Beautiful You: A Novel

  Penny weighed the relic in her palm. It saddened her to think of her own mother nude and spread-eagled, struggling against her bonds in a gritty Nebraska attic. Gibbering in the throes of sexual cold turkey, she’d be writhing against the sweat-soaked sheets like a feverish wild animal. The image filled Penny with despair.

  When the girl reached to return the treasure, the Baba did not extend her hand to accept it. Instead she arched her back and pushed forward her ancient pubis. Sensing what the sex crafter desired, Penny spit on the finger to moisten it, and she aimed its gnarled tip at the center of the snowy thatch. As she boldly pressed it home the older woman gasped with enjoyment.

  “This is what I must instill in you,” vowed the ancient. “I saved myself by channeling Max’s contempt back to its source. When I awoke he was gone, the devil, and many of my favorite instruments were missing with him.” What Max hadn’t stolen he’d re-created from memory—the herbal recipes, for instance, for his unholy salves and enemas. “The way a bullet ricochets off a rock. The way an echo resounds off of a canyon wall. You must redirect his energy.”

  On one of her last dwindling days in the cave, Penny set aside her tea and searched among the meatless bones and castoff eggshells that covered the stone floor. The Baba would be away foraging for some time, and Penny needed to right a grievous wrong. After rooting through the litter, Penny located what she needed: her mobile phone. An icon on the screen showed that a few moments of power were left in the battery. She dialed a New York City number stored in the phone’s memory.

  On the first ring a man answered. “Brenda?” He sounded hoarse, as if from months of weeping.

  Sadly, Penny replied, “No.” Compassionately, she explained, “we met several weeks ago—”

  “In Central Park,” he affirmed. He sounded crushed, the poor wretch. His fiancée was still among the millions of women who’d dropped out of society.

  Penny had to remind herself why she’d called. She’d wanted to apologize and to accept at least partial responsibility for the scourge of Beautiful You. And to promise that she’d do everything within her power to remedy the crisis. She wanted to assure this suffering, lovelorn stranger that she was almost ready to do battle with Cornelius Linus Maxwell. Soon she’d be a full-fledged sex witch, powerful enough to confront and expose Max’s nanobot conspiracy. She wanted her kind words to wrap this pitiful man in a comforting cocoon. But at the crucial moment, her courage failed. Instead, she asked, “What’s your name?”

  Over the phone, the man sniffed. He said, “Yuri.” His quavering voice calmed and he asked, “What’s yours?” Suddenly his question had an odd, pointed quality to it.

  Penny considered saying her real name. She stared guiltily out the cave’s mouth, her eyes following the graceful path of a bird against the blue Nepalese sky. Eventually, she said, “I’m Shirley.”

  A longer silence followed before the man repeated, “Shirley.” His voice now had a hard edge to it. “Shirley, why does my phone’s caller ID say ‘Penny Harrigan’?”

  Caught in a lie, Penny froze, speechless and mortified. Her heart rate sped up to 165 beats per minute.

  “Don’t fool yourself,” the man, Yuri, cruelly taunted. “I read the National Enquirer!” His tone was steeped in bitterness. “I know Penny Harrigan is claiming ownership of the Beautiful You patents! I saw on the news that you’re appearing in court next week!” He brayed a hysterical laugh. “You stole my Brenda from me! You stole the wives from millions of husbands and the mothers from millions of children!”

  His ranting had grown so loud Penny was forced to hold the phone at arm’s length. The cavern echoed with his threats. She could hear the murderous scorn in his voice. It was unmistakable.

  Enraged, Yuri screamed, “Every red-blooded man in New York dreams of killing you!”

  Penny’s phone beeped to signal that its battery was failing.

  “If you dare to show your face at the patent-ownership trial,” Yuri vowed, “we will tear you limb from limb. Tonight … tonight we will go to burn down your house—”

  His threat knocked the wind from Penny. Monique, she realized. Monique was alone, incapacitated in her bedroom, equipped with only Pop-Tarts and bottled water. Penny needed to call and warn her. If an angry mob set fire to the town house, Monique would be burned alive.

  That was when the telephone battery chose to go dead.

