21. Jahr
Jahr was comely as Kings naturally are. He paced the chequered black-and-white tiles, commanding servants in chess-piece suits to navigate the floorboard.
“Knight to D4,” he ordered as he strolled with his back facing to the end of the hall. The manservant in helmeted-mask and a mechanical horse that’d replaced his dick crossed in an L to the allotted square, fucking the opponent’s bishop in the ass with the stallion before lobbing off the diocesan’s head. The crimson Episcopal cloak soaked redder in martyr’s blood.
The game is at the final stage of conquest, a few more inevitable moves before Jahr checkmates his challenger, which is a supercomputer programmed to balance the heavens and coordinate celestial orbits.
The floor is a battlefield. The dead are left to rot, while carrion crows pick at cadavers. It was a scene from the Bible, Armageddon, an invitation for the birds of the air to feast on the meat of kings, great men emasculated, now awaiting judgement in the pit of perdition. Enemy soldiers walk the plane, stripping armour and gold and all things valuable. Peasants slowly trotting behind, scavenging for leftovers.
“Yes, drink. Drink my children. Be drunk on the blood of lords, let it merry your heart like wine,” Jahr boomed, speaking to vultures and marabou storks, deriding the powerful machine; its pawns all fallen, its king surrounded. It was a painful death, slow and excruciatingly evil, tortured and toyed and torn until the king in rags, like a pauper, a ragged victim. And his tormentors mock; his manipulative wife and queen, Jezebel the bitch, is butchered; beheaded. Paraded on a stake, like ice cream on stick. Melting. She with her long strides, his protector, the true governor of the province; she is dead, she who wears the pants.
The kingdom rejoices. Now he limps one pathetic step at a time, the enemy in close pursuit, making him a laughing stock. Forced to ride a donkey backward, completely exposed and with a crown of thorns; his kingly tummy, three hairy layers of luxurious fat, is soaked with sweat. The oppressed of the land jeered the downfall of a dictator, once a tyrant, now a butt of jokes. Crying, weeping, in tears to his god who has forsaken him, the supercomputer, regulator of heaven, inept, unable to help its creation. Because of Jahr. Because of the power of Jahr.
Checkmate.
The king of kings summoned for me to approach. He will speak to me now. But before, he pointed to a window. I stared outside to witness the deconstruction of a universe even as the infinite-calculating cosmic machine broke down and surrendered, waving a white flag, conceding defeat. For once there were stars, black holes and revelations (as sung by the popular rock group Muse), now there is nothingness. A whiteness. But of course that was before the contractor in his yellow boots walked into the frame, followed by bulldozers and a whole lot of other heavy-duty machines. Each one outdoing the other before with regard to size; were if it were once with wheels ten-feet tall, it was now a hundred, and later a thousand…ten thousand times ten thousand, a million, billions, trillions, zillions, gazillions blah blah blah…
The contractor, a Chinaman with a huge mole on his cheek and ultra-curly hair, spoke loudly into the handphone, his voice crinkled jarringly over the receiver at Jahr’s end. The god had to keep his set an arm’s length away to talk to that crude builder. And even then I could hear every corrupted English word and phrase (Singlish – Singaporean English) that was coming out of the earpiece clearly.
Jahr was annoyed. He only said, “Yah…yah… yah…yah…yah…” throughout the conversation, while the other side babbled on and on and on. “Oh, but he is the best,” he finally told me when he switched his Samsung off, an irritation lingering on his mug, “Best in Syurga and Hell, and some say Planet Muthafukker as well.
“I think his country of origin is adjacent to yours. Your neighbour down south back on Earth,” he added.
Yah, I recall him, a popular TV character produced in that island state.
Now he makes construction his real business. What more, not merely erecting houses, but developing dimensions for gods. Impressive. Not bad for a humble start.
“Let’s leave him to it,” Jahr mentioned and snapped. The window closed. “He’s making a new world for me, one which I planned. It’s gonna be a glorious theme-park, a tesseract circus; rides you’ll never believe possible. The kids are gonna love it!
“Now, what can I do for you?”