See this previous post for a communication to any who would join me in writing.  For a thought on David Lynch, see this article.  And see this article to read the story from the beginning.  Meanwhile…

THE CLIMAX OF ACT ONE.  I’m never getting through this thing, am I?  Anyway, content warnings for edgy, edgy sex stuff.  Avoid if botherable.  I can’t make the time to get more specific right this moment.

–

Noise walked behind Josefina sullenly, a new cigarette in her mouth.  She’d fished out her pack and a lighter, but Josie hadn’t given her time to put the pants on before walking away.  Noise didn’t want to be left behind, and the khakis were over her shoulder.

Josefina led them down a ramping hall with a weirdly soft floor.  Felt over concrete?  There was a room ahead with one cold fluorescent light, some people within doing unknown things.  No door to conceal them, just the dim light and inscrutable nature of everything.

A child suddenly came out of the room, and walked past the women at a brisk pace.  It was a little girl, of no more than eleven years, but with eyes wrinkled from weariness, a strangely adult expression.  She said, “It’s almost time.  I’m coming for you.”

They came into the little room.  It was plain concrete, the wall-mounted fluorescent light leaving the felt-covered floor mysterious in darkness, and Peace stood in the middle of it all.  There were a few white people operating office equipment.  One – a man whose only visible features resembled the VIP – took a flash picture of Peace with a little silver plastic digital camera, and then walked to a computer station, with two outdated printers and a fax machine plugged in.  At another computer, a nerd in headphones was editing a trap remix of Limp Bizkit’s Faith.

Peace shook off the daze and welcomed his friends with open arms.  “Girls, I’m sorry.  I got lost.”

After the group hug, Josefina said, “We should leave, dude.  This trip is just bad news.”

“no shit,” Noise said with a voice quieter than the chug of the printer.

“But now you have both of us together, Josie,” he said.  “We can help you get through it.  A sip?”

She took a slug off his water bottle.  “Why is it so cold down here?  We’re half naked.”

“You’re this close to the bottom of it, Josie.  Come on.  I need to show you something.  Both of you.”

Josie rudely grabbed a fistful of his t-shirt and leaned close.  “I’m only doing this for you, then  we’re gone.”

He shook his head sadly, but led them on.  They were in darkness again, until they emerged in a theater lit by an old-time film reel that was playing on the big screen.  It was like a bootleg Betty Boop cartoon up there, in glorious limited color.  They took seats in the middle of the theater, no one else to consider, tall or small.

Josefina was in the middle, Peace left, and Noise right.  Noise was the last to sit down, awkwardly pulling her pants on first.  “What’s up with that?,” Peace asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Josefina said.  She wasn’t paying attention to the cartoon, leaning over to embrace Peace.  “Sorry, I have to do it,” she said, rubbing his chest.  “I have to know you’re real. Nothing feels real anymore unless I touch it, or smell it.”  She breathed deeply on his shoulder – slightly stale laundry, shampoo, dry sweat, the dust of the huge empty theater.  The ecstasy blended it all into a heady potpourri, a tingling over her skin.

He picked up her hand and kissed it, before pushing it back into her lap.  “You got to pay attention, wild girl.  This is all about you.”  He pointed to the screen.

At this, her blood ran cold.  Why would she be in a movie?  There was nobody else in the seats, but who else could be watching?

A cigarette burn flashed and film scratches let them know it was time for a new scene.  A clapperboard clicked, scrawled with the title Pony Up in Here, and hands pulled it away, revealing a film of the peep show runway they had just left behind.  Only this time, Josefina was alone there.

“Where am I?  Where?”  Noise nervously hotboxed her cigarette, leaning forward in her seat.  “Oh no, oh no.”

Josefina was arrested, barely breathing.  On the screen, she was dancing to Ginuwine, kicking off her shoes.  Muffled voices may have been yelling “faster baby,” “take it off,” but were a little too quiet to hear, even at theater volume.

“I didn’t strip,” she said.  “I didn’t.”

Screen Josefina shook her hips as she dropped trou, and stepped out of the mounded cloth – now wearing nothing but her bikini and little black socks with pink hearts.  She quickly switched to more provocative moves, dry-humping one window, slapping her ass on another, twirling and bouncing her tits.

She looked so human, so ordinary.  There was no screen magic, not even to the level seen in cheap porn.  It was point and shoot, at a gangly young woman shaking her unthrilling baby chub, prematurely aged eyes drifting between closed and barely open.  Was she dreaming?

“It was you, Josie,” said Peace.  “You were exposed.”

Noise gripped Josefina from the other side, body rocking in terror, cigarette bouncing dangerously near her face.  “You were right!  I was wrong to make you dance, Josie.  It was always wrong!”

Josefina slapped her cigarette and it flew off, rolling under the seats.  That snapped noise her out of fear, for the moment, and she returned to rocking in her seat, debating internally whether to go crawling after it.  “Why’d you do that?  Why?”

Screen Josefina slid her bikini top to the side, letting tiny breasts out to wobble side-to-side, so boring they may as well have stayed concealed.  Was one of the muffled voices booing her?  It was either dog braying or jeers, and she couldn’t tell at all.

“It was Noise who was naked.  Not me.”

Screen version put a leg up on one of the windows and pulled on the straps of her bottom, sliding it back and forth through the crack, exposing herself.  The Josefina in the seats gasped and shuddered.  “Wasn’t me.”

