Read Online Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: John Darnielle
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happens except inside our heads. But understand too that I have to defend myself and my creation that has brought pleasure to a few people over the years. The Trace is a good place. It is a place where people can go, in their imaginations. That is a good thing and while I’m sorry it went wrong for your daughter it is not wrong by itself.
By the way and against advice of counsel I want to say that Lance and Carrie were technically right. Of the four possibilities on the paper, the one that would have moved them in the direction they wanted to go was FORAGE FOR ROOTS. I don’t know why I want to tell you this. I know it doesn’t help my case. I just feel like I owe it to them to let you know. They were right to start digging. But they were only right to start digging in the game, not out in the real world. Not in Kansas in actual ground. I am so so sorry.
I had to fight to keep my bearings, hearing it read out loud; there’s a gap between things I write down and what they’d sound like if I were to try to say them. My grief sought out all parts of my body it hadn’t yet inhabited, and I felt like I might collapse in on myself right there, at last, spectacularly. I’d left out a lot of things I’d wanted to throw in: Chris Haynes, forinstance, how I felt like his exit proved there was nothing wrong with living in dreams as long as you didn’t let yourself get carried away. But I had been advised—”in the strongest terms,” they’d said, looking harder at me than most people ever dare, driving the point home as deeply as they could—to make no reference to other players, to anything anyone else had ever done inside the playfield. When I brought up Chris’s name, they’d held up their hands, no-thank-you style: counterexamples might end up being part of my defense, they said; it was “protected,” we could get to all that later if it went to trial. “Don’t get defensive,” they said. They meant
Don’t get mad.
I tried, but I felt the impulse moving: as I wrote, as I listened. Don’t these people know I’d never hurt anybody again? But I couldn’t let myself think like that. Too much terrain off out there. So I wrote what I wrote, and the clear, level voice of my lawyer presented it to the sterile field of the conference room, and I sat there as still as a stone.
Nobody looked at anybody else for a second. It was like a scene from a dream. And then my lawyer rose and said, Your honor, Lance’s parents aren’t here because they don’t believe my client bears any responsibility for their son’s current condition. She paused for a second, and then she presented the signed affidavits: Lance’s parents had written them and agreed to have them read at the hearing. Copies of the affidavits went around the table until everybody had one, and then we all followed along while the reporter read them into the record. The mood changed; Lance’s parents lived in a world far from the room where we seven had gathered. Their days were spent with terms like
long-term care
, and in the eternal tangle of insurance forms. They said that Lance had always had problems;they didn’t think Lance’s problems had been anybody’s fault, and besides, he had new problems now. They were more interested in the future than in the past, no matter how hard the past had been. They were putting all that behind them.
There was silence for a minute, and then the judge, a little crudely I thought, nodded toward Dave and Anna, saying, “Well, this makes your case a lot harder to make, I think,” and there were some concluding statements, but none of them really mattered. People rose to speak and sat back down again, but it was pretty obvious that none of it was going anywhere. You could feel something giving up in the air. Eventually the judge said he’d take a brief recess and come back with his decision, and we all went out into the hallway and milled around. My capacity for vanishing into whatever shadows happen to be around is
By the way and against advice of counsel I want to say that Lance and Carrie were technically right. Of the four possibilities on the paper, the one that would have moved them in the direction they wanted to go was FORAGE FOR ROOTS. I don’t know why I want to tell you this. I know it doesn’t help my case. I just feel like I owe it to them to let you know. They were right to start digging. But they were only right to start digging in the game, not out in the real world. Not in Kansas in actual ground. I am so so sorry.
I had to fight to keep my bearings, hearing it read out loud; there’s a gap between things I write down and what they’d sound like if I were to try to say them. My grief sought out all parts of my body it hadn’t yet inhabited, and I felt like I might collapse in on myself right there, at last, spectacularly. I’d left out a lot of things I’d wanted to throw in: Chris Haynes, forinstance, how I felt like his exit proved there was nothing wrong with living in dreams as long as you didn’t let yourself get carried away. But I had been advised—”in the strongest terms,” they’d said, looking harder at me than most people ever dare, driving the point home as deeply as they could—to make no reference to other players, to anything anyone else had ever done inside the playfield. When I brought up Chris’s name, they’d held up their hands, no-thank-you style: counterexamples might end up being part of my defense, they said; it was “protected,” we could get to all that later if it went to trial. “Don’t get defensive,” they said. They meant
Don’t get mad.
I tried, but I felt the impulse moving: as I wrote, as I listened. Don’t these people know I’d never hurt anybody again? But I couldn’t let myself think like that. Too much terrain off out there. So I wrote what I wrote, and the clear, level voice of my lawyer presented it to the sterile field of the conference room, and I sat there as still as a stone.
Nobody looked at anybody else for a second. It was like a scene from a dream. And then my lawyer rose and said, Your honor, Lance’s parents aren’t here because they don’t believe my client bears any responsibility for their son’s current condition. She paused for a second, and then she presented the signed affidavits: Lance’s parents had written them and agreed to have them read at the hearing. Copies of the affidavits went around the table until everybody had one, and then we all followed along while the reporter read them into the record. The mood changed; Lance’s parents lived in a world far from the room where we seven had gathered. Their days were spent with terms like
long-term care
, and in the eternal tangle of insurance forms. They said that Lance had always had problems;they didn’t think Lance’s problems had been anybody’s fault, and besides, he had new problems now. They were more interested in the future than in the past, no matter how hard the past had been. They were putting all that behind them.
There was silence for a minute, and then the judge, a little crudely I thought, nodded toward Dave and Anna, saying, “Well, this makes your case a lot harder to make, I think,” and there were some concluding statements, but none of them really mattered. People rose to speak and sat back down again, but it was pretty obvious that none of it was going anywhere. You could feel something giving up in the air. Eventually the judge said he’d take a brief recess and come back with his decision, and we all went out into the hallway and milled around. My capacity for vanishing into whatever shadows happen to be around is
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