God of the Game (Dreamstate) (7 page)

   
Inside, gothic architecture lined expansive stained glass windows depicting icons of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. Paraphernalia of cult and occult beliefs, like the idol of Baphomet and the inverted star of Satanism, as well as artefacts from ancient faiths ranging from the Sumerians’ to the Mayans’, were laden as part of the interior décor. Religion was propagator of much worldly violence, and therefore it was the intention of the owner from the beginning to diffuse the message of peace and harmony. Modern art and Athenian statues of the Renaissance, placed haphazardly, intertwined with flesh and blood mingling
as a crowd. Giant video screens and cutting-edge lighting illuminate the dark with images from history: newsreels, MTV and popular movies dissected by comic art and animation.

    There are
three halls. The main,
Zeus
, which usually plays house music, commands the greatest action. At times pop stars are raised from the dead (outside Club Utopia most definitely); and examples of the reincarnated that have graced the stage include Beyonce, Elvis, Michael Jackson, Madonna and countless others generations have grown up loving.

    The second
,
Tartarus
,
rocks! Live musicians play hard and furious. Tapestries suspended from the ceiling and Indian carpets on the floor provide a warm atmosphere, contrasting the high energy of power chords, thumping drums and shrieking guitar solos.             

    Finally
, the third area, dedicated to trip-hop and chilled-out jazz, is a smoky blues bar dubbed
Orpheus
, which has an intimate dance floor for coupling and soulful individual expressions.

    There is a fourth
upstairs,
Dionysus
, where patrons go when they’re horny. Devoted to licentious appetites, this space boasts of all coitus known to man. There are small booths for duos and large areas for orgies and fit-for-one rectangular cubicles for peeping-toms and fanny-introverts or those who get hard or wet sleeping in a coffin. Gloryholes with erections hang decorative ornaments – fake ferns hiding real penises; precious stone embroidery and spider web gold threads draped over to beautify generational jewels; and masculine muscles tested with the weight of portraits, tongues substituted by cocks, sticking out of the mouth of Mona Lisa & Friends, contemporary wise or classical. I guess sex and music always go together hand-in-hand, like cookies and cream, or toothpaste with a toothbrush. A hallway with rows of doors leads to wide ranging fantasies to satiate the wildest appetites.  

    What hits me as I enter the club is the pungent odour of humanness, sweet and salty. Perspiration reeked havoc, topless males and bikini chicks rising high in spirit to join with the almighty by mediation of the high priest international superstar DJ. I find it funny that we would shred ourselves of our supremacy and don a fragile form, and then crave to be united again to an absolute. Though I admit that I left out the convenient fact that most of those present are still trapped in mortality, or merely made this way, and Club Utopia is their only hope of securing an experience of godlikeness as grasshoppers walking timidly amongst a crowd of giants.          

    What was I doing here? I need to be in ZOOL.A.ND instead, but somehow discover myself gravitating toward
s my past. Some kind of security or nostalgia I presume, a scent I was trying to get back and remember. The scent of love, the scent of a woman, a previous lover to inspire an intimacy with Sha-Rronne.

    Why the heck do I torture myself? What do I seek? I can create subterranean worlds of longing so potent to fill every need and want. I don’t need to force others to love me, they naturally do. So why? What is it with Sha-R
ronne that makes me lose my wit? What is it that makes me nervous? I need an answer.          

16

    Dreamstate is a name I coined in my novel. It was the high I got as a dance addict. The imaginations seducing me under the strobe lights, then spewing me out into an all-possible future. I saw things; wicked things, funny things, things that got me longing, lusting; things that got me thinking. It was another name for heaven, the heaven I imagined…how absurd life would be in it. How ridiculous if we could live forever, eternity as our playground, infinity our games.

    But it did happen; Dreamstate dawned. Well it need not actually, for it possessed the same desired effect as death. Scientists called it the Singularity; mystics, Doomsday. Religion’s term was the Second Coming (there was always a notion of a great god returning to Earth in the literature of faith, regardless ancient or contemporary). The aliens have landed. It was all the same. It was one big bloody death, a mass killing. As I said, its desired effect was similar to
the last breath, the end of life…the afterlife. It didn’t matter whether you were fused with alien technology, transformed to a digital being, burned in hell, fucking in heaven, casting magical spells, battling dragons, one with a consciousness, or merely fading away. It did happen, all of the above, and much, much more.

