Wolf in White Van

by John Darnielle

  Over the course of the next month the house took on its own atmosphere, like a terrarium for fragile plants. I worked in earnest all day and into the night, sketching maps, writing turns. I stayed inside; the sun rising and setting outside my bedroom window became the sun of the Trace Italian, climbing the sky to illuminate the wasted plains of the near future, sinking down behind the western hills at night and leaving endless streaming dark in its wake. After I’d become adept with crutches, and later, when I walked, I’d go out to the front porch in the morning sometimes before the rest of the world was awake, thinking about the elaborate architecture of my invented world, how most of it lay east of here, in places I’d never see. Sometimes I’d turn my head left to look a little north, which always felt like the direction of the cold to me; ever since I was a kid and heard about the North Pole, where the snow never melted, I’d feel chills looking up toward Mount Baldy.

  Chris followed a northward path when he first started playing. Lance and Carrie did the same thing a few years later. I took note of it at the time, but it was a connection I drew in the wrong place, like a surgeon putting an X on the wrong leg just before somebody fires up the saw.

  I don’t save everything. It would be impossible to save everything. From the busiest days of the game, starting in the summer of 1990, there’s almost nothing left. Once I had boxes full of excited dispatches from across the country and occasionally even farther off: Mexico, Canada, Germany. But I cleaned and culled and thinned, and things lose meaning over time.

  I grabbed a copy of The Watchtower from a small stack left on top of a PennySaver dispenser outside the Golden Arcade on the day of the accident, though, and I’ve saved it in a shoe box I keep near my desk. There’s a story called “Who Hid the Dead Sea Scrolls?” in it. It has underlined phrases and half-sentences running through its three short paragraphs: Sets out to reveal. Brought the bundles or sackfuls of texts from the capital to the desert caves for hiding. “All flesh is like grass, and all its glory is like a blossom of grass.” I don’t remember reading it or underlining anything, which troubles me, which is sort of why I keep it.

  I used to save these Xeroxed handbills some crazy person attached by thumbtack to local telephone poles warning about the imminent colonization of Earth by aliens; there’s a few of these in the box, too, and some toys from the cheap toy dispensers you find in grocery stores. There are, finally, a few tapes, things a little too close to the bone for me to listen to but which I don’t want to throw away; and a letter from Chris from right around when he started reaching depths I hadn’t really foreseen. The turn he was answering had ended, You see the horde of misshapen half-human creatures on bony horses. North toward Oregon they ride, always at night or in the waxing dusk, evading the hungry outsiders who kill horses for meat and their riders for sport. You see packs slung astride the horses. There’s some brush just east.

  These guys can’t touch me I’m going to live forever, Chris says toward the end of his second page, preparing to hurl himself upward and face-first toward the riders who weren’t supposed to pose any threat, who had no designs on him down in the dirt in his overnight lair. I remember reading this letter and closing my eyes, both seeking out and fleeing from the sharp memory it called up, unable to decide where to go, where to put the parts of myself it seemed to make manifest in the room.

  “It actually starts with tissue removal,” he said, his voice getting livelier. “Because we—they—when you have a post-trauma reconstruction like the one you initially did, what they do is they take what’s left and then reshape it, and they graft skin and in your case bone and that’s how the reconstruction happens. But—and I don’t know where you, what you—what your thoughts are about surgery.”

  I didn’t remember much about the early surgeries.

  “Well, we used to heavily favor what’s called autografts, which is skin from the same patient, from somewhere else on your body. Or bone.” I knew about this. “But we have synthetic polymers now. And the equipment’s more accurate, which means we can work more quickly and get a much better result.” He took a breath, and I took a breath.

  “It’s pretty dramatic,” he said, “some of the results.”

  I was a little dazed; I usually start asking questions when I don’t know what to say, so that’s what I did. How many surgeries, how many sessions, how many times a week or month for how long.

  “It varies,” he said. “It’s new. I don’t want to say it’s five sessions and then it turns out it’s ten. Or more. But four or five is sort of the starting point, it’s what we start out thinking about. It can be more. But it can be four, or five.”

