My novel based on my career at the National Security Agency is now available--guaranteed to be one of the two best NSA novels by a former employee ever!

Do you get it? Because there have only been two. 

I’ve decided to go ahead and self-publish my NSA novel, the one I’ve been trying to get published for almost a decade now. It is not without a certain sense of shame and failure that I do this. Although there are plenty of authors now doing just fine in self-publishing, and some are even wondering, with traditional publishing in so much trouble, whether it might be the only way forward for authors, I can't get over the feeling that self-publishing is for amateurs who weren’t good enough to get published for real.  

But so be it. After sending out query letters to possibly as many as a hundred agents, and paying the money to go to a literary conference to meet agents, after having several say they admired it but it wasn’t for them, and after struggling to understand how something that meant so much to me could mean so little to the profession’s gatekeepers, I’m resigned to this. It’s too important to never share with the world, and if the world doesn’t want it, then I’ll have to live with that. There's a public service in publishing it, and I feel compelled to do it in whatever way available. 

A talented cartoonist, Jerry King, very kindly made the cover art for me.

I’m reminded of the example of Kilgore Trout, Kurt Vonnegut’s alter-ego sci-fi writer who appears in many of his novels. Trout had great ideas but poor execution, and both he and his works live in ignominy within the universes of the novels he appears in. Characters find Trout’s novels only by the greatest of coincidences. When they do find them, though, it always causes something that changes the whole plot, and often the whole world along with it. If Trout can live with the shame of being a failed writer who still believes in himself enough to get his stories out any way he can, then so can I. What happens with it from here is up to fate and whatever author there might be behind the big show.

There are some possible benefits to self-publication. As a former NSA employee writing (albeit very loosely) about analysis at the agency, I’m required to go through a pre-publication approval process for this book. That means some poor guy in the pre-pub office has to read all 80,000 words of this. I have no doubt this book is unclassified; I’ve gone to great, possibly absurdist, lengths to make it so. When I get back my approval from NSA, though, it will come with a note that says that if I change anything, I’ll have to get it approved all over again. If I worked with a publisher, there would be many rounds of editing, which is suffering enough for normal writers, but in my situation, having to work with my former employer working at my former employer’s pace, would be unbearable. Also, any interviews I might do would involve questions that, however reasonable seeming, might make me nervous. I might claim to be a bad boy, but at heart, I don’t really like to risk running afoul of authorities, especially not authorities I’ve finally gotten away from by way of retirement.

So this blog post is likely to be my only extra-textual commentary on the book. It’s perhaps a little unusual for an author to offer up an interpretation of his own work; for the most part, authors are authors and critics are critics, and if authors wanted to go around trying to say what stories mean they’d do that instead of writing the damn things. Since so much of this blog has ended up being about reading well, however much I started it with the intent to make it about writing well, I’ll offer my own take on what the novel might mean.

NSA has been criticized for being too intrusive. In my personal experience, it has resolved the balance between security and privacy in different ways over the past three decades, but in general, it has never been so far to either side that it wouldn’t have been within the lines of what most people would consider reasonable, if most people had the access to know what the agency really does and how it does it. In recent years before I retired, it might have even gotten a little bit deferential to privacy, to the detriment of its ability to do its core functions. If NSA were meant to be a backdoor to eavesdrop on Americans, it would be a miserable failure.

I wouldn’t die defending that understanding, but to me, the danger of an advanced surveillance program like NSA’s isn’t the risk of an omniscient despot using the knowledge to control subjects. The danger is in a country that lacks the self-knowledge to know what to do with the information it gets, no matter how much it gets. Knowing our enemies does us no good if we don’t know who we are, what we believe, and what we want. In fact, it will only confuse us.

I am only too well aware now of the faults of this novel. Its original creation was a blur, a true Wordsworthian spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. I’d been at the agency a little over a decade, and I’d just met a group of enormously intelligent co-workers who, for some reason, let me attend their weekly gatherings. It felt like thoughts were all coming together at once. I was also blogging on the agency’s internal system, and the reaction from fellow employees was positive enough to give me a false sense of having something to say. My employer was either tolerant enough or didn’t care enough to let me become a minor celebrity within out little world, and I thought it time to share my ideas outside the walls of Fort Meade.

Once it was written, I realized I had the “shitty draft” that all the writing books say is the sole goal of a first effort. Fine, rework it, they say, but once I had the world of Zendia in place and the person of Tom Williams and his family, I found myself unable to see it differently. My provisional draft ended up being hard to overrule, even when I was confronted with many passages that made me wince, and I probably pruned where I should have replanted.

