Beautiful You (21 page)

The Baba’s saga continued as she rose and began to pace the floor of the dripping cave. “My reputation as a sex crafter was such that students young and old, male and female, sought me as their guide.” As a young sex witch, she was besieged by suitors yearning to acquire the secrets she’d accumulated, her real treasure, earned over countless grappling nights of pain. “To winnow their numbers I retreated to this cave. Here, only the strongest and most youthful can endeavor to reach me. The weak, the old, they die in their pilgrimage, and their bones almost pave the trail to my door.” She laughed.

“The Sherpa will not approach me or my home,” said the Baba. “The Sherpa believe that I kill my would-be lovers, but those who die do so by their own hands.…”

Only the healthiest aspirants reach the cave. There are no cripples among the skeletons. No deformed. These are the skulls of the beautiful with shining straight teeth. They came seeking pleasure for themselves, the Baba explained. “Only Max arrived with the purpose of providing pleasure to others. But once he recognized the power of supplying such pleasure, he was seduced to use it for his own gain!”

She gestured toward the skeletons, her voice windy and hollow. “They waste away and die.” Starvation and exhaustion stripped the flesh from them and soon the young apprentices looked more aged than their bemused master. Not long after, the Baba would stagger back from her day’s hunt and find them expired.

If she fancied a novel curve in the dead apprentice’s iliac crest, the Baba might scavenge it for a new project. Nothing was wasted, for she used the vocal cords and sinews and dried entrails to lash parts together. Thus the young beautiful lovers brought her more pleasure once they were dead. With luck she’d fashion a new pleasure tool before the next student presented herself at the cave opening.

Aghast, Penny asked, “You used them, these bones?”

All Beautiful You products were based on the designs of the Baba. The arc of one tool was that of a rib. The diameter of another toy was based on a human femur.

Pointing to a tangle of ulnas and tendons, her eyes dancing with excitement, the Baba said, “Max once tried to murder me with that one! So great was his skill that he wielded my own creation to spur me to paroxysms of ecstasy so glorious that I almost died!”

She described how Maxwell had challenged her to an erotic
duel. He’d stood, nude, an arrogant young male animal, with his bare legs wide apart. He’d pressed his erection downward, toward his knees, and then released it to spring upward and land a great thwack against his taut belly. A waggish glint in his eye, he’d swiveled his hips to make his member swing from side to side, saying, “Come, old woman, impale yourself. Take your pleasure from this meat you’ve trained so well!”

Penny asked, “How did you save yourself?”

Smiling at the memory, the old woman said, “The weapon he used flew from my body and shattered. It blasted from me like a cork from a bottle, and the force threw me backward, where my head struck the cave wall. When I awoke Max was gone. He’d absconded with much of my sex-craft technology.”

“But how did you free yourself?” Penny demanded.

The Baba touched herself solemnly. “I replaced one pleasure with another. I thought of how beautiful my mother was and how much I adored her. I screamed.”

Penny gasped. “From your vagina?”

Almost shouting, the Baba responded, “Child, you can expel energy from any opening of the body!”

Penny sipped her lichen tea and considered the idea.

“This,” the sex witch said, plucking something from her wet depths, “this is all I have remaining from my mother.” The object she held was brownish, like polished wood, like an unvarnished pencil, and she withdrew it slowly. The extraction made a faint slurping sound. “It was her longest finger,” the Baba explained in a hushed voice. “I cut it from her even while the wild animals devoured the rest.” She offered it for Penny to examine. The finger gleamed damply, its surface fluted with wrinkles. The narrow end was scabbed with a discolored nail. The blunt end sprouted a shattered, yellowed stub of bone. It felt warm and alive, heavily scented with the Baba’s natural oils. Even in the cavern’s dim light, it was lovely.

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 sought 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.