Schneufel
Des reckoned the
party had already gone on long enough, but it was still too early to leave
without offending the others. It had turned out to be more of a multi-day
convention than a party, although the Wills, Laura and Joe, had distinctly called
it a “party” when they’d invited him. They’d promised an array of absorbing
board games, the kind that would take Des’s mind off questions having to do
with what Joe called the “heartless voids and immensities of the universe,” the
kinds of questions Des’s mind tended to drift to when not engaged in something
else. Friends of the Wills would be there, and Laura and Joe were sure everyone
would be thrilled they’d brought Des along.
He’d
always wondered what the Wills’ house looked like, figured it was sure to be
full of the most wretched kinds of curios he’d ever seen. Would it be ceramic
salt and pepper shakers glazed in the kinds of blues and whites you’d normally
see on Mary in old paintings of the Holy Family? Miniature windmills that wound
up to spin past idyls of maidens kissing shyly by dikes? Puppy statues made of
baked straw? Laura seemed the type, and Des had wanted answers.
But
the party hadn’t been in the Wills’ home at all. It was in the conference center
of a hotel, one of those nondescript boxed buildings that spring up near
industrial parks, with a pinkish faux granite exterior and a loopy cursive sign
almost too Baroque to read. Des had noticed it from the road once and only once
before, just because it made him wonder who would ever stay at a hotel like
that.
Turns
out, he would.
Sitting
at the table next to Des, Jung spun the donkerwheel. He was strong with a
permanently flushed face, and when he spun the wheel, it could take as long as
five minutes for it to finally run out of momentum and land on the sign that
told him where to move. Des didn’t understand why the game’s designers had
built the donkerwheel to spin for so long. It meant that a lot of the game was
full of dead space and waiting, like the creators hadn’t considered what it
would be like to actually play the game. The designers could have made it so it
maxed out at three rotations, or they could have just built a digital machine
with a button you pushed to tell you your fate. Instead, Des had some time to
kill, which he did, as he’d done so many times already by now, by examining the
mural on the ceiling of the conference room.
It
never ceased to amaze him how much actual care someone had put into it. It must
have been painted by someone who’d wanted to be a real artist, then realized a
hotel in an industrial park was the only patron they’d ever have, so they’d
decided to put everything they had into it. How strange that a space normally
reserved for the most cynical of interior design had been treated with such—there
was no other word for it--sincerity. Des had already discovered so many
wonderful hidden treasures in the mural, he’d lost count. The elk whose fur partly
concealed a whole civilization on its back, so if you looked closely enough,
you’d see an entire world riding along as it bounded a stream. The skyscraper
with lights on it that were really suns. The heron in a completely different
scene that somehow reflected the light of the sun from the skyscraper in
another world back, as if distance were only a symbol in a math problem, and
math that meant nothing more than the game Des played below the mural.
As
the donkerwheel finally ticked down, Des realized he hadn’t seen anything new in
the painting for a while. Maybe he’d gotten tired of looking. Hadn’t one of the
players once said that when you no longer took joy in the mural on the ceiling
of the hotel, that’s when you knew it was time to quit playing the game? Or had
Des made that up himself, one of the first times he’d started to question
himself how much longer he wanted to keep playing?
Jung lit up with
anticipation to see where the needle would land, and Des felt a surge of fondness
for him, wanted to hug the guy with an almost desperate affection. Players had
come and gone during the convention, but Jung had been at the table with him since
Day One. He was as excited to play the game now as he’d been when the
conference started.
How
many days ago had that been now? He’d lost track of the days during the
Schneufel World Tournament. That’s what the sign in the conference room called
it. World Tournament, as though the players had trained for this, as though their
participation made them distinguished somehow. In fact, nobody seemed to
understand the game much better than Des did, although the conference was the
first time he’d played.
Jung
studied the donkerwheel for a moment. It had come up with
green/seventeen/positive alignment. On most turns, it would have been a very
lucky spin, but Jung was trying to complete his second set of thacktongs so he
could level up his prutel. There was almost nothing he could do with the spin
he and everyone else had waited so long for.
“Trade?”
he asked no one in particular, the futility of the question masked in his voice
by his indefatigable optimism. Nobody answered, and he set his token aside to
let the next person spin.