Even with all the faults in the novel, I still think it’s worth putting out into the world, however humble its entrance may be. And I think it’s worth you buying, reading, and hopefully commenting on the book, for two reasons. One, it’s only three dollars. It's the lowest price Amazon will let me get away with, and I don’t want price to be a barrier for anyone. This is a public service, not a way to make money. Secondly, even with its faults, it’s important to support a former agency employee trying to share something about the work there. Because of the difficulty in pre-publication and the concern about what might happen if we try to publish something wrong (a frequently heard threat is that the agency will come take all the devices from our homes if we write something on one of them that they deem to be protected information), hardly any former employees ever say anything about the work there. The only ones who do are usually either disgruntled or they’re former executives who are kind of homers, meaning the voices aren’t very balanced. I'm neither anti-NSA nor excessively a fan. I am forever grateful to them for taking a chance on me when they hired me and for allowing me a voice--often a voice of rather strong criticism--while I worked there. The fact that was able to voice so much criticism and still have what by any measure was a very successful career says a lot about how NSA is a place that at least sometimes values truth over being told what it wants to hear. Still, all those criticisms I made had a source, and I couldn't help but see the glaring weaknesses I saw there. The results is that I’m as balanced a voice about that place as you’re likely to get, and your support of this book will hopefully encourage other, more polished voices of reason to share their stories.

 

Kilgore Trout’s tombstone read

 

Some Guy

Some Time to Some Time

He tried

 

That’s how I’d like this book to be read. Up against a lot of odds when it came to trying to write about my very secret workplace and what message I think the rest of the country should get about it, I tried.

My Thanksgiving time travel story for your enjoyment

Once in a while, I put one of my own stories on this blog. They seem to get as many readers when I do this as they do when I get it published somewhere. And even if I did get this one published, it'd be hard to get it timed exactly right to come out right on Thanksgiving, which seems like the best time to read this. 

So here goes, one of my own stories.

 

Herald

At first, it annoyed me that Elmer made me learn time soaping from her in person. Truth be told, it annoyed me at second, too. Couldn’t she have just given me the password to a secret wiki page or something? Why had she made me practice with the dispenser in her basement over and over for months? And why had she made me go all the way into Greenpoint for one particular kind of apple fritter she just had to have before bringing it all the way back to her place in Brooklyn to practice?

Now that I was actually holding one of the bones to a four-story high baby Yoda, though, I was glad she’d made me do all the training in person. Soaping wasn’t about science or technique as much as it was about psychology in practice. Not really something a wiki page could teach you. It was a kind of Jedi mind trick, an irony not lost on me based on the balloon I was trying to keep more or less tied to the Earth. I was so nervous, I couldn’t even feel the bone—what viewers at home would call a rope—in my hands, and I half feared I’d be carried off into the sky with the baby Yoda. I guess the name of the thing was actually Grogo. I don’t know. I don’t have Disney Plus.

“This is more of a workout than I thought,” one of the other volunteers said to me, huffing as she said it and pulling down more than was necessary. She was short, and the physics of it pretty much dictated that all the taller handlers would be shouldering the real weight. She should have faked effort until we got to Herald Square to deliver her message. That was her real purpose in being here. That was all of our real purpose in being here. How else would the competition to stand in the cold all morning for free be so fierce?

I forget what her story was, what kind of message she was hoping to send as a stowaway. We’d all exchanged our stories in the pre-dawn dark. Hers was probably something about love. That’s what more than half of us were here for. It’s what got me into soaping in the first place. When I first reached out to Elmer to teach me, I wanted to make Elaine forget the things I’d said to her at Thanksgiving a year ago.

“Port side, a little more slack!” Elmer ordered the volunteers, running up and down the columns. “And don’t forget to smile! You’re in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Enjoy yourselves a little.”

We all tried to smile, but we forgot her command almost as soon as she moved around to the other side of the balloon. Who could smile when we were all so close to the moment of truth? To work right, time soaping required absolute focus at the right moment, and we all feared that if we focused too much on anything else before we got to the end, we’d wear ourselves out prematurely.

Having run from one end of a column to the other and back again, Elmer eased up to the front and slowed to a walk.

            “I know it’s hard to relax,” she said, in a voice low enough only the first row of spectators in Bryant Park could hear. “But trust me, your message will go out a lot better if you’re calm. You’ve got this. Good luck, washers.”

