Hello DEAR READER,
The following is Chapter 3:1 from my first novel, The Pupa Woman. You can read Chapter 2:6 here.
You can get the PDF over at my gumroad! ^_^
Available from our unfortunate tech-overlords over at Amazon both in paperback and eBook.
Some geezer with a green Mohawk threw glass onto the pavement as Susie stumbled into the dark air of night through the second-floor ramp, holding her ears which were tingling with a loud heavenly buzz overpowering the loud conversation and whistled excerpts of music prior. “Yes,” it was a familiar feeling– visions of two little girls annihilated by a missile made her dribble with tears, and she wondered if Lolita 108 was watching over her, biding its time. She shook with fear and felt the warm arms of the crowd enveloping her. “I feel the same way; I don’t know what I’ll do now that it’s over.” Susie ignores the salty-irony BOs and looks into the faces around her who are puffed, contorted uneasily with line of mascara running down their cheeks. She had surrendered herself to the adipose currents of the audience, she now felt their blood pumping as if it were own and it started to feel so damn good. A group of young creeps begun vandalizing a little station-wagon, undeterred by its horrible digital shriek of alarm and full of smiles & laughs as they used metal & bone to crack the windshields and dent the frame.
A jolt of violence animated her hands, sending some sort of horrible terror into her head which travelled down towards her… “oh no,” she said when an attractive little darling handed Susie a brick and licked her lips, daring Susie to give herself to the surge of heat bubbling within what had begun to be called her terminal by the glassy-eyed creeps on the networks. Interface by touch, swelling & redness & discharge, pleasure signals surging to the brain via neural pathways, reproduction; all of it was simply another manifestation of information, interacting with our bodies which had the unique ability to recompile into something physical & tangible ‘n what information is about really is communication. “What are you waiting for,” she felt a voice say behind her. The desires, nah the sexual excess of those around her flooded the pathways of her physical form and now all she could think about was pure wholesome fucking as she’d only passively captured onto film so many times before and the wonderful sound the brick made when it travelled through the window of a large colorful sedan. To take all that overwhelming data which had surged into her stomach and transform it into one physical act which announced with a shatter that indeed I’m here and I’m ready to fuck– it was as divine as it was inarticulate, almost feeling a sense of uneasy pride at its cryptic nature, and Susie felt her heartbeat rattle her head and her eardrums while she watched greasy-haired creeps with bad skin engage in orgiastic displays of heavy petting and sticky spittle-loaded making out.
“I feel so good,” she said to the little darling who was now splashing her naked feet in the oil & radiator liquid spilling onto the street. “How pretty,” the little darling chirped with surprise as little rainbows began to form across the asphalt. They were both transfixed, incapable of moving even when one of the creeps with his face covered in black screamed their name. Well before that vital second when Susie could tear her brain away from a delirious hallucination, dreaming how she’d look if her thin little shirt were to be covered with black motor oil, powerful waves of smoke announced by the clattering of canisters scraping across the ground began to emerge from the dark corridors and the people around her became consumed by the grey nebulas as her throat became stiff with panic and her eyes wet with tears & pain. She could not hear herself blubbering with tears through the sounds of screaming punctuated by yelps of pain and barbed insults towards the police who seemed to be everywhere & nowhere, their clubs materializing from the clouds and striking the sensitive & well-maintained noggins of anyone they could find. Even though her veins pulsated with fearful bursts of burdensome blood, her legs seemed far too heavy and the most resistance she could muster were her limp arms hanging loosely in the air as sobs escaped from her snotty mouth. “I’m really jacked now; shit I’m fucked totally” she blabbed at the sight of the little cats who had opened a manhole cover.
