Wolf in White Van

by John Darnielle

  Technically this move exists, but I have never sent it to anyone. I wrote it when I was eighteen. At my best I figure I’m only an OK writer; any good effects I have are things I got from people who are only considered good writers by young men who need to escape. I have my moments. But this move is made of cruder stuff; it was typed directly onto the page that became the master copy and I never revised it. I just put it in, and every time I get a chance to let somebody see it, I don’t. Sometimes I wonder if people suspect they’ve been sent the substitute move, the one for players who pick “Move East” instead of “Treat Wounds” when they get to the way station that should lead here. Whether they get a feeling, something that tells them that where they are is a stand-in for the place they’re supposed to be. Whether they suspect something. They almost never tell me if they do.

  I did the math and also we keep a map. This is wrong there ought to be something else here. There was trail of mutant bodies they didn’t just die of old age. It’s cool I’ll figure it out though. Our next move is to gather bones. We put them in our night packs. Gather bones. Well take it sleezy

  Lance

  The only one of my close friends I remember coming to see me in the hospital was Kimmy. I didn’t have a whole lot of friends anyway, so I didn’t feel abandoned so much as reminded. A few people sent me letters: Joe from sixth-period U.S. history wrote, kind of from nowhere, to say he’d heard about what happened and was sorry; Barry, an old friend from grade school, wrote and said he hoped I was going to live, and he said it twice in the same letter, which kind of shook me up. Teague sent word somehow, through which channel I forget, and said he’d find me when the commotion died down, which I respected. He was a known presence. Showing up at my bedside in his denim and feathered hair would only have made things more tense on balance.

  But Kimmy started coming within a day or two after the nurses loosened up the visiting hours, and she came early and she stayed late. She strained to make out the constituent parts of the words I’d try to form and she’d help me arrange them into thoughts; she helped me find the path back to my self. This was why, later on, I enshrined her in a special place no one will ever see, which is kind of a shame, except that I did it on purpose, so it’s only a shame if you limit yourself to the smaller picture.

  It was a blank day about two weeks in. I didn’t see her come through the door. My peripherals were shot, and my ears hummed like generators, so unless you were standing directly in front of me, leaning over me, I’d have no way of knowing you’d arrived. In stray moments above the surface, I’d sometimes wonder if there were people at the head of the bed, standing there silently, waiting to see if I’d respond to the presence of other people in the room. I’d say something from time to time just to check: “Hey?” or “Are you there?” This is different from calling out into a cave or well; it’s a form of prayer.

  She put her hand directly on my wrist. For those first few seconds of contact I had no idea who she was, and maybe that was why things panned out the way they did: from the dead depths of the infinite ceiling, a strange hand reached out and landed on my wrist, and rested there, warm and soft, and I felt so grateful for it. I drank in the simplicity of it, the soothing totality. Then Kimmy’s head came craning into view. The only other people who touched me during those days were people who were being paid to do so; there was no feeling in their touch.

  “Sean, you dumb shit,” she said. She was crying but she kept her hand where it was. “What the fuck.”

  I was full of painkillers; I could barely form single words without considerable effort. But I dug down deep and said, “Kimmy,” while she stroked my wrist.

  “What did you do, what did you do,” she said.

  “I, hhuggh,” I said. The dried blood in what was left of my oral cavity was coming loose, little bits of gummy candy lodged in my throat.

  “Sean, you dumb shit, you stupid asshole,” she said. The close air of the room framed her words in such a way that their specific weight, their breathy heft, has never left me.

  “I, hnnuggh,” I said, and with great effort used my neck and shoulders to move my head enough to see her where she stood, leaning there, seeing all of me and looking ready to see more if she had to. For reasons that seem obvious to me, I don’t believe in happy endings or even in endings at all, but I am as susceptible to moments of indulgent fantasy as anybody else. When I picture the scene just then, when I remember it right, I imagine a story where Kimmy and I grow up and get married. To each other.

  pass through crystal gate

  cut central cables

  food, water, gauze

  sewn patches for light uniform

  I spent a few minutes in deep concentration trying to decide what I thought about this: it was the opening four-line salvo of a two-page letter from Chris, and it continued on in this way jaggedly toward its inevitable terminating CH.

  invert map

  Hansel and Gretel

  ration supplies

  defogger

  knife

  It was a mixture of styles: the imperative chosen from the list of available options, the tell-your-own-story tendency that most players settle happily into, the wild compression that made Chris so strange and special. But it was lost in itself here; I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  mark signposts if any

  flora/fauna

  hydrate

  circular detours when possible

  gloves

  bedding

  protective glasses

  Nobody has any protective glasses; they’re not something I would have thought to include in the game. Nobody needs to hydrate: the movement of the game is simpler than all that. Detours? Those come from my side of the table, not the player’s. I guessed that the second page might contain some one-line summation of what I’d been reading; I thought maybe Chris was fleshing out his experience and letting me in on the process. Instead it continued in the same way:

  call mom?

  blade

  bat

  memorize passwords

  flint and gel fuel

  saline mist

  “focus”

  check map inversion at intervals

  rest in open

  love enemies/friends

  note tacked to near post

  when tower in view.