            With that, our backs straightened and our flagging arms grew strong again. Elmer was a good pilot. Actually, her name wasn’t Elmer. It was Nancy, but I hadn’t known that until she’d introduced herself in the wee hours of the morning as the pilot to the other balloon handlers.

 

            She’d had me call her Elmer from the first time we met. She said it’s what all the time soaping mentors went by. I guess it came from something they used to do a million years ago called Ham radio. Back then, before the Internet and wiki pages and helpful how-to TikToks to show you how to do everything, there was no way to learn the hobby except to have someone who’d been doing it a while show you. There were guidebooks and stuff, I guess, but there was a lot of equipment involved, and it was pretty complicated, so the best way to learn was to sit with an actual human guide. These guides were called Elmers. She told me why, but I forget. I’ve called her Elmer since I first found her through Bubble, which is like Craigslist, but on the dark web and only meant for time soapers.

            Dark times led to the dark web for me. After two years with Elaine, I’d said one stupid sentence at her parents’ house, and that was the end of it. I wanted Elmer to help me undo it, or to at least make it seem undone to Elaine.

 

            “We’ll pull up right at the end,” Elmer Nancy said to me in an even lower voice. “While we’re waiting, the actors will run on and do their thing. That’s your moment.”

            It wasn’t as cold as we’d hoped. It’s a lot easier to hide the dispenser over your ear if you’re wearing a hat. For that reason, most of the volunteers had started out with them on in the morning, but I was sweating so bad I had to take mine off back at Columbus Circle. The few still doggedly keeping theirs on looked like they’d been cooked in one of those roasting bags for turkeys. Hiding it in my pocket wasn’t a bad second option, though. I could still pull it back out when I needed it.

            “Remember,” Elmer Nancy advised us one more time, “You aren’t trying to convince anyone, because there’s nothing to convince them of. The way it is in your head is the way it is.”

           

“The way it is in your head is the way it is” is a mantra she’d been drilling into me since the first time we’d met. When I knocked on the door to her brownstone, she’d opened it quickly, snatched the box of pastries from me, pulled me inside with a quick glance down each side of the street, and took me to the basement. She’d inhaled both fritters and waited until the last bite had fully travelled down her gullet, her eyes closed to savor every hint of flavor. At some point, she decided she was done, opened her eyes, and that’s the first thing she said to me. The way it is in your head is the way it is.

I was confused, because I was hoping to make it so the way it was in my head wasn’t the way it really was anymore. I wanted to change the past, undo what I’d said. She said that’s not how time soaping worked. Time travel was impossible—another frequent truism of the time soaping community—but if you could convince someone that something else had happened in the past, didn’t that come to the same thing? Anyway, she said what I was feeling was regret, but that regret wasn’t how to change the past. If you transmitted even a sliver of regret, the dispenser wouldn’t work. You had to believe that the way you wish things were or the way things had been was the way they really were. That was the only way to change the mind of the receiver, and in so doing, to change the past.

 

We passed 37^th, and I found that now I was pulling harder on the bone than was necessary, wearing myself out as much as the woman next to me had been doing. We all were. We were in the zone now where the crowds thinned out, because the television broadcast limited viewing near Herald Square and the big finale. We were all getting close to show time. Volunteers patted their pockets with a free hand to make sure their dispensers were still there. We’d all been given these white and black jackets that said The Mandalorian on them, and we’d tucked our devices into them.

It was an open secret that nearly all the balloon handlers were there to time soap. At first, the parade had tried to stop it, but then they almost couldn’t get anyone to participate, so they had to relax a little bit. You were allowed to soap as long as you kept it reasonable. Convince the person you’d been crushing on that he’d actually been in love with you their whole life? Fine. Get your bosses to unfire you for that outburst? No problem. Just keep it discreet. The main time soaper on top of Macy’s was for the big corporations that paid for it. Your ideas were allowed to hitch a ride, but only if it wasn’t something that would go messing with their profits. One year, a soaper tried to convince the whole world that Santa Claus didn’t exist. For thirty minutes, capitalism seemed doomed, until Santa came along at the end of the parade and the corporate soapers managed to undo the damage just in time. Considering how well you have to understand the subtleties of the human heart to make soaping work, it’s amazing how well the folks who work for evil corporations do at it. Because of scares like that in the past, you could only get into the parade now if you had someone who’d vouch for you. Elmer Nancy had gotten me in. She’d been a balloon pilot for years. Nobody questioned her.