  “And how much—”

  “We think insurance will cover a fair bit of it. But because—” When people break off I become immediately suspicious; I was suspicious. “Because it would be valuable to my colleague to practice his new technique, he thinks costs could be—”

  This was a free shot.

  “Well, we should meet up about it, anyway, sure,” I said, trying to sound as normal as I could: trying to make my reaction fit his expectations.

  There was another little pause, a small emptiness, the distant sound of things he didn’t quite want to tell me yet. Or maybe not: I think sometimes I hear things as riddles that aren’t really riddles. “We should, yes,” he said with that tone of conclusion doctors get. “But if you’re interested I’d like to go ahead and schedule the first procedure, just to get you in there. It’ll take a few weeks to get the approvals process rolling. When surgeries are new the paperwork’s heavier. It won’t be much at all on your end, just a lot here in the office, but if we schedule it now we’ll be able to put the whole thing in motion.”

  I said, “All right,” and he said, “Great,” but I had managed to do quite a bit of thinking between phrases, to look into various futures and think just enough about them to know if I liked them or not. I remembered the lights of the ambulance and the sound of the voices yelling. The chaos. The involuntary twitching in my toes, and the raw, open feeling all over my face. And then he said I should call the main office to make an appointment and to mention his name when I did, and that they’d “get me right in.” And he gave me the number, and I repeated it slowly as he went, doing my best to pretend I was writing it down.

  Somebody’d parked a truck out in front with the windows down and the radio playing. It was really loud. The music was in Spanish so I couldn’t understand it; I only ever took one semester of Spanish and that was in the seventh grade. Sometimes if outside noise starts to bother me I’ll put some music on inside the house to blanket it over, or I’ll go to the park and feed squirrels, or maybe go get candy and hope it’s quieter when I come back. But for some reason I can’t pin down, I had a weird feeling of attachment to the music from the truck out by the curb. It wasn’t an intrusion; it belonged.

  The driver was still in the cab: I saw him from my window. I was standing there taking in the early-morning breeze, these winds that’re native to Southern California, Santa Anas. They make the brush fires worse. His radio’d jolted me awake, but I didn’t really mind. He wasn’t singing along or nodding his head back and forth or smoking a cigarette or anything. He was sitting there staring straight ahead. Waiting for somebody, I guess. He was wearing some kind of work jumpsuit, like the guys at the auto shop wear, dull dark blue.

  I had this rising premonition about him turning to look over at me, catching me in the act of sort of staring at him for no reason. It was a premonition with texture and heft, something I could almost taste; in my mind I saw his head begin to turn, casually, gradually but decisively, until his eyes found mine and held them. I stood ready for this to happen, wondering what I’d do, but he stayed put. He listened to the Spanish music and gazed out at the road ahead of him, steady through the windshield, and I got so worried he’d catch me that I began faking movements, pretending to survey the rest of my outlook in a broad sweep from right to left: the front walkway, the hedges, the street. When I swiveled my
gaze back toward him he was starting up the truck.

  I expected he’d just leave then, because it always seems to me like nothing ever happens, but something did happen: he began to back up. Monte Vista’s a busy street during the daytime, but it was too early for traffic and there wasn’t anybody parked in front of him, so I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. He checked the rearview very intently, his neck rigid, head still like a hawk, and then I realized, quickly, that he was accelerating in reverse, that there was another car parked behind his with enough gap between them to allow him to build up some speed.

  The next minute—it couldn’t have been longer than a minute—went predictably: the gunning motor, the artificial thunder-crack of the crashing fenders, and then the fallout: things dropping from the cars’ frames to the asphalt, making ping sounds when they hit. In a movie version of this scene the driver wheels his glance abruptly to the window where a misshapen man stands watching it all unfold, and fixes me with a threatening look. That didn’t happen. He braced himself hard just before the collision, and after it he spent maybe fifteen seconds looking over his shoulder, surveying the damage as best he could from his restricted vantage point. Then he looked back into the rearview to check for cars. There weren’t any, so he shifted into drive and headed north, at a clip but not speeding away, eyes forward, his hands at ten and two.

