Wolf in White Van (5 page)

If you go north after escaping Las Vegas you can skip the astrologer shack. The jagged route east will take you to a state fairgrounds; there’s lots to do there. But most people look at the straight line on the map and follow it like a beacon, and then they get their fortunes told. I’ve had people get a little angry about the sequence once or twice, people who after receiving “You Have Arrived At The Small Shack of a Local Astrologer” feel like they deserve a little more action for their money. But when they get inside the shack their tone shifts. There’s power in thinking you’re about to meet somebody who knows what’s next for you, and there’s another level of power in seeing that person’s body on the floor, having to get the information from him somehow now that he’s no longer in any condition to give it. This latter power is the greater power, full of dark, worldly secrets that you have to go out of your way to find out about, and I consider it something to be avoided, but I force everybody’s hand all the same; if you want to avoid the astrologer you have to put in extra work. Some do
manage to shrug off my cues and go around, or go past without looking, or even get so far as approaching the door but get scared off instead of intrigued by the smell. I can see how they’d think they were being warned instead of lured, but the ones who don’t go in are in some way strangers to me.

Most players just drift off eventually. Their focus wanders; their interests shift. Maybe they finish their games stealthily, like Teague had, like who-knows-who-else had over the years. Chris Haynes was different. He’d been different in his gameplay from the day of his first move; his letters appeared as the fruit of long, careful consideration, small, smooth, dense bursts of thought in flowing script, punctuation adhering to some internal rhythm that was easy to pick up on and easy to follow, grammar not quite holding together but always moving the play forward. “
Sean, everybody says that’s your name so OK
,” one started.

and then his initials, a cipher, something I could imagine him working out in grade school and holding on to all his life.
CH
. Write it again until every one’s exactly the same. Get so you can carve it into a desktop with a paper clip in one class period. A
C
whose high line arced but whose bottom line was straight, nearly the outline of a human eye but with a gap at the right, and then that tiny
H
inside it like an alien pupil.
CH.
Several times a month.
CH.

I wonder if I’d remember Chris as fondly as I do if he hadn’t quit the game, but he did quit, formally, which as I say is not usually how it happens. Usually, people just seem to drift in their attention; long gaps form between their turns, and then at some point they don’t renew their subscriptions and I stop hearing from them. “Growing out of it” is the phrase that comes to mind, but this is an obviously problematic view for me, so I try not to analyze it much further than the bare facts. Something happens over time, and people stop playing. General rule. Except for Chris, who let me know why.

I got up last night at 2 am thinking about how to repair my rifle, I don’t even have a rifle except in the Trace
, his final move began.

If you are a person whose authority is generally limited to his own small life and to a series of imaginary choices that exist on a vast but comprehensible grid, it’s odd when you hear someone, across the impersonal distance of the page, pleading for your permission. I thought of this during the preparation for the trial, when I was leafing through my files and arguing with myself about burning things, or maybe ripping them to pieces and driving them out to a dumpster in a parking lot somewhere. But all that was too much drama, too much action, too much of everything: setting things on fire, heading off somewhere to hide the proof that they’d once existed. I had spent too long clearing a path that told its own story, and it was a straight path. That was its whole appeal. The path to the Trace is different from other paths; that difference is supposed to make up for something.

I remember reading that turn through at my desk, the ancient, heavy wooden desk I’d gotten for thirty dollars at Goodwill, half-stripped of a deep red paint that was never going to give itself up entirely, dozens of interlocking grooves left across its top by countless ballpoint pens pushed down too hard onto unblotted paper. I remember feeling with total confidence that everything was all right with Chris, that he had made the right move. I took a piece of 8½ × 11 paper from a drawer and found an old charcoal pencil with a nice thick nub and I made out his death certificate.
Chris Haynes pronounced dead this day by own hand b. ( )
d. Tularosa. I do hereby affirm the truth of this document by affixing my signature hereto
,
here followed by an intentionally illegible signature,
county coroner, Trace Italian Kansas.
It looked ragged and blunt, appropriately Old West. My signature bore no resemblance to my actual signature in the real world; I did it with my left hand. I take a lot of pride in my work.

5
When I got back from the courthouse I was pretty shaken up. The only thing I really felt like doing was lying down on the floor in the den with the television on and all the lights off. First I tried a little plain old broadcast TV: some news, and a few minutes of a cooking show, and an old episode of
Family Ties.
But I couldn’t focus. I was agitated; the strategies I’d developed for shutting down the several tape loops running concurrently in my head weren’t working.

The judge had dismissed the case against me without prejudice, saying he couldn’t reasonably imagine another judge looking at the same evidence and coming to a different conclusion, etcetera, but that he wanted to leave a door open in the interest of justice being served in the event of new evidence coming to light, and so on. But his tone, and his gentle manner, conveyed his true meaning to everybody in the room; he didn’t want to seem heartless, so he’d tried softening the blow. But he’d been telegraphing his punches from fairly early on: in the questions he directed to Carrie’s parents. In the silences that grew between their responses and his subsequent
remarks. Even his bearing while seated, those deep-rising heavy black-robed breaths, seemed to be preparing everyone to hear his opinion.

