The Pupa Woman (I.V)
Chapter 1:5
Hello DEAR READER,
The following is Chapter 1:5 from my first novel, The Pupa Woman. You can read Chapter 1:4 here.
You can get the PDF over at my gumroad! ^_^
Available from our unfortunate tech-overlords over at Amazon both in paperback and eBook.
It took the strength of the whole crew to band together and push Susie through a back window into the second story of the hotel, having already told the back porter to f-ing scram with mean looks and the brandishing of a knife. She had no plan nor did she have any understanding of what the man named Dr. Sanyo-Infinity actually looked like and she realized that any security guard worth his salt would see the camera and the raincoat and realize that this girl-creep needed to get thrown back into the garbage-can she smelled like. That said, she forced herself through the frame and fell onto the mosaic-decorated ground of what she’d soon realized by the chlorine smell and light-fixture was a small bathroom. Susie pulls herself up using a sink and almost breaks a soap-dispenser on the way there, not really noticing that a woman was actually sitting on the toilet seat in front of her with a tabloid in her hand and a skeptical facial expression at the sight of Susie.
The woman sitting on the seat had her pants around her ankles, and now Susie’s got a kind of stammering shame and she’d covered up her really-red face with her hands while attempting– failing– to mutter some justification… “I uh,” was really all she managed to say before she’d decided to simply face the wall instead in a Hail Mary pass of respect for privacy.
The woman on the toilet seat begun to laugh, only heightening Susie’s shame to an even greater extent… feeling herself bullied for the stupid stunt she’d just succeeded in pulling off. “Hey… who the fuck are you,” the woman asked while giggles sputtered forth from ‘tween her teeth and it was surely a phrase Susie had gotten used to now… and it was a voice Susie had heard before yet it seemed unfamiliar. “Well okay… maybe I’ll start. I’m Nancy,” she said with an oddly good-natured voice and that is when Susie realized that the woman she’d stumbled upon with her pants down as she tumbled through the window was actually the super-cool Nancy from the Pupa Girls which was Susie’s absolute favorite girl group and she felt herself now wanting to fucking die and without much understanding of really what else to do she’d now again begun crying with her head up against the cold porcelain tiles of the bathroom’s walls.
“Hey, don’t do that,” Nancy whispered as she quickly buttoned-up her jeans– “what’s wrong,” she said, trying to be sympathetic to this Peeping-Sally. Susie dried off her tears but kept herself facing the wall while she explained that the Pupa Girls were her favorite group of girls and that she’d loved and bought every single thing they’ve done and yes even bought the deluxe cassette tape where they show off all their outfits to the camera with the plastic wings and the little cutie-pie antenna and the smiles as they pretend to suck on sap and that she was so sorry and so embarrassed to meet her in this way which solicited very kind & supportive hugs from the short lil’ pupa girl who tried to ignore the fact that Susie was also trying to sneak in a quick pic with her camera.
After Susie had calmed down a bit and tried to break some of the awkward tension by saying “hey, that’s a real swell t-shirt you’re wearing… constructivist right,” she told Nancy that she was a journalist who was trying to get information on the illusive Dr. Sanyo-Infinity– head ideas-guy for Oriana Music Group’s top line-up… the mention of his name inspiring an angry glare and a series of huffs & puffs from the bug-lovin’ gal who folded her arms with trembling movements.
“You know him?” Susie asked, she awkwardly tried to navigate herself around Nancy’s angry pacing.
“I know him,” Nancy answered spitefully. “All of three of us know him. He couldn’t wait to introduce himself and ask if we wanted to get to know him.” She kept pacing, occasionally attempting to shake the anger away with her shoulders. “You know what I’m saying, right? How can a top science-guy act like some kind of pig?”
“Uh,” Susie, unable to respond, felt herself getting angry, how dare someone do that to her favorite band? This group of geniuses who had become an important part of her own life, who sung words which seemed to capture something so uniquely within her that it would give her powerful shivers– how dare you, I’ll fucking kill you.
