Beautiful You: A Novel, Page 21

  As Max’s finger hovered over the buttons of a global massacre, Penny announced, “I know about the cloning research. I know that Max has implanted cloned embryos of himself in every user of Beautiful You products, and soon he’ll trigger them all to begin gestation.” She had the attention of the entire cathedral as she shouted, “The same nanobots that bring pleasure and pain to Max’s slaves, those same tiny robots will suppress the immune function that might otherwise reject these foreign fetuses. That army of microscopic robots will protect and defend those fetuses so that hundreds of millions of fertile women will give birth to exact copies of Cornelius Linus Maxwell!”

  By the end of her short speech Penny was screaming her words. Wildly waving her wedding bouquet about. As she fell silent, the assembled crowds stared at her in disbelief. Penny, in her fluffy, flouncy gown, waited for the reaction of outrage. She readied herself for Max to begin tormenting her with a few keystrokes. None of that happened.

  The Baba turned clouded eyes on her. The old woman tilted her head quizzically and said, “What are you talking about, my dear? That’s not it at all.”

  Somewhere, someone in the cavernous church giggled.

  “Another word,” Max threatened, “and I’ll deliver more suffering than you people can imagine!”

  Heedless, Baba Gray-Beard ventured, “The dress you’re wearing, Penny Harrigan, it was her dress twenty-five years ago. It’s the wedding gown Max’s long-dead wife wore when she was your exact age!” Her words echoed around the huge stone chapel. “Ask your groom why that dress is such a perfect fit!”

  The dress had been an exact fit. From the first time Penny tried it on, the gown had felt as if it were made for her.

  Before she could ponder this miracle another moment, Max fingered his device. Unseen, a satellite relayed the signal, and Penny felt a searing jolt of pain shoot through her. Likewise, every female wedding guest shrieked and slumped to the cold floor. Only the Baba remained upright, staring defiantly into Max’s outraged eyes. “Tell the girl,” she hissed. “She must know the destiny she was born to fulfill.”

  “Never,” Max cried.

  Penny was only vaguely aware that the Baba had closed the distance between herself and Maxwell. The two adversaries circled each other, the tuxedo-clad dandy and the emaciated skeleton. Maxwell stashed the control box in the inside pocket of his tux jacket and raised both his empty hands menacingly, ready to lunge at the hag’s next words.

  The bishop stood over Penny, blushing furiously as she wriggled at his feet, writhing in agony and sensual pleasure, near crazed, with a lunatic’s guttural yammering streaming from her mouth.

  “You, little Penny,” the Baba shouted. “You must reflect his evil energy. It was no accident that you met Maxwell. Only you can defeat him!”

  No sooner had she muttered those words than Max sprang forward, grabbing Baba Gray-Beard around her desiccated throat and saying, “Die, wicked sorceress!”

  Even as she gasped for her next breath, the Baba said, “Look! Look in his notebook at a date nine months before you were born, Penny!” Her voice reduced to a garbled whisper, she said, “Look and see who he was seducing.…”

  Penny rolled around in the fluff of her vast wedding dress. She could sense the nanobots scooting about in her veins. She wanted to slice her arteries open and strain her blood clean. The robots would never be at peace. She’d never be free of them. Maxwell’s little sentries were alive and inflicting their pain from the inside.

  Her neck crushed in Max’s cold hands, the Baba was dying. After two centuries of coaching pilgrims to sexual enlightenment, the gentle yogi was expiring in the grip of her greatest pupil. Even as the hands throttled her windpipe, she croaked, “Child, you must rebound his energy. Channel it through yourself and return it with greater force!” She whispered, “No mirror is ever burned by the rays from even the hottest sun!”

  To displace the assault of false pleasure, Penny concentrated on her close-knit family and their simple Lutheran faith. She savored the real friendship that had formed between herself and Monique. Penny’s mind embraced everything she truly loved in the world. Butter brickle ice cream. Ron Howard. Richard Thomas. With steady meditating, Penny’s consciousness began to deflect the signals from Max’s control box. The teeming nanobots gradually trickled downward, crowding to a halt within her waiting pelvis.

