inspired by the genius of Robert E. Howard,” for example—stuff made by guys living in distant backwaters with no hope of ever making their voices heard anywhere, writing songs about the books they spent all their free time reading just trying to escape, playacting in a vacuum. There were similar ads in comic books, in
Omni.
They were everywhere if you knew how to look, so I spent my allowance on this kind of thing. Mom still gave me an allowance, even after what I’d done.

The first tape I got was folk music from someplace in Massachusetts, and I hated it. The second, which I’d ordered on the same day as the first one but which took a week longer to arrive, was by a band called Sunlight, and it came from Texas. I remember being excited about that, because Robert E. Howard was from Texas: he blew his brains out in the driveway of his house in Cross Plains. He was thirty years old and his mother was in a coma. I memorized all these details when I was fourteen, running around everywhere devouring every piece of information about Conan I could find; it had a religious appeal for me.

Sunlight’s tape was called
In Hyborian Sleep
and by normal standards it sounded terrible: there were no bass frequencies,
the singer just screamed, the drums were a constant artillery barrage the whole time. But it transported me. It freed me from the ringing in my ears and from the decision that sound was always pointing toward, from what the sound meant. From the second its staticky blasts started scratching through the speakers of my cheap Montgomery Ward stereo, I loved it, and I turned it up as loud as I could get it to go without distorting. I held my big head in the sweet spot between the speakers and closed my eyes to dream of barbarian conquest, and that’s how Mom found me when she came in.

I think I was half-conscious of her for a minute: something from outside the squall trying to draw me out. “Sean, please!” was the first thing I heard.

I turned the music down but not off. “Please what?” I said.

“Please tell me what it means that you’re listening to such …” I could see the tension in her neck, in her eyebrows. “Such racket.”

“What it means?” I said. It was still early in the whole process; I always felt humiliated if a situation called for an answer of more than a few words, and I could feel my anger building.

“Sean,” she said, “we …” and then she stopped herself again. Over the years I have tried to figure out what thoughts, what actual words, lay in the gaps between the things my mother starts to say and the things she ends up saying. “Whatever this is, it’s too much. You’re alone in your room all the time, and the music’s always on, and you’re still doing that Conan thing you did when you were just a—”

I saw my mother’s eyes fill halfway with tears. She held out her hand in an almost stage-like gesture, and swept it from left to right in an arc that drew in the stereo, the fanzines, the books
and cassettes piled on top of the turntable’s dust cover, and the Michael Whelan posters on the walls that my dad had taken down while I’d been away, which I’d dug right back out and hung again as soon as I got home. And the sketches I’d made of the Plague Blaster gun: those were up now, too, taped to the walls in places of prominence. These were big improvements over the nylon lariats the Retrievers had used in earlier drafts of the Trace outline. They fit right in your hand. They were thumbtacked in clusters on the wall next to the bed, one on top of another: the guns, and the Retrievers, and the mutated horses they rode through Kansas on. The sketches and maps clustered out and overlapped with one another like flyers on telephone poles. Mom let her hand drop back to her side, and she said, “It’s just too much, honey,” and I couldn’t look her in the eye.

I wish now that I could have explained to her about the noise in my head and the music fixing it, but I couldn’t, because it all happened too quickly and my temper flared before I had a chance to think. I punched the POWER button on the stereo to shut the whole thing off at once and all the life went out of it, and the noise roared in my ears again, worse than ever. I sat on my bed and looked down at the floor, and my mother came and sat next to me and put her arm over my shoulder, buddy-style. I leaned into her, against her, feeling sorry now, regret rushing in to fill the spaces where the anger drained. “It’s OK, I’m sorry,” she said. In the corner of my eye I caught the Plague Blaster, its contours clean, its heft exactly right.

I stopped listening to tapes at some point: it was a phase. You either get used to noises in your head, or you learn to focus instead on whatever other noises happen to be present in the room, like the air conditioner. Still, I kept them, and they’re arranged neatly on top of the dresser in my bedroom, which means Vicky dusts them once a week. They look like museum pieces now.
Chaos Blood, Black Lake, Rexecutioner’s Dream.
Sean at sixteen thought
Rexecutioner’s Dream
was the greatest thing he’d ever heard, something so strange and different it seemed like a message from another realm. It had cover art, but the art was glued onto the inner sleeve of a standard-issue blank cassette; the spine was hand lettered. It was the product of someone’s hard work, a vision brought into the world of real things. A dream disguised in a crude, plain package.

When the hate mail started up I had an impulse of the sort I rarely get anymore, the kind the antidepressants I’m supposed to be taking would probably keep completely and indefinitely in check. I was sitting up in bed reading the postcard that began
You aren’t going to hear us when we come in you ugly reject
, trying to see if reading it several times over would quiet the real fear that it gave me—
You’re just going to feel the pain
—and the light through the window caught the edge of something hard and shiny across the room, and I thought, if any of these have a return address in them, I’m going to send that person a tape. Something random from on top of the dresser.
Fire Caverns.
Just put it into a Jiffy bag and mail it.