Wolf in White Van

by John Darnielle

  In Missouri, fifty California delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in Kansas City were housed at a Holiday Inn near the freeway. The convention was first delayed, then canceled, when the gravity of the situation on reactor five became clear; the aggrieved were told to return to their families, to save what they could. There was to be no return home. Disorder and panic spread like brushfire. Uncontaminated cities quickly formed citizen posses, built strong walls around their boundaries, and guarded them with heavy armor. Three of the Kansas City fifty set out in a southerly course tending westward, despite misgivings. Their eventual ends are unknown.

  The remaining members of the delegation left Missouri on foot for the fallow fields of Kansas. Among their numbers were several laymen, employees on reactor five. Historians posit that genetic contamination among employees at the reactor would have been at or near 100 percent by the time of the collapse, though this is conjecture. Only two verifiable employees of the reactor are known to have survived the ensuing chaos of the days that followed. They were in Kansas City on the day the core melted, and are remembered now as the first people, ten years later, to be denied entrance to the Trace Italian.

  For the third time since sunrise you see men in gas masks sweeping the highway. It’s dusk. They are approaching the overpass where you hide in the weeds. You can only guess, but guesses are better than nothing: you calculate your chances of escaping unnoticed at 15 percent. When the nearest of them is close enough for you to hear the sound of the gravel underneath his yellow rubber boots, you know that the time has come for you to act.

  Welcome to Trace Italian, a game of strategy and survival! You may now make your first move.

  Within earshot of my twitching, living body I heard them tell my parents I wasn’t going to last long. That was, almost to a phrase, how they put it: “We don’t expect patients in Sean’s condition to last long.” I was too febrile to take offense or to feel relieved; the words just floated past my consciousness like a scrolling news bulletin at the bottom of the screen during a baseball game. Wherever it was my conscious self had actually fled to, the terrain lay somewhere out beyond where you might wonder what people mean by the things they say. I was having dreams of a guy named Marco, who was the editor and publisher of a small-press horror magazine called Marco. He was talking to me through the tight oval mouth hole of his ski mask.

  He had all kinds of interesting things to say. He kept picking at his teeth with a steel toothpick, and I wanted to ask him where you get a steel toothpick from, but then I’d bubble up to the bright surface again and hear the chatter and see all the people and their hospital machines, like the world coming into total focus when you first wake up; and then Marco, whose hidden face probably originated in trailers for spy movies and send-two-dollars-for-our-illustrated-catalog ads in magazines or on the backs of comic books, would go wobbly like the vertical hold on a TV and vanish.

  Still, even after he’d disappeared from my visual field, I could make out his voice, trying to fight its way back into the world of the living, wriggling out over the bells and the beeps and the people talking past one another. In the hall on the other side of the curtain, my mom kept describing the tableau in my bedroom, going over the details of it with the nurse and the treatment team. The louder she got the louder Marco had to speak to be heard; he also had to compete with the patient in the bay next to mine, who was screaming. After a few passes it started to seem like Marco only spoke when my coherence dropped, and got clearer when I let the fever take me: as soon as I’d start to lose my grip on things, he’d come suddenly through. When the fever settled in for a long swell, he coached me quickly up from my bed, and he hustled me through the door while everybody’s back was turned. From there we went speedily down the sterile busy hallways and hurried through a door that opened onto an eerie desert landscape, all cactus and cow skulls and shaky gravity. The scene played itself out several times, finding its bearings, but then someone from the outside would touch my hand, or say something that breeched the burbling static, and I’d hear the real things around me, my family and the doctors and the constant low hum of the building.

