John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van

“Just don’t need it,” I said.

“Everything all right?” Dad said after he’d exchanged a look with Mom.

“Just too busy for TV,” I said, trying to telegraph a smile with my tone of voice, in a small nod of my head, and everybody caught the same good mood for once, a rare grace for us in those days, the sort of high note that inspired dangerous, inexplicable thoughts in me, which I kept to myself until I could get back to work.

BYPASS — HUSK OF SEMI — BRUSH — HIGHWAY — OFF-RAMP

BYPASS — BRUSH — HUSK OF SEMI — HUSK DEFENSE — BRUSH CLEAR — OFF-RAMP

BYPASS — MASK DROP — BRUSH — CAUGHT — GARAGE

BYPASS — MASK DROP — BRUSH — CAUGHT — COMBAT — GARAGE

GARAGE — DECOY — MAIN STREET — POST OFFICE

GARAGE — DECOY — MAIN STREET — MARKET

GARAGE — COMBAT — CAUGHT — GARAGE

GARAGE — COMBAT — CAUGHT — OFFSITE

OFFSITE — SOLITARY

ACTION 1–REASON

ACTION 2–DECEPTION

ACTION 3–MADMAN

ACTION 4–DIGGING

OFFSITE — CELLMATE — ITEM EXCHANGE

ITEM EXCHANGE 1–AMMUNITION — MAP SKETCH

ITEM EXCHANGE 2–AMMUNITION — RATIONS

ITEM EXCHANGE 3–SECONDHAND MAP SKETCH — RATIONS

ITEM EXCHANGE 4–SECONDHAND MAP SKETCH — MAP SKETCH

ITEM EXCHANGE 5–MASK — MAP SKETCH

ITEM EXCHANGE 6–MASK — RATIONS

ITEM EXCHANGE 7–MASK — INFORMATION

ITEM EXCHANGE 8–SECONDHAND MAP SKETCH — INFORMATION

OFFSITE — CELLMATE — COMBAT

SEIZE ALL ITEMS

NO INFORMATION

I think about lizards that puff out their necks, or those brightly colored frogs down in the Amazon, coated with neurotoxins, adapting to their surroundings, their needs. But my head’s not an evolutionary adaptation, so that’s not quite right. All my reshaped parts seem like they protrude now, or hang; it can’t be possible, I figure, but maybe they do, I haven’t measured. Everything looks bigger to me in the mirror now. And when people out in the world see me, something in their expressions reminds me of people looking up at buildings. Sometimes I sit by the window, but the chair by the window feels almost like a platform. The window frames my face in such a way that my head seems monstrously huge.

Still, I make a point of working there sometimes, even though, as I say, there isn’t so much work to do anymore. I thought about inventing a new game, but the Sean who built the Trace is as distant from me now as the Sean who blew his face off is from both of us. All three live in me, I guess, but those two, and God knows how many others, are like fading scents. I know they’re still there. I could find them if I needed them. But I don’t need them, and one of them survives only in bits and pieces. They certainly don’t need me. They are complete just as they are.

It’s one small thing I remember noticing in those months of building and making and drafting and plotting, something that seems less small over time: for a player to make progress, he has to pacify or destroy whoever’s in his way. Those people become part of his story: he can’t go back and breathe life into them, and whatever gains he gets from the wrecks he leaves behind are permanent in the sense that any other courses open to him beforehand will then become closed. So when I sketched the scene where a player, having been caught by warlord resource-hoarders and imprisoned in an improvised jail, could just kill his cellmate and get everything he might otherwise have spent six turns gathering, I didn’t feel right about it: it was directly rewarding a player for attacking somebody who hadn’t done him any harm, for doing the wrong thing. It saved the player all the work while giving him all the spoils. But I saw the bigger picture: that it was true. That to the player who intended to make it to safety, no one in front of him amounted to more than some stray marks on paper, half-real figures to be tunneled under or blasted through as you headed on east toward the spires.

