Authors: John Darnielle
You’re inside a cylinder, a silo some thousand yards high; from your perch you can see that it continues down into the earth for many thousands more. It must have taken years to dig so deep. To build the broken network of platforms you must now navigate. To construct, from available scrap, sanded smooth and disinfected to keep the interior clean, the descending entryway to the kingdom beyond.
When I got home my mom asked me what Ray’d had to say. That was how she put it: “So, Sean, did you have a good day, what did Ray have to say?”
“He said guns are awesome,” I said. It was a mean thing to say, and I was immediately sorry, but it was too late. My
mother’s shoulders stiffened, and she held her hand at her chin, two fingers pressed across her lips.
“Sean, you don’t—” she said, and then she stopped to draw in some breath and try to keep her composure. “You don’t understand,” she said finally. Like most things she started to say about the accident, this went nowhere: there were too many places for it to go, so when it opened out onto its great vista of sad possibilities it just rested there, frozen by the view.
“I do, I do, Mom,” I said. We were standing in the living room; Dad was in the bathroom. “Ray said I had to respect guns, is all, it was—”
I took my mother’s hand between my hands. I felt like a very old man who had lived for a very long time; I knew I wasn’t that old man, not really. I hadn’t actually come into possession of any great wisdom, hadn’t been on a quest that had seasoned me and invested my words and actions with meaning. But the sheen of it, the reflection maybe of a wisdom I might someday still attain, was visible to me for a second, and I felt the weight of what I’d done to them press against my chest like a heavy hand. “It was a funny thing for him to say, is all.”
Mom wanted to meet me out there in the space I was trying to clear. But she couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t blame her then, and I don’t now. There was too much wreckage in that space for her to stand.
My father came in then and saw Mom crying, and he was mad. He must have been mad already, after taking me down to Ray’s with some uncertain hope in mind, looking for some conclusive moment and not getting it: I was pretty sure about this. Instead it had been another incident without clear lessons.
“Why do you have to make your mother sad?” he said in his louder voice, the one he saved for when he wanted to be heard. “Haven’t you done enough—” he said, his stutter catching him at a crucial moment; I could see it make him even angrier. He kept his eyes firmly on mine. “Done enough already?” he said at last.
“It was an accident,” I said, and Mom put a hand on his shoulder and said it was really OK, that there’d been a misunderstanding, and Dad’s face did that thing it had recently learned to do: where his expression skidded across a sliding drift from anger to sadness to something else that didn’t quite have a name, all in the course of a few seconds.
“OK, Sean,” he said, “sorry, sorry to yell.” We stood in our little triangle and then the doorbell rang; Dad had ordered some pizza for dinner. He put out some plates with a knife and fork by mine, and we all sat down to eat. Mom asked him the same question she’d asked me, in the same words—”What did Ray have to say?”—and Dad tried his best to explain why he hadn’t really said much to Ray about liability and so forth, and Mom didn’t say anything back, and then after a while Dad got up from the table and turned on the evening news with the volume too high.
Conan the Barbarian has no parents, as far as I know, but in my mind he was my model: trying to stand strong and brave, sword in hand, black hair flowing. In truth I have very little hair on my head now, and the hair I do have tends to clump in stringy clusters, but if my eyes are closed and my concentration is strong I can form a different picture of myself in my
mind, so this was what I did, standing by the waist-high desk where the phone was. I closed my eyes and I concentrated. Dad was getting ready to tell me about the funeral plans, I knew. I could make it easier for him if I tried hard enough. It isn’t really much of a mystery, this occasional need I have to comfort my father. I did something terrible to his son once.
“Grandma lived a long time,” I said. Ten-plus years since Dad took me down to Ray’s on that open-ended mission where nobody got revenge and nothing got resolved, and a whole lot of empty ground in the space from now to then. I have a theory that the less you say when someone dies, the better. Leave everything as open as you can.
“Thanks, Sean,” he said. “For me this is hard, I—”
“Terrible,” I said.
“No, no,” he said, “that’s—it’s all really hard, but what I actually—I—”
“Not—”
“No, what—Sean, I don’t like to say this; I know you loved your grandmother, and she loved you, but we—” Pausing here. Some things you practice a few times but it doesn’t make them any easier. I could hear it now. “We don’t think you should come to the funeral. I know that’s—”
He just left it there for a second.
