My own damn story

I've been talking about the stories of others on here for a long time. Today, I thought I'd try something different. I'm going to post a story of my own. This means that this story won't be eligible to be published elsewhere, but I'm okay with that. It occurs to me that even when a story does get published somewhere, it's unlikely many people will read it. I've won a few contests and been published in a few of the "better" journals, and not one person has ever reached out to me to say anything about something I wrote. How much less of a readership can I get from publishing on my blog?

In any case, this story is a 7,400 word allegory, which isn't likely to get published by anyone. A few smaller journals said they liked it and wanted to see other things I'd written, but nobody is going to publish this. But it's an example of the kind of story I wish I'd see more of. When I was critiquing Karen Russell the other day, for example, I was saying that I'd like to see more stories that feel like they were written out of a sense of urgency, rather than because a talented writer found a thing to write about. I'd like slightly unpolished truth rather than beautiful half-truth. That's what this story is. It's the least likely thing I've written to get published, and yet it might be one of my favorite things I've written. Here goes:

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.