God of the Game (Dreamstate) (54 page)

The crowd boos him. All
around, a jiving technicolour mob swells in the presence of parade-floats, till it seems all is a freshly painted masterpiece left out in acid rain.

We get to cover. Sha-Rronne discards her tainted skin of running dyes. As if a serpent moulting
scales, she is now a new person: dark-haired vamp...or is it a blonde pinup? “You choose,” she allows. I go for the Vampirella. Figure it’ll be safer...should we meet dragons or other horny threats in the dark. Then she hoses me down. In the wet, I see a puddle flowing out from my feet, containing buoyant rainbow oil slicks, flotsam and jetsam too of my many lives.

   “Behave,” she warns sternly. “Did you bring the knife?”

   “Yah,” I nodded.

A maze lies before our destination, wherever that mi
ght be. There are five firefly-lit grottos, but Sha-Rronne does not hesitate. She takes the middle path, walking directly in a straight line. I follow suit, leaving the luminescent insects behind.

She says, “Careful of the light.”   

What light? It’s blacker than midnight in an abyss. Five minutes groping in the dark, tailing the hem of her garment, holding on to her muscular tail, (which grew out for my convenience), we come to a humongous cave. Spotlights spray from holes in the ceiling. Presume this was what she was warning about. I tiptoed to the eventual edge of darkness, just to the point of dawn, and like a curious and puckish child, slowly dipped my hallux in morning sun. A sizzling paralysis gripped me, and the glow-ball wobbled to my intrusion. “Ouch!” I called. Sha-Rronne says, “Told you.”

   “Now do what I do,” she continues. The goddess strips and dives
into the pool, a radiant lake of death rays. (The trick is to go in all at once.) She does the breaststroke, which appeared odd from my angle. The best simile I can provide is of a stage performer propped by invisible wires doing a Peter Pan manoeuvre in the sky under a beam of sunlight.  

   “
Come on in. The water’s nice.” Then she kicks up - bare legs showing - and disappears into the cavern floor; but not before running fingers through glistening hair, seeming to have caught jewels in tangles. 

What is a demigod to do? And do you know how I feel like? I feel like a young boy outmatched by a girl of the same age, for she’d beaten me in the race to puberty. Taller, stronger and braver she was; but not to be outdone for the sake of those upholding the vestige of male genitalia, I jumped in. Splayed and similar to a dead frog, totally inelegant, and everything of a douche, the brightness bit me as I hit the surface.

But thankfully, the raw aching awkwardness caves in to a waterfall in a Garden of Eden. The view is magnificent. Hundreds of feet above, water crashes from rocks floating midair in early mist. Spectacular, and equally pristine, and I couldn’t help but reminisce and be awed by the eclectic vagaries I’d been graciously and inextricably exposed. Just a second ago, I was standing in the dark and the dank, observing Sha-Rronne fly, or should I say swim, in air and heat waves. But now a refreshing nibble of cold, fresh H2O purifies.

Earlier, I thought I was a vampire afraid of daybreak.

Currently, I’m in childhood frolicking by a freshwater beach. 

  
(Remember, I am still in 2D.) 

Sha-Rronne had dried and dressed up. She hollers over the blare of the cataracts, “Hope you enjoyed the respite. We got to get a move on.” 

Reluctantly, the journey reels closer to the end. If this was a cassette tape, we would be on the last track; which coincidentally involves a locomotive. I mean, what’s the use of a track without a train?
Lame
. Sha-Rronne tells me the rail time-travels to our final destination. After that, it’s a new leaf. I’d yet to understand what she’s yakking about. For an eminence the size of her majesty, Sha-Rronne sure blabbers like some goofy science geek. It’s time to ditch the airbrushed sexpot-heroine image in exchange for punk attitude meets Japanese schoolgirl anime; something more down to earth, something Hairy RZ can relate, she explains.      

I asked is that where we’re heading, his castle. Sha-Rronne answers me with a flawless mathematical formula surmising the funk
y physics of Planet Muthafukker before launching into a theory on the paradoxical and laborious existence of corporeal live viewed from the perspective of a couch potato, channel surfing god of the ages. All very surreal. Sha-Rronne provides a tip:
feel it; don’t think about it
. And yes, that’s where we’re going, Hairy’s nucleus, provided the train arrives and departs on time.

