Short Story: ‘Playing Kings in the Dark’

Peadar and his housemates were in the middle of their second game of Kings when the grid controlling the Southwest quadrant of the town blew its lid. But everyone was drunk and it was inconvenient only in the way that calls from his mother sometimes were. He simply ignored them; hanging up prematurely because he knew she’d be in a bar somewhere stiffing one of the more kind-hearted or stupid suitors for taxi fare.

Jemmy had it sorted in ten minutes—staggering through the living room into the adjoining kitchen by phonelight and digging out candles from beneath the sink—and there was the feeling of being involved in some kind of ritual, with Gary suggesting that they invite some of their neighbours round for a blackout party.

‘What about that house full o’ girls at the bottom of the Pound Road?’ He said. ‘Plenty of puss flyin’ around there and I’ll bet that wee blondie one was takin’ a shower when the electric went out.’

‘How are you not in prison?’ Peadar asked.

‘Wouldn’t mind takin’ her back onto the power grid,’ he continued. ‘Like, when you hit our age girls tend to get all broody and sentimental and you have to be prepared to just… go for it, like. Know what I’m sayin’?’

‘Not really,’ Jemmy said. ‘And you still haven’t done your three fingers yet you fuckin’ tube.’

Gary winked. ‘I will if we can get those girls round.’

The three of them sat on the living room floor huddled in a circle round a smattering of wax covered playing cards. Two candles burned in the fireplace next to them with another precariously balanced atop an empty can of Carlsberg in its centre, so that from an outside perspective—or even if one came up on the rear-side of their game, nearest the kitchen—the light made them look like witches shifting tarot and the fireplace itself like some kind of crude, ritualistic voodoo shrine. Peadar had read about such things and knew that with voodoo—as indeed, with tarot readings—much of society’s association with devil worship and black magic was based in Hollywood sensationalism which had, in turn, stemmed from earlier mixed feelings about cultural difference, race, gender and sexuality. He remembered watching the films White Zombie and The Serpent and the Rainbow in one sitting and knew that logically there was nothing to be afraid of. But he couldn’t help feeling uneasy—even as the three of them sat drinking and joking in the dark. The truth was that with the storm battering against the window and filtering the amber of the streetlights into a concentrated glare of harsh tangerine, Peadar’s survival instinct was bugging the whole time. He’d also never really lost the guilt and fear of being a Catholic schoolboy, even when all notions of deferred good and evil had been examined thoroughly and conscientiously disposed of. But what else was there to do during a blackout but play drinking games?

‘We could always do a Ouija board,’ Jemmy suggested.

‘We don’t have one,’ Gary said. ‘And anyway, what about the girls? We should be havin’ a fuckin’ blackout party, not pullin’ our wires to some shite you took from that poncy fuckin’ Derren Brown thing about séances. Don’t be a faggot.’

‘Fine,’ Jemmy said. ‘You feel free to go out in that weather if you want; just don’t come cryin’ back here when they tell you to go fuck yourself. No-one’s gonna leave the house in that. No-one’s that stupid.’

Peadar interrupted. ‘You’re both right,’ he said. ‘Like, Gary, even if you somehow made it round to that house there’s no way anyone’s gonna come back here to drink and listen to you talk shite all evenin’.’

‘Told you,’ Jemmy said.

‘And I dunno what the fuck you’re on about!’ Peadar laughed. ‘To do a proper Ouija, we’d need one of those fold-out wooden things with a printed alphabet and finger-dock. The thing would be a fuckin’ mess without them and we’re probably all too bollixed to do it anyway.’

‘Sounds like Jumanji,’ Gary suggested.

‘Shows what you know,’ Jemmy said. ‘When I was at the Gaeltacht some of the older boys from West Belfast built a Ouija board from scraps of paper—just wrote each letter on its own wee slip—then spread them out in a circle around the floor with a shot glass in the middle and a few candles from the Bean-an-tí’s cupboard.’

‘That doesn’t work,’ Peadar said. ‘And anyway the whole thing’s a racket. It was patented by the same fuckers who invented Monopoly back in the day. It’s a kids’ game.’

‘Not if by “kids’ game” you mean, test-of-inter-group-psychology. It’s probably true that there’s nothin’ supernatural about it like, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t reveal some greater truth about the players.’

‘Alright,’ Peadar said. ‘But I’m not gettin’ the shot glass and someone else can find paper to make the letters.’

