Hello DEAR READER,
The following is Chapter 2:4 from my first novel, The Pupa Woman. You can read Chapter 2:3 here.
You can get the PDF over at my gumroad! ^_^
Available from our unfortunate tech-overlords over at Amazon both in paperback and eBook.
Hold on, Susie thought… there was a light at the end of the tunnel she’d crawled through, from which hands appeared to tightly grip on her shoulders, pulling her from the dark & damp & buggy hole she’d been trotting through. She held her eyes closed, worrying for the worst that could happen; perhaps the police had sniffed her out all dog-like, waiting to pummel her face in or perhaps it was Lolita 108 armed & ready with a lollipop-barreled machine gun. It was once she’d opened her eyes that she noticed she’d been placed on the singed brown grass of a hill, overlooking the dense gray structures which rose into the dark clouds burning with the purple and orange light of the evening sky– full of concrete domes and curved steel stark and naked underneath the street lights. She could feel the movement of trains underneath her feet, rumbling through the tunnels which pulsed & throbbed along to the rhythm of afternoon traffic. She held her hand up to her forehead, shielding her eyes from the orange sun which was obscured by the black curves of smoke which gyrated & squirmed in patterns quite delicate as cold wind rushed by her blushed cheeks and moist nose.
There at the feet of the impossibly tall skyscrapers of which each foot was marked by a window through which you could see the children and mothers and father and grandparents sat the old decaying ruins of another time, buildings with blackness coming through the veneer of paint and windows full of cracks which were reinforced by cardboard. Soon all of us; Susie gulping as she pondered whether her bones may form the cement & binding agent– would find ourselves living in these marvels of engineering, holding each-other tight as the powerful typhoons would make the 2,000 feet structure quiver & shiver as ripples of force traveled through its rebar. She found herself almost weeping at its beauty, tears falling onto her face as her cry-baby-tired eyes admired the way the beautiful orange light made the tight & inner dark recesses found ‘tween the buildings seem so inviting.
“Oh great, she’s fucked on ampho,” Susie heard a voice to her left speak out. “What are you crying about?” Susie didn’t know how to answer the question so instead she just said “thanks for pulling me out of that pipe” to the lady & the dude with a little bow in her torso as she wiped her nose on the sleeve of her raincoat.
“No problem, creepette” as the dude dressed in camouflage responded. Susie absentmindedly went to touch his head; entirely bald save for the large jutting spikes of purple-colored hair all sprung out form the center. “Creep! What are you doing,” the lady exclaimed with a squeaky voice, her red military beret almost slipping off of her head as she lunged at Susie. The dude smiled and stood still with his arms crossed, showing a toothy grin as Susie poked at the conical tendrils softly.
“It’s real,” Susie said quietly as if the dude’s hairdo was the most ontologically-suspicious thing she’d seen in recent hours. “Of course, it’s real, you creep” and the lady zipped up her black jacket in response to the cold. Susie lost her interest in the dude’s hair and instead looked down at the lady’s long black boots which extended up to her thighs and were held up by garters which disappeared underneath her black shorts.
“What are you looking at,” the lady said as Susie turned back to the dude, staring for a few moments before yappin’ again. “Are you guys fuck-freaks?” The dude laughed and adjusted the denim long-sleeved shirt he’d tied around his waist, trying to seem inconspicuous as he gingerly moved himself into the gap between Susie and the lady. She could somehow hear the telepathy between them, though it was one of sights and eye-motions which had acquired a meaning only through a bond of friendship. The dude continued to grin, his eyebrows going slightly slack. I think she’s genuinely curious. The lady placed her hands into her pockets and twitched her eyebrows. I’m going to fucking stab her. The dude put his hands together and placed them under his chin. That’s a really bad idea. The lady tried to hide her smile as she fondled with the contents of her leather jacket. Try to stop me, then.
