HOW ABOUT SAMA

Since I tend to drift from topic to topic and get sidetracked or distracted, I’ve decided to journal the thought process. My therapist asked me what my top three priorities are. It sounded difficult at first, but my top one is clearly my writing. Then I think about my character, Doris. I think of her as someone shaped by alienation, someone living on the edge of the city. And the city I’m writing her into is Vienna, or let’s assume it is Vienna — because I know it so well and have lived here for quite a long time. Vienna, as I know it, is a small and comfortable city with generous welfare and a certain charm but filled with unsurprising people who no longer inspire me. So, therefore, Doris is also uninspired in this city, still unaware of the myth of “inspiration” itself. She perhaps doesn’t yet know that inspiration doesn’t drive a writer, it only lights the initial spark. Doris has spent a good deal of time in a kind of social hibernation, or let’s simply call it solitude and now she finds herself searching for a new way of living. A way back into life. A way to experience it all over again. After reading A Room of One’s Own, she decided she can’t keep writing from the same familiar desk anymore.

She wanders the city aimlessly, drifting, speaking in fragments with strangers and especially with the one she refers to as “you.” We follow her through these half-conversations as she moves through Vienna. And from there, I suddenly had this idea and for some reason, I wrote it down in the form of “Hypothesis A,” and then never continued to explore whatever Hypothesis B or C might have been. In one of these conversations, she casually confesses that she has done something unspeakable, and yet it has somehow triggered an immense, impulsive energy in her writing. We don’t really know whether she is speaking to an actual person, or to the idea of a person, since she is often alone and talking out loud to herself. A little later, we see her in a bar that looks like Crypt. There she meets a girl who introduces herself as Darling. Darling bluntly announces that she works as a waitress in a swinger club. She has long Hello Kitty nails and is bubbly, but also a little out of this world. She is the liberated kind who sometimes wonders what exactly she has been liberated from. She is both goofy and confidently self-assured. She’s a Berliner. Very quickly, Doris becomes electrified by this new sensibility. She knows instantly that Darling is perfect for her. New perspectives, she thinks. Darling comments on Doris’ trench coat, or rather, she fully compliments it, the trench coat Doris recently bought and hasn’t taken off since. It makes the world feel slightly different. She can’t explain how, exactly, but when she wears it she feels as if her legs have grown longer, or as if the ground has tilted upwards to meet her. Let’s say she’s acquired “tall-person perspective.” After two drinks, Darling offers to take Doris back to her apartment on her bike. Doris sits on the back, holding on, and they ride through the city to Darling’s place. Inside: glorious kitsch. Porcelain dogs and cats everywhere, watching them quietly from the shelves.

Darling wiggles her tongue, and a silver piercing flashes in her mouth. She casually tells Doris that she also has one on her clit. The level of uncensored honesty in her both shocks and excites Doris. Darling is definitely a fun girl who sometimes says really dumb things, but she’s very real, Doris thinks, She’s different. Darling disappears into the kitchen, fixes another drink for both of them, and tells Doris she should get her nipple pierced just now. Doris says she likes the idea, she really does, but her nipples are too sensitive, and her pain tolerance is basically zero. Then, suddenly, Darling slaps Doris hard across the face, with an alluring smile. Doris’ mouth falls open.

“Did you just slap me, bitch?”

“Yeah. See? You can take it.”

They talk about hygiene, and symmetry! Darling explains that waitressing for the swinger club is only her side hustle. Her main work is tattooing and piercing. She shows Doris her sketchbook, and they drink another glass of absinthe. Then Doris says, “Okay. One nipple. Fine.” They discuss symmetry again, and whether it might actually be more interesting to have just one nipple pierced, one touched, one untouched. Then Darling threads the needle through Doris’ pink flesh so quickly that Doris almost blacks out for a moment. And for the first time, a new sensation opens inside her, like an alleyway in her body she didn’t know existed. The pain is intense but brief, and as she recovers from that small blackout, the feeling is strangely deep and wholesome, like a sexual release.

“That’s cool,” Doris says. “So,… tell me about your job. Unpack it.”