‘We can use the playin’ cards,’ Gary chimed in. ‘They’re covered in wax anyway and it might give off a weird spooky vibe to have the letters drawn on top of all those medieval lookin’ Kings and Jokers.’

‘That’s not a bad idea,’ Jemmy said, pointing. ‘And sure if I get the shot glass, Gary, you can make the letters—there’s a marker on the mantelpiece up there.’

‘Do I have to do anything?’ Peadar asked.

‘Aye. You could try growin’ a pair of fuckin’ balls.’

* * *

By the time the letters in the Ouija alphabet were laid out evenly and far enough apart that there was room to play the game, the electricity was back on. Peadar knew that in order to recreate some of the giddy spontaneity of the power-cut, the lights would be turned out again and the game would continue as planned, but he could sense that something in the group’s initial trepidation had vanished and he couldn’t help but feel a pang of disappointment as he realised that some of his own fear had vanished with it. Wasn’t that the point after all; to come out the other side of the Ouija as new men reborn by fear? To feel the catharsis of discovering their limitations as men? Fear was to be understood as one of the hallmarks of successful experience, for without it there was no guarantee that something was even real. In essence, it guaranteed aliveness.

Nevertheless, with a new batch of candles lit and placed at various points around the room, the game was set. Each of the players had a tumbler of unmixed vodka between their knees and a bowl of ice set to the side; partially because the bag had begun to melt and drip all over the freezer, partially because it made the paint flavoured kick of the vodka more bearable and the careful ritualism of the game more believable.

Gary nominated himself as medium. ‘In case we pick up on the ghost of Marilyn Monroe,’ he said. ‘Imagine she had to speak with one of you sad acts…’

‘Switch out the lights there, will you Peadar?’ Jemmy said. ‘If we’ve to trust this prick with the most important aspect of the game, it’s probably best if he does fuck all else.’

Peadar switched off the lights as instructed, then sat back on the floor. Gary placed the shot glass in the middle of the circle of letters and turned it upside down and for ten minutes nothing happened, though Gary tried valiantly—At first by speaking to the board, as though he were addressing a table of friends in a bar, then intoning loudly like a priest and finally, by whispering like a snake charmer. ‘Is anyone there?’ he kept saying, ‘who am I speaking to?’ But nothing happened. It was only when Peadar started to lift his finger away from the shot glass that it shifted beneath them and the housemates became aware of the fact that something was really going on. They all felt it.

‘Fuck!’ Gary said. ‘It’s movin’.’

‘Quiet,’ said Jemmy. ‘What’s it tryin’ to say?’

Peadar spelled it out. ‘K—I—N—G’

‘The fuck does that mean?’ Gary whispered, his eyes reflecting back the candlelight like two dark puddles. ‘I don’t wanna be fuckin’ with any demons or anything. King Who?’

‘Be quiet, for fuck’s sake!’ Jemmy said. ‘We won’t be able to tell which fuckin’ king it is if you keep blatherin’ on like a tit!’

Gary took a drink. ‘Well, I am the medium,’ he said quietly.

It took what seemed like a very long time for the glass to move at all between the monogrammed cards and when it finally came to a standstill, not even the sound of the housemates’ collective breathing was perceptible. The name the letters had given to their collective unconscious was King Solomon and though Peadar spent the next few moments thinking quietly to himself about what this could mean, he ended up stumped. All he could remember about Solomon was the offer in some paternity suit to cut an infant in half and he didn’t know what the fuck that was all about. Something to do with the literal manifestation of the divided self? No. Their collective unconscious wasn’t that clever. Maybe it was simply that they’d been watching The Greatest Story Ever Told on Film4 that day and had started drinking when Jemmy suggested halfway through that they take a slug every time the word Jesus was said. They’d finished four cans apiece by the end of the film and then decided to play Kings. The blackout happened after that and maybe some of that Bible stuff actually sunk in, but who knew?

Gary spoke up. ‘Are you good or bad?’ He asked.

‘G—O—O—D,’ the board said.

‘And what exactly is it that you want?’

‘T—R—U—E’

Gary was shaking. ‘I’m confused,’ he said.

‘Ask it what truth it wants,’ Peadar whispered.

‘What truth do you want?’ Gary asked.

‘Y—O—U,’ it spelled back. ‘G—A—R—Y.’

‘Wh-why? What truth do I have?’

