It was difficult, that day, to remain in the moment. I wanted her to know how I felt, thinking of Lance where he was now: in a place called Casa Central, some physical rehabilitation center for adolescents. Most of his fellow patients had survived more sudden traumas than his: car accidents, house fires. His problems had a better shot at total resolution, but in the immediate present they were as bad as anybody’s. He’d spent days down in a shallow pit without food, with only forming ice to suck for water. Now he lay on a burn recovery bed all day hoping that feeling would return to his legs from the knees down, his face salved and wrapped, everybody praying that enough attention would encourage some of the skin to grow back.
As best as I can put it together, this is what I can tell you about Lance Patterson: he was born to a couple in their mid-twenties who had been married for several years. His father worked the evening shift at some Winter Park assembly line that made parts for machines; his mother was a substitute in the grade schools. His family was a good family; they weren’t rich, but they all lived together and stayed in one place. Of course I only knew him through the mail, but I imagined him as an awkward boy with too much energy. His teachers liked him, and they told him so; I know this because he mentioned it once when he said that the other kids his age didn’t like him but his teachers were nice. He spent his afternoons after school hanging around the house, watching television and keeping himself entertained. He had a few friends, all casual, but was personally somewhat guarded; when Carrie came into his life, a corner of the world he’d only ever dreamed about was opened for him. I learned about this corner of his world when he brought her into the game, which he’d only been playing for a few months. Is it OK if I have a partner playing with me who can just start where I’m at? he wrote. Can we just say I found her hiding somewhere? I didn’t see why not; I couldn’t write a special turn for it, but I wrote at the top of his next turn: You have been joined by a young technician who can help you tap the aquifer.
He was not unusual in sending me bits and pieces of his life; that, in part, was what contributed to my horror at the whole situation. There might have been others like him about whom I’d never heard, people whose play had taken them into lightless hallways: What of them? They found their way out and disappeared. Or they never said anything and kept on playing. What did I know about these people, about anybody anywhere whom disaster hadn’t struck? There was Chris, he was all right. But generally the only way we ever know anything about anything is if something goes wrong. Knowing this is hard for me.
“This is a picture of a boy named Lance,” I said to Vicky, out of nowhere, while she was straightening things up. “He plays that game you always see me working on.” I felt like a man leaving a spaceship for the surface of a new planet; it is pretty rare for me to feel that sort of need so many seem to have, that irresistible desire to tell somebody else what they’re thinking. I hadn’t talked to Vicky about the lawsuit; for several reasons I tend to keep my conversations with people limited to basic, pleasant things like the weather or which kind of macaroni and cheese tastes the best.
“Oh?” said Vicky. Back in my own trauma ward days I knew several social workers who could have learned a thing or two about reflective listening from Vicky.
“Yeah,” I said. She was making my bed for me hospital style, tight corners and accordion folds. “He’s in the hospital now but he’s been playing Trace Italian for almost three years. Him and his girlfriend. She died.”
“I’m real sorry,” she said, “to hear it.” I could see her taking the measure of me, noticing how talkative I was today. “How is he getting by, now?”
“He’s—” I looked for the word, and for a few seconds while I looked, I considered her question, the depths of understanding that seemed to have formed its words: How many people had she taken care of whose problems involved getting by or not getting by in so many hundreds of different degrees? “He’s managing,” is what I came up with. She came over and sat down beside me, getting her dressing-changing things together on a tray, and she waited for me to continue.
“He went a long time without food or enough clothes to keep him warm,” I said. “He was in a place a long way from his home and he didn’t know how cold it got there, and by the time he figured it out, it was too late. He tried to save his girlfriend, they say, but she was trying to save him, too, and she didn’t make it. They liked to read the same books together, and see the same movies and talk about them; he used to write to tell me about the things they liked to think about. I don’t think he really knows how to think a few steps ahead, you know.”
“Young people can’t think ahead,” she said. She was opening up some Betadine swabs.
I laughed my little wet throat-laugh. “I know,” I said; “you know I know. I keep hoping he won’t blame himself too much for being stupid. I mean, he is a little stupid, I think, but to me that’s not a bad thing to say about a person. I’m a little stupid but I’m all right. Lance is young and stupid though, I guess. That’s two strikes.”
“Now, now,” said Vicky.
“He likes to play video games but he hasn’t got any sensation in the pads of his fingers anymore so he can’t feel them pressing on the buttons, and he says it feels weird, so the games aren’t as fun. The first thing he thought of when his girlfriend died was what she’d want him to do, how to keep the memory of her happy in his imagination. What a sweet kid,” I said. My face stung. “They met in junior high school band; she played the flute, I guess, and he was in the drum section, and they went to the movies together a lot.” I wanted to give Lance a better biography, but all l really had at the ready were some bare bits and details: the parts he hadn’t been able to stop himself from mentioning, the pieces of himself that flew from him naturally like sparks from a torch.
“Well, he sounds like a nice boy,” said Vicky, straightening my collar for me. The sun was cresting the cypresses that line the walkway, and a clean warm light had filled the room. It’s hard not to feel good in that kind of light. I nodded, and I looked at her and felt such gratitude to have her around. I was happy to know her in my small, formal, dependent way. And I felt a ravenous grief for nice boys who are too stupid to take care of themselves, and too dumb to remember to check the surrounding brush for snakes before settling down to sleep for the night.
9
They freeze up when I open the door. You can see it happen. They’re in a sort of imagined forward motion, ready to launch into whatever pitch they’ve come to give, and then the sight of me arrests them mid-swing. Wielding this kind of power feels different from what I imagine people who crave power think they’ll get if they ever get their wish. Because this … this can’t be what people want. Or maybe it is, and I just don’t really understand how power works, I think sometimes. But then I think about it some more, and I think: Yes, I do know something about what power is, how it works. What it’s like. I do know.
“Sean Phillips?” is what the process server said, already holding up the summons in front of his face like a shield. He was in his early twenties. I don’t think anyone had warned him about adjusting his expectations. Probably he was working through a whole sheaf of cases, nameless after a few hours on the clock, one indistinguishable from the next. I assume that you end up seeing all sorts of people in the course of your workday in a job like this; in any job, really. But “all sorts of people,” in most lives, is a spectrum with fairly narrow extremes. If your job involves knocking on doors, your parameters might begin on the far end with a man who answers his motel room door naked and dripping wet, and on the other side you might find some guy who tries to tip you when you leave. If you go out on religious work, I imagine you learn early that some people are glad to see you and other people are mad. I am different; I’m outside all that. People don’t expect to meet me. They don’t know they have expectations, but I show them by counterexample what their expectations were. I had old music from my teenage years playing loud on the stereo when the process server found himself having to decide whether to look at me or not.