  On her long flight from Nepal back to New York, Penny thought of her best friend. When she considered Monique, once so vibrant, now slavishly diddling herself in a darkened, locked room, using a human coccyx modeled out of some space-age polymer, she wanted to cry. Poor Monique with her abused, blistered privates, she was no doubt hovering in some twilight where pleasure yielded to death. Penny prayed silently to the ancient tantric gods that her lovable roommate still drew breath.

  To pass the time during the lengthy trip, she practiced the self-satisfaction exercises the Baba had relentlessly drilled into her. She coaxed her hindquarters to the brink of an orgasm, and then replaced that thrilling sensation with thoughts of sincere love for her dad. By tweaking her nipples, she brought herself to the verge of hyperventilating, and then quickly redirected that mounting passion to dreamy thoughts of Abyssinian kittens.

  Throughout their days together, the crone had selected erotic weapons seemingly at random from those strewn around the caves. Those rude assemblages of bone and stone and feathers, each she used as a wedge or lever to breach even Penny’s most inaccessible tantric hot spots. Once she’d gained access, the witch had repeatedly stimulated Penny to lunatic arousal, always encouraging her to vent the enjoyment in physical thrashing and joyous shouts of vile language. Following each session, she would sponge the sweat from Penny’s body using handfuls of fragrant mosses.

  Together they would drink lichen tea, and Baba Gray-Beard would expound on the theory that pleasure was a deathless energy that can be directed and channeled. Pleasure, she explained, was attracted to those people who’d trained their receptive organs to welcome it. But, she warned, pleasure could not be held or collected. It must flow through its target, or that target would die.

  Brandishing a ram’s horn, which she had augmented with many thrill-inducing pebbles and herbal oils, the witch motioned for Penny to lie back, saying, “Shall we recommence your lessons, my dear?”

  It was true. Penny’s 136 days in Paris with Max had taught her about pleasure without love. But her weeks cloistered in the Baba’s dank cavern had taught her that such profound ecstasy could coexist with an even stronger affection. The depth of her attachment to the witch-woman surprised even Penny. She had no idea of it until the final morning she awoke in their shared bed of dried plant matter and realized she had to return to the outside world.

  That morning, Penny had quietly breakfasted on a porridge of coarsely milled snakes. She’d packed her few belongings into a commodious sheep’s bladder. Penny had lived day-to-day naked for so long that her Norma Kamali pantsuit felt strange against her body. She’d knelt to kiss the sleeping Baba good-bye. Then she’d begun her harrowing predawn descent down the sheer cliff faces of Everest.

  Now, seated alone aboard a chartered private jet, attired head to toe in scrumptious Versace, Penny sipped tea she’d steeped using twigs and yak milk the lamia had gathered. She’d checked her e-mail and found that her patent-rights trial was set to begin in a few days. Her first step in her war against Max would be to contest his exclusive ownership of the Beautiful You designs. She’d force him to confront her, and they would do battle in a public court of law. If she lost, she would be dead. Death held no fear for her, only the hope that she’d someday be reunited with Baba Gray-Beard in an eternity of pleasure.

  And if she, Penny Harrigan, won her audacious battle? If she won, and the world was truly liberated from the conspiracy of C. Linus Maxwell, then she would return to live as the old hag had lived: in that isolated cliff-side cavern, inventing endless means to pleasure herself and instructing those students who sou
ght her guidance.

  Returning to her Upper East Side town house, Penny found the frosted-glass front door marred by hooligans. Using bright red spray paint, someone had written, “Penny Harrigan Sucks Cocks in Hell!!!” in foot-high letters. The words stretched to deface the elegant stonework facade on either side of the doorway. Long drips ran down from each letter like horror-movie special effects. As she mounted the porch steps she saw that the white-marble stoop was cluttered with stuffed dolls. Roughly the size of baby dolls, each effigy wore miniature Salvatore Ferragamo pumps. Their facial features were stitched and quilted to closely resemble Penny’s face. Careful embroidery had given them her warm brown eyes and pink pouting lips. It was unsettling to see how all the dolls were mutilated and bristling with pins. Penny gasped and shuddered, chilled by a realization: These were voodoo dolls.

