Wolf in White Van

by John Darnielle

  “Me neither,” I said, and she laughed, but I saw her eyes: something more going on in there. But it flickered only once, and then she snapped back to the present.

  We didn’t visit long. She told me about her job, and her plans: ideas she had about opening a business, places she and Paul might move to so he could be closer to his work. She asked if I still knew anybody, and I said no, but I told her about Victory, how you get close to the people who take care of you in a weird way. I wanted to thank her for how she alone among all my friends had never let me see how sick the sight of my bandaged head must have made her feel, and I wanted to tell her I was sorry for any trouble I’d caused her back then, but I felt like it might spoil the mood, whose easy gravity seemed worth preserving. But I ended up breaking the spell anyway when I asked about JJ.

  “JJ’s dead,” she said. There are so many different kinds of ghosts.

  “What—”

  “He got into drugs,” she said. “Somebody shot him. That was, like, ten years ago.” I started doing math in my head.

  “Nobody really knew him anymore,” she said. She took my hand in hers and gave it a squeeze like she used to do at the hospital. “We just kind of all did whatever after graduation.”

  Later, talking to Mom on the phone, I mentioned how Kimmy’d come around to visit. Mom tried not to sound irritated. “What did she want?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Really,” said Mom.

  “Just saying hi,” I said. I knew ahead of time that Mom wasn’t going to accept this answer, because she couldn’t understand it, but I tried it out anyway. “She was in the neighborhood,” I offered, hoping to hit the right tone so we wouldn’t get into an argument, but I did not succeed.

  14 “What do you have in this bottom drawer, now, that I can’t open it and tidy it up a little?” Vicky said once. The bottom drawer is locked.

  “Nothing I’m ever going to use,” I said.

  “You should let me just clean the whole cabinet, honey,” she said.

  “There’s really no need,” I said.

