Slashing Mona Lisa

by D. M. Barr

  “Is there anyone else present that would like to speak?” asked Mangel after the throng had cleared.

  No longer thinking for herself but, rather, driven by a force beyond her control, Camarin rose and staggered to the stage. Mangel patted her on the back and guided her to the podium. She looked down and saw April, mouth agape in shock. Knees shaking, Camarin grabbed the dais with both hands and stared out into the blur of faces. One man in the fourth row almost looked like Fletcher. Now I know I’m hallucinating, she thought. Like a rock concert, several people held up lighters or cellphones with flaming candle apps and waved them rhythmically from side to side.

  She breathed in deeply and leaned toward the mic. “The last thing I expected to do tonight was stand up and speak to you all. And I’m not sure I deserve one iota of the support you’re sending my way. In some ways, I am you. In others…I am everything you despise.”

  She bit her lip, willing herself to hold back her tears.

  “I have spent a lifetime hiding this, but every day I starve myself so my clothes don’t get too tight, so I can look okay. And on the rare occasions when I eat too much—” She held up her pointing finger. “—this little baby makes it all come back up and go down the toilet. And it’s because…I learned from an early age that if I gain weight, I won’t fit in. And in our family, fitting in was all there was.”

  Eerily, she felt herself rise up out of her body, floating above the audience, looking down to watch herself address the crowd. It was almost comforting to finally be free of the body that had caused her unmitigated anguish for so many years. A view of the world from Monaeka’s vantage point.

  “My mother and her sister married US Naval officers who brought them here from Guam. They were new here, alone with no friends, their husbands usually away at sea. So, I understand why they were so desperate to belong. When my twin sister and I came along, that’s the message they instilled in us. Fit in, at all costs. But Monaeka…she was the weaker of us two. She wasn’t the storybook child. She had childhood epilepsy. The pills blew her metabolism apart, and she grew heavy. And my mother and my aunt…well, let’s just say there was nothing they wouldn’t try to transform her into their perception of what was acceptable. The problem was…”

  She paused, feeling her sister’s approval as she prepared to express what she had never admitted before.

  “She counted on me to protect her. And while I did help, I did so with great resentment. She was the focus of the family. No matter what I did, it never registered on anyone’s radar. Straight As? Great, you’re so smart, help your sister lose weight. Prom coming up? How can either of you go unless you’re skinny? I grew to hate my twin and everything her overweight cost me. So, the irony and the tragedy were, as much as my family went on and on about how important it was to belong, everything they told me to do pushed me further and further from hanging out with my own group of friends. And my sister…she’d look up to me. I was the skinny one, the strong one, her savior. And I grew to hate her for that too.”

  Camarin started to shake wildly. Mangel came up behind her and asked if she was strong enough to continue. She nodded yes and faced out at the multitudes once again.

  “When my senior year came around, my mother wanted me to stay close to home, go to community college. But I knew it was my only chance to escape without hurting anyone’s feelings. I secretly applied to every decent college on the East Coast, figuring that by putting three thousand miles between myself and my family duties, I could finally carve out a life of my own. But what I did…”

  Another deep breath for courage. It was Monaeka talking, Monaeka who had finally invaded her body as well as her brain and forced this confession. And it was Monaeka who would laugh at the shame Camarin would endure after everyone knew the one secret she’d never spoken aloud. The day of reckoning was upon her, and there was no escape.

  “My grades weren’t enough. And with all the competition, I feared that being a minority wouldn’t be enough either. I needed something that would blow the admissions people away. So, I took a photo of my sister, and a photo of myself, and I wrote an essay about the persistence I’d shown, losing a hundred pounds because I wanted to start my life fresh in college.”

  The audience gasped and booed. She grasped the dais even harder, fighting to stop the tremors and keep her knees from buckling. She wanted to run, but she knew that now that she had started, she had to complete her confession, get it all off her chest.