“You ever heard of industrial music?” the dude asked of Susie. She answered in the affirmative, an obvious lie though she did not know why she’d commit to such a thing. Perhaps she’d hoped recognition might have saved her from a nasty knife wound– call it a survival tactic. The lady interjected, “well this is how industrial music people dress.” Susie smiled, though it slightly unnerved the lady and the dude who smiled back awkwardly. “Oh, you guys like music,” Susie said as she tried to mask her excited shakes. The dude looked back at the lady with raised eyebrows. Maybe she’s scrambled. The lady looked at the dude and then looked at Susie, pausing slightly before speaking. “Yeah, we’re going to a record store,” perhaps choosing a safe place out of slight fear. Susie placed her hands together and set them in front of her face, almost begging to be taken there. It’s okay, Susie– if only you could tell them about the day you’d had.
They stepped down from the hill and cut through the train tracks, using an opening in the fence to bypass the security checkpoints which had been established in the lower slums of this once-great city. The dude informed Susie that their hairstyles and dress-manner did not go over well with the beat-happy officers who’d particularly single out the youth for a good corrective bashing. It seemed to Susie so greatly unfortunate that those showing the most kindness and openness to a creep such as herself would be the ones who’d claim the most familiarity with the hardness of a black plastic truncheon. However, soon a profound sense of wonder came over her as she walked through the pitch-black tunnels to find an inner courtyard in which many metal staircases led into other alleyways– one could look up and see the receding sunlight be reflected by windows and metal panels into a kaleidoscopic scattering of light, casting little slivers of rainbow color which glittered magnificently as they illuminated the dust & debris particles suspended in the midst of air.
Listen up and through the humming of the hundreds of air conditioners you can hear laughter and screams, sirens and honks– and also the sharp words of the old man who cursed at the clumsy foot of Susie’s which had crushed his cup of coffee as she passed through an alleyway filled with shopping-carts and shivering bodies covered with blankets. The lady held onto her beret and looked behind herself, baring her fangs which were still stained crimson with blood sourced from a deep artery– Susie thought for a second, squishing her fingers into one of her garlic-flavored mooncakes. She looked up towards the sky and found that the receding sun had been blocked off by the giant highway structure suspended high above the buildings– it seemed clear to her that indeed there were two cities, built on one-another yet never truly intersecting. There was the city which belonged to those who drove on its immaculate roads, little metal capsules launching towards their destinations in record time as an impersonal landscape full of shapes and lights passed by their window. There was also the city in which Susie belonged, full of dizzying corridors and never-ending walls– a city of walkers, the smell of oils & trash in their nostrils as they transfer from one bus to another. They were invisible, the background radiation– the energy which powered the city flowing through the cracks and crannies too small to see from up there in the sky where tire and asphalt met.
Susie felt at the shuttered windows of the stores as they walked through the empty street, letting her hand create rattles as her fingers slid by the metal. Listen, to how they travel down the strips of metal– listen, to how they shake & scream many miles away. The dude and the lady led her through the lower slum’s thriving downtown areas, moving underneath the shadows of the skyscrapers– describing to her the sounds which had filled their ears with a certain twisted joy. “There’s a part where he sings ‘rot and assimilate’ and it’s just so fucking hot,” the lady screams before she once again readjusts her red military beret. She opined on how the usage of percussion fashioned out of steel drums and car frames gave a shape & form to the space created by the reverberation, becoming so real that each corner & wall was perceivable– a virtual space which existed only within the movement of waves as they excited the air. Susie broke herself away from her thoughts when she noticed that the dude had been eyeing a rather inviting spot of pinkish flesh as Susie ran her hands through her hair to rid it of loose fibers and torn ends.
Across from them she could see the record store, a wonderfully decrepit building covered in various posters, graffiti, and menacing slogans. It seemed that any image which might have once had some meaning to any ‘x’ subculture or peoples had been reconstructed and regurgitated, silk-screened or permanently-marked onto a once-pristinely gray concrete wall. Slowly approaching, the images came into focus… phallus-wielding zombies and ghouls disemboweled by short-haired women… skull-clad figures emerging from mysterious depths with unnerving smiles… victims of war Xeroxed and transformed into symbols while authority figures loomed dejectedly over them… faces missing teeth which grin as the molten goo once beautiful skin stained the edges of letters & numbers which recommended a place and a time. ‘tween the holes and tattered lines Susie could see ghostly transparencies of images past, music & emotion lost to the days which had now been painted over by government employees wearing orange jackets and holding institutional green paint-buckets– she placed her fingers up to the decaying paper and felt its rough edges as if touching the surface of waters underneath which lay an entirely different world w/ its own mythologies and its own truths.