“You
played that round as well as you could,” Nipsy encouraged him. “Big risk, big
reward, but also big risk, big loss, sometimes. Nothing you can do about it.”
“Yep,
some days you eat the bear, and some days, the bear eats you,” Jung said, sticking
his hand in the bowl of chips.
When the Wills first
brought him to the table on day one of the conference to introduce him around and
teach him the rules, several of the players had made the same joke.
“Teach
him the rules? That should be easy. There are none.”
In
the most literal sense, they were right. The box the game came in, which had required
the use of a luggage cart to bring in from Amanda’s car (she’d graciously
brought the game, as well as fondue), contained no printed sheet of instructions.
On the box was a photo of the two mountain chains players had to pass through
on their trips around the board, along with an appropriately mixed-race and
mixed-gender set of players smiling and laughing as they waited on the results
of a donkerwheel spin. There was but one small moustache-shaped blurb of text
on the box, and it said, “The only rule is to have fun!”
That
hadn’t kept the players at the board from creating plenty of rules of their
own, none of which were written down. Essentially, Des had figured out in the
days since he’d started playing, it wasn’t a game where you could win or lose,
exactly, but you could gather more or less esteem from players at the board for
how actively and creatively you played. This esteem came from a number of
purely subjective factors: how brave you were in making decisions, how well you
cooperated with others, how calmly you took setbacks, and, most importantly, your
level of enthusiasm about playing. You could be terrible but have a good
attitude, and most of the other players would give you the head nods and
encouraging words that were apparently the whole point of the game.
It
sounded non-competitive, but in fact it could be extremely competitive
sometimes, although entirely in a passive-aggressive sense. Players developed
grudges if they felt their moves hadn’t gotten enough grunts of approval from
others, which made the offended parties withhold their own encouragement in
turn.
Jung
was a welcome relief from this unspoken, non-competitive competition. He really
believed the whole point was to have fun, and he only wanted everyone to have a
good time. As a result, he got more approval than almost anyone playing the
game, maybe precisely because he cared so little about things like approval.
“I
think it’s about time to call it a night,” Joe said. He had been elected
Pingling Master by unanimous consent, because he had a way of keeping the game
on track without being too bossy about it.
“Des,
why don’t you spin the ole donker there and then seal your move?”
Des
didn’t spin very hard, but he also tried not to spin too softly, because he
didn’t want it to seem like he was judging Jung by contrast. Live and let live,
Des thought, and there was no reason to make others feel bad about playing how
they liked to play. The game was still fun, mostly, even with everyone’s
idiosyncrasies. Maybe because of them.
He
spun it far softer than he meant to. The three gears on the wheel barely made
it the required one time around to count as an official spin. He glanced
sideways at Jung--he hoped not enough to be noticed--but Jung didn’t seem to
pay any attention. The wheel came up gold/twenty-one/neutral.
It
was the kind of spin Des seemed to get more of than he deserved. There was no
other way to put it: he was a lucky Schneufel player. At first, he’d thought
the others were somehow rigging the wheel to give him good moves to help him
out as a new player, but his good fortune had gone on well past the point of
him needing help understanding the game. Was it possible he had a gift for
being lucky?
Luck
had its downsides. It brought envy. He had a large collection of Zimfla for a
newer player, something that the older hands didn’t seem to appreciate much. When
he’d gotten fifty Zimfla in the first day, they’d congratulated him, and
there’d even been applause, but lately, they tended to watch him rake in his
coins without comment. The vague sense that his luck had worn his welcome thin
with others was part of why he’d started wondering how much longer he wanted to
keep playing. It was exhausting, trying not just to play a game with no real
rules, but to make others appreciate how he played it.
He
decided to take a huge risk with the points the spin had given him. He applied
all twenty-one mobility credits to sending his third prutel up the Glorbor Pass
into troll country. It was a reckless move, one usually only taken by players
so behind on resources they had nothing to lose. It could pay off mightily, but
it could also mean losing a good chunk of his wealth. The others would have to
respect that. He thought he remembered a line of poetry in praise of moves like
that, one a player who’d since left the conference had used to try to explain
the mysterious, unwritten rules of Schneufel:
If
you can make one heap of all your winnings
And
risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And
lose, and start again at your beginnings
And
never breathe a word about your loss;
He
couldn’t remember what the “then” in the “if-then” of the poem was, but he was
reasonably sure it was something good. Des sealed his move in the envelope of
ceremonies and padded across the checkered carpet of the conference room to the
restaurant, trying hard not to look at the games being played at other tables.
