THE GO SEEKERS by Christian Moody
In the final weeks of sixth grade the world is abloom, the sunset is late, and the game is a daily after-school frenzy that lasts deep into dusk. George and Elise hide beneath a garden gazebo, in a broom closet under a staircase in the historical society, in a long-abandoned tree house littered with disintegrated nudie magazines, and in a tarpaulin-draped canoe afloat in a rickety lakeside boathouse. Once, George and Elise spend the afternoon hiding in the TV room of an elderly widow who suddenly claps her hands at 5 PM, serves them milk and cookies, and tucks them into the bed of a dusty room filled with rabbit dolls and balls of yarn. They crouch behind chimneys on roofs. They dig holes overnight, cover them with grass, leaves, and branches, and hide in them with juice boxes and crackers the following day. They spend every morning for a week constructing what they call the Movable Bush Suit, a giant shrub they wear around their waists, inside of which they creep from yard to yard. They learn by heart the attics of their neighborhood, the crawlspaces, undersides of porches, hollowed-out trees, drainage culverts, and cobwebbed corners of backyard barns: a world-within-a-world where they learn to live in the quiet and shadow.
In each hiding place, George is aware of the discreet way Elise moves and breathes in the dark. Her elbow taps his ribs. It lasts a few minutes. He can’t remember when it first started. It has built up slowly in the darkness, and now it’s as much a part of their hiding as holding their breath when a seeker steps near.
On the first official day of summer vacation George and Elise lie side by side beneath the school stage on an Unofficial Hide, and George realizes that Elise is touching herself. Above them, fairytale scenery from the year’s final production sits on the stage: a gingerbread house, a castle, a troll bridge. The curtain is drawn, the auditorium dark. George feels the familiar light tap of Elise’s elbow against him. Touch yourself is a new phrase to George, something he picked up from an older kid or song or movie, and until now he hasn’t understood what it means and still doesn’t entirely connect it to what he himself does at night.
“Why do we do Unofficials?” he whispers.
Elise’s elbow pauses.
“Unofficials are my favorite,” she says quietly.
Unofficials are what they call it when they hide without a game happening, without anyone looking for them. Hiding for the sake of hiding. Elise’s elbow patters against him again. He wants to ask why she likes Unofficials so much, but instead he lies in the dark and listens to her breathe. He wonders if it has to do with her mom, who simply up and left when she was still a baby, but he knows the question is off limits. He’s tried before. George sometimes thinks about death when they’re lying together in the darkness. He also thinks about whether or not Elise will fall in love with him and marry him when they’re older. He believes that she will, that maybe this is what the game is all about – about being with Elise.
“Is it because, you know, your mom?” he asks.
Her elbow pauses. “Unofficials are even quieter than a game,” she whispers. “I like how some sounds are far off. Cars. People’s voices. Wind. And other sounds are close. Like your stomach, or when the wood planks of the stage creak for no reason. The whole world feels small, like it’s forgotten you.”
They breathe quietly in the darkness. Her elbow tapping resumes. Eerily, the stage creaks. Elise stills herself: “Do you think maybe someone stepped on that plank days or years ago, and it’s just now lifting up?”
“The creak?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe.”
Her elbow starts up again. George hears Elise’s father, the custodian for the combined school buildings, buffing the floors in the far-off high school hallways. He wonders if Elise hears it too or if parent sounds are invisible, like the hum of your own refrigerator, or your heartbeat. George likes Elise’s dad. He lets them roam the empty school and hide wherever they’d like while he works. Getting to know the classrooms and hallways in their quiet, empty state has made it easier for George to survive in them when they are full.
“Why do you hide with me?” he asks her. It’s a long time before she answers. Their conversations while hiding are always like this; minutes and minutes can go by between sentences. It’s George’s favorite way of talking, as if there is all the time in the world.
“You’ve always been part of my hiding, from the very beginning. Do you remember the leaves?”
“I don’t know, maybe.”
She describes it to him, her first memory of hiding. Even though he doesn’t remember it, he begins the process of turning it into his own memory: They huddle together under a heap of raked leaves on Elise’s front lawn. They are three years old and next door neighbors. The pleasant smell of autumn decay reminds them of Elise’s father’s spice cabinet, of the pumpkins, squashes, and gourds on his kitchen counter. The crinkly pile scratches and tickles George’s skin, and so do Elise’s lips against his ears: “Shh,” she whispers. Her dad dumps another wheelbarrow load on top of them. Their shoulders move up and down with laughter.
“Hey, what’s under there?” jokes Elise’s dad.
They laugh harder. George wants to burst up through the oranges and yellows. Elise holds him still, in a tight embrace, like she still does when a seeker steps near.
“I think I might remember,” he tells her now in the under-stage darkness. Elise’s breath quickens. She shivers. From now on, Elise’s memory of the leaf pile will be as vivid to George as if it were his own. Years from now, after the tragedy, everyone will think back to Elise’s mother’s abrupt absence, to Elise’s many hiding escapades, her vanishing acts, and it will all become portentous in retrospect, a series of foreboding omens. Only George will remember the pile of leaves, Elise’s breath, the way her elbow moves in the dark.
A few weeks later, in June of summer break, the game surges, swells, and swarms through the neighborhood. George and Elise type up House Rules. All players must read, sign, date, and return a copy. Teams of hiders form, teams of seekers form. The teams have mascots. While everyone has to share in both the hiding and the seeking, each team has a tendency, a specialty. It’s a difference that seems to be deep down in everyone. The Webelos Scouts are seekers, and when they seek they do so in full uniform, carrying their homemade felt flag with a flaming arrow on it. The flag’s forked tongues of fire are always peeling off and getting glued back on. Seekers tend to be like this, with their emblems and badges. They like to be seen and heard. They like you to know they are coming.
