Kleptoparasite
by Maria Drăgoi
2005 on the outskirts of London. Think Croydon a la Peep Show. A derelict office building built in the 1970s and abandoned (probably asbestos.) Brown glass, the kind you see when you pull into Waterloo on a Southeastern train. The action is set on the fifth floor, which consists of a reception, a room filled with filing cabinets, a few desks, a scanner and a fax machine. It smells like warm carpet, stale tea, and acid-free Manila folders. The furniture is made of shiny brown plastic, stained MDF, and worn out sickly yellow fabrics. Because of the brown glass, the light is murky like instant coffee, and the characters alternate between gloom and occasionally being thrown into sharp relief by the cold fluro lighting. It’s the kind of place with an itchy heat that gets you hot around the collar. The only relief is found in the bathroom, which is a beautiful cool blue, with an antiseptic smell reminiscent of paper towels and wooden tongue depressors. The set is a normal size, except for the scanner, which is enormous. An evening in summer. The action is continuous.
CAST:
Acorn Weevil / A.W. - Fond of the office's wooden fixtures, an invasive species, an immigrant and pest. Lurks by the filing cabinets. Enamoured with P.M. from far away.
Pill Bug / P.B. - Receptionist. Tired, old, inflexible, perpetually smoking. Can no longer curl up due to a bad back. Dislikes A.W. and P.M.
Puss Moth / P.M. - British, IT (and It) girl, wears white furs
Wood Worm / W.W. - Speccy, sweaty, forum dweller. Generally disinterested.
Vodka Beetle / V.B - P.M’s lover from the city, wears a gilet and always has his shoes shined
ACT 1:
You are crouched on a carpet tiled floor surrounded by manila folders. The dust makes your glossy brown
snout itch as flakes jump out of the documents you’re leafing through. You work as the archivist for a debt collecting agency that’s ironically about to go bust itself. You were hired without interview by a secretary whose letters back and forth to you reeked of pathetic desperation and a flirtatiousness thinly veiled as professional amiability. When you arrived for your first shift, she was tarted up in giddy expectation which immediately wilted as you walked through the brown glass doors, knackered hinges prefacing your arrival. Her lipstick encrusted mandibles (which surrounded a set of surprisingly pearly whites) snapped shut at the sight of you, and despite yourself, you felt like you’d let her down. After a tennis match of uncomfortable niceties she introduced you to the two other members of the office: Wood Worm and Puss Moth. Worm, as you’d continue to call him, was the in-house analyst, in charge of tracking down poor sods who’d been late on a mortgage payment or forgotten to pay a medical bill. He would write down their name, address, and the nature of the crime, then fax it over to Puss Moth. She would cross check the details and print out an official copy, slot it into a manila folder, and walk it over to the filing room: your new domain. You would take the folder and stick a red tab on it to indicate the debts inside had yet to be payed, and then file it in the correct section. Once a week someone from another office in the city would come in and collect all the folders with red tabs and drop off the ones from the week before, red tabs now green or orange, indicating the status of the debt. This becomes your routine, and as the weeks pass like sludge in a blocked drain, you begin to look forward to Puss Moth knocking on your door holding a handful of fresh manila and a cup of insipid coffee.
The curtain rises to the sound of plastic keys clacking and the whirr of old desktop computers. The phone is ringing. Pill Bug is sitting at her desk, wearing bright red lipstick which has bled into the creases around her mouth. She smokes a cigarette with surprising vigour and ignores the phone, staring distastefully at Puss Moth instead, who is primping and preening on the other side of the room by the fax machine. Wood Worm is sat at his desk and is the source of the key clicks and mechanical purr. Totally entranced in his work, he only pauses to scrape his greasy antennae back and readjust his specs. Acorn Weevil is rifling through the filing cabinets, isolated from the other characters by a glass wall with plastic blinds.
A.W. [muttering]: Bureaucratic pricks are obsessed with record keeping.
[Voice turning mocking and high pitched with a bad British accent, nasal and affected, growing more theatrical with each adjective listed.]