He’d been strictly warned on the first day about the etiquette of not watching
other tables, although nobody had ever explained why.
Like
every night, he ate with Joe and Linda. They ordered the extremely rare steaks
the hotel was famous for. One of the oddities of the steak was that the hotel
strongly recommended—insisted would be more like it—that it be paired not with
wine, but with milk. It’s what all three had eaten on Des’s first night, after his
first few hours of Schneufel. He’d been so excited about the game, he kept
forgetting to eat while he talked long into the night with the Wills about everything
he wanted to do while playing Schneufel, and Linda would cut off red, wet
chunks of meat for him and fork them into his mouth, forcing him to stop
gushing long enough to eat.
How
endless the possibilities of Schneufel had seemed to him then. How much the
game seemed to fill every emptiness he’d ever had. How long now since he’d felt
that way. Eating the same meal as that magical first night somewhat revived the
feeling, or at least the memory that he’d once felt that way about Schneufel
made him nostalgic enough to forgive the game for the ways it had since shown
itself to be less than he’d hoped. Maybe the problem was with him, not the
game.
“If
you ever get tired of playing Schneufel,” Joe had said that first night as
Linda shoveled food into Des’s mouth, “it means you’re playing it wrong.”
Tonight,
Joe and Linda seemed more pensive, less celebratory, although not in an unhappy
way.
“You’ve
gotten to be so good at Schneufel you don’t really need our advice anymore,”
Joe said. He’d ordered a Scotch and soda to go with his steak, and although
Linda eyed him warily as he drank, she said nothing.
“It’s
what we hoped for when we brought you here,” she said. “I hope Schneufel is
everything you hoped it would be.”
Des
wanted to reassure them that it was, that he was having such a good time, he
never wanted to leave, but he couldn’t. The steak tasted had a soapy taste to
it, the milk sour.
“We
wanted to say how glad we are you came,” she told him. She sawed a piece of the
meat, stabbed it with the tines of her fork, and held it up as if to ask if he
wanted her to give it to him. Des didn’t move.
“You’re
kind of moody tonight,” Joe said.
“Joe,”
Linda warned him.
Joe
muttered something else, and though Des couldn’t quite hear it, he could guess
it was Joe’s nickname for him whenever he felt Des wasn’t showing enough
gratefulness for being at the party: “Desultory Des.”
“What
I’m saying is that we’ve come to think of you as a son, and that playing
Schneufel is better with you than we ever thought it could be. It’s like we’re
playing a whole new game.”
Des
tried to swallow the piece of steak, found it too big and had to gulp milk to
help coax it down his gullet.
“We
know the game’s not always perfect. Why Helen acts the way she does sometimes,
but oh, I shouldn’t talk about others like that…”
“Thanks
for coming is what your mother, I mean Linda, wants to say, Des,” Joe put in.
“Yes,
thanks for being here.”
Joe
sniffled a bit, and a tear started to come out of one eye, but he pushed it
back with another swallow of Scotch. Linda wasn’t as fastidious about showing
her emotions, and she cried as she ripped through a piece of raw beef with her
knife and held it out to Des one last time. Des, still coughing from the last
bite, hesitated.
“Do
it for me,” she pleaded.
Des
sat alone at the bar afterwards, stirring grenache with a mixing straw.
“Zimfla
for your thoughts,” the bartender said. He had a round face and overly large
ears, like he’d been built to invite you to talk to him.
Des
found himself pouring out his thoughts before he was even aware of having
decided to share. Yes, the problem had been that he’d been keeping his feelings
to himself. To tell someone else would be a great relief.
“It’s
Schneufel,” he said.
“Uh-huh,”
the bartender dried a glass without looking at it, focused on Des.
“Like,
there is so much about the game to love, and what I love most about it are the
people playing it with me. Even the annoying ones, like Helen, have their
moments.”
“Go
on.”
“But
as much as I love the people I’m playing with, and as fun as Schneufel used to
be, I’m kind of wondering when it will end. I like everything about it except
for the fact it seems to go on too long. If it had ended after a few nights,
right when I made my first songong, that would have been perfect. I could have
left the game and the hotel and gone back to whatever is outside of here having
had just the right amount of Schneufel.”