  I think it was our third trip down the hallway that took me deepest into the desert; I remember that suddenly it was night out there, and that there was a huge, deep drone in the air, and a trillion stars. I remember Marco in the full flower of his clarity, asking me questions, but I could only tell that they were questions by the rising tone he’d end them on. The actual words were heavily distorted, movie dialogue through a blown speaker or a fading radio signal turned up way too loud. Atop a low butte in the near distance I saw his armies gathered, the incomprehensible force of his voice somehow increasing their strength, maybe even their numbers. He began to tower over me in stature, quickly, and before long the masked boy my age who’d guided me out of the emergency room a moment before had become a giant, nine or ten feet tall, skinny and spindly, his voice threading through the desert hum like an insect song. I listened for some opening in his monologue where I might cut in and ask what was going on, and I prepared myself to get in one good question before his squadrons came charging down the hill. He had grabbed hold of my neck like I was a puppy; he was lifting me into the air. But just then someone started applying silver sulfadiazine to my forehead, and it burned, and I snapped back into my surroundings.

  The whole thing only lasted for a few minutes, and I seldom thought of it again except to try and figure it out: where it came from, I mean. Because there isn’t any magazine called Marco, and anyone connected with the magazine Marco is a phantom construction that my mind scared up during the first few minutes after the disaster.

  The art therapist came in fairly early on, or what feels now like it must have been fairly early on. I was in no condition. I was running a temperature they couldn’t figure out; it came and went. But I was awake some of the time, and that was enough. She stuck to simple questions: “Do you like to paint?”

  “Not really.”

  “Puzzles?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Do you like to draw?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good! What kinds of things do you like to draw?”

  I looked up to where I’d been looking, where I’d still be looking long after she left. I felt warm. “The universe,” I said, with a little effort.

  People have ideas and theories about coping with catastrophic injury, but most of them are based in practicalities. They’re right in thinking that the practicalities—how will you live? what will you do?—are important, but these aren’t the main thing. The main thing is what happens to your vision, how you’re a little different after you’ve seen a few things, and as far as I know, nobody really gets this, though I thought Chris Haynes did once. Something in his overall distrust of the path going forward felt moored to some bigger thing I knew about, something he’d either inferred from the play or known instinctively. But maybe not. It’s hard to say.

  One way of coping, anyway, is to stare at the ceiling. A hospital room ceiling, white, like an egg in a carton that’s been in the refrigerator for several weeks, away from the light, is dull, completely uniform, revealing variations only when you stare at the same spot for some time and then, very slowly, venture out. If you concentrate hard enough on the task, you might find a bubble or grain where a brush or a roller has stopped to reverse its stroke. You could let your attention rest there for a while; you could imagine the future of the ceiling, the battles playing out up there, camps pitched when the building was new back in unremembered time. You could picture the paint beginning to crack and fragment, and see, either in your mind’s eye or out there on the actual field of play if your vision spreads that far, the plaster underneath it learning to follow the cracks, the mildew forming on residues left by cleaning solutions beginning to breed, and colonies of microscopic life-forms, hostile to dull matter, developing their ruthless, mindless strategy: consume, reproduce, survive. You can see the hospital when the building has been emptied of pa
tients but a few workers remain: administrators, janitors, members of the demolition crew. You can see the ceiling in the next room, following the splits of the ceiling in its neighbor, and the one beyond that in turn, and then the greater canvas, the sky at night gone flat and painted white, the constellations in the cracking paint, the dust the cracks bring into being as they form, finding free land where none had been before their coming.

  Nurses and doctors come and go, and family. It’s like they’re visiting a person at his lonely outpost on the space station, miles above the earth. How do they get there—just coming in through the door like that? In the brief moment between infinite communion with the ceiling and the beginning of whatever conversation they’ve come to strike up, it seems like the deepest mystery in the world. And then they break the spell, and the world contracts, palpably shifts from one reality into a new and much more unpleasant one, in which there is pain, and suffering, and people who when they are hurt stay hurt for a long time or sometimes forever, if there is such a thing as forever. Forever is a question you start asking when you look at the ceiling. It becomes a word you hear in the same way that people who associate sound with color might hear a flat sky-blue. The open sky through which forgotten satellites travel. Forever.

