The Pupa Woman (I.II)
Chapter 1:2
Hello DEAR READER,
The following is Chapter 1:2 from my first novel, The Pupa Woman. You can read Chapter 1:1 here.
You can get the PDF over at my gumroad! ^_^
Available from our unfortunate tech-overlords over at Amazon both in paperback and eBook.
Susie pulls on her arms; funny that we are brought together like this. “Hey… Sylvie, hey doll maybe we should take a drive over there and see it for ourselves.” Sylvania turned her head and looked at Susie for a couple of seconds with a blank expression: “sure, bored anyway,” eager to leave the noodle spot and she told Susie to get into her roughed-up hatchback, making sure to grab just one more swig of liquor and a pink puffy coat before stumbling onto the street with her big bundle of keys and maybe dropping them on the way to the white door with a big dent in it and she chuckled once she’d found the right key and from the heavily-populated key chain hung a cartoony blue-haired woman dressed in a stripped white-turquoise one-piece. “Can’t get myself to throw any keys away,” she said with a half-hearted smile as she unlocked the doors and Susie moved her feet away from the junk food wrappers falling onto the ground from the passenger seat. The car sputtered to life with Sylvie’s trembling wrist and the radio started whizzing with all sorts of interference as a clearly-intoned voice found its way through the noise with an assertive depth demanding the attention of anyone within earshot to hear this time-allotted advert:
― Hi! Hello Judy, oh, what is that?― Huh? What do you mean? This?Judy! You don’t even look like yourself with all that make-up!― Ohh, how rude! … What’s wrong with it… too much? Judy, you’re most beautiful when you’re just yourself. Lips Network isn’t about covering up what’s there.― I see; what a pretty pink!Lips Network is about revealing the beauty that’s always been there.― How do I look? You look like Judy, why look like anyone else?“underneath a summer’s sun / all things appear bright
as time stains our skins bronze
there is a love which ends in waiting / and its last words are never heard
‘Ooh how I miss you’”
Susie hung her head out the window, watching the many little box-shaped vans & tiny cars pass by riding along a chiseled concrete passageway which diverged from the road they were on and passed underneath them to join the larger aorta of the city which was always bulging with the metal vehicular mass of thousands. The slender roadways were elevated from the streets below and twisted & constricted alongside the skyscrapers, converging into longer & thicker stretches of gray freeway decorated with green signs and arching lights which hung like hanging plants over layers & more layers of elevated structures & roads which groaned & shook in concert with the ebb & tide of traffic. Once the afternoon begins its lapsing into night, the cool wind will turn into a frigid frost and people will button up their coats and condensed exhales will escape their mouths as they pass by the broken windows and flickering neon-lights with the still-azure sky looming above like ocean water… as the radio buzzes with fragments of skronk and synth doodle, the occasional lone voice struggling to be heard beneath slapped bass so loud it created teeny-tiny seismic bursts in the left-hand mirror’s reflection. In the distance, one could see the tall metallic buildings jut up into the clouds of pollution, billboards & signs full of logos and happy faces attached to their inorganic edges as straight as any arrow. Sylvie’s car on these roads did not travel as much as it did surge, halting alongside the thousands of other vehicles each with their own individual destinations until the moment when they’d all rev up those gears and sputter forward… well, Sylvania turned the volume way down on her radio once the broadcasting voice begun to speak, indifference dulling each informative syllable which had started rattling her tomato-red noggin’. She was quite a capable driver even when really drunk, save for the occasional drifting into another driver’s lane– she’d curse and wave her middle-finger around in response to the honking.
