Wolf in White Van

by John Darnielle

  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.

  They introduced one guest as a guy who’d been a rock musician for many years before he’d started living for the Lord. He was there to explain how the messages got put into rock music, whether it was something people did on purpose or some more subtle process from the spiritual world; his mission was to spell out what the messages meant in greater detail, because sometimes they were hard to understand, and it was important to know what was out there. “Some of the stuff that’s out there,” he said, “it’s really amazing, what’s right out there under your nose.” He gave everybody a grave look, and they passed the same look around among themselves, and I felt, watching, like I was either missing out on something or being let in on a big secret: or someplace in the space between those two possibilities, drifting.

  It was hard to follow, but as near as I could figure it, singers whose hearts were in the wrong place were vulnerable to demonic influence when they wrote. They wouldn’t know when the process started, and it would take hold of them before they knew it: they became emissaries then, messengers carrying sealed envelopes. They sang songs they felt they’d written but actually hadn’t, and if you played them backwards, they spread the message of Satan.

  Nobody on the broadcast seemed particularly surprised by this claim. The world was a place full of ugly magic. As an example, the guest held up a record by a singer named Larry Norman, which he said was full of backwards messages: “packed” was the way he put it. Larry Norman made Christian music—”the so-called Christian rock,” the guest practically spat—and he’d actually been a guest of Paul and Jan on the show at some point, which they mentioned with a look of concern. And then the guest told the producers to cue up a Larry Norman record, and they played it forward and then reversed it, and in reverse, it sounded like a hole opening up in the earth out in the dark, abandoned desert.

  What you were supposed to hear when the record played backwards was the phrase wolf in white van. Nobody had a very firm idea of what that was supposed to mean, but they all agreed about what they were hearing: that it was a hellish picture to paint, and for young people to hear. Paul did ask what, exactly, it meant, and the guest talked about the symbol of the wolf in ancient cultures, but nothing got much clearer. It was a dark smudge of an idea shared among believers.

  The second time I saw the show it looked like everybody’d kept right on worrying about the whole question between the first broadcast and its twin. They seemed tired, and a little frightened, and they were beginning to repeat themselves, working the meaningless backwards phrases out loud like riddles nobody could quite solve. It took them longer to get from one point to the next; the messages were sticking in their throats, looming before them like visions. That was when I got the idea, because the prayer line number was right there on the screen.

  In the hallway there was a phone with a long cord. Mom and me were alone in the house all weekend; Dad was off hunting boar with his friends from work up in Solano C
ounty like he did every summer. The house felt so different with fewer people in it. It was the middle of the night; I crept out of my room quietly, and I snuck the phone down the short distance from its little hallway alcove to my room, and I threaded the cord through the gap between the door and the carpet so it wouldn’t get pinched in the jamb. I eased the door shut, and I wondered why I was doing this, but at the same time I felt like it was too late to turn back.

  “Praise the Lord, this is Carol,” said the woman on the other end when the line picked up. I always remembered that afterward, the exact sound and rhythm: “Praise the Lord, this is Carol.” Was I younger then than I now believe I was? I told her my name was Sean, and that I had a question for the guest.

  Carol laughed. “This isn’t our call-in show, honey,” she said, gently. “That’s that morning show, on the weekdays.”

  “I just had a question,” I said. For a minute neither of us said anything and I could hear the other operators praying with callers in the background.

  “I know, honey, but they can’t really—” She stopped for a second. “What’s your question, hon?” she said.

  What I’d meant to ask her was why the devil would talk backwards: why he didn’t just get his message out directly, by speaking clearly, straight into the brains of the people he knew he could win over. To me this was obviously the most important question about the whole thing, because the devil’s process as they’d described it sounded like a lot of hard work for almost no gain. But then I thought about my old throne in the backyard, and I understood something about the operator and the people she worked for, and I changed my question. “The devil,” I said, and I just let the word hang for a minute in the air.

  I thought she was going to yell at me or hang up, but she surprised me. “Sean,” said Carol, the TBN telephone operator who was supposed to be taking down people’s pledges, “praise the Lord, the devil has no dominion over us. He tries to take back the good things the Lord has done for us, but he can’t, because that power isn’t given into his dominion, amen?”

  “The devil,” I said, with a rising inflection to suggest more question coming, but then I found myself cupping my hand between my lips and the mouthpiece. I reached down into my imagination and made a strangled gurgling sound with my throat, vocalizing on the inhale and curling my tongue into various positions to make it sound like I was talking in reverse. I scared the hell out of myself with this sound: it felt real. I kept it up for the better part of a minute and a half.

  Carol was a prayer warrior for Jesus working in Costa Mesa toward the end of the last age, and she was made of sturdier stuff than a young teenager might have guessed. “Devil,” she said as soon as I was done, without any break to get her bearings, “you let go of Sean right now. He’s heard the Good News tonight and nothing you can put in his head can drive it out. You loose this child of God from your chains. In the name of Jesus, I pray,” she said. In my room a total silence took hold.

  I said “Amen” the next time she asked for an Amen, but I was barely listening: I was lost in the story these people all believed, catching currents of it and riding them out into the far reaches of imagined possibility, believing everything they believed but from different angles, exciting perspectives, smoldering momentary vistas without end.

  “Sean, you don’t have to live as a slave,” she said. “Jesus paid the price for you. Will you pray the sinner’s prayer with me now?”

  “I drink the blood of my slaves,” I said, in a hushed-house whisper clean out of nowhere, shocking myself and feeling the power, and that was when she hung up.

  Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room. I sift and rake and dig around in my vivid recollections of young Sean on the floor in summer, and I try to see what makes him tick, but I know a secret about young Sean, I guess, that he kind of ends up telling the world: nothing makes him tick. It just happens all by itself, tick tick tick tick tick, without any proximal cause, with nothing underneath it. He is like a jelly-fish adrift in the sea, throbbing quietly in the warm waves of the surf just off the highway where the dusty white vans with smoked windows and indistinct decals near their wheel hubs roll innocently past.

  I looked back over at the TV; everybody had their eyes firmly fixed on the guest, who was holding up more records by so many rock bands. He said the problem was everywhere, it was epidemic. But at that moment all I could see was the wolf in the white van, so alive, so strong. Hidden from view, unnoticed, concealed. And I thought, maybe he’s real, this wolf, and he’s really out there in a white van somewhere, riding around. Maybe he’s in the far back, pacing back and forth, circling, the pads of his huge paws raw and cracking, his thick, sharp claws dully clicking against the raised rusty steel track ridges on the floor. Maybe he’s sound asleep, or maybe he’s just pretending. And then the van stops somewhere, maybe, and somebody gets out and walks around the side to the back and grabs hold of the handle and flings the doors open wide. Maybe whoever’s kept him wears a mechanic’s jumpsuit and some sunglasses, and he hasn’t fed the great wolf for weeks, cruising the streets of the city at night, and the wolf’s crazy with hunger now; he can’t even think. Maybe he’s not locked up in the back at all: he could be riding in the passenger seat, like a dog, just sitting and staring out the open window, looking around, checking everybody out. Maybe he’s over in the other seat behind the steering wheel. Maybe he’s driving.

  I swept all the old medication bottles from the counter into a plastic bag, and I meant to throw them away, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to because … for a lot of reasons I didn’t want to. As I put them into the bag one at a time I kept coming up with more reasons not to toss them out: casually, like I was trying out excuses. No reason seemed to hold its weight for long. I just couldn’t throw the medications away, was the end of it. I tied a knot in the bag and I placed it back in the cabinet I’d been cleaning. I pushed it back a little ways, thinking to put it out of view, but then I thought better, and I looked at it for a minute before closing the cabinet. There was plenty more to clean. Old cleansers and rags by the dozen under the sink, canisters leaving rust rings on the contact paper. No shortage of things still left to do.

  Two

  11 I caught Vicky looking at my face in the light—I was sitting at my desk with some old pictures I’d dug out from an unmarked box. Me and my grandma running with geese somewhere. The zoo, I guess. Or on vacation. I wasn’t sure.

  If I’m in a bathroom out there in the world someplace I’ll catch the glint myself on the raised ridges on either side of my mouth area, the dully shining skin. “Pretty bad?” I said.

  “No, now, no,” she said, with a little catching laugh in her breath. “You know I work doubles on weekends out at Loma Linda, though.”

  “No,” I said. My conceptions of people’s outside lives are pretty crude: basic, two-dimensional stuff.

  “I do, I do,” she said. “Anyway, my sister’s friend works reconstructive. They had somebody like you in there just last week.”

  Our eyes met. This doesn’t happen for me often, with anybody. It felt so naked. I tried to stay with it, to be present for it, to see where it would go.

  “They can do so many things now, honey,” she said, returning her eyes to her work. She was prepping some swabs for my cleaning. “It’s a lot they can do since you first got hurt.”

  “I—I know. I talked to them about it a couple years back.”

  “How long ago was that?” she said, her gaze back on me, pretty steady. You forget how well people know you, when they know you.

  I opened a drawer on the left side of my desk, the personal business side, which doesn’t see a lot of traffic. I moved some stuff around and found a few brochures. One was even from Loma Linda. Imagine.

  Vicky looked them over. “They’re in their own building now,” she said. “This one is from when they were still over in the main surgery building.” The western desert gives way a little
. Marsh gas? Some smell on the wind. DON FACE MASK. TRACE BACK. CONTINUE DUE EAST. DIG SHELTER.

  “Anyway,” she said, “you could call them,” and she swabbed my cheeks with some glycerine on a compress, so gentle it barely stung at all.

  “It’s your grandmother,” Dad said on the phone after we’d finished up our opening moves today. “Last night she—she died last night.”

  When you shoot yourself in the face with a Marlin 39A, one thing you don’t think about is what your father will tell his mother when it becomes necessary to tell her something’s happened. My grandfather on my father’s side had been dead for over a decade; he had a heart attack one day in the supermarket. I’d overheard my dad explaining it to Mom after he came home early from work. “The aisle was empty, it was early,” he said. “He was lying there for—for a little while.” I was twelve; they took me to the funeral at Oak Park and I stood quietly imagining what the screams would sound like if the coffin lid sprung open and something crawled out.

  Grandma stayed on alone in the giant house where my dad and his brothers had grown up. When, eventually, the climb up the stairs got to be too much, she moved downstairs, and the second floor became an accidental museum commemorating the last day anybody’d lived there. I used to hide out up there when we’d visit and try to get lost in the dusty, abandoned feeling of a place where nothing ever happens.

  What they told my grandmother after the accident was that I had been in a car accident and that everyone else in the vehicle had been killed. This was an important detail, because lots of people get into car accidents and come out basically OK. They break arms or they get concussions, and maybe they get brain damage and can’t remember things like they used to. But they don’t look markedly different, unless maybe their face hits the windshield and the car catches fire and everybody else inside gets burned to death. These were two of the details my father had asked me to memorize in case Grandma ever asked me about the accident and to mention if she did. “She’s not going to ask you to talk about it, I know she won’t,” he said. “But in case she does.”