  ARIZONA–NEW MEXICO–TEXAS–OKLAHOMA–KANSAS

  NEVADA–UTAH–COLORADO–KANSAS

  OREGON–IDAHO–WYOMING–UTAH–KANSAS

  OREGON–IDAHO–WYOMING–COLORADO–KANSAS

  ARIZONA–UTAH–COLORADO–KANSAS

  ARIZONA–NEW MEXICO–COLORADO–KANSAS

  ARIZONA–NEW MEXICO–OKLAHOMA PANHANDLE ONLY–KANSAS

  OREGON–WASHINGTON–NORTHERN IDAHO–MONTANA–NORTH DAKOTA–SOUTH DAKOTA–NEBRASKA–KANSAS

  OREGON–WASHINGTON–NORTHERN IDAHO–WYOMING–NEBRASKA–KANSAS

  ARIZONA–UTAH–IDAHO–WYOMING–NEBRASKA–IOWA–MISSOURI–KANSAS

  NEVADA–UTAH–COLORADO–KANSAS–MISSOURI–KANSAS

  NEVADA–UTAH–COLORADO–KANSAS–NEBRASKA–KANSAS

  ARIZONA–NEW MEXICO–TEXAS–OKLAHOMA PANHANDLE ONLY–COLORADO–NEBRASKA–KANSAS

  ARIZONA–NEW MEXICO–TEXAS–TUNNEL UNDER OKLAHOMA–KANSAS

  NEVADA–UTAH–COLORADO–NEW MEXICO–TUNNEL UNDER PANHANDLE–KANSAS

  NEVADA–UTAH–COLORADO–NEBRASKA BORDER TUNNEL–KANSAS

  ARIZONA–NEW MEXICO–TEXAS–LOUISIANA–MISSISSIPPI–ARKANSAS–MISSOURI–KANSAS

  ARIZONA–NEW MEXICO–TEXAS–LOUISIANA–MISSISSIPPI–TENNESSEE–KENTUCKY–MISSOURI–KANSAS

  ARIZONA–NEW MEXICO–TEXAS–LOUISIANA–MISSISSIPPI–TENNESSEE–KENTUCKY–INDIANA–ILLINOIS NO CHICAGO–IOWA–NEBRASKA–KANSAS

  ARIZONA–NEW MEXICO–TEXAS–LOUISIANA–MISSISSIPPI–TENNESSEE–KENTUCKY–INDIANA–ILLINOIS (CHICAGO)–IOWA–NEBRASKA–KANSAS

  NEVADA–UTAH–COLORADO–WYOMING–SOUTH DAKOTA–MINNESOTA–IOWA–NEBRASKA–KANSAS

  NEVADA–UTAH–COLORADO–WYOMING–SOUTH DAKOTA–MINNESOTA–IOWA–MISSOURI–KANSAS

  NEVADA–UTAH–COLORADO–WYOMING–SOUTH DAKOTA–MINNESOTA–IOWA–MISSOURI–ARKANSAS–OKLAHOMA–KANSAS

  ARIZONA–NEW MEXICO–COLORADO–UTAH–WYOMING–NEBRASKA–KANSAS

  OREGON–NEVADA–IDAHO–UTAH–COLORADO–KANSAS

  OREGON–IDAHO–NEVADA–UTAH–COLORADO–KANSAS

  OREGON–IDAHO–NEVADA–UTAH–COLORADO–PANHANDLE TUNNEL–KANSAS

  OREGON DEAD END

  ARIZONA DEAD END

  BAJA CALIFORNIA–ARIZONA–NEW MEXICO–TEXAS–OKLAHOMA–KANSAS

  BAJA CALIFORNIA–ARIZONA–SONORA–NEW MEXICO–TEXAS–OKLAHOMA–KANSAS

  ARIZONA–SONORA–CHIHUAHUA–TEXAS–OKLAHOMA–KANSAS

  NEVADA–CALIFORNIA–BAJA CALIFORNIA–ARIZONA–NEW MEXICO–TEXAS–OKLAHOMA–KANSAS

  ARIZONA–CALIFORNIA–NEVADA–CALIFORNIA RETURN–ARIZONA–NEW MEXICO–SONORA–CHIHUAHUA–COAHUILA–TEXAS–OKLAHOMA–KANSAS

  ARIZONA–NEW MEXICO–TEXAS–COAHUILA–TEXAS–OKLAHOMA–KANSAS

  BAJA CALIFORNIA–SONORA–CHIHUAHUA–COAHUILA–TEXAS–OKLAHOMA–KANSAS

  BAJA CALIFORNIA–SONORA–CHIHUAHUA–COAHUILA–TEXAS–OKLAHOMA DEAD END

  BAJA CALIFORNIA–SONORA–CHIHUAHUA–COAHUILA–TEXAS DEAD END

  BAJA CALIFORNIA–CALIFORNIA–BAJA RETURN–DEAD END

  CALIFORNIA DEAD END

  NEVADA–OREGON–WASHINGTON–OREGON–NEVADA–UTAH–COLORADO–KANSAS

  NEVADA DEAD END

  It’s almost impossible to remember the fury of assembly, that time back home when the house was a way station: when I was unwelcome there and knew it; when I was a dark presence in other people’s nearby lives, a person who made the house harder to live in. But the Trace had come home with me in bits and pieces: on Pomona Valley Hospital letterhead stationery, and in remembered scenes and phrases, fresh and vital. I wanted to make good on it before anything happened, before I got worse. Maybe I wouldn’t get worse: it was hard to predict. Hard to predict was another thing I’d brought home from the hospital, a phrase that had become a secret personal talisman, something I didn’t dwell on but kept nearby. I had headaches, and a pulsating ring that throbbed in my ears. I was still too weak to bear much weight. But I’d had an idle little dream in a small dead space, and the dream was now alive and hungry inside me.

