The Pupa Woman (II.III)
Chapter 2:3
Hello DEAR READER,
The following is Chapter 2:3 from my first novel, The Pupa Woman. You can read Chapter 2:2 here.
You can get the PDF over at my gumroad! ^_^
Available from our unfortunate tech-overlords over at Amazon both in paperback and eBook.
She wanted her so desperately to pick up the phone, crying as she placed one hand up to the frosted glass of the windowed phone-booth. She’d had only one call on the phone-card she’d pilfered from those two creeps and she cashed it in for an act of desperation. The dial-tone on the other side continued on without relenting, inhumane in its inability to offer some comfort to a despondent Susie. After a couple of seconds, the whir of an answering machine came on the line and Sylvania’s voice asked the caller to please leave a message after the beep. Though Susie knew that she wasn’t speaking to her in person, she went on as if… unwilling to admit that the voice she’d heard (“Xiangjiu Noodle House, please leave a message”) was pre-recorded and reiterated by a machine.
“I don’t know when you’ll get to hear this, but I think I’ve gotten myself into a lot of trouble.“
“You were right, I was really desperate. I just lied because; well no-one seems to like people who are obsessed. To tell you the truth, it seems all I can think about right now is that girl and where she might be. I don’t even know if she is alive or if she’s dead. I’ve learnt nothing about her and I don’t think I’m sure about myself anymore.”
“Hey, well I was also thinking about you, Sylvania and I just wanted to say that I was sorry. I know I never apologize but I thought I’d start now. I mean, I don’t even know how much of what I know about you is just part of like, some ridiculous fantasy I came up with. I guess if you’re lonely then obsession and fantasy, that’s all you have, right? I’d like to walk away from all of this, I guess I have the choice to I mean, but I don’t think I could. Somehow, I’ve become responsible for this girl’s fate, though I don’t know if I’ll be the reason she’ll be really dead.”
“Anyway, boring you to tears on the phone as always, I know, I just wanted to say thanks for listening like you always do. I… don’t laugh when I say this but I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. Well, bye bye now Sylvie; XOXO I miss you. I hate everyone but you.”
Now look at you Susie, standing in the middle of the station with your face all scrunched up as you’re begging for change. They’ll give it to you because of all your tears and your red eyes– capable of sensing that something within your internal chemistry had indeed gone through an irreversible change which had now alienated you from all of those around you. Though you only see them only as faceless entities, they somehow manage to see all of you with only a momentary glimpse… your entire history encoded within your smell and pained expression. Some of them might even feel threatened by you, reading of the insane creeps which had taken to brutally murdering the objects of their obsessions– wondering if indeed Judy herself had fallen victim to her most exceptional photographer. Without your camera, any resemblance of innocence has been lost… everyone knows you’re in it for something a lot heavier than a quick pic.
Susie learns from the many televisions occupying the attentions of those awaiting the trains that in fact many girls had fallen prone to what had been dubbed “Judy Syndrome.” It seems that some of the girls who had been her most loyal fans had found the silence & loneliness in the wake of her passing so unbearable that they’d jumped from a building in emulation of Judy’s own death– to join her in the here-after. Take note of the grieving father who believed that his daughter’s obsession with Judy had simply been an adolescent phase, fated to pass like the aimless rebelliousness and the artistic pursuits would be. Susie clapped her hands loudly and scolded the man on the television screen for not realizing that within Judy laid an expression of all one held close & dear and that in the absence of such a simple truth one would be confronted with the horrible silence & realization that in fact it was not a phase and that it would in fact not go away but rather grow & fester like an open sore which demanded to be continually scratched. Take note of the neighbors who had the horrible misfortune of waking up to a loud body clattering violently in front of their bedroom window, how they’d say that they’d never noticed anything strange about the daughter’s behavior. Yes, perhaps some would be like Susie… easily picked out of a line, easily singled out for a good stomping… yes but not all, some would bear their horror in private where it could be fed by their own shame & illness until the moment where the inner-self would burst violently from within the body and announce its arrival. Susie thought of her colleagues, the group of paparazzi which had realized that their obsessions could only be completed by a gruesome act of violence which would align the world outside of their minds with the world within their minds. She drifted from terminal to terminal, looking for perhaps some food which had been left uneaten… perhaps sitting discretely on the peak of an otherwise inedible mound of garbage.
