“Just don’t need it,” I said.
“Everything all right?” Dad said after he’d exchanged a look with Mom.
“Just too busy for TV,” I said, trying to telegraph a smile with my tone of voice, in a small nod of my head, and everybody caught the same good mood for once, a rare grace for us in those days, the sort of high note that inspired dangerous, inexplicable thoughts in me, which I kept to myself until I could get back to work.
BYPASS — HUSK OF SEMI — BRUSH — HIGHWAY — OFF-RAMP
BYPASS — BRUSH — HUSK OF SEMI — HUSK DEFENSE — BRUSH CLEAR — OFF-RAMP
BYPASS — MASK DROP — BRUSH — CAUGHT — GARAGE
BYPASS — MASK DROP — BRUSH — CAUGHT — COMBAT — GARAGE
GARAGE — DECOY — MAIN STREET — POST OFFICE
GARAGE — DECOY — MAIN STREET — MARKET
GARAGE — COMBAT — CAUGHT — GARAGE
GARAGE — COMBAT — CAUGHT — OFFSITE
OFFSITE — SOLITARY
ACTION 1–REASON
ACTION 2–DECEPTION
ACTION 3–MADMAN
ACTION 4–DIGGING
OFFSITE — CELLMATE — ITEM EXCHANGE
ITEM EXCHANGE 1–AMMUNITION — MAP SKETCH
ITEM EXCHANGE 2–AMMUNITION — RATIONS
ITEM EXCHANGE 3–SECONDHAND MAP SKETCH — RATIONS
ITEM EXCHANGE 4–SECONDHAND MAP SKETCH — MAP SKETCH
ITEM EXCHANGE 5–MASK — MAP SKETCH
ITEM EXCHANGE 6–MASK — RATIONS
ITEM EXCHANGE 7–MASK — INFORMATION
ITEM EXCHANGE 8–SECONDHAND MAP SKETCH — INFORMATION
OFFSITE — CELLMATE — COMBAT
SEIZE ALL ITEMS
NO INFORMATION
I think about lizards that puff out their necks, or those brightly colored frogs down in the Amazon, coated with neurotoxins, adapting to their surroundings, their needs. But my head’s not an evolutionary adaptation, so that’s not quite right. All my reshaped parts seem like they protrude now, or hang; it can’t be possible, I figure, but maybe they do, I haven’t measured. Everything looks bigger to me in the mirror now. And when people out in the world see me, something in their expressions reminds me of people looking up at buildings. Sometimes I sit by the window, but the chair by the window feels almost like a platform. The window frames my face in such a way that my head seems monstrously huge.
Still, I make a point of working there sometimes, even though, as I say, there isn’t so much work to do anymore. I thought about inventing a new game, but the Sean who built the Trace is as distant from me now as the Sean who blew his face off is from both of us. All three live in me, I guess, but those two, and God knows how many others, are like fading scents. I know they’re still there. I could find them if I needed them. But I don’t need them, and one of them survives only in bits and pieces. They certainly don’t need me. They are complete just as they are.
It’s one small thing I remember noticing in those months of building and making and drafting and plotting, something that seems less small over time: for a player to make progress, he has to pacify or destroy whoever’s in his way. Those people become part of his story: he can’t go back and breathe life into them, and whatever gains he gets from the wrecks he leaves behind are permanent in the sense that any other courses open to him beforehand will then become closed. So when I sketched the scene where a player, having been caught by warlord resource-hoarders and imprisoned in an improvised jail, could just kill his cellmate and get everything he might otherwise have spent six turns gathering, I didn’t feel right about it: it was directly rewarding a player for attacking somebody who hadn’t done him any harm, for doing the wrong thing. It saved the player all the work while giving him all the spoils. But I saw the bigger picture: that it was true. That to the player who intended to make it to safety, no one in front of him amounted to more than some stray marks on paper, half-real figures to be tunneled under or blasted through as you headed on east toward the spires.