I thought one more time about scrapping the mission Elmer Nancy had given me, of going back to the original plan of trying to soap Elaine into thinking I’d never said what I’d said. It was so stupid. Her parents had kept pushing wine on me, and I don’t usually drink, but I didn’t want to be rude. And then it took so long to get dinner out, I just kept getting drunker and drunker. Elaine’s mom, whom I just called Mrs. Wanjiru, said that she hoped I wouldn’t find her cooking too strange. She’d never seen a turkey until she was twenty-five, she said.

“I’m sure if you can cook a warthog, you can cook a turkey,” I said. Mr. and Mrs. Wanjiru both laughed, but Elaine went cold, and she dropped my hand she’d been holding on the couch as we watched the parade. She didn’t say anything, but I knew she was angry. I would have asked what I said that was wrong, but someone named Jordin Sparks came on to perform, and suddenly I realized that I’d always loved her music and I pulled out my phone to download all of her songs on Spotify.

Elaine barely spoke during dinner. I should have been concerned, but I was, for reasons I didn’t stop to consider, so excited to go book a trip on a Disney Cruise Line, I just couldn’t bring myself to think about it. It wasn’t until after dinner when I was taking Elaine home that I realized how badly I’m messed up. I didn’t catch everything she said, but as words like stupid and Americentric and insulting and racist burst out, each one popped a bubble of thought that had been floating in my mind, bubbles having to do with a movie I suddenly wanted to watch or Broadway show I suddenly wanted to see or how glad I was that Al Roker was still alive and how much I hoped he’d be back next year.

I tried to stammer out some kind of explanation. Wait, did I want to explain? Should I just apologize? But if I apologized, would that mean I thought I was totally wrong? Hadn’t her parents just made a joke about how easily I got sunburned, and wasn’t I just trying to make us all comfortable with each other by making it okay for us to tell jokes we wouldn’t say in public? I felt like maybe I was two-thirds wrong and one-third right, but that my two-thirds wrongness was mitigated by having been a hundred percent soused. But I couldn’t both apologize and explain at the same time. I had to pick one or the other, and it confused me so badly I chose neither, and I yelled at her instead, and we were done by the time I pulled into her driveway.

That’s why I’d volunteered. We’d all volunteered for some reason similar to that. I wanted to make her think I’d never said it. Was I going to punt that all away now because Elmer Nancy had filled my head full of talk about responsibility to society?

There were more delays as we got closer to the finale in front of Macy’s. Some acts performing in Herald Square hadn’t had to march the whole way—who was going to make Cher wave along the whole damn parade route?—and they had to be weaved into the rotation so they could perform in front of the cameras. It didn’t really seem right to me. Was this a parade or a lip-synch concert? If something couldn’t be marched along a parade route, did it belong in a parade? But there was big money paying to put those acts in, so the definition of a parade got stretched as long as the route along 6^th Avenue.

I was waiting for one of those acts to go on. That was going to be my moment. If I held to my course, that is. Elmer Nancy had seemed so convincing in her basement when she’d asked me to do it, I couldn’t tell her no. But now I was thinking back to Thanksgiving a year ago and reliving how lonely I’d been in the year since, and I didn’t care about the world. I wanted Elaine back.

 

“Time soaping isn’t time travel,” she’d said to me when she first pulled out a dispenser in her basement and started to show me the basics of it. “It was invented as sort of a side effect of the search for time travel, though.”

I tried to listen as I turned the dispenser over and around in my hands. It looked like the kind of headset we’d all had to start using for video meetings when the pandemic started, the kind with a pullout microphone, only the microphone was sort of a jagged ball and it was supposed to go to the back of your skull instead of in front of your mouth.

“Scientists and nations tried for a long time to discover time travel,” she said. “But they finally decided it was impossible. The universe protects causality, it turns out.”

I thought I could guess what “causality” meant, although it was a word I’d never used before. It didn’t help me to follow what she was saying, though.

“Early on, we realized that you couldn’t send, say, a whole person into the past or future. Their mass was too great. In order to travel in time, you’d have to somehow have negative mass, so you could go faster than the speed of light. Nothing we know of has a negative mass, of course, and a whole human being has a mass so large it couldn’t begin to get near that fast.”

I install heating and cooling systems for a living. I can read a schematic and I understand how electricity works. I can even do mental math pretty well, which has given me the false impression over the years that I’m smart in science and math. But this stuff was over my head. I thought hard of a question I could ask that would sound halfway smart, enough that she didn’t kick me out for being too stupid to learn.