It seemed that people like her, so willing to grant their objects of affection an early retirement, were the result of a long-term cultivation which begun at birth. It was in their childhood where they’d be exposed to the horror of celebrity, those who would be in a place you’d never see… those who will always be wanted… unafraid… never lonely because there would always be the audience watching you cry. People like Susie were trained at birth through repetition to understand the role obsessions would play within their lives, obsession & desire itself forming the back-bone of every single interaction they’d ever experience… was it not desire which had led her to this point, seduced by the promise of delicious meals and scrumptious treats? Was it not obsession which had led her to sheepishly beg Sylvie for forgiveness? Was it not desire which compelled Susie to keep her mouth shut as her teacher took advantage of her in ways she’d always be ashamed to admit… trauma which would find its expression by ways of obsession, the entire ecosystem which had enabled her asking for more salacious detail & scandal? You’d see their faces everywhere, on the television and in the super-market where they’d ask you to commit and to surrender to your obsession in the service of maintaining the ecosystem which had provided to all of us the ability to forget our own loneliness– asking in return only that we feed it and allow it to grow within our own lives. Yes, people like Susie– obsessed and filled with desires utterly inexpressible and unattainable– they were the ideal product for only their existence could continue to sustain the ecosystem which relied on publicity & entertainment, endlessly recycling its own images.
Nothing was more compelling than to have from within our own people, from within the very things we believe to hold dear– nothing was more compelling than from that to be conceived an absolute horror, some creature borne of alienation willing & able to be so brutal and to act on desires we’d hide from our parents and loved ones not only out of fear of rejection but out of fear that the very ecosystem itself might crash underneath the weight of our own obsessions & desires. To Susie it seemed clear, from an early age she’d be trained to think… her brain process transformed by continual streams of information too complex to process yet all the while being fed the right heuristic to guarantee the correct finite state, gaining the mechanisms necessary to understand the signal from its noise– to realize that there was no such thing as coincidence, only an expression which emerges from the point where all instructions must converge. Even though she could not control her movements, compelled by her own necessity to act towards her own end– she knew that everything which had occurred so far only furthered her towards that end, the very moment when all conditions are met and the very properties which had enabled Susie’s existence would grind her existence down to an absolute HALT.
Susie watched the city lights pass by her as she breathed in the recycled air wheezed out by the train’s dusty air conditioning and in the distance, she saw the metal structures which loomed over the city like ancient protectors who guarded the prosperity of the teeny-tiny denizens who crowded at its feet with hurried marching each day. The economic miracle had done strange things to the psyche of the individuals who were greeted every morning by the serpentine heads of the building, and a profound anxiety had begun to set into their nervous system which had the power to transform the solid concrete and unwavering steel of these large skyscrapers into animate moving creatures whose immense maws demanded more flesh to fatten up its interiors. Its shrill and mechanical howls resonated throughout the city and could be felt deeply within the body’s most sensitive core.