As she searched the walls for an opening, she pulled herself away from a spot which felt soft & still warm to the touch. It was a figure which stood awkwardly in a poorly-lit white room, her hands hanging down to her waist with fingers loosely hinged on her hands. Susie looked at her shoes and noticed the decrepit sneakers, moving up past her black denim pants and her plain white working-creep’s shirt to see an expression of apathy underneath coarse black hair in a state of poofed-up distress. Susie stood speechless for a second, as shadows begun to flow up to her neck… indeed the expression was worn on a face she thought she could recognize, familiar yet distinct & unique. Yeah, the shape of her face and the bulbous contours of her nose reminded her of that hollow mask– sans that empty expression the killer sex-bot wore on its face as deep-learning routines attempted to identify its target. Susie placed her hands on the face of the poster’s figure, covering its eyes. She imagined Judy’s awkward & static expression on its lips, to her mind almost a precise match– a perfect replica until she’d removed her hand, ripples of neurological terror spreading through-out her body as she stood transfixed by the horrifying complexity visible in the figure’s eyes colored like the amber sap of a tall tree. “Wow, she’s so…” was all poor Susie had a chance to say.
“Oh s-shit, Susie! You’re bleeding again,” and Sylvie sprung up and held her hand up to the wound which was now sputtering some more blood from underneath its pink-with-blood bandages, and Susie was now feeling really woozy and trying not to fall onto the floor as Sylvie groggily took her arm and guided her to the bathroom where she let her fall into the old tub, orange creases and black discolouration marred its otherwise off-white surface, feeling herself sink along as Sylvie undid the surgical tape around her head, revealing congealed blood with stuck-together hair on inflamed skin which smelled like the horrible stench of death.
“Maybe,” a hic-up before continuing, “you should go to a doctor,” but Susie pointed at her shoe and then wiggled it around a bit which prompted Sylvie to undo the laces of the sneaker and take them off, revealing a sweaty foot marked with dark discolorations which she stroked & sniffed. Susie was clever, but not clever enough to figure that the metal minimalist lamp she’d spotted before hiding under the bed could potentially be used as a projective thrown at the back of her head as she exited the penthouse by stage left– observe the many reels of film flying from her pockets, sputtering and twisting like some kind of gelatin noodle as it fell soundlessly onto the ground. Pockets from which spilled the proof of Sylvie in her drunkest of hours, captured by Susie who held the camera and tried to ignore the voice intoning the words “please stop”, the equations and truth-values expressed in electro-magnetic information and projected onto a tube in a red-green-blue pattern; their existence was certain, undeniable, observable for any able to do so, formatted for broadcast and soon to be quantized and stored onto those same 5 ¼” diskettes she’d bought from the store down the street.
Susie turned to Sylvie who was enraptured by the television, subtly mimicking the voices with the movement of her mouth, watching with incredible curiosity… just to see what it looked like… guessing the name of the person who was undressed by the fresh-faced boy goaded on by a man in a suit with a fat wallet who would whisper into an ear to get closer, yes further as he waved those bills around which felt so heavy & nice in your pocket as you thought of delicious things… holding the camera steady as the jeans were unbuttoned and unzipped, pushing away the hands but only weakly, whispering “no” only loud enough to be heard by the microphone… to make herself not search for the eyes which were behind the view-finder, the panoptes with its gigantic all-seeing retina which could see straight into you, into the horrible disgustingness which had always raged within you… just for something, she didn’t know what… while playing to the camera’s most repugnant desires with lips and soft moans and careful squirms. Susie told herself that she hated watching, but she controlled the camera and moved it salaciously, with an eye that trembled with hunger, a close-up on what she’d want others to see as the fresh-faced boy awkwardly kissed & licked… She wished she could grab Sylvie’s head off the steering wheel right now and through the tears say “I’m so sorry, Sylvania… friends do horrible things to each other” and kiss at the lips which with no pleasure or feeling would pucker at the sight of those engorged… “I’m so sorry I did that to you,” while tasting her spit and the bodily fluids of all the men who’d thought her to be a means to some easy money– enacting her own slow and extended revenge on Sylvie whose only crime was that she was someone other men would enjoy imagining to themselves with hoots & hollers and thoughts of I-can’t-wait-to-tell-my-friends.
