Uncollected Blood (7 page)

It had been done. No matter what I could’ve done that might’ve convinced me otherwise; it was far too late to try.

Beyond me the cold Manhattan morning doesn’t want the sun to break through the clouds. The wind laughed its way between the tall buildings, smacking the poor excuses for trees as it whisked by.

My nose was cold, but my hands can’t move to warm it as they fight to keep freezing. Only my ears burn.

It was far too late. It had been done.

What use did it make to repeat the words in my head over and over again? Maybe in hopes to numb my mind to the cold pulling its way through my nostrils with every breath?

I still felt the shame though. At least that kept my veins from icing over, reminding me I was still alive. I shouldn’t be shameful for I have saved myself from damnation. I was right. They were wrong. All of them.

Every last one of them.

Maybe the shame dwelled upon me because my choice was just because I feared what could be as opposed to believing what I was doing was actually the right thing? Maybe.

No one wakes throughout Manhattan today. It’s just my eyes that scan the city skyline. Searching the streets for someone, anyone, who had lucked out like me. Had anyone else had enough fear of a possibility that they saved themselves?

No. There’s no one.

Not a soul. Even the birds know what has finally taken place. I haven’t heard a bird in months. But maybe they all flew south. I hope so. I hope they are still alive. Maybe there are others, and they are just smart enough to stay indoors on this morning.

Perhaps they’re still wrapped up tightly in their beds, afraid to venture out because they know that it had been done. The greatest trick.

The greatest trick.

My knees jolted back into place as I rose up to my feet, I must be going now. My cheeks were flush with a sudden rush of blood, at once everything seemed clear to me, and then everything goes in and out of focus. But the air…the air feels so clean.

There is a card shop a few blocks away. They don’t just sell cards. They sell flowers to go with the cards, and chocolate candies and coffee and teas. They sell elegant pens and pencils with twirls and goofy fuzzy erasers. They have a window full of books for your coffee table, cookbooks for every holiday and theme, and collections of photos of almost every photographical subject. They sell prints of famous masterpieces in all shapes and sizes. And have cards just the same with a goofy message on the inside.

I pick up the Mona Lisa. I have never liked her smile. On the front of the card it says,
“I know why she smiles.”
Inside the card reads
“you would be smiling too if you knew you would never be as old as your mother!
’

I suppose it’s supposed to be funny in one of those rude sarcastic ways. It’s in the section labeled
: Birthday – Mothers
.

I shouldn’t have broken the door. The wind seemed to crawl its way through picking up the nature of the shattered glass and cutting through the warmth that still slightly hung in the card shop.

I wasn’t here for the cards, even though I couldn’t help flipping through a few more. I’d never really bought a card before. I’d received plenty, but I never saw the point in them. They seemed to lack substance for me. But someone must’ve gotten something out of them. Look at how many of them there are.

No, I wasn’t here for the cards, even thought they could be used to start a fire, and I wasn’t here for the chocolate, or the coffee or the tea. Or for the cash that was probably in a safe somewhere close. None of that mattered anymore. I reminded myself again:
it had been done
.

I still wasn’t numb yet.

On a top shelf they still had three of
them
stacked on each other. Three of the best selling board games ever made:
The Black Hole
.

The Black Hole
wasn’t any board game. It was the first board game you could play by yourself, or with as many people as you wanted to. There were no limits. The board itself seemed to be magic, but as science proved it was just cool technology using gelatins and electricity.

That’s how you were able to make as many game pieces for the unlimited amount of players who wanted to play on one board. You went online real quick and you selected one of a billion or so styles of game pieces, then you placed a piece of the gelatin into a contraption that went right into your USB port.

Zap!

Just like that your game piece has been formed. It had something to do with metallic particles in the gelatin that reacted to certain magnetic energies or something. I did watch the special on Discovery Channel about it, but I didn’t really retain all the facts. It was interesting but not that interesting. Not at the time anyway. Plus that was five years ago. I shouldn’t be held accountable for stupid facts from that long ago that weren’t important to me then.


I pulled one of the boxes down and stared at the cover. The words “
Black Hole”
spiraled into the blackest of spaces. “
Don’t Get Sucked In!”
was fighting its way out of the center.

The shrink-wrap was cold on my fingertips as I pulled away at the plastic covering. It was like opening a Christmas present that I already knew what it was. Disappointment entered my mind as the wind howled, mocking me:
“What did you expect?”

The box made it seem so harmless. It was just this colorful cardboard box complete with cheesy catch phrases. I went along with this idea and was able to pry the lid off just like I was about to play Monopoly. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t sure what I was about to do.

I knew what I wanted to do.

I’m not sure if the Internet still ran, but if it didn’t there were the ready-made designs. The TV commercials made it seem like they were demanding you to make your own custom piece to fully enjoy the experience. But did any of that really even matter anymore? Maybe it wouldn’t work anymore.

In the Black Hole the object of the game was to acquire as much items, money, and connections before you made it to the center of the black hole. The top three players could then attempt to roll the dice to escape the center, calling on connections, asking for help making deals with all they accumulated.

The connections were the key to the game. If you played with the same game piece every time they actually stayed with it some how. I think there was a silicone memory infused in it or something weird. It was on the Discovery Channel special.