Their kitten paws pulled on Susie’s legs, beckoning her to gather her strength and brave the vastness which may lie beyond the tear-gas. A little white cat’s face appeared from the sewer, its two fluttering tails letting Susie realize that it was all up to her now. “You’re right, babes. There’s a scoop to be had.” The kittens cease to pull on Susie’s legs, purring with delight as she rubbed her hands underneath their necks. Hundreds & dozens of kittens rose from the manhole, unorganized in their tiny meows which Susie chased with her eyes completely closed, listening for the pitter-patter through tinnitus-afflicted eardrums. Her footsteps travelled across the dirtied stone surfaces of many courtyards, large square pillars supporting the cubic structures which loomed over her as she wheezed & coughed with each couple of meters. She placed her trust in the kittens, that large black convoy of life carving their journey through hollow spaces where even their little paws could make loud dramatic stomps. The vast open spaces, decorated only with little flower pots turning brown from neglect, were filled with rusted metallic garbage and graying, sagging appliances– those stretches of gray unending streets sprouting into the maze-like recesses in which all childhood memories of wasteful wandering inhabit. Though her feet howled with pain, her toes bursting at the seam with blood, she was unwavering with her heavy stomps ascending the brutal steps of each floor. The thought of where she might have been led only came to her when she arrived at the top floor, pulling on the door handle of the heavy reinforced door only to find the still-light hemisphere of night staring at her from above with the moon’s tender smile her only reward.
She emptied the contents of her stomach over the edge of the building, unwilling to analyze the contents of all the bile & peptic acid which now might be tumbling down towards unsuspecting pedestrians. The cats had now scattered themselves in all directions, some running over drain pipes, others disappearing into grates, leaving Susie with only her thoughts and the beautiful view– the many buildings all decorated with windows surrounding her, each with their own tiny tapestry of life unfolding within them. Watch the family sit by their cramped table share their noodles, see the school-chums gathering by a television, admire the woman’s subtle movements of the brush as her dog peeks outward and dreams of running freely across the street with all the cats & trash one could ever desire. The spaces below her receded into completely darkness, with satellite dishes glowing with halos underneath the light-polluted sky, and there was the flicker of television screens which lit up the living rooms of the apartments across from her where she saw a man sitting on the floor who was drinking something while watching two comedians, one bald & one with hair, stand in front of a microphone, and Susie could see the man laugh whole-heartedly but heard only the faint sound of cars in the distance and wondered why the orange glow belonging to the rooms of strangers always seemed more loving than her own. She rests her tired face on the metal safety gates, scanning the windows beneath her for anything of interest. Bored out of her mind, she travels down through the grates, teasing her steps through the scaffolding which hung between the many buildings of this particular project. She felt like a ninja or something, like Rinny from Super Golden Castle Tournament II but without her trademark poisonous short-blade or salaciously tight spandex. She peeked into the empty corridors of bedrooms and felt an incredible sadness strike her heart when she reached for her camera by instinct, only to find the wet edges of her pastel-peach shirt. It was moments like these which really compelled her to become a capturer, nah a hunter of light. Susie wanted to somehow hold within one frame something which seemed to be utterly dissolved by the caustic waves of light, the lives & machinations of those who are always unseen– the people, spirits, spaces; she means, those entities whose very nature demands utmost secrecy. It seemed to her that the world has always existed beyond her grasp, behind the bullet-proof glass which she could only press her curious eyes up against. Children who are the products of rejection can grow in two directions– they can become bitter, cynical plants which abhor their nature and bemoan that they could grow their roots beyond the flower pot they’ve been placed in… they can also be like Susie, so fraught with horrible curiosity that they cannot look away, they cannot help but pull themselves with their vines closer & closer until what had rejected them becomes an inseparable part of their existence. What existed in the deepest recess of Susie’s pornography & pop damaged mind was a fantasy of inescapable revenge, a promise made with blood & sebum to give the people what they could only in their weakest moments admit to desiring.
Susie suspended herself in the shadows, clinging to a metal girder which bent slightly to her weight, her belly & mouth hungry with savor for the sound of water hitting the shower and the fog frosting the glass of the window. She knew that it was only a conditioned response, an urge to cash the check and pig out on fried cabbage and squid the second she could get the film developed. The naked bodies, their taut & tanned flesh and the rehearsed movements even when supposedly no-one was watching, rarely excited her beyond anything more than a relief from boredom.