  “Please, let me finish… I got into NYU. Full scholarship, thank God, otherwise, my family would have never let me leave. I just didn’t want to hear about Monaeka’s weight anymore and the opportunities she was losing because of it. I was finally meeting friends, dating, having fun. I just didn’t care about Monaeka’s problems anymore. Then one day I got a call.”

  Her voice choked with bawls waiting to escape, but she continued as best she could.

  “She’d found a copy of the essay. It was hidden in my desk drawer—just in case I’d have to send it out again. She called me Benedict Arnold, a traitor, said she could never live with the memory of the betrayal. I apologized over and over again, but she wouldn’t accept it. She slammed down the phone and wouldn’t answer when I tried to call her back. And then a week later, my mother tried to wake her up, but she couldn’t. They found the empty bottle beside the bed. Her last meal was an overdose of diet pills, downed with half a bottle of tequila. No note…but I knew what killed her. It…was…me…and no matter what I do now to fix it, I can’t make it better. I can’t bring her back.”

  From her viewpoint high above the crowd, Cam watched herself collapse in tears, her guilt compounded by the boos of the audience. One threw an empty soda can at her, another a half-eaten hot dog. Mangel and April came to her rescue, quickly escorting her off the podium to a secluded area at the rear of the tent, hidden from the staff as well as the agitated crowd. She could hear Maria over the microphone, trying to calm the melee.

  “You’d better go back out there and contain the crowd, figure out some way to put a positive spin on this,” Mangel told April. “I’ll stay here with Camarin until she’s herself again.”

  He stroked her back and patted her hair but said nothing until her crying jag eased. Cam slowly felt herself coming back down to reality. But Terry Mangel, comforting her? That seemed more unreal than the episode she’d just experienced. Such kindness and compassion, and it seemed so genuine.

  “Feeling better now?”

  “I am, thank you.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been carrying a heavy load on your conscience all these years.”

  “I have.”

  “Difficult, I’m sure. How can I help?”

  He slipped his hand onto her thigh and squeezed it lightly and then leaned in to kiss her on the cheek. She recoiled in shock, the heat of anger burning off the last of the fog that had been clouding her brain. She slapped him across the face and jumped to her feet.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Her head pounded furiously.

  “I was just trying to help. You feel alone. I wanted to make sure you knew you weren’t. You’re young and beautiful, and there’s a world of people out there who appreciate that. Me included.”

  “Look, you slimy, double-crossing pile of shit…”

  Mangel’s eyes grew wide. It was clear he wasn’t used to having someone see through his carefully constructed facade.

  “You’re not going to include this in the interview, are you?”

  “There isn’t going to be an interview. I’m here because—fuck, I can’t believe I’m going to tell you something that’s going to help you and your money-grubbing empire. You don’t fucking deserve it. I’m here because I believe there’s someone in your crew, someone so dazzled by your censure of the weight-loss community, that they’re ignoring your vapid pleas of ‘love the fat haters’ and instead are going out and knocking them off.”

  Mangel opened his mouth but stayed silent, clearly stunned by her tale.

&n
bsp; “Everywhere your caravan goes—Los Angeles, Phoenix, Santa Fe, all the way to your recent stop in Chicago—somebody has died. And those somebodies have been people who have discriminated against fat people, or have sold products to help them get thin. I need copies of your employee files, so I can start investigating everyone on your team and figure out who’s behind this. And if you don’t cooperate, I’m going to tell your fiancée Maria about your other fiancée, April. And vice versa.”

  The color faded from his face. He shook his head violently. “You know! Thank God somebody knows! It’s true. It’s true, but it’s not what you think. It’s no one on my team. Stay here. I have to run back to my trailer. There’s something I’ve got to show you. Do. Not. Move.”

  Mangel ran out of the tent, leaving her speechless and confused. He knew? What the hell was going on? She closed her eyes and tried to ignore the sounds next door of people buying souvenirs as well as the realization that her confession had disrupted the revival and brought shame upon herself and her family.