“I
see,” the bartender said, something in his posture now changing, the cadence of
his glass-wiping slowing.
“Like,
if I just hated Schneufel, I’d know what to do. I’d leave and not feel bad
about it. If I loved Schneufel, I’d know I want to stay and keep playing. But
I’m somewhere in the middle, and I’m just stuck there day after day. The game
is okay. The people are charming and endearing and make me want to stay for
their sake. And I’ve been remarkably lucky in the game. So lucky, I even feel
bad complaining, which makes me feel worse, and then the game seems to be
taking even longer. I even start resenting the people I love, because I know
I’m staying for them, which means I feel like they’re forcing me to do
something I don’t want to keep doing. But that’s unfair, because it’s not their
fault.”
The
bartender stopped wiping, set the glass down, his hand edging its way toward a
large red button on the counter Des had somehow not noticed before.
“Are
you saying you’re thinking of quitting the game and checking out of the hotel?”
Something
told Des this was a question he couldn’t give the real answer to. It had always
been implied, maybe, in the comments made by players at the board, or the bits
of wisdom his “parents,” Joe and Laura, had passed on to him. Like Joe’s
comment that if you were tired of playing Schneufel, that meant there was
something wrong with you, not with Schneufel. Whatever else you did at the
hotel, you should never question the absolute value of playing the game for as
long as you could keep playing it.
“Oh,
of course not,” Des said, giving his glass a twirl he hoped would look
nonchalant. “I mean, of course I want to keep playing Schneufel forever. I’ve
got Joe and Linda’s feelings to think about, don’t I?”
The
bartender’s hand stopped moving toward the button, but didn’t move away. Des
sensed he’d have to come up with more.
“I’m
just upset because of the way Helen and Nipsy seem to be mad at me all the time
about how many Zimfla I’ve got. Like, I can’t help the way I spin.”
The
bartender’s hand moved, at last, away from the button and back to the glass,
which he massaged through his towel with the same hypnotic motion he’d been
using before.
“Yes,
sometimes the reactions of others can affect our own perceptions of Schneufel,
can’t they?” he said.
“It
seems like that.”
“I’m
going to recommend a book for you,” the bartender said. He wrote the name on a
cocktail napkin. “You’ll find it in the hotel library.”
“There’s
a library?”
“You’ll
find the hotel has a lot of interesting things if you look. That’s why it
doesn’t make sense for anyone to talk about checking out when you haven’t
experienced the whole hotel yet.”
The
bartender’s face, which had seemed smooth and inviting at first, now seemed
swollen and engorged, like he’d feasted on Des’s words. Des wanted to pay his
bill and go, but suddenly realized he didn’t know how to pay. How did he not
know this? Had he been letting Joe and Linda pay for him? That seemed wrong to
him now, that he’d been around long enough to pay for himself.
“Don’t
you remember?” the bartender asked. “The bill is paid for.”
“Paid
for? How?”
“It
comes out of your Zimfla balance in Schneufel, of course.”
“You
mean the game actually means something outside the conference room?”
“Of
course it does,” the bartender said, like Des had asked the silliest question
imaginable.
“Zimfla
and prutels and all those other nonsense words…all that absurd stuff about
there not being any rules and the whole point being to have fun…that game has
actual consequences as far as being able to eat and pay for my room?”
“Why
do you think everyone is so jealous of your luck?” the bartender asked.
Back
in his room, which Des suddenly realized was a very well-apportioned suite with
warm and soft carpet, graceful arched windows to let in the gentle morning
light, and a refrigerator stocked with all the things Des loved, he thought
about the meaning of this new information. The game mattered. It wasn’t just
for fun. This changed everything. It also seemed unfair to the point of
absurdity. How could the game matter? It had no rules. Nothing about it made
sense if you thought about it too much. Why was it even called “Schneufel”?
There was nothing in the game called a schneufel. It’s like the game had been
named at random, and all the rules had fallen into place without anyone having
thought it all through. Of all the reasons to reward someone with comforts, the
hotel chose the spin of a badly designed donkerwheel and the accumulation of Zimfla?