With each turn, piles of video-cassettes in the backseat made loud knocking noises as they bounced up against the faux-leather paneling, decorated with lurid depictions of beautiful men. Open one of ‘em up and you’d find the inlay adorned with a smaller boy-ish lookin’ kid with soft eyes, looking away as a broad-shouldered mandarin watches him from the distance– all discrete about the white splotches and hideously-moist tongues which magnetized the tape within and gave shy boys ‘n girls fevers & bloody noses. Susie unbuckled her seatbelt and wiggled her body towards the back, trying to reach some of the cases for closer inspection, almost making Sylvie crash into a guard rail as she tries to dodge Susie’s posterior that bumped into the side of her head with timpani thumps. “Hey Sylvie… woah, what’s all this?” Susie flipped some of ‘em around and they made her giggle; not expecting such a pretty aristocrat to lie down so cutely while the rough-necked truant looms over him, pulling on the zipper and oh boy! Stick around for joy!
Sylvie keeps her eyes on the road as she fumbled with the volume of her radio, trying to keep the hands from falling numb– getting sleepy often when liquored up, needing Susie to cover her with trash bag material when she’d abruptly choose a napping spot on pedestrian walkways. “Home movies. Just for curious kids. I’m the entrepreneur now. Amateur markets are hungry for the video-girls & boys next-door,” she said with only a slight smile formed by those whiskey-tasin’ lips as the car swerved in-n-out of the lane just slightly. Sylvie & Susie would do anything for a little bit of cash, bouncing from one ill-conceived plot to another like a raccoon following its moist snout ‘n its mouth foaming with urge for exotic delights.
Susie placed herself back into the passenger seat and continued to browse, particularly enamored with a heated medieval groping session between a young scholar and his retainer. “Back in the video-girl trade, I guess. You finally get to be a director bitch” and Susie chuckled with a hoity-toity laugh but Sylvie didn’t reciprocate and what seemed to be fanciful high-concept smut to one seemed to be a deadly-serious matter to another, not mere escape but an alternative in which all contradictions & anxieties could be reduced to one dichotomy– a distance which pulled away all other layers & nerves which spring into pained unease and allow from underneath the surface the capacity for simply pure fucking all gone & done on black tape; easy to put away before it starts feelin’ like it might change you for good.
“Do you wanna talk about it, Suz?” Sylvie asked after a palpable break in convo and there wasn’t much of a smile on anyone’s face anymore– using that awful contraction to communicate a vulnerability… an intimacy, things to admit only when intoxicated, we’re so fucking transparent Susie thought to herself as she kept her eyes on the credits page, not really reading but just trying to avoid eye-contact. She’d gained an attachment to the young pop star too, close like friends– or so it felt and the fear that it was all smoke & mirrors orchestrated by someone who had a vested interest in fostering your love was confirmed with desperation. God, I never really knew her.
“Why give a shit? Teens do stupid things. You ‘member what it’s like to be a teen,” Susie adjusts her legs and puts one of her sneaker-clad feet up against the windshield, her camera dangling from her neck. “Always sad always feeling sorry for yourself; she’d had enough and jumped.” Sylvie hums along as she changes lanes.
“I ‘member. ‘member being a sad & sorry teen; creep too, with slag grades. What’s an A-student with the adoration of horny schoolchildren everywhere got to be sad about?” Sylvania sez rhetorically. Neither Susie nor Sylvania seemed capable of remembering much of those days.
“What if the adoration of horny schoolchildren’s not enough? Maybe she wanted daddy, an older creep like him,” Susie felt all disgusting about herself saying this, angry at herself for twisting her own mental image into oblivion. She wondered if there was anyone who was satisfied with the time they’d spent with daddy, and maybe just thinking about it was evidence that the well was already polluted with junk & gunk many moons prior. It’s easier to project now that she’s dead, to take the whole jump-to-your-death thing as an affirmation of your own twisted intuition– something that made it acceptable to feel shitty too. That is a pretty fucked-up thing to think, Susie– maybe Judy was chemically depressed and needed someone who cared.
“’member Mr. Blaupunkt?” Sylvie with a forced chuckle to make it all seem distant. “’member how many girls cried in numbers class?” “Isn’t that why you liked him?” Susie answered.