“If you can’t send a whole person into the past, what about a message, like a radio message? Those go about the speed of light, don’t they?”

“We used to think there was some hope in that,” she told me. “But over time, we started to think about it. Let’s say you could send yourself a message in the future. So you start to send it, but as you’re about to send it, a message comes to you from the future telling you to destroy the machine. So you destroy it, but by doing so, you make it so the device never existed, meaning you couldn’t have gotten the message from the future in the first place. It makes no sense.”

            She brushed crumbs from her blouse. I didn’t know if she really understood physics or she was a crank. She seemed a little undignified for a physicist.

            “Aren’t you just describing what makes sci-fi stories about time travel confusing? Just because it’s confusing doesn’t mean it’s impossible, right? I mean, the soapers work, don’t they? If not, what am I doing here?”

“Oh, they work alright,” she said. “But those paradoxes aren’t just potential plot holes. They’re the reason we know time travel can’t work. Have you ever heard of Hawking’s cocktail party?”

I knew who Stephen Hawking was, and I thought of making a joke about how lively a party a guy in a wheelchair could have thrown, but then I realized that jokes like that were the whole reason I was looking to go into the past to fix my love life in the first place.

“Hawking threw a cocktail party in 2009. It had champagne and caviar and balloons and everything. But he didn’t send out the invitations until after the party. He figured that if anyone actually figured out time travel in the future, they’d be able to get the invitation and come back in time to attend. Since nobody attended, he figured that time travel was impossible.”

I stood there trying to understand how the timing of that worked.

“So if time travel is impossible, what am I doing here?”

“Time travel doesn’t work because the universe doesn’t violate the law of causality,” she said. She was standing in front of a wooden workbench under a long, hanging fluorescent tube light. Dust was falling on her, and she looked gray and indistinct.

“A city is burned because a cow kicked over a lamp. If the cow doesn’t kick over the lamp, the city doesn’t burn,” she said. “Everything causes something else. Time travel would alter the series of causes and events, and the universe just doesn’t like that, it would seem.”

“So the dispenser…”

“There is something, though, that confuses causes and events all the time. The human brain. If you can convince the human brain that the past was something other than it was, you can make someone see the whole chain of causation differently. For them, at least, the message got there before the event. Get enough people to change their perception, and the world, at least this world run by human brains, really does change.”

This sounded like an episode of something I’d seen.

“You mean like a brain worm? Something that inserts itself into your memory and makes you think it was there all along? Like Photoshop for somebody else’s brain?”

“That’s a little bit crude, but it’s not too far off, I guess. People’s memories aren’t really all that stable to begin with. They’re always looking to rewrite their past to what they wish had happened. They just need a little push. That’s what the time soapers are. The same way soap changes water molecules so they penetrate clothes better, the time soap dispenser sort of makes the brain a little more absorptive. Enough that you can send a thought to it and it will accept that thought as its own.”

I felt a little disappointed. I wanted to go back in time and unsay what I’d said. But here she was talking about some kind of hypnosis or something where I’d just convince Elaine I’d never said it. What would happen when some stimulus made her snap out of it and she realized she hated me again?

“Of course, to make it stick takes a lot of power. I’m talking 1.21 gigawatts kind of power here.”

I felt like that was a reference she expected me to get, but I had no idea what it meant.

“When the first bubble makers were being made, it was nations that paid for them. You can see why the CIA would be interested in technology that could make all our enemies think they’d already lost, or that they loved us after all. But all of our adversaries developed similar technology at about the same time, meaning they kept cancelling each other out. Every nation still has a dispenser or two, just to keep things equal, but they’re useless now, except for making sure nobody else takes over the world through suggestion.”

“So this dispenser I’m holding…”

“Is useless in itself. It’s far too weak to soap a brain on its own. It has to hitch a ride on something much more powerful. You need your signal to hide in a much stronger signal.”

“How am I going to do that?”

“Well, the biggest soaper still in existence is at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade,” she said. The dust below the light shimmered like a halo around her head. I couldn’t tell what color her hair was.

“The parade? You mean Santa and Miracle on 34^th Street and Snoopy balloons?”

“That’s the one.”

“What the hell is a soaper doing there?”

“Nations can’t use soapers for defense purposes, but companies can. They just have to keep their purposes below the level of something another nation would care about enough to fight it.”