  Saline mist? Gel fuel? Crystal gate? These were touchpoints from somebody else’s dream, traces of the fallout from somebody else’s accident. I pulled REST AND RESTORE from the actual options that Chris had been offered at the end of his last turn. REST AND RESTORE was a placekeeper move of the sort you got every four moves or so; they drew out your time and imparted a sense of depth without moving your play ahead too fast. I knew that some people who’d get that would instinctively take advantage of these moves if they needed to. People don’t play games like mine with a view toward not having anything left to play.

  My dad came straight to the hospital from work. When he got here Kimmy was sitting bedside on one of the three-legged rolling stools with the circular seats that doctors use. She was pushing herself back and forth, half a foot this way, half a foot back, rocking. “What have we here?” said my dad, which was something he always said: most of the time it more or less just meant “Hello,” but it was an actual question here.

  “Mr. Phillips,” said Kimmy, and she got up to hug him, which was a thing she did to absolutely everybody; it was one of the things I liked about her. But my father left his arms at his sides, leaving Kimmy to squeeze his ribs like a person on angel dust hugging a stop sign. They remained that way for a few seconds; I could only make out the edges of the scene but it made me squirm.

  “What do you know about this?” my father said when she’d let him go.

  “What do I know?”

  “What do you know?” my dad said.

  “Probably as much as you know.” She was a little angry now. I could hear it. It was kind of exciting; people were pretty selective about how they let themselves feel
when they were in my room.

  “That’s probably not—probably not true,” said my dad. “We don’t know anything at all, his mother and me, we don’t know anything.”

  I moaned in protest. Kimmy’s fingers brushed my hand, hanging down by the siderail.

  “I don’t either!” she said, and then: “What are you even talking about?”

  As Dad answered I could hear in his voice that he’d been rehearsing these lines, getting them ready. Sometimes I’d catch him at the mirror in the morning while he shaved, testing out things he might later say to his boss or to his friends at work. When he’s heading toward some specific point, you can’t miss it: it’s in the air. All my life this has given me the creeps.

  “We called your parents,” he said. I wished I could see her face from where I lay, wished I could see the response in her eyes. “We think somebody knew something about this. About all this. Before.”

  “Before?” she said. I loved her anger, how much she resented my father just then. “I don’t—”

  “Well,” he said, “we think you probably do.” When I imagine this scene as part of a movie, the minute of silence after my father says this is extended for an hour or so, and then the credits roll.

  At the northern gate of Camp Oklahoma the capos have gathered around a pit fire. It is late at night and the stars above you shine, huge oceans of milky light. Too dehydrated to stand up, you hunker forward on your knees and elbows, prepared to fight with your fists and your teeth if it comes to that. An outcropping of sage provides partial cover, but if you stand up you will be seen.

  Around the fire stand the guards, consulting either a map or some blueprints, it’s hard to tell. In Camp Oklahoma you are adrift, and each turn you take could be the one that leads you back to the same crag wall you landed against when you jumped off the train. No matter how many possible plans of the compound you sketch out in the dirt beneath you, none of them seem accurate, and your days and their stops have begun to blur in your mind. Beyond the soldiers stands the gate, locked but maybe scalable, possibly electrified. The unlabeled bottle of pills that remains from your pharmacy run three days ago presses into your thigh through your pocket as the thirst turns your throat dry. Maybe you can make some kind of a deal. Or maybe you’ll just run straight for the fence.

  I must have drifted off into dreamworld somewhere, which would have made me feel ashamed if it hadn’t been something that happened all the time; I couldn’t control whether I stayed conscious or not just yet. “Sean, are you awake?” my father said when the time came for him to make his move.

  “Yeah,” I said. I wouldn’t be getting speech therapy until after I’d been sent home; it took me ages to get to full sentences.

  “Sean,” he said. I hate it when people say my name again and again, like I’m going to forget who they’re talking to. Over the years I’ve developed a theory that the sicker you look, the more people say your name. “Your mother and I want to talk to you about Kimmy.”

  “Here?” I said; it sounded like I was asking if we might have this conversation somewhere else. But my father understood me. I wanted to know if Kimmy was here, if she’d come with them, if she was OK.

  “No, no, Sean,” said my dad. “We asked her parents to ask her not to come today. We want … we want to know why she keeps visiting you.”

  “Friends a long time,” I said very carefully, very slowly, holding my spasming jaw as still as I could. I wanted to get the r in friend right, but I couldn’t, so I said fend. Who knows what long even came out like.

  “Yes, we know,” he said. There was no mistaking his tone. “But we don’t think she’s been entirely honest with us.”

  I had been waiting for this. It was almost a relief. They’d been working variants of this line from the moment I’d first regained consciousness: “Who gave you this idea?” Things like that. I had very concrete fantasy scenarios in which I taught myself to speak again, clearly and coherently, with the explicit purpose of then being able to say to my parents I don’t know why I did it, it just happened, OK. I didn’t know yet how fantastic a scenario that was: to be able to look at someone whose need for reason and order has become truly desperate beyond all measure and tell them that it doesn’t matter how cold it gets at night, they’re just going to have to keep digging.