  It’s really just simple math, the whole of it. There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die. But it’s very hard to die, because all the turns pointing that way open up onto new ones, and you have to make the wrong choice enough times to really mean it. You have to stay focused. Very few players train their focus on death. The path forward stops here and there as you go, each frame filled out by outlines and figures from the rich depths of my hospital ceiling, shaded by colors I’d reconstituted from the foggy memory of the visions that had preceded the event for sixteen years: all those blurred plains, now melted down into an ideally endless landscape, its key peaks judiciously spread out so as not to use them all up at once. Saving some for last when there was no last. When there was no point in saving, when no one would ever see the very last.

  I listened to music to drown out the drone, and I sat in my wheelchair exercising my legs so they’d be able to carry me when I left. I noticed how the blue padding on the seat of the chair retained heat, which made my thighs get sweaty and then clammy as I sat in it all day. I learned to hate it, and to look forward to the slow, hard work of physical therapy. Pain woke me up several times a night, as it would continue to do for over a year and, occasionally, forever, and I taught myself to power through it on the way back to sleep, because getting medication in the middle of the night was too sad and horrible to be worth it. I closed my eyes and pictured the stronghold I’d built as it would really look out there in the physical world, in the unknown Kansan expanse: it was vivid, and beautiful if you managed to get inside it. From without, it was stark, windswept, a silo in the middle of nowhere, nearly nothing in the middle of more nothing.

  I filled notebook after notebook after notebook with paragraphs describing it, indicating its parameters, the directions leading to it or away from it, the coordinates of its hidden refuge. I annot
ated every page with numbers and abbreviations and self-invented legends that were hard to keep track of—which needed, eventually, a smaller notepad of their own—and some ideas that didn’t fit but still seemed cool got ported off to new notebooks, where they grew into their own games, smaller concerns, exclusive worlds for players with specific needs. Little private exorcisms that would eventually find people in need of their hidden formulas. Barbarian Zone. Crosshairs. Wolf Patrol. It was like shrapnel scattering this way and that, who knows where it lands, but I kept my sites trained on Kansas; and I told my parents at dinner one night that I didn’t need the TV in my room anymore, that they should sell it, and Dad said, “Really? Why?” because he knew I’d been watching lots of TV late at night for a while.

  “Just don’t need it,” I said.

  “Everything all right?” Dad said after he’d exchanged a look with Mom.

  “Just too busy for TV,” I said, trying to telegraph a smile with my tone of voice, in a small nod of my head, and everybody caught the same good mood for once, a rare grace for us in those days, the sort of high note that inspired dangerous, inexplicable thoughts in me, which I kept to myself until I could get back to work.