Fastidiousness is at the heart of our organisation. We must be meticulous, assiduous, sedulous, punctilious, scrupulous! No one is to slip through the cracks.
[Voice returning to normal acrid tone]
They let me in though, didn’t they. Burrowed my way in. The muck in these files would turn anyone’s piss into vinegar. They’d never survive an audit.
[She walks to the glass wall and snaps the blinds open, observing the other characters whose activities haven’t changed. She sighs and walks to the door, opening it with a limp arm and closing it quietly behind. Continues through the office and into the bathroom, head down and scuffling. Pill Bug tuts as she walks past and ashes her cigarette brusquely. Once inside the bathroom she closes the door and presses her snout against the cool blue tiles. She remains in this position while the following scene unfolds]
P.B. [speaking mostly to herself]: They just let anyone into the office these days don’t they! Always muttering away to herself like some nutter – either spit it out or pack it in! Not that you’d be able to understand it anyway, that snout makes her sound like a muffled bassoon.
W.W. [without looking up – tone of politely feigned interest, masking a goad]: Wasn’t it you who hired her?
P.B.: Yes, over the phone. It’s the new company policy – there’s not enough funding for in-person interviews anymore and we end up with…well we end up with people like her! She sounded so normal over the phone.
[Phone rings. Pill Bug ignores it]
W.W.: You picking that up?
[Pill Bug glowers at him and reluctantly picks up the receiver, falling into a conversation which involves mostly nodding and saying “Uh-uh” every now and then. In the bathroom, Acorn Weevil has slouched to the floor and is nervously nibbling her nails.]
Face to face with the blue porcelain you listen to the conversation in the office as prickles of shame roll through you like rivulets. You lean your snout against the condensation of your breath on the tiles. You had known you didn’t belong in the office since you first walked in and Pill Bug’s mandibles snapped shut in confusion and discontent. You had managed a convincing accent on the phone, and had felt proud and lucrative at your hoax – you weren’t here because debt collecting was your passion, you had some business to attend to, and the goal had never been to make friends, but you couldn't help your social instincts getting the better of you. You wanted to be liked – or if not liked then disliked for a trivial characteristic, like vanity or selfishness, instead of an immutable one.
Whilst the cool tile presses grout lines into your cheek your thoughts drift to Puss Moth, and your brain starts to play its familiar anxious game. Did her nicety come from pity or compassion? Or worse, from a feminine social obligation which you had managed to shirk by dint of your foreign status? You couldn’t understand why she worked at the office. She was always going on about her boyfriend, Vodka Beetle, a city finance type who was gonna make it Big. You hated him with a childish fervour even though you’d never met the guy. You imagined she went home to a cushty glass apartment where everything was shiny and expensive, drank champagne and laughed at you and the other poor bastards she worked with.
Despite this concocted myth, you’d never see her leave the office – she was always in before you and left after, reliably dedicated (at least in punctuality) to a job she tried to daydream her way out of consistently. You’d never had a conversation about work with her, only about future plans: one-sided chats that you didn’t mind because you liked the glimpse into her fantasy. An unkind and jealous part of you hoped that her dreams would never materialise – you wanted Puss Moth to stay working at the dreary agency with you, drinking acrid coffee and slowly wilting her wings under fluorescent light. Her small kindnesses done out of pity or grace were your small comforts – made you feel seen – not that you stood a chance.
[Meanwhile, Puss Moth saunters around the office, catching glimpses of herself in every reflective surface. She slowly makes her way to the other side of the stage and stops to admire her wings in the glass wall. Wood Worm, sitting nearby, continues to work. He slobbers as he chews a pencil – this helps him think.]
P.M.: [airily, to no one in particular]: God my wings look good in this light. I think the fluorescence brings out the gold stripes. They shimmer too nicely for this shithole, that’s what Vod says.
[She strokes her antennae lovingly and cocks her head to the side. She sighs at her own touch, pretending it's a lover’s.]
