31. Perverted Penguin
I live a borrowed life. All that I have is not mine, the providential graces of others. A scorpion stings the back of my neck. I am crawling on all fours, dressed in leather grey. The sand is pure and fine, sifting through my fingers, and I am in the confines of a wilderness; as far as my vision can cast, are ragged dunes.
“Where am I?” All I remember was I failed…again. This time I got past the irritating peddlers, but halfway down the noisy market I met my greatest test. Pirated DVDs. No, not the latest blockbuster movies, I can get by those...
Porn! No need for magic or enchanted properties draping over the natural to distract my focus, the disc jackets of hanging tits, colossal or perky, was enough to sidetrack me.
And with that, I was removed from Esotoria Lane once more. (I will never get to AXXion at any rate.)
The desert landscape reminded me of a drawing by an artist whose name I cannot remember. It was apocalyptic. A rusty fire-engine and other corroded vehicles, the skeleton of a once great city now carrying soulless streets. Could this be the wreckage of my heart?
And as my eyes adjusted to this oxidized scene, and my knees elevated from unfertile ground, I see an image that was wrong in proportion to the tarnished scenery. A transparent, sapphire-blue sarcophagus stood out like a clown amidst dull-faced, black-suited mourners in a funeral.
Protruding from the coffin are motley valves of tubes linking to a low cloud of the same azure, hydrating the box’s content; breathing, I presume, for a figure seems to gently flow in it.
I crept nearer, my hands out wide; they appeared webbed; and I touched the surface, my palms tenderly resting on plastic. She was asleep, dead perhaps, Sha-Rronne with eyes wide shut, a mannequin, serene as a baby in dreams. The fluids calmed her nerves; she was, as yet, unborn.
Saline rolled out of my tear ducts. I kissed the glass which separated Sha-Rronne and I. She woke not.
“Where am I?” I enquired once more; and a gentleman approached.
“You are in you,” he explained, “the interpolation of your soul in Jai-I’s ZOOL.A.ND to create Sha-Rronne.”
I do not recognize this man. It is a new production with a different cast. Vesper, Lolla Lollipop, Fat Man, Little Boy and that disembodied voice had been fired. In place was this guy who was in Doc Marts and a no-trousers penguin tux; his pubic department, free for all.
“I shall be your guide from here on. My name is Mr. PP, Perverted Penguin, if you must know; but you can drop the Mister and just call me PP, or Double P. You may have guessed by now that your power animal is the penguin.”
“Is it?” I retorted, “I always thought it was the rat.”
“You are mistaken. It is the penguin,” replied PP, who had now come up by my side to admire the beautiful Queen sleeping in her watery grave.
“Take a walk with me and allow me to explain.”
“This is the beginning,” he started, “your first subconscious desire towards divinehood, rubbing against the set menus of ZOOL.A.ND, triggering the innate longing of all beings.”
“Divinehood?”
“Yes, you heard right. What’s it got to do with your precious Sha-Rronne, you say? Everything, my lad.” This chum, whose skin was as pink as babies’ flesh, spoke. He was five-foot-five, and he tilted from left to right in small steps when he moved. He had a nose as hooked as his cock, and a double chin like testicles bobbing loose in scrotum soup; they moved with his uttering mouth, as if an invisible hand stroked.
“People, when you first taste infinity only have fun in mind. I don’t blame you; you’re children after all, devoid of such luxuries in life. It’s only natural that you splurge.
“But as your stay becomes permanent, you want your own; your own little corner in everything, your suburban bungalow in all possibilities, the penthouse going up and up and up forever.
“Often it begins in the layer beneath mental activity. Even as you’re playing, having fun, your other-self is slowly laying the foundations for your next rung of evolution. And my friend, Sha-Rronne is yours. This period usually heralds confusion, whereof I’m aware you’d been suffering recently.” He motioned pink painted fingers in piano playing fashion.
“But fret not, it is only the common process of growth experienced by all things, and if your memory serves you well, you may remember similar growing pains on Earth. You will, in time, bloom like a beautiful flower.”
I raised a query, “Why do I create another being separate from myself?”
“Different people do it differently. I guess, for you it’s your innate longing, since you never tied the knot and have always wondered what it’ll be like. A natural road of progression you observed in friends, to be coupled, to bear the next generation; all very well; all very good.” He drooled on, “You long for someone to know you, to understand your emptiness, to taste your joy.
“But mind you, though joy can be copied, emptiness can never be understood; by no one, otherwise there’ll be stagnation in the orders above. Emptiness is unique. I cannot comprehend your faculty of it, neither would you know mine. It can only be filled by its bearer. And as gods shovel in the dirt to stuff the hole, eternity expands.”
The Perverted Penguin continued, “Sha-Rronne is your spade for your cavity; all for the betterment of everlasting civilizations.”
“Look at her!” he screamed with a shuffling of his tail, a stamping of the boots; and I thought I heard the heavens roared.
Sha-Rronne breathes, o’ ever so slightly that it escapes mortal eye. But I am a demigod, and I am bound to her. Even the slightest tremors of her heart are as thunders to me. Her bloodstream crashes like a prodigious cataract in my acute hearing.
“I have a question,” I asked. PP raised his thick brows, and I said, “Why Sha-Rronne? Who is she to me? Why that name, what is its significance?”
“You have forgotten? Search yourself.”
I dug deep, tumbling in mire of memories. I see myself fall inside a rabbit’s lair, vortex green; the intricate function of my intellect, synapses sparking off, electricity riding, laden with information in the brain to invoke reminiscences, allotting new data, giving direction, absorbing nutrition in way of new environs – the operation of this great machine, the centre of the universe, the god’s mind. My mind.
Y2K New Year Party at a defunct airport. A hundred thousand strong in attendance. DJ is counting down to the next Millennium, “Ten! Nine! Eight!” the inebriated crowd shouts with him, “Seven! Six! Five!” in unity of spirit and in one voice…
…and she decides to faint…
The biggest event for a thousand years, and I spend it in a medic tent. My friend had carried her, hero of the day, knight in shining armour. Heat wave, the nurse explained, common. The beds were full, the result of too many people canned in excitement together. We waited, her friends, my friends. I remember one of them, black pants, grey top. She said her name is Sharon, and she’s adamant she’s neither bulimic nor anorexic.
Vivaldi strings to a thumping electro beat and Double P is framed by two topless beauties; fake but very real at the same time. Big tits and hot pants, metallic blue and green. We appear to be in a discothèque, some hot media party celebrating mega-boobs and megalomaniac private parts. In the middle is a giant vagina dentata, chewing up male slaves with its sharp teeth mainly, besides some domestic pets and a lesbian or two. The cunt burps as she swallows her prey. Pinkish goo-spray, greyish haze, and perfumers are analyzing the potency of the scent, her pheromone juice, which sends revellers to frenzy. An orgy.
There I see her again, last from year 2K. With the same set of clique, but this time bare breasted, advertising low-slung hip-hugging Levis jeans. One plain Jane with plain twins; another, who is the sweetest tit of the lot; followed by a bodacious vixen, the largest tata of them all; accompanied by the ‘faint-girl’ and her sky-scraping towers gravitating to the middle, but now no more cataleptic despite the smouldering temperature generated by human bodies heaped.
Sharon, she said her name is Sharon, an anorexic bulimic waif supporting healthy hooters…and she’s leaving the club with the fucking Penguin.