  BYPASS–HUSK OF SEMI–BRUSH–HIGHWAY–OFF-RAMP

  BYPASS–BRUSH–HUSK OF SEMI–HUSK DEFENSE–BRUSH CLEAR–OFF-RAMP

  BYPASS–MASK DROP–BRUSH–CAUGHT–GARAGE

  BYPASS–MASK DROP–BRUSH–CAUGHT–COMBAT–GARAGE

  GARAGE–DECOY–MAIN STREET–POST OFFICE

  GARAGE–DECOY–MAIN STREET–MARKET

  GARAGE–COMBAT–CAUGHT–GARAGE

  GARAGE–COMBAT–CAUGHT–OFFSITE

  OFFSITE–SOLITARY

  ACTION 1–REASON

  ACTION 2–DECEPTION

  ACTION 3–MADMAN

  ACTION 4–DIGGING

  OFFSITE–CELLMATE–ITEM EXCHANGE

  ITEM EXCHANGE 1–AMMUNITION–MAP SKETCH

  ITEM EXCHANGE 2–AMMUNITION–RATIONS

  ITEM EXCHANGE 3–SECONDHAND MAP SKETCH–RATIONS

  ITEM EXCHANGE 4–SECONDHAND MAP SKETCH–MAP SKETCH

  ITEM EXCHANGE 5–MASK–MAP SKETCH

  ITEM EXCHANGE 6–MASK–RATIONS

  ITEM EXCHANGE 7–MASK–INFORMATION

  ITEM EXCHANGE 8–SECONDHAND MAP SKETCH–INFORMATION

  OFFSITE–CELLMATE–COMBAT

  SEIZE ALL ITEMS

  NO INFORMATION

  I think about lizards that puff out their necks, or those brightly colored frogs down in the Amazon, coated with neurotoxins, adapting to their surroundings, their needs. But my head’s not an evolutionary adaptation, so that’s not quite right. All my reshaped parts seem like they protrude now, or hang; it can’t be possible, I figure, but maybe they do, I haven’t measured. Everything looks bigger to me in the mirror now. And when people out in the world see me, something in their expressions reminds me of people looking up at buildings. Sometimes I sit by the window, but the chair by the window feels almost like a platform. The window frames my face in such a way that my head seems monstrously huge.

  Still, I make a point of working there sometimes, even though, as I say, there isn’t so much work to do anymore. I thought about inventing a new game, but the Sean who built the Trace is as distant from me now as the Sean who blew his face off is from both of us. All three live in me, I guess, but those two, and God knows how many others, are like fading scents. I know they’re still there. I could find them if I needed them. But I don’t need them, and one of them survives only in bits and pieces. They certainly don’t need me. They are complete just as they are.

  It’s one small thing I remember noticing in those months of building and making and drafting and plotting, something that seems less small over time: for a player to make progress, he has to pacify or destroy whoever’s in his way. Those people become part of his story: he can’t go back and breathe life into them, and whatever gains he gets from the wrecks he leaves behind are permanent in the sense that any other courses open to him beforehand will then become closed. So when I sketched the scene where a player, having been caught by warlord resource-hoarders and imprisoned in an improvised jail, could just kill his cellmate and get everything he might otherwise have spent six turns gathering, I didn’t feel right about it: it was directly rewarding a player for attacking somebody who hadn’t done him any harm, for doing the wrong thing. It saved the player all the work while giving him all the spoils. But I saw the bigger picture: that it was true. That to the player who intended to make it to safety, no one in front of him amounted to more than some stray marks on paper, half-real figures to be tunneled under or blasted through as you headed on east toward the spires.