The Webelos’ younger counterparts, the Daisies and Bobcats, are hiders, and their mascot is the poison dart frog. With a marker, they draw their frog insignia in secret places: ankle, wrist, armpit, shoulder blade, bottom of the left foot. The older D&D kids are hiders too. They play in hooded Druidic robes. You can’t tell them apart. They favor dark hiding places where they whisper to each other in Old Elvish. The D&D kids are the ones who develop the dice-rolling system that George and Elise include in the House Rules 2nd edition, the first illustrated edition. The dice – twelve-sided, twenty-sided, and the strangely triangular 4‑sided die – determine which teams will hide each round, which teams will seek, and what the count will be. The probability is not equal: seeking teams mostly seek, hiding teams mostly hide, and the count is usually around 100. But a little randomness in the universe is necessary, and so sometimes hiders seek, seekers hide, and the count is under ten. The way the rules are rigged, George and Elise almost never seek, and when they hide they always hide together. They are a team of two, no mascot, no name. Their motto is silence, their insignia invisibility.
College kids home for the summer form their own teams, roughly divided into state school kids (hiders) and private school kids (seekers). There is a team of seeker-parents who bring their six-year-olds, even though everyone can see the adults are in it for their own deep-seated reasons. There is a team of newly single forty-year-old women from a nearby suburb who just don’t give a shit. Their mascot is the flask that they pass back and forth in the dark. The teams assemble near the elementary school playground at 11 AM. Sometimes the games last until midnight, until all the kids in the neighborhood have missed curfew and are grounded. George and Elise ask Elise’s dad to drive them to a copy shop to have the third edition of the rulebook printed and bound. By July a fourth edition is printed with new cover art and a password-protected website that includes stats: top hiders, top seekers, and play-by-play accounts of the most legendary and epic games. The House Rules offer extra Advancement Points to the team that finds George and Elise. It’s called the Find the Founders Rule. They hide together high in trees and deep in the tool sheds of retired old men who look baffled by the temporary alliance of divorcees and young Druids trampling through yards in search of a place to hide.
By sophomore year of high school they are The Go Seekers, an official club. At their inaugural meeting in the school library George reads the Tennyson poem “Ulysses” out loud by candlelight. “Come, my friends,” he reads, his face flickering above the flame. “’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.” Outside, dark clouds rumble. The club members whistle and hoot. George feels like a miniature rock star. He’s not sure what his English teacher would say about the poem, or if it even applies to hiding and seeking, but George and Elise and the whole club like the sound of it, and that’s enough. He raises and deepens his voice for the thunderous last line, their club motto: “To strive . . . to seek . . . to find . . . and not to yield!” The club cheers. He blows the candle out. A hush falls. Rain drums the roof. In the darkness, students scamper through the high school corridors to hide. Eugene, Second Vice President of the club and Captain of the Seekers, begins the official count to 100 on the principal’s intercom. His voice echoes through the begloomed hallways.
By the end of the year Eugene is George’s and Elise’s best friend and third wheel. Hiders need good seekers, and Eugene is the most persistent seeker they can find. He’s also good at recruiting his own kind. Athletes, they realize, have the drive to pursue; they will sweat and suffer to know where you are. Nerds, too, can be tenacious finders, especially those students who stay late after school to conduct lab projects or write research essays. Musicians are especially persistent; they are willing to fail at something over and over, to chase a sound until it is perfect, and chase it farther until it is art. Eugene has all three seeker qualities: math, pole vault, piano. Like George, Eugene is in love with Elise. He is George’s best male friend, and George hates Eugene more than anyone, even if he likes him too.
At high school dances George sits up in the gymnasium bleachers where other kids slurp and suck while making out. He watches Eugene and Elise dance. Eugene will always ask Elise to school dances before George does. This is because Eugene is a seeker and George is not. Sometimes, from a hiding spot deep inside a swarm of anonymous dancers, George watches Eugene and Elise jumping and grinding. He sees how their bodies touch. Over the course of many songs, Eugene always steers Elise right into the middle of the dance floor, where the lights flash the brightest, where the dancers who love their own moves peacock and prance and hope to be seen, Eugene chief among them. George knows that Elise hates the lit‑up center of the dance floor, but he can see that she doesn’t hate it as much as she says she does: she’s as thrilled as she is horrified.
The epic spring break meet of their senior year takes place in the high school and lasts for three days. Of the nine other clubs at the meet, seven are from out of state. They assemble in the gym and go over the rules. George sits next to Elise. She has her game face on. It reveals nothing. On her other side, Eugene is smiling his giant, goofy seeker’s grin. Elise will eventually want someone quiet to hide with forever, George tells himself, someone to breathe with in the dark, a family of hiders unhidden only to each other. He tries to believe this. George needs to win this meet: the trophy is a scholarship good for a semester’s books and tuition, without which he won’t be a freshman in college with Elise come fall. Elise says losing isn’t an option; they’ll be freshmen together if they have to transfigure into invisible vapor to hide and win. Bringing the national meet to their school was Elise’s work, her brainchild, for George. The private school kids are utterly silent as the rules are read. They have special hand signs for communicating. They sit in lotus position and control their breathing. Their uniforms are silky cat-burglar unitards and soft leather moccasins.
The game is on. An hour in, George and Elise sit together in a ventilation duct after crawling on their bellies for a short distance at an excruciating pace. George guesses that they have maybe twelve hours before seekers start to poke their heads up through the vents with flashlights. This hiding spot would be a good short-game strategy, but it’s not a viable three-day strategy. They sit at a T in the ductwork. One of the arms of the T is a main tunnel that joins the labyrinth of other tunnels. The other arm of the T is a dead end that sits above the high ceiling of one of the more remote girls’ restrooms, where the middle school joins the high school. Footsteps and voices echo through the halls below. A crew of intentionally loud seekers passes beneath them. Beaters, they call these groups. Minutes later they hear a ninja-like sweeper crew following the beaters. The beater-sweeper sequence is a common technique: when the beaters pass, hiders feel safe to shift position, sneak out, or whisper, and then the sweepers sweep them up. Only amateurs fall for it. However, this sweeper crew has three additional solo sweepers who follow minutes apart, after the initial sweep, which makes their initial sweeper group more like a decoy, quasi-beater sweep. This is a good trick. These private school kids from Chicago are smart. George can tell it’s them by the whisper of their unitards, by the miasmic cloud of sweaty moccasin leather and feet.