The rituals had ceased to be merely entertaining distractions and elevated themselves into necessity, a need to recover feelings which had now been muted by the shrieks emanating from the matter which engulfed us… a continual reenacting and simulation of what had now fallen far beyond our reach. There was a beautiful song being pumped into the metro-train and the delicate synthesized strings soothed the overstressed cerebellum while the computerized engine dragged its passengers over brown tracks through the backstreets adorned with metal pipes and sign-posts. There were factories with long indistinct walls and there were aging houses with rusty gates and house-plants which stood out with their leafy greens amongst the tarnished greys of the staircases and the orange coming through the windows. She looked to her side and saw an aging man in a stuffy suit reading a newspaper full of events never seen, and across her was a nervous foot-tapin’ girl whose thin plastic headphones emitted tinny & bass-less percussive sounds. The colorful geometric shapes on her sweater suggested an eye towards the fashionable, and Susie wondered if she’d know where a confused woman like herself might be able to go for some fucking answers. She kept listening to the song, nodding her head slightly to each wonderful beat as it bravely gave its life to make place for the next one in line. “We walk in the garden of love / our hands clasp together while we watch the doves fly.” She realized that the answer might have been in the music itself, if only she’d listened to the way its spaces & hallways gave space to the lyrics– gave it geometric definition so vivid, it was as if she’d been transported to a place she’d never seen yet so familiar… so safe, all warm with reverberations which seemed to never end but rather reflected themselves into infinity, continually building in size until it threatened to overwhelm anything caught in its liquid-y veil. Across the train-cars, she could see the spaces fold upon each other– copies and copies of the same train slithering back & forth as it were a shiny red-plastic earthworm, the walkthrough expanding and contracting as all of the train-cars bent and then came together again as one perfect straight line.
Susie looked to the fashionable girl who had now gotten up from her seat and begun brandishing a rather compact-looking revolver as her headphones hung from her neck. The aging geezer had now begun to sweat profusely, turning his newspaper into a damp dripping mess while a lady who was sitting in a seat towards the back fainted at the sight of the firearm. It seemed that the girl wished to take the people onboard the train as hostages, signaling at the driver behind the flimsy plastic screen with shaky gestures which hinted at some sort of violence. Across from her sat a sleeping man reeking of urine & alcohol, and Susie wondered if the suit was what separated him from her…until the man woke up from the screaming and looked towards Susie to be clued in on the situation. Susie made a fist and stuck two fingers out, then moved her other hand over the pretend-hammer of her pretend-gun. “A revolver?” Susie nodded again, blowing the pretend-smoke away from her pretend-gun. “What an odd choice, you’d think someone would use a pistol or something in that situation,” the groggy man said as his eyes closed again– looking around, Susie can see them all waiting under the street-lights and loitering in front of the department stores, their face lit up with a coy smile while their finger rubs the cold metal of a gun… with anticipation. “If I was in this situation, I’d use a submachine-gun. Sure, they go through a lot of ammo, but with controlled bursts you could clear out a room fairly quickly,” Susie said to the man without much thought. The girl stepped away from the driver, hoping to be heard over the loudness of the bullet-train.
“I’m taking over this train, don’t fuck with me and no-one will get hurt,” she screeched in a nasty voice. Susie heard another scream, followed by a gunshot which shattered a window. She wasn’t quite sure if this was one of the movies she’d loved to see in the dingy cinema next to the internet hotel, if she’d now been expected to take down the cute girl dressed in her colorful oversized sweater with a high-punch like in Golden Castle Tournament, using Xiahua’s double-dragon fist to take her down with one solid KO.
“I said, don’t fuck with me!” The girl was now waving the gun around, perhaps worried that the gunshot had now elevated her from a confused margin walker to a domestic terrorist.
The man who had been sleeping before now seemed quite annoyed and went to adjust his genitals before begrudgingly playing along by asking her motives, making many grunt sounds as he tried to balance himself upright.
“What do I want? I want revenge,” the girl said without much breath. “I want revenge on the news companies, the tabloids, the media conglomerates and internet aggregation services. I want revenge on the crawlers, the algorithms, the content delivery systems that create endless streams of noise. I want revenge on those long hands which have pressed their fingers into our throats. I want revenge on the men who have tried to sell our souls from their seats in those big metal buildings. I want revenge on those who peddle our bodies, peddle us bogus identities– who sell us all into bondage through advertising & production, trapping us in a cycle of consumption & depression.” One of the women in the back of the train-car had started hysterically sobbing, more out of confusion than anything else.
