Wolf in White Van (15 page)

“By the time you’re nineteen, Sean. They say you’ll be walking unassisted when you’re nineteen.”

It would be a long time to keep me at home, I knew.

“If I can find a place to live by myself, will insurance pay?” I said. I had been around for enough insurance talk to understand that this was a big part of my future picture: who would pay for it. How I’d eat. When I asked this question, Dad looked at me like he was looking at a grown-up. I felt proud.

“They would,” he said. “If you can find work, insurance will pay for your care, but otherwise you have to be at home for them to pay. I just can’t see how you find a job with your—with your face—with your face like it is.”

It was the first time either of them had said something so direct about how I looked, about how I was always going to look. Dad’s little pausing stutter only slowed him down a little; I felt impressed with him, proud of him. I wanted to tell him. There was no way to tell him.

“I know I can figure something out if I can just have a little more time at home,” I said, remembering my intensive care bed in the dark, the patterns in the ceiling, the infinity I’d learned I had in my head. I imagined a quiet future in an imaginary
world where nothing ever really happened but everything seemed charged with life.

Mom looked at Dad; if she meant to convey any message to him in her look I couldn’t read it.

“We can go home from here and talk about it for a while,” Dad said after a long minute. “We don’t have to decide anything today.”

It was too quiet for everybody. Mom started gathering my books from the cheap nightstand with its floor-scraping wheels.
Conan the Freebooter. Conan of Aquilonia. Conan of the Red Brotherhood.

Skulls in the Stars.

16
They’re riding toward me now. They bear the mark of the captive on their forearms. These are men from a degraded oceanside kingdom somewhere far off, back where I come from, maybe: hunters with no personal interest in their bounty, conscripted into service by want or need. There’re two of them; one gestures toward me, his finger arrow-straight in the oncoming Kansas dawn. He has seen the tangled mass of new growth on my chest. I’m standing there shirtless, wide open, all my weapons long since traded for food or medicine, corn-stubble on the hard winter earth, the thousand kings of the strewn territories as good as dead, drained, ad hoc leather cuffs tied to sticks swinging saddle-side. They’re coming for me. There is an opening in the ground. I can stand and fight, or I can drop down. I have come too far to let myself be captured.

It was back when I was twenty-three, I think. Maybe twenty-two. From my own perspective my life was unremarkable. The pity strangers visibly felt for me, the unmistakable physical
flinches they gave off on seeing me, were like map markings suggesting some present horror. But in my own eyes I was normal. Here and there, alone, reflecting, I’d bump up against what felt like a buffer zone between me and some vast reserve of grief, but its reinforcements were sturdy enough and its construction solid enough to prevent me from really ever smelling its air, feeling its wind on my face. There must be others like me who struggle more than I do. It makes me sad to think of them.

I got a phone call, anyway.

“A colleague of mine has been working on this new surgical technique people are having pretty good results with,” said my old doctor. “He’s had several patients, burn patients, you know, people with really significant trauma, and they’ve been able to live a, you know, a less secluded life.”

I put on my glasses and I looked in the mirror.

Chris told me about the scalpel and the cyst as he prepared to launch an assault on the men in the gas masks by the overpass. Almost nobody began their play by attacking the cleanup guys; it was a nearly suicidal move. But Chris’s involvement in the game, the intensity of it, was so total from the outset that it was hard to know what to think about it. I pictured him acting out his dreams in real space, pantomiming his moves in a room somewhere before he wrote them down.
I’ve got this cyst on my arm
, he wrote;
it’s gonna be a problem but I grabbed a scalpel off a crashed ambulance when the fallout hit.
It was shocking stuff; this was his first full move.

I actually had a scalpel in the kitchen. I saw someone use
one on a cooking show once and it looked cool, and since I have to get gauze and Betadine from the medical supply store every so often, I’d picked one up the next time I went in. They didn’t blink.

I used it once or twice to peel some oranges, and then I kept it on the desk for a while for opening letters. Using a scalpel to open my mail was a little more theatrical than I’d usually get in my daily life, the sort of thing people might imagine about me that wouldn’t turn out to be true. But really it was an accident. It sounds sad to say “It gave me something to do,” but it gave me something to do.