“You know, it’s sort of fun. I get great tips every time I work. But you do get desensitized.”

Then Darling asks, “So what do you do?”

“Mostly I just walk around, write, and talk to people.”

“That’s pretty cool though!”

Darling asks more about the writing, but Doris struggles to give a clear explanation of her plot. So Darling says: “Please, please, please, don’t write another novel where women are victims of violence or abuse. There has to be more to women than their trauma.”

Doris is slightly taken aback. “What? But don’t you think that’s the reality?”

“Yes, it is. But that one slice of women’s lives has been commodified. We’re always the image-bearers, the sufferers, the victims, always angry, always harmed.”

Darling doesn’t express it in the most articulate way, and it doesn’t strike Doris as particularly profound, but still, she can’t deny Darling probably has a point. So the next scene is Darling, either already at work or heading there, when she starts to think someone might be following her. Not in a dramatic way. More in a “Did I just see that guy twice?” way. Then she shrugs and keeps moving. Once she gets to work, everything becomes very mechanical. She prepares trays of condoms. She waves goodbye to the cleaning crew. She slices oranges and lemons like a robot bartender. She checks the reservation list. She checks the playlist. She keeps checking things because that’s what you do when you have a real job. Eventually the club starts filling up, and once the swinger club is, let’s say, fully swinging, Darling just keeps working on autopilot. She takes drink orders in and out while people are literally having s*x everywhere. She gets big tips. She smiles, thanks them, makes another drink. And another. And another. Until the eternal loop of the shift finally ends. Guests are absolutely not allowed to flirt with, touch, or even mildly vibe-check the staff. There are two security guards whose job is to swoop in the second anyone forgets that rule. So Darling actually feels very safe. It’s weirdly one of the safest places she’s ever worked. She’s wearing loose white cargo pants and a cropped T-shirt that says: “Hating me doesn’t make you prettier,” with the sentence growing out of a red rose! 🥀

And yes, the description is intentionally flat, because that’s exactly how Darling experiences her job. Just: task next task nipples, condoms, playlist go home. After work, she walks back through the city and, again, gets the feeling someone might be following her. Then she immediately tells herself: You’re being ridiculous. There is no one. Relax, you paranoid idiot. And she keeps walking. Darling goes back to the same bar, the one that looks like Crypt, to chill the fuck out after work. And of course Doris is there, like fate or lazy writing. She’s waiting for her slice of fun, too. Wonderful. Meanwhile, Doris has been writing like a possessed monk with one swollen nipple. When Darling spots her sitting across the bar, she lights up immediately. Doris is secretly way more excited than Darling, but on the outside she behaves like Lily from Duolingo, extremely blasé but smiling just enough to show her nice teeth! She casually mentions that her nipple is “kind of swollen,” and also admits she was hoping to find Darling here, since last night she was so out of her brain she forgot to ask for her number. So they talk. Darling says she’s in the mood for karaoke at Luna City. So they head to the mall, to this karaoke place that looks like a stretched limousine. They sing Schlager and 2000s hits until the world around them becomes cotton candy. Afterwards, they somehow end up at Darling’s apartment again. This keeps happening. The porcelain dogs and cats are still there, judging. They smoke a little joint and talk until the conversation dissolves into a nappy. Later, we expect Darling to wake up for extremely mundane reasons, water, pee, cat duties, whatever. Her cat is meowing nonstop, so she goes to pet her. But when she stands up, she feels dizzy, and then a man grabs her from behind and strangles her.

He whispers: “I’m not going to hurt you if you don’t scream.”

Which makes absolutely no sense but okay.

His voice is weirdly gentle. He explains, very romantically, of course, that he loves her. He and his wife have been fantasizing about her for ages. They go to the swinger club all the time, but since they’re not allowed to talk to the waitresses, they had to find… alternate methods. Darling starts screaming. Doris, meanwhile, is in deep REM sleep and absolutely useless until the last second. But finally Darling somehow manages to claw the guy with her long Hello Kitty nails, then whacks him in the head with one of the porcelain animals. He drops instantly. Cold. On the floor. But her cat, Sissy, sprints out the window like a furry missile. Doris is being shaken hard in her sleep. She jolts up in the dark and blinks a few times.

