49. Livewire
Detective Lingam’s pistol is un-holstered and Jimmy’s injured on the mouth. Helicopters and squad cars surround the isolated diner. To flush us out, stink-bombs are used. The old owner of the joint said, ahh...dinner’s ready. Next, some modern sonic-warfare ear-piercing shriek, and the old man this time says, hallelujah, my hearing’s back. Then it was the tear gas, and he proclaims his ducts have all but dried up. No tears, no remorse, no regrets. Hundred-and-twenty years in the making, if the gods are now clamouring for his death, he is prepared. Only that he never expected the opera, and that they would trumpet so loudly his return. An unseen blanket drifts upon his antediluvian frame even as he psyches up for the afterlife.
When they finally stormed in, the ancient creature was on his knees, screaming, Lord, take me; hands waving in celebrated blindness like a village idiot.
But then in the blur… I see angels dressed in black, he murmured through forlorn dentures.
Are you taking me to that other place?
You shan’t take me to that other place! He thundered authoritatively like Gandalf. Crooked hands gripped a skillet and ladle, ready to swat off any SWAT unit swarming his way.
Fuck off, you demons, he rang; and they circumvented him, streaming both sides like traffic avoiding an accident. Victorious, but suddenly alone in the commotion, all the king’s men charging into the basement, leaving the antiquated geezer in dismay that life is again back to the monotonous drone before Jimmy and I stepped through the door.
In prime of his dotage, he had so much fantasized the rapture, the paranormal transfiguration of this fragile frame to a super being of the infinite levels. The dream, he’d rattled on-and-on, saw him in a vast carbon-fibre elevator with buttons going all the way to the rims of the Earth; the atmosphere outlined as a massive blue soft-glow ribbon from the openness of space.
These buttons, some of them were lighted like windows of a high-rise at night, and from where he was standing he could not discern in or out. Was it the view of the world he was staring, as if Satan had taken him to the pinnacle of a high mount and showed him all the magnificence of the nations throughout millennia at a single parallel point through the telescopic lens of time? Or was it merely just a lot of buttons with numerals replaced by encrypted calligraphy which controlled the lift door to open at specific dimensional floors for one to spend the rest of forever in? Some kind of Vegas-like hotel, the porter of his dream mentioned, with gaudy carpets one inch thick one would feel one were walking on air.
People went in and out – businessmen, hookers, choker-collared priests, paramedics and black shapes under blacker plastic zipped and hitching a long tunnelled ride on gurneys – but, converse, he, in excess of a century, is ignorant of life beyond that reflective door except for the momentary glimpse of crowded excitability around gambling tables - gowned and tuxedoed - prior to the lift door closing; and thus begins a new tease, featuring the next level of sentient suffering and mortal bliss.
Defeated, morbid, the frail, bent senior dropped the pan and scoop onto the floor with a loud clang, and wondered if he were to ever know the mysteries behind death’s door. The truth is that he would have rather died thrashing in the embrace of the devil than live another day to man this rusty old joint inherited from his pa, and grandpa before. What could he now do but to quietly pick up the broken pieces of crockery and cutlery dashed on the ground by the chaos of attacking angels, and clean up his diner amidst the dying hiss of gas and the prevalent mist of farted out stink-bombs.
Slowly, in small old man steps, he sits on his favourite rattan chair, and in the dark, sombrely awaits the dawn, which brings with it the occasional traveller of the lonely highway.
Jimmy says, look into my eyes. Around us I can hear the boots of Special Forces. And I’m afraid.
When they find us, we’re gonna be as one; so impossible to extricate our firmly fused flesh. Jimmy’s playing with livewire when he asks, do you love me?
I say yes.
He says, remove your clothes.
I obey.
Now he says, remove mine.
And I smile a timid smile of satisfaction as I undo his fly.
Machine guns are unlocking, loaded weapons of destruction that can ply holes in our bones and end the stakeout with black body bags removed from the building. Problem is, the way we’re gonna die, there ain’t no bloody bag big enough for the both of us.
I’m shaking.
Jimmy says, don’t be afraid. All of us are virgins once in our lives. And then he spreads my labia apart, but enters by way of the bum.
Look at me, he states again. I stare into his cold blue irises; they had animation in them. Face-to-face in an impossible anal sex Kama Sutra position is an acrobatic endeavour requiring the flexible skills of a professional contortionist. Jimmy does all sixty-four love-acts instructed in the manual on me while Detective Lingam and his boys look on.
They think he is raping me to death, but dare not engage in case they accidentally trigger a barrage of bullets, killing me too in the process. Snipers are considered, but the sparkling wire in Jimmy’s hand is a deterrent, fearful he may decide to have a threesome with me and a sumptuous bolt of electricity.
Which is exactly his plan.
Look into my eyes, Jimmy commands this time, `cos I’m easily distracted by the voyeuristic audience of young virile men not certain which gun to point at our direction. This must be very odd for them, watching hardcore porno staged at the climax of a high-tension hostage situation.
Then Jimmy drills deep into my vagina, throbbing on one intimate spot. Where the tip of his stiffened 20.32 centimetre dick kisses, according to him, is the solid steel cage wherein my soul is enslaved. And his penis is the key to that gate. Consistently banging on my drunken gong, yet not turning the glans to unlock the dungeon; the rest of his stature is as still as a statue, silent and barely breathing, ignoring the salivating police; and Jimmy says one final time, look into my eyes.
I do, and love bubbles out of his eyelids and swims across our misting breaths into the opiate pores of my skin, absorbing every addictive ounce of affection. Thus emancipates my broken spirit from its sacrum jail, as vibrating energies ascend the womb through a flood of feminine fluids to drown out an aching heart caused throughout the years by my irresponsible and impenitent father. My heart then, the crown of emotions, is a flaming forest of famished desire licking dry all that vaginal liquids, till only a pure and uncontested devotion for my man remains. This purity shoots up the brain, tangos with every yarn of memory - some good, but mostly evil - thrilling those amorphous thoughts of the mind, which is a well or hole strewn with debris and refuse over a long, convoluted course of time, but now sanctified by Jimmy’s blood sacrifice. I bite into his wounded lip, and the iron flavour of crimson flow permeates with the poignant storm already present in the head. This amalgamated elixir wrung from unadulterated feelings and liberated memories, mixed in a dash of Jimmy’s red life, is the potent ingredient required for the hyperspace jump that will transform us onto the next rung of evolution’s fidget run.
Jimmy, sizzling wire in hand, comforts me one ending moment; don’t be afraid, RZ is waiting on the other side. What he’d done is ignite the spiritual explosion in the coitus. And with that, I close my eyes and bungee into his fragrant mouth. I can hear his last sentence transmuting synapses as they transient bond with incarnated information; Jimmy says, in my past life, my name was Frank.