Des had only felt mildly irritated and fatigued by Schneufel up to now, but suddenly
he felt that irritation turn to resentment.
He
also now regretted his choice to risk all his Zimfla on a reckless move. He’d
sealed that choice in the envelope of ceremonies, though, meaning first thing
the next morning, he’d likely lose almost everything he had. What would happen
to him then? Would he have to move in with Joe and Linda?
When
Joe consulted the Pingling charts in the morning, though, the unthinkable
happened: Des had beat the long odds up the Glorbor Pass, avoided detection by
the troll hordes, and made off with a treasure chest full of thousands of Zimfla.
He was the richest man at the table, and he’d done it trying to go broke back
when he hadn’t even realized Zimfla really mattered.
The
table broke out into a roar of applause that didn’t even feel fake to him. That
kind of luck was so extraordinary, maybe the players felt themselves fortunate
just to have been around to witness it, even if it hadn’t hit them. Perhaps it lifted
their spirits because if it had happened to him, it could happen to them, too.
Des
played the game the rest of the day in stunned silence. What would he do with
that much Zimfla? He’d never even looked at prices of things before, didn’t
know what things cost. How rich was he?
Joe
kept slapping him on the shoulder, proud as though the success were his own,
telling him that he’d have to be responsible with all that good fortune.
“Put
it somewhere where it’ll be safe. Let it work for you so you don’t have
to work for it.”
Jung,
however, said that if it were him with all that Zimfla, he’d have fun with it.
Have pool parties on the roof of the hotel, drink caviar and eat Cristal,
haw-haw.
Helen
pursed her lips and said that if it were her, she’d do something for all the
players at the other tables who slept in the basement.
“The
basement?” Des asked.
Linda
hushed Helen before she could say anything more.
Des
ate alone that night for the first time. He ordered cold noodles in a spicy
broth that made his eyes water. He never wanted to taste flesh again. After
dinner, he wandered the hotel to places he’d never been before, past the pool
and arcade he’d spent so much time in when he’d first arrived. There was a
solarium filled with gaudy flowers or plants with long, short leaves that
looked like swords. The plants were labelled with their names: hibiscus,
African violet, spider plant.
The
corridor went on a long way past the solarium with nothing of note, making Des
wonder why such a barren stretch of the hotel even existed, until his arm
bumped against the knob of what looked like a supply closet. His forearm
throbbed, and as he grabbed it with his other hand, he saw the sign on the
door: stairway.
He
wondered if he’d need some kind of key to enter, if maybe only staff were allowed
to use it. He’d only ever taken the elevator to his room, and it had never
occurred to him before that there might be another way to navigate from level
to level. When he pulled the handle that had struck him, though, it turned
easily. The stairway smelled like dust and air that needed light. He thought of
trying to use the stairs to go up to his room, just to see if he could find his
way by a new route, but he thought of what Helen had said. The people in the
basement. Was there a basement? The stairs went in two directions, up and
down, so it stood to reason there was.
He
took a step down and the hotel didn’t explode into alarms, so he took another,
and then another. The staircase wound around and around downwards. Why would
anyone build a basement so deep? When he was just about to give up, thinking
he’d never have the energy to walk back up so many stairs, he at last saw
another door at the bottom of one final rung of steps, and he opened it.
The
smell hit him so hard he couldn’t see, and when he at last thought he had
acclimated to it, he tried to take a step forward, and it hit him worse. Des
doubled over, his hands on his knees, retching, the spice from the noodles
burning his throat on the way back up. He stayed that way, doubled over, for
some time, short of breath but afraid to take any air in, until at last, his
body, trying to save itself, seemed to have cut off its own ability to smell,
and he stood up and walked forward.
Countless
human skeletons moved listlessly, lined up along a straight expanse of room
that went on forever in both directions with no rooms or walls to break up the
view. They were lying on ragged blankets, mostly staring off at nothing,
although there were smaller skeletons swirling around like gusts of wind here and
there playing a game of tag, unaware of the filth they played in.
Des
worried that the skeletons might attack him if they noticed him, but none came
close. Once in a while, he would lock with the vacant eye sockets of one, but
the only response he got was the skeleton would lift one arm with great pain,
the bony hand turned, palm up. He turned and ran back to the stairway,
terrified the door had locked him in and cursing himself for not propping it
open. Otherwise, why would they all stay in the basement? But the door opened.