Elise gives George a hand signal when the corridors below are quiet again, and they squirm their way slowly down the offshoot duct to the dead end. Here, a vent looks straight down over the girls’ toilets. It smells faintly of cigarette smoke and pee. George wonders what they are doing here, and then Elise swings open a false wall at the dead-end, revealing another ten feet of ductwork. They inch inside. Elise swings the wall shut and carefully latches it at the top and bottom. She turns on a tiny, battery-operated nightlight with an underwater scene of fish and seashells. It glows faintly blue, then green, then red.
George knows Elise well enough to show no surprise at this hideout. When Elise reveals something you don’t make a big deal, you don’t mention it, you pretend not to notice. At the same time, George feels startled and hurt. It appears that Elise has had this secret hiding place for a long time. There is a collection of blankets. A pillow. Packs of cigarettes. Rum bottles, full and empty. A flashlight. There is a stack of National Geographic magazines stolen from the library. Elise has torn out maps and photos and taped them to the wall: a diagram of ocean currents, mossy boulders in a forest. The entire ceiling is covered in photographs of women’s faces. Some are actually old photographs, stained, creased, and weathered by time. Others appear to have been torn out of magazines.
Elise has also taped up a drawing she made with George in eighth grade, a map of a fantasy world they invented for a novel that they never finished. The Forest of Echoes. The Sea of Sad Memories. The Grief Islands feature Elise’s rendition of a humanogriff, a creature they invented after imagining the offspring of a centaur and a hippo-griff (both back ends are horses, so it’s bound to happen). The humanogriff inherits two enormous, useless humanoid appendages from its father instead of its mother’s giant eagle wings. The humanogriff flaps and flaps its gigantic arm-wings, wiggling the huge hands and fingers, but can never lift itself up to fly away from the Grief Islands. The map makes George feel a little better. He has a small presence here. Elise hasn’t been hiding from him entirely.
She turns off the nightlight. They share a cigarette in the dark. It’s not a great idea, but the nicotine-stained girls’ bathroom below might mask the smoke. Elise turns on a tiny book light with a red bulb and writes in a journal. She hands it to George. This is how they will communicate for the next three days.
“My dad helped me make this,” it reads. “I’ve spent every fifth period since seventh grade in here.”
“Are we cheating?” he writes.
“Home team advantage,” she writes.
Before bed, they hear other hiders crawl through the ductwork. After they pass, Elise’s elbow taps his ribs in that familiar way. She pauses. She takes his hand in hers and sets it on his own crotch, where he’s hard. He twitches in surprise. She moves his hand on it, and then she lets go. He goes ahead. She holds his free hand with her free hand. It’s never felt so good before as it does now, close to her. He’s delirious with it and not thinking clearly when he turns his head and finds her mouth. This is George’s first kiss. It’s not as he imagined it would be, except that it’s with Elise. A minute later she pulls two tissues from a box and hands them to him. None of this feels as weird as it should. George never feels more at home in his body than when he is close to Elise in the dark. Over the next three days, George’s second through ninth kisses will be the same as his first.
On day two a team of beaters crawls noisily through the tunnels, followed shortly by another team coming from the opposite direction. Individual sweepers follow each group quietly. One of these is Eugene. They know him by his expensive deodorant and the swish of his exercise pants. He pauses at the T. He might smell them too, Elise’s brand of cigarettes, her sweat mingled with George’s. This is how it should be, George thinks: Eugene close by, but always with a wall between them. After a half hour he moves on.
When they have the book light on, George looks up at the ceiling, at all the women’s faces looking down at him. A face in the very middle, in an old photograph, reminds him of Elise.
George writes, “Is this one your mom?” and points to it.
“My dad gave it to me,” she replies.
“Why all of the other faces?” he writes back.
Elise turns off the book light. They lie side by side in the dark.
Later that evening they hear caught hiders, now seekers, in the girls’ bathroom, peeing lengthy pees. Early in the morning, Elise exits their hideout to squat over the vent and tinkle down onto the floor of the girls’ bathroom. She pours George’s rum bottle of urine down through the vent for him. They both did a cleanse and a fast before the meet – all the hiders talked about it – but now, on the final day, George has to poop wildly. Eugene crawls by twice more but doesn’t stop. As hiders are caught, they go straight to the bathroom, where they fart and moan and sigh with relief.
Elise begins drawing a map in the notebook, and they pass it back and forth, adding topography, naming the cities, lakes, and mountains. This must mean that she can tell he is suffering, and she’s trying to take his mind off it. She takes the pencil from George and writes: “When I find a photograph that makes me think of her, I tape it up here.”
They work on the map. George knows the best way to get Elise to divulge information is to not ask her, to let her take her own time. Midway through an inscription on a historical statue in the public square of Loomopolis, a city of weavers, cloth makers, and story-tellers who live just inland from the Sea of Fog, where the coast meets the Weeping Grasslands, she takes the pencil from him again: “I don’t remember her,” she writes, “but I like to look at the photographs and imagine what she’s like. If I imagine long enough, then I might get one moment with her right.”
“What is her name?” he writes back, even though he knows it’s a mistake. “We could find her.”
She closes the notebook, turns off the light.
Finally, at the end of day three, the first horn sounds. They haven’t named their world yet. That’s always last. The first horn means that the seekers have an hour left.
There’s a commotion of activity in the hallways, through the ducts, as the seekers get desperate. Elise grips George in a tight hug, like she often does, to keep them both still and quiet. It’s George’s favorite feeling in the world.
The second horn sounds, and the game is over. After visiting separate bathrooms, George and Elise run out through the high school doors holding hands and smiling deliriously. There is a large crowd. A band starts up. This is all unexpected. Apparently the national meet made the local paper. George and Elise are the lone hiders remaining. Cheerleaders stand on each other’s shoulders. Tailgaters hold up bratwursts and beer and whoop and yell. Elise’s dad sits on the hood of his truck and gives them a shy wave. George sees Eugene’s face in the crowd, smiling his big goofy smile with so much sadness behind it that George drops Elise’s hand for a moment. She takes it up again and holds both their hands overhead. She turns to him: “I don’t want to ever talk about my mom after this.” George nods. “My dad says it wasn’t enough for her to live here, married to a janitor. She needed more, a bigger world. I don’t want to be like her, but I think maybe I need more too.” Their hands are still raised, the crowd still cheering. George looks at Elise’s father on the pickup hood, a quiet man with a kind smile. He taught George how to play chess, is the best cook and gardener in the neighborhood. This photo of George and Elise will be a full spread in the yearbook. They will sign it together for almost everyone.