This arm however was still raw with a wound, the metal girder supporting Susie shifting uneasily with strained sounds as she tried to pull herself closer towards the window. Her legs were the same skeletal meshes from which skin hung uneasily she’d seen before on the posters which decorated the record store. A tear of relief almost fell from her eyes, and with a whisper she thanked the little kittens who had gotten her to this point– though Susie didn’t have a fuckin’ clue why or what would be next so she held on firmly. She admired June’s thick collarbones, and the dark hair which spread into a spider’s web much like her own. She carefully studies the scars on June’s breasts, and examines the stretch marks and imperfections which contoured around her legs and stomach. Judy, Lolita 108, that VirtuaIdol she’d seen on that green terminal screen– they seemed now to only be figments of light, idealized forms created for hungry lenses and famished film devoid of anything beyond a manufactured surface.
Susie looked at her own hands, their rough calluses and fine hair, and her own body… each mark represented something which light could never capture, a hidden history of touches & hurts, the side-effects & left-behind artifacts of our experience with information as it tunnels through our brains and bodies. A deep revulsion began to rise from Susie’s stomach, acid burning at her esophagus. An emotion she thought had burrowed itself away years ago jolted into her psyche. It was shame, shame for staring at June and greedily taking in her body without consent and shame for a desire so foreign that it had instilled fear within her mind. She wanted June to be in her arms, she wanted June to think of her, she wanted June to tell her everything she was feeling and what was thinking, she wanted June to… so so bad, and now she was smiling with love as June awkwardly pulled the shower curtains and stowed herself away. Tears welled into Susie’s eyes, and with hurried mouthed sentences convinced herself that she should never see June ever ever again. She halted her monologue as the girder begun to moan with each bend, steadily shaking Susie who held on with fearful blinking.
It was the sound she heard once the girder had ceased its queasy movements that alarmed her; in the corner of the eye she heard the sound of boot onto metal, and steadily she held pose with a silence only a ninja could perform. From the shadows comes the unmistakable sheen of a camera lens, and a sneering face with moist lips which maneuvered itself over the metal grates underneath the windows. Anger & revulsion made Susie quiver steadily, no doubt it was a celebrity-hunter contracted to uncover June’s sick fuck-freak private life as a contrast to the whole chasteness of Judy which the hungry wolves who made tabloid print their personal playgrounds for perversion paradoxically lauded. It was something Susie did best, and now the shame & anger emulsified into a potent mix of hotheaded feeling.
The girder begun to moan again and Susie watched the hunter steady himself behind June’s window, simulating what the scenario might look like in her head. “Well,” she reasoned to herself quietly, “if I just close my eyes.” Susie arose onto her feet which nervously steadied themselves onto the girder’s collapsing surface and spread her arms with only one eye open. The hunter steadied his camera at the window, hearing Susie’s grunt of exertion far too late… both of them tumbled through the glass, shards spilling into all directions, the hunter and Susie yelping with confusion and pain. June opened her curtain and shrieked with horror, trying to cover her body with the fabric while shooting water unto the two invaders. Susie kept her eyes shut as hot water moistened her face, soliciting only pleads for her to stop.