“I got into this for the fame, really. I mean, we’ve always wanted a big contract but, well what am I willing to lose?” remaining vague to maintain her dignity. “Apparently, we’re neither the first, nor the youngest… blegh,” Nancy pretending to vomit with a finger pointing at her open mouth.
“I need your help,” Susie explained with as big of eyes as she could muster… trying to melt a heart with her fan-girlish demeanor. “I’m running an expose on his double life, the one kept far away from the public. Where do the young stars go? What’s behind the closed doors?”
Nancy examined Susie and the camera with studious looks, her reluctance palpable in the way she sighed before she spoke. “You’ll stick out like a sore-thumb at the party downstairs.” She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, a ridiculous undersized getup which would look funny on someone ten years younger. “Even in a Pupa Girls crowd packed with fuck-freaks needing a shower.” Look to your left, look to your right… the faces are cratered, scarred with the pain of troubled adolescence. You can recognize the weariness in their faces, the pain in their backs… you regret all those summers spent ignoring your parents, the way you subjected mama and papa to the careless cruelty of your words. “Who will take care of the unlovely, those who were already losing by the time they’d caught their breath?” It’s a question no-one is brave enough to ask, yet they raise their fists anyway: “Pupa Girls rule!” The broken middle-aged men shed their stoicism. Shy boys become cheerleaders, waving glowsticks for their nation. “Pupa Girls rule!” Shoulder-to-shoulder, unconcerned with the trivialities of sweat & blood. Forgotten young girls reimagine themselves, adopting the pose– don’t judge them for this, we all crave attention. “Pupa Girls forever!” You know nothing about me but when you shake my hand and you say “thank you for coming to see us! We love you!” I feel like it really is just me and only me in this world.
Nancy thought for a couple of seconds with her finger on her lips tapping expectantly, ogling Susie’s raincoat and wondering why she wouldn’t pick a better form of camouflage on such an intel-gathering mission… incapable of knowing that Susie had been stumbling her way into sequential co-incidences through a series of guesses gathered from second-hand information. Bless her, trying to figure her way through a plan that could placate this potentially-dangerous fan-girl without blowing her own chances to finish this well-paying corporate gig. She remembered Mitchie and Atty, their complaining & groaning about the lack of comfort & poor-quality food in their tour-minivan– sleeping with their heads up against each-other and making sure the outfits were laid across the seat to prevent crinkles, trying to never even feel sorry once for quitting the soul-crushing model-citizen-factories momma called high school. She remembered the purging at the toilet, the public declarations of weight gain, the weeks crying with hands together… the youth draining away under each layer of make-up, skin helplessly grasped by transplanted collagen, reshaped, lifted, tightened, your tissue fragile as paper while latex-covered hands reveal its arbitrary borders.
She opened the bathroom door and looked to her left and then to the right, flashing a thumbs-up to Susie who followed her through the winding corridors of the hotel’s second floor. She explained to Susie in hushed words that Dr. Sanyo-Infinity would often “vet” pop-idol potentials in a small & modest room reserved just for him, kept away from the highly active & probably bugged high-roller suites on the higher floors. Of course, everyone knew, it was the open secret between those seeking publicity and those who had the power to grant it– any dip in a burgeoning career could be ironed out with a well-placed scandal fueled by a suggestive picture through a hotel window… shocking enough to be revealing yet private & personal enough to seem like a personal vice rather than a criminal transgression. Whoever the good doctor was, his anonymity seemed like evidence that something’s happening here… something crossing the threshold from a crazy isolated event you’d have to see w/ your own eyes to an intrusion from something deeper within our society we’ve all tried to forget for own sakes, rearing its ugly head as proof that there was something bigger connected to it.
