John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van

People were always saying how ugly Southern California was, especially when they came back from their summer vacations. They said it looked plastic or fake or whatever, and talked about all the cool things they saw in Ohio, where their grandparents lived. Or in Pennsylvania. The wall behind the arcade was made of giant sparkling white bricks, just like all the other buildings connected to it. There was graffiti on it, indecipherable gang writing. It was dark now and getting a little cold and then the super-bright lights they have behind stores to keep bums from sleeping by the dumpsters came on, and I thought, people who don’t think Southern California is the most beautiful place in the world are idiots and I hope they choke on their tongues.

Mom was in her purple nightgown when I got home. It was about 9:30. There was another TV in the bedroom and Dad was back there watching. I could hear it. Mom asked how studying went and I said, “Great,” and she asked what we studied and I said, “American history.” She told a story about her history teacher in high school, and my head was so full of other stuff it was hard to listen, even though it wasn’t like I didn’t care. But I had to struggle to pay attention.

“What have you got there?” she said.

“One of those free magazines,” I said. I handed it to her. She looked at the cover, her eyes sleepy but focusing hard.

“ ‘Who Hid the Dead Sea Scrolls?’ “ she said. “Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

“I guess,” I said.

“Are you going to join up with the Jehovah’s Witnesses?” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was teasing, or just talking like you do when you get too tired, or if she was trying to see what was up with me. She was asking a lot of questions lately. I felt one of those urges I always got when I was younger and that I still get sometimes: to just say something for the explicit purpose of blasting a hole through the conversation. We’re all witnesses except me. I’m an unaligned cleric. She leafed through the pages.

“The picture on the front, I just liked it,” I said. “And the Dead Sea.”

“ ‘Its glory is like a blossom of grass,’ “ she read from The Watchtower , which I must have underlined sometime during the next hour or two, possibly, I’m not sure; as I say it’s possible the underlining was already in there when I picked it up, I don’t remember.

Later, when it was late, I thought about taking out the whole house at once, and I rode that idea like a wave for ten or fifteen minutes; everybody was asleep, if I was quick nobody’d even have time to feel afraid or confused. I was a good shot, I could make it painless. How long would I stand, a new creation, blood-flecked and alone in the noiseless dark? The police would find me standing silently there, motionless, waiting for them to take their turn. There, at the far end of the hall with their pistols raised, commands I’d never hear issuing fruitlessly from their straining jaws, their voices lost in the all-consuming quiet … Whose uniforms are those? Who do you represent? I got as far as the door to my parents’ room and I stood outside it, stock in hand. My breathing was shallow now; I heard it whistling from my nose and I felt the rifle stock rising, falling, rising, gently, evenly, barely perceptible except yes, as my shoulder followed the expanse and descent of my chest. All stillnesses amplified to a tritone hum. I contemplated my mission there, right on the threshold, but all honor had gone missing from it, too many threads came loose and couldn’t be drawn back in. And so I thought about what was important to me: about how I would want to be remembered, about the totality of my vision realizing itself now under the heavy pressure of the moment but remaining true, still true, to the impermeable solitude of its origins.

And I remembered Conan, the real one: how he conquered with honor, how his code cohered. People don’t usually understand this when I try to explain it, which is why I’ve stopped trying, nor will never try again, no, not in courtrooms nor in conferences: but when it came down to the actual moment, I was trying to make the right decision. I can never trace all the paths back to it clearly enough to know for sure if I did, or not; I know there must be other navigable paths where either nothing happens, that night or later, or where, when the idea to just pull the curtain on most things and then on everything just because crosses my mind, I let the moment pass, and I go to sleep like everybody else did on my street that night. I finally get my own car, and I graduate with my class, and eventually I either go to college or get a job, and somewhere off in the hidden gullies of the future I’m a good dad to a kid who looks like I did when I was small. How his grandparents beam. Or maybe instead I just stay up in my room, picking out swords from the Brazilian catalog, and I send off for them, only then two weeks later they’re here, the falchion blunt in its aspect like a hand-hewn machete, and the great Sword of Attila, dull golden horns sprouting from the head at its hilt and blank dead empty eye sockets pinkie-wide in the bulging forged face beneath, hollow negative space palpable when I close my palm around the hilt and head out into the moonlight, naked to the waist, going house to house, gore streaming from my blade as I emerge: my blade Who in its infinite mercy leaves no sign of its passing on those whom it favors, yet woe, woe to those in whom no favor is found; or maybe I get the swords, but then I just hang them on the wall, and there they sit, mute, domesticated, blameless, and years later Mom calls: “What do you want me to do with these swords, you left them in your room when you moved out, if you want I can put them in the garage sale,” and I tell her she can do whatever she wants with them; I’m a different person now. I saw it then briefly, and I see it clearly now, but these possibilities are lost in the play, hidden somewhere in the hills of Hyborea, diamonds stuffed into the hollows of stripped skulls and spirited by night into a far corner of a distant cave above the plains where I drank in the lush vistas of the inner gardens, seen by no one, clear to no eye. The pulsing bare light in which they grew, its dull glow eternal, originating who knew where, pale and diffuse. Wild tendrils seeking the outer walls of the circular room, climbing the Plexiglas toward no light. Behind me the titanium door auto-locked; a cool mist began to drift from somewhere in the latticework. All at once the air hissed: first within, and then from the halls beyond. I heard the voices of the guards, their code language cracking in desperation. They were kicking at the door. But the inner gardens, made safe centuries ago for no recorded purpose, can only be entered at the appointed hour. For days I would plot my escape, breathing clean air, consulting the illustrated booklet about edible plants I’d gotten in trade for bullets.

There was a summer-long gap between me and all the stuff that was supposed to happen next; I now saw, nested within that gap, possibilities without number. Infinite futures. I am a musician on a stage somewhere, my instrument singing in tones so universal that the masses howl their accord in places near and far: Reseda, New York, Japan; or else I escape through a bedroom window three minutes from now and careen through the streets, crazed, lost, locked inside the person in whose image I have remade myself; or I am no one, driving a delivery van carrying boxes of electronics from nowhere to no place, the road empty before me by day, shared by headless headlights after dark, beams increasing briefly and then gone, beyond, somewhere off in the cross-traffic, catchable in the rearview if I dare. I thrive. I fail to thrive. I fall. I rise. Too many. Too late. Not that, not those, not these: this.