Hello DEAR READER,
The following is Chapter 4:1 from my first novel, The Pupa Woman. You can read Chapter 3:4 here.
You can get the PDF over at my gumroad! ^_^
Available from our unfortunate tech-overlords over at Amazon both in paperback and eBook.
So, what was once a “Video City” was now nothing beside remains, and now ‘round the decay of that flattened structure, boundless & bare, its lone emptiness and dust brushed the walls of the surrounding apartments with a thin film of urban residue. The nostrils of those two lonesome bystanders who had parked their asses on the stoop flared with inflammatory pain as their sniffs tried to catch more of increasingly premium clean air– though only Susie’s shirt was peppered with mucus, trying to pull herself away carefully from June’s cloth-obfuscated snores. The weariness of wandering had made the pain in her feet feel more present, the cold water offering no relief to her sweaty sneaker-clad feet. Once the flames petered out to a warming glow, the meaning of what she’d done begun to dawn on her. Judy was dead– the cute pop-star she was told to chase down by Aiwa-Goldstar for juicy gossip, the ersatz-daughter of the Duchess, the probable reason for why that supposed doctor was split in half in that hotel room so many hours ago, the symbol of everything which was wrong & right in the industry of cute children singing songs.
Who was she… was she the outlier, the chaotic radical who had punctured the eggshell and split out into the world in some act of radical freedom? Had she joined a spiritual covenant with armed girls in time, in history, pulling from their coat a revolver against the masters of the world… to reassert with a single act that indeed you too will have to die, that no matter what machinations & schemes exist in the world the simple fact that they are of flesh & bone means that no matter what lofty ambition the end result is decomposition underneath six feet of mud. Or… maybe she was mistaken and she was only the physical embodiment of a movement set into place long before she was even needed, the rehearsals of which could be seen in the months-long aftermath of your average celebrity-murder tragedy. You could call it paranoia, but it wasn’t the paranoia of your conspiracy-creep who refuses to accept the grim proposition that maybe no-one was in control and we’re all just unwilling participants in a cosmically-rigged dice game that’s just as likely to leave you with snake eyes as it is to leave you with boxcars… no, it was the paranoia of a she-creep who knows that everyone including herself are simply manifestations of currents, historical/cultural/physical like a fish caught in a amniotic drift amongst fellow pisces… the paranoia of a she-creep who knows that no one person is in control but rather that what she feels & does was only the ultimate output of a system in which she is only a single biological entity in a huge pool of other biological entities… and ultimately you can’t escape that system more than you could escape gravity or a bullet traveling way quicker than you ever could. If you were clever, or just fuckin’ dumb maybe, you could take solace in the finality of death & learn to appreciate the little changes you could make in service of someone you love or a stranger who is in a time of need… but it terrified Susie to know that only in the recesses of her pornography-addled mind did the world as she knows it exist, her body was not of that world but of this world which consisted of facts & meat ‘n to see herself in that window still imbues within her a feeling of terrible loss for reasons she couldn’t understand. She came to see that burning Judy to death wasn’t an act of love, a transgression to assert some identity… no it was exactly what everything was leading up to, the only possible outcome ‘n she wondered if anyone except her even knew it.
With Judy burnt to a crisp, the Duchess hopped up, someone who was once called Dr. Sanyo-Infinity dead, yeah now all the loose ends were tied ‘n the mass-media system won again– thanks Susie, couldn’t do it without ‘ya! She felt depressed, wondered why she was thinking so hard about this bullshit, staring into ponds & puddles which rippled her reflection away. ‘Ah, fuck it’ she thought ‘n she was starting to feel hungry again ‘n she wondered what Sylvania would think listening back to her message… a good-bye, an apology, a confession for a crime unforgivable… June followed Susie with her eyes glued-together from sleepy gunk & tears, her ankles aching, and just the worst headache you can imagine. Susie took a deep breath, standing at the edge of the stoop– the scent of garbage & run-off flooding her nostrils and the breeze riding up her pants as the sound of water hitting roofs grew in volume, hairs standing on edge as the bleakness of night begun to recede and begin anew the day’s cycle.
