John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van

“Good,” she said. “Thank you, Sean”; and so we moved on to the nurses, who talked about specifics of in-home aftercare, about having a night nurse at the very least in case of emergency, and asked my parents if they understood that changing dressings once a night was absolutely necessary for at least another twelve weeks, and so on. And then the conversation came around to someone I didn’t know, dressed in street clothes with a name tag that said J. CAMPBELL / TRANSITIONAL LIVING.

I could tell from how he engaged my parents that they’d met before. I personally had never seen him. He didn’t really ask questions; instead he gave a presentation about the place he worked. It had twenty-four beds, two to a room, and was for people who required various levels of care in transitioning from hospitals to — his phrase —independent living.

“After you turn eighteen, Sean,” my mother said.

I soaked up the fluorescent light of the conference room and looked at everybody sitting around the table, people who’d seen all sorts of situations. I wasn’t entirely sure what month it was anymore: were there eight months left before my birthday? Nine? I looked back at Mom, and I tried to think of a way to explain to her that I understood. That she was concerned for her son, hoping to do right by her son. But the picture she had of her son wasn’t anyone still walking the earth: that was someone who had been destroyed. His life had been real once, and had value and meant something. But all that was gone now, remade in shapes and forms she hadn’t come to understand just yet.

“It’s OK, Mom,” I said.

“I worry that you’ll be lonely,” she said; she was crying.

“I was going to be lonely anyway,” I said, which I didn’t mean to come out the way it did, but it did, and besides, it was true.

Lance took over the second letter from the newly formed alliance at about the halfway point, and Carrie never got it back. I’m pretty sure this was when I sort of let my guard down and let myself go, even though I knew better. Sometimes I guess you can’t help yourself. By the time Lance’s relentless scrawl started peaking at the end of the second page, he seemed to have forgotten that they were playing jointly; he talked about the interior of the game as if it were a place he’d escape from someday, and he wanted to remember to tell Carrie all about. She will freak! he said. I know she will. But OK look. Before I leave these dead guys in the dust I am going to put a mark on their masks. Just write LANCE there aren’t a lot of guys with my name anymore.

You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter. But I remembered Chris, who’d made it seem like it was safe, like it was OK once in a while. What harm was there, if things only happened in my mind? I had a moment’s pause, though, about writing somebody’s name on a mask that now concealed the face of a corpse. Lance’s fever was infectious, a live virus, even through the page, even across the time that had elapsed between his stuffing it into an envelope and my opening it twenty-seven hundred miles away.

But I did it anyway — I wrote Lance’s name on the mask; there was nothing to it. I drew a very crude picture of a supine body amid some broken boards, its masked face gazing out at the onlooker, LANCE on its forehead. The change was permanent for me; I didn’t rewrite the turn, but it was always different afterward, even in the otherwise unremarkable year-plus between then and the week when I learned that they’d both gone off the grid. I couldn’t remember a time when the body in the dust, whose presence compels the player to move on, hadn’t had a name knifed into its mask. It gets hard to keep track of time, tracing back to someplace and trying to be diligent about it; and I don’t even know why, really, I feel this drive for diligence or watchfulness, knowing already that there isn’t anything worth finding at the beginning, nothing that points to anything. But I keep checking anyway. Just in case.

He ended the letter on a personal note, a tendency that persisted until the letters stopped coming. He told me about the town he lived in and what it was like in summer. Kind of dead! he said. This is kind of the only thing there is to do around here, you ever feel like you’re going crazy sometimes! This is kind of the only thing there is to do around here. I had a terrible thought, which I am ashamed to have had, and which I will probably never be able to bring myself to write down.

Mom was crying again, trying to get my stuff together. It was time to go. They’d explained at the conference how I was going to need intensive treatment for at least the next year, and that it would be a while until they got a clear picture of how much reconstructive work would be possible. They talked about me, and my progress, in what was functionally the third person.

It had been the final discharge conference. I was leaving at five that afternoon; they were waiting to get some bloodwork back from the lab, stuff they technically needed to have on file in case anything happened to me later. I’d hurdled all the milestones for leaving weeks ago: I could walk steadily under my own power from a wheelchair to a bed; I could see clearly ahead of me, read an eye chart; my balance was improving. They’d fine-tuned the pain management profile so I could function while awake. The question of what exactly anybody was going to do with me remained.

A nurse’s aide wheeled me down to the conference room, a corner room with big windows and white metal blinds tilted open. Mom and Dad were already there waiting, dressed a little better than they might otherwise have been; a doctor I was pretty sure I knew — there’d been a lot of them; I was still pretty foggy a lot of the time — explained why we were there, and then the questions started. The social worker asked variants on her how-do-you-plan-to-spend-your-time question; she was trying to assess risk, it seemed really obvious. “What are your outlets?” was the way she phrased it this time.

“Working on a game,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “What else can you do besides games?”

“I am making my own game,” I said with some effort. I felt unexpected gratitude for the familiarity of the team. They understood me when I spoke. Outside of that small, exclusive club, no one would have been able to figure out what I was saying.

“For other people to play?” she said. I felt my vision making overtures toward the outside physical world, sensed the expanse of it. It felt unbelievably good.

“Yes,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows and wrote something on the form she had on the table in front of her, nodding as she did so: not at me, but toward the nurses and the doctor. Then, still writing, not looking up: “What’s changed since you came here?”

I thought hard; it was a good question. “I have bigger ideas,” I said. I felt very smart and proud of myself for this answer. It was true, but loose.

“Better ideas about how to cope with situations?”

If I’d had any front teeth, I would have bitten my lower lip hard. You could hear, in the questions they asked and how they asked them, that there were right answers, things they wanted to hear. You could also, if you thought about it, understand that this was a preview of what the outside world was going to be like for the foreseeable future.

I weighed a few responses against one another in my head. There was a bargain to strike somewhere. You pick your battles. “Just bigger ideas,” I said.

“What do you mean by ‘bigger’?” she said.

I looked at everybody. I stopped caring about what they decided to do with me long enough to say bigger again, and then the doctor moved the conversation along, and I understood that all the decisions had actually already been made and this conference was only a formality.