The Last King of Scotland
The Last King of Scotland
The Apocalypse
happened,
and God decided that
now everything would float.
Nothing on this
whole planet
would have much weight,
most especially not
the fundament or Man’s
situation.
Trespasses against gravity
would be
decriminalized.
On the 178th day
of levitation,
Edinburgh Castle—with its storied
walls, moss, and unacknowledged
basement skeletons—passed ominously
over Entebbe Airport,
totally disregarding
airspace regulations
and confounding three balaclava-wearing
men who glided up its ramparts
like wuxia rapscallions
and made frantic attempts to find
a control room.
It reached Kampala,
and soon afterwards
became embroiled in
its 27th siege,
which was initiated by a native
son insistent on calling himself
Dada
as though he were the
elemental manifestation
of
the world’s burgeoning absurdity.
(In fact, Dada was a man
of several well-constructed identities,
and the ghosts of his dead names
haunted foggy village greens far away
along with
nearer makeshift
barrows.)
Artillery pieces were
perched
delicately
on top of trees
that clung tenuously to an upwardly mobile landscape,
branches
stripped bare of fruit to give rest
to both
revenants of British science
who might be watching from above
and
the distended bellies of local mutineers.
When the order was given
to fire,
trajectories and declinations
were
unsure of their place
in such an
evolving scene
and struggled with the prospect of going
full pariah.
On a forum existing at the quantum level—
or in God’s brain, same difference—
superstition discourse fought
science discourse
fought Love Radio discourse from a guy named “Kijambiya”
who despised math and digits and said that they
should have departed with the L̅X̅ Asians who
decided to beat feet
for some reason.
The only thing that mattered, though,
was the resulting
explosion,
which tore rifts between
slabs of rock
and
terrain
and
the brain hemispheres of those gathered.
Ancient divisions along
clan (or was it ethnic?
or was it ley?)
lines “are now insignificant,
mostly,” Dada said
during the victory celebration
he hosted in the Great Hall
at a table
that was
ostensibly round,
but 4-dimensional if you squinted.
Kakwas sat on one side
talking Pan-Africanism with Macleods
and McCullochs roosted on another, splitting wives
with the Congolese because
the melting pot’s stew always tastes better
when it’s stirred
with a claymore.
In his fashionable splice of tartan,
battle dress uniform
and bathrobe—covered
in medals
that clacked
more than they clicked—Dada
started to
lament that he
was kind of the
Gaston of
the ball
as the atmosphere disintegrated
and people got too familiar,
too harmonized
and it
became hard to
breathe.
He was troubled
by his own fading.
Out he floated,
down steps that were hardly connected
to anything
across a nostalgic hundred meter hallway
and deep down into
the castle’s core
of
fractal rock,
a solitudinous place
where he decided that he could be
free from
the wide-eyed denizens
who let the hands of
preying foreign sodomites
move them.
Dada surrounded himself
with suits of shining
armor,
donning bits and pieces
that fit his big-boned frame
while bidding the rest
to orbit
him
in substitutiary locomotion
as he, King in
this new stronghold,
drafted plans
to supplant
Earth’s gravitational
pull
with his
own mojo,
which he reasoned was expanding as fast as the universe
(and if you just carry the “1” …).
Occasionally, bullets that he
didn’t recognize would
inch through his de facto
throne room
at the pace of snails
crossing blades with impunity,
an annoyance
he commanded
an unoccupied William Wallace
to deal with
ruthlessly.
With the shells in his
pocket, consolidating
power became
a
joke.
As periods of sunshine flickered by,
advisors did come and go
with faces
that sometimes made sense
and agendas that rarely did
until one infinite day,
when everything finally revolved around
Him, He
apologized for the
levity.