He ran the countless flights of stairs back to the door on the main level,
listening the whole time for clacking feet following him. He heard nothing. He
burst back into the hallway, ran through the empty hotel back to the main lobby,
hit the button to his room, and stayed on top of his covers the rest of the
night, shaking.
When
Des started giving his first Zimfla away, he didn’t know how word got around to
the other players at the table, but it wasn’t long before they all seemed to
know, even though he’d tried to keep it quiet. He thought Joe might disapprove,
would think he was throwing his Zimfla away. Instead, when Jung shouted out to
the table that Des had paid for rooms and meals for a few wretches from the
basement, Joe had been one of those who’d cheered the loudest.
“That’s
my boy,” he yelled.
Surprisingly,
it was Helen who seemed displeased, although she’d been the one to bring up the
idea of giving to those in the basement in the first place.
“I
guess it’s something,” she said.
The
hotel management was nothing but gracious when he gave them a donation and
asked them to pull ten families of skeletons from the basement and put them in
rooms. They’d called him a “hero.” They even reduced the rate on his room so
much, he actually made money through his donation, which made him feel so
guilty, he soon gave more, then more still. The hotel didn’t keep discounting his
room, but they did give him a plush chair to sit at the Schneufel table with,
marked “Continental Class Seating for Mr. Des Only.”
Schneufel
was fun again. It still seemed unfair beyond reckoning that a game with no
rules could also determine everything about a person’s physical comfort, but at
least he was in a position to help others. He began to give more and more, and
although his fortune waned somewhat, he still had far more than he needed. It
was absurd that fate kept gracing his spins on the donkerwheel, but by helping
others, he felt he was giving a meaning to fate it didn’t have on its own. Once
in a while, someone from another table would try to shake his hand and thank
him for giving them a better room, until hotel security came to chase them back
to their own table and their own game.
Nobody
stopped Des from wandering about the room, though. Rules didn’t seem to apply
to him, so during Jung’s ridiculous spins, Des started getting up from his
special chair and watching other tables. Some tables were playing Schneufel,
too, but most were playing a completely different game. It had different names
at different tables, but the rules seemed to be more or less the same. Unlike
Schneufel, where one player or a couple of players could amass significantly more
wealth than others but everyone had at least something, the games the others
played all had one player with all the big items—whatever they called the Zimfla
in their game—and everyone else had nothing. Although the skeletons were
wearing a thin layer of skin Des had bought them and cheap clothing to cover
over their tenuous flesh, he could still easily see that beneath, they remained
chipped and sagging bones.
Des
started sleeping poorly, so poorly he was exhausted all the time and would nap
here and there, including at the Schneufel table, suddenly waking up when
someone would tell him it was his turn. He’d wander the hotel at nights, going
further and further down hallways he’d never explored. From the outside, it had
seemed like a very ordinary hotel, and he couldn’t imagine how there was enough
space inside for everything, but the more he wandered, the more it seemed there
would never be an end.
One
night, he found the library. It was between a potted plant and an ice machine
that clanked non-stop. It had three concentric rings of shelves of books with
occasional breaks in each ring to allow you to move from one to the other. He
picked up a book at random.
If
you can keep your head when all about you
Are
losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If
you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But
make allowance for their doubting too;
So
that’s where it came from. He picked up a different book, battered and coming
apart, dogeared with excited-looking circles around words drawn around the
words inside. One circle penned in this question: “Is it that by its
indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the
universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when
beholding the white depths of the milky way?” Joe had been to the library, too,
it seemed.
What
surprised Des wasn’t that bits of wisdom he’d heard quoted for as long as he
could remember were actually from books that could be found in the hotel
library, but that the people who’d quoted them must, at some point, have been
feeling the way he felt. If not, why had they wandered the hotel long enough to
find the library? Why was it okay to quote the things one found in the library,
but not talk about what had made you want to go there in the first place?
He
passed between the openings in the rings of shelves, felt himself being pulled
toward the center of the room, until he found it: perched on a small table was
a single book lying open. Des read the words, but found he somehow already knew
them. The proud man’s contumely. A bare bodkin. Lose the name of action. It
was as though he’d said the words himself, forgotten them, and then come to the
library to remember what he’d once said.
