John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van

I sit there reading, and reading, and reading. I take the cash or checks they send and tuck them away into a money pouch I’ll take down to the bank once a month. Some players write long letters that narrate their next move in great detail, explaining why they’re doing one thing and not another, guessing at the perils of going the wrong way; others are just a sentence, or a fragment of one. Leave silo and scope out street. Head for hills. Interrogate the traitor.

Decrypting the letters is like detective work, but it’s also like surgery: there’s a lot of connective tissue, and some of it’s wet and messy. People get invested in the game. They scatter details of their daily lives throughout their narratives; some friend who used to play the game but is gone now, God knows where — dead? lost? got too old? — will appear mid-letter, a ghost whispering an idea to the player as he writes. If Jeff were playing, he’d probably attack the guard, but I’m not Jeff, so I’m going to wait until the guard falls asleep and remove the grating in the floor of the cell. Things like that. Who’s Jeff? Did I know him? I extract the necessary information from the greater narrative, and I pull the corresponding next move from the filing cabinet.

Every move I send out begins with the same word: You. When I first wrote most of them, so long ago now that it’s incredible to think of it, I had in my mind only a single player, and of course he looked almost exactly like me: not me as I am now, but as I was before the accident. Young and fresh and frightened, and in need of refuge from the world. I was building myself a home on an imaginary planet. I hadn’t considered, then, how big the world was; how many people lived there, how different their lives were from mine. The infinite number of planets spinning in space. I have since traveled great distances, and my sense of the vast oceans of people down here on the Earth, how they drift, is keener. But you , back then, was a singular noun for me, or, at best, a theoretical plural awaiting proof.

I went through my plural yous now. I sent one guy off to find a brass bowl for the eventual gathering of venom from the jaw of the scorpion widow herself, and I let another sweat through a long night on the beach at Crete, waiting for Nazis. I was taking my time about it, and I knew why, even though in my head I’d told myself: I’ll just go back to my life as it was, back to the land of spectral effects. Nothing is really different now.

I have a deep need for stasis and for the most part I’ve gained it, over time. Even after the recent assaults my shield zone remained fairly strong. So I wanted to be telling myself the truth about where, in the state of play, I stood this morning. But I’d recognized a postmark going through the pile, and I’d set that one aside, knowing what it was going to be about. I try not to be dramatic about my life, no matter what turns it takes. There’s nothing down that road for me. But I took a little breath, worming the tip of my index finger in under the seal and then ripping the envelope open down the side.

Hey Focus dude. Hope everything’s cool with you. I’m just going to keep playing if that’s OK. Maybe that seems weird to you I don’t know. After all the stuff. It’s not your fault you know, it isn’t anybody’s fault. There was other stuff going on with us not just the game. It’s a whole thing you couldn’t even know about. I am glad the judge dropped the lawsuit it was bullshit anyway. OK so I pick up the shovel by the disposal unit and start digging, all right? When we dug back in Tularosa it worked out all right. Anyway let me know what I find I am pretty sure there will be some antidote there. Love, Lance

It doesn’t have anything to do with me, I thought. Just out on the edges, maybe. I am in a unique position to understand that. But back down where the old me lived, somewhere near the brain stem where everything gets basic, I could see how Lance would want to just forge forward. It seemed less crazy to me than it would have seemed to his parents. I picked out the “Dig Near Unit” move from the filing cabinet and I stuffed and sealed the envelope. I wrote getting close! over the seal. And I noticed that the envelope would be going to Lance in care of somebody else — a neighbor? a friend from school? I didn’t know; I didn’t need to know. I let the moment sort of evaporate as I slid the stuffed envelope into the tray marked outgoing. And I thought, you know, maybe tomorrow I will go to the park, or if not tomorrow, next week. I should go to the park, just to sit in the park and look at the world. I am working too hard, not that I mind. But I need to get out more. I’ll go to the park and just sit, and see what comes up.

It was Teague I thought of when I first drew up the Tularosa fortune shack, and it was his face I saw when I dreamed up the astrologer inside it. I knew Teague from junior high. We’d gone to different elementary schools, but everybody in town got dumped into the same junior high. It was a scary place. Some of the kids from the other schools were bigger, meaner; you had to spend a lot of energy trying to avoid them. Teague was kind of short. His shoulders were starting to broaden, but he wore his hair long, and it opened him up to a lot of grief. Kids threw food at him when he walked through the cafeteria. He never even looked back at them.

We had Composition I together but Teague sat by himself, his head hanging low. Everybody called him Tits; they’d say it a bunch of times to try to make him look up. He’d be sitting there, eyes down, head tucked, pencil working, worlds away, when the hissing would start up. Just this through-the-teeth whispering chant, almost empty of meaning: not Teague, you suck , or Teague, fuck you , or anything. Just Tits over and over. During tests it sounded like a forest at night in the classroom. Voices rising singly or several at a time from the focused quiet. Tits. Tits. Titssss.

I didn’t call Teague Tits , because I wasn’t any more popular than he was: I was just better at staying invisible. Sometimes he and I sat together on the metal tables over by the date palm in a corner of the lunch yard. He collected these handcast metal figurines of characters from The Lord of the Rings and he’d show them to me if I asked. I’d find him sitting there combing intensely through a stack of magazines with his right hand while holding a neglected sandwich in his left. He always looked like a guy who wanted to be left alone, but we’d talked about movies a couple of times in class and I felt like we were on the same side. I’d leave a little distance between us when I sat down just in case I was reading him wrong.

One day I was working on a slab of beef jerky and leafing through a book while I ate; it was Fritz Lieber’s Swords Against Death. After a while, I noticed Teague peering over at me. He’d stopped looking at his magazines; all his attention was on me. It was like he was looking at a bug that’d been flipped over onto its back.

“What,” I said when I noticed him.

“What’s that book?” he said.

“ Swords Against Death ,” I said.

He looked down at the cover, which had a boat on it and a monster with a trident rising out of the ocean. “Is it supposed to spell sad ?” he said after a while.

“Is it … what?” I said.

“ Sad ,” he said. “ Swords Against Death. ” He tapped his index finger on my book, three times, harder than he needed to. “Look down the left side, that spells SAD .”

“I don’t think that’s on purpose,” I said.

“It’s probably on purpose,” he said. “They put a lot of things onto the covers of books and stuff.” I didn’t know what to say to that; Teague, with his figurines and his bound notebooks bulging with sketches of imaginary mountain ranges or mysteriously numbered dodecahedrons, their lines meticulous, was someone whose opinion I valued. He wasn’t a big talker. When he spoke it carried weight.