ENDGAME

He had been developing a new strategy game in his sleep to pass the agonizing hours, and it involved placing different colored rocks on a three-dimensional pitch that he had carved out of the sandstone bunker beneath the house where he lived in his sleep that year. It was a few years ago. The field of battle spread through many many rooms of the bunker where he explained the rules to his greasy little companions, who slept in the walls. There was a light system that recorded all of the moves and projected the position of the different pieces (grey, pink, blue, purple, teal, oak, cream: perfectly round and polished with one flat edge) and stored the positions and moves in a locked database. Or else the gnomes, who had elephant trunks and tiny human hands, would cheat by moving the pieces whenever he turned his back, and to his disappointment they started stealing the rocks, too, for the pieces had become very costly. They were unique in that world, born from his own thoughts like drops of brain, which he dribbled onto wax paper as they ran out of his nose and baked in an oven, and in addition the game was now very famous. Not only were the stones priceless, they had become essential for the survival of that world and its humans and by extension the elephant people. In fact, the man realized one night with a start, the movements of the pieces now dictated the movement of the mechanized armies out on the supercontinent. The dreamer and his trunked gnomes had become generals in a war of robots, and the map in the sandstone bunker had become the map of the world. Now the pieces also flew on silver dollar sized platforms that notched into the board squares with a whiz and a click, and drove upon remote control flatbeds across miniature superhighways that zoomed in and out of tunnels in the bunker, and ran upon tracks that the dreamer fashioned, that crawled upon the walls and twisted into fantastical loops and corkscrews.

And they flooded a section of the bunker and put the stones upon floating shingles to create navies. Peering through the observation slits of the bunker out at the dark grey sea they thought they could make out the lights of the cruisers waist-deep on the main, and hear the creak of their turrets as they spun on their cranks.

The game was like Go but as he lay in his heavy sweating flesh somewhere back there upon the awful bed on the surface of the world, his eyes flicking behind their lids, knowing time was short, he thought he would never find the words to explain ko or seki, and the little gnomes sat and chuckled when he tried and stuttered. They sniffed through their trunks and said, Aw just let us play it our way!

They had sharp claws on the ends of their withered little hands and would ride the game tracks, which were equipped with entire stockyards of cars and cabooses that ran on tiny lumps of coal, pulling on the steam whistles as they rode the loop-de-loops, jumping on the cars and hooting, revving them up and playing chicken, falling like furry ten pins!

As soon as he left the bunker and got on the ladder they were at it, they thought he was asleep inside his dream. He heard them back there, and sometimes there were accidents, which they did a bad job of cleaning up after, was another reason he carefully confiscated the game pieces. Imagine losing a day of moves because your stupid friends fell off their model train and skidded across the model supercontinent, like idiot elephant kaiju!

The creatures would shriek and screech in delight but they would not move the pieces on the sly because at the end of each game session he would log their positions, then scoop the stones into a burlap bag which he lugged with him up the ladder to the big house, which was part lighthouse and part mansion, and nestle it under his head in the bed tent where he slept in the big dream.

The gnomes would not come into the big house, but he kept the colored stones with him at all times, embracing them with his incredibly muscular arms and a trunk of his own, which he noticed one day while shaving in the dream had sprouted like hideous pink cauliflower above his lips.

Since there were no rules it was difficult to say who was winning, though he worked on the logistics of the play in the sandbox of his mind for many, many months that year between waking hours, and loved his little friends with their mucus rimmed mouths half hidden under their goofy trunks, and the three-dee board which he fashioned with vicious perfection from the walls, ceiling and floor, right out of the rock of the island, and all its many details, and returned to again and again, to luxuriate in its texture and tone.

In life he worked his shifts, took his punches, miked his meals, burned in rage, cringed in his boxers and socks, crossed his heart, prayed feebly to a crucified Jesus that became less and less anthropomorphic, which grew a wobbly long trunk and whose Dumbo eyes would well with tears, that wished to die.

One night as his big belly rose and fell in the electric streetlights through the curtain, he slipped into the dream to discover that the sack of stones was gone from the big house, and the hatch of the bunker open. He approached the ladder and heard a snickering and gurgling, the voices of his orcish companions, laughter and whining.

He dropped onto the sandstone floor in his golden slippers, in his golden robe, and saw the tracks were smashed and the water of their game sea was swilling with blood.

There were prisoners lined up against the wall, tiny elephant prisoners he had never seen, not his friends. They wailed and yipped, trunks bloodied, eyes bewildering and begging, much like an elephant Christ’s.

The stones had been placed with great dexterity on the sandstone squares all throughout the halls and the rooms on the multifaceted, articulated game board. They both flew and sloshed. They twinkled in variegated constellations and emitted a hum, as though they had been given life by an elephant Frankenstein from a source he had never suspected, right under his very very very long nose. The gnome generals, delighting in their coup, floated through the air on chariots of rock, barking orders, reaching again and again into burlap bags from which they pulled rock after rock, more stones in more colors than he had ever imagined. In fact, that night he saw colors he never knew existed.

When they turned on him it was with a hellhound yip and a whinny and he fled. He felt their teeth sinking into his back and legs, their trunks, now rough and slimy, slap across his backside again and again, which is how he woke up in bed at 3 am, with a sob.

Game over.