by JONAH BAKER March 15, 2017
Ajanta Caves, Aharashta, India
Bartholomew Chase, inventor of the children’s game Hide and Go Seek, as any child can tell you, disappeared in 1907 at age ten during an epic game. Seekers searched for him for over three months, his brothers and school friends setting aside school and other festivities in wealthy Uxbridge, England.
“I found the perfect hiding place, in the Ajanta Cave system in India. I spent the past 110 years investigating the caves and lost track of time. They are extraordinary in the stories they tell through exquisite stone sculptures,” said the man upon being discovered by Walter Spink, scholar and explorer of the caves, himself having explored the caves for many decades.
Bartholomew, upon hearing about global warming, nuclear warfare, Donald Trump, and the fall of the British Empire, promptly asked Walter to begin counting and then disappeared.
Before returning to the same or another hiding place, Mr. Chase clarified the idea of the game originally was a spiritual seeking, not merely to look for each other in the same easy locations within houses and apartments. “It was designed to be a game of glorious proportions, something of which the Greeks would have approved.” While some scholars argue he stole the game from native peoples of the Americas, Chase did not stick around to prove his authorship.
Mr. Chase, 120 years old, had been working all this time on a manuscript, often in total darkness, that in its unedited form runs some thirty thousand pages and outlines a more complex version of the game. Called “the human experiment”, the new game presages social media (of which he had no knowledge) and involves everyone hiding and seeking simultaneously and finding oneself and each other in a deeper sense. There are 10 billion rules. Who wants to play?