    This is Dreamstate. I
live in Dreamstate, though I only use the term. Everyone calls it to their own abbreviations. Dancing in the colours of the rainbow, dying in a role-playing game, making love in a bubble that opens up to the Garden of Eden, running un-tired across all terrains, jumping from planets to planets, rock to rock with one mighty leap, ruling universal territories, building dimensions, populating the moons, possessing a harem of genome, DNA of life, the codes to creation. This is Dreamstate. I have it all; I live it all.            

    And yet there is a lack. The insatiable nature gnawing a hole in my stomach with every bite of food that I swallow. Shit streaming in diarrhoea, like an alien stuck to the anus, sucking out faeces together with my intestines even as I eat to replenish my being. What is it? Have I not done away with my raw negative emotions of life forgone in a mortal age? Have I not grown out of my human ache and affliction when I donned this new garment of grace? I am eternal, but feel undead. At times. And I begin to realize that being undead is merely an angle to life. The emptiness spurs us on, the unending hole to create, to perpetually fill it, and yet, continually hunger. It is an engine of creation, this lack. It’s not depression…just a big empty. A big natural empty.

    Strange but expectedly, a longing cascades its elegant gown on my psyche, like a bride’s train flowing down the aisle behind her waltz. And I embraced it, drowned in it, encapsulated by it; I shiver to taste my death, my spectral beyond, like ecstasy, rapture, and I was unquestionably ready, ready to cross over, to know for myself new encounters that will further enrich and prosper my existence. I am ready, indeed I am.

   My deficit evaporated instantly. In Dreamstate, one does not linger in remorse. Life is bright and bubbly (though we so often explore the darkness). But occasionally, one requires a boost, propulsion to keep us going, to keep us exciting, to try new things; and again, I’m ready, I am.

    I dance. I dance the human dance on the floor in Club Utopia - pogo in Zeus, mosh in Tartarus and float in Orpheus; feeding my brain with endorphins, sweat and grime slowly purifying the soul to nostalgia. I was taken back to the first time, my virgin dance steps, the awkward awful desire to impress a girl, or rather, to ensure I not look like a fool…though I’m sure I failed quite miserably. Fond memories.

    Then to
my real event with a girlfriend; she inspires me to dance my darkness away. A complicated fool and a carefree sanguine; slowly she chased the shyness and coaxed the happiness in me, paving my destiny, initially with a morsel of joy caught between my throat and lung, then finally a gigantic rush like the hallucinatory explosion of a waterfall. I found my call.  

    But of course, she was beautiful, and she sounded like she wanted to fuck (which we eventually did). We broke up in the end, yet remained friends. I catch myself stroking to the reels of thoughts involving her in my head. Yes
, even now in my godlike state, and certainly more when I was on Earth.

    Reminiscences of that planet are strongest in Utopia; and the recollections of her, the greatest. More so than those of Gee Ni. She was my favourite, the only of the exes I st
ayed in touch with throughout our Earthlives. I wonder where she is? I’d made a point not to remember, not to seek her out, but allow chance and the fortune of eternity to roll the die and play its course; for we will eventually meet, more than once, more than
one
, like gods and pet phoenixes, maker and destroyer, terrible in glory, die in the eye and write new mysteries, new histories…new stories. 

    I closed my
mind’s eye and opened my natural sight; bogus humans to my front, back and side. I’d enjoyed dancing while alive. I still do, now, ultra-alive. I used to imagine stuff when I grooved; future stuff, magic stuff, sex stuff. I used to imagine the universe populated, and everyone jiving to the sounds. Now, it’s true.

    When I strut, miracles flower, colours take on a vivid hue, a solid state, they bend to the motions of hand like to a fairy’s wand, opening portals in thin air ak
in to the vulva or a cock’s little slit. More often, they ride on three-dimensional space, like augmented reality. Animation pops up, similar to the canopy of an artist’s palette; a moment the woman has butterfly wings, voice bubbles in air, self-illustrating t-shirts, Manga beings, 2D images of childhood monsters living side-by-side with adult entertainment.