The hunter looked around for his camera, using his hands to prevent the water from spilling into his eyes before collapsing back onto the ground to cover the SLR from the spray. Susie wants to put herself upright but every try ends up in horrible slips back onto the ground, punctuated with loud crashes, feeling the sharp edges of the glass poke into her thighs & ass. She opened her eyes only to find that the hunter had pulled from his coat a large knife, screaming angrily while waving one half of his broken camera around with film hanging from its exposed innards. The floor beneath them looked like a shattered mirror and puddles of water & the dirt of their shoes mixed together into a brown muck. June, hoarse from her fearful shrieks, pulls the shower head away from them and tries to make herself smaller within the folds of the shower curtain with confused eyes saccading from one creep to the other. Susie had mustered up the courage to open up at least one of her eyes and searched the bathroom for any potential weapons, eliciting an awkward laugh from the hunter who now kind of waved his knife around half-heartedly as Susie reached for a broom and shook it around in spiral patterns. As if from divine inspiration, the voice of a Super Golden Castle Tournament II end-level boss sprung into her mind: “I am Bu Beiju, master of the martial arts.” The hunter looked around for a quick anxious second; searching June’s face for some answer… she only gave him a wide-eyed stare in response. “Do you wish to try me in combat?” The hunter lunged forward with his knife ahead of him but slipped on the muddy water and shrieked in pain as his hands fell onto the shards of glass. “How do you wish to die?” Susie bellowed in the best impression of an old man she could manage. With panic rattling her ears, she tried to remember the names of films she’d recently seen. “By Master of the Flying Bonobo Stance, or would you rather get a taste of my 36 Chambers of Dragon style?” Susie tries to improvise a variety of dangerous movements with the broom, by complete accident slapping the side of the hunter head with its end. The hunter covered his head and screams invective with fear trembling on each syllable, slipping once or twice back down onto the glass-covered floor before hurling himself through the front door and into the shadows.
A few shards of glass still hung from the window, the sirens and yells of those on the street now capable of permeating through the apartment without boundary. Susie swept some of the glass aside with an absent mind, caring only after placing some of the spare towels off the rack onto the floor to see that the little foggy capsule was vacant and its shower curtain was missing in action. She peeks her head into the living room, and she reached for a square lamp which sat underneath a window and the light revealed this chamber to be in a state of untouched single-ness, one blanket and a pillow surrounded by books and pop-music CDs strategically placed adjacent to a well-worn PC system covered in stickers, in a corner tapes of both audio and video formats, bottles of water, molding polystyrene cups which littered the floor, and underneath her feet she saw tabloid magazines imprinted with the wet outline of her sneaker. Susie grabbed one of the books that were on the color television in the corner of the room, propped up on the cardboard box which once contained it, flipping through it to find annotations, thoughts expressed freely between the text in the only-familiar dialect she assumed she must have thought them in, and full of knotty loops shooting in wild directions and hesitant lines overlapped with more assertive corrections. The windowsill was decorated with rows of stuffed animals, some fresh with their tags still hanging from their fuzzy limbs and some ragged with discolored features & worn edges where the artificial fur had become bumpy fabric.
When the sirens died down & the traffic outside lapsed temporarily, Susie could hear the faint sound of whimpering accompanied by rattles & knocks coming from a closet by the bathroom. She approached cautiously, following beside a trail of water to a still-wet curtain wedged between two doors. Her fingers traced the rough wood and pulled gingerly on the handles, revealing a damp June covered in a shower curtain & shivering with loud clacking of the teeth ‘n that clattering sound was the only thing Susie could hear for what seemed like a very awkward eternity. Her emaciated frame had collapsed into itself, her arms folded over her knees as long dark hair formed thick strands which foamed with soap & dripped with iron-rich water. “Hey ma’am, I’m not here to hurt you or anything.” Susie was never great at breaking the ice, her first meeting with Sylvania consisted mostly of listing off all the facts she knew about access terminals and long-distance telecommunications. “Think about it, Sylvie. Communication used to be so damn hard. They’d send pigeons; they’d send little beeps through the air. But soon it’ll all be so easy. You could feel close to someone even though you’ve never seen them. You could feel like you’ve become one person, because they’d never be far away.”