In any other situation, Susie would be ducking behind a seat– she’d be sheepishly trying to shield her body parts from stray bullets once the executions had begun. However, realizing that really the next minute could be the minute a skirt-to-surface missile turns the entire car into a heap of hot metal and bloody goo– Susie got up from her seat, prompting the girl to wave her gun wildly while promising a swift bullet to the head. Having lost her grasp on reality with televisions and radios speaking to her, Susie no longer understood the boundaries between the grossest recesses of her own mind and the brutal physical world beyond it– no longer understood the difference between being a living creature, for it seemed clear to her now that indeed many things long outlast their physical form. The others in the train watched Susie approach the girl, putting her hands up in the air as a sign of good will.
“You stupid girl-creep,” Susie said with a spiteful voice. Susie closes her eyes and once she opens them, a second or two later, she finds herself staring down the business-end of the dark brushed-metal firearm, swearing she could see the sheen of the grey flat-nosed bullet. The girl was chewing on her fingernails, part of her speech muffled by the noisy munching on cuticle, and her eyes were wide and probing as they hovered over every exposed inch of Susie’s person from her twitching eye-lids to her shaky legs. If only she’d saved her camera; it’s a perfect and priceless shot which already fills her mind with visions of the delicious foods which she might fill her gullet with such as the cream-filled pastries in the bakery next to the photo-store, or the delicious barbequed beef sold on the street on skewers, or the tiny buns which they sell in the tiny cubicles, even a high-class spaghetti dinner with a handkerchief in her lap as she screams at the waiter for more of the meatballs and the cheesy noodles as she spills crimson wine all over her clean clothes.
“This is what they want you to do,” Susie musters out of her mouth with a creaky meek falsetto– trying to steady the shaking of her hands as they languidly move closer to her head, the edges of her thumbs touching her temples moist with cold sweat. The train continues to rattle along on its tracks, vistas of polluted waters below concrete structures seemingly etched out of sharp glass roll by the window in a blur. “They?” The gun-toting girl interjected.
“You’ve been taught from birth to be this hysterical. I know because they did it to me.” The girl was chewing her fingernails down to their cuticles, insatiable in her appetite for keratin. Susie calmly walked past her towards the window, trying to seem deep and considerate in an effort towards an appeal of pathos.
“They’ve manipulated us to be this way, violent and confused. Your revenge is the best evening news anyone could have asked for,” she was surprised by her own articulate words. It appeared that parts of her body had adapted, could now communicate in ways which were utterly novel to her. She felt her body transforming, ligatures & axons growing as roots which bloomed into beautiful nets of syntax and grammar and beginning their previously-thought-unlikely ascendance from the muck. This is how the first ape-like ancestor placed itself upon the rock, utterly a violent guttural groan which she’d refined into a concise statement– the other hominids raising their head to hear the Word as it had been told to them, understanding that within all which was around them laid hidden rules and systems which had given form and function to the leaves and the trees and the sun, sound & fury to the crackle of fire and the movement of water.
“What are you saying,” the girl screeching once again, sending the other train passengers into a distressed migration. “How can they want or ask for anything? Corporations and conglomerates don’t have thoughts or feelings!” Some of the people ducking behind their seats in avoidance of the gun’s muzzle had now slightly raised their heads, interested in what the answer could be. “They?” One of the ladies crouched in cover interjected.
Susie didn’t know the answer even though it seemed clear to her that indeed it all and not just companies, all had formed itself into a they, simple in its wants & desires. The superimposition of machines and code, dedicated to the optimization of ‘x’, had now created a self-sustaining ecosystem built out of television static & short-hand communication. What made them so scary, so alien & frightful to our very inner-being were their single-minded pursuits of exposure and the increase of profit-margin. Susie had now begun to thought that Judy’s death was a choice that no-one (yes! no one) had really made but rather a consequence of algorithm put into place by metal and silicon which had found the most-popular girl for the most-horrifying fall to enable the broadcast of the most-seen national television event possible. Everything from the contest to the suicide to Susie’s bare-ass fall onto concrete to the revolver held by the twitchy hand at her head– indeed it had been the best possible solution as found by heuristic-based search tree pruning, her each action so predictable that even the most basic molecular atom of her very being would follow along willing by its determined path. It made her feel stupid for even trying; it made her feel dumb for even trying to pull herself away from the path which had so obviously been paved just for her. We rehearse these tiny revolts, intoxicated on our fervor, without realizing that it only sustains the system which enabled for it in the first place. We’re just opening the pressure valves, letting out societal steam, never willing to admit that change will never come– and it’s all our fault.