It’s gone now, anyway. I sent it to Chris a few turns after he’d described his impromptu surgery. I ought not to have done this; I am pretty careful to avoid acting on the spur of the moment. But it felt like a fun and probably harmless improvisation, a tiny thing conceived of on a moment’s notice. Still, I’d had to pack it up in bubble wrap, and find the right sort of box, and sending it required a trip to the post office instead of just placing a stuffed SASE in the mail slot on the door. That so much planning was necessarily involved is troubling to me; I don’t like to think about it.
I can tell this is the wrong move I don’t care!!
Chris had written at the end of that first turn.
I can’t play through this with this burly knot on my arm!!!
And immediately, wide-eyed, I’d seen the playfield as it must have looked to him, really letting myself take in the full view of it through what felt like his eyes.

He never mentioned it again; I thought I understood why. It was a question of style. I put it, for the most part, out of my mind. Sometimes I’d remember when his turns would get long and intricate.
I get out the scalpel to kill snakes but there aren’t
any snakes actually in snake landing so I look pretty stupid
, he wrote once. No you don’t, I thought before I could stop myself from thinking it. No you don’t.

At home we worked out the mechanics of my situation, setting terms; my parents were very angry with me, and would stay angry for a long time. The air in the house would stink of blood forever; we’d breathe it as long as we lived there; new carpets didn’t really help. There was nothing anybody could do about it now. Even if I could’ve explained myself, anything that felt like an overture toward pressing the issue was visibly too painful for them to stand.

I would take the California High School State Proficiency Exam; this was an important point to both of them. I would go to therapy weekly, all of it: physical therapy, talk therapy, the dermatologist. I’d talk to the job placement people whose contact information the social worker had sent home with the discharge papers, and if they found me work, I’d take it to save up money. Dad would work out my monthly payout with the insurance people and send it directly to me to help with rent once I’d found a place. I told them about the game I’d come up with in the hospital, how I thought it might bring in a few hundred dollars a month if people liked it; they didn’t really try to hide their doubts, but they said that if it came to something, they’d support me in it. In a canvas tote from the hospital I had the papers I’d put together framing the full expanse of the Trace. They bulged in notebooks and folders that bore the hospital’s name and its little futuristic logo, a stylized cross that doubled as a letter.

Over the course of the next month the house took on its own atmosphere, like a terrarium for fragile plants. I worked in earnest all day and into the night, sketching maps, writing turns. I stayed inside; the sun rising and setting outside my bedroom window became the sun of the Trace Italian, climbing the sky to illuminate the wasted plains of the near future, sinking down behind the western hills at night and leaving endless streaming dark in its wake. After I’d become adept with crutches, and later, when I walked, I’d go out to the front porch in the morning sometimes before the rest of the world was awake, thinking about the elaborate architecture of my invented world, how most of it lay east of here, in places I’d never see. Sometimes I’d turn my head left to look a little north, which always felt like the direction of the cold to me; ever since I was a kid and heard about the North Pole, where the snow never melted, I’d feel chills looking up toward Mount Baldy.

Chris followed a northward path when he first started playing. Lance and Carrie did the same thing a few years later. I took note of it at the time, but it was a connection I drew in the wrong place, like a surgeon putting an X on the wrong leg just before somebody fires up the saw.

I don’t save everything. It would be impossible to save everything. From the busiest days of the game, starting in the summer of 1990, there’s almost nothing left. Once I had boxes full of excited dispatches from across the country and occasionally even farther off: Mexico, Canada, Germany. But I cleaned and culled and thinned, and things lose meaning over time.

I grabbed a copy of
The Watchtower
from a small stack left on top of a
PennySaver
dispenser outside the Golden Arcade on the day of the accident, though, and I’ve saved it in a shoe box I keep near my desk. There’s a story called “Who Hid the Dead Sea Scrolls?” in it. It has underlined phrases and half-sentences running through its three short paragraphs:
Sets out to reveal. Brought the bundles or sackfuls of texts from the capital to the desert caves for hiding. “All flesh is like grass, and all its glory is like a blossom of grass.”
I don’t remember reading it or underlining anything, which troubles me, which is sort of why I keep it.

I used to save these Xeroxed handbills some crazy person attached by thumbtack to local telephone poles warning about the imminent colonization of Earth by aliens; there’s a few of these in the box, too, and some toys from the cheap toy dispensers you find in grocery stores. There are, finally, a few tapes, things a little too close to the bone for me to listen to but which I don’t want to throw away; and a letter from Chris from right around when he started reaching depths I hadn’t really foreseen. The turn he was answering had ended,
You see the horde of misshapen half-human creatures on bony horses. North toward Oregon they ride, always at night or in the waxing dusk, evading the hungry outsiders who kill horses for meat and their riders for sport. You see packs slung astride the horses. There’s some brush just east.