The muffled voices from behind the windows were definitely jeering.  Snippets of phrases could be gleaned.  “ugly ass” “don’t wanna see that” “ugly ass” “put it back on”  Trays started sliding out from the booths, holding brass knuckles, knives, chains, and crudely scrawled death threats.  Screen girl looked like she was getting off on it, or in spite of it, sliding against the glass, bumping on it, pleasuring herself obscenely.

“It was you,” Peace said.  But his voice was too close, too small.  Josefina felt a thrashing at her chest and looked down.  She was holding two babies – one who was Peace, with improbably long hair for an infant; the other was wriggling and fussy Noise, with pink face and the tiniest eyes – a sliver of a drop of shine the only hint they were open at all.  “It was me!,” Noise cried, begging to exist.

Josefina looked up at the screen again, as Peace said, “Don’t look away.”  She obeyed as a dracula victim, transfixed, needing to die.

Cigarette burn, scratch, a new reel.  No board, just a title screen, of elaborate motion graphics – the sign appearing from baroque gold foliage between two marble pillars, “The Perils of Brujeria – an Infallible Transmission.”

A character appeared, and it was apparent that she was not a real human being – a cartoon contrivance, of extreme graphic fidelity.  Her skin was luminous, her hair glossy, her eyes reflecting every phantom light in the most aesthetically precise way regardless of which direction she glanced.  The doll’s costume was like a nun reimagined by Coco Chanel and Hugo Boss, in black pink and white.  Her name wrote itself in gold vines and then erased itself in the same movement, Donatella Cheri.

She said, “Blessed are we in harmonious purpose to serve to the Lord, our God.  Today the Office of Holy See has released a dire admonition indeed, that we should all take upon our hearts.  In Heaven we will never have to witness such things as this, but in the fallen world of the material, it is vital that we know the adversary – that we recognize sin, that we may rebuke and revile it.”  Each syllable bounced the pink-blonde curls, each fleeting breath was a chance taken to convey the sensual energy of this intensely false creation.  It felt, to Josefina, like an artifact of Japanese pop culture.

What was Japan?  The concept surfaced and disappeared, like everything else she had known at the beginning of the night.

The “woman” was replaced by a serious “man,” with profound voice.  “An agent of the Inquisition uncovered video of a witch engaged in congress with unreconstructed spirits – bestial servants of Hell.  The pontiff would have us all look upon this misbegotten creature and ask ourselves, could any temptation ever be worth this?”

He slid away from the screen to reveal mobile phone footage of a forest glade, the floor broken with mossy stones, and upon those stones a wild sexual orgy – with Josefina in the center.

Josefina watched herself.  Baby Peace said, “You were exposed for who you are, for what you love, and the world has vomited you out.  They hate you, Josefina.  Everyone in the world considers you to be the lowest of the low.”

She felt for him in the darkness, not looking down, unable to look away from herself.  But the babies were gone, leaving only moist creatures on her shoulders like fat amphibians.  Frog Noise said, “It is the worst!  The most terrible thing ever!  We should never have done this!”

Shafts of magic light came and went like ghost images on the scene.  Screen Josefina was being vaginally penetrated by a man that looked like Jesus Christ, bits of the cross still nailed to his feet and hands.  She strained hungrily to lap at the labia of a tattooed and pierced woman whose midriff had somehow been replaced with a giant chain link.  That woman was stroking the cock of a skeletal being in flamenco garb, and skull face.  A plump androgyne with little brown bird wings rubbed their micropenis on her belly and mashed her tits.  A goat-headed and goat-legged woman slid a huge dildo in and out of herself, while balancing Josefina’s ass on her thigh.

The man’s stentorian voice resumed, laid over the scene.  “We remind you that these creatures have minds like animals.  This is like having intercourse with hounds and cattle.  Look upon her hideous flesh and despair.”

She looked upon her flesh and felt something else.  She remembered them: The Libertines.  Their minds were not as deep as those of humans, but they were intelligent creatures, with agency and desire, and so much charm.  Spirits of nature incarnate.  They were her friends.  The contrast between living bodies and the Holy See’s fascist dolls had long been used to make the despised look ugly.  To Josefina, the feeling was inverted.

Frog Peace asked, “All the Stars of Weal have seen your true self and found you to be vile.  The expression of this hatred is shame, shame to isolate you from them, to feel like they are safe from ever being like you, in any way.  The gentlest of their number see this shame as a tool of pedagogy, a mirror they can hold to you, help you see that you must change.  Become like them.”

“How can this be real?  It’s impossible for anyone to be hated like this.  Isn’t it?”

The dapper cartoon characters receded in a flourish of gold vines, replaced by a video of the pope.  His features had been run through digital filters to look more clean, unblemished, more kindly – elderly in the only ways that could be accepted by masses swimming in illusion.

And yet his tall hat – his papal crown – was in flames, and his heart was marked out on the cassock with a brutally carved X, leaking blood with every word he spoke.  “This is what awaits the so-called intuitive, the witch.  To rut like a dog, to offend the eye of god, to make filthy his creation.  In the place in your mind where you keep knowledge of all terrible things, seal this experience away.  When this transmission ends,” his head lolled sharply and then snapped back upright, “Pray that your understanding of God’s Will remain strong,” his neck bent as if broken and his eyes rolled up, “That you may live in chaste serenity.”  His tongue fell past his teeth and lips, distended to unnatural lengths.  “God bless you all, and good night.”  His body fell away, and the celluloid melted away to a blank screen and a flickering sound.

“You are the most hated person who has ever lived.”  Was it Peace?  Noise?  Her own voice?

“No,” she replied to herself.  “Now I know who is.”

The projection died and Josefina remained floating in darkness.

–