  Once he was gone you would have had to’ve stopped and looked around to know anything had happened. There was a good chance that the driver of the car he’d rammed wouldn’t notice he’d been hit for a day or two: if he came up to the driver’s side door from behind, he might not see anything. I thought about the guy in the truck, the focus in his expression, and I felt like I already knew enough of the story to tell it to somebody else maybe better than either of its major players could. But I didn’t call the police, even though I know you’re supposed to. And I hadn’t taken any notice of the guy’s license plate, or written down any of the details. I’d answer questions about what I’d seen if anybody asked me, but I know what I know. Nobody was going to ask. So I just stood there at the window for a minute more, and I heard a bird singing; and while I am a person who, for reasons I consider good, am reluctant to assign specific meaning to anything I see or hear going on out there in the natural world, I couldn’t get out of the way of a sort of prophetic feeling I assume everyone gets from time to time. I couldn’t see the bird, I didn’t know where it was; I told myself a few stories about it, how it was a migratory bird I’d happened to catch on just the right morning, separated from its company en route to cooler days; or again how it was dying, singing some cheerful dying song. Kids’ stuff, old stuff. And then I had a memory from childhood, not childhood really but a while afterward, but what felt, in that moment, like childhood.

  17 It was JJ; Teague; Tara, who was JJ’s girlfriend; Kimmy, who was Tara’s friend; and then me. It was the middle of the week. We were bored, sitting around on the aluminum bleachers up by the practice baseball diamond on the other side of the high school parking lot, waiting for something to happen. Tara had her boom box and we were listening to Relayer. I was looking hard at the tape shell and thinking the thoughts I get looking at tape shells. Am I the only person who gets the hard creeps from this guy’s face? was what I was thinking specifically. I was looking at the singer from Yes. His mouth looked like it was from somebody else’s head. I couldn’t make all the pieces fit.

  Teague was teaching himself to dungeon master; he’d gotten The Dungeon Master’s Guide from his parents for Christmas. It was May now. You could see from the book he’d already read it a million times. The front was like a wrinkled old map, and half the pages were bent in at the corners. He was hunched over it with his index finger pointing at the middle of a page and his eyebrows scrunched down. When Teague is irritated it’s really obvious.

  “Can we listen to some Rush?” he said without looking up.

  The Yes tape was Kimmy’s but she had all kinds of different music so she started digging through her gigantic purse to try to find something else to play. In her purse, tape shells clacked against one another while she dug; you could hear them scraping against each other, against keys, against pens and compacts, the sounds muffled in the purse’s puffy vinyl folds. To me it sounded like somebody shaking up dry bones. I closed my eyes and thought about those old bones in some girl’s purse and then I let my mind go: if you wanted to fit bones into your purse they’d have to be broken into pieces; you couldn’t fit a whole arm bone or a leg bone or a skull in there, just teeth, toes, and fingers; maybe kneecaps; but my imagination told me teeth would make a high sound, like pieces of glass, and toes would sound dull, like old crushed cans. That left fingers. I remembered biology class when we did anatomy. Distal phalanges, proximal phalanges, metacarpals. To walk around with a bag full of bones in the normal world would require a stone constitution. You could be a thief. You could be an actor, probably. Actors die young in ancient Rome, though. If it’s the present day and you’re Kimmy, and you’re carrying someone’s bones around in your purse, then I have a lot of questions for you, and I’ll probably never ask them, and you’ll have a secret that only I have guessed.

  When I snapped out of it Kimmy’d popped out Yes and put in 2112. She has everything. JJ and Tara were halfway making out. She had her hand on his pants, moving up the thigh. He was two years older than her, already out of high school. Nobody really knew what he was doing with his life, because we only ever saw him at the park when he wanted to hang out with Tara. He had a mustache.