I notice the artwork is now composed of long brushstrokes, skeletal Chinese calligraphy s
uperimposed by our caricatured flesh. The painted tone is melancholy, elongated limbs drooping over oval and convex shoulders. Exaggerated, poignant and pointy chins anchor wilting facial features, and through the dull earthly hues, I couldn’t help but breathe the stifling gloom that is already locked in the air.  

The grey train chugs up. It is not the Orient Express. Rather, the bale of burned coals coughed up by the steam engine peppers us with soot, oppressing further the drab atmosphere in a grainy sepia filtered effect. Even the other passengers carry with them a slouch belonging to prisoners of war. Sentries posted smoke cigarettes. They have a lackadaisical attitude. No one’s escaping to anywhere.

In the coach, minimalist and functional, we sat on nothing more than a wooden bench. I asked Sha-Rronne, “Why the harsh misdemeanour?” She tells me to bear with it. In the cognition cell, a malevolent premonition could not help but to present itself. I fear we head towards a bad end.

Hope I’m wrong, for we arrived at a medieval home of some Count. RZ bought it over at a steal, I am told. The nobleman had accumulated some real bad debts and was in the market to offload most of his assets. No one knows his whereabouts now. A particular legend has it that he is a hirsute he
rmit prowling the mountainous arid lands scourged and scorched by dragons encircling his citadel. If you see him, the fate of your hand will change. For better or worse, it is unproven, as none could agree on the facets of this apparition.              

There’s another myth that says the Count had never left home.

Sha-Rronne rings the doorbell. RZ answers it. He lives alone, prefers his own shadow for company. We don’t shake, we don’t hug. Sha-Rronne, earlier, reminds me, “Remember, he thinks yer Jimmy.” She pauses, cups my cheeks, studies my pupils and adds, “And my, you do look exactly like him.” Then she flashes a comb as one would a switchblade, and combs the James Dean pompadour I had on my head.   

Recap. I shot Jimmy;
I shot Frank. Blew their brains out. Hijacked his dream, and here I am. ‘
Don’t be afraid,
RZ is waiting on the other side.
’ I’m about to find out what on earth this means.

92

Hairy RZ

RZ wastes no time. Rushes us to the cellar. Keeps asking if I brought along the knife regardless how many times I answered in the affirmative. The man’s in a dotage’s hurry, encapsulated in urgency, he is an acrimonious mad scientist, and quite changed from the chummy host he’d been in the script an aeon ago.

His habits and mannerism are intact
, nonetheless. Still as dirty as ever, the entire castle gives out a decomposing animal odour. Experimented subjects lie in ponds of maggots, and fly swarms (his food source) buzz along stonewalls lined with Renaissance paintings and the cobwebbed armours of King Arthur’s knights. Excalibur, wedged between two bricks. When this is done, and if I’m still around, I can try my luck at pulling it out, he scoffs.

R
Z’s taken to a nudist’s approach. Says it helps him think better, in the buff. He’s got a theory that his cerebration extends beyond the confines of his cranium and traverses the entire length, crook and cranny of his body. Thus, clothing is merely a hindrance, acting as a contraption on which ideas are trapped in the microscopic fibres of the garment. Conversely then, he perishes the frock on his back, and eureka doubles the speed of inspiration.

Frizzy white hair mops all the way to his bum, and wherever his skin is exposed, malignant sores are present. Insect larvae crawl out from the abscesses, the result of a lifelong diet on c
reepy crawlies, I guess. Nevertheless, his eccentric rationale responds that it’s better this way. Uninterrupted by the need to, say, go fix a dragon fruit salad, he can simply pick a bug from any part of his body for a meal and perpetually focus on his workaholic scientific obsessions. He is a self-sufficient closed-circuit ecological unit, both for the benefit of the arthropods and his own survival sensibilities; especially since he has got a drool stained pillow by his side, and the work-chair is in the hollow shape of a toilet bowl.    