The flagship state research university they all choose is a hider’s fantasy with its monastic, forested campus, footbridges over streams, gazebos in secluded groves, and turreted academic castles creeping with ivy. There are forgotten nooks, crumbling crannies, cloistered corners, hidden corridors, secluded study towers, and remote reading rooms. This is all lucky for George and Elise, who don’t have any other options financially. Eugene, who does have many options, is accepted into the university’s famed School of Music on scholarship. He will also pole vault and double major in mathematics.
They don’t have to start a campus club because they can resuscitate a dormant club still on the books that last met during the seventies. The advisor is Full Professor Frederick Bilgarius of the History and Philosophy of Science Department, a scholar of the Second Age of Exploration, especially Darwin’s voyage aboard the Beagle. He has a hider’s face; you can’t see much of it beyond the bedraggled gray-and-white beard, stained yellow around the mouth from pipe smoke. His office is high up in a turret with curved windows overlooking the campus hedge maze, which is dotted with statues of fauns, dryads, Silvanus, centaurs, and Bacchus. Students run through the twists and turns below, laughing. George, Elise, and Eugene wait in creaky chairs while Bilgarius digs through one of many tottering, yellowed stacks of paper strewn with nutshells and seeds, corners chewed by mice. Miraculously, he produces the club’s original charter, with Bilgarius as founding advisor. The club is called The Society for Undergraduate Crypsis and Mimicry – or The Cryps ‘n’ Mims – which will have to do. After much pipe sucking and staring out the window onto the tangled puzzle below, he agrees to update and amend the rules to what George, Elise, and Eugene have proposed. With one condition: That the most points be awarded for finding Full Professor and Club Founding Advisor Frederick Bilgarius. He signs with a flourish and when he smiles they see that he is missing a canine tooth. He probes the hole with his tongue. Bilgarius provides an impromptu lesson about aggressive mimicry techniques used by advanced under-graduate seekers: The professor crouches on the floor and opens and closes his hands to imitate real and false firefly flashes; he draws a golden orb spider web in yellow whiteboard marker on his window, appearing to capture students in the maze below. Then they are dismissed.
After weeks of practice, during which Bilgarius shows them slides of butterflies that look like leaves, they finally have their first major meet over fall break weekend. Elise and George have discovered the drinking of red wine, and Saturday afternoon they hide sloppily in a bell tower with several bottles and are promptly found by Eugene, who gets drunk with them. When they wake up in a pile it is dark and, according to a note taped to George’s chest, everyone is still searching for Full Professor and Founding Club Advisor Frederick Bilgarius. Finally, as dawn breaks Sunday morning, someone sees that a section of the maze is smoking a pipe, and Bilgarius steps forward in an emerald academic robe sewn with hedge clippings, his face and beard leafier than the face of The Green Man carved above the labyrinth’s archway entrance.
* * *
On Christmas Eve George and Elise hide deep inside the Waltham Rare Manuscript Library. They’ve been here since the December 22nd Solstice Hide-and-Seek Meet, a twelve-hour meet, noon to midnight. No one should be looking for them now except for Elise’s new boyfriend and George’s new girlfriend. They have both been dating an almost-significant other for about a month now, and they’ve both been prematurely invited home for Christmas to meet the family. If George were going to make it to Christmas Eve at his girlfriend’s, he needed to start driving four hours ago. If Elise were going to make it to her boyfriend’s, she needed to have shown up for her flight the day before. Breaking up is new to George, but he’s hidden with Elise through any number of her break‑ups so he knows how it’s done.
This is the most comfortable hiding ever. They have wine, snacks, several board games in progress, and the gas fireplace is set to its highest crackle in the Waltham Family Foundation Game Archive, a walnut-paneled room with leather sofas, multiple game tables, and rare games from the ancient and modern worlds under glass. The playable, less-rare games are in the walnut cupboards, which is where Elise and George hid themselves during the twelve hours of the Solstice Meet, and also during two hours of the librarians’ annual Christmas Party, after which they squirreled away leftover wine and hors d’oeuvres before the custodian cleaned it up.
In the locked and alarm-protected rooms below them a Gutenberg Bible and Shakespeare folio reside behind glass. There is a main reading room, where on non-holidays visiting scholars wear white archival gloves to read the letters of the Romantic poets. There is a also a book bindery, repair studio, administrative offices, a staff break room, and endless rows of subterranean, climate-controlled stacks, where Elise and George initially planned to hide before they found the elevator to the Waltham Family Foundation Game Archive.
They spread dozens of boxes throughout the room, shuffle cards, set up spinners and dice, unfold boards, and place pieces in starting positions. They amend rules, and all the games become part of one large drinking game. They rotate through standards: Clue, Risk, Scotland Yard. They also play a naval game they don’t quite understand, although they adore the intricate wooden ships with names like l’Astrolabe and La Boussole, and the map is beautifully illustrated with leviathans and mermaids. When you land on one of these sea monsters you have to take a double drink and remove an article of clothing. Before long they are down to their underwear and a few odd, errant items – a belt, a sock, a mitten – and are almost aware of what they intend to get into when they push away sofas to unroll the giant map that is Twister: Mythological Edition. This version of Twister features a Minotaur in a labyrinth, along with Scylla, Charybdis, Circe, and Sirens. When Elise half-attempts to crabwalk herself from smoldering Troy to the Oracle at Delphi she bumps George in the mouth with her crotch. They laugh. George is in love again, still. They collapse together, laughing, and without thinking he grabs her hips and kisses his way slowly up her stomach to her mouth, sets himself between her legs. It’s George’s first time.
“I’m sure we’re both very single by now anyway,” Elise says hours later, before they have sex again, for the second time in George’s life.