She woke up from her involuntary nap with a terrible neckache and some loose lint in her mouth which swam around for a while as she pulled her head up and titled it around with a sleepy sluggishness to get a sense of her bearings in a room covered with posters of women dressed in flowery shirts and checkered sport coats all poof-ed the heck up. She moved her hands up her neck and felt at the two puncture wounds which still slightly oozed with clotting blood– trying not to panic as fingertips traced the edges of the red welt. She felt chilly, shivering as she looked around for her yellow raincoat and pulling the sleeves of her peach button-up over her hands with teeth clattering loudly. A head peaked up from behind a counter, akin to that of a beautiful baby-boy but with a bushy beard and large red spectacles shaped like oppressive ovals erected on tan skin.
“I think the creep’s awake,” the baby-faced boy sez and in response more heads peeked out from behind counters and milk crates… some dyed with colorful shades of pigment and some with pierced ears, some with extravagant fizz-balls of hair and some with no hair at all. A pixie-cut twerp sucked on her teeth before speaking, “what does it want?” Susie looks around as she covers her shoulders with her hands, each one of her awkward movements carefully watched by the absolutely-silent crowd. She heard objects whiz past her head– peanuts, malt balls, little candies thrown by curious record geeks. “I want my coat,” Susie says meekly. She felt vulnerable without it, like a warrior without her shield… like a house without its walls, well no more like a…
“Here you go, creep.” A short little dude with long black hair goes to hand Susie her yellow raincoat, which sparkled so brilliantly in the soft halogen of wherever she was. “We washed it for you, it smelled like,” but all of a sudden Susie panics and lunges towards the coat, delving into her pockets with frenzied movements as the bystanders watched in suspense. “My mooncakes,” Susie cries in horror as tears come down from her face. It seems her mooncakes had turned to dust, filling and all. She looks up towards the baby-faced boy who had now placed his hand on her shoulder. “Sorry. Uh, for your loss,” he said with a deep tremble. The rest of the audience closed their eyes and sighed, as if indeed Susie’s sorrow at the needless destruction of her pastries was an experience shared by these unique bodies… bodies dressed in sweaters and overalls, draped in black denim or lace… but mind now all in sync, in respect of the raspberry & lychee flavors which now only flavor the waste water rapidly excreted into the sewers below.
A short vigil. A moment of silence. The crowd disperses; the baby-faced man stays by Susie’s side as she revels in the comfort of the raincoat she’d missed & ached for. “Again, sorry about the cakes, we’d have asked you first but you were out cold.” Susie says nothing as she rubs the yellow plastic fabric, watching the pixie-cut twerp pull from a stack of boxes a single cassette-tape while the short little dude fumbled with the wires to some mysterious box covered in little grey squares. “What are they up to?” Susie asked as she pointed in their direction. The pixie-cut twerp wore headphones and scrubbed through the cassette tape, only stopping at a point they both seemed content with. They were the words of a squeaky blonde with a voice that disappeared into the echoes of the room but as they passed through the mysterious box into a set of homely wooden-cabinet speakers, the voice gradually dragged itself down to a crawl– revealing textures and tones which Susie had never heard in such a voice before, as if it were turned inside out to reveal something lying deeper within the vocal cords, as if the voice could offer a question stretched to the limits of its meaning and each word abundant with contour and mass as it continuously echoed.