“So who is behind the Macy’s Parade soaper?” I asked.

“Oh, whoever has a shitty movie or television show nobody cares about but which they need people to care about. So they have a huge and powerful soaper sitting on the roof of Macy’s. When a balloon for some Nickelodeon show goes on the air, they hit the soaper and suddenly, children all over America who are watching the parade at Aunt Sally’s find they need to borrow their parents’ phones immediately to stream the show. A singer nobody has paid attention to in a decade suddenly has a resurgence. A musical about to open its run that nobody has bought tickets to suddenly sells out.”

“How does it work so well?” I asked. I was hungry and wishing I’d gotten a pastry for myself.

“Think about it. Everyone watching the parade is in some kind of awkward family setting. They’re at a house they’re anxious to leave. They’re hosting family members who annoy them. They’re meeting their future in-laws and they’re nervous. And it’s not even noon yet, so they’ve got hours left to go. And here’s this parade of floating balloons and vanilla announcers losing their absolute fucking minds with excitement over it. It’s all very disorienting. Leaves the mind very open to soaping, especially when the world’s most powerful commercial-grade soaper is beaming thoughts at you.”

 

We were making the turn onto 34^th Street now. Elmer Nancy was busy guiding us through the turn, which wasn’t easy. It would have been challenging for the Marine Corps, getting the left flank to wheel while the right flank held firm. I was near the front of the balloon, and I looked into the baby Yoda’s eyes. They were black and expressionless with no pupils, sort of blank the way an ancient Greek statue was. It was as if the baby Yoda didn’t want to influence anyone with its own emotions. It wasn’t going to tell me what to do. Within your own heart look you must.

We were in Herald Square now, within site of the front of Macy’s and the cameras and the performances. I could almost hear Al Roker, now back at the parade, frothing at the mouth and about to give himself a heart attack with excitement.

“Okay, we’re going to hold up here while they bring an act on in front of us,” Elmer Nancy said. Then, lower, she added, “Clear thoughts. Best wishes.” She was looking at me when she said it. I still couldn’t tell what color hair she had, and I swore her face looked different than it had before. I wouldn’t have recognized her if it weren’t for the voice in my head asking me one last time for a favor. Remind me of why I did this, it said.

As we held Grogu in front of the performance area, a DeLorean pulled out in front of us. Its doors popped open, and out came an Einstein-looking older man in a white hazmat suit and a younger man with curly hair, tennis shoes, and a red sleeveless vest. Music came on, and they danced and lip-synched their way through a routine. I couldn’t really hear what the song was about, but I thought maybe it was something about science and time travel. Eight very attractive female dancers came on, shaking their way through what was probably the exposition to whatever musical they were brainwashing people into wanting to see.

Elmer Nancy had said it was a movie when she was a kid. A series of movies, actually. It had meant a lot to her, but she didn’t think I needed to watch them in order for me to help her. In fact, maybe it was better if I never watched Back to the Future. I’d have a clearer head that way.

A week before the parade, she’d told me what she wanted from me.

“I need you to send a message that time travel is possible. That if someone only works hard enough, they’ll be able to find a way to make it happen. I want you to say that this has been a dream since someone was a kid and first watched those movies.”
            “Who am I sending this message to?” I asked her.

“To me.”

 

I pulled out my dispenser and put it on my head. I would only get the chance to soap once. All the companies who paid Macy’s for a spot in the show had their own bubbles going out. You could sneak in a small message here or there, but if you tried to soap a second time, they’d catch you and squelch your message. I had to decide. Would I help out Elmer Nancy or would I wait until Back to the Future the Musical cleared off the stage and go send Eileen a message of love with all the other balloon holders?

Grogu’s eyes seemed to grow a shade darker, as if to emphasize that the answer wasn’t anywhere outside me. To send a message with my own brain that would implant in the brain of another, I had to be absolutely clear in my own mind. I looked at Elmer Nancy. She gave me a slight smile and blinked slowly. Not really a blink so much as a message of understanding. I know it’s hard, she said. I’d do it myself if I could soap my own mind. Wouldn’t the whole world be easier for all of us if we only could?

The song changed. You gotta get back in time, it said. Over and over, it said it. I looked into Grogu’s eyes and thought yes, you’ve got to get back in time. You can do that through time travel. Isn’t this a wonderful story and not in any way convoluted and isn’t this musical delightful and not at all a shameless cash grab aimed at Gen X and their sentimental money? This is brilliant, I thought, and I tried to mean it. This is brilliant, and everyone should aim to be an eccentric scientist in a hazmat suit with white Einstein hair who turns a car into a time machine. Ignore the plot holes. It makes sense. Do this with your life.