The tall buildings in the far distance hummed with fuzzy luminescence, clouds at their apex grasping the project light which illuminated their curves ‘n underneath the dozens of concrete roads suspended in the air intersected & overlaid one another ‘n the howling & whizzing of its cars above Susie’s head now seemed to her some kind of strange poetry in a language still unwritten. In the way the cats feasted on garbage which tumbled & danced across the asphalt ‘n the way hobos shivered as frostbite threatened their toes, it spoke to her as an expression of something out there reflected within herself– yeah, for the first time in like forever, she recognized herself in the world around her. They walked beneath one of those mammoth spirals, its satellite dishes cocked towards the sky like a concave eyeball & its hundreds of windows reflecting the moon’s white-hot glow. June begged Susie to stop as the trains above them rattled with deathly metallurgy, its oils & gunk forming black scratches alongside the walls beside them. Susie approached the railing and peered over it into the light below, her throat gulping with unease at the crevice below her which groaned with excess… the little apartment complexes within it seeming so small with their teeny-tiny air conditioners & staircases, and ‘tween them hung streetlamps under which a late-night stillness crept through the hallways filled with shuttered storefronts and buzzing soda-beer vending machines.
“Susie, where are you going?” June dragged herself along, on her back a plastic covering she’d pilfered from an electronic store’s dumpster as her words of protests twanged with shivers. Spurts of rain would sometimes fall within the cracks ‘tween the buildings above them, foamy liquid flowing onto the streets which now softly rippled & crackled with shimmers like a disturbed river. Susie squeezed her raincoat together and pulled June into the recess of a boarded-up subway station, the sudden precipitation forming itself into torrents of cold ugly water which splattered onto the metal with spiteful pangs. “We can probably chill in that book capsule,” June holding onto Susie’s arm as they passed with their backs bent underneath the square rooms of the hotel which shielded them from the rain. The book capsule was a small metalloid structure, sealed with a heavy door ‘n accompanied with a shelf overflowing with periodicals, erotic comic books, & tabloids. Susie pulled on the green handle with a grunt, at first not recognizing the distressed looking figure with tufts of rough hair entrenched with flakes of dead skin. June shrieked with surprise, falling to the wet ground with clear plastic enveloping her like a shield.
“Ah, Sylvania… I was wondering where you were.” Susie grasped the bookshelves with alarm, takin’ a minute and thinking for a sec… “yes, it’s me… Sylvania…” Susie replied. “How have you been, Duchess?” June peeked thru’ her plastic covering, shooting glances of confusion at Susie while the Duchess stuck her finger into a pill-bottle and brushed the dusty residue onto her gums. “June, this is Ms. Toshiko Autumn-Leaf… the Duchess.” June nodded her head and smiled, soliciting a twitch of recognition from the Duchess. “You’re that girl who sings about being a robot! I love that one, how does it go…” the Duchess following the perfectly-replicated melody with her hands, adding a touch of swing to each delicately sung note. “In my head, there are no thoughts… in my heart, there are no beats… only the sound of a pulse from somewhere beneath…” the Duchess now swaying along to her own rhythm, “Radar Man!” Susie guided June into the dark warmth of the book capsule, to her surprise finding that where a bookcase and a warm comfortable chair should have been stood now instead a glowing passageway into some lantern-lit cavern. The Duchess brought her extended coda to its finale before turning again to Susie and pulling her in for a lovely hug, tears falling onto Susie’s shoulder and warmth flooding her body. “I’m sorry, Sylvania,” the Duchess said tho’ Susie was not sure what exactly she was apologizing for. The Duchess pulls away and points to the graffiti-stained walls, messages of violence & resistance surrounding that curious set of numbers she’d seen before… “8.8.8.8?” Susie wondered aloud as she raised her arm and found that the numbers she’d scribbled into her skin had washed away with her sweat. June tilted her head out from the book capsule, her knees digging into the torn paper which formed a floor within the chamber.
“There’s something big happening Sylvania, but you can’t really see it.” The Duchess scratches her scalp, snowy chunks falling onto her dirty sweater. “All the nodes are burning with irrepressible information, but I’ll tell you a secret… they’re fighting only for an illusion, another battle in the street for something no-one really knows is true. All they have left now is to move their inner-world to somewhere far away… you dig it?” Susie conjured up a fake smile and nodded in agreement, trying to ignore the awful stench of garbage which seemed to have penetrated every fiber of the Duchess’ being. “Come on, I’ll show ‘ya what I mean. You can bring the weirdo with you.” June’s big eyes glowed with disbelief as Susie followed the Duchess further into the depths of the cavern, only chasing after them once the rain begun to fill the subway station with brown vinegary-smelling mud. The cavern’s rocky path brought them to the edges of a horrifically green current of water, bits of trash & adipose tissue crashing up against rusted brown grates which separated the foul-smelling river of garbage. June and Susie plugged their noses, their faces suddenly drained of all color. The Duchess guided them alongside the torrent of water, which flowed down into the ocean below them beside the waterfront. Green & brown spurts of liquid bursting from the pipes around them accompanied the burning sensation which brought tears to Susie’s eyes, trying to hold down her vomit with great difficulty. Beneath a bridge by the waterfront, a group of men dressed in yellow plastic robes greeted the Duchess and offered Susie and June breathing masks for which they lunged with hasty pleas & a thank you.