  “Has,” I said.

  “I know you both say that, Sean,” he said.

  I was still heavily medicated, and when I had to infer something, to take a few details into account and form from them a conclusion, it happened in slow motion, with great deliberation. I saw my dad getting ready to say another thing he’d been preparing to say, some other part of the script, and I began to sense the scale of it: that he’d told himself a story and shared it with Mom, who’d written her own version of the same story, and then they’d compared versions until they’d arrived at one they could both believe in. It was my father’s job now to make me tell them their story was true.

  “We know,” he went on, “that that’s your story. But we think we have a pretty clear picture of what actually happened, and anyway, Kimmy didn’t even try to live up to her end of the deal, so I really don’t get how you can expect—” I could hear his anger, trying to work out a plot point he couldn’t make fit.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said finally. “What does matter is that your mother and I …” And that was the point where I started to tune him out. When I try to recover his exact words from memory, I can only come up with composites, things that sound sewn together, unstable mixtures of what they’d decided to believe and what they couldn’t figure out, and probably some other stuff support services were telling them down on the second floor. I know the thrust of what he said involved their theory of a suicide pact, a theory that, in later years, made me feel great pity and shame: that they’d been driven to tell themselves this particular story, to settle for that—for something completely made up, an invention landed on by parents who’d found themselves in a terrible place quickly piecing together some ad-hoc narrative from random chunks of available data: comic books, movie posters, records and tapes. Sketches in my notebooks. Old toys. Things from the near side of an unbridgeable gulf. But the exact details of what he said are lost to me. When he was done, I said: “Totally wrong,” which came out so bluntly that it made me laugh, which made him angrier.

  He stood up and stayed there for a minute, silent, and then he left, and I thought about what it meant to still be alive, and then huge walls of earth began rising in formation inside me, spewing clouds of dust as they rose, right angles like dominos leaning against one another but refusing to fall, six or seven layers of ground beneath each rail buckling until they hit bedrock with a long, rolling, decisive thud, a chain reaction rippling out with great percussive power, the mud walls banding together for miles into a structure gigantic enough to be seen from space, a star-shaped beacon in the gray distance.

  People bring you books, cheap paperbacks, when you’re in the hospital: this was how I found out that I hate mystery novels. I tried Ellery Queen and Nero Wolfe. They just made me nervous. My parents wouldn’t bring me my own books; they’d thrown most of my stuff away. So Kimmy brought me magazines to read. She’d sit bedside and flip through Hit Parader or Circus with me, and she brought some Robert E. Howard from the library, short stories. August Derleth. L. Sprague de Camp. Things she knew I liked.

  “Mötley Crüe just got back from their tour of Japan,” she’d say. “They look like dicks. Here.” And then she’d hold the magazine up for me to see, and I’d laugh, and she’d say: “What are you laughing at, you look like a dickhead, too.” But she never asked me why I’d done it, and I’ve wondered my whole life whether that was because she understood instinctively that it was a stupid question to ask, or because she thought maybe she understood something other people didn’t.

  I never found out whether my parents called hers and told them to keep their daughter away from me. There wasn’t a traceable moment. But her visits became less
frequent, and then she was gone. I would think about it sometimes, by myself, in empty hours. What happened? Nothing happened; Kimmy visited until she didn’t feel like coming anymore, and then she stopped. I could be sad about it but I couldn’t get angry, because I couldn’t imagine being in her shoes and doing anything different. She told me, one of the last times I saw her, that she expected me to “get better,” and this made her unique among all my visitors; my family didn’t talk that way. They talked about me “coming home,” or “getting out,” but not getting better. Kimmy told me that I was going to get better. And she asked me whether I was going to do anything when I got out. “Are you going to do something when you get out?” That was how she put it. I said what teenage boys say about their plans: “I don’t know.”

  Some things stick with you, great visions, and other things you never seem to learn: every few years I try to read a mystery novel or two, because they’re always there in their hundreds at the Book Exchange, constituting the greatest part of the inventory. I see them and I remember trying to learn to like them in the hospital, and so I buy two at fifty cents apiece and try again. Ngaio Marsh. Ruth Rendell. I can’t stand them, but I keep on trying. Are you going to do something when you get out? For all I knew she meant I should get out and finish the job I started; it’s a possibility. But I took her to mean something else, and I held on to the idea as tightly as I could, focusing on it like a fixed point you stare at when trying to distract yourself from great physical pain.

  Kimmy and her husband were out looking at houses. She was reading the street names out loud when she realized she was in my neighborhood. The husband was a guy she’d met at community college after high school. Paul. Nobody I knew.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “I had him drop me off,” she said. “Meeting you would be kind of intense for him.” She sounded, for just that moment, exactly as she had on the last day I’d seen her. But as we sat and talked, I could hear how she was a different person now. The change must have come gradually; an easy shift into adulthood, a softening. She told me about Paul’s job—he was a regional manager for Enterprise—and how they didn’t have any kids.