“It’s really hard to—”
When anger rears up in me I have a trick I do where I picture it as a freshly uncoiled snake dropping down from the jungle canopy and heading for my neck. If I look at it directly it’ll disappear, but I have to do it while the snake’s still dropping or it will strike. This sounds like something they’d teach you in therapy at the hospital or something, but it’s not. It’s
just a trick I found somewhere by myself. Once you’ve looked at a deadly thing and seen it disappear, what more is there to do? Walk on through the empty jungle toward the city past the clearing.
“It’s OK, Dad,” I said, evenly. I took stock of how I really felt: found all the various threads, saw which way they all ran. “Dad, it’s OK. I get it. It’s all right.” And I do get it: I am not a welcome presence at a funeral, no matter whose it is. If I let myself stay mad about that I will go insane.
On the other end my father, now an orphan, was crying.
“Thank you, Sean,” he said. “I don’t mean to be awful to you. It’s just—it’s hard for me to ask, it’s really hard. Your grandmother was so happy back in those early days, back when—”
The little silence that followed wasn’t my dad’s repetitive stutter. I could hear him entering a space he usually tried to avoid, finding himself on the other side of a door he wouldn’t normally open. I followed him in.
“When you were a baby,” he said, at last.
He sounded like he was choking. “It’s OK, Dad,” I said. “It’ll be OK.”
CLAN SCARECROW
, I saw penned in neat script on a little card inside my head.
12
I stood with the phone at my ear and tried to think of something to say. My father plays his cards close to his chest, but I felt like there was an opening here, a portal: a seam in the surface I was supposed to notice and pull open and climb through. That was why it was Dad calling, not Mom. So I took a quiet breath and put on my grown-up voice, the one I use when somebody looking for me gets ahold of my phone number.
“Dad, I’m sorry,” I said. Nothing. “Hard to know …” I had no idea how to finish that thought.
“It is hard,” he said. “Your grandmother … that was my mother.”
It was a simple truth, something self-apparent. Something somebody might point out to you in kindergarten: when your dad was little, your grandmother was just his mom. Like looking at a 9 upside-down. I pictured my dad as a teenager: hair combed straight and parted on the side, head cocked at the direction of a portrait studio photographer. Big smile and a far-off gaze. “Dad, I am so, so sorry,” I said, and I could see
the distance from the rim of the tower to the ground, all that wasted Kansas plain going on and on forever, soaking up daylight and cooling to an inky black at night that spreads out uninterrupted for so long that eventually you can’t see any tower at all.
I let people play for free in the early days. It was hard for me to imagine anybody signing up for a subscription without having gone through the first few passes, so I took out a dozen ads, some in bigger magazines, some in tiny self-published things I’d found at the comic store. The smaller ones sometimes didn’t re-set my type: they’d just shrink it a little, and when it ran, it looked just like it had when I’d stuffed it into an envelope at my desk.
NEW BY-MAIL GAME—DEADLY FUTURE/IRRADIATED WORLD. FIGHT TO SURVIVE IN SEARCH OF THE TRACE ITALIAN, my copy read. PLAY FOUR TURNS FREE. SEND FOUR SELF-ADDRESSED STAMPED ENVELOPES TO: FOCUS GAMES, BOX 750-F, MONTCLAIR CA 91762
. The
F
stood for
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
; if the ad ran in
Analog
, I’d use
A.
Somewhere I’d read that this was a way to keep track of which ads brought in more business, but that wasn’t why I did it. I just thought there was something cool about using different box numbers for different places, something trivially arcane.
If you don’t get drawn in by the free turns, you’re not likely to keep playing, so I came up with the idea of putting players in classes, like when you’re a kid outside playing and you’re either a cop or a robber. But I didn’t want there to be teams, because the problem with cops and robbers had always been that there was no scope to the action. It was basically just hide
and seek; I wanted to be a robber who killed his victims, or the robber with X-ray eyes, or the one who could walk through walls and ends up in a special jail designed just for him. I wanted cops and robbers to last beyond the apprehension of the suspect. If we were playing cowboys and Indians all I could think about was how the actual point of the game was for one team to murder everybody on the other, and how the winners could be riding off covered in blood, which was how they’d look when they ran across somebody who hadn’t been in the battle, and they’d have to explain themselves.
What I came up with for the Trace was elegant, I think, and simpler in function than it felt like in play. The first two turns led directly to a fork in the road, and that branched out onto three or four different paths. Three or four in my first, crudest pass: then six paths, then eight. As many as I could stand. The hub of the third turn would be an immense wheel, and you’d pick a spoke that would determine the course of the rest of your life. I saw stars when I thought about it. Usually when people stand at an intersection like the third turn hub they’re not conscious of their position: they don’t know where, in the course of their lives, they stand.