“What the hell is happening?”

She is still stunned and has no idea why Darling is screaming in the middle of the night. Then Darling slaps her across the face with bloody hands and switches on the lamp. Doris finally focuses. Darling is covered in blood. Her T-shirt is torn. The print, “Hating me doesn’t make you prettier,” is ripped open, and the rose on it now looks like it is bleeding too.

“What happened, Darling?”

In a shaky, stuttering voice, sniffing her nose, Darling manages a few broken pieces. “This guy… he was strangling me. He was following me. I thought I was paranoid. He is a customer from the swinger club.”

“Please, talk in full sentences.”

“He is lying on the floor,… my cat ran out too. Sissy. Poor Sissy.”

We see a perfectly arranged constellation of objects on the dinner table, like a fashion advertisement where the entire contents of a bag are laid out and displayed. This is how they begin to process the situation: by looking at the man’s belongings as if they’re museum artifacts.Doris and Darling are standing over the table, examining everything in a slow, slightly dumbfounded way.

They read his name on the ID: something like Magister Arnold Edigger, almost like Heidegger, but without an H. His keys are dangling from a designer chain. His phone is strangely one of those old models without a camera. They keep staring!

“This fucking sicko has a wife too.”

There is cash on the table. Four hundred euros. All in fifties. Doris says, “We need to think fast, Darling. What are we going to do? Should we call your boss? Should we call someone we know? Anyone?

“Let me think. Let me think for a second. I thought about my mom for a moment. But she doesn’t handle stuff like this very well. We need a car though.”

“A car to where?”

“It’s so funny. I’m thinking about that book you told me about. The Persian writer. The pen case Painter.”

Doris goes ice cold. “Darling. You don’t mean what I think you mean.”

“I know. I KNOW. It’s horrible. It’s horrible.”

“No. No. There are other ways. We can get him out of here. Like in movies. Wrap him in a rug. Take him downstairs. Where’s your mom’s car?”

“Fuck. I don’t know. Okay. We blind owl the situation. We chop him up. We put him into suitcases. We Uber to my mom’s place. I grab the key to her car. Then we drive to the countryside.”

“It’s two in the morning, Darling.”

“I CAN’T! Darling screams! Do not chicken out on me now. She pinches the sore nipple. You’ve read the book, instruct us.”

At this point Darling should obviously have a weird favorite song. Something she sang at karaoke. And now she hums it very lightly while she performs the extremely gruesome and illegal act of cutting the man’s body into pieces. And somehow the scene becomes… aesthetic. Almost beautiful in a terrible way. Everything laid out with the same care as the table of objects earlier. Like a product commercial. A still life of chaos. They pack the pieces into luggage. They call an Uber. The Uber drops them at Darling’s mother’s house. Darling finds the key. The garage door opens.

A Chevrolet Chevelle rolls out.

Red.

No wait. Blue.

Doris stands there in awe. In her head: This is the perfect story. This is literally the best material I’ve ever had in my life. They drive off into the night. The vibe is weirdly good. Like an old arthouse horror road movie where nobody is fully sure what genre they’re in. Meanwhile, somewhere else, in a dim little room, the wife sits in an armchair, rocking slowly. She pets a cat that looks like Sissy and mutters dark things into the air. Is she the wife?

And honestly, I don’t know where I’m going with this….. Doris isn’t sure if she’s inspired or trapped. She keeps thinking of escape scenarios. She thinks about dropping Darling somewhere at the border and disappearing. But instead, Darling eventually drops Doris in the middle of nowhere, somewhere between Vienna and Slovakia, and drives off alone. Doris finds herself in a small border town. She checks into a guesthouse under a mysterious name. She spends a few panic-filled nights there until her nipple heals. We don’t really know what happens. Not exactly. All we know is that Doris is trying to find the right mixture of primitiveness and civilization. The right balance between living and hiding. And just as suddenly as Darling had appeared in her life, she disappears again. As if she had only ever been passing through. This is all the brain juice, and the fingers are curved. What are Hypothesis B and C?