P.M.: Vod says he’s gonna get me out of here once he makes it in the city. He says he won’t see me till then because I’m too distracting. Just sit tight he says, and he’s gonna come and get me when he’s made it big. He’s gonna whisk us away somewhere bright and clean.
W.W. [taking the pencil out of his mouth]: As if.
P.M.: It’s going to be so beautiful. I’ve got this dull ache inside me that goes on like a pulled tendon, like a sprained knee. Every time I move it’s like I’m being pricked all over by a parasitic stinger, but it's heavenly, it gets me all numb and strange. That’s love, Worm. You ever feel like that?
[Acorn Weevil has her ear pressed to the bathroom door and has been listening in. After Puss Moth’s most recent statement she flushes red.]
W.W.: That’s not what love should feel like.
P.M.: Isn’t that how you feel when you pore over those spreadsheets, salivating? Don’t you feel that ache when you’re at home, far away from your keyboard? When you smell the hot ink off the fax machine, doesn’t it get you dizzy? I’ve seen you get hot and bothered over a fresh box of pencils darling.
[This has embarrassed Wood Worm. He bends over his work again and resumes typing, shaking his head a little as he does. Puss Moth crosses the stage again, fluttering around the fax machine and scanner, looking around to see if anyone is paying attention to her. Seeing Pill Bug and Wood Worm engaged in their tasks, she bites her lips and gingerly lifts up the scanner cover.
A column of light shoots up from the scanner. Puss Moth is drawn to it like… well, like a moth to a flame. She shimmers wispily and sways in front of the machine, jaw agape, and speaks as if lost in a reverie.]
P.M. [almost whispering]: I could scan my wings. I could scan my wings to send to Vod. I could be dressed in light. He’d find that sexy.
[She clambers on to the scanner and squeals with delight, kicking her pointed boots up into the air. The glass flattens the fuzz on her wings and the backlight blinds her, so all she can see is her body in the glow.]
P.M.: [drawling, drunk with light] It’s as warm as a cunt. God I wish I could lie in it forever, let it melt me from the inside out.
[She lies silently on the scanner, curling into a foetal position. Its light shines through her, making her look almost translucent. A sense of expectation hangs over the tableau, a kind of edgy giddiness. One gets the sense Puss Moth has been meaning to do this for a long time. She reaches her arm out over the edge to push a button, then, writhing with pleasure, slowly shuts the cover of the scanner over herself. The scene is plunged into darkness.]
ACT 2:
The darkness lingers for a few moments, then, suddenly, a projection illuminates the scene which is frozen. The light scintillates and shakes, coating every surface in a blistering, coruscating skin, crawling with an almost sickening array of colour: brilliant ultramarine, orange cream rising, magenta, the purest ever, and a glowing embryo pink. A dull and even thump is heard around the room. Wood Worm and Pill Bug are frozen at their desks like statues. A few beats of just this, then in a gristly rasp Puss Moth begins to speak from inside the scanner.
P.M.: I want to peel myself away from everything.
I want to stick myself back on adjusted,
But the second stick is never as strong as the first.
The more I peel myself back the harder it is to lie flat.
I keep dreaming I’ve dropped something and I’m chasing it.
My dreams are like my days,
A constant dirge of bleak evenings in the yellow light.
This job’s got me like canines poised over a taught throat.
I act out love like an obsession to distract me from stagnation.
Distracted from distraction by distraction,
Flirting with translucency as relief from the squalor
Made irrevocable by shadows which catch and cling to the real.
In this chimaera lies at last a place of disaffection,
Investing form with lambent stillness
So I might cast my once curdled gaze down clear and neat.
Here, in the light so bright it blinds
I will circle the square and square the circle of my debt.
I’m never getting out.
[Acorn Weevil opens the bathroom door and peeks her snout into the main room of the office. She walks into the scene gingerly, like a mime feigning a break in. The room is hot, and sweat starts to bead at her temples. She approaches the centre of the room, where the scanner glows like a beacon, and sits down next to it. The heat coming off of it starts to singe the tips of her antennae. The room continues to vibrate with colour. Stillness for a few beats, like a trance.]