Susie didn’t want to ask where Nancy had gotten the keycard which opened the lock with a little beep; the look she kept on her face was one of starry-eyed blankness… as if keeping quiet in the hopes of having your gross & hideous expectations subverted. Nancy placed the keycard back in her neon-yellow wallet, remaining silent for a couple of seconds until looking away, telling Susie that the creep-o Dr. had been so presumptuous as to ask room-service about leaving the keycard on her bed. Susie wanted to give Nancy a big hug and say “no-matter what you do, I understand;” being responsible & in charge when it comes to the fate of two others whom you love very much comes at a cost– or so Nancy argued to herself internally, her principles and desires standing in irresolvable conflict between one-another as it always does. Susie instead (with a tremble) remained dead quiet, allowing the silence to maintain itself as a mutual understanding in order to save her favorite person from her favorite group at least some dignity and when her bravery inspired her to finally speak and utter a word… “Hey, don’t think twice… it’s alright, nice lady,” which made Nancy laugh really hard and she punched Susie’s shoulder and told her that she’d sincerely hoped everything would go her way even though she knew within herself that it was such a big lie and felt a bit embarrassed about herself and could almost hear herself say “run, honey… run as fast as you can” in the most pathetic voice as Susie softly snuck into the room and closed the door behind her.
That scent– soap, floral simulacra, superficial cleanliness. “Small & modest,” with rectangular paper lanterns and clean white sheets on an elevated mattress… of course makin’ sure to sneak the complementary mint into her pocket, Susie observed as she tippie-toed across the waxed floor like a cat might. She crept up to the curtains and parted them slightly, seeing only the fan blades of air-conditioning units and the slow ascension of steam from the many vents which awkwardly extended from the buildings at the rear of the hotel and in the middle, there was a watery path which led down towards a plaza hiding within its heart a metro-station. She let the curtains fall to a close by pulling her hands away, allowing the shade to once again shelter the untouched surfaces still reeking of lemon freshener.
Real stroke of genius on Susie’s part, thinking of the closet as a way to shelter herself as was so wonderfully nostalgic to her sappy heart. She pulled the wooden handles to herself and saw the inviting darkness of the closet’s interior, trying to make herself as small as she could be in order to fit herself underneath the school uniforms held there for a reason she could not really comprehend. Whatever, she relaxed her muscles and pulled the doors of the closet back to herself… letting her body fall numb as it begun to adjust itself into its wooden corridors and corners. She could still see through the slits in the doors of the closet, though at the moment the dimness of the room made it hard to see very much at all and she’d started getting a little bored so Susie pulled from her front pocket another delicious mooncake, this time flavored with sour cherries within its scrumptious center. In this little wooden coffin of hers, she’d found a wonderful warmth all to herself… feeling her head descend itself onto the soft fabric of the school uniforms, sour cherry-kissed crumbs falling from her mouth as her eyelids drew to a close and colors in shades she’d never seen begun to overwhelm her senses… the appearance of light in circumstances where no such thing could ever be realized… shapes and fragments & symbols which excite the retina into an overactive frenzy, at first glance appearing almost solid yet dissolving into seas of hues when feeling the destructive scrutiny of an attentive gaze. The fire of the mind agitates the atmosphere which is buzzing & humming with the excess radiation of all cognitive things, feedback overloading Susie’s receptors until they themselves become only conduits through which the world passes. The images and shapes would soon overwhelm her nervous system as well, sending sharp jabs of pain up her brainstem which created memories shaped out of blood as real as anything she’d ever shed– memory and the collective consciousness intertwining until the boundaries between both realms blur beyond coherence.
“Sing me something, Sylvie,” taking advantage of their high-spirits for a ridiculous request. Sylvie looked a bit surprised for only a second before going “harr-harr” and pulling off Susie’s raincoat, and she looked down and saw her worn-out button-up had become stained with blood-red marks, especially severe next to the soft pastel-peach fabric.