“After I heard that other girls were killing themselves because of Judy, because of something that I created… well I couldn’t live with myself anymore, Sylvania.” The men nodded in agreement as Susie & June took in deep breaths. “I stood by the waterfront; I looked at the ocean… I took as many pills as I could and I lunged into the water.” Susie looked up from her bent-over position, trying to set aside her contempt… “But when I jumped in, I didn’t land in the water, Sylvania. I landed on a pile of shit.” The men laughed with chortles, the Duchess herself even managing to crack a smile as they slapped their backs & knees. “I was so disgusted, the shit went into every part of my body, and it was in my eyes and my nose, my mouth… it tasted so awful that I just threw up all the pills I’d swallowed down.” Susie looked at June, who now was starting to cry with discomfort and had hid her breath-mask-clad face into her arms. “But when I was surrounded with shit and throw-up I realized something, Sylvania. I felt so… alive. I couldn’t explain it away; I couldn’t think about it or take control or push my anger onto others like I’d always tried to do. It was real, without any possibility for fantasy or anything like that. For the first time in my life, I realized what being physically alive meant. All the troubles of the past, the jealousy & anger, it seemed to just melt away and I finally felt alive. Those generations of hardship finally made sense. I realized as the shit and throw-up penetrated every orifice of my body that I was born so I could live.”
June had stuck her face in the gangly mud, out of shock or maybe out of desperation– desperate to feel the coolness of the dirt on her face. She clutches the brown mounds in her hands, fighting the temptation to chew onto the clumps of earthen waste & compost. The Duchess had found herself a hobby in directing the plastic-robed men who with a couple of count-off snaps plunged themselves into the midst of a wonderfully little choral number. Low basses swirled around the tonic as high falsettos danced with cheeky slides across rapid chord changes, “Bb7” the Duchess would yell as she clapped her hands with strictness. Their complicated harmonies clattered as they reverberated through the metallic frame of the sewers, invigorating June’s abject display of mud-munching with an unseemly pep. “A kiss from you,” sang the tenor and the baritone responded “oh my love.” June’s tear-stained eyes looked up at Susie, her hands clutching at her legs while mud dripped from her mouth. “I’m a bug, Susie. I always knew it. I’m a bug.” Susie remembered Sylvania’s nights in her room, practicing her comedy routine with her eyes peeled on the mirror. “Susie… you know when, uh, you’re with a man and he says… ‘Hey, let’s just be friends?’ What, did he think I dressed up just so we can have a beer and talk about the sports?” Susie laughed, finding some strange sort of beauty in her pathetic attempt at cracking jokes. An attempt to make someone laugh with a simplistic quip seemed to Susie so earnest & brave that she was soon convinced Sylvania could be nothing more than a comedic genius.
“I’ve always been fascinated with bugs,” June pulled at Susie’s pant legs and almost dragged her into the mud. “I’d visit the Parasitological Museum every change I’d get, even when I was a full-grown adult.” Susie hated it when Sylvania would sneak up behind her, pull on her hair and say “hey, I love you!” In songs, in the television programs and yes, all the videogirl tapes they used words like “love” and “togetherness” without thought. “Bugs feed off of the decaying matter that all other life must eventually become,” June quotes from memory her high-school teacher. “The death of one of us means the life of a million other creatures. There’s no purer love.” Susie saw this principle as extended beyond life itself into the realm of the abstract, as surely there is no ‘information’ that could be called ‘information’ if just a single node of that good stuff doesn’t spread like a spider-web ‘twards potentially an infinite set of data. Just like our bodies, each molecule of meaning feeds the creation of its children– herself only one receiver on an Earth riddled with antennae, each an autonomous agent in a collective bound only by the information which forms the sum of our being. June imagined enveloping herself in a cocoon of mud, moonlight falling onto dead leaves as cicadas burst from their chrysalises. With sap dripping from her mouth, amber fills up her body and from her back spills forth with hemolymph her silvery wings which shook & shivered with each passing ripple of the wind.