For most people, all they needed to see was the Discovery Channel special. It didn’t quite work for me. Not after the first time I considered playing.

The first time was about three years ago. All the hoopla surrounding the game had died down a bit. Some of the religious right had made fools of themselves and plenty of late night talk shows mocked them, by playing the game on live television.

Politicians with religious backgrounds even reassured voters that they were never afraid to play
The Black Hole
. They had no need to be. They already had no soul.

That’s what
The Black Hole
did. That’s what has happened. The whole world has lost their souls to
The Black Hole
.

Now I’m the crazy religious radical. And the sad thing is, I had stopped believing. I had no faith whatsoever. I believed in reason. I believed you should be a good person and that was that. Just be decent and decent things will come your way. It sounded good enough for me. And if there were a God, he’d see my effort on that front and at least consider that at the pearly gates, wouldn’t he? Sure I looked at the Bible as an early form of comic books, without pictures, just reoccurring characters like a television series.

I didn’t hate religion. I was convinced it was a good thing; it was our only hope to raise some kids with an inkling of moral fiber. But it was losing a battle against indifference and television. Everyone’s fight for tolerance and understanding meant anyone could do exactly what they wanted and you had to accept it. And that was the perfect time for this game.

In the middle ages this wouldn’t have lasted one night. But as I said, it’s been five years and it’s the best selling board game ever. Lifetime. Compare it to Monopoly or checkers, which has been around forever,
The Black Hole
has sold more copies.

It came on like any fad. Kids talked about it at school and adults were filled with the same reckless giddiness in the workplace. It was like the iPod. Something no one really needed but made a lot of sense since it was fun and cool. And that’s how it was marketed.

But things started to happen. The maker of the game, something Johnson, was brought up on murder charges. They dug into his past to lean he was a Catholic who had been involved in some scandal not even the newspapers would print. Not only that, but he had murdered three people, one of them a priest. He was proven innocent after a relatively short court case with evening updates making their way onto Court TV. He however lost control over his company during the period and committed suicide real soon after being set free.

The Catholic Church was the first to declare the game unholy and an abomination. It wasn’t something they did lightly, but it made for a running gag of many stand-up comedians.

One was funny, I’ll admit. Ben Stapp had this one where he did an impersonation of the Pope playing
the Black Hole
and losing to Rob Schneider and Adam Sandler, like that scene from
Big Daddy
, the impersonations were dead on.

But something was up with the game. I could feel that even as I was about to play it. I wanted to watch my friends play it first because I absolutely hate playing a game not knowing how to, and then in the middle of it someone whips out some rule or stipulation that I wasn’t aware of that makes no sense to me and it usually means I automatically lose.

It’s why I don’t play most games period. But this was the “it” game. The cool game. Every conversation I had with people was filled with adulation, “You’ll love it. You have to play. I can’t believe you’ve been missing out on it?”

What are you superstitious?

I watched as my friends really got into it. They kept asking me to join, and I’d say no, no not yet. It made plenty of sense to them, but to me it seemed so foreign, so alien. To me there were so many loopholes and opportunities for outrageous rules to pop up and ruin my fun that I really didn’t want to get involved.  It might’ve also helped that it wasn’t a fun game to watch. I guess you
had to play it.

They’d talk to their contacts and a message would appear in the center of the black hole. Their contact would tell them a secret about the other player. This could then be used as blackmail (most of the gameplay techniques had something to do with blackness). By blackmailing another player, they were in your debt, which means if they are in the top three they have to free you when they free themselves and use their resources up to help you.

You could even ask the contact certain questions and it would give a yes or no answer. You could learn a secret based on your own suspicions. This was done when a player would draw a Black Sabbath. The Black Sabbath occurred when you pulled a black card on your seventh turn. It didn’t happen often. But it meant you had to do a charade, and the other players each had a turn to guess it.

Now during the game your players are being pulled into the Black Hole every turn, so you’re always moving one step backward. But if a player got the Black Sabbath correct, all the players rested. If you got it wrong you were sucked another three spaces into the center, and the person who drew the card loses an item.

Really the game had so much going on it’s a wonder so many people were able to play it. It seemed like every time another player played there was a new rule. I knew it was going to be frustrating so I sat back and stopped paying attention.

I listened to my friends as they joked and would tell stories about
The Black Hole
. About people going into comas and epileptic fits. How there really was a government study to see if they were linked since so many had occurred. But nothing was conclusive. They joked the Catholics. And by then the Baptists and a few other Christian groups had commanded their fellow believers to stay away from it.

But this only made them look stupid and backwards. Like they were the fools. Eventually most of these religious leaders gave in, believing they were strong enough to deal with evil, if the game really was. They’d survive and religion would die. It was cool to hate religion. It was archaic and based on superstition. Science couldn’t prove the faith was real.

Science could prove
The Black Hole
wasn’t supernatural. At least that’s what the documentary had said. But could it have proved
The Black Hole
was?

That’s what I always thought. Even before the Black Hole. I worried about dying. I had been raised strictly to believe in God and Jesus. There was always this fear hanging next to me, keeping me in check. I did not want to go to hell if there was a hell. I did not want to piss off God if there was a God. I lived my life according to the possibility that it all
could
be true.