“Oh, just shut the fuck up for a second,” the girl now very agitated as she tried to stop Susie from rambling on like an ampho-fucked street-creep… unable to get herself to pull the trigger as dripping flop-sweat had turned the cyan of her sweater into deep ocean blues. She thinks to herself, feeling her head throb as thousands of dendrites swelled with information– really? Had she been manipulated? Forced into making the same mistake as Susie by believing that the anger, the gun… that all of it was her own brilliant act of rebellion, an irrepressible anxiety which had forced itself towards a violent burst of action? Susie’s chewing on another mooncake, crumbs falling onto the urine-stained floors as train-passengers prayed for a quickly-approaching stop. She remembers the delinquent kids taking her aside, their arm pulling at her own– with tears in their faces and a question on their lips, the words as brought to you by Oriana Music Group still resonating in the cochlea: “am I doing this because I want to or because it’s what I’ve been programmed to do?” She takes her hands and pulls on the side of the mooncake which she’d not chewed on, watching it come apart at the center where wonderfully gooey custard glistened in the rays of the florescent lamps. The girl begins to cry as she lowers her gun and moves her other hand in front of her to accept the mooncake, custard having always been her favorite filling. She meekly watched Susie place it into the palm of her hand, her nose stuffy with snot sniffles and her lids puffy as liquid poured from her eye sockets.
They’d found common-ground somehow, the girl and Susie– the rest of the train’s passengers raptured with disbelief, unwilling to accept that a simple custard-filled mooncake would be enough to turn a crazed gunwoman into a heapin’ crying mass of flesh you’d just wanna hug and say “it’ll be okay” to. Susie and the girl chomped on their mooncake halves as the train approached the station, everyone else gathering up at the doors quickly in order to escape the stupid series of events which had transpired within this train-car. Susie doesn’t make eye-contact with the girl, looking away as she lowered herself into a chair with her gun on her lap– waiting to be taken away by the police so her angry parents could pick her up later.
Susie wondered if Dr. Sanyo-Infinity was a human-being indeed chopped in half or only a name born quickly out of improvisation– coming from the Royal Highness of improvisation herself, playing the nerves and anxieties of Susie like an out-of-tune piano which needed to be bent into tune with everything else. Perhaps the good doctor was a name worn whenever necessary, whether it is by a lackey tasked with deactivating deprecated idols or an abuser seeking to twist the arm of a musician into submission. She wondered if the story about needing pills to control “battiness and exuberance” was a lie or if indeed the Duchess believed it herself, too weak to pass on the opportunity for neurochemical bliss. Was Susie only a conduit to guide along Lolita 108 towards whoever it was which had been splattered across the walls of the hotel room? She wasn’t quite sure what it was she’d stumbled ass-first onto nor did she know who or what had been manipulating her– assuming that indeed she was only the shadow of an electron orbiting around a nucleus, a virtual particle undetectable and uncertain but soon to be annihilated by its antithesis. They know everything about you, Susie. You can only hope to become so insane that your blip on the radar becomes a streak, un-minable as a data-source. They?
Susie had been thinking a lot recently, she realized as she climbed out of the train-car’s broken window in the hopes of avoiding the squads of police units ready to beat the living out of any flabby human flesh they’d find along their way. She only narrowly avoided the electrified rail which hummed dangerously above her head, crouching down and using her hands in the dark to find a way out from underneath the train platform. She felt the movement of rats and those nocturnal insects brushing by her feet, hearing the loud rumble of other trains passing by through the concrete. In a sense, she’d now begun her ascent further into the rumbling belly of this city she’d come to now call her home, pawing and clawing her way further through an artery in search of its atrium– trying to imagine what the truth may have looked like if indeed she could see it, yes if indeed it hadn’t been that all she could see was what she’d been equipped to see with all other things filtered out as noise.