  VOORHEES–HUGOTON–ZIONVILLE–SURPRISE–KEARNEY–EMORY–WASHBURN–CORONADO

  VOORHEES–VALPARAISO–IVANHOE–GARDEN CITY–LAKIN–KNAUSTON–MODOC–CORONADO

  SHARON SPRINGS–EAGLE TAIL–HACKBERRY CREEK–SCOTT CITY–CORONADO

  BLAIR–HURON–HORTON–WHITING–TRAIN TO TOPEKA–TRAIN TO KANAPOLIS–LYONS–GREAT BEND–NESS CITY–DIGHTON–SCOTT CITY–CORONADO

  MANHATTAN–SALINA–KANAPOLIS–LYONS–GREAT BEND–NESS CITY–DIGHTON–SCOTT CITY–CORONADO

  BIRD CITY–SHERMANVILLE–EUSTIS–EAGLE TAIL–SHARON SPRINGS–TRIBUNE–CORONADO

  MONTERO–HECTOR–TRIBUNE–CORONADO

  KANORADO–HORACE–LEOTA–CORONADO

  COOLIDGE–CARLISLE–EMORY–FEDERAL–WASHBURN–CORONADO

  JETMORE–PAWNEE VALLEY–PETERSBURG–SCOTT CITY–CORONADO

  RICHFIELD–LAPORTE–EMORY–WASHBURN–CORONADO

  RICHFIELD–DERMOT–ZIONVILLE–EMORY–WASHBURN–CORONADO

  SHIELDS–CHEYENNE TOWNSHIP–SCOTT CITY–MODOC–CORONADO

  CUTTS–ELLEN–SCOTT CITY–MODOC–CORONADO

  ATWOOD–RAWLINS–COLBY–BOAZ–WALLACE–LEOTA–CORONADO

  LAWNRIDGE–ITASCA–EUSTIS–HUGHES–COLBY–BOAZ–WALLACE–LEOTA–CORONADO

  RED CLOUD–PHILLIPSBURGH–TIFFANY–DIGHTON–SCOTT CITY–CORONADO

  FORT SCOTT–IOLA–YATES CENTER–EL DORADO–NEWTON–LYONS–LYONS–GREAT BEND–NESS CITY–DIGHTON–SCOTT CITY–CORONADO

  CORONADO OUTER SHELL

  CORONADO DAY WAIT

  CORONADO NIGHT WATCH

  CORONADO BREACH

  CORONADO INNER

  It’s a ghost town. I was little the first time I heard the term “ghost town”; I fell immediately in love. Coronado is still on all the maps, but to get there you’d have to crawl through Kansas forever. Still, if ever a testament is needed to the existence of the great fortress, the final stand, the place within which the search for some unnamed final shelter within the shelter would then begin and continue on forever and forever, it’s here. This is what it looks like; these are its girders and panels. It is visible. It exists.

  TRACE VISIBLE

  TRACE NEARER

  TRACE BREACH

  15 When Tim from therapy started talking about board and care facilities, I was barely listening, but it turned out he wasn’t just ticking off the options; that was actually the plan: every week there was a meeting called discharge conference, where my parents and I would sit down with my main doctor and one of the nurses and the therapist and the social worker, and we’d talk about how I was doing. The first discharge conference I attended had been the one where the doctor said: “Realistically, we don’t know how long Sean will need to stay here.” They hadn’t thought I could hear them through the painkillers, but I could. For a long while after that, discharge conference was more of a weekly progress report, but eventually they’d start asking me questions: about my plans for after I left, about what would be different.

  “Different?” I said. “Different how?”

  The therapist spoke up. “Different, like how will you deal with frustration?”

  I was still pretty foggy a lot of the time; I was heavily medicated. But I saw where she was going, what answer she was looking for. I kept looking at her in silence, because I didn’t know what
to say: it wasn’t really a meaningful question to me. “What will you do when things don’t go your way?” was the rephrasing she offered, meaning to clarify her point but just making it harder to explain that we were at odds in ways she wasn’t likely to accept.

  “Relaxation” was what I said, because Relaxation was one of the therapy groups I got wheeled to twice a week, and it was true that I found it useful; the group leader talked everybody through inner journeys to weird places, like a lake in the forest, and you were supposed to go there in your mind and feel at peace. It worked, in a way, though I always saw other things in the forest, which I kept to myself.

  “Good,” she said. “Thank you, Sean”; and so we moved on to the nurses, who talked about specifics of in-home aftercare, about having a night nurse at the very least in case of emergency, and asked my parents if they understood that changing dressings once a night was absolutely necessary for at least another twelve weeks, and so on. And then the conversation came around to someone I didn’t know, dressed in street clothes with a name tag that said J. CAMPBELL / TRANSITIONAL LIVING.

  I could tell from how he engaged my parents that they’d met before. I personally had never seen him. He didn’t really ask questions; instead he gave a presentation about the place he worked. It had twenty-four beds, two to a room, and was for people who required various levels of care in transitioning from hospitals to—his phrase—independent living.

  “After you turn eighteen, Sean,” my mother said.

  I soaked up the fluorescent light of the conference room and looked at everybody sitting around the table, people who’d seen all sorts of situations. I wasn’t entirely sure what month it was anymore: were there eight months left before my birthday? Nine? I looked back at Mom, and I tried to think of a way to explain to her that I understood. That she was concerned for her son, hoping to do right by her son. But the picture she had of her son wasn’t anyone still walking the earth: that was someone who had been destroyed. His life had been real once, and had value and meant something. But all that was gone now, remade in shapes and forms she hadn’t come to understand just yet.