John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van

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.

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.