  Heaped among the evil artifacts were a number of decomposing chickens, their throats messily cut, their feathers splashed with gore. Their glassy avian eyes stared back at Penny accusingly. They’d clearly been sacrificed on the spot. The threshold of her home had become an altar for intense hatred. Drawn to the spilled blood were her old nemeses, black houseflies. They hovered above the stubs of burned candles.

  Around her, the wail of fire engines echoed from every direction. A pall of black smoke blocked the sky, the stench of it making her cough. A rocket screamed by overhead, like military ordnance, tracing a low arc in the direction of Midtown. It disappeared behind some buildings. A muffled blast followed. The city had become, inexplicably, a battlefield.

  Instantly, Penny thought of Monique.

  Her roommate and best friend would’ve been upstairs when whoever had laid siege to the town house. A rush of loving concern displaced Penny’s fear, and she quickly kicked aside the elements of the grotesque still life. She fitted her key into the lock.

  Inside, broken glass crunched under every step of her Kate Spade kitten heels. The vandals had broken the panes of several windows. Their ammunition—rocks wrapped in paper scrawled with angry messages—lay in the shards. Thank goodness stout security grilles of ornately cast bronze had prevented the attackers from bodily entering.

  Rushing up the stairs two steps at a time, Penny shouted, “Monique? Monique, are you okay?”

  She wielded a fire ax to bust down the locked door of her roommate’s bedroom. Within she found her once free-spirited friend lying across the sodden mattress of her bed, near death. The room stank of drool and stale blueberry Pop-Tarts. Penny nursed the girl, holding a cup of lichen tea to her chapped lips. If the batteries in her Beautiful You products had not failed from overuse, Monique would’ve died of exhaustion and dehydration long ago. As it was, the once sassy girl responded with hardly a whimper as Penny wiped her frail limbs with a salve made from eagle glands and rich reindeer tallow.

  Penny spoon-fed the crippled girl a broth of plover eggs and fermented marrow. When her fallen comrade tried to speak, Penny hushed her. “You mustn’t feel ashamed of your hideously degraded circumstances,” she said. “You were the victim of primitive pleasures no untrained female could resist.”

  Penny carried her famished, unresponsive housemate to the media room and arranged her limp form in a comfortable lounge chair. As the two young ladies had done while watching the Academy Awards, Penny popped popcorn and lavished it with salt and butter. She hand-fed Monique kernels, slowly, placing them between the girl’s chapped lips as, tonight, together, they watched CNN coverage of the world news.

  Spread before them on the high-definition, seventy-two-inch plasma flat-screen was a panorama of global unrest. War and natural disasters were no longer the top stories. The Beautiful You effect had trumped every misfortune. Some men were fast forging new roles for themselves in this rapidly evolving world. Most were not.

  Among the first group were slimy lotharios. Self-proclaimed intimacy coaches warned that women who succumbed to Beautiful You products would be unhappy with the ordinary machinations of a human sexual partner. However, any male who could wield a Rotating Relaxation Rod, product number 3447, such a man was never lacking for the companionship of the fairer sex. The cunning pickup line was no longer, “Would you like to see my etchings?” For a successful come-on, a would-be lover need only mention that he possessed one of the rarer BY products. Any laborer who could utilize a power drill or chain saw, he could easily operate the Jiggle Whip or the Trembling Love Snake. Thus, displaced workers from all the construction trades were finding new careers demonstrating Maxwell’s personal care tools. In the retail shops. Or selling them door-to-door.

  The CNN cameras panned across the showroom inside the Fifth Avenue store. Business was brisk as suave salesmen plied the female shoppers with products. And not just products, there were pricey warranties to sell. And financing schemes, the newscaster explained. Analysts claimed that DataMicroCom was making big money on the financing charges that customers accrued using their bright pink charge cards. Any desperate, libidinous lady wandering into that den of unscrupulous cads, Penny realized, she wouldn’t stand a chance! It was the career that every male in the city hotly coveted.

  On television, the scene changed. The cameras displayed the miles-long line of shoppers outside the flagship store. Among them, Penny recognized the sales associate from Bonwit Teller, her elegant good looks gone, replaced by a gap-toothed, slack-jawed zombie woman. Likewise, Kwan Qxi and Esperanza, Penny’s former roommates, were there, bleary-eyed and clutching well-worn bright pink credit cards.