In the Trace you know. I made it clear in the text that this was a decisive moment, even in the original draft: You sense you’re no longer alone in the old movie house, then you hear people knocking things over out in the lobby. On the floor you crawl through the dark, from your seat in the front row toward the glowing green EXIT sign. Bits of rotting carpet flake off beneath your fingernails. You’re almost to the door down the hallway when you fall through the floor.
ALL CLANS IN BIG WAYSTATION ROOM UNDERNEATH THE THEATER
, I
wrote excitedly in my sky-blue Mead notebook when I got the idea.
ONE CLAN EACH CORNER, ONE MIDDLE OF ROOM, WARRIOR CLAN AT FURNACE??
These early drafts were always full of excited possibilities; they were written without outlines or diagrams, you can see them taking shape as they go.
You have to lie still until the militia leaves: you can hear them upstairs, sweeping the theater, knocking stuff over, pulling down drapes. You get a few pages describing the people around you down there in the basement: how they’re dressed, whether they look friendly or smart or mean or well-armed or hungry. At the end of the turn, your choice is open: It is late and your eyes are heavy; you’ll have to sleep here. Which group will you join?
At that point you have to boil down your decision to some descriptive term of your own choosing based on what you’ve read about the other people in the room, who’ve been sketched in groups—the ones crouched around a space heater, the ones hunched over an old road atlas. It works every time; I never have to explain. When a player writes back after the movie theater raid, I read what he says, and then I go to the files and I pick out a path. The total number of clans is infinite, but there are only sixteen paths, identified by Roman numerals, because people like the kid I used to be have always really liked Roman numerals. Beyond those are sixteen more I never assign, because they lead nowhere. They are unfinished, dead ends.
To the player, of course, the path is invisible. The point of the night spent underneath the theater for the player is to find out who he is. But the people he meets down there—the clan with which he becomes identified for the rest of his life in the game—will all be killed within a turn or two, or else he’ll get
separated from them in the rail yard, or they’ll all find the surface by daytime and eat cactus and go insane while the player, who wasn’t hungry, has to watch. Something will happen. When it does, he’s left with a name that he picked, a way of identifying himself. “I join the warlords,” somebody will write in response to this turn, and then the next week, in an envelope he addressed to himself, he’ll get a small card, like an old library card, on stiff mottled gray card stock: CLAN WARLORD, it will say in my weak imitation calligraphy.
All rights and privileges
in smaller script underneath.
I personally don’t play. I can’t. I wouldn’t really want to, either, I guess. But I do have a card of my own, which sits in the front drawer of my desk. I’m clan seeker/digger. It’s Path IV, the one that ends up sticking to the foothills along a semi-northward pass. The first player ever to head down it wrote in and said,
I go over to the seeker/diggers
: he meant the group with the army bags full of tools, the ones who’d commandeered the film screen and were using it as a tarp. I wrote out a card that said
CLAN SEEKER/DIGGER
, but that didn’t look right, so I made him up a new one that said SCOUT, and then I kept his original card for myself. I have to admit that I like and am pretty self-satisfied with my position as the only member of this sublimated clan. The one-man clan who exists only in rough draft. The player with a clan but no path. Scepter-wielding king of the class-A seeker/diggers.
In the metal drawers where the gears of the Trace are housed I keep a stray file that’s really only there for motivation. It holds about a dozen pages, delinquent bits and pieces from lost time
before their then-unknown predicate had been identified. I could pin everything inside it to a single corkboard and hang it on the wall near my desk; I feel like that’s what most people would do. It’s good knowing it’s in the drawer, this one file, at arm’s reach but hidden away in the dark back behind the more important things.
In it, among other things, is a list I made in the sixth grade, when I was twelve. We’d had a substitute teacher desperate to rein in the energy of the room for maybe fifteen minutes; after we came in from morning recess our desks were waiting for us with single sheets of blank lined paper on them and the words
Five Things You Want To Be When You Grow Up
written in colored chalk on the board, flowing cursive script three or four inches high, and
QUIET TIME
in big block capitals underneath. Everybody set to work; the sub strolled down the rows of desks where we sat writing in silence. As we finished we’d get up, one at a time, and put our pages in a basket on the desk, and when all of them had been handed in, she reached in and grabbed one from the pile.
