91. God of the Game

Sha-Rronne states, “Time’s up. Let’s go. You’re a wanted man.”

I reply, “But I’m up next. That’s my cue.” Topless pink pixie with the psychedelic jublees gestures at my direction. “It’s my turn to fuck the girl!”

Ruined. It was the climax of my sexsimulation coming to naught; for the finale, the plebeians were to invoke the idol to life by atonement of beauty for gifting them the collective courage to devour the bourgeois. Now, my wooden anticipation of an accumulating libido, hoarded by this stiff, impassive voyeur of marble and teak taking first breaths to automaton, was to be unceremoniously axed and fired.

She simply walks off.

I shrug, and the little horns of the emcee grew an inch. She snorts and summons an incubus to commit the furnishing rape in my stead; and Orgy, the sexless cloud from Jai-I’s ZOOL.A.ND, rains down on all.

In a glum I swayed to the swing of Sha-Rronne’s two round buttocks juggling, hypnotized by the force of pendulum’s bounce. To the right, a pirate galley is booming cannons. The ship is sailing like the Flying Dutchman, but shooting candy and confetti, as if the spectral vessel was on holiday.

To my left, zany preacher man prophesies doomsday in eloquent phrases. His calculations reveal an abstract date no one believes; but he persists. “You are but words,” he speaks, “poetry recited by the Almighty. Stop this partying at once. Raise your ears to your conscience, to the subtle frequency of expression, where actions glide in slow-motion grids. In stillness, your remote heart makes meaning of the empty carousing your watercolour-self instigates.” Clearly a dreamer, an arty-farty poet of the comic strips; he’s tormented by night visions of illumination beyond the borders of two-dimensional pages.

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 might 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 on 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 funky physics of Planet Muthafukker before launching into a theory on the paradoxical and laborious existence of corporeal life 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 superimposed on 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 hermit 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.

AI generated art prompted by author

All characters and events, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.