  Simultaneously, a shrill whistle filled the church. Faint at first, the sound grew in strength. The whistle increased to become a siren, a wailing of air-raid volume. The siren built to a bullhorn, so loud it threatened to scramble the brains of everyone present. The guests, the bishop, every person in the cavernous church clamped their hands over their ears and cowered in pain.

  Penny was its source. Muffled only by her skirts and crinolines, the trumpeting sound was being emitted from between her legs. It echoed off the masonry walls. The towering stained-glass windows rattled. As trumpets had toppled the great walls of Jericho, thin cracks opened between the cathedral’s stones. A dust of mortar drifted down. As the sound built to thunder it exploded through her satin and petticoats, spraying sequins and seed pearls like shrapnel. Shredded lace flew like countless flakes of white confetti, exposing the seat of the bride’s power.

  Penny focused on the love she felt for the great Baba, and the edges of her sex flared outward, blasting forth a huge noise. It blared, a sonic cannon. The blast extinguished the sanctuary candles.

  Without warning, the cathedral’s great rose window exploded. Not outward. The window burst inward, pelting the wedding party with razor-sharp fragments of red, blue, and green glass, shattered by something flying bullet-fast from the direction of Yankee Stadium.

  Like a lightning bolt … a ball of fire … a molten flaming mass of latex and batteries shot across the vast length of the great sanctuary. With the force of a shotgun blast, this murderous rocket smote Max squarely in the tailored inseam of his designer formalwear. This searing-hot mortar round of burning personal care products, it tore into the groom’s private man-parts, doubling him in half at the waist and toppling him backward.

  The centuries-old lamia was dead.

  Maxwell, he’d been mortally wounded by a weapon from his own arsenal of space-age pleasure tools—an immolating phallus that had launched itself from the Promise Keepers’ bonfire! Blood flowed steadily from the torn crotch of his tuxedo. Penny didn’t need to look closer to know his genitals were obliterated. Like a character in some Ernest Hemingway book she’d been required to read in high school, his private junk was blown to bits by the blast. Baba Gray-Beard was dead and Max was dying.

  The nanobots within her ceased their torment. Slowly Penny and the other women in the church struggled to their feet, blinking dazed eyes. They shook their disarrayed hair out of their faces and opened their purses to begin the long, difficult task of repairing their makeup. And their lives.

  The frigid fingers of a dying hand closed around Penny’s ankle. It was Max, looking up at her with pleading eyes. His already pale face was bled paper-white, and his lips moved to form words. “Listen,” he said. “Look.” With his free hand he reached into his jacket pocket and produced a ragged scrap of newsprint. “For you,” he said, and held it for her to take.

  Penny knelt and accepted it: a newspaper clipping dated exactly thirty years ago, to the day. It had been saved from the National Enquirer. Prominently featured was a black-and-white photograph. It was grainy and faded by the years, but it was like looking into a mirror. It was her face, wearing the same veil and gown she now wore. It was a wedding announcement. Cornelius Linus Maxwell was to marry Phoebe Bradshaw. Stapled to that was a second newspaper article, an obituary dated exactly 136 days later. The young Mrs. Corny Maxwell had died from an allergic reaction to shellfish.

  Fear shadowed Penny’s heart. She herself was allergic to shellfish. Their first dinner at Chez Romaine, when she’d almost ordered scallop sushi, Max had stopped her. Somehow Max had also known about her severe allergy.

 
; “My wife,” he said. Where his penis and testicles had once dangled, Penny saw that there was only a rude wound gushing blood. The same dying hand that had presented the articles now offered his ubiquitous notebook; holding it open to a specific page, he said, “ ‘Test subject number eleven forty-eight, Myrtle Harrigan, March twenty-fourth, 19—. Place: Shippee, Nebraska …’ ”

  Penny’s mother sobbed quietly as Maxwell read aloud the details of their tryst. Twenty-five years earlier, she had been a small-town newlywed attending a pie social at the local grange hall. In untypically gallant language Max had recorded, “ ‘The test subject seemed bereft as she confided in me about her inability to bear a child. A stranger in town, I must’ve seemed a safe person with whom to unburden her heart.’ ” A generation ago, this young Nebraskan woman had spilled out her secret fears to Max just as Penny would on their first date at Chez Romaine. “ ‘The woman was a hundred and sixty-eight centimeters in height, approximately fifty-four kilograms in weight—’ ”

  A distance away from where Max held his notebook, recounting his past, Penny’s weeping mother lifted her face from a handful of tissues and interrupted: “I was only fifty-one kilograms!”