The castle’s cellar is an abattoir, which has more creatures in life-
and-death stages between a pink baby and dried skeleton. Right at the centre is an old grandfather clock standing at eleven-fifty-nine. Next to it, a bloodied operation table. The hands of the antique almost touch twelve, but they do not. They never do, for the gears of their mechanism are in coma.

This
, however, is a human’s reasoning, seen from mortal perspective. The timepiece is in fact well and alive. It is the keeper of cosmic time (a part of infinite time), when existence stretches over billions of years, and the birth of man only comes in the dying fraction of the last second before...

...before doomsday, before...

   (Remember it’s still in 2D.)

And Hairy RZ is the custodian of grandpapa’s hickory-dickory-
but-no-dock
. Not yet. But when it chimes, Planet Muthafukker will unravel and cease. Planet Muthafukker, in which all Jimmy’s kingdom hang by a thread.

Jimmy
and RZ: two characters in Sharon’s tale who managed to find an alternate reality and life. In the back-story, RZ stumbled across the revelation that you could transfer your consciousness to the dying psychic patterns of tortured animals and live forever when he was electrocuting mongrels for fun. But due the limited synapses of man’s best friend, only a two-dimensional realism could be achieved. Thus they tried it Jimmy’s artistic murdering style. Victim after victim, other than the bloodied masterpieces, the serial killers were never successful concerning the hereafter with
Homo
sapiens. So they reverted to lesser beasts, modifying their methods, vowing to attain that coveted breakthrough, that three-dimensional Holy Grail that had so eluded them.     

Jimmy’s theory why it won’t work on man is the human consciousness as a wall, ward
ing off alien forces even at that point of death. The only way is when they’re unaware, in their subconscious, in their dreams. But getting in is an impossible feat. Thus, the one and only final means is to infiltrate the subjects from the other side. From the afterlife. Since man is fearful of death, his defence is down when he is dead. He does not know what to expect. Death is, after all, very new and alien to him, and he is naive of the supernatural faculties he possesses.    

The two despicable conspirators
, on the other hand, have been frequently uploading their consciousness into the last breaths of both mammalian and reptilian species, and are knowledgeable (to a degree) of the potential kicking the bucket holds. Thus, the conquest begins; soul after soul over a calculated eternity. They are aware they have a limited spell (for they operate within the
tick-tock
of creation), and it is unfeasible to own every human spirit within that short space. So they need a shortcut, a trump card; they need to cheat, break the law from outside once more.

Luckily
, fate had arranged for Jimmy’s close proximity to Sharon. Via their relationship, he found the maker –
me
: a dumb, obnoxious, redolent auteur addicted to sexual and violent games. Told you not all demagogues make an impression; and if what’s in their heart and mind perverted, and absurd, and melancholic, then so too would be their invented imaginations.

The partners in crime figure that if they can subjugate the architect, then they can access the heavens beyond the dream dimension of death
, and thus, become nouveaux gods themselves. But the plan was skewered, and Jimmy was banished into the jail of my abyss. RZ is oblivious to this, Sha-Rronne is dressed as Sharon, and I am in Jimmy’s form. I smell a plot.

In the
ir modus operandi, once done away with me, the fumbling deity, the final steps are to cut Sharon open with an otherworldly artefact, scoop out Sha-Rronne’s pumping heart, consume it as the clock strikes twelve, and they would be on their way, scot-free, to an infinite playground, which is basically the same one I amuse myself in.

By observation, I arrive that Hairy RZ loathes Jimmy. Spending all
death-eternal in his laboratory while Jimmy dupes the starlet Sharon and savours the fruits of the lands, the panoramic eternity of dead men and women; surely, the one stuck in a lab would be sore. But a segregation of roles is required. Jimmy’s an artist, not a scientist. He is hopeless with tubes and vials; thus RZ’s got to be the one to find a way out from this living time-bomb. Doing so, forever after, has driven him from ‘just mad’ to ‘way fucking madder!’ And in the scene that is to be unveiled, he is going to be at his ‘
bloody maddest!
’