Susie’s hand reached for her arm but June knocked it away, pulling her head up where her fiery amber eyes struck fear into Susie’s heart. The veins in her face twitched with anger, the muscles taught with anxiety, but the lines & teeth melted away as her expression softened with each studious blink. “You were at my show. I ‘member because you looked different from the school-age kids I usually see.” She pulled her arms closer to her torso, the rough tissue surrounding the drying wound accented by the light coming through the window. “You a stalker? Like that other guy…” Susie looked around aimlessly, peeking into corners until settling with the blanket by the piles of stuff and handing it to June who cautiously accepted and covered herself like a Bedouin stuck in a torrent of hail. “That other guy must have been paparazzi. They always chase after family members when, uh…” June was quiet but then tried to mask a smile, “it’s okay.” Something about the pathetic awkwardness in the way Susie tried to clean up the glass shards with her hands, drawing blood as she stifled her yelps, it was endearing and made the anger & self-defensive urge for violence seem insensitive & inappropriate. “Ridiculous,” June said to herself and a feeling of shame & loathing made the bones in her back slump. Susie perked up her ears, glass falling from her hands back onto the dirtied bathroom floor which left brown streaks on her pants and shoes. “You look ridiculous. What do you want from me?” June tried to summon as much of her anger as she could, but worried that what was meant to be the roar of a tiger came out like the squeak of some particularly tiny mouse.
Susie didn’t quite know what to do with herself, rubbing some of the dirty water onto her head as she tried to think with footprints following her pacing. “This is gonna’ sound really weird.” I’ll say, and now June was feeling quite concerned with Susie as sweat began washing the dirty surfaces of her round face. “Is Judy real?” June didn’t say anything. “I said: is Judy…” I heard what you said, but she responded with an uh, pausing: “Are you huffing paint?” Susie approached June all of a sudden with animated hands, causing her to jump back further into the closet. “No no no no look, I mean would a record company really kill an innocent girl just to sell records? I mean I’ve never seen her in person. She always looked off; you know what I mean? All that blood it didn’t look weird– it looked like special effects from a movie or something.” June didn’t know what to say, but her mind drifted towards the characters from the scribbled pages she hid under her bed. She recognizes Susie as one of them, the desperate creatures who are forced to the extremes of behavior & thought when the world’s disease pulls them into lunacy.
She thinks of the housewife who plunges herself into a nationalistic abyss, searching for a scary ecstasy amongst the images & sounds of dismembered body parts belonging to those who were no longer considered human. She thinks of the office lady who reconstructs herself as an android, the electrical pulses & buzzing of information internalized & transformed into the movement of her bionic arm. She thinks of the murderers who have always fascinated her, boys who were driven by their voices to stab peers, classmates, teachers, mommy. She thinks of the schoolkid who grabs a gun and begins a futile & suicidal revolt against the institutions, the long-arms, the violent fathers & silent mothers. She thinks of herself, overcome with lust, obsessed with his body parts and driven to bliss whenever she imagines deconstructing him with a chainsaw.
“I’ve seen a lot of things, ma’am,” Susie continued. Things today I’ve never seen. I’ve seen computers the size of rooms which could construct a popstar so real I could smell her & feel her. It’s like her limbs & her legs & her hair became my own. You know that weird feeling when like, your arm falls asleep or something? No? I saw a girl who looked just like you while I was trying to figure out if this guy was even a doctor or just some guy pretending to be, I saw her well she didn’t have any wrinkles & scars it was like she was plastic, I saw a missile come from under her skirt and I saw it collide with two little girls, really way too young to be stars, I saw them explode into a whole mess of oil & computer chips. I saw a girl pull a gun on a train, and I was rescued by two vampires who left me with these weird creeps who make music out of old cassette tapes and talk about taking down the government or something– have you seen this it’s like the music itself is slower but you start to hear things and you don’t know if it’s the music but yeah anyway then I met a ghost and then I saw you and…” Susie stops herself from talking, feeling a little weird when June’s eyes blinked with fear. Without context, it just seemed like white noise, really crazy white noise and she wanted to just hug June and say shh, it’s okay now as long as you’re safe but instead she just shrugged her shoulders and ended with “I gotta’ know for certain. If Judy’s real, the secret’s in the music. The music’s what got me this far. I promised someone I’d find out if Judy was okay, but I think she tried to kill me. You ever hear Duchess Autumn-Leaf? I think she’s a piano player,” but as Susie spoke, she only realized after a long rant about the decline in the quality of jazz that June had closed the door of the closet onto herself. Susie puts her head up against the cold wood, soothing her ears, and she tried to project herself into it with the hope that it wouldn’t get lost amongst the towel fibers and fresh-scented soaps. “I just gotta know, about Judy…” She heard a murmur muffled by the doors. “I need you. I can’t do this by myself.” June raised her voice, a tremble to her hoarse screech. “Tomorrow.”