He
tried the basement again, but found, to his surprise, that the number of
skeletons in the basement had only increased since he’d last been there. Some
were too sickly to even raise their bony hands in supplication. The noise of
the smaller skeletons playing had disappeared, leaving only the smell and the
quiet.
He
wandered back to the bar. There was no telling what time it was, other than it
was the middle of the night. The bartender leaned on the bar, his head propped
up against his hand, somehow holding himself up in his sleep. In a corner
someone was guiding a floor buffer, his hands out in front of him at a right
angle as though he was revving the engine of a motorcycle. Des could tell the
man was a skeleton wearing a borrowed skin suit, probably so as not to upset
the customers.
At
a table in a corner sat a woman, rectangle of a suitcase propped up on the
floor beside her, its handle telescoped out, like it was a dog waiting to be
taken for a walk. He’d heard the expression “dust of the road” before, but she
seemed, literally, to be covered in a fine, red, film.
He
didn’t want to disturb her. If she was there at this ghostly hour like he was,
maybe some kind of unsettled thought she couldn’t nail down had driven her
there, and she wanted to be alone to hammer at it. He chose a table far from
her, but almost as soon as he sat down, he heard her voice.
“I
don’t suppose you know anything about…snuffel, do you?”
Des
looked around for others she might be talking to, although he knew they were
alone.
“Snuffel?”
“It’s
a game, I guess.”
“You
mean Schnuefel?”
“Oh,
is that what it’s called? Sorry. My friends Ed and Sally invited me here to
play it. They say they love it and think I’ll love it, too.”
“So
you just got here, then?”
“Hence
the suitcase,” she said, giving the handle a waggle or two.
He
sort of knew Ed and Sally. They’d joined the game a while ago—long enough not
to be new, but not so long ago he could say much about them. They sat on the
other end of the table.
“I
do know about Schneufel, to answer your question,” he said. “But I’m not sure
I’m the right person to tell you about it.”
“Well,
I know nothing, except that I like Ed and Sally and didn’t want to say no to
them, so whatever you know will be more than I do.” She pushed a chair out next
to her for him to sit in.
“I’m
Jenny.”
“Des.”
“Like
‘des’cribe. Why don’t you describe the game to me?”
The
next morning, after a night of no sleep and excited conversation, he couldn’t
wait to introduce Jenny to Laura and Joe. Of course that was the answer to what
he’d been feeling all along. The answer wasn’t in giving his money away to the
poor, trying to bail out the ocean of sadness with a teaspoon, but in finding a
companion to share the game with. It was in one of the first books he’d read in
the library.
But
when he brought Jenny to the Schneufel table, their hands locked together, a
stupid smile on Des’s face, Laura was sitting alone. Nipsy was holding both of
Laura’s hands between her own.
“This
is Jenny. I just met her.” Ed and Sally got up from their end of the table when
they saw Jenny. “Where’s Joe?”
“Your
father, I mean Joe, won’t be playing with us anymore. It was his time to stop
playing.”
“What
do you mean, it was his time to stop playing? Why isn’t he here?”
“You
know he would be if he could. Oh, and now you have a friend. He wanted that for
you for so long. I’m sure wherever he is, somewhere out there on the road
outside the hotel, he’s happy for you.”
Des
felt like the hotel’s raw steak had stuck inside him and he couldn’t get it to
go down. He wanted to flip the table upside down, to ruin the game for
everyone, but Linda was obviously trying hard to keep it together. And there
were Ed and Sally, giving their condolences to Linda so sincerely, while also
so happy to see Jenny at the game and with a friend already…
How
many thousands of days of Schneufel Des played after that, he couldn’t say. By
unspoken but common consent, the players hardly spoke of Joe. Des didn’t wander
the hotel anymore, because Jenny now shared a room with him. She soon invited
friends, who stayed with them in their room until they learned to play the game
well enough to have a room of their own. She loved the game, she said, and the
best part was playing it with Des.
After
Joe’s departure, Helen took over as Pingling Master, which made the game far
less fun for Des. He knew she didn’t like him, although he could never figure
out why. Whereas Joe had had a way of getting people to follow the rules
without making it feel like he was telling them what to do, Helen wasn’t shy
about turning suggestions into commands.