The board paused. Peadar took a drink from the tumbler of vodka and ice between his knees, no longer able to distinguish its flavour and watched as Gary sat across from him shaking in the dark and thinking all the time that it made him look like he was laughing with despair. He could see his breath condensed—likely resulting from the fact that there hadn’t been any heat in the house—but Peadar found it disconcerting in a way which made him realise that the violence in Gary’s shaking was partially due to the fact that he himself was shaking and that his vision was spotty and blurred. Jemmy seemed more controlled, though several seconds of careful observation told Peadar that he was merely trying to conceal a facial tic and that all three of them were frightened; with no amount of rational thought or lack of superstition able to help them.

‘Y—O—U,’ the board spelled again. ‘G—A—R—Y’

‘Me what, for fuck’s sake?’ Gary said. ‘Tell me what you want.’

* * *

When the game was finished, the cards they’d been using as letters were placed carefully in the middle of the fireplace and set alight. The rest of the deck soon followed suit. Then the television and all the lights were switched on and the shot glass, which had been used as a makeshift planchette, was thrown in the recycle bin along with the empty cans and bottles.

It was generally agreed that what had just taken place was in no way supernatural, but there was an uneasiness there—one which Peadar knew would linger for days. He likened it in his mind to the feeling of nausea attributed to subjects in the Milgram experiment of 1961, or the “prison guards” used in the Stanford Prison experiment—All of which amounted to a kind of guilt, one without any real responsibility or apportionable blame. Those men had been following orders after all, and what we seek most as a species Peadar thought, must be the desire to delegate responsibility to some higher authority, or to abstract it in some way—which is really how they’d rationalised the board; as an extension of their collective unconscious. It was Gary who’d been forced into revelation, though whether it was real and not just some quirk in their drunken three-way groupthink would remain unclear.

‘You know that’s all bullshit, lads… Don’t you?’ Gary said.

Jemmy kept his eyes on the TV. ‘Of course.’

‘Aye,’ Peadar said.

‘Like yous were both sayin’, none o’ that Paranormal Activity shite really goes on. It’s just our three heads cookin’ up the first thing that comes to mind—spellin’ it out in words.’ He laughed uneasily. ‘And who’s to say it wasn’t just tryin’ to spell Gary? Like none of us have ever been in any spellin’ bees or anything… And we’ve been drinkin’ since like five today…’

‘Four,’ Jemmy said. ‘We’ve been drinkin’ since that piece of shit film started at four o’clock and I’m fuckin’ exhausted.’

‘Me too,’ Peadar laughed. ‘And I have work at half twelve tomorrow afternoon. This blackout craic’s a fuckin’ hazard.’

The wind was blowing again and the TV began rolling steadily between static white noise and pictures of George Alagiah reading the news in broken monosyllables. A rough wet draft blew concurrently under the living room door and down the chimney and Peadar noticed the vigour with which electrical cables were swinging in the street. Nobody spoke, but as the lights began to fade again and Peadar turned back from the cityscape out the window—which in a minute would go from the bristling black and yellow of a bumblebee’s fur to total darkness—he lifted a card they’d forgotten in the cleanup and turned it. It was a Joker.

Bad is the New Good? Television in the Age of Pragmatic Cynicism

There was a moment in the second series of Beau Willimon’s American remake of the classic political drama, House of Cards, when Frank Underwood—the show’s chief protagonist/antagonist—turned to the camera and intimated, “I don’t know whether to be proud or terrified.” It’s a trend that began with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, where the viewer was forced into momentary empathy with their inner Norman Bates—on the one hand, appalled by the murder of Vivien Leigh in the shower scene and on the other, swept up in the morbid fascination of the predator. Understanding that via a combination of socio-psychological conditioning, genetic predisposition and the pent up fury of the repressed American male, Bates had merely obeyed his own nature. He had manifested destiny. After all, didn’t you feel a twinge of the relief he felt when you watched the car and body disappear into the swamp for the first time?

But this pragmatic empathy with “Evil” is something which has grown over the last fifty years, not diminished. Surely with all of our technological advancement, the end of the Cold War, the eradication of polio and smallpox, and the rise of the globalized free market, fiction should be reflecting back our cause for celebration. Why is it that—especially in the 21^st Century—we’re so willing to believe that human beings are capable of often unspeakable acts of Evil? And why are the characters who are presented in this way, not only sympathetic, but strangely alluring? Answer: because technological advancement has led to alienation, the end of the Cold War has allowed for a rise in religious extremism, polio and smallpox have been replaced by newer more widespread and visceral illnesses, and the globalized free market has widened the gap between the world’s wealthiest 1% and everybody else.