  Dying, Max continued. “ ‘In my heart I knew I could do more for this poor, barren woman than provoke her to a gut-wrenching orgasm. It was within my power to give her the baby she so badly wanted.’ ”

  He described how he’d seduced this latest test subject over a slice of pumpkin pie. Her husband was away, attending a Promise Keepers weekend retreat. It took very little charm to persuade this lonely young housewife. Max had consummated the evening in the backseat of his rented Ford Explorer.

  “ ‘When her heart rate reached one hundred and sixty-three bpms,’ ” Max announced flatly, “ ‘I implanted a cloned zygote along with the latest generation of nanobots needed to ensure its survival.’ ”

  Sobbing, Penny’s mom insisted, “I’ve never weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds, even after you got me pregnant!”

  Nine months later, Penny had been born. A seeming miracle.

  From his anguished expression Penny knew her father had no idea. Neither of her parents had suspected that they’d played a part in Max’s plan to replicate his long-deceased wife. They’d innocently harbored the experiment of a fiend. He could’ve planted his embryo in any of the many women he’d romanced. He could’ve implanted embryos in all of them.

  More troubling to Penny was the real possibility that she wasn’t herself. It was bad enough that impulses were being beamed to her, prompting the arousal of her pleasure centers. Now her very DNA was secondhand, bequeathed to her by a madman genius who yearned to be reunited with his beloved. She, Penny Harrigan, was the genetically resurrected Phoebe Maxwell.

  In that shocked, otherwise silent moment, one voice rang out. As spunky as ever, Monique squealed, “Omaha girl! Yikes!”

  Farther back in the church, Esperanza, once more a Latin spitfire, shrieked, “Ay, caramba!”

  “All your life my agents have kept watch over you,” Max whispered, blood leaking from the ragged gash between his legs. The church had fallen so silent that everyone present could hear his confession. Penny had only to look at the faded photograph in the obituary to know this was all true.

  Her guardian angels, she realized, weren’t the helpful agents of Homeland Security. Since infancy, those suited and besunglassed sentries had protected her on Max’s behalf. They’d allowed nothing to befall her before she could mature as a replacement for his long-dead wife.

  “You are proof that my cloning technology will work,” Max continued. “I’ve spent my life gaining access to every uterus in the civilized world.”

  As a gesture, even to Penny, it was really quite touching. Maxwell had loved her. He’d loved her enough to resurrect her from the dead.

  Maxwell crowed, “You with your perfect genitals, my good girl, you will be my gift to all men!”

  The Baba’s battered corpse lay beside him, so close that his blood washed against it. As the flow of his living juices slowed, Max’s eyes fluttered closed. His lungs exhaled their final breath. “Oh, Phoebe … I’ve missed you for so many years.…” And Max was gone.

  Alone in her Himalayan cave—nude, of course—Penny sprinkled seasonings into a stewing broth of chopped lizards. She stirred the simmering pot and brought a steaming spoonful to her lips. The taste filled her with a sad nostalgia for the dead Baba. Not an hour after the lamia and Max had expired on the floor of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Penny had boarded a private chartered jet and was winging her way to Nepal. She’d scaled the ragged cliffs of Mount Everest still wearing the tatters of her wedding gown. She’d told no one her destination.

  Penny’s parents were safe. Monique was delivered from her battery-powered obsession. Monique, to judge from the text messages she blasted on an hourly basis, was engaged to marry Tad. She’d continue to reside in the Upper East Side town house and have the adoration of a handsome spouse.

  Penny reasoned that perhaps in due time a trickle of students would find her here, lured by the ancient legend of a mystical sex witch who could perpetuate the erotic legacy of the ages. A constant stream of physically perfect specimens striving for erotic education would deliver themselves to apprentice with her. Penny was the heiress to the collected tantric skills of all time, was she not? She, Penelope Anne Harrigan, would accept the torch passed to her by the likes of Baba Gray-Beard and Bella Abzug. She’d liberate women from having to go to men for fulfillment. This legacy—not clothes, not jewelry or practicing law—this was the destiny she had long sought. Hers was a power based on carnal pleasure. Her kingdom a realm beyond interpersonal politics.