“I’m not going to have you bleed all over my car,” and she felt hands starting to undo the buttons as well… Susie didn’t have the strength to playfully push aside those hands, though the release of hormones within her body had started to turn the awful pain into pleasant warmth, almost romantic Susie thought as her mouth drooled just a little bit and Sylvie found herself singing a song all off-key like: “I knew from the first moment our eyes met / we’d be lovers, meeting face-to-face,” which put a stupid smile on Susie’s face as she knew Sylvie loved singing these sappy & trite songs even though her voice was absolutely dreadful: “like a cat shoved into a shredder,” she might have said in a more-conscious state of mind, a voice which was only beautiful in its inability to be not heard. “Do you really think love will fix all of your problems, Sylvie?” A pain came into Susie’s stomach, hurling projectile vomit onto the grimy pavement. “I don’t know. Why would you ask me that, idiot?”
“Susie, look what I found,” and Sylvie was laughing as she stepped out of her room dressed in a beautiful navy-blue shirt with a darker-blue skirt and there were golden-yellow linings at the collar and sleeves which looked so good when pressed as finely as it was and the sight of it made Susie chuckle awkwardly with confusion as she pulled the towel closer to herself and dried the moisture falling onto her forehead. Sylvie’s dyed peroxide-blonde hair was put into a very professional-looking bun which she patted as she made deliberate steps towards the light of the windows from which the orange-yellow rays of the street-lamps shone with a sickly intensity. “Remember the scenes we shot with this?”
She’d walk quickly to the terminal along with her friend, exchanging small lady-like conversation and anecdotes while the sounds of their blue high-heeled shoes reverberated through-out the dizzying halls of the airport. Her voice was higher now, taking on a peppy squeakiness: “anywhere the airline takes me,” and she laughed to herself with slightly-jittery yips as Susie looked on with hollowed-out neutrality, trying to ignore the unpleasant sweatiness of her undergarments which clung like inorganic plastic to the skin.
Sylvie misreads the expression on purpose and walks away with a confident smile, “well I thought I made a great pretend-stewardess,” humming a tune and then quietly speaking its words: “I knew from the first moment our eyes met / we’d be lovers, meeting face-to-face.” Susie followed her into that hot & humid bedroom… dimly lit by a bronze-lit lamp and decorated with aging wooden dressers, a cracked mirror, and a closet from which she was pulling piles of clothing kept in black plastic bags, and a sense of recognition struck her… Sylvania had kept all the bizarre costumes which she’d once worn for the entertainment of men but now wore for herself, unappreciated and neglected in what they could do for the person wearing them.
“You know, I just couldn’t get myself to throw them away,” with a certain sorrow to the way she smiled as she wiped away the dust from her eyes, and Susie felt herself having to say “hey that’s great, lady” in the most enthusiastic and non-judgmental voice she could conjure. The outfits were ridiculous in a manner so obviously dreamt-up by cynics with a knack for selling things to fuck-freaks; nevertheless, it was part of the performance for an audience just as Judy’s had been. The audience was unaware of where it’s happening maybe but they knew of it, knew that somewhere in one of these apartment complexes something which plagued their thoughts and haunted their dreams was being orchestrated and brought to such an extreme that it threatened to unravel what they’d understood about themselves; this mystical scenario seemed as if it were always dangerously close to colliding with what we knew of daily life, yet always safely tucked away where it could be closely guarded as a secret and repeated as an image of an image of an… Sylvie pulled from a bag a maid’s costume on a coat-hanger wrapped with plastic, its layers decorated with frilly edges and an apron and sang with her increasingly-wretched voice a song (“who is that girl in the window / working for a hard day’s pay? Could I ever be more than a ‘sir’ to her / maybe at the end of the day?”) … performing basic acts of servitude for the watchful gaze and dusting the corners while whistling, (“could I bring her a cup of coffee in the morning / before she goes off to work?”) There was constant rewinding, a repetition of the fantasy with rehearsed gestures… yes, the way she placed the hamburgers on the tray, unaware of the stray hairs from her cap and her red lips accentuated by the red uniform… or the conservatively-dressed office-lady who bites on her pen with deliberate movements of the mouth, and the crossing of her pantyhose-covered legs.