    But that’s outside this demented place called Utopia. I am merely human here. Savouring the salt of perspiration, the palpitation of heart, the throbbing in the veins of my head as blood rushes to the brain. The tiredness of limbs, the hoarseness of throat and the scorching of tongue. I’d traded my divinity for flesh and bone; incongruous, but a primal need remains, the packing order of things, the social strata. The desire, the attraction, the flirtation; like animals in ritual mating calls, a peacock’s erected plumage, his boasted dog and her bloated cupcake. It’s the same in gods, ape and man; he rubs her in the secret and sensitive garden, and the next generation is spawned; but more so in gods and man, he wastes (again and again) countless sperms, committing to death his children with no hope of being born at each spit of the dick’s, but only to be collected by Morpheus, the god of dreams, through his funnel, and
into the cellars, dormant, then fed to the factory when a purchase order is signed, a modern assembly line, robotic and fully automated; it constructs new homes for this once dejected seeds to grow and mature to full-fledged beings, and no more will their unfulfilled dreams be denied.                

    A tiny pill of magic I have in my pocket. I tire of the frames fleeting across my stripped-down brain. Documentaries of world politics, cartoons and blockbuster movies, cult classics, indigenous music, rock stars and international bestselling novels. Friends, Gee Ni and relationships, my second lover and a dead buddy with his estranged wife. Lust, porn and disgust. Masturbating starlets. Handjobs. Footjobs. Fantasies, reality, success and failure, my poor fragile skin condemned to die and rot, to feed the earth and worms; to dust I become, merely a twinkling of the eye, gone; how much more my memories, as vapour in the sky. Do I long for a little sorcery, a little incantation, a tiny spell to evoke. I am bored, how can destiny be fused to a disco named after the pursuit of an ideal but nonsensical style of past life;
my
Earthlife? I mock it, a splinter in the cell that is all, for now I am god, eternal. And infinite is my might.

    A tiny pill of magic I have in my pocket. I’d hidden it, sneaked it in, masked the divination of the witch with a counter charm as I dropped off my powers at the door. She was dumb, worthless. I would have fired her if I were the boss. Paid good money after all. Stupid bitch. Stupid boss. They deserve each other, fooled by the hands of a trickster god…haha…me. Not that I’m bothered if I’m caught. I know Jai-I, I know DJ Trekz.
Not that I’ve been caught
. It takes more to capture a master of the game, especially not by those worshipping frail humanity. How they wish actually; I wonder how often they’d been duped.

    At an opportune time I sucked the tablet and farted out a flame, an invisible blue flame. It spun in the congested air. I was in Tartarus at that moment, watching the Nudes perform, a rock band notorious for playing naked on stage. The lead singer’s dick le
apt about, the guitarist’s butt-cheeks were covered with tattoos, the drummer played with three sticks, and the only one with any article of clothing on was the gal bassist who spotted a bright glow-light bra. She had a mighty-hairy red gold and green Rasta inspired bush though, I noticed and remarked to my over-pierced neighbour when she released the strap of that four-string guitar after the encore. They all wore army boots, their trademark style.

    The audience behaved in mass paranoia, believing they saw monsters. The o
rganizers weren’t sure if it was the free flow of drugs, and the band thought their music conjured hallucinatory fuck. I knew better. My flatulence got them all. Screwed with their brain. They
did
see monsters…monster rape to be precise. Tentacles with testicles tore out from the ground and ravaged them. All this happening in a subliminal region of the cortex, and I am sure some sick pervert in the surveillance room is recording this event even as he picks out spikes in the energy reading barometer. Tuning the vision into the right sub-altered frequency will allow those streaming data from Utopia’s mainframe to view the carnage caused by my pet beast. I should be able to get a pirated copy of my artistic handiwork in the black market. I hear there’s an exhibition next week by neo-artists in a grindhouse, and perhaps I can obtain a spot and squeeze my masterpiece in as one of the exhibited pieces.