God of the Game (Dreamstate) (31 page)

The lady
awakes in white gauze and bandage, in a hospital, with red wounds seeping off the sanitized dressing to the reminiscing tune of tears and fear, recalling the nightmare on how her femininity was snatched by an arachnid machine and its sick, sadistic master.     

All the girls had one thing in common. They had big boobs sliced out. The rapist is making a statement; he’s got a fetish (assuming it’s a man) collecting souvenirs. A macabre compilation in a freezer; or perhaps he’s a gastronomic artiste, a chef cum food critique - cooking, sampling and judging those mammary by taste and texture. Or, he turns those ample fat fleshes to trinkets and other painstaking knick-knacks, a laborious toymaker and craftsman of an art foregone or avant-garde for its time.

Detective Lingam is theorizing the possibilities, the plot to
this insane case; going into the mind of a compulsive, obsessive criminal loner. To repair the damage done to the reputation of the police department, he and his brother have been assigned to Roanna’s convoy by the chief in hope of bridging relations with the lady; so they’re here, reluctantly, in an impressive cathedral with TV crew fused to huge cameras, transmitting live the event. Lenses tailing, Roanna tells the women how she understands, relating the loss of her jugs. She is a good speaker, charismatic, able to stir the hearts.

But then
, out of the blue, a sarcastic voice yells, “
What do you understand?
You never went through what we did.” It was one of the victims, howling. The statistics of this group never esteemed her, they were caramelized chicks more interested in fashion and beauty. But fate had dealt a hard blow. One night in the hands of a psycho converted them to Roanna’s debilitated sisters, and perhaps, Ms. Fausi’s campaign manager thought, they could play the cards that’d been dealt to their advantage and win a new demographic.

The hall was silent after that remark; then whispers started. Yes, how could Roanna Fausi understand their predicament? How could she compare cancer to their excruciating torment? So, no one
, except her, knows if it was a generous expression of empathy or a calculated call of strategy, but Roanna Fausi, with all eyes shadowing, in church and on screens, eagerly anticipating her forthcoming answer, slowly, circumvents the rostrum, and drops her top.

There were gasps and cringes and cheers. Those sad skins that used to contain full
boobs, now dejected and forlorn; Roanna’s suffering soul laid bare for all to stare. Eyes shut, unending tears flooding down to empty naked breasts, and one by one, the women came out, everyone weeping shamelessly. Now was the televised time for group hug therapy.

Sergeant Siva thanked god he preferred men.

Pomelo Anderson banged the ta
ble in anger, cracking an intricately manicured fingernail depicting rose thorn bushes. “That Roanna Fausi has gone too far. Showing off her
titless
chest to the entire population!?” she exclaimed with a question mark. “Who does she think she is, changing the face of desire?” Pomelo plumped a glum.

  
“
I
am the fucking face of desire! Not that incomplete bitch.” Ms. Anderson fanned her face with her hands, trying to remain cool. She downs two capsules of Xanax, and mineral water after that, and paces up and down for a plan. Her room is resplendent pink and fur, with supplements and vitamin pills spilled and flung about in a raging ecstatic parade, making her abode a colourful polka-dotted dollhouse.

   
Here she eats inspiration, feasts on graven ideas; but only in bits and pieces as much as her tiny brain permits. A buffet of unachievable beauty, extreme physical makeovers of a myopic utopia, to drink of a holy grail and sup on the sufferings of perfection; in this banquet of bodily insecurities, followed by mental and actual bulimia, Pomelo plots how she is going to rule the world. It has its roots in health and nutrition. It is a sublime plan.

In an ante
chamber Pomelo keeps her stash; all her favourite grubs gobbled behind public eye. Her one weakness is she truly loves to eat. If not for this single but momentous defect, being beautiful would be much easier. At the corner is a golden toilet bowl. She squats facing the well, as much as her customized frame allows, and the third finger, as if cursing herself, sticks in the mouth.