For their freshman year Spring Break Invitational, The Cryps ‘n’ Mims organize their biggest game yet. The far-flung members of their former high school club The Go Seekers forego spring breaks on beaches in Florida and Mexico and instead arrive on the slowly thawing campus for a real rager of a hide-and-seek. They bring new friends from their new clubs at their new universities. Even the Druids show up, their robes a little high off the ground now and faded. They’ve been studying video game design at art school, or doing computer things at MIT and Stanford. When they converge for a group hug their robes appear to blend into a single brown tent supported by a dozen pale, sandaled stick feet.
The groups now all have their own House Rules, so some arguing and compromising ensues. Elise stands on the Speaking Rock in the middle of campus. The rock splits a little brook that flows to either side. She answers questions, and the Druids act as scribes, taking down the rules.
“Name the boundaries,” someone says.
“It’s the campus map. You can’t step foot off campus. You have to be on university-owned property at all times.”
“Including, like, by air? By like hot air balloon?” someone says.
“Some part of your body has to always be touching the campus,” she says.
“What if you, like, leap off the ground or climb a tree?” someone says.
“I think I’ve been clear enough,” she says. “If a tree is on campus then you’re on campus. Is it clear enough?”
The crowd shouts, “Yes!”
A representative of the Druids hands the scroll up to Elise on the Speaking Rock, and she reads the rules out loud. Everyone has agreed that this most epic of games won’t have a time limit. Instead, George and Elise, in a nod to the original game in the original neighborhood, are to be like the golden snitch in a quidditch match: the game will only end when they are caught, and they are worth 150 points while other hiders are worth 10. This special rule requires the agreement and signature of Full Professor and Founding Advisor Frederick Bilgarius, who consents to being worth 11 points so long as whoever finds him buys him an immediate eight pints of ale.
“If they find us first, we’re coming for you, Professor,” say the Druids, each holding a flagon.
The professor tongues his tooth gap. “I’ll be waiting,” he says, and dons the hood of his emerald robes.
The “golden snitch rule” makes George nervous, since there are so many expert seekers here, all of whom will be looking for them. On one hand, there’s a collective desire in the crowd to honor the original neighborhood game, which is nice. At the same time, George senses an even bigger desire to take him and Elise down for good, to end the myth and legend of their hiding skills. As far as he knows Elise doesn’t have a secret compartment in an air duct anywhere. And yet, when he looks up at Elise reading the scroll on the Speaking Rock, she is smiling. She’s radiant. She lives for this. If George and Elise aren’t found, read the rules, then the game continues, no matter how long it takes. Whoever is on campus will search for the week, and whoever can travel back weekends will search on weekends. The game only ends when both are found.
A silence falls while a Druid shakes the D&D dice in a cup. The Druid pours, and the dozens of colorful and variously shaped dice clink and clatter into a tray. There is a collective gasp. The nearly impossible has happened: George is named a seeker and Elise is not. The dice are checked and re-checked. There is less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of George and Elise ever being separated. Yet, here it is. To make matters worse Eugene is a hider, and Eugene can’t hide his wide-eyed grin about it, the chance to tuck himself close to Elise for a full week or longer. The rules are amended, and a Druid reads the newly amended article out loud, naming Eugene and Elise as the golden snitch. There’s an air of disappointment, since the opportunity to take down the original Dream Team is gone. And yet, everyone knows that the true hider is Elise. She’s the one to get.
“Good luck, my friends,” George tells Eugene and Elise on a footbridge over the stream near the Speaking Rock. The three hug each other. “I’ll be looking for you.”
They turn to leave – George to the statue of Odysseus on the seeker’s side of the brook, for the count, and Eugene and Elise to the Lightning-Struck Oak on the other side of the brook, the point from which all hiders will depart. “Wait,” says George. He knows he’s making a mistake. He stands at his end of the bridge, they pause at their end. “Elise, I love you,” he says. “I’ve always loved you.” He looks her in the eyes, but she has her hider’s face on and he can’t tell what she’s thinking. Eugene looks stung. George turns and runs to the statue of Odysseus, heart pounding. He considers foregoing the game altogether. In the twilight, wearing a seeker’s blindfold, he stands on the statue’s plinth: “To find, to seek, and not to yield!” he exclaims. He blows the candle out, followed by silence – the non-sound of expert hiders hiding, seekers listening. In unison, they chant out loud to one hundred and eleven.
George doesn’t abandon the game. He’s on a quest. The thought of Elise and Eugene together has made a true seeker of him. After a mere six hours, he discovers the Druids huddled in a hollowed-out tree in the campus forest. The next morning he finds the former Chicago prep school kids, the ones who are now at Princeton, in the guise of hairnet-clad recycling sorters in the dining hall. The ones who are now at Yale – never much for hiding – are in the Music Library playing cards, singing a capella, and eating cheese and crackers. By Wednesday, only Eugene, Elise, and Professor Bilgarius remain. On Thursday, a mud-caked professor Bilgarius emerges from the pond in the campus meadow with a reed in his mouth. He sits down on the grass and asks for an ambulance. He’ll be on medical leave for the rest of the semester.
Friday night there is a party, and the mood has changed from one of seeking to one of getting drunk and waiting. “E & E” is what people are calling them for short. They’ve already achieved a new hiding record. George, who has barely slept, imagines them in the dark, touching each other. He leaves the party wildly drunk, wide-eyed with heartbreak. Late Saturday morning the campus police find him naked in the grotto of the campus hedge maze with an out-of‑town seeker he doesn’t know. “You called me Elise all night,” she tells him. “But you better not call me Elise now.” The campus cops issue him a first-warning citation. Still a little drunk, he searches the campus woods alone.
When the week is over, some visiting teams stay an extra few days, sleeping on dormitory floors and common room couches. Professor Bilgarius emails from his recovery room to tell the club to cooperate with campus police. He’s CC’d top administration. The campus police investigate, and it turns out that Eugene has mailed a postcard to his parents, telling them he is OK. He has also unenrolled for the semester. Elise has done neither of these things, but of course she wouldn’t. They’re shooting for two weeks, the club members speculate. They’re going for a month, they speculate later.
