I drifted off into the sanctity of my earliest, angrier visions of the Trace Italian as the screen dimmed and flashed. A band of thieves led by the newly crowned king heading through mountains that looked identical to the ones a few miles north of my house. The quest to recover the kidnapped queen from the clutches of the beast. Distractions that killed people: kindly old wizards possessed by things that turned their eyes black and left their bodies empty shriveled husks atop the swamp. Calm marshlands from whose mists steel-clad killers rose suddenly, their muffled electronic screams grabbing hold of something inside me that was basic, primal, essential. The nearing of the goal. Dark caves. Lava streams that reminded me, and only me — but what was the difference — of the little fountain that used to flow at the center of Montclair Plaza. The battle of the king against the beast for his kingdom and its spoils. The worm left in the king’s brain, and in mine, by the few things the beast says before going down howling, felled by a magical throwing star that only the king could wield.
What the movie was really about was ambition, and what a fine thing it could come to seem, given the right light. It was about coming of age, and the rich reward waiting for those who went through it with courage. The brave and true of heart prevailed, and the usurpers got their due. One world escaped the slavemaster’s grasp. The wicked went down to perdition and the good folk prospered.
It was too high-minded to satisfy my seething adolescent brain, whose permanent thirst for blood I’d been hoping to feed, I now realized. And I wondered why I’d want to feed a monster I’d spent much of my adult life trying to bury; but I set that question off to one side. Because the story wasn’t the point, wasn’t what was troubling me. It was the little details, the stage on which it was set, the margins. The trappings of the greater story — the props, the scenery, the special effects — those were what held me, what spoke to me. In them I recognized the guessed-at originals of my crude early visions, the ones that would grow over time. The caves, the castle, the final battleground: these were all signposts on the road to the Trace.
But the Trace that Lance and Carrie’d found did not teem with lush growth or offer breathtaking vistas. There were no swamps to pass through en route to it, and it had not terminated in any final confrontation with some immense evil made flesh, towering arrogant and glowing in the sky above them. There had been at Lance and Carrie’s sides no parties of fellow travelers, noble thieves, or inevitable tragic figures, joined together in common or disparate cause toward one victorious end. The terminus of their dreams, whose architecture may or may not have originated in me, had been a burrowing into dead earth. Its conclusion was neither climax nor punch line; it wasn’t even a conclusion at all, except for Carrie. It was a headline in The Wichita Eagle. One Dead, One Critical in Sci-Fi Game Pact. The young king with his eyes toward the open mouth of the serpent, its voice cavernous: You have chosen a paltry kingdom on an insignificant planet.
6
The worst part of the hearing was I guess the presentation of the various artifacts, the unboxing of the bits and pieces that the prosecution had rounded up preparing for trial. Testimonials and letters, various receipts. Rough ideas in fabric. These were blueprints for a case no one would ever end up making, and their imagined barbs would go no further than the fat folders in which they’d been collated; they did find a home in me, though, and lodged there, like particles in a bedridden patient’s lungs.
There was for example a postcard bought at the Flying J, a point of origin determined from receipts found in the abandoned car. It had been written at a Qdoba, though, from whose window one could see the highway, and it had then been addressed to me; they knew this because the text on the postcard said so, and also because detectives had visited the Qdoba in question in the course of their investigation, where they’d asked the manager whether he remembered some teenagers stopping through and writing a postcard either before or after or during their lunch. Naturally the manager of the Qdoba didn’t remember any particular teenagers who’d had lunch there, but he did volunteer to ask his employees whether any of them remembered anything. One of them, eventually, did remember something, or thought he did, and so the claims the postcard made for itself were allowed to be discussed without anybody arguing about it.
It was numbing, but only down to a certain level, past which there can be no numbness. Lance and Carrie had written: Got this postcard at a flying j but we’re at qdoba now. next time you hear from us we will be inside!! There was no need to reassemble the circumstances of the postcard’s purchase, its meaningless life on its way to me; it did that by itself. All that was left for me to do with it was hold it in my hands and answer a question or two: yes, the business to which this postcard is addressed is Focus Games; yes, I do business under that name; yes, I notice that there’s no stamp on the card; no, I couldn’t guess why it wasn’t stamped and sent (I wanted to guess, because I had some guesses, but my attorney had advised me against trying any of my guesses out loud). No, as I had told them all before, I had never been to Kansas. No, I did not know why Qdoba. No, I had never eaten at such a place, or mentioned it in passing in any of my correspondences with customers. Yes, I understood why they were asking me about the Qdoba. They were asking me because it was the last place anybody had ever seen Carrie alive.
Carrie’s parents had flown in from Orlando. They’d been staying in a motel by the freeway for weeks. It was a safe bet that their lawyer would have warned them by then about what to expect from my physical appearance, but unless you work in the medical field somewhere, you can’t really be prepared to meet me, I don’t think. It is always a surprise. It’s just not a thought people can get their teeth around, having to brace themselves to meet someone at whom it will be difficult to look while he’s talking but whose speech they will strain to understand.
They were brave. My lawyer and I entered the room; she nodded her hellos to the prosecutor and the judge while I kept my head low like I always do, and then we took our seats on our side of the table. Carrie’s parents — Dave and Anna; Anna and Dave: I could never decide how to pair them in my mind — fixed me with a look that I imagine had taken some practice, but which was sincere. There was not a whole lot of anger left in it, though traces lingered here and there: in the crow’s-feet by their eyes and the bags under them, say. In the way their eyebrows didn’t rise when they nodded. But the main thing their expressions indicated was a sense of duty. It pained me to think about it.
The judge read out a few things about the nature of pretrial hearings and about what we were here to do, and then things opened up a little: it was like a refereed argument between people who weren’t allowed to address each other directly. Their lawyer stated what their case essentially amounted to — that I’d contributed to the endangerment of a minor both directly and indirectly, and that this had resulted in the death of one and the grave injury of another: manslaughter and attempted manslaughter — and mine tried politely to say that you’d have to be crazy to blame anybody besides Lance and Carrie for what they’d done.
I focused on my breathing, because I knew my lawyer was eventually going to read my statement, and I wanted her to get it over with; I’d hoped it would come out right at the beginning, so that Dave and Anna could either accept it forgivingly or reject it scornfully, and then I’d at least know where I stood. Until they’d heard what I had to say, I figured, there wasn’t really any way of seeing their hand. It was impossible for me to imagine any scenario other than those two: total understanding or total denial. Either they’d get what I meant, or they’d shut their ears to it and we’d head down our sad road together. I didn’t see a third way.