“Liked him because he was peng and said things that made sense,” Sylvie’s chuckle sounding less forced now. Susie thought of her own teacher and now she might split the blinds with her fingers and look through the balcony, to see a young girl opening the door for a woman and Susie could tell she was older by the blouse and thick dark-brown parka she wore and the way she so confidently closed & locked the door and the almost-matronly way she touched the cheek of the younger girl who was now blushing and awkwardly stroking her own arm.
From the outside, you’d make some assumptions like “maybe her aunt, or their neighbor, or a family friend”– the younger girl’s lack of unease meant that they were familiar and Susie wondered if the older woman had done this before because of how easily she sat on their couch and invited the younger girl with a pat on her leg. Yeah even a fuck-freak like that older woman could disappear into a fog where a cry for help was drowned out by the sounds of car horns and the shrieks of the television, its secrecy secured by an unspoken hierarchy of faceless actors who obscured the boundaries between truth and rumor till there was no longer a difference. She was rubbing the thighs of the young girl, and the feeling of soft & warm flesh brought a sudden youthfulness in the woman’s smile. Susie couldn’t tell exactly how many years apart they were in age, but it was large enough to be there as present as an entity in the room… smiling with crooked teeth at the way it reminded her of her own once-youthful body, and offering a supportive hand on the shoulder… to be thought of was a desire so enticing, so alluring that to a predator it would smell like blood in a pool of water– especially if it was someone as cool as her, the way she was dressed and carried herself with a mature confidence and what made it worse is that she seemed to gladly accept a role in this impromptu performance with pride, happy to have someone to be and happy to have someone to perform for… the young girl giggled, in silence, as Susie’s anxiety grew, poisoned and tormented by the knowledge of what was happening and riddled with jealousy and guilt … feeling more lonesome with each passing minute yet unable to look away. Under the balcony of the apartment complex, on the stoop sits a smiling geezer with dirty pants and a cane, whistling a melody full of complicated twists and turns which betrays its antiquity:
“Just like the doper will seek his fix / and from the East the sun will depart
You can never save a sinking ship / you can never mend a broken heart”
“I’m sagging enough to know it now, Suz” and Susie was all ears now, watching Sylvania take that authoritative tone with a dignified glee masking her guilt for probing & prodding when Sylvie was most vulnerable. “It’s that power poisons everything,” sounding like a teacher herself. “You can always smells it.”
“That the reason you sell the A-star video-girl tapes, Sylvania? Show your power by ripping off innocent babes,” Susie rattled with a mean-spirited sneer, knowing a drunken punch would likely miss and she laughed & giggled herself into a stupor which made Sylvania all angry with red blushes hidden underneath her make-up encrusted face and she almost hit another car as she merged into an exit lane.
“All you do is laugh… you’re a real mogwai” ‘n poor Sylvie is being honest thanks to that helpful jug of whiskey hidden under the car-seat and here’s Susie busting her gut and laughing with tears in her eyes, too conceited to ever admit anything– maybe shedding some of those tears because she feels herself incapable of saying, well… her eyes passing by the large buildings bristling & positively overloaded with the weight of what appears to be a thousand reporters with their camera crews standing by connected to umbilical cords which cover the streets like a web leading to each individual news-station van parked around and forming a cradle from which there is no escape for neither executive nor journalist.
“I don’t see the cameras anywhere,” Sylvie said with a slight whimper. “Maybe it’s over there?” There was a large tarp covering a stretch of concrete underneath the windows of the apartment complex which often housed important members of the record label, curtains shivering in the wind behind the ajar screen-door of its highest balcony and awful crowd noises could be heard everywhere as nicely-dressed professionals with microphones outstretched outran equipment-bearing creeps with plastic sleeveless jackets, all forming together into loosely-clumped blobs of hysterical person trying to push their way into the record studio owned by Oriana Music Group– “comments on accusation of abuse!” they’d scream in shrill bursts, trying to capture even the faintest of words on Betacam tapes quickly aired by satellite.