Annoyed by all the commotion, an imposing creature disfigured by the garbage-bag plastic which hung from its appendages forced open metal gates which allowed dozens of children dressed in cardboard skirts with matted hair & stinky feet to spill into the rotting orange corridors of the sewers. “Seroquel, you promised we’d go swimming today,” a little girl screamed while stomping her feet– her attention suddenly captured by June’s horrific visage. At first her eyes glazed with imminent panic but standing together with the other children, June’s mud-covered body became an object of fascination which prompted pokes of interest ‘n questioning asides. “Ma’am– why are you covered in fur? Are you a lion?” One of the younger children interrupted with a jolt of surprise– “Lion?” Another child pushed them aside, insisting that lions didn’t exist anymore and that obviously June must be some mutant creature borne from the radioactive waste pumped into the sewers by the military-industrial complex. “Cool! I wanna be a mutant,” one of the little girls said as she rolled around in the mud next to June. The imposing creature passed by the children who fell silent in its presence, the slivers of plastic & silicon brushing onto their faces. Its face was covered by a headscarf sewed together using old computer advertisements & cup-o-noodle packaging– its body amorphous & without designation, only conforming to the contours of its metropolitan waste-lined curves. “We weren’t being bad, Fereidoun!” The kids moved along, pulling aside the muddied girl as the creature guided them back into the darkness of the gate. “They were sleeping, you know”– the creature gave the men a stink-eye as they looked towards the Duchess for an excuse, finding none in the withdrawn isolation of her mind where the song still continued with each careful movement of her hands.
June wiped the mud from her face and followed Susie and Fereidoun, plugging her nose as the stink of their garbage-filled surroundings begun to blister the skin. They walked by mountains of landfill, machinery & browning circuit-board pressed together by food refuse & bodily waste– feasted upon by cockroaches, dung beetles, flies, all manner of chitinous exoskeletal creatures who’d evolved an appetite for plastic & chemical waste and made sustainable life once again possible. The creature introduced themselves as Deluxo-Worldbank, though acknowledging that once they’d gone by their first name… before they’d found themselves transformed by their environment, changed irrevocably by the interface between themselves and the material which surrounded them to a point where such an anthropomorphic designation no longer held any relation to their physical form. “We’ve met before, Susie”– prompting a look of confusion from her hand-obscured eyes which watered from the insect-infested mounds which had now enveloped them. Deluxo-Worldbank had also been a fond crawler of the user-networks, explaining that for a creature such as themselves digital inter-personal contact seemed more appropriate than the ordinary physical connections of the analog. If Susie had tried to capture this creature onto the halide of her film, the resulting picture would have been obscured by the inability of the lens to resolve such an image for the creature seemed to exist in multiple frames of time with one single frame incapable of sustaining the necessary throughput. The material which enveloped something she thought could have been called a body had only meaning because of its history & its relationship to herself.
Deluxo-Worldbank explained that once they’d been a simple consumer of material, drowning their thoughts with the latest freshest videogirls and high-speed techno-pop. “Eventually, the thought of continuing to live in this male body… it overwhelmed me.” The tears in Susie’s face had washed away the residue left behind by the dirtied air; her chin darkened by soot. “The outside world oppressed me so I sought refuge in those cassette tapes & floppy-disks but it was never enough. In that black mirror, in that fuzzy white line fading away, I saw again everything that made living so intolerable, isolated by my machines, grieving for a world that disappeared long ago and left just a pixelated impression of itself. I had no struggles, nothing to overcome– I had only empty, meaningless mediocrity.” Deluxo-Worldbank showed Susie and June their quarters, millions of dirtied pages covered the walls with their words strewn across a chamber which held only a state-of-the-art PC-9800 and a soft mat with a yellowing pillow. The floor was bare, insects scurrying across the surface which made the gals stand on attention and whimper with each march of a cockroach battalion. “I decided there were only two ways to cease being human. One choice was to end my own life, the landlady finding my decaying corpse in a pool of its own semen while comic books turned to pulp from the rain and the videogirls faded into static… but I saw the trash around me, the cup-o-noodles & the tabloids, I realized there was another way.” Susie could see the trash-dumps stretching for miles & miles into the horizon, never-ending ‘n she wondered what exactly anyone was supposed to do with all of this waste… it was the footprint of our humanity, the unmistakable ruins that we would leave for future inhabitants and visitors to reconstruct. Very well, she might be that traveler who would find herself in the shade of some faraway tree-house in which men & women wore loincloths barely obscuring their nudity and they would pour her a cup of fermented monkey’s milk with a little colorful umbrella made of banana leaf and in their strange language they would ask her for another tale, go on tell us O’ great traveler of that Nameless Place and she would sip on the sour concoction and tell of two vast and trunkless legs of concrete & metal standing in a desert of plastic & polystyrene foam and near them in the sands of the green ocean would be a billboard half sunk, a shattered visage whose pretty lips & finely-white face dolled-up with rouge and a face of love tell that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed and on the billboard these words appear: “My name is Judy, cutie of cuties. Look on my face, ye Mighty, and despair!” Yet nothing beside ruins and round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level wastes stretch far away.