These “Evil” people are exaggerated versions of ourselves—That’s why we keep watching them. We watch Dexter because he satisfies the lurid fantasy of every armchair judiciary in the world; every person who’s watched the news and thought, ‘How!? If it had been up to me he/she would’ve gotten the chair, not fifteen years.’ We watch Breaking Bad because it entertains the idea that within every frustrated small-man exists the capacity to overcome adversity. Walter White becomes Heisenberg just as we might, so long as we have the justification of protecting family and giving them “the things we never had.” His is the inverted crucifix of the American dream. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happyness without the unwritten sub-clause that we don’t step on people along the way. Everyone makes his own lot, right?

Or how about The Walking Dead? Before the Apocalypse, Rick Grimes is the ultimate expression of the upstanding citizen; a man who has a wife and young son at home but who nevertheless, takes a bullet in the line of duty whilst apprehending an escaped criminal. After the Apocalypse, many of the decisions he makes in order to protect his own are questionable, at best. He kills his best friend, declares himself benevolent dictator of a band of survivors, tortures a teenage boy for information about a rival faction, and kills two prisoners whom he sees as potential threats to getting what he wants. Which begs the question—Why the sudden change? If things suddenly became difficult, are people really as willing as The Walking Dead suggests to throw the social contract in the fire?

Jean Jacques Rousseau didn’t think so. To him, man reduced to a state of nature would be a “noble savage” —benevolent, albeit unsophisticated and poorer in his lot. Which is probably true, but mightn’t there also be the possibility that in a state of nature there are men who would fend for themselves only, even at the expense of others? Or as Thomas Hobbes would have it, living lives “[in] continual fear of violence and death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Modern TV would seem to concur with the latter, though much of this is hypothetical. But it is becoming increasingly more difficult to ignore the questions it raises about human character. The truth is that there are people quite unlike any of the examples mentioned above; people who aren’t motivated by the warped altruism of Dexter Morgan, or the family protection of Walter White, or the survival instinct of Rick Grimes. There are people who are motivated by pure will-to-power, people without scruples—despite that they operate within the social contract—who operate on the basis of one word and one word only: Attainment.

The ultimate personification of this is the character of Frank Underwood in House of Cards. Like Walter White, his pursuit of happyness is an inversion of the American Dream, no doubt intentionally alluded to by the upside down stars and stripes in the opening credits. The difference is, of course, that Frank has no family to protect and thus no initial justification to set him on the path to wrongdoing. His is the Machiavellian prince on his ascent to power in its purest form; all human regard for intelligence, passion, virtue and aspiration turned to a live-action game of chess—His wife merely his partner in crime with as much to gain as he has.

So why are we interested? It can’t just be that we’ve succumbed to a fascination with something we don’t understand. Isn’t Underwood merely exacting a kind of slow revenge for being screwed in the initial nomination for Secretary of State? And what could be more petty or indeed, more human, than the desire to get one’s own back. It’s in the Old Testament, after all—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. We all do it. The truth is that Underwood represents everything our collective unconscious has told us to ignore, written large. If no-one had a conscience maybe more people would accomplish the same. He represents the feeling that all of us have felt at one time or another, that emotions make us weak. All anger, pity, regret, empathy, happiness… love—Aren’t these the things that hold us back from getting what we want; make us doe-eyed, cloud our judgement?

The short answer is, of course not. Attainment is something we engage in in order to feel. That’s the goal. The rest is only window-dressing and I suspect that if the next season of House of Cards has anything relevant left to say about the human condition, it’s this—that power, votes, money, immediate gratification and influence mean exactly squat if you can’t feel anything for them. In the end they just become symbols of everything you wished was within your control, namely, emotion and that perhaps this contradiction is at the heart of all new-age cynical drama. Maybe we are more Walter White than Frank Underwood. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we’re more Tony Soprano, because like the crime-boss expertly portrayed by the late James Gandolfini, society’s character is twofold. At times it may be brutish, ruthless, calculating, manipulative, corrupt and downright murderous, but its occasion for compassion outweighs all of that because ultimately that’s when people feel most human. And those are the moments we have to hang onto because at any damn moment, the great Director in the sky might decide to cut the screen to black. And then what?