An officer wearing an orange vest guided Sylvie towards the green fields behind the apartment complexes adjacent to the recording studio which were transformed into a make-shift parking lot, the blades of grass intermingling amongst plastic water cups and protein bar wrappers. They’d parked in-between two popular news station vans, drawing the sneering looks of videographers on stand-by. Oh, who bought you that Minolta? Get lost, she-creep. Susie pulled herself up from the car seat and hopped on the leg which had not fallen asleep, holding onto the car door as she watched Sylvie put her head back and close her eyes with enviable calm.
“I’ll… be with you in a sec… just give me a few minutes,” Sylvie said with a softness to her usually shrill voice as the early-afternoon sun begun to melt off the brown goop of her spray-tan and she looked quite beautiful like a dripping kewpie doll in her long pink dress with her face just a lil’ obscured by her peroxide-blond hair-do. Susie closed the door as quietly as she could and followed the migration of camera-crews with her own camera in hand, trying to squeeze her way through the crowds which were pushing themselves towards the gates of the recording studio. She was forced to the absolute periphery (early bird gets the worm, Sue) by defensive shoves and prize-winning elbow jabs and wondered if there maybe wasn’t some other way around, pushing her way towards the small back-alleys which reeked of garbage and run-off, demarcated by dozens of smoking individuals holding camera equipment and various makes of microphones.
A woman stood by an elevated passage that led to the thin walkways behind the apartment complex, puffing eagerly on a cigarette in what appeared to be a quite-expensive grey dress-suit. Susie held her breath, never fond of that cancerous smoke which billowed into a big dust cloud and rose up towards the sky, approaching the woman with cautious steps and wandering eyes which inspected the stone-shaped contours of the path. The woman looked at Susie’s camera first, then took a heavy drag full of contemptuous smoke, her eye-lid twitching with a rage she was too pro to express. “I can smell a paparazza from a mile away,” she said with a husky voice, reserving her soft & polite timbre only for the commanding gaze of a portable one-piece camera. “Real journalists don’t sneak into people’s bathrooms. You’re worse than a pervert fuck-freak,” a girl in a beige jacket and a horse-tail holding a duffle-bag spoke out with huff-puff pretend-outrage while clamping her sinuses shut.
“I don’t think you’ll be able to reach the ladders but maybe you can climb up the wall like a monkey,” the woman said in response to a question Susie didn’t ask and her crew laughed along with percussive yuks sharpened by spite. A man to her side holding a microphone attached to a stick coughed into his hand and then told Susie that with her weight she’d probably be better off with a forklift, inviting the whole audience to join in the mocking too and Susie had thought of perhaps punching him in his bulky unshaven face but instead pulling herself up using the iron rails and trying to not give-in to the cryin’ urge which had manifested in response to the howls & insults rising up in volume behind her, running alongside the walls in search of a way up to the roof without much of a plan beyond that.
Well maybe she really did give in to the worst temptation, becoming far worse than a pervert fuck-freak– in search of something dear & personal to serve as catalyst for further gossip, something to discuss with voyeuristic glee as the images of a dead girl with her brains split into dozens of teeny-tiny pieces replay ceaselessly on the television screen. Something was different in her internal chemistry yeah she could feel it, some re-arrangement of atoms in response to Judy’s death– processes & functions once capable of sustaining life; its fiction, its boundaries, itself suddenly returned syntax errors or pointers referring to information which no longer was there and the only evidence of their existence remaining in the virtual where you know it should be but it ain’t.
Shit, she says to herself– again, two options: withdraw and put a soup-strainer on your head to maintain internal stability or keep going… dig further into the noise until a working pattern emerges, something you could take a picture of and hold during nights when the threat of dissolving into that ever-present background radiation seems to be the only thing flooding your neural net with cripplingly-deep streams of thoughts, feelings, emotions, fears, and yes the sick things your father said to you as your school-chums idly watched.