VOORHEES — HUGOTON — ZIONVILLE — SURPRISE — KEARNEY — EMORY — WASHBURN — CORONADO

VOORHEES — VALPARAISO — IVANHOE — GARDEN CITY — LAKIN — KNAUSTON — MODOC–CORONADO

SHARON SPRINGS — EAGLE TAIL — HACKBERRY CREEK — SCOTT CITY — CORONADO

BLAIR — HURON — HORTON — WHITING — TRAIN TO TOPEKA — TRAIN TO KANAPOLIS — LYONS — GREAT BEND — NESS CITY — DIGHTON — SCOTT CITY — CORONADO

MANHATTAN — SALINA — KANAPOLIS — LYONS — GREAT BEND — NESS CITY — DIGHTON — SCOTT CITY — CORONADO

BIRD CITY — SHERMANVILLE — EUSTIS — EAGLE TAIL — SHARON SPRINGS — TRIBUNE — CORONADO

MONTERO — HECTOR — TRIBUNE — CORONADO

KANORADO — HORACE — LEOTA — CORONADO

COOLIDGE — CARLISLE — EMORY — FEDERAL — WASHBURN — CORONADO

JETMORE — PAWNEE VALLEY — PETERSBURG — SCOTT CITY — CORONADO

RICHFIELD — LAPORTE — EMORY — WASHBURN — CORONADO

RICHFIELD — DERMOT — ZIONVILLE — EMORY — WASHBURN — CORONADO

SHIELDS — CHEYENNE TOWNSHIP — SCOTT CITY — MODOC–CORONADO

CUTTS — ELLEN — SCOTT CITY — MODOC–CORONADO

ATWOOD — RAWLINS — COLBY — BOAZ — WALLACE — LEOTA — CORONADO

LAWNRIDGE — ITASCA — EUSTIS — HUGHES — COLBY — BOAZ — WALLACE — LEOTA — CORONADO

RED CLOUD — PHILLIPSBURGH — TIFFANY — DIGHTON — SCOTT CITY — CORONADO

FORT SCOTT — IOLA — YATES CENTER — EL DORADO — NEWTON — LYONS — LYONS — GREAT BEND — NESS CITY — DIGHTON — SCOTT CITY — CORONADO

CORONADO OUTER SHELL

CORONADO DAY WAIT

CORONADO NIGHT WATCH

CORONADO BREACH

CORONADO INNER

It’s a ghost town. I was little the first time I heard the term “ghost town”; I fell immediately in love. Coronado is still on all the maps, but to get there you’d have to crawl through Kansas forever. Still, if ever a testament is needed to the existence of the great fortress, the final stand, the place within which the search for some unnamed final shelter within the shelter would then begin and continue on forever and forever, it’s here. This is what it looks like; these are its girders and panels. It is visible. It exists.

TRACE VISIBLE

TRACE NEARER

TRACE BREACH

When Tim from therapy started talking about board and care facilities, I was barely listening, but it turned out he wasn’t just ticking off the options; that was actually the plan: every week there was a meeting called discharge conference, where my parents and I would sit down with my main doctor and one of the nurses and the therapist and the social worker, and we’d talk about how I was doing. The first discharge conference I attended had been the one where the doctor said: “Realistically, we don’t know how long Sean will need to stay here.” They hadn’t thought I could hear them through the painkillers, but I could. For a long while after that, discharge conference was more of a weekly progress report, but eventually they’d start asking me questions: about my plans for after I left, about what would be different.

“Different?” I said. “Different how?”

The therapist spoke up. “Different, like how will you deal with frustration?”

I was still pretty foggy a lot of the time; I was heavily medicated. But I saw where she was going, what answer she was looking for. I kept looking at her in silence, because I didn’t know what to say: it wasn’t really a meaningful question to me. “What will you do when things don’t go your way?” was the rephrasing she offered, meaning to clarify her point but just making it harder to explain that we were at odds in ways she wasn’t likely to accept.

“Relaxation” was what I said, because Relaxation was one of the therapy groups I got wheeled to twice a week, and it was true that I found it useful; the group leader talked everybody through inner journeys to weird places, like a lake in the forest, and you were supposed to go there in your mind and feel at peace. It worked, in a way, though I always saw other things in the forest, which I kept to myself.