Wolf in White Van Read Online Free

shapes and the slow sweet life I built for myself when I finally got out and learned I wasn’t, thank God, welcome at home anymore. But eventually I locate what I’d known I’d find up there all along, what I’d been seeing already in brief seconds of lucidity arising from the murk of those nights become days and those days of no light. I see my own face. I see it as it was, preserved in stray signals too late to read right.
    I’m pretty sure that’s the lesson there was to learn in the hospital: the main one. And I’m pretty sure my play was the right one to make. Because the unnamed every-player who lies in the weeds at the moment of Trace Italian’s opening move—that’s me. It’s me. Motionless, ready for something, awake and aware. When the player gets up from the weeds, as he or she always does, because the first move is rigged and all players arrive persuaded that they must act, everything changes: He enters a world where danger’s everywhere. He has a goal now, something to do with his life. His map is marked; he’s headed somewhere as he rides down the desolate plain.
    But this is the point where we split, the player and I. He heads for the road to seek shelter or something to eat. But I remain in the stasis of the opening scene, bits of gravel sticking to my face, cold night coming on. I am strong enough to endure it. I am strong enough to remain in its arms forever. I won’t get up; I have seen the interior once. I’m not going back.One thing I’ve learned is it’s better sometimes, in the weeds, to resist the temptation to stand up and follow the compass.
    Years later when they made me look at pictures of Lance and Carrie I remembered Marco, the empty, incoherent prophecy I’d heard amid the chaos. For a second, as I flipped through the evidence, my long-forgotten hallucination became real, and I wondered how he’d managed to remain hidden for so long. What if I’d tried to talk to the doctors about him; why hadn’t my mind offered him up as a way to get them off my back? I’d had plenty of encouragement. “Who made you do this, Sean?” my father asked at my bedside, my hand in his. I thought then how nice it would have been to have a good answer ready to give to him, a little gift from son to father, something he could take to his friends by way of explanation. To blame Marco. To lay it at his feet.
    “Have you seen these people before?” the attorney asked me in the conference room, running through the planned stations of his performance, giving Carrie’s parents their money’s worth. He fanned several photographs across the table in front of me and waited for my reply. But they were impossible to understand, all of them and each of them; they belonged to a context that couldn’t be referenced outside of itself, incredibly important in one way and completely meaningless in another. They were artists’ renditions of somebody’s dream. What could I say? Sure I have, a long time ago. You wouldn’t understand.

3 There are games I’m prouder of than Trace Italian but it doesn’t really matter how I feel. Trace Italian is what built Focus Games, and if people know my name at all, Trace Italian is why they know it. It was my first idea; they say your first ideas are your best ones. I think it’s maybe dangerous to think that way all the time. But when I remember finally building Trace Italian, seeing how it was actually going to come together and really work, then I know what people mean about their first ideas being the best. There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.
    I’d harbored the Trace concept for a long time—I think I was inspired by a commercial for an old board game called Stay Alive. It starred a bunch of kids playing on a beach; there were no adults around, and waves crashed angrily against rock cliffs nearby. The children pushed or pulled levers on a playfield, opening holes in the board as they did so; eventually all marbles on the board except one