VOORHEES — HUGOTON — ZIONVILLE — SURPRISE — KEARNEY — EMORY — WASHBURN — CORONADO
VOORHEES — VALPARAISO — IVANHOE — GARDEN CITY — LAKIN — KNAUSTON — MODOC–CORONADO
SHARON SPRINGS — EAGLE TAIL — HACKBERRY CREEK — SCOTT CITY — CORONADO
BLAIR — HURON — HORTON — WHITING — TRAIN TO TOPEKA — TRAIN TO KANAPOLIS — LYONS — GREAT BEND — NESS CITY — DIGHTON — SCOTT CITY — CORONADO
MANHATTAN — SALINA — KANAPOLIS — LYONS — GREAT BEND — NESS CITY — DIGHTON — SCOTT CITY — CORONADO
BIRD CITY — SHERMANVILLE — EUSTIS — EAGLE TAIL — SHARON SPRINGS — TRIBUNE — CORONADO
MONTERO — HECTOR — TRIBUNE — CORONADO
KANORADO — HORACE — LEOTA — CORONADO
COOLIDGE — CARLISLE — EMORY — FEDERAL — WASHBURN — CORONADO
JETMORE — PAWNEE VALLEY — PETERSBURG — SCOTT CITY — CORONADO
RICHFIELD — LAPORTE — EMORY — WASHBURN — CORONADO
RICHFIELD — DERMOT — ZIONVILLE — EMORY — WASHBURN — CORONADO
SHIELDS — CHEYENNE TOWNSHIP — SCOTT CITY — MODOC–CORONADO
CUTTS — ELLEN — SCOTT CITY — MODOC–CORONADO
ATWOOD — RAWLINS — COLBY — BOAZ — WALLACE — LEOTA — CORONADO
LAWNRIDGE — ITASCA — EUSTIS — HUGHES — COLBY — BOAZ — WALLACE — LEOTA — CORONADO
RED CLOUD — PHILLIPSBURGH — TIFFANY — DIGHTON — SCOTT CITY — CORONADO
FORT SCOTT — IOLA — YATES CENTER — EL DORADO — NEWTON — LYONS — LYONS — GREAT BEND — NESS CITY — DIGHTON — SCOTT CITY — CORONADO
CORONADO OUTER SHELL
CORONADO DAY WAIT
CORONADO NIGHT WATCH
CORONADO BREACH
CORONADO INNER
It’s a ghost town. I was little the first time I heard the term “ghost town”; I fell immediately in love. Coronado is still on all the maps, but to get there you’d have to crawl through Kansas forever. Still, if ever a testament is needed to the existence of the great fortress, the final stand, the place within which the search for some unnamed final shelter within the shelter would then begin and continue on forever and forever, it’s here. This is what it looks like; these are its girders and panels. It is visible. It exists.
TRACE VISIBLE
TRACE NEARER
TRACE BREACH
15
When Tim from therapy started talking about board and care facilities, I was barely listening, but it turned out he wasn’t just ticking off the options; that was actually the plan: every week there was a meeting called discharge conference, where my parents and I would sit down with my main doctor and one of the nurses and the therapist and the social worker, and we’d talk about how I was doing. The first discharge conference I attended had been the one where the doctor said: “Realistically, we don’t know how long Sean will need to stay here.” They hadn’t thought I could hear them through the painkillers, but I could. For a long while after that, discharge conference was more of a weekly progress report, but eventually they’d start asking me questions: about my plans for after I left, about what would be different.
“Different?” I said. “Different how?”
The therapist spoke up. “Different, like how will you deal with frustration?”
I was still pretty foggy a lot of the time; I was heavily medicated. But I saw where she was going, what answer she was looking for. I kept looking at her in silence, because I didn’t know what to say: it wasn’t really a meaningful question to me. “What will you do when things don’t go your way?” was the rephrasing she offered, meaning to clarify her point but just making it harder to explain that we were at odds in ways she wasn’t likely to accept.