The stink of vomit fills the air
, blending with perfumed molecules and aromatic delicacies, creating an utterly unutterable miasma. Pomelo Anderson gazes at her reflection. White bubbly grains dribble down her chin, mascara melted, her million-dollar, surgically manufactured flawless face distorted into a crying clown’s. Pomelo Anderson reaches out with trembling hands to pick an ornamented frame containing an old sepia photograph of a
stranger
, an obese teenage girl clutching her school books and Barbie and Ken dolls.

Nothing looks out of place in the master-bedroom except for the opened drawer. The thief had duplicated the key and removed the top item;
but he will put it back
. No one will suspect anything.

Usually
, he wouldn’t be bothered about his father’s collection, but this month there is something he wants. Purchasing it is out of the question; he is far too young. Sure, he can go online to check,
in fact he has
, but he prefers to see it on print.

Wong Boom Bong has the hots for Pomelo Anderson, and his father is an avid voyeur and secret subscr
iber to
Triple F
magazine; which is no mystery to the son. Knowing she is on the cover...
again
, young Wong is in camouflage today. Decked in war paint, black streaks across the cheeks, and midnight overalls, he engages this covert operation, imagining himself a Counter Strike commando or something.

It is three
o’clock in the afternoon, and he’d just gotten home from school. Whole time in class he’d not been able to concentrate; even the ritual beatings seem palatable, `cos the mag arrived yesterday, preceding the torture of the poor boy as it sat unopened with the rest of the mail. Father, (the previous day), returned, and he took the inconspicuous envelope to his room before mummy came home. Behind locked doors, Wong senior defiled the marriage bed with strange women.

His son is angry and jealous. He doesn’t want to think
of what his father is doing to Pomelo Anderson. To his mind, she is just a slave genie of his dad’s, held in a harem of varied publications, and taken out only for entertainment when the ‘master’ rubs the lamp until the wish is granted in the puffing smoke of thoughts and the destitute slime in hand.

Quite pathetic, but mostly evil; Boom Bong will free her from his father’s clutches, the boy tells himself after he’d locked the drawer and closed his parents’ room door, relishing what M
s. Anderson did with two tangerines and a fried banana. 

Someone else subscribing to
Triple F
is Muhammad ‘Tongkat’ Ali, but his agenda is completely abnormal, completely alien and out of this world. Ali likes to eat. No doubt. He also likes consuming food and fruits served,
or splattered
, upon persons; especially littler persons (but not dwarves. He considers dwarves mutants of nature, stunted freaks to be despised as abominations to the angelic twelve-and–under whose skins he so adores and desires).

W
ith his permanently erect dick, Ali spoon-feeds innocents.
Triple F
stimulates this unlawful fetish; not just of its content, but also the art-paper he makes kids chew and swallow.

That man is terrible, but he is not the paedophile the cops seek. Sure, all child molesters are wanted
fiends, but
that
particular one eluding police custody is much more sinister. Underage victims he’d done with end up in coma. In this vegetative state, their eyes blink nonstop, as if downloading information, as if in forever REM sleep. Experts are baffled, but are more afraid of the bogeyman, of a dream invader.

After the W
ar, weird shit has been happening. In fact, the War itself saw the revelation of many top secret weapons and classified projects; not just bombs and armaments, but psychic warfare, mind games and cerebral infiltration; brainpower able to launch missiles by a single thought.

The government is fearful what these children will wake up to be, scared
of who’s behind the enigma. So, no one has to worry over ‘Tongkat’ Ali, he’s just a regular, plain old dirty child fucker with a green veined evergreen erection –
the envy of impotent but ignorant men
. The sex act itself no longer delivers satisfaction, it’d ceased to excite since he was twenty-five. He was born the year the War started. It’s hard to believe it’s coming to half a century since the sparks conflagrated that led to the devastation of the Earth. Decades the battles raged, and when it creaked out of steam like an old war machine, it was because man had burned up most of his resources without a compromise and solution in sight. An uneasy truce out of necessity was signed, but by then matters of contentions and the points of debate had escalated to an irresolvable gamut that it threatened to tear the fragile thread of society. The generation that survived paid the economic, mental and physical price. It was told that Muhammad ‘Tongkat’ Ali’s mother gave birth to him under an umbrella of radiation, in sunlight of toxic rays, and from overexposure to chemicals and harmful waves. Birth rate was low that year, most babies didn’t make it, and Ali would have to consider himself lucky that whilst most of his peers that pulled through the hole suffered defects and damages too obvious and painful to describe, he got away merely with an extremity that tangled around the umbilical cord, and got itself, the dick, stuck to the roof of the vulva during his difficult entry into wartime life. Otherwise, baby and mummy were fine. 