These guys can’t touch me I’m going to live forever
, Chris says toward the end of his second page, preparing to hurl himself upward and face-first toward the riders who weren’t supposed to pose any threat, who had no designs on him down in the dirt in his overnight lair. I remember reading this letter
and closing my eyes, both seeking out and fleeing from the sharp memory it called up, unable to decide where to go, where to put the parts of myself it seemed to make manifest in the room.

“It actually starts with tissue removal,” he said, his voice getting livelier. “Because we—they—when you have a post-trauma reconstruction like the one you initially did, what they do is they take what’s left and then reshape it, and they graft skin and in your case bone and that’s how the reconstruction happens. But—and I don’t know where you, what you—what your thoughts are about surgery.”

I didn’t remember much about the early surgeries.

“Well, we used to heavily favor what’s called autografts, which is skin from the same patient, from somewhere else on your body. Or bone.” I knew about this. “But we have synthetic polymers now. And the equipment’s more accurate, which means we can work more quickly and get a much better result.” He took a breath, and I took a breath.

“It’s pretty dramatic,” he said, “some of the results.”

I was a little dazed; I usually start asking questions when I don’t know what to say, so that’s what I did. How many surgeries, how many sessions, how many times a week or month for how long.

“It varies,” he said. “It’s new. I don’t want to say it’s five sessions and then it turns out it’s ten. Or more. But four or five is sort of the starting point, it’s what we start out thinking about. It can be more. But it can be four, or five.”

“And how much—”

“We think insurance will cover a fair bit of it. But because—” When people break off I become immediately suspicious; I was suspicious. “Because it would be valuable to my colleague to practice his new technique, he thinks costs could be—”

This was a free shot.

“Well, we should meet up about it, anyway, sure,” I said, trying to sound as normal as I could: trying to make my reaction fit his expectations.

There was another little pause, a small emptiness, the distant sound of things he didn’t quite want to tell me yet. Or maybe not: I think sometimes I hear things as riddles that aren’t really riddles. “We should, yes,” he said with that tone of conclusion doctors get. “But if you’re interested I’d like to go ahead and schedule the first procedure, just to get you in there. It’ll take a few weeks to get the approvals process rolling. When surgeries are new the paperwork’s heavier. It won’t be much at all on your end, just a lot here in the office, but if we schedule it now we’ll be able to put the whole thing in motion.”

I said, “All right,” and he said, “Great,” but I had managed to do quite a bit of thinking between phrases, to look into various futures and think just enough about them to know if I liked them or not. I remembered the lights of the ambulance and the sound of the voices yelling. The chaos. The involuntary twitching in my toes, and the raw, open feeling all over my face. And then he said I should call the main office to make an appointment and to mention his name when I did, and that they’d “get me right in.” And he gave me the number, and I repeated it slowly as he went, doing my best to pretend I was writing it down.

Somebody’d parked a truck out in front with the windows down and the radio playing. It was really loud. The music was in Spanish so I couldn’t understand it; I only ever took one semester of Spanish and that was in the seventh grade. Sometimes if outside noise starts to bother me I’ll put some music on inside the house to blanket it over, or I’ll go to the park and feed squirrels, or maybe go get candy and hope it’s quieter when I come back. But for some reason I can’t pin down, I had a weird feeling of attachment to the music from the truck out by the curb. It wasn’t an intrusion; it belonged.

The driver was still in the cab: I saw him from my window. I was standing there taking in the early-morning breeze, these winds that’re native to Southern California, Santa Anas. They make the brush fires worse. His radio’d jolted me awake, but I didn’t really mind. He wasn’t singing along or nodding his head back and forth or smoking a cigarette or anything. He was sitting there staring straight ahead. Waiting for somebody, I guess. He was wearing some kind of work jumpsuit, like the guys at the auto shop wear, dull dark blue.

I had this rising premonition about him turning to look over at me, catching me in the act of sort of staring at him for no reason. It was a premonition with texture and heft, something I could almost taste; in my mind I saw his head begin to turn, casually, gradually but decisively, until his eyes found mine and held them. I stood ready for this to happen, wondering what I’d do, but he stayed put. He listened to the Spanish music and gazed out at the road ahead of him, steady through the windshield, and I got so worried he’d catch me that I began
faking movements, pretending to survey the rest of my outlook in a broad sweep from right to left: the front walkway, the hedges, the street. When I swiveled my gaze back toward him he was starting up the truck.