The baby-faced boy looked at Susie kinda awkwardly as she stood entranced in awe of the impossibly-deep voice which bent the air and tingled at her ear-drums. “Uh, should you be up so soon,” he said awkwardly after scratching the dry spots on his back. Susie ignored him and continued listening– at a certain point they even ceased to be words… (we’ll) becoming only figments, wait no shapes suspended in the air… (make) each with its own curve, its own slope and drama… (Heaven) no longer spoken in a tongue but simply becoming the crying of sound, unintelligible yet coherent… (a) constant yet punctuated with an absence, full yet also hollow… (place) as if meaning was a resource exhausted by repetition, by the continual rehearsal of understanding… (on) now they simply hang in your head, divorced of any recognizable features… (Earth) becoming amorphous bodies of movement which paradoxically change shape with each identical repetition. “Huh oh,” he murmured after adjusting his glasses. “They’re taking all the discarded music in the world, on all the decaying formats– they’re taking that stuff and jamming with it. We call it ecco-jamming because it’s economical; it only uses what’s already there. It’s like the echo of what music was once like, you know.” Susie had now turned to the baby-faced boy and begun to pull on the shaggy curls of his sparse beard.
“You’re telling me, you’re playing around with worn-out cassettes for fun,” pulling the baby-faced boy closer by his facial hair. He studied the features of Susie’s sweaty face carefully, the split ends of her fizzy hair and the bags underneath her tired eyes. He would never admit it but he’d been mesmerized by her ever since he’d found her passed out in front of his record store– fighting the urge to sneak a peek by lifting the fabric of her shirt. Susie’s single-minded passion was an aphrodisiac to creeps who carried their disappointment on their sleeves.
“People abandoned this music because it wasn’t useful anymore. We’re trying to recover what was lost with them; it’s like a, uh time-capsule for a different time,” the baby-faced boy said after pulling himself free. Susie rubs her dry face and walks over to a stack of dusty cassettes, their black magnetic material deteriorating as light burns at their delicate surface.
“What is it that you hear in them, my dude?” and now Susie is thinking of her own ecco-jams, touching a cardboard surface decorated with a beautiful lady in a leather jacket posing next to her exotic sports car– while he was admiring the broadness of her shoulders underneath her raincoat. “You mean you don’t hear it? The songs are always speaking to you; there are messages coded into each bar, each phrase of lyrics designed to make you feel a certain way. They’re designed, like a robot or something would be,” and the baby-faced boy rings up a creepette with no hair. “We’re trying to take back control.” It remained hidden before, cloaked in its own mediocrity, but the manipulation of the voice brought out the yearning, the screaming of the artificial space that surrounded the voice, a promise for a world that may rise from the mains hum with pillars shaped of transistor-gates & fast Fourier transformations as DC current excites the air– oh yes, I’m begging you let’s go… a place this alien must be Heaven.
Susie lets a stack of cassettes tumble down onto the wooden surface of a shelf and turns back to face the baby-faced boy, wondering how much he knew and how much was an assumption just as she’d made– something to turn the indecipherable randomness into an image one could grasp and say ‘behold, the truth!’ “Take back control? What are you talking about?”
Now the pixie-cut twerp interjected, setting the ecco-jam on hold. “We’re trying to take back reality from them,” she said with no hesitation. Susie laughed, reading the posters which lined the walls above the collections of cassettes. “You think they control reality? How do you suppose they do that?” The baby-faced boy grabbed a compact disk and gently tossed to Susie, who almost dropped the jewel case onto the ground before catching it on her second grasp. “They?” the pixie-cut twerp interjected. “Them?”
“It’s in all the music you listen to, like that Judy disc. All of our memories and our hopes, they’re all brought to us through the discs. The love that’s supposed to be there, your first kiss and your first date– they’re all rehearsed, perfected, and programmed into you, their dreams become yours, on a constant loop,” he says as Susie opened up the jewel case. He saw Judy’s awkward smile once again, the same face which belonged to the sex-bot and the woman on the poster. She was wearing a Cinderella-type getup, all pink with a tiara– except her eyes were neither aflame nor empty, they were full of fear as if she’d already seen her future in the simulations her designer may have called dreams. The pixie-cut twerp poked at her teeth with her stubby fingers as the baby-faced boy thought hard about what he’d reveal about himself.