[As Acorn Weevil begins to speak, she fiddles with her sleeves and the collar of her shirt like a prepubescent boy admitting love for the first time. The dreamlike scene has given her courage, letting loose a tongue padlocked by office triviality.]
A.W.: [slowly, as if lost] Where are you?
P.M.: You’re inside me.
A.W.: [addressing the scanner]: You look beautiful within the light. What can you see inside?
P.M.: [impassive] All of myself splayed open, what I owe and what I’m owed. I’m stretched thin and loose. I’ve woven my myth too thin and it’s starting to get motheaten.
A.W.: How lucid to see it all outstretched. My head is full of cloddy thoughts like wet dirt.
P.M.: What a shame. Let the heat wither your thoughts, ring them out till they’re desiccated. You’ll be dry and light like kindling.
A.W.: Will it feel good?
P.M.: It’ll be delicious.
[Something unfurling, startlingly tender. The dull thumping which has been present throughout grows louder. From above, Acorn Weevil is drenched by a slop of water.]
A.W. [shivering]: It’s freezing.
P.M.: I’m burning up.
[Mist or smoke begins to fill the scene]
P.M.: I’m getting singed. Can’t you smell it? I’m burning up. I’m burning hot.
[The room grows brighter. Crackling is heard from inside the scanner as it starts to glow and shake. Then, suddenly, immediate darkness. A spotlight on the edge of the scanner, out of which Puss Moth’s limp wing hangs crumpled.]
Act 3:
Office lights come on and the scene resumes as if Act 2 hadn’t happened. Pill Bug is still talking on the phone, smoking, and Wood Worm is typing away at his keyboard. Acorn Weevil is slouched by the scanner and rouses herself as if coming out of a dream. She crawls on hands and knees and rubs her eyes, straightens out her tie. Slowly she stands up and looks around, confused. Her clothes are still drenched. She catches a glimpse of the wing poking out of the scanner and her eyes widen.
A.W. [under her breath]: No. [louder] No.
[A beat, then sheets of paper start to flow out of the machine. She rushes towards it and tries to lift the cover, but it’s stuck. She wrestles with it, pushing hard, trying to force it open. She bashes the scanner in frustration.]
P.B. [holding the receiver against her chest to mute it, still on a call]: Stop that! Do I need to teach you how to use a scanner? [muttering] Imbecile.
[Acorn Weevil paces. Pill Bug smushes her cigarette out and blows out a plume of smoke. She slams the receiver down and hauls herself out of her chair with great difficulty, her body seeming reluctant to leave the space it has moulded itself into. She skitters over and raises an eyebrow at the flood of paper pouring out of the machine. Wincing, she stoops down to grab a clump of sheets. She holds it in front of Acorn Weevil’s face]
P.B.: Are you taking the piss?
[As they both stare at the cluster of paper held aloft by Pill Bug’s clenched, arthritic fist, everything falls silent. The image embossed into the paper is of Puss Moth, mouth agape and wings so bright the paper looks like it’s got LEDs embedded in it. The portrait, still hot off the press, is made up of tiny numbers. Paper continues to pour out of the scanner. Acorn Weevil dazedly reaches down to grab more papers. As she rifles through them, Puss Moth’s face morphs grotesquely, slowly becoming overwhelmed by numbers. After a long time, the printer grinds to a halt. The last page printed bears no resemblance to her, and simply says 1000000010000011011011001000000111010110. Pill bug whistles through her teeth.]
P.B.: She did have a lot of debt. Grab me a manila folder will you?
Maria Dragoi is a writer and researcher interested in ideas of agency and possession in institutional spaces. She writes about the way the construction of value hinges at the cruces of ownership, power, and dominance. She is the founder of Zgriptor Journal & Press, and is currently pursuing an MA in Museum Studies at UCL.