  He returned a few minutes later, brandishing two pieces of paper. “I had to print this one out from my computer. Here, you’ve got to see it.” He pushed both onto her lap.

  She lifted the top sheet, which looked like a printout from a Facebook post, and began to read.

  A Call to Arms

  I pay to be touched, an hour with my masseuse every Monday. I pay to be listened to, an hour with my therapist every Wednesday. I pay to be weighed and then chastised, every Saturday at my weight-loss center where they tell me—in not so many words, of course—that if I keep eating food that tastes like cardboard and running for hours without getting anywhere, I may one day become acceptable to those around me.

  I am over fifty, I am overweight, and I am overcome by the lack of respect afforded me by society. I am truly the Invisible Woman.

  I am tired of those who tell people like me that we can fit in as long as we pay thousands for books, videos, camps, and foods that help us lose the weight. And I am equally tired of those who take the opposite tack, who tell us we should love ourselves as we are, as long as we pay even more to read their books and attend their therapeutic retreats, designed to guide us down the ‘right’ and overpriced road to self-esteem.

  If you are as angry as I am of the fat jokes, the surreptitious glances, the allusions to Moby Dick, the comments about our ‘pretty faces and what a shame about the rest’, then join me. Together, we will employ whatever means are necessary to teach them that we won’t accept this treatment, that we are a force to be reckoned with. With apologies to Shakespeare, let us demand our pound of flesh from each of our detractors. Together, we will be The Collective.

  “You see? You see?” Mangel was frantic. “The part about the opposite tack, to love ourselves for what we are? The therapeutic retreats? Camarin, that’s me she’s talking about. And my followers. She’s using my words to recruit this vigilante group to fight against me, against us. The nerve, lumping my people in with the fat shamers. The Collective must have seen our tour schedule, and they’re trying to make a statement. Maybe implicate my staff in these murders so they can get away with them…I don’t know. I’m just so glad someone else sees what’s going on.”

  His voice faded as he lost himself in thought. Then, as if suddenly revived, he shoved the second piece of paper under her nose.

  “And here, look at this. It was left in my trailer the other day. How they got in, I have no idea.”

  Camarin grabbed what looked like a lined page torn out of a spiral notepad, and squinted to read the tiny scrawl, scribbled in purple. Enjoy the crowds in our fair city of brotherly love, Mr. Mangel. Alas, your time here will be short-lived.

  She felt the tiny hairs on her arms standing on end. “A death threat?”

  “That’s what it sounds like to me. I think that I may be the murder they have planned for Philadelphia.”

  “Did you show these papers to anyone else?”

  “No one, no. I didn’t want to worry them. You seem to know so much more about this than I do. Perhaps we can figure this out together?”

  “Why not call the police?”

  “At Mangel Enterprises, we have our own security force, so we can keep all information close to our chest. No outside influence, ever.”

  In other words, no bad publicity.

  “But they’re limited,” he continued, “more like guards than detectives. Even if they do manage to protect me, there are others to consider. My staff, for example. We need to figure out the identity of the Invisible Woman and The Collective, so they won’t strike out at anyone else, ever again. I implore you, please help me.”

  Camarin’s mind was a jumble. Her carefully crafted theory of the murderer—one of Terry Mangel’s legion of traveling staff, possibly an angry, jilted love interest—was destroyed, kaput. The Invisible Woman had recruited an internet army of supposed do-gooders, dedicated to body acceptance, to carry out missions on her behalf. Who knew if the perpetrators were even local to the incidents?

  And ironically, here was this man who came to the aid of people like Monaeka, a healing huckster whom she alternately admired and deplored, begging her to save his life. One glimmer of a silver lining: if she did agree, wouldn’t it make one hell of a first headline?

  “I need to consider this. Do you have any idea who the Invisible Woman could be? Someone who attended one of your revivals perhaps? A spurned lover? Someone who got on stage and didn’t get the response she’d hoped for?” She scrambled for any scrap of a lead.