Two weeks back into classes, George is surprised to see Professor Bilgarius – who is supposed to be on medical leave – cross the stage of George’s History of Evolution lecture in his emerald robes. The original professor has suffered a full‑on heart attack and will need bypass surgery, Bilgarius explains from the podium, whereas he, Bilgarius, has merely suffered some hypothermia, angina, and humiliation from wading in cattails for nearly a week while sucking air from a reed tube underwater. “Medical leave?” he says, and then sticks out his tongue and blows a raspberry. “Discussing crypsis with bright young minds is the best medicine there is.”
After that first lecture George finds himself in Bilgarius’s office hours several times a week. The professor is content to smoke his pipe up in his turret and mumble and mutter behind his beard and robes, so long as George brings him chocolate, cheese, and strong ale. George tells the old man, many times over, the whole story from the beginning: the pile of autumn leaves, Elise’s little arms around him. The hiding place – the ceiling of possible-mothers – in the air ducts. Sex in the Waltham Family Rare Games Archive. The misguided declaration of love on the footbridge. The professor blows large smoke rings into the air and then sends small rings through the bigger ones. His missing canine has been fixed and his teeth gleam, something he must have done while on medical leave. They hug at the end of every session, with nary a word from Professor Bilgarius. The old wizard’s arms are surprisingly strong and sturdy under the emerald robes.
The more advanced students complain that Bilgarius’s lectures are merely chapters read out loud from his books Love Among the Mimetic Weeds, The Milk Snakes of Mexico and Me, and Fly Orchid, My Heart, all best sellers in the ‘80s, but George doesn’t mind at all. He enjoys the bearded lull of the professor’s familiar voice, and because George is awake all night, searching his mind for Eugene and Elise, the pro-fessor’s lectures are one of the few times he actually sleeps. Then, exactly one month to the day the seekers chanted to 111, Professor Bilgarius is in the middle of a digression about female hyena pseudo-penises in a lecture that started out as a treatise on Müllerian mimicry in monarch butterflies, when he abruptly stops speaking. There is a long pause. He scans the auditorium with piercing eyes from his podium. “Hiding,” he whispers in the parched voice of someone adrift at sea. The students lean forward in their chairs. The hush in the auditorium wakes George up, and he leans forward with his peers to listen. “Hiding,” says Professor Bilgarius again. He sighs deeply. “I’m too tired. I can’t anymore.” He closes his book with a thump. He leaves the stage and walks up the center aisle toward the doors at the back. He pulls his emerald robe up over his head and drops it on the floor, tears off his beard, and it is Eugene in a white t‑shirt and blue boxer shorts who exits the auditorium.
Later, after the police and campus administration have questioned Eugene at length, George and Eugene have a beer in a pub frequented by the older professors. Eugene has been drinking here as Professor Bilgarius for a month. The bartender doesn’t even ask for their fake IDs.
“She wouldn’t hide with me,” says Eugene. “Because I’m not you, I guess. When I asked her to marry me, she told me if I could last longer than her in the game she’d consider it.”
George wants to punch him. “You proposed?”
“You declared your love first. You spoke the unspoken. We’ve both loved her forever. What was I to do?”
“I’ve loved her longer.”
Eugene shrugs. “Now I’ve lost her. I failed. She knew I would fail.”
“A proposal would only guarantee that she would never marry you,” says George. “Do you know her at all? Telling her I love her was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.”
Eugene shrugs. “I wear my heart on my sleeve,” he says. “Apparently, so do you.”
They sip beer. George wants to fight him, considers fighting him. But Eugene also feels like his closest link to Elise, like the only friend George has, which is exactly what Eugene is.
Eugene’s story is this: he hid in Bilgarius’s office, prepared with an emerald robe and beard he’d procured way back at the fall meet, waiting for the moment the dice would choose him as a hider. He’d long suspected that if he proved he could be a hider to Elise, she might love him. He knew Bilgarius’s turret wasn’t ideal concealment, but then again no one would think to look for Bilgarius there, and if they “found” Eugene as “Professor Bilgarius,” Eugene’s plan was to join the seekers and technically still be hidden and unfound. He’d reveal himself the moment Elise was found, and then she’d love him, and so on. It seemed brilliant, to Eugene.
As it turned out, no one from the game looked in the turret. The cleaning crew treated Eugene like Bilgarius when they emptied the trash at night, and colleagues – perhaps getting news from the custodians – wound their way up the turret stairs to inquire about his health. Eugene answered them with mumbles and a thumbs up. When a colleague came down with a heart attack, the department head asked Bilgarius – since he was on campus already and seemed in good health – if he’d return from medical leave and fill in.
“It was so lonely,” says Eugene. He sips a fresh pint. He reaches out a hand to touch George’s shoulder, hesitates, pats George, then grips his shoulder like a miniature, one-handed hug. “Our talks together meant a lot to me. You saved me with your company, I think. And your cheese.”
George thinks about fighting him again, but instead grips Eugene’s shoulder back. “I was so jealous,” says George.
“I know, you told me, told ‘Bilgarius,’ ” says Eugene. “Elise said that if I didn’t out-hide her, she’d marry you instead. She said it was what she’d always planned.”
George drinks deeply from his mug and searches Eugene’s eyes for the truth. Eugene’s never been a liar, and doesn’t look like a liar now. Eugene stands up and extends a hand. “Congratulations,” he says.
George laughs, nearly spitting out beer, and waves away the handshake. “You’re drunk,” he says. “Elise was joking. She was fucking with you.”
George believes what he’s saying, but he also doesn’t want to. Of course they would marry each other. The leaf pile, the darkness beneath the stage, the Games Archive: What else is marriage but the person you most want to hide with? He believes it, and he doesn’t.
“We’ll find her. You two will be together,” says Eugene, a tear sliding down the side of his nose.
George smiles, squeezes Eugene’s shoulder with another one-handed hug. “We won’t be together anytime soon,” says George. “Maybe when we’re ancient, like forty years old. Elise isn’t going to settle down for a while. She hides from one relationship by jumping into another one. She likes sex with a lot of different people. She could have been with any number of people since the countdown. Let’s find her.”
“Let’s find her,” says Eugene, lifting his beer. They knock their mugs together.