  So when I remember the ceiling I try to invest it with meaning somehow. I try to connect its cracks and bubbles to palpable things out there in the world, to things I might have run across later. I treat the imperfections like tea leaves. I remember it as vividly as I can, and I look for shapes in things too small to have any visible shape, and I see centaurs or cavemen or trowels or piles of bricks, and I try to draw lines between the shapes and the slow sweet life I built for myself when I finally got out and learned I wasn’t, thank God, welcome at home anymore. But eventually I locate what I’d known I’d find up there all along, what I’d been seeing already in brief seconds of lucidity arising from the murk of those nights become days and those days of no light. I see my own face. I see it as it was, preserved in stray signals too late to read right.

  I’m pretty sure that’s the lesson there was to learn in the hospital: the main one. And I’m pretty sure my play was the right one to make. Because the unnamed every-player who lies in the weeds at the moment of Trace Italian’s opening move—that’s me. It’s me. Motionless, ready for something, awake and aware. When the player gets up from the weeds, as he or she always does, because the first move is rigged and all players arrive persuaded that they must act, everything changes: He enters a world where danger’s everywhere. He has a goal now, something to do with his life. His map is marked; he’s headed somewhere as he rides down the desolate plain.

  But this is the point where we split, the player and I. He heads for the road to seek shelter or something to eat. But I remain in the stasis of the opening scene, bits of gravel sticking to my face, cold night coming on. I am strong enough to endure it. I am strong enough to remain in its arms forever. I won’t get up; I have seen the interior once. I’m not going back. One thing I’ve learned is it’s better sometimes, in the weeds, to resist the temptation to stand up and follow the compass.

  Years later when they made me look at pictures of Lance and Carrie I remembered Marco, the empty, incoherent prophecy I’d heard amid the chaos. For a second, as I flipped through the evidence, my long-forgotten hallucination became real, and I wondered how he’d managed to remain hidden for so long. What if I’d tried to talk to the doctors about him; why hadn’t my mind offered him up as a way to get them off my back? I’d had plenty of encouragement. “Who made you do this, Sean?” my father asked at my bedside, my hand in his. I thought then how nice it would have been to have a good answer ready to give to him, a little gift from son to father, something he could take to his friends by way of explanation. To blame Marco. To lay it at his feet.

  “Have you seen these people before?” the attorney asked me in the conference room, running through the planned stations of his performance, giving Carrie’s parents their money’s worth. He fanned several photographs across the table in front of me and waited for my reply. But they were impossible to understand, all of them and each of them; they belonged to a context that couldn’t be referenced outside of itself, incredibly important in one way and completely meaningless in another. They were artists’ renditions of somebody’s dream. What could I say? Sure I have, a long time ago. You wouldn’t understand.

  3 There are games I’m prouder of than Trace Italian but it doesn’t really matter how I feel. Trace Italian is what built Focus Games, and if people know my name at all, Trace Italian is why they know it. It was my first idea; they say your first ideas are your best ones. I think it’s maybe dangerous to think that way all the time. But when I remember finally building Trace Italian, seeing how it was actually going to come together and really work, then I know what people mean about their first ideas being the best. There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.

  I’d harbored the Trace concept for a long time—I think I was inspired by a commercial for an old board game called Stay Alive. It starred a bunch of kids playing on a beach; there were no adults around, and waves crashed angrily against rock cliffs nearby. The children pushed or pulled levers on a playfield, opening holes in the board as they did so; eventually all marbles on the board except one would drop out of play, and then the winner would announce, in a breathless voice that suggested he couldn’t believe his luck: “I’m the sole survivor!” It held my attention. As a child I wanted everything to be in some way concerned with endings. The end of the world. The last Neanderthal. The final victim. The stroke of midnight. So children playing a game called Stay Alive on a beach with nobody else around, that spoke to something in me, something I’d maybe been born with. Of the many logos for imaginary products I would come to design throughout high school, Trace Italian was the first. I’d gotten the name from dry days in history class during a lesson on medieval fortifications: anything that involved the word star always sounded like it was speaking directly to me. The trace italienne involved triangular defensive barricades branching out around all sides of a fort: stars within stars within stars, visible from space, one layer of protection in front of another for miles. The World Book preferred the term star fort, which I also liked, but in idly guess-working trace italienne into English I’d stumbled across a phrase that had, for me, an autohypnotic effect. TRACE ITALIAN. I would spend hours writing and rewriting the name in stylized block capitals, reticulated line segments forming letters like the readout on a calculator. On notebook paper rubbed raw with erasures, the evolving logo resembled a department store’s name spelled out in dots and dashes on cash register tape: RILEYS UNIVERSITY SQUARE. The driving image for my game involved people running for shelter across a scorched planet. There was something on fire in the near distance behind them. Their faces looked out from the page toward their goal. The Trace Italian represented shelter, and it was shaped like a star. That was all I had.