That opinion, which carried legal force, was that there was no case here. No reason to go forward. Just several sad people and their partially wrecked lives. Once he’d spoken I was technically out of the woods. But my head: my head was all messed up. In video games you sometimes run into what they call a side quest, and if you don’t manage to figure it out you can usually just go back into the normal world of the game and continue on toward your objective. I felt like I couldn’t find my way back to the world now: like I was somebody locked in a meaningless side quest, in a stuck screen.

So I went to the kitchen and I made myself a sandwich, and I cut it up into manageable pieces so I could eat with a fork. And then I drove down to Cinema Video. I can hardly believe Cinema Video’s still in business, and I really can’t believe how many videotapes they still have in there, gathering dust against the east wall. But look down toward your feet and they’re all right there, neatly piled up in hopeful stacks on the floor. There’s a little sign taped to the wall at about knee level, green marker on canary-colored copier paper:
Used Tapes $5.00.

Stacks of dusty VHS tapes automatically register to the eye as trash now, and I’d be surprised if anybody ever took much note of the sign or the hoard it pointed toward. But I got out a twenty and I brought home four:
Future-Kill, Krull, Red Sonja
, and
Gor.
It was a little bracing to carry
Gor
up to the counter, because when I was a kid I used to think about
Gor
the way some kids thought about making the football squad. It was an object of almost religious contemplation. I would
scrutinize John Norman paperbacks in the Thrifty book rack like a code cracker working against the clock.

There were so many
Gor
books. No end to them.
Marauders of Gor. Slave Girl of Gor. Priest Kings of Gor.
They stared out from the same shelf as Doc Savage at the Book Exchange, but Doc Savage books were different, because you could tell the publishers wanted you to like them. Afternoons had been spent in meetings and at drawing boards coming up with the right combinations of images and cover copy, and by the time the books reached the racks, they were rich with code: images for the curious, images for the devout, all threaded together. They faced the world with action scenes promising adventure and intrigue, and the promise of triumph over fantastic adversity or final glory at its hands. Who doesn’t want to rise above the obstacles in his pathway? Who wouldn’t want to go down in flames? And for those of us who can’t or won’t rise above, who doesn’t at least want to hear stories about how it might be possible for some triumph to eventually happen, given enough luck?

The
Gor
books, by contrast, were shameful and garish. The pictures on their covers were pornographic, but in an almost dishonest way: near-nude mutants leering out into the fluorescent air of the drugstore aisle. Willingly or not, they seemed to suggest that maybe you shouldn’t actually be reading these books. And so I never did. I would stare at their covers, and maybe thumb through them a little, picking out phrases and images like a secret shoplifter. But that would be enough for me, and sometimes more than enough. I didn’t need to hear the stories the books were trying to sell me: their skins haunted and troubled me enough. But I would assemble my own stories,
based on the information I had from the covers; and in my stories, there’d be winners, victors, spoils to divide, satisfying conclusions to things. Happy endings sometimes. I felt sure that the books themselves would be less kind to their characters, that whatever was actually going on inside was dark and mirthless. There was this odd, flat sort of desolation in those covers. Steam or smoke rising from a distant city, seen from a boat out on the water: grimy, vivid. It always made me feel uneasy.

I set the stack of movies down in front of the TV when I got back, and I pulled the VCR out of the closet and wired everything together. I thought about
Gor
, but it still had some sort of prohibitive power over me, so I turned out the lights and sat in my recliner watching
Krull.
It took me back. The screen throbbed in its familiar way and the darkness around it spread out to the farthest corners of the room. When the movie was over I just sat there in my chair for a while. The sun was going down outside. I nodded off and caught one of those ten-minute naps that always feel like they last longer than they really do.

I dreamed of a ghost in a hallway; the ghost was holding his own head in his hands. I know where this image came from, and I knew in the dream, too, though that didn’t make it less real or frightening. The ghost holding his own head in his hands, coming down a hallway, was a neither-common-nor-rare card in the Monsters of the World series. These were bubble gum cards with a stiff stale powdery pink slab of gum included in every pack; I used to buy them at Rexall. Kids
would joke about buying the cards and throwing the gum away, but nobody actually threw the gum away, because they had paid for it. It crunched when you chewed it.

Some people dream whole stories, but I get only fleeting images. A ghost in a hallway, an open hallway facing out onto some trees. Maybe an office building in California. Maybe an apartment complex. The ghost is holding his head in his hands, making a ghost sound. I’m not even sure how I know it’s a ghost; his flesh is solid. The face is held close against the ghost’s body, so from where I’m standing, I can see only the back of his head.

