Wolf in White Van (12 page)

As you leave the Chamber you have to walk across the mosaic; even if you’re not looking down, its colors and shapes will bleed into your field of view. Back at the high school there used to be a superstition about an inlay in the concrete near the office, a multisided star: you weren’t supposed to step on it or something bad would happen to you, I forget what. Bad luck. People would turn and walk around it, or rear up and take a big leap across when they got to it. You wondered if anybody actually believed in it, even one person. But everybody did it anyway.

Back home the mail had come. Two smart kids from the scavenger clan who’d cleared Tularosa a few turns before were plotting a course for Kansas. I consider it unethical to give anybody any help, and it’s usually pretty easy to stay impartial, but I really wanted these two to make it; they were the most committed players to come along in quite some time, young and excited and full of jittery asides.
First night in Oklahoma and hopefully the last!
they started out this time.
We know we gotta keep going north we’ve got our sites on the barb wire!
which was a reference to something they’d read in one of the papers they’d taken from the fortune teller’s body.

I sent them duly north, to a gas station near a reservation where they had to sleep because it was cold. Trace Italian was mostly written over the course of a year or two. I kept adding new turns for a while, injecting detours or increasing ellipses as the need arose: I saw a few patterns developing in live play and responded with byways that would extend the lead-up to
a few payoffs. Once ranks began to thin, I almost never had to write new turns; the kinds of players whose letters warranted real action were usually the first to get distracted and quit. This turn was among the newer ones, the later ones. It was an empty turn, a turn where nothing happened, and that was because it had a ghost in it, and the ghost was Chris. His initials were suffocating there amid overlapping graffiti tags on the gas station walls.
REZ LIFE. CATHY TORREZ. MIKEY T. CH. JESUS IS LORD. YOU SUCK. NAG WEST SIDE. 40 CREW
. Chris Haynes. Chris the digger. Dead Chris, who’d seen the future and counted himself out.

13
It felt like so much was happening: I don’t lead a busy life. The externals of the world I’ve built are quiet and even. Even small events amount to a shift in the current. All that movement and then Kimmy knocking out of nowhere, and me answering the door with my unwashed face, my hair all messy.

“You’re still around!” she said in that one voice, the one from the other side of something. For a minute I was an astronaut having dreams about space: letting her voice register, feeling what it’s like to be in the presence of somebody who isn’t surprised by how I look.

“Still hanging around,” I said back, opening the door a little more to let her in, and then she did come in, just like that.

By the window in the living room there’s a soft chair that looks out onto the walkway. In Southern California even the most modest complexes keep their landscaping up; my walkway curves on its way out to the street. There’s a sudden turn that takes you out around a small rounded hedge and some birds-of-paradise; my chair by the window is angled so that
the corner of your eye catches this little flash of color and growth if you’re gazing out toward the traffic or straight down at the dull grass.

Kimmy plopped herself down in the chair like a teenager visiting somebody’s parents’ house, and she cocked her head at me and said, “You look like shit,” which was an old joke of ours, I’m pretty sure. It had that old joke feel. But I couldn’t really latch on to the specifics of it, whether there was some rote response I was supposed to give back to show I remembered. But I didn’t, so I just stood there, dumb and big, looking at her, trying to figure out how I felt.

You hear a rumbling in the Texas dust. Clouds form in the dirt. They lift and join together until it’s just dusty air everywhere, brown and dirty. You could run, but you can’t see more than a foot or two ahead at a time, and you’re coughing. You bury your face in the crook of your arm and breathe in through your sleeve.

Your first guess is that this is an earthquake, but as the minutes pass and the rumbling grows louder you remember small quakes you used to feel in California. How long did those last? A minute at most. Never longer. And then the aftershocks. Now, beneath your feet, you feel the ground rising. There’s no other way to think of it. The ground is rising.

You scramble back and you end up on all fours, watching as the earth cracks, like there’s a giant underneath it pushing up against the lower surface with his fingers, about to break free. And then a structure punches up through the dry earth, crown first, sharp steel. But the map indicates that you are still far from the mark. Could the map be wrong? No: as the tower rises you see
symbols that bear no resemblance to the ones you know will mark the spires of the Trace Italian. Half-scratched pictures, shapes that could be letters, clusters that could be numbers. This is not the bulwark, not the housing that guards the Trace. And still it rises.

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.

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.”