  It was later, lying supine and blind for days, faced with the choice of either inventing internal worlds or having no world at all to inhabit, when I started to fill in the details: how the planet had been ruined (reactor five); how the cities had been emptied (mutant hominids from sea caves seeking out coastal cities for uncontaminated flesh, and continuing to move inland, spreading disease and killing innocents); where and how the surviving humans had built the Trace Italian (far inland, with their bare hands, from available materials cut and tumbled and hewn and polished over generations for several hundred years). How it rose from the landscape, bigger than its medieval counterparts, a shining structure on the plains, protecting the sprawling self-contained city underneath it, a barrier against the outside world and a sign to would-be intruders that its architects were people of great vision and design. Thinking of games as a way to kill time in history class had been one thing, but filling out the map and telling the story of every spot on it by myself, in my head, on my back: it was a refuge for me. I identified with the people I’d created
to populate the barren landscape. I shared their goal: to find the location of the Trace Italian. Work through the ant-leg limbs of the star layer by layer until you find the shining heart. Get there at last. Stay there.

  I identified with the seekers to the point of imagining myself as one among their numbers. Pushing myself against the wall-rail down the hall to the shower room, I would picture myself scurrying shirtless through the few gutted buildings that remained in the slumping cities, whistling signals to the others who crawled across the crossbeams; served lunch, I would imagine that I was foraging for untainted canned foods, coughing through dust that rose from the shelves of a grocery store on an empty block in a long-depopulated city. Lying in my bed, I would think: I have been wounded en route to the Trace Italian. I am going to have to heal myself, or limp to safety. Get up. Get up. Get up.

  One day one of the nurses caught me sketching a dungeon, one of the innumerable and potentially terminal signal stops on the road to the star fort, and she looked at it over the siderail for some time, scrunching up her brow. I could feel her, scrutinizing my work, her eyes following the spindly arms of a mutated star, and then looking at my face as my undistracted bandaged hands determinedly cornered right angle after right angle. I knew she wanted to ask what I was doing, but I had the advantage. Nobody liked to see me speak.

  The way you play Trace Italian seems almost unbearably quaint from a modern perspective, and people usually don’t believe me when I tell them it’s how I supplement my monthly insurance checks, but people underestimate just how starved everybody is for some magic pathway back into childhood. Trace Italian is a mail-based game. A person sees a small ad for it in the back pages of Analog or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—maybe he sees the ad month after month for ages—and then one day he gets bored and sends a self-addressed stamped envelope to Focus Games, and I send him back an explanatory brochure. The brochure gives a brief but vivid sketch of the game’s imagined environment—no pictures, just words—and explains the basic mechanics of play: a trial subscription buys you four moves through the first dungeons, and five dollars a month plus four first-class postage stamps keep a subscription current. I boil down handwritten, sometimes lengthy paragraphs that players send me to simple choices—does this mean go through the door, or continue down the road?—and then I select the corresponding three-page scenario from a file, scribble a few personalized lines at the bottom, and stuff it into an envelope. They respond with more paragraphs, sometimes pages, describing how they move in reaction to where they’ve landed. Eventually they recognize the turns they’ve taken as segments of a path that can belong only to them.