Sometimes I try to make my dreams mean something: to connect them to the accident, which seems like an obvious fit here, or to connect them to things going on in my life. But there’s so little to them, so little to pick apart in my dreams. A thing that’s a ghost because something tells me that’s what it is, coming toward me in a hallway of some building. No real details. Ghost, hallway, building. When I woke up, I thought about Kansas, cold Kansas where the hallways of the buildings would be tightly sealed against the weather, so unlike the open, exposed buildings of Southern California, which are the only buildings I can actually tell you anything about, because they’re the only ones I’ve ever seen with my own eyes.

Krull
is a movie about a man on a quest, and it plays like something made by guileless people. Who knows the secrets of anybody’s heart, I guess: for all I know everyone involved with
Krull
has bodies under the floorboards and babies in the oven. But the evidence on the screen strongly suggests that these
were people trying to make something fun for others to enjoy, something largely innocent, not trying to open up any windows on the abyss. For me, though, it was a hallway full of doors leading to dark places. The hearing at the courthouse had propped several of these doors ajar: bagged bits of evidence standing in for bigger questions that couldn’t be answered, timelines of meaningless afternoons that ended somewhere big and terrible. But whether they’d seen it coming or not, the abyss had eventually gotten around to claiming most of the people who made the movie, or starred in it, or underwrote its considerable budget. The abyss was general. Which I couldn’t help thinking, the whole time: I was twelve when I first saw ads for this movie running in the
L.A. Times.
How old does that make some of those young people on my screen now? Who’s left?

The plotline was fairly clear.
This was given to me to know: that many worlds have been enslaved by the beast and his army the slayers.
It aimed high; I could feel the old excited hopes, destined for disappointment but still game, rising up inside me. Everything came together: the potential letdown of the saccharine wedding at the outset suddenly ripped into vivid pieces by the electric-blue flashing doors and the slayers scaling the walls. Swords that gave off lightning when they clashed, full-screen flaring X’s in battles whose backstories hadn’t been filled in sufficiently yet, so that the central remaining image for me—then as now—was the crystal-clean desolation of the aftermath: Confusion. Sudden loss. Evaporating bodies in an emptied stone cathedral. One guy looked like somebody I used to hang out with, I thought, watching his face turn to
steam. Was it JJ? Maybe. I couldn’t even get a clear picture of JJ in my mind anymore. It had been too long.

I drifted off into the sanctity of my earliest, angrier visions of the Trace Italian as the screen dimmed and flashed. A band of thieves led by the newly crowned king heading through mountains that looked identical to the ones a few miles north of my house. The quest to recover the kidnapped queen from the clutches of the beast. Distractions that killed people: kindly old wizards possessed by things that turned their eyes black and left their bodies empty shriveled husks atop the swamp. Calm marshlands from whose mists steel-clad killers rose suddenly, their muffled electronic screams grabbing hold of something inside me that was basic, primal, essential. The nearing of the goal. Dark caves. Lava streams that reminded me, and only me—but what was the difference—of the little fountain that used to flow at the center of Montclair Plaza. The battle of the king against the beast for his kingdom and its spoils. The worm left in the king’s brain, and in mine, by the few things the beast says before going down howling, felled by a magical throwing star that only the king could wield.

What the movie was really about was ambition, and what a fine thing it could come to seem, given the right light. It was about coming of age, and the rich reward waiting for those who went through it with courage. The brave and true of heart prevailed, and the usurpers got their due. One world escaped the slavemaster’s grasp. The wicked went down to perdition and the good folk prospered.

It was too high-minded to satisfy my seething adolescent brain, whose permanent thirst for blood I’d been hoping to
feed, I now realized. And I wondered why I’d want to feed a monster I’d spent much of my adult life trying to bury; but I set that question off to one side. Because the story wasn’t the point, wasn’t what was troubling me. It was the little details, the stage on which it was set, the margins. The trappings of the greater story—the props, the scenery, the special effects—those were what held me, what spoke to me. In them I recognized the guessed-at originals of my crude early visions, the ones that would grow over time. The caves, the castle, the final battleground: these were all signposts on the road to the Trace.

But the Trace that Lance and Carrie’d found did not teem with lush growth or offer breathtaking vistas. There were no swamps to pass through en route to it, and it had not terminated in any final confrontation with some immense evil made flesh, towering arrogant and glowing in the sky above them. There had been at Lance and Carrie’s sides no parties of fellow travelers, noble thieves, or inevitable tragic figures, joined together in common or disparate cause toward one victorious end. The terminus of their dreams, whose architecture may or may not have originated in me, had been a burrowing into dead earth. Its conclusion was neither climax nor punch line; it wasn’t even a conclusion at all, except for Carrie. It was a headline in
The Wichita Eagle. One Dead, One Critical in Sci-Fi Game Pact.
The young king with his eyes toward the open mouth of the serpent, its voice cavernous:
You have chosen a paltry kingdom on an insignificant planet.