Wolf in White Van (9 page)

I got as far as sliding one of the tapes out from the row and setting it down on my desk next to the letters, like an arrow in the quiver. But of course nobody threatening to kill me was about to send a return address.
I hope they give you the chair.
And then I pictured myself sending some incomprehensible tape to a stranger whose hatred for me was a pure flame, bright and clear: someone who’d hear a package drop in through his mail slot one day and find, when he opened it, this unexpected, undecodable
thing.
And he’d turn it over in his hands, trying to make sense of it, and he’d feel all shaken up. Or confused. Or a little scared. And I said out loud: “No,” and did the deep breathing exercises I learned in relaxation class when I was seventeen. I made ready to tear the threats all into neat squares, but instead I put them in a manila envelope and tucked it into the bottom drawer in the filing cabinet, down among the scenes and byroads almost no one’s ever seen.

More mail came in the following weeks; I wondered if swells in volume meant there’d been some editorial in a local paper somewhere about a gunshot survivor who’d lured a couple of teenagers to a frozen grave. Maybe even a human-interest story on the evening news. Because it did seem to come in waves. There were appeals to my conscience to “turn myself in,” and prayer groups letting me know they were interceding with God on my behalf. I stopped reading this stuff fairly quickly; I either filed them or, if an envelope looked a little fat and came from an unknown source, I’d hand it over unopened to my lawyer, who I assume put them all into a filing cabinet of her own. But
Dear Freak
was the first one, out ahead of the actual news, a confusing and frightening intrusion into the dull quiet of my life, the first I had heard about any of this. The crazy road trip letters from Lance and Carrie had stopped suddenly, and I’d thought maybe their parents had made them come home; then there’d been radio silence for a week—two weeks—and then,
Dear Freak, With the internet now
, one of about
seven letters from strangers that came that day, some supportive and some caustic, a stack around which the postman or somebody at the post office had put a rubber band. I remember the rubber band because I reflexively threaded it from my pinkie around my thumb to my index finger pistol-style and shot it across the room.

10
I was cleaning out the bathroom cabinets when I ran across the expired medications … they were tucked back in a corner. They formed a little squadron of yellow-brown bottles, hidden away from view. When I uncovered them their serial numbers and expiration dates met the incoming light like bits of unearthed code on ancient tablets. I had no conscious memory of hiding the bottles back there, away from sight; maybe they’d been getting pushed back gradually over the years, until at some point they reached a place where they were safe from scrutiny. But they were all upright, like orderly sentries, which worked somewhat against that theory.

There was a small, strange moment during which I had this feeling that someone was filming me, which was ridiculous, but it was that specific—”there’s a camera on me”—and then some hard ancient pushed-down thing, a thing I’d felt or thought or feared a long time ago, something I’d since managed to sheathe in an imaginary scabbard inside myself, erupted through its casing like a bursting cyst. I had to really struggle to recover. Something was dislodging itself, as from a cavern
inside my body or brain, and this situation seemed so divorced from waking reality that my own dimensions lost their power to persuade. I craned my great head and saw all that yellow-brown plastic catch the light, little pills glinting like ammunition, and then my brain went to work, juggling and generating several internal voices at once: someone’s filming this; this isn’t real; whoever Sean is, it’s not who I think he is; all the details I think I know about things are lies; somebody is trying to see what I’ll do when I run across these bottles; this is a test but there won’t be any grade later; the tape is rolling but I’m never going to see the tape. It is a terrible thing to feel trapped within a movie whose plot twists are senseless. This is why people cry at the movies: because everybody’s doomed. No one in a movie can help themselves in any way. Their fate has already staked its claim on them from the moment they appear onscreen.

I looked away; I looked away. Held myself steady for a second and then got back to the work of the cleaning, shaking free of the crazy feelings, and I felt the corners of my mouth, half smiling. Most people can clean their bathroom cabinets without waking up any traumatic memories. Not me, not yet, I guess. But as Dave the art therapist told me once when he found me sulking: it’s not so bad to be special. My journey, he said, was longer and slower. He looked me in the eyes, which impressed me, and told me that my good fortune was to learn what special really meant.

I raised my spray bottle, filled with plain white vinegar solution, and I blasted the mirror cheerfully, wiping the glass with a wadded newspaper until the vinegar dried. Then I sank an easy two into the wastebasket on the other side of the toilet,
and I reached back into the cabinet without thinking too hard. I set the old medication bottles down on the counter one at a time, and after I’d finished clearing out the rest of the cabinet, I took a closer look at them.