  In recent weeks, according to CNN, the gender composition of the shoppers had shifted. Now an almost equal number of men stood waiting among the women. These were the profiteers.

  Among the fastest to adapt, these usurious men sought to buy as many of the new products as possible. They were scalpers who, in turn, sold the toys to females at an astronomical markup. For rich women, crippled women, impatient gals, anyone who couldn’t or wouldn’t wait in the out-of-doors, it was an expensive godsend. Vibrators and dildos had become the world’s new form of underground currency. No day passed without reports of Beautiful You trucks being hijacked for their valuable cargos. Warehouses were looted. Security guards assassinated in drive-by shootings. Deliveries of new stock arrived at stores by armored car. Recent purchasers were targeted by street thugs, who openly stole the merchandise at gunpoint for resale on the black market.

  Rival gangs fought over turf. Slave-labor sweatshops flooded the market with counterfeit products that failed to satisfy.

  To Penny, the whole situation seemed almost as crazy as Beanie Babies or those Michael Jordan shoes had been. Almost.

  As Monique began to listlessly gum her mouthful of calorie-rich corn, the CNN reporter ascended in a helicopter from midtown Manhattan and slowly made his way northward toward a huge plume of black smoke that rose from the Bronx. The New York below them looked, to Penny, like some contested third-world killing field. Mortar rounds seemed to jet across the neighborhoods, igniting fires in high-rise buildings. Police cars and ambulances bathed the streets in flashing red lights. Traffic was gridlocked by burning vehicles.

  The camera shot hovered above East One Twenty-second Street, moving steadily toward the Harlem River Drive, slowly crossing into the Bronx. Suspended high above the grid of streets, the helicopter swooped and tilted, dodging some kind of rocket or missile that came jetting directly at it. The weapon looked to be about the size of a bazooka shell. It blazed with flames and trailed an arc of black smoke. Another projectile raced directly at the chopper, and the pilot dived to avoid it.

  On the media room television, the skies of the city were crisscrossed with these flaming warheads. Wherever they landed, each burst like an incendiary bomb, igniting buildings, cars, and trees. Turning the island into a war zone. By following the black arc of each, Penny could trace them all back to the source of the black plume.

  The smoke rose from the center of Yankee Stadium. There, a massive fire appeared to be raging on the pitcher’s mound.

  The aeria
l shot cut to a ground-level news crew broadcasting from the infield. The scene was chaos as mobs of people caroused. Everyone within sight was male, and most wore Promise Keepers T-shirts. Penny could discern long chains of men. These chains snaked toward the bonfire from every direction, spreading to fill the stadium like the spokes of a wheel. They were all-male versions of the customer lines that snaked away from every Beautiful You retailer in the world.

  The frenzied men were singing a song Penny recognized from childhood. It was the religious hymn “Kumbaya.” Their measured, chain-gang movements were timed to the rhythm of the melody while they passed objects hand to hand. As each item reached the fire it was tossed into the flames.

  The cameras drew closer, and Penny witnessed what looked like any male’s vision of hell. Innumerable multitudes of severed penises were writhing in the conflagration. Phalluses squirmed in the intense heat, blistering and twisting as if in prolonged torment. Aflame, some suffering man-parts crept, inchworm-like, from the fire as if attempting to escape to safety. They flopped. Flipped. Jumped and twitched. As if in agony. These were caught by the surrounding men and summarily flung back to their doom. Still other dongs erupted in the heat, spouting pink molten lava.

  They were all Beautiful You products, Penny recognized. The figures who capered and sang like savages around the inferno, they were men sacrificing their common rivals. As generations before them had torched books and disco records, these men yelped in cathartic abandon, passing the prods and love wands man to man, until they were heaped onto the bubbling, spitting flames. The stench and black smoke of this pyre hung over the streets, acrid as the poisonous reek of an unending tire fire.

  Among the phalluses were withering Dragonflies and exploding douches. No product was overlooked. Batteries burst with a high-pitched squeal like butchered baby rabbits.