It was mine, of course; she just picked it up and started reading it out loud in her deep, dusky substitute voice. She didn’t say who it was by, or look in my direction while she read; I don’t think she’d had enough time to connect names to faces in the half-day she’d been with us. But the blood rushed to my face all the same, and I remember my anger at hearing my real dreams spoken out loud by someone else’s uncomprehending voice. “Number five, sonic hearing,” she said. “Number four, marauder. Number three, power of flight. Number two, money lender. Number one, true vision.” Some of the other kids shot laughing looks at one another. It was horrible.
People talk sometimes about standing up for what they believe in, but when I hear people talk like that, it seems like they might as well be talking about time travel, or shape-changing at will. I felt righteousness clotting in my throat, hot acid: the other kids were suppressing laughter and exchanging glances; the whole thing was so funny to them they had to punch their thighs to keep from cackling out loud. None of them had actually made a true list like mine, I thought, though this was conjecture. I wanted to defend my high stations, to tell them that what they were laughing at was something real, something vast. But no one was looking directly at me; everyone was looking around to see who’d flinch, and I picked up on this just in time to join them in scanning faces around the room, pretending to hunt for the list’s author. And I kept my mouth shut, and then the sub said, “Here’s another,” and moved on to somebody else’s list, which consisted of actual occupations, things you might really become out there in the world once you got out of school. They sounded like weak things compared with my list; I kept my thoughts to myself.
I remember this scene because it was embarrassing to live through it, and because remembering it is a way of knowing that I am half-true to my beliefs when the time comes. I sit silently defending them and I don’t sell them out, but I put on a face that lets people think I’m on the winning team, that I’m laughing along with them instead of just standing among them. I save the best parts for myself and savor them in silence. Number three, power of flight. Number four, marauder. Enough vision to really see something. A stack of gold coins and a ledger. People want all kinds of things out of life, I knew early on. People with certain sorts of ambitions are safe in the Trace.
So while everybody else was at the funeral I was down at the Montclair Chamber of Commerce reinstating my business license. I’m supposed to renew it once a year, but the bills they send out don’t look like much of anything so sometimes they get tossed out. When this happens I get new envelopes marked URGENT, and then I have to apply in person to have the license reinstated: renewal you can do by mail, but once they’ve put the license on hold you have to show up in person.
People look up from what they’re doing when I enter a building. Famous people are probably quite used to this; I’m used to it, too, but sometimes, on good days, I feel like my job is to try to set them at ease. This I do by pretending everything is normal; the secret is to believe it in your heart, which comes more naturally than you’d think. So I meet their gazes gently, and I nod my head as lightly as I can, which is almost like executing a pirouette. I try to get them to find my eyes, which are still as they were on the day before the accident, and I try to hold them there as I pass. Unless they’re being gauche about it: covering their mouths with their hands like somebody in an old horror movie, or whispering loudly to somebody nearby. Then I pop open my jaw as if I were trying to dislodge a stuck seed from my back teeth, and they get to see inside my mouth.
The window where you write the check to reinstate your business license is its own separate station at the end of a long fake-woodgrain counter where people come to pay less exotic bills: water bills, sewer bills. Business Licenses used to have its own separate room, but they had a big consolidation a few
years back, and Business Licenses got moved in with the water and sewer people. I wouldn’t care, but the people ahead of me in line always get nervous when they hear my breathing, which has a wet sound that I can’t help.
I stood in my short line trying to keep my breathing even, and when I got to the front of it I strode purposefully down past the utilities windows toward my stop, and there wouldn’t be anything else to say about the whole thing if my eye hadn’t caught a nameplate atop one of the sewer-and-water tellers’ windows as I passed: CHRIS HAYNES. The clerk behind it was young, with a weak goatee; there was no way it wasn’t him. Even in passing you could see the younger man he’d once been, the oily grease on that young man’s chubbier cheeks, the posters on his bedroom wall. He was helping a customer and he didn’t see me, and I kept my pace steady and didn’t make any gestures, but my heart leapt in my chest, and a few dark corners of my imagination were suddenly flooded with a cleansing light I knew was permanent.
There’s an immense mosaic on the plaza, embedded in the concrete outside the doors of the Chamber of Commerce. It shows a man with a nose so long it must be a costume nose of some kind; he’s holding a dish in his outstretched palm, while a person with a headdress, who could be a man or a woman, stands opposite him, reaching into the dish with finger and thumb together in a plucking gesture. From the first time I saw this I assumed it had something to do with a native local population I didn’t know anything about. I loved that I didn’t know, that there weren’t any signs about it: the mosaic, too
big and colorful to escape notice, tells no story to anyone and is seen by all. Maybe there’s a plaque explaining it elsewhere on the plaza, but I’ve never seen it, so the mystery’s intact.