 

The actors cleared off the stage. Elmer Nancy directed us forward. The crowd cheered. We were on, and while sixty balloon holders sent their desperate messages as inconspicuously as they could, the announcers said something cheery. Then our time was up and we were headed off to go deflate the balloon by sitting on it until all the air was out.

Had it worked? After the balloon was folded and put away for next year, I couldn’t tell that Elmer Nancy was any different. All the people I’d marched with for the last few hours were texting the loved ones they’d just tried to soap. Some got immediate responses and some were still waiting, chiding themselves for not having believed enough.

Relieved at last of her piloting duties, Elmer Nancy strode over to me with such determination, I was afraid she was coming to yell at me for not having done my job right. Instead, she asked me to go eat at a place in Koreatown she knew was open.

 

I let her order for me. I didn’t know a damn thing about Korean food, and I wasn’t even sure I could locate Korea on a map. A year ago, I might have made a joke about Gangnam style or whether the restaurant served dog, but I didn’t make jokes like that anymore. I was going to shut up, eat what she told me, and wait for her to talk.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve had to ask someone to do this for me,” she said. She wasn’t half bad with chopsticks, and she was digging into a number of bowls filled with green or red plants I didn’t know.

“Why hasn’t it worked before?” I asked, wondering if our talking about it this way meant it also hadn’t worked this time.

“Oh, it’s worked, but each time, the same conglomerate that sponsors the Macy’s time soaper has gone back and erased the memory. So I have to fight back.”

“Why would they care what opinion you hold of a silly 80s movie?”

“Because that movie is what inspired me to first get interested in time travel. Which then led me to realize that it would never work, but time soaping might. Which then led me to invent the technology.”

“You mean you’re….”

“Nancy O, the inventor of the time soaper, the technology nobody admits exists but every powerful entity on Earth is using.”

And suddenly I saw her. The brilliant Korean-American scientist even I’d heard about. She was quoted on every documentary about anything involving science. But I, and probably most of the country, didn’t know what she was famous for or why everyone thought she was so brilliant.

“I never wanted to make the soaper for commercial or government purposes,” she said. “I originally thought of it as a tool for therapists. Something to help people out of their bad habits. If you think you’ve never smoked, it’s a lot easier to quit smoking. If you think you’re assertive enough to tell your boss he’s creeping you out with his sexual jokes, you’ll be assertive.”

I tried stabbing one of the green things enough to get the pointy end of the chopstick through it and use it as a skewer. It only worked enough to flatten it out. Elmer Nancy picked it up and put it on a little plate in front of me. I stared at it, not sure how to get it from the plate to my mouth. I wished she’d have just fed it to me.

“Of course, you can’t develop something like a soaper without the resources of a big institution. I started with my university research lab, hoping that’s all I would need, but before long, we needed help from the government, and then industry heard about it and got involved. We didn’t just need help with equipment and power, we needed test subjects to send and receive the ideas. We needed psychologists to figure out what kind of suggestion would work. It got away from me very quickly.”

I gave up on using the chopsticks like pincers and just picked up the green thing with my fingers and put it in my mouth. It was oily and spicier than I expected.

“There was a scary moment there where it seemed like governments were going to be able to use it for domination through hypnosis. We got lucky that it was possible to cancel out soap with more soap. But then companies came in to use it for advertising, which of course had been their intent all along. I resisted. I started to speak out in public, making it known to everyone that this technology existed and what it was being used for.”

A server piled meat on a grill. She didn’t look at me, but Elmer Nancy spoke to her in Korean, and the server handed the tongs to her and left.

“I suppose you can guess why not everyone knows about it even though I’ve made it known to the world?” she asked me.

I thought about it. Normally, I’d have failed to come up with the answer right away, written myself off as an idiot, then panicked and lost the thread completely. For some reason, though, this time I didn’t. I kept on track. What was the most likely reason? And soon, I had it.

“The companies that use the soaper erased it from everyone’s mind?” I said.