“Hey, Susie; I found your favorite one” and unlike the other creations, her school-girl costume was a different sorta fix, one with an eerie wholesomeness to it, what had yet to be seen, yet to be developed; it reveled in mock-modesty rather than the stark filthiness of the other costumes. The long skirt which reached down to her knees covered with fine villus hair was colored in a stately dark-blue, and Susie read off the tag of the upper-shirt, a baggy-kinda pull-over with the kinds of loose flaps that reminded you of some-kinda sailor getup, while Sylvie guided her arms into the long cavernous sleeves. The antiquated genuine-ness of the costume struck her as sentimental almost; it had a weight, a sense of colonial history which was missing from the others.
Susie turned around and watched Sylvie place herself onto the shag carpeting all ragged & discolored with nicotine stains and she’d dressed herself in a dress-shirt with a pretty red tie and black pants which fit loosely around her firm legs with a wonderfully-matched blazer which didn’t even seem that big on her. Sylvie’s problem had always been her tendency towards kleptomania, an inability to step herself from taking something which struck her fancy regardless of its value or lack there-of and she’d help herself to the loose clothing she’d stumble upon in her cleaning of rooms after the eventual check-out and over time she’d would manage to accumulate whole sets of stuff which always soothed the pain & boredom of having to wear that same dreadful uniform each day with its soft blue-white dress-shirt and long stained apron so distasteful to the hotel guests who viewed her with glances balancing their disdain with their pity. She wondered where Sylvie had gotten those round glasses from, which sat so awkwardly on her small nose. She wondered how Sylvie felt when she was caught stealing clothes, humiliated in front of everyone for doing so. She wondered if Sylvie blamed Susie for getting stuck on the easy money, thinking that the internal pain would be more bearable if it was your best friend behind the camera– telling each-other that as strangers in a strange land they’d needed the money more than they needed anything else. There was a strange asymmetry in their actions– Sylvie dressed up, adopted her roles, for the attentions of others… Susie dressed up in her roles for the sake of capturing instances, little moments worthy of the attentions of others. They enabled each other; they could only perfect their roles through the perspective of the other. An exhibitionist requires a voyeur willing to watch, and the voyeur needs an exhibitionist to watch. This irreducible tension stood between every interaction they’d ever had in their long, tumultuous friendship.
“Let’s just pretend.” Maybe it didn’t look like love, the powerful kind you feel towards someone who is laughing in precisely the same way at the same jokes you do so you want to gently squeeeze them and bring ‘em close, but perhaps it was a way to pacify her own guilty conscious, to feel of use in service as she placed her feet up against Sylvie’s supine body while she whispered (“don't you dare untie the ribbon on my chest / young girls are supposed to wait”) with a deflated voice. It was yet another performance as adapted from an older television drama, that of a suicidal teacher in fear of being throttled by rightfully murderous parents while the school-kid, bless her innocent heart, pulls on their sleeves while cryin’ about how much she loved that nasty perv.
Susie softly pulled the shoes off of her socks and stepped onto Sylvie’s body which under the weight of her feet swayed like a wooden ship sheering while the ocean’s waves pummeled its hull, and Sylvie kept her eyes closed as the fabric of the sock begun to prod at the areas of her face but Susie felt nothing in her belly as she pretend to be squashing grapes with her feet and used her arms to maintain her balance– though a small involuntary giggle escaped as she felt a wet mouth underneath her toes. There was a worry that she’d squash her friend like those berries as she slowly & steadily stomped her into the ground, with red and green chunks and viscera bursting forth from her head… instead the flesh and skin simply bent & surrendered to the pressure and the body arched with pained breaths while Sylvie whispered cruel & horrendous things about people she’d never dare say at an audible volume and it was an expression of loneliness just as the teacher’s pathetic words of lust for a child half of his age would have been. She kept her hands to herself, kneading and prying with workmanship at the places which ached with impossible pressure begging to be released and Susie could read her lips and spoke along to the rehearsed gestures they’d realized years before as written by unemotional & broken men with an eye towards the marketability of the perverse… a complete understanding of the value of entertainment which demands nothing but investment and rewarded all who were willing with bodily satisfaction ‘n an acknowledgement of what was repressed and held-within.