It
was about this time that Des’s luck began to change. It didn’t go all the way
bad, but it wasn’t always great, either. For the first time, he had to work
hard for his Zimfla, something he found inconvenient, because now, with a room
full of people depending on him, was the first time he actually needed more of it.
He wasn’t poor, but he wasn’t rich, and now he had to put a lot more effort
into the game. This, along with Helen, made every day feel more like work and
less like a game where the only rule was to have fun. He kicked himself for
having given so much of his wealth to the skeletons, calculated over and over
in his head what kind of room he could have moved Jenny and their dependents to
if he still had all those Zimfla he’d given away.
In
time, Linda started having a hard time seeing the board and needed help from
other players to know when it was her turn and what she needed to do. She
couldn’t spin the donkerwheel for herself. One day, words came to Des he knew he
must have been thinking for some time.
When
she finally leaves the game, I’ll be free to go myself.
But
she didn’t leave. Her eyesight got worse, until she really was blind and couldn’t
make out the painting on the ceiling anymore. She had to be wheeled to the
table, and now she ate in the evenings with Jenny and Des, where the two of
them took turns feeding her as she had once fed Des when Schneufel had seemed
full of promise to him and he’d been glad they’d invited him to play.
He
started wandering the hotel again at nights. Jenny said nothing, although once
in a while, when he’d end up in the bar, he’d find her there, as if she was
making sure he wasn’t trying to find any new players the way he’d once found
her. Des didn’t go to the library. The answers to his problems weren’t in there,
nor in the gym or the spa or the bar or the rooftop vista, either. He wasn’t
sure the answer was in the hotel at all, but he’d been a guest there so long,
he’d forgotten what life was like outside of it. Had he even had a life outside
the hotel? Or had people just told him that so long, he’d believed it? He
couldn’t remember. What if life outside the hotel didn’t exist at all?
One
day, after Helen had been particularly fastidious about enforcing the norqual
rule concerning prutel trades, Des had gotten up without even waiting for the
last player to seal her move. He went to the elevator and hit a button without
looking at which one. When it opened on whatever floor it was, he turned left
and started running. He ran until he had to bend over and press his hand to the
cramp in his abdomen, then straightened up and ran again. He’d grown old in the
hotel. When he couldn’t run anymore, he walked. He walked until he wore
blisters into his feet. It no longer surprised him how large the hotel was. Why
shouldn’t it be this big? Could he even remember seeing it from outside
anymore? He took his shoes off and walked in his socks, which relieved some of
the pain from the blisters.
He
walked for hours. What would Jenny be thinking? She must have known he wasn’t
at the bar. He hoped she knew that whatever he was doing, it wasn’t looking for
a replacement for her. She was the only one who could fill that position for
him. A replacement might revive him for a while, but he knew it would end up
just making him resent the game even more.
He’d
been so lucky in Schneufel. He had a nice room, good food every night, Jenny to
share it with, plus all the players they’d brought to the hotel. He was fully
aware of the privilege he had, but rather than making him feel grateful, it
made him feel worse. Even with this privilege, he was tired of playing.
Schneufel wasn’t terrible, and it wasn’t great, and it was, above all else, far,
far too long. There were people who loved him, and he loved them back, but this
love kept him trying to swallow the same thing that had stuck in his throat
ages ago.
And
then a door. The end of the corridor. There really was one. The door was glossy
and black, and it had no handle. He’d have to shove it hard with his shoulder to
get through. A voice in his head. There’s the rub. The wall around the
doorframe in all directions was stained red, as though someone had thrown
pitchers of fruit punch at the door over and over just to watch the juice
splatter in all directions. Must give us pause. Written on the wall in
black ink next to the red splatters were names. Scott. Idris. Jin-hee. Gigi.
Big Tex. Azeb. Joe. And lose the name of action.
He
turned from the door. There was an emergency phone on the wall, but he sensed
that if he used if from that spot, he might regret it, the same way he’d known
there were some subjects with the bartender it was best not to talk about. He’d
found the door out. That was enough for now. Knowing the door was there was
somehow enough for him to not need the door, at least not right now. Maybe
after Linda had gone through it. Maybe after Jenny had. Maybe when fate pushed
him through, like it had Joe and so many others. Who knew? Maybe it wouldn’t be
that long. He’d always had rather good luck.