“Exactly. Of course, soaping isn’t an exact science. It’s kind of frothy, so to speak. They couldn’t completely wash away the memory of something that had so fully gotten into the public consciousness. And there are irresponsible uses of it that threaten its secrecy. A few years ago, they loaned a soaper to a rich man who wanted to be a politician. He started using it all over the place to make everyone think he hadn’t said things he’d clearly said before, or that he hadn’t done things he’d definitely done. It actually got him elected president. It would have worked even better, but he was so capricious about how he used it, the time soaping would start overlapping with other time soaping, and soon the people he was trying to influence just started running into each other. The companies eventually had to steal it back from him to get him to quit messing up their tool. So there is still some public knowledge of it they can’t erase, but it exists somewhere between rumor and conspiracy theory. Only people desperate enough to need it end up finding out the truth.”

People desperate enough to need it. People like me. I’d screwed things up with Elaine. Elaine, who I’d loved from the minute she met me at the door when I showed up to fix her thermostat. She’d been holding a six-pound dog in one hand and a spatula covered in cake batter in the other. She was wearing a purple tank top and white shorts in the middle of winter because her thermostat wouldn’t shut off and her apartment was eighty-eight degrees. When she said, “The damn thing won’t shut off, I’m sweating my tits off in here,” I’d thought that if I were around her, I couldn’t imagine ever feeling sad again. And here I’d been without her for a year and I’d been sad the whole time.

“I’ve been playing a game of cat and mouse with the big corporations,” Elmer Nancy told me. They half erase my mind to get me to quit trying to tell the public about their tool or to develop a rival to it, then I, who have just enough memory of being a part of it to know I need to reverse it, manage to get my memory back. I fight them for a while, then they manage to get the next soap savant to override my memory again.”

She seemed calm for someone whose brain was a battleground and knew it. She had the serenity of a baby Yoda balloon. The barbecued meat, which she’d handled herself, was half gone.

“If you already know who you are, more or less, what do you need people like me to remind you of it for?”

“Because I want to design something so good, it breaks the corporate soapers altogether. Something that people can use to improve their lives, not just something companies can use to sell crap to us. To do that, I need to believe I can with all my heart. I need to believe I’ve been wanting to do this my whole life. I need a story about having seen a story about time travel when I was a kid and making up my mind that was what I was going to do.”

“But you know I put it there. How can you still think it’s real?”

“It honestly doesn’t matter if you know it’s made up. If the memory is there, it’s real. People who’ve been through trauma keep living the same thing over and over even after they know it’s gone. The dispenser does the same thing, but in a more useful way.”

I was still hungry, but I was out of water and didn’t see the waitress anywhere to ask for more. Without water, I was afraid to keep eating.

“Each time, I come back a little better,” she said. “A little smarter about how it all works. That much soaping, that much openness to suggestion in the brain—it doesn’t make you softer. It makes you stronger. And here’s what I think I realize this time, now that you’ve helped me break free again. Causation. It isn’t what you think it is. You aren’t miserable because of what you said. You’re miserable because of what you didn’t say afterwards. There’s no soap in the universe that can take back the worst things we’ve done. To some extent, you can’t change causes, even in people’s minds. But you can change effects, and when you do that, it changes how people perceive the cause itself. The way to change the past isn’t in the past. It’s in the future, in how you react to what you did.”

With that, she tucked into the meal and didn’t speak again until she’d cleaned up everything on the table. I was hungry after marching all morning, but I looked around helplessly for someone to ask for water while she finished it all. When the last morsel was gone, she stood up and dropped what looked like a poker chip on the table. I picked it up and looked at it. It had an engraving of bubbles on one side and Buddha on the other.

“Here you go. Congratulations, you’re an Elmer now. Use it wisely, and pass on what you’ve learned.”

After she had gone, I realized she’d left me to pay the bill.

 

On the train back to Queens, I signed up for a free trial subscription to Disney Plus. Even if you knew you were being manipulated, even if you were part of the manipulation, literally pulling the strings the whole time, the trick could still work on you. I started to watch the first episode of the Mandalorian.

When I came out of the station by home, I turned off the show. I wanted to do something about the future that would change not the past, but the effect the past was having on me. I pulled up a text box for Elaine. My phone still remembered the last angry thing she’d sent to me a year ago.

I thought of explaining myself, of telling her that of course I hadn’t meant it like that and how could she think that I could, after I’d learned so much because of her I could even tell when she was speaking Kikuyu and when she was speaking Swahili. I could have tried to explain it, but explanations don’t change the future or the past. I could only think of one thing powerful enough to do that. So I wrote Elaine nothing is right without you and nothing ever will be and I’m so sorry and I sent it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

             

           

           

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.