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.
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.
Wolf in White Van Page 8