I was eleven, maybe twelve, I’m not completely sure, when I was given a small black-and-white television and told I could keep it in my room. My grandmother had just died; she was my mother’s mother, and she’d lived most of her life in one house, just a mile or so away from where we settled when we finally circled back to Montclair. When she died, she left behind a room all full of grandma things, things too familiar to be given to Goodwill but too yellowed to be kept out in plain view. In the wake of her death a small windfall came my way. Besides the television, I got two transistor radios; a blanket that smelled, as I would later learn, like a hospital smells; and a hollow stone statue of an owl, which had been sitting atop the wall-mounted heater in my grandmother’s room for as long as I could remember.

Both the owl and the television became immediate touchstones. I talked to the owl sometimes, and I’m not sure why; I don’t remember what I told it or when I stopped doing it. I just remember that it was a thing I did for a while. The TV I used like a night-light. I plugged it in and left it on.

This was back in the age of networks and UHF. Most stations signed off sometime toward two in the morning. But on summer nights I’d stay awake until three, and sometimes later, because a pulsing feeling in my stomach made it hard for me
to want to sleep. In my room down the hall with my face close to the bright screen, cross-legged. Close enough to the screen to describe variations in the grain of the dust that would form on the glass. Once in a while I’d wipe it clean with the palm of my hot, oily hand. I would watch anything; I believed everything. I could convince myself that I was the last person in the world, watching the screen after the station had signed off, sinking into the blur. Sometimes I’d fall asleep on the floor, my face in the carpet, and I’d wake up with the TV still on, my head near the speaker, local news droning. My mom would come in later, in the morning, and say it wasn’t good for me, but how could I explain?

What I had on those nights were as near as I had come since childhood to religious experiences. Lots of people who survive personal traumas get close to God. My accident didn’t do that for me. It was like a cleansing wind: mystic thoughts would always be hard to come by for me afterward. Those times of snowy vision I’d had in the summers after my grandmother died subsequently became the stuff of personal myth for me. My parents had their own version of it, which was linear; it told a story about me staying up late and reading things and watching things that told me to do something awful, of staring too long at a static screen. It’s because they thought this, and because they maybe still do, that I can’t communicate with them. I can’t explain to them what those nights were like except to say that they gave me a sort of shelter. “Shelter from what?” they would say if I managed to put it to them that plainly. “Why did you need shelter?” Some things are hard to explain to your parents. Some things are hard to explain,
period, but your parents especially are never going to understand them.

All that was left of the Navane was a dark orange film, hardened against the plastic walls of the dropper bottle, segmented and flaking like dried earth. I remembered this stuff. It was the worst of the worst. It came with all kinds of warnings about going out into the sun and what to use on your skin to protect yourself from the extra sensitivity, which seemed like jokes to me, like they had to be meant as jokes. I think it was years before I stood outside in the sun at all for longer than the few minutes it took me to get from a transport van into the cool shade of the indoors.

I sniffed at the bottle. There wasn’t a whole lot of scent left; just enough for me to grab hold of the memory of what it had been like getting this stuff from the dropper to my tongue. Like forcing a cadaver to drool something sweet into my mouth. Whole sweeping narratives had formed inside me around this medication, I remembered: stories I’d told myself to make taking it less numbing, to give not just meaning but intrigue to my dull condition. Explorers on distant South American mountainsides retrieving flowers from rock cliffs whose petals alone could yield the essence that would make the nauseating syrup in the tinted bottle: but you couldn’t get the essence directly from the petals; it was far too potent for human beings, it’d kill you; first you had to feed it to sparrows, whose livers filtered out the toxins, then cut out the livers and boil all the remaining organs in water. Then you strained the resulting decoction through cheesecloth and diluted it in a ten-to-one
solution, and capped the bottles you’d drained it into and kept them away from light, because what you were left with was thiothixene HCl, known commercially as Navane, which I took in oral suspension because the doctor thought without it I might see or hear bad things.

Every medication from the drawer had not just one story like this but several. Pale pink Tegretol hauled across the Caucasus by caravan under cover of night, the only man in the world capable of manufacturing it unaware that his creation was being packaged and sold to people in the hated nations of the West. Xanax, certifiably the medication that came from space, traded to the architects of our shadow government in exchange for a full map of human DNA, the eventual future costs of this trade arrangement unspoken but plain as day to everybody involved, a rash of suicides and disappearances cropping up when the uselessness of the medicine for anything beyond mild sedation was revealed. Ludiomil, the one the drug companies were lying to all the doctors about, telling them it did one thing when really it did another, all the while advising baffled treatment teams that one of Ludiomil’s side effects was to make patients lie about how it made them feel; and so the doctors kept right on prescribing it to treat something it didn’t really treat, blind actors in a study whose actual aim would never be known by anyone. I made up these stories when they brought me the medications with my breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I refined them some after I’d been sent home. Everything became infused with purpose. It’s hard to overstate how deep the need can get for things to make sense.