  Penny had learned what was important. Family was important. Love was paramount.

  Slowly she stirred. Concocted according to the Baba’s favorite recipe, the soup’s surface was garnished with flakes of spicy guano. As Penny squatted beside the cooking pot she enjoyed the gentle warmth of the flames. In the stance of a sumo wrestler, she lackadaisically stroked herself with a short, knurled length of what looked like damp wood. It was the Baba’s longest finger, the very finger with which the wise ancient had read all of Penny’s secrets. As the old lamia had cut a finger from her own dead mother, Penny had severed this memento mori from her mentor’s cooling corpse. Still, the keepsake, even well lubricated with stone-ground rabbit sebum, fell far short of slaking Penny’s growing melancholy.

  The words arousal addiction loomed in her mind, but she shooed them away.

  As she dipped her spoon for a second taste, she worried that millions of ladies all over the world were likewise crouched, struggling to achieve fresh self-fulfillment. After the sultry ordeal of Beautiful You it was possible that they might never achieve comparable heights of release.

  The rudimentary pleasure tools fashioned by the Baba … they were okay. But minus the high-tech vaginal stimulation of Max’s hybrids, not to mention the salivating attention of the mass media, Penny felt down in the dumps. Perhaps the eggheads were right. Just as teenage boys clung to their precious video games and skin flicks, Penny longed for her bright pink products. Perhaps arousal addiction was real. Her limbic brain was thirsting for dopamine. Her hypothalamus was completely catawampus! She was suffering withdrawal from the Beautiful You effect. She redoubled her efforts with the desiccated finger but felt little reward.

  Leaving the fireside, she waddled across the cave’s littered floor in search of something. She cast aside the aged tendons and Prada handbags in her frantic search. At last, she found the object she so feverishly sought.

  It was a small black box, no larger than a Game Boy. Max’s controller. She’d pocketed it in the final moments of her botched nuptials. After Max had been fatally cut down by a flaming dildo projectile, she’d also made off with his precious notebook. Since then she’d spent the wintery hours deciphering these coded records of his sensual research. The mosaic of black push buttons was cryptically labeled, but she’d taught herself what com
binations to press for the best results.

  She’d begin with the blizzard winds outside the cave’s entrance. Night and day they wailed, a constant annoyance. Quickly Penny utilized the controller to adjust her perception.

  She keyed in the first code, and the satellite-relayed result was almost instantaneous. She tasted a flood of red velvet cake with chocolate icing and rainbow sprinkles sliding down her throat. No Swiss clockmaker could’ve picked out the codes with more dexterity and accuracy. To distract herself further, Penny punched another combination of keys and tasted delicious butter brickle ice cream. Regardless, her busy fingers weren’t satisfied. Making quick work, she prompted the nanobots in her brain and bloodstream to create the overwhelming pleasure of Tom Berenger and Richard Thomas kissing her wetly on the lips and breasts.

  In the next instant, something shocking occurred. A sound. Someone spoke, and the kissing stopped. It was a familiar voice. A female voice. Penny’s eyes scoured the filthy cavern but found no explanation. The disembodied words were vague as a dream. But it was unmistakable: The speaker was Baba Gray-Beard. Hanging in the chill air was the odor of fermented egg yolks, the signature aroma of the lamia’s labored sex panting.

  Dared Penny hope? Might the great mystic’s ghost return to make love magic to her while she slept? A darker possibility was that the nanobots were somehow continuing to shape her perceptions. Faint as a thought, the Baba ordered, “Destroy it!” In words as weak as an echo of an echo of an echo, the spirit warned, “Little one, such power will corrupt you as it did Maxwell.…” The spirit urged, “Mash the evil controller device betwixt two large rocks before it seduces you!”

  In awed response, Penny whispered, “Baba, are you here?”

  She waited, listening, hearing only the fierce wind. She sat and contemplated a future of solitude with only the hoary love implements hewn from bone and sinew. She counted to a hundred in fives. She examined the sorry state of her cuticles. After that, she counted to a thousand by twenties. The sex witch’s ghost spoke no more. The youthful sex apprentice struggled with the decision of what to do next.