  “Not off the top of my head, no.” They both hushed as staff members wandered into their area of the tent. “We can’t stay here. The roadies are going to start breaking everything down. The caravan heads toward Charlotte tomorrow afternoon. If I’m still alive anyway. Let me go through my papers for anything that might be helpful. Could you come to my trailer tomorrow morning as planned? Maybe earlier, around nine, so April doesn’t interfere? I don’t want to frighten her.”

  She agreed to his request. Any clue he could dig up was better than none at all.

  “Do you feel okay now?” he asked. “Your speech got some of the audience pretty angry. Do you need someone to accompany you back to your hotel? I have people who could drive you.”

  “I appreciate the offer, but no, I think I’ll walk. Anyone offended by my words has likely left the area by now, and perhaps the cool evening air will help to clear my head.”

  * * * *

  Fletcher crouched in the bushes outside the back of the tent, waiting for Camarin to appear. It had been almost an hour since they’d shepherded her backstage after her breakdown, and he wanted to be sure she got back to her hotel without any further reprisal from the incensed crowd.

  How his heart had broken for her as she confessed her supposed crime against her sister. He’d ached as she had exposed her psychic pain in public, drowning in her own tears as the audience withheld their usual show of support. She really had nothing to apologize for, he reasoned. She had been entitled to live her own life, unfettered by the demands and expectations of her family. In the end, she’d taken creative, extraordinary means to extricate herself from an unfortunate situation. It was nothing to beat herself up over, even if participating in the event had been an extremely unprofessional act for a journalist.

  Finally, she emerged. Her stance seemed steady as she walked from the compound into the night. He followed about a block behind, careful not to be noticed. He longed to hold her, to take her soft, supple body into his arms and protect her from the world, even from her own harsh, self-flagellating thoughts.

  He trailed her to a large, purple Victorian and watched as she went inside. A few moments later, a light illuminated one of the gable windows. Her silhouette appeared, and he envisioned himself behind her, drawing her against the warmth of his body, enveloping her in his desire. He felt himself grow hard at the thought of her near him again, her full lips opening to accept his kisses, his tongue, all he had to offer.

  She str
ayed from the window, and a few minutes later, the room went dark. He hustled back to the main road to find a cab to take him to his hotel. He had things to do before he returned tomorrow morning. He wouldn’t rest easy until he saw her board that Amtrak train and head back to his offices at Trend, where she’d finally be safe.

  Chapter 26

  “So how did you enjoy your stay here in town? Did you go to the Mutter Museum like we suggested?”

  Camarin shook her head but remained silent. Nancy and Harold Hawkins, her Airbnb hosts, were doing their best to keep her engaged, but she kept drifting off into her own private thoughts. She noshed on the breakfast they’d cooked for her—two fried eggs, no bread, please, and a fruit salad on the side—while she contemplated her next move.

  If Mangel had been so perturbed over that note, why not skip the Philly event, pack up the circus, and continue on his way? Scared the murderer would follow him wherever his caravan landed? Or was the lure of all that potential income too much to resist? Even if it cost him his life?

  And what about this Invisible Woman brigade? Camarin had spent the last hour searching Facebook for any glimpse of that vigilante recruiting post, or any mention of The Collective anywhere on social media. Nothing. Perhaps it was privately emailed to a select few? Or maybe she’d published it and then deleted it when her ranks grew full, less evidence to present against her in court?

  She’d have to ask Mangel later where he’d found it online. People say that nothing in cyberspace ever really disappears. When she returned home, she’d have to find some internet whiz who could uncover archived or deleted files.

  “What time are you checking out today, Camarin? We have another guest arriving at three, and we want to make sure his room is ready. Got to get busy Endusting and Swiffering!”

  Were all Airbnb hosts as goofy and irreverent as these two? Camarin wondered. It must help to encourage repeat visits. Normally, she would have shared in their cheerful discourse, but with her meeting with Mangel only thirty minutes away, she was too distracted for levity.