June bugs & crickets played their unending tune with accompaniment of the night-time traffic cars, Susie drawing shapes in the moisture of the canvas birthed by the throat’s canal. Her stubby finger manipulated the world as it existed beyond the glass, the old bespectacled friend lying on the cool floor while summer heat turned her breathing shallow. Susie didn’t want to stumble home, the city looked the same from her room but it seemed even lonelier– so many of its halls neglected, empty passages in which footsteps reverberated infinitely. The old bespectacled friend asked Susie if she liked anyone from their class but neither of them could think of any names, what only came to mind were the videogirls and the actors and the young professor and the soft thin lines which traced the beautiful chins of comic book boys. “We can be honest with each other, right Suze?” She turned away from the window and looked down at the sweaty figure crowding the dusty floor, her short-sleeved shirt clinging onto the shiny skin. “Yeah, holmes.” The old bespectacled friend gets up from the floor and opens the drawer underneath her bed, revealing rows of neatly catalogued cassette tapes. She thought of the others at school, content to live in dreams where princes on white horses would kiss their passions awake– they did not share the bespectacled friend’s malignant curiosity, believing that a pure mind would keep one safe & away from the world beyond. She moved her fingertips across the edges of the black tapes. “They’re all recordings of people. People on the street– people in their homes. At night, I sneak around with a video-camera and look for windows that don’t have their curtains pulled. Sometimes I stay up till morning, just watching them sleep while the birds chirp. In the streets, you know they’re there but you can’t hear them because they’re all asleep– you feel them, even in the emptiness around you.” She was the one who wouldn’t look away as the critter’s body mutilated by the wheel shook with each spasm. Lacking the desire to pollute her own body, numb at its extremities and quickly turning the color of sores, she threw herself into the work of watching how other bodies reacted– each creep’s novel sexual fixation appeared to be another clue to finding some treasure, the hormone-trail footsteps leading to the war chests of those who created our idols for us to love and desire. “How do people get so strange?” Susie asked thoughtlessly. The old bespectacled school-chum adjusted her glasses with tired movements, and she yawned before telling Susie that those desires have always been here, all people had done was simply given form to those things we’ve always nursed within the heart.
Sylvie was moaning now with small throaty sounds escaping from the back of her chest as her face adopted the shades of a tomato and small droplets of sweat collected makeup as it traveled down to her chin, and Susie was pressing her foot up against her breasts hidden underneath the dark cotton fabric and felt the increasing frequency of inhalation and exhalation on her sole. It was the only thing she’d felt, muscles underneath the skin expanding and contracting like a machine with an internal hum caused by the movement of cogs & gears. The fantasies had gotten more and more vivid as time went on, each escalation a response to a higher requirement of stimulus and Susie wondered what else she could do to alleviate the pain as her ankles & thighs grew sore and her socks moistened by sweat and spit, and somehow she was feeling even more distant and removed from the system of muscle & bone underneath her feet than she’d ever felt as lungs expelling warm breath sputtered with gasps and an arching spine building up to a powerful release and Sylvie uttered a low growl as she threw her head back and the body begun to lose its tension and became flatter as if it were drained of air like a ball. Susie stepped off of the body, feeling with relief the steady ground once again and curling her toes at the sensation of the cool carpet and she stood there silently, waiting for Sylvie to catch her breath as her chest heaved with decreasing frequency and she couldn’t tell if the liquid which had created tendrils of darkness on her face emanating from her eyes had been caused by tears or by sweat or what.
“I’m so sorry,” apologizing while wiping away what was left on her face with her hands. “Turn off the light for me, would you?” The room was still and its only sounds were two hearts which thumped with a lurid intensity… Susie reached for the switch and Sylvie disappeared within the pools of blood red, the only evidence that she was somewhere in there came from a faint & creaky thank you.