John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van

I let the evidence bag rest flat on my upturned palms, as if it were some historical document of great value or interest. I looked at it, remembered a whole bunch of things from my own distant past, and then recalled the day the turn had come back to me in the mail with none of the options circled. Instead, in pencil, a fifth way: a mystery at the time, a bad punch line now. Of all the things that made me wince, this was the one that hit me hardest, because there was hope in it: determination, drive, all that youthful focus. Two words, one compact phrase, handwritten in one script: one person signing for two. START DIGGING. L+C.

My lawyer read my statement.

I wish I could read this to you myself instead of having somebody read it for me. It’s not like I can’t talk, but it is distracting to other people when I do. So I have written it down. I hope you both can understand.

It would be an insult to you and to the memory of your daughter for me to spend too much time dwelling on who I am and what I am like as a person. I imagine your attorneys have explained to you how I got to be the way I am. I have no children of my own. I can’t imagine what you are going through.

I spent most of my teenage years in hospitals and physical therapy rehabs. It gets so lonely living inside your own head. Because of my face I could not even wear headphones for listening to music. So I invented a world in the future and I called it the Trace Italian. It was a place where I could have adventures, and when I grew up, I wanted to share those adventures with other people. I wanted specifically to share them with people like me, but I don’t know any people like me. Most people like me are dead.

I don’t have close personal friends but my customers are like friends to me. I share in their lives a little. To them I am just a company, and that is fine. I live a little through them and the small things I learn about them. It makes my own life feel more interesting. I don’t go to conventions to meet with them or personalize my business, and I don’t answer personal mail; I don’t want to be a creep. I am only here to provide a service. I have taken pride in that service, and my work has brought me pleasure over the years, and I never, ever thought anyone could possibly come to harm from it. If I had thought someone would get hurt because of Trace Italian, I would have shut it down. I would not even have started it in the first place. Lance and Carrie played the game together and did so well that I was amazed. I thought they were just two smart kids. Anybody would have predicted a great future for them both.

I understand that you blame me and I can’t be angry about that but I ask you to look at things my way. However different I am from normal people, in the end I am just a guy trying to do his job. Trace Italian doesn’t stand for anything in the real world and I couldn’t have guessed anyone would ever think otherwise. I hardly know anything about the real world. What little I do know I got from books and movies. I did not knowingly send any young people to their deaths. I would not. I couldn’t. Please understand. It is a little strange to me, to be defending something that was supposed to have been a place where people could feel safe and have fun, where nothing ever really happens except inside our heads. But understand too that I have to defend myself and my creation that has brought pleasure to a few people over the years. The Trace is a good place. It is a place where people can go, in their imaginations. That is a good thing and while I’m sorry it went wrong for your daughter it is not wrong by itself.

By the way and against advice of counsel I want to say that Lance and Carrie were technically right. Of the four possibilities on the paper, the one that would have moved them in the direction they wanted to go was FORAGE FOR ROOTS. I don’t know why I want to tell you this. I know it doesn’t help my case. I just feel like I owe it to them to let you know. They were right to start digging. But they were only right to start digging in the game, not out in the real world. Not in Kansas in actual ground. I am so so sorry.

I had to fight to keep my bearings, hearing it read out loud; there’s a gap between things I write down and what they’d sound like if I were to try to say them. My grief sought out all parts of my body it hadn’t yet inhabited, and I felt like I might collapse in on myself right there, at last, spectacularly. I’d left out a lot of things I’d wanted to throw in: Chris Haynes, for instance, how I felt like his exit proved there was nothing wrong with living in dreams as long as you didn’t let yourself get carried away. But I had been advised—”in the strongest terms,” they’d said, looking harder at me than most people ever dare, driving the point home as deeply as they could — to make no reference to other players, to anything anyone else had ever done inside the playfield. When I brought up Chris’s name, they’d held up their hands, no-thank-you style: counterexamples might end up being part of my defense, they said; it was “protected,” we could get to all that later if it went to trial. “Don’t get defensive,” they said. They meant Don’t get mad. I tried, but I felt the impulse moving: as I wrote, as I listened. Don’t these people know I’d never hurt anybody again? But I couldn’t let myself think like that. Too much terrain off out there. So I wrote what I wrote, and the clear, level voice of my lawyer presented it to the sterile field of the conference room, and I sat there as still as a stone.

Nobody looked at anybody else for a second. It was like a scene from a dream. And then my lawyer rose and said, Your honor, Lance’s parents aren’t here because they don’t believe my client bears any responsibility for their son’s current condition. She paused for a second, and then she presented the signed affidavits: Lance’s parents had written them and agreed to have them read at the hearing. Copies of the affidavits went around the table until everybody had one, and then we all followed along while the reporter read them into the record. The mood changed; Lance’s parents lived in a world far from the room where we seven had gathered. Their days were spent with terms like long-term care , and in the eternal tangle of insurance forms. They said that Lance had always had problems; they didn’t think Lance’s problems had been anybody’s fault, and besides, he had new problems now. They were more interested in the future than in the past, no matter how hard the past had been. They were putting all that behind them.

There was silence for a minute, and then the judge, a little crudely I thought, nodded toward Dave and Anna, saying, “Well, this makes your case a lot harder to make, I think,” and there were some concluding statements, but none of them really mattered. People rose to speak and sat back down again, but it was pretty obvious that none of it was going anywhere. You could feel something giving up in the air. Eventually the judge said he’d take a brief recess and come back with his decision, and we all went out into the hallway and milled around. My capacity for vanishing into whatever shadows happen to be around is a hard-won and precious skill. Then we reconvened in the side-room, and we listened while the judge read out his ruling, and that was the end of that. I didn’t feel like I’d really won anything, but I had come through the day no worse off than I’d come into it, which, as I have been telling myself for many years now, is a victory whether it feels like one or not.

The supermarket is for me what the beach is for other people: it’s eternal. I remember riding there in the car with my mom, once or twice a week every week; that out-of-time hour pushing the cart up and down the aisles, me wandering off to the magazine section when I got bored, always coming back with a copy of Hit Parader in hand. Or Circus. I liked Hit Parader better on principle because it printed song lyrics, but Circus had better stories and a much cooler name. I’d sneak copies into the basket and she’d feign surprise at seeing them when we got to the checkout. Our supermarket outings spanned the years from childhood to adolescence right up until the big change. It was a natural ritual: unscheduled, unchanging, traditional. We’re out of coffee, Sean, do you want to go to the supermarket? Yes. Yes, I do.