Beautiful You: A Novel

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Tasting this new sample, the Baba intoned, “You feel a great guilt. You betrayed your sister women. You helped him to calibrate his weapons of control. Numerous are Maxwell’s slaves due to the work you performed.”

  Hearing this, Penny wept. It was true. It was horrible, but it was so true that she’d never allowed herself to admit it.

  The Baba sucked the finger in her mouth. She pulled it free and smacked her lips. “You, Penny Harrigan, have come to me for training so you can fight against him.”

  The gray tongue stroked the finger. Savoring whatever truths lingered in its wrinkles.

  “You know my name?” Penny asked incredulously. It was the first time she had spoken in the cave and her voice echoed shrilly. “Just from the taste of my juices?”

  Baba Gray-Beard’s withered lips smiled. “I know many things.” She motioned to a mat woven from dried lichens and her own shed hairs. “Come and sit. You will need strength for your erotic training. I will brew us some tea.”

  In the same way Penny had submitted to Max’s experiments, sequestered in his lofty penthouse, now she gave herself to the Baba in the cloister of the old woman’s stony cavern.

  Penny had never been with a woman, but this was different. She never felt as desirable as she did when her tender, supple flesh was juxtaposed with the wizened hag-flesh of the ancient. The Baba was teaching her, instructing her in the greatness of sex magic. The crone fingered her relentlessly until Penny cried out, screaming as if these words would be her last on earth. The witch seldom asked her to reciprocate, but when she did Penny went about the task of pleasuring the wrinkled elder with the utmost respect. And when Penny wrested from her teacher even a modest cry of pleasure, it occurred as the greatest triumph.

  When she embarked upon her hunts, the ancient teacher encouraged Penny to utilize the many bones and rocks available to build her own pleasure tools. Brandishing an armature of feathers welded to sticks with thongs of stout leather, the Baba boasted, “These may seem like the crippling versions that Maxwell has bastardized. But they are meant to enhance a woman’s energies. They will make you stronger, not weaker.” With a wink of one cataract-eclipsed eye, she assured the girl, “They will not exhaust you.” Leaning closer, she leered. “But you must be disciplined!”

  The Baba warned, “The erotic wisdom of the ancients is too much for most who seek it.” She grinned wistfully. “The students trek here to acquire these skills. Many die from the hardships of the journey, but more die by their own hands.” She explained how she would bring them eggs, but they would not eat. She’d invite them to her bed of moss and feathers, but they’d refuse to sleep. “So it goes.” She shrugged with resignation. “I introduce them to a few rudimentary sensual practices, but they are soon consumed by self-pleasure.”

  To her own surprise, one night Penny brought her mentor to prolonged, strenuous release. Dabbling expertly with her lips and tongue, she teased the wily crone to a full-pitched fit of fevered yelping. The scrawny sex witch bounced violently atop their bed of twigs. Her toothless gums yammered incoherently.

  Penny sustained the sweet torment to the verge of cruelty before she gradually lessened her campaign on her mistress’s private parts. At last Penny lifted her drenched face from its task. She swiped her dripping chin with a clump of absorbent moss. Playfully, she caught the Baba’s eye and demanded, “Tell me a secret, old one. Tell me a secret, or I will return to my licking until you go mad.”

  Penny knew her mistress was well pleased. The old woman looked drunk with pleasure. Breathless, the Baba shook her head to stave off the onslaught of orgasms.

  “A secret, then!” Penny demanded.

  “A secret,” the Baba agreed. Lying on her back, she lifted herself to her elbows. “Did Maxwell tell you why he sought me out?”

  Penny shrugged. “For instruction?”

  No, the Baba shook her head sadly. “For distraction. To help him forget a great sorrow which had visited him.”

  “His mother’s death,” Penny ventured. This was hardly a secret; it had all been well documented in the National Enquirer.

  Again, the mystic corrected her student. “Max launched his journey for sexual training in order to forget his wife’s death.”

  It was Penny’s turn to be confounded. Nothing could’ve surprised her more. “His wife?”

  The Baba nodded in silent confirmation. Maxwell had once taken a wife. In college he’d met and courted a wholesome girl who was studying prelaw. The two of them had been deeply in love. This wasn’t the cold, clinical Max with whom Penny had dallied. This younger man had been utterly devoted to his new bride. They were two lovers on the threshold of a blissful life together.