Susie walked away from the closet, not knowing really what to do with herself now and feeling so stupid for telling June anything in the first place. The pains striking into her temples made it difficult even to shut one’s eyes, millions of images devoid of any meaning on their own swirling into a soup of projecting lights onto the backs of her eyelids. She approaches the stuffed animals on the windowsill illuminated by the moon’s white-hot rays, feeling the ears & noses of the bears, tigers, raccoons, red pandas… did these creatures ever exist? or like June were they only the rewriting of history by material? As if by replicating it as it should have been could somehow make the past easier to understand, to acknowledge as being. “That’s how it should have been,” Susie imagines them saying as their hands knitted closed the infantile shape of a little cub’s head. “Cute, and then we’d still have them with us today.” Maybe, they made Judy’s body the same way, to right some wrong committed in the past– it was the innocent, nostalgic, and blissfully ignorant childhood we all should have had but never did.
Susie hugs one of the stuffed animals and places it back onto the windowsill, turning to see that the closet door had opened slightly and one of June’s eyes peered at her from the closet’s dark interior. They exchanged glances, Susie remained silent; expectantly, smiling. “I really liked zoology when I was a kid. I wanted to live amongst the gorillas and the tigers, but when I found out that they and most of the animals we studied didn’t exist anymore… well uh, I stopped caring.” Susie just stood there and didn’t really say anything, hoping that maybe she could leave through the broken window she’d broken and disappear completely. Deny everything. Change your name. Become a third-rate videogirl and disappear into the abyssal interworking of the city’s worst vices. Accept failure as the price of principle. Pretend none of it happened and bury the horrible inclinations of your mind in pornography and cheap mass media.
June’s eyes fall to the ground. “Please don’t leave. I’m scared someone else will come after me.” Susie looked out the window, having just remembered that a missile-wielding sexbot was still on her tail… what was it waiting for? Or maybe it had misread Susie’s intentions, and now they were drawn together as familial allies in pursuit of ‘something.’ “I dunno’,” Susie blurted out with an absent mind, “I dunno what I’m really doing here.” You know you’re hosed if you’re questioning the motives of cats living on the streets and the thought that everyone knew what that ‘something’ was made her feel really dumb. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, just please stay.” June’s face scrunched into a red & wet contorted mess and she sobbed into her blanket as Susie looked around for, anything really. Nothing worthwhile on the TV, no other blankets… she lunges for one of the stuffed animals (the cutest one, a bear) and catapults herself towards the closet, expecting June to reach for it but instead her wet hair and soapy ears fall into the nape of Susie’s neck and they remained still, June’s arm wrapped tightly around Susie’s back with only the sound of crickets & car jams accompanying them. Susie had forgotten what a desperate grasp for another human-being felt like, the warmth of their body & the sensation of the heart & the rumble of the intestines sizzling on the skin– man, fuck everything else she thought.
June cautiously left the closet and descended onto the frosty vinyl flooring, embarrassed with the overtaking of her rational processes by an urge for closeness. Even though she’d been on fifteen different stages these past weeks, her face melting underneath their warm colored lights, she felt alien– alone, a single mannequin dangled before the crowd. Little pangs of spite would shoot into her heart when she saw people happily singing along, dancing, holding their dates & mates close by. What was she missing? Susie looked away at the cassettes sprawled about the television as June covered her chilled flesh with grey shirt and synthetic fur, dressed like a factory worker being enveloped by some plastic lion. Her feet seemed paler in the moonlight; their nails jagged… it was always in these private moments that the strange topology of this body moved her.