There was also Darvocet. Darvocet had some stories, too,
but unlike the others they were all true. I had learned them in real time: I’m burning from the neck up. Every repaired bone feels like it has been electrified. Every thought or emotion I have is focused on the pounding pain in my face, which feels as big as the side of a barn. I hurt so much that I would trade anything for relief, do anything, hurt anyone. I remember the day I tried to make a deal with the devil: how stupid I felt, how I cried to know there was no Satan to help me, how there was only the medication they’d give me when I couldn’t pretend I didn’t need it anymore. Which I tried to do all the time; I hated how much I needed all the help they gave me, hated needing to call the nurse, hated feeling like my greatest success would be in making childhood my permanent condition.

Somewhere in the middle of a long night, between one dosage of Darvocet and the next, I made a promise to myself. I remembered it now. I’d promised myself that all this was temporary, the medication and the bed in the room where the blinds were always down, and that I would get out of it somehow, get away somewhere, do something again with little reference to any of it. I didn’t promise myself future success or total recovery. Just escape. I remember that it was dark in the room when I came up with the promise, and that I had a special way of wording it that I swore to myself I’d never forget, and I noticed, now, shaking the Darvocet bottle with a few tabs left in it, that of course I had forgotten whatever the special magic words of my promise had actually been. They had been scattered to the winds long since. I don’t think I can explain why it made me happy to learn that I’d been unable to keep my promise to myself, but it did. I felt so content to have
forgotten: like I’d been touched by a blessing so obscure that almost no one would ever share in it, or no one I’d ever know or hear about. Like I belonged to a tiny secret brotherhood of people who’d forgotten something hard.

I arranged the bottles into a loosely octagonal formation on the counter, and I pictured a very small person sitting at the center of the octagon, no bigger than the distal joint of my little finger, bored but safe, half-crazy from isolation but protected from the outside world. That person was me. My parents would have asked the younger me, what do you want to be safe from? After the accident nobody would ask. That was, to put it harshly, the best thing about the rifle blast that destroyed most of my face.

I saw a show about music one summer on that TV. I saw it twice.

They were showing it on TBN, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, “fifty thousand watts of power broadcasting from Costa Mesa, California”—I watched TBN a lot, because when all the other stations had powered down their transmitters for the night, TBN stayed on. After a while I started to notice patterns in the way they operated, and I came up with theories about how things worked at TBN. For example: sometimes you’d feel pretty certain you were seeing the same show twice, but I became convinced this was never actually true; maybe there’d be the same hosts and the same guests going over the same material, and it’d seem like you were watching the same thing you’d watched once already, but there were variations if you looked hard enough. I learned to look very hard.
Sometimes their voices would sound different, more strained or more awake, more tired or somewhat softer. Gradations in tone. And sometimes they’d just look less involved, a little more distracted, a little less believable. But everyone would still pretend the conversation hadn’t already taken place, that all these questions hadn’t already been answered to everybody’s satisfaction.

And then sometimes, not often but for me always with a profound feeling of revelation, the conversation would go to a new place: not too far off the script, but somewhere just down a side path, for five minutes, maybe, or even less. Things would briefly open, and, in the opening, possibilities would emerge. Jan, with the high-piled hair, would remember something her mother used to say to her; or a guest would be reminded of a story he’d heard from somebody in his travels, and he’d lose the thread somewhere in the middle of the story but keep right on telling it. Or a musician from the in-studio band would say something like “That’s the first time we’ve played that song in a while,” but when you saw the same show again two nights later he’d say “We don’t get to play that song as much as we used to” instead. Or a visiting preacher might swap out a story about his trip to Houston for another about his home parish in Phoenix. Or someone would carry out a Bible verse for an extra line or two, heading off into parts unknown before breaking abruptly off.

When I saw the music show the second time it seemed like there were more of these glitches than usual. The show was about Satanism in music: apparently bands had started encoding Satanic messages into their songs by recording the music backwards,
and teenagers were being won over for Satan through this process. They had a couple of experts on the show as guests, and they said that rock music, which had become the most popular music in the world, was being used by the devil to get his message across. Does the devil actually have his own message? This seemed like a big question for me when I was thirteen and up late on summer nights.