  The sex witch sighed. “The details of the girl’s death are unimportant. A severe allergic reaction. Without her, Max’s life was also ended.”

  He’d arrived at the Baba’s cave a recent widower. Embittered, his only goal was to squander the remainder of his years in hedonistic cavorting.

  Penny craved more of the story, but this hardly seemed like the best time to pump her mentor for details. She asked, “What was her name?” She slid her fingers gently against the older woman. Playfully, she prodded the fragile tissues of the witch’s bunghole. She spit generously to lubricate the worn orifice.

  The Baba replied, “Her name?” She slowly succumbed to the stroking. Her voice softened as if she were lapsing into a dream. “Her name was Phoebe.”

  Phoebe. The name echoed for a long time in Penny’s mind. Phoebe Maxwell. It was likely that Maxwell’s people had excised every mention of Phoebe from the newspapers he owned, from the Internet, from history. She would be Max’s Achilles’ heel. She’d been proof that his heart could be broken. As Penny pondered this new aspect of his life, she lowered her face to the waiting thatch of off-white hair that even now thrust itself upward, eagerly nudging her for attention.

  As Penny returned to her studies she yearned to ask how long Max and Phoebe had been married. Yet even without asking, somehow she knew.

  They had been married for exactly 136 days.

  For respite the Baba rubbed unguent into Penny’s raw membranes. The sensual mystic lovingly tucked her into a bed of dried mosses and went out to forage for eggs and mushrooms. She brewed invigorating teas and prompted the girl to drink them from the wrinkled palm of her hag’s hand. She taught her student how to grind spiders between rocks to produce a soothing ointment that would enhance Penny’s anal sensitivity. So tranquil was her life and so deep their bond that Penny forgot about the legions of evil robots that might be swimming in her bloodstream. She wasn’t to forget for long.

  As if Max were testing his power, one day Penny felt her nipples grow hard and begin to vibrate. Her nipples and clitoris, they began shaking violently. The old woman had prompted her to orgasm many times that morning before leaving to scavenge eggs and lizards, so the last sensation Penny expected was this. So strange was it that she knew instantly that it was Max’s doing. At the time she was sitting alone, cross-legged on the cave floor, sipping a cup of lichen tincture. The next wave of excitement struck her before she could even struggle to her feet.

  What felt like a demonic possession overcame Penny. She wasn’t in sole control of her body. A separate force seemed to bloom and expand between her legs. Her breasts ached with desire. Her pulse began to accelerate as goose bumps pebbled her skin.

  Max had described the physical process so succinctly. Her aroused vagina was extending, growing in length as if to accommodate an erect phallus. It would balloon until it formed a pocket above the opening of the cervix, ideally to trap and hold sperm until they could successfully fertilize an egg. In nature, this was a natural and beautiful process, but what was happening to Penny now was Max’s evil remote-controlled handiwork. It was easy to picture teams of microscopic robots ravishing her nerve endings. Even here, with her sequestered in the Himalayas, he could activate them. He was sexting—but with real sex. As if arousing her were just an application on
his phone! Whatever his method, he was stimulating her the way he’d attacked Alouette onstage. This was some savage satellite-relayed rape.

  Moments later, when the Baba returned to the cave, Penny was still wheezing and convulsing with unasked-for pleasure. The aged lamia flung aside her pack of moss and rushed to comfort the figure rolling on the floor.

  “Fight it,” the Baba urged, kneeling. “What is done to you, you can do in return.” She wetted a thin finger in her toothless mouth and began to slide it between the girl’s engorged labia. “You are not merely a receiver,” the Baba cried. “Return the energy to its vile source!”

  At that she shrieked and pulled back a finger that was already bleeding. “What is this monstrous thing?” She peered at a hole lanced in the tip of her shriveled digit. The flow of blood was channeled by the wrinkles and cross-hatchings that centuries had carved in her palms. “What has that devil installed within you?”

  Even now Penny’s sane demeanor had been displaced by the spirit of a slobbering madwoman. Delirious, she spread her legs and arched her back, pumping her thighs into the air. Her hands roamed her own nude body beyond her rational control, her deranged fingers tweaking and diddling in a frenzy of self-stimulation. Her head tilted back, her mouth hung open, and her tongue lolled thickly around her groaning lips.