The two friends don’t so much look for Elise as wander campus and wait for her to reveal herself in the way of her choosing. George stands on his Footbridge of Embarrassment in the middle of campus, the brook trickling beneath it, and he thinks of a home with Elise. On the beach, their children splash through foamy fingers of surf. On the deck of a mountain home, George and Elise drink coffee and watch mist weave through the evergreens. On a boat somewhere in Scandinavian waters, they peer at fjords through binoculars, Elise’s belly pregnant with their first child. It is dusk and fireflies twinkle across campus when George realizes that Eugene has already said goodnight and left George alone on the bridge. Some of the firefly blinks are mating calls. Others are the false flashes of predators. His heart feels insane.
Dogs are brought in to sniff the campus when Elise is declared a real missing person. Her face is on posters, and police interview all the seekers and hiders at length, again and again. The search continues through summer, with seekers of a different sort volunteering from all across the country. They spread their arms, touching fingertips, and walk the campus, the town, and the neighborhood back home.
News of the disappearance spreads across the Internet and hide-and-seek takes on a new popularity among teens, who feel the twinkle of danger and sex when they read about it online. Elise is on t‑shirts. Her face becomes an Internet meme that has her hiding in the most ridiculous places. George worries that Elise will see these things and never come out. Internet infamy is her worst nightmare, a life she couldn’t live. It could be years before she emerges, or forever. He believes, in his heart, that she’s still hiding, that she’s a master, that this is what she does. He imagines her sipping wine in a secret room behind a painting in the university art museum. He imagines her attending classes under a new identity she’s been building for years. He imagines her in a foreign city, starting over, gone, hiding forever. Maybe she’s found her mother and reunited. When he walks the campus with Eugene at the start of their sophomore year he finds himself following the smell of decay through the woods. He follows it all the way to a dead fawn. He lifts it with a big branch and looks under it, just to be sure.
* * *
Throughout the year George searches for Elise. He lifts manhole covers at night and descends ladders beneath streets and sidewalks. He spelunks the university’s sewers and underground conduits with a headlamp affixed to his forehead. He sleeps in late and dreams of her stuck in tight places. He wakes up in a sweat, fighting his covers. Eugene transfers schools. In his last email to George he writes, “Please don’t contact me again. It’s too painful, and I’ve moved on.” Ignoring him, George writes and texts, asking for help with the search, certain that his messages aren’t getting through. Eugene blocks him on Facebook, across all social media.
George visits Professor Bilgarius several times per week, like he did when Bilgarius was Eugene in disguise. Bilgarius listens, nods, and smokes his pipe, and when there is nothing more for George to say they stand at the turret windows, sip liquor, and stare down into the hedge maze. Bilgarius gives George study abroad brochures: “Leave,” says Bilgarius. “Go see places. Free your mind.” He also gives George articles and books on crypsis and mimicry, on the history of natural history, and on Darwin’s voyage aboard the Beagle. George reads them carefully many times over, hoping Bilgarius has given them to him because hidden somewhere within is secret information about Elise. He knows this is fantasy and he won’t find clues about Elise within the pages, but George has run out of physical places to look and combing through texts satisfies his drive to search. He sifts through data. He finds overlooked connections. He seeks the words and meanings hidden behind other words and meanings. This academic work calms his mind, like doing a puzzle. His GPA goes up. He finds a home here, in his homework, and he shys away from parties, from football games, from people. It feels like hiding and searching at the same time.
In the summer George stays in the college town and works on a lawn care crew. He peeks into sheds. He stomps on the grass for signs of a hidden trapdoor. He spits on basement windows to rub away grime and peer in. If Elise is captive somewhere, she knows George will look forever. The idea could be keeping her alive.
“I’m looking for you,” he whispers to Elise before he sleeps.
“What?” says a temporary lover, next to him in bed.
Junior year, George calls Elise’s dad and asks for evidence that Elise was once real and not just a mental construct, an imaginary friend. The first time he calls, Elise’s dad gives him detailed lists of memories and reasons, and they laugh and cry together. The second and third times Elise’s dad hangs up.
Professor Bilgarius insists that George not enroll in the graduate program in the history and philosophy of science. He encourages George to skip graduate school altogether and to head out into the world to make money, shake things up, and live a simple and happy life. George doesn’t listen, and in the second year of graduate school he teaches his own discussion section, and in the third year he teaches his own lecture. George sometimes stops mid-sentence to examine the faces of his students, to see if she’s there, hiding under his nose. The students don’t understand it, but they like it. They find it dramatic and piercing. Have I have found you, Elise? he sometimes writes in the margins of term papers. There are rumors among his students that he’s been seen in strange places: Astraddle steeply pitched rooftops with a drink in hand, up in tree branches smoking a cigarette, emerging from manholes covered in grime, lying beneath porches, asleep on a sofa in the Waltham Family Game Archive late at night. All the rumors are true. George gives up on Elise. She is lost. He gives up looking for her monthly. He gives up weekly. He stands in Bilgarius’s office and promises to give up by the next quarter-hour chime of the campus clock, and with each new chime he promises again.
The day before the final exam for George’s lecture class, George gets a phone call from Elise’s father. George has been calling the house from time to time, but he always hangs up before Elise’s dad can pick up the phone.
“I won’t call you anymore. I won’t,” George answers.
“It’s okay,” the man says. “We need to meet.”
“No, I promise I won’t call anymore.”
“Do you have a car?”
“Yes, but I usually take the bus home to save on gas. I could come this weekend.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow evening. I’ll text when I’m on campus.”
George tries to reply and confirm but nothing comes out. The man hangs up.
It’s dark, past dinnertime, when Elise’s dad pulls up in front of the student union. George gets in the pickup. They shake hands awkwardly. They start driving. A few turns later they have left the college town and are driving down a dark country road. Elise’s dad has finally lost it, George thinks. He blames George for Elise’s disappearance and is going to murder him on some back road.
“Look,” says George. “I don’t know anything.”
“I know you don’t.”