Now, with almost five
dilapidating decades gone, it’s the comedy which accompanies intercourse that takes his thoughts off his dreaded, puffed up organ: like seeing the funny, scrunched expressions of children munching 2-50 grams UV-finished art-card; or his own cold, sour look in mirror, dipping hard penis into ice cream as though serving a bewildered banana split!

Muh
ammad ‘Tongkat’ Ali praises God for food-sex, the blessing for being able to add love to curse, gastronomy to priapism. It makes it temporarily agreeable. The man has values, lines he will not cross; though he is not happy, he keeps his fetishes funny, and shies away from violent tendencies. As long as he thinks he is not physically hurting anyone, (though the individual threshold of pain is as subjective as one’s preference for certain kinds of food) he believes he is saved and upholding the tenets of his faith.

Rex the dog wakes up more alert. Fresh from a dreamless slumber. It sniffs its way home from the alleyway it last remembers. The canine feels good, stronger, no knowledge of a memory gap, no recollection of being thwacked on the head and a surgery after. For all it grasps is that it’d found an ideal spot to snooze, and it merely snoozed away. Now it’s time to go back. Master must be waiting. Rex felt hungry; it should be dinner time already.

Halfway home, a high pitched pierce was activated. The dog doesn’t realize the sound is triggered from within its brain. It halts, ears perked, stance erect
; Rex squints about, detecting the source, and suddenly a flash of lightning on four legs prances across; blue fires flickered behind, the smell of gas emerging from stove.

Rex takes chase; its legs seem
tougher after the rest. The Rottweiler can run fast, close on the trail of the sapphire flame, going in and out of motorcars, passing shops; for a while a hot dog stall got its attention, but it was so close to the accelerating flare. Rex never knew such focus; all it cared was to catch the strange phenomenon. But the blazing azure cloud was getting quicker, weaving across traffic; Rex, hot behind. It turned a sharp left. Rex followed, and vanished into a dimensional portal. 

An old lady pushing a pram was burnt to crisp. Blackened in the form of solid ash, but yet, her bent and gnarly frame retained. Good thing there was the absence of a baby, for she carted only her entire worldly possessions. A tramp. Other street dwellers warming by a barrel said a fiery blue dog jumped out of nowhere and ate her. A muscular dog; it was as if the creature consumed her soul, and all that was left was the charred husk.

They added
, it was better this way, she was never happy, a bitter, grumpy granny negative of existence. On and on, mumbling she used to be rich once, wore pearl necklaces round her neck, took golden showers from jewel studded faucets. She’d go, “yes, liquid gold, have you heard? I used to bathe in it. Tastes like champagne, only warm.” No one mourned her death. Everybody preferred her dead.

Master Wan visited the scene. Instinctive clues
he
only spotted, no one else sensed. Something ominous was spinning in the air, giving his bones the chill. For once, he seemed to have lost his composure. Hands holding a cane shivered, but only so slightly that none noticed. Master Wan has work to do. Armageddon is nigh, and he must ensure he is the Christ.

If the end of the world is coming for everybody, new life awaits Divalicious. Unconscious on the hospital bed, the transvestite, ex-coffee-shop worker hears visions. In them, he is taken to another realm, and a voice tells him to prepare the way. The being belonging to that voice was just a fuzzy blur outline, and a vocal effect was on, which made the speech sound disembodied and floating on air in an ambit of light.