  The Baba cried out, “Vomit the pleasure or allow it to pass through you as you would excess food or wine.”

  She grasped the girl’s arms and shook her. “A mirror is not burned by the sun!” She screamed, “Reflect back his evil!”

  As Penny slipped deeper into an erotic coma she could still hear the old woman’s urging. “You would not try to hold all of the water of the world inside your bladder.” Muffled by sensation, the aged voice continued. “You wouldn’t eat to hoard the entire world within your belly. Pleasure, like food, must pass through you. If it accumulates it leaves room for nothing else. You explode. Your only hope is to replace one pleasure with another. The way food drives waste from your body, you must use love to displace the sex magic Max is practicing. Focus on what you love, and you can deflect his erotic spell.”

  In desperation, Baba Gray-Beard seized a cluster of antlers and began to gently work it between the suffering girl’s loins. “Do not fight the sensations,” she urged. “My child, let them pass through you, or you will be killed like so many of my students whose skeletons you see around you.”

  Penny’s eyes rolled. Spittle flew as her lips disgorged a furious stream of obscenities.

  “That’s it,” the Baba exhorted. “Say the words! Release the heat!” Working the antlers gently, rhythmically, she pleaded, “Do not harbor the energy within you!”

  Her voice guttural with lust, Penny brayed profanities. Her body intoxicated with pleasure, she rasped and squawked foulness.

  “Allow the pleasure to overflow you!” the hag crowed.

  Penny gasped. Her torrent of lewdness ceased. Slowly she came back into herself.

  The witch tenderly withdrew the antler. “Your torments will not end,” she said. “You will find no peace until you have defeated Maxwell, or he has destroyed you.” She began to apply a cooling balm of crushed centipedes to the bruises that were already forming between Penny’s legs.

  “What I teach you,” the Baba said, “you must teach all women in the world so that they might defend themselves against this evil force.”

  Baba Gray-Beard spoke without bitterness. Nude, she lay back in her commodious bed of moss and feathers, and she parted her legs, shamelessly exposing the wrinkled flesh of her sex. This she began petting, softly flogging herself as she reminisced. Every stroke seemed to elicit memories, as if she were reading the stories from her own gray folds of skin. “I was orphaned at such a cruel age. At dawn I found her—my mother’s body lay broken at the foot of a high cliff where she must’ve been gathering plover eggs.” Her blank eyes stared into history. “I lifted my mother’s cold hand and placed it against myself, pleading.” In this way, the bereft child had eked out a few final hours of nurturance from her lost parent. “For a short while I did not allow the sex energy to leak from me through screams or thrashing.”

  It didn’t take long before the heartless sex seekers of her village discovered that a helpless, unprotected child was theirs for the taking. The first night the young Baba was alone in her hut, they’d attacked.

  Her voice husky with nostalgia, the Baba said, “They mapped for me my inner womanhood. With their every violent thrust they taught me about my body.” She described how any number of savages might enter her in the night. Many took their wicked pleasure with her tender child’s body, but the Baba resolved that she would take something from each of them in return. If she could not stop them, she could learn to control them by increasing or decreasing their pleasure. In her girlhood, she took on a thousand such attackers and used them to her own advantage. Those cruel encounters were her education. From her suffering she gleaned a wealth of incredible sex practices.

  “I grew to be eager, my eyes shining with anticipation as they flopped out their meaty penises. I knew each was an opportunity to experiment and perfect my developing sex craft.” She closed her eyes in dreamy remembrance. “Among my brutal mentors were women who palmed the back of my head, their fingers interlaced to hold me in place as they bade me lap at them until I neared suffocation.” She spoke in a voice without misery. Outside the cave’s mouth, a whiteout blizzard raged. Inside, a small campfire warmed a bubbling broth of stewed skinks. The Baba stirred the pot, saying, “This was my childhood, but those were but a handful of years. As my strength grew, the strength of my aging teachers began to fail. By then I’d enslaved them with my erotic skills, for I’d become a rich repository of sensual techniques. They could find satisfaction nowhere else, and I’d learned all they had to teach me. They brought me gold and jewels, things for which I’d no use. Finally, in scenes tinged with mercy and vengeance, I brought each of my former abusers to an ecstasy so great that he or she died.”

  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 f
emur.

  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.