They keep driving. The dark road is long and straight, empty cornfields and patches of woods to either side. George quietly unclicks his seatbelt and places his hand on the door latch, in case he has to roll out. A few miles further, and Elise’s dad abruptly slows down, clicks on his right blinker, and turns into a dirt tractor lane between fields. They slowly bump down the lane about a hundred yards, and then he turns the truck off. It’s quiet. Wind blows over the bare fields. The engine ticks and cools.
“Why are we here?” says George. He is ready to run out across the fresh-tilled dirt if he needs to.
Elise’s dad takes a deep breath. “I didn’t mean to drive this far. I couldn’t decide if I should tell you what I know. It’s the right thing, for you, but maybe not for me.”
George looks at the man, but the man stares down the tractor lane, searching the darkness with his eyes. The moon appears from behind a cloud and bathes the field in its light. George looks out the window, imagines tiny seeds under the dirt, roots and shoots pushing their way out.
“Here,” says Elise’s dad, and he hands George a folded piece of paper.
George opens it, looks at it by moonlight. It’s a photo of Elise printed in color on a cheap home printer. She’s sitting close to a handsome man with salt-and-pepper hair, a baby on her lap. Two things feel wrong with the picture. One, Elise has aged. Of course she has. Two, she’s smiling and looks happier than he’s ever seen her.
Her dad snatches the photo, opens the truck door, and sets it on fire with a lighter. It warps and blackens. He closes the door. The smell of burning paper lingers.
“Now you know,” he says.
“Was that a real photo?” says George.
Her dad smiles while looking ahead out the windshield. “I always thought of photos as hard evidence,” he says. “But to you guys – your generation – there’s nothing more suspicious.”
“I guess so,” says George. “She’s alive?” He knows it’s true. He sees it on her dad’s face.
“We’ve emailed. Talked on the phone once. She’s happy.”
George nods. He feels numb and doesn’t know what to think.
Elise’s dad looks George hard in the eye now: “You’re to say nothing. Not a thing to anyone. Is this understood?”
George nods.
“Say it’s understood.”
“I promise I’ll never tell.”
Her dad’s face softens. He places a hand on George’s shoulder. “You remind me of her,” he says. “You two were always together. All this time I kept telling myself you must already know, probably knew before I did. I’m sorry.”
“How long have you known?”
“It was a little over a year after she left, and then one morning she called. It was an answered prayer. She told me that if I told anyone she’d disappear again. I believed her of course. You’re the only one who knows. She’s traveled, had a whole life. Maybe found her mother, maybe not. She has a child now, and I think she needs me. She might be changing. Kids will do that to you. I might actually see her again.” He pauses to roll down his window. A cold breeze blows through the cab. He looks at George. “Please keep quiet. Don’t ruin it. Don’t make her go away again.”
“I won’t.”
They sit in silence for a long time, and then Elise’s dad starts the engine and backs out of the field. They drive to campus in silence.
“Do you need dinner?” he asks George back at the student union, pulled up to the curb.
“I’m good,” says George. It feels too weird, too tense, and he wants the encounter to be over so that he can sit alone somewhere and figure out how he feels. There’s only shock now, a kind of numbness.
“OK,” says her dad. “If you change your mind, if you need company, I’m staying here in town tonight.” He smiles. “You really were always around,” he says. “Always the two of you. It’s nice to see you again.”
They shake hands. George gets out of the car. He pauses before he shuts the door. “She looks happy,” says George. “In the photos. I think she’s happy.”
“Now you know,” says Elise’s dad. “Go live your life.”
George can’t sleep that night. He drives back to the old neighborhood. It’s 3 AM when he parks in the lot of the local grocery chain and walks a mile to Elise’s house. His own childhood home next door is dark and quiet, his parents asleep within. He knows how to go from fence to tree to rooftop to upstairs bathroom window, but he doesn’t need to. He doesn’t even need the key kept in the planter where it’s always been. The back door isn’t locked.
It’s easy to find what he’s looking for. It’s right there in the messy spare room her dad uses as an office, scattered across a desk, some of it in a manila folder, the rest of it on the computer desktop. She’s in Spain. Her husband is Spanish. Elise didn’t even take Spanish in high school. She took Latin and French and dabbled very poorly in Japanese. It was like she took everything available except Spanish, and now she’s in Spain. George is careful not to disturb anything. He snaps photos with his phone, and he texts himself her address and information. He doesn’t want her dad to know, doesn’t want Elise to know he’s coming. He imagines he’ll make it look like an accident, like he happened upon her while on vacation. Or maybe he’ll just watch her from a distance to make sure she’s as happy as she looks in all the photos he’s found. She looks happy in every one.
He stands in her bedroom and loses track of time. On the wall is the framed yearbook photo of the two of them, emerging from the high school halls hand in hand, victorious. Every edition of the House Rules, the maps of the fantasy world they invented together – it’s all here. Different scenarios pass through George’s mind. He could declare his love, even though it backfired once and he’s not even sure he feels it anymore. She’s obviously in love with her baby and Spanish husband. He could be angry and confront her, but he’s not sure he feels that now either. He could say goodbye to her. He’d like that.
“George?” he hears from downstairs. “Are you here?”
Elise’s father must’ve been sleepless too. His mind must’ve turned to what he would do in George’s position. George gets down on the floor and squeezes under Elise’s bed, much more slowly than he did as a child. Elise’s dad walks through the house. George lies on his back and listens. Elise’s dad is quiet now. He enters the bedroom and stands silently. George imagines Elise squeezing him tight, like she would have long ago. Her dad sits on the bed, and it’s several minutes before George realizes the man is crying. George has two possible plans in mind. The crying becomes sobbing. George’s first plan is to drive to the airport to see if his credit card can handle a flight to Spain. Her dad collapses onto the covers. His heaves shake the bed. The second plan is to do nothing, to let her be gone and happy. He’s not sure which is better, which he has in him. For now, though, he lies still, listens to Elise’s dad cry himself to sleep above him. It feels good to hide again. The man sleeps. George hides. He listens to his own breath, crouched under the leaf pile in his memory. He feels the dry tickle against his skin, smells the scent of autumn decay. Elise’s lips whisper against his ear.
Christian Moody is the author of a forthcoming collection of short stories and a novella, Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds (Sarabande Books).