  I was ditching P.E. to come up and hang out with everybody. I started to worry that if I missed two classes the school might call my house, and I’d get in trouble, and when I start to worry I can’t stop, so I told everybody “Later.” I felt sad to leave even though there was nothing going on. The sun was out and it was really bright; I wished I had some sunglasses. I walked across the parking lot toward the school, and then somebody honked at me. I never look up when people honk at me because I don’t want any trouble. People gave me trouble back then because of the way I dressed and because they didn’t like my friends. Inside I hated anybody who honked at me and wished I could cause their car to crash using only the powers of my mind. I could see what the crashes would look like from the outside and what they would feel like inside the car. It was awesome.

  I once heard in a science class that you don’t start remembering things until you’re three, or maybe five. When I remember this day and most things before it, it’s like trying to remember being four years old, or two. I can see it, and I know it happened, and I have enough information about it to reconstruct the whole scene to my own satisfaction, but the person to whom it happened is somewhere so far off that I only know it’s me because I can see his face, and because I’m the one remembering.

  Later that day I walked home in the bright sun. I remember seeing the bottlebrush bushes that lined the street for the last four blocks, how they looked ancient, or maybe Martian. Alien. Home from school was a straight shot through four different neighborhoods, and by the time I got home, I always felt like a traveler returning from a great journey, relearning what home was like, acclimating to newly unfamiliar waters. Two packages were waiting for me on the front porch; I was glad to get to them first, because sometimes my parents teased me about how much time I spent with my books and tapes and magazines. Or they tried to start conversations about what I was into. I hated that. It wasn’t like with some of my other friends, whose parents were Christians; my parents weren’t Christian like that. But they did say they “wondered about where I was headed.” That was how they put it. It got on my nerves. So if I sent off for something cool, I avoided opening it in front of them. I didn’t want to have to answer any questions.

  I went back to my room and spread the mail out on my bed. One of the packages was from Brazil: it was a sword catalog. I’d seen an ad for it in one of the little magazines I got at the game store. It cost three dollars, but mail from far away was worth a little extra, s
o I hid three ones inside a folded piece of newspaper and sent it off to São Paulo. Catalog of Rare and Unknown Swords from Around the World, Send Three Dollars and Two International Reply Coupons. It was like a treasure to me, weird alphabet letters in the return address and a strange slick sheen to the envelope. Sometimes when you send off for something without knowing what it is, what you get back looks like a third-generation copy somebody found somewhere, but this was nice: glossy paper, clean staples. Some of the swords had hilts with designs, like dragons or horses, and some had what looked like jewels. Smooth semi-precious stones inlaid afford textured grip. The prices were listed in a currency I’d never heard of; it had a little symbol that set my mind racing to the good places.

  The other package was from up north in Oregon, some town I’d never heard of before, Grants Pass. It was a membership patch from Inter-Hyborea, a Conan fan club; it came with a tape of songs based on Conan stories. The patch was high quality and was going to look very cool on my backpack if I could just get it on there without getting caught. This was going to involve a needle and thread and working on the patch in secret, or asking a girl to do it for me. If I asked Tara, JJ would be mad, but Kimmy was a possibility so I called her. I had my own phone in the room ever since Christmas, because if they didn’t give me my own phone I’d always be in the living room talking and no one would be able to hear the TV. It was a good deal.

  Kimmy either didn’t believe I couldn’t sew the patch on myself or she just wanted to tease me; she pretended she didn’t understand what I was asking, and then either she pretended she thought the patch was an excuse for me to come over to her place or she actually believed that. It made me mad, and I felt embarrassed, and the conversation gradually evaporated until neither one of us was saying anything. Then her voice got softer and friendlier, and she said everybody knew how to sew. But actually I didn’t know any guys who took sewing. It was the least popular elective class for guys, below even accounting. So I made a joke out of it, and said during registration I tried to sign up for sewing but all the jocks beat me to it. That was a joke for us to share, because I hated all sports, and she hated guys on the football team specifically; I didn’t know why specifically the football team. I didn’t care. I hated them, too.