“You have heard it, haven’t you,” he watched Susie’s face– the way her eyes blankly stared at Judy. She tried to feign her ignorance, stammering her denial as the baby-faced boy tracked the movement of her head.
“You’ve lived in her dream world, it’s there when you put those headphones on” but Susie was shaking her head and trying to walk out the door before remembering the terrible welts on her neck and she stood at the door, wondering if the vampires hid crouched in the dark– waiting to pounce on their gullible prey. Susie kept her face hidden away, facing the tattered rusty metal barrier between her and the rest of the world. “I wish I could live there,” she says with not-quite-sobs welling to the surface. “In her world, I’m the one– the only one.” The baby-faced boy approaches Susie, she feels herself shrink as his arms hovered over her shoulders– hesitating for a second before pulling themselves away. “I didn’t mean to make you upset,” he now says with a meek voice… feeling kinda awful for trying to destroy her understanding of the world only minutes after waking from a hypoglycemic fainting spell. “Hey, my name’s Emmy by the way. Emerick Uniball-Kiyoshi, what’s you go by?” What does she go by? Susie panics, stammering as she tries to create distance from Emmy without entirely deciding to leave the room– soliciting weird looks from the pixie-cut twerp and her collaborator as she sniffed in search of what had been emitting that awful moldy smell. “I don’t know, what do you wanna call me?”
“Uh, like what do you do,” the pixie-cut twerp interrupted all question-y like. Susie stands by a crate of what appeared to be ammunition and makes a square with her hands, one of her fingers depressing an imaginary button. “I’m a celebrity-hunter. I find them and I take pictures, or well I used to but I broke my camera. I don’t know what I’ll do now ‘cuz I can’t really afford a new one.” Emmy scratches his face before crouching down behind the counter, the sound of rummaging through trash audible through his grunts of exertion. “So, what’s all the ammo for– you guys like hunting too?” The pixie-cut twerp smiled; her mouth slimy as a chewed-up piece of gum passed from one end to another.
“You could say we’re hunters, yeah. It’s not the right season yet; they haven’t come out of hiding.” Emmy whistles and throws something at Susie which was wrapped in a brown envelop. She fails to catch it but luckily it landed on a stack of old crooners’ records, kept in wet moldy cardboard. She unwraps the envelope and finds within it a little Fujifilm disposable camera, with a couple of shots still left in its 135 film– it’s funny to her, going from her wonderful SLR with that particular whir it had to something like this which lacked even like a basic focus. The pixie-cut twerp posed with a stretched-out hand on her neck, one of the eyes in her face seeming to threaten a sudden escape as Susie winded up the mechanism.
“What do you guys plan to hunt,” Emmy posing with a poster of his favorite movie– “1000 Knives,” starring Selena Honeywell-Librascope as the buxom harvester of demonic organs.
“One day, all the walls will come tumbling down,” he said matter-of-factly as he formed his two fingers into a peace sign. “Every day, there are dozens of conflicts– between our dreams, our fantasies and what the world is really like. Sooner or later, these conflicts will spill into the streets. The user-networks are already buckling under that weight.”
Susie depressed the shutter and pulled away, uncertain as the viewfinder had no relation to what the image would be– nothing about how light would pass through the lens and burn its ghost onto the film. It was only an imitation, one which required imagination to truly represent one’s desired photograph.
“I didn’t want to admit it before but I have heard it,” Susie trembling as she used her thumb to advance the film. “It’s been in the music, the news and television programs too. I’ve heard the voices.” The pixie-cut twerp listened carefully as Emmy placed his prized poster back on the wall. “All the networks are one big contradiction. Judy is dead but they wanted me to find her, I know it…” in response to which Emmy almost felt his spine collapse upon itself and the pixie-cut twerp slammed her hands together in delight.
“It’s happening just like I thought it would,” the twerp laughing as Emmy readjusted his glasses. “I told you, it would happen just like this. The snake is eating its own tail!”