Beautiful You

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Other phalluses blasted off like skyrockets. They shot straight up from the bonfire. These, these were the airborne torches that had almost taken down the CNN helicopter. Like incoming missiles, they rained fire on the citizens of the metropolis.

  The CNN reporter explained that these pleasure toys had been bought, borrowed, and stolen. Regardless of how they’d come to Yankee Stadium, none of them would leave intact. In every stadium around the world, from huge coliseums to bare-dirt soccer fields, the reporter intoned that hordes of enraged men were fanning the flames of similar love-tool pyres.

  Without warning the camera jerked. It veered away from the CNN reporter. Someone, some unseen thug, had commandeered it, forcing the lens to focus on a single bedraggled man. His face was blackened with soot from the burning latex. A scraggly beard hid all of his features except his bloodshot eyes. Only when he spoke did Penny know who he was.

  It was Yuri.

  “Penelope Harrigan,” he ranted from the plasma flat-screen of her luxurious media room, “soon we will drag you from a courtroom and burn you on this fire like the witch you are!”

  The Manhattan that Penny had returned to was a cityscape of men. Only men roamed the sidewalks. No one but men drove the cars and trucks or rode the subways. Every seat in every eatery was occupied by male buttocks. And walking among them, Penny attracted much attention. Her near-starvation diet of organic fungi and her long hours of strenuous self-pleasuring had left her body beautifully sculpted. Every muscle twitched enticingly beneath her thin, smooth skin as she confidently traipsed the streets.

  To prevent being recognized she’d donned oversize sunglasses and a baseball cap worn backward. The glasses were by Fetch, and their stylish frames offered the perfect balance of “look-at-me” versus “go-away.” She forswore wearing the huge ruby pendant that had become her signature accessory as the Nerd’s Cinderella. Despite being incognito, she could too easily imagine a flood of livid vigilantes pouring from the skyscrapers. Men like Yuri. A world of furious, obsolete penises. The same men who had sacrificed chickens on her front steps, they would come streaming down the sidewalks. She pictured them all carrying torches and nooses. If they knew who she was, this all-male lynch mob would hound her as if she were the Frankenstein monster.

  The smoke from Yankee Stadium hung over Greater New York like a pall. Blazing dildos shrieked across the sky, and ash fell like black snowflakes. The soot burned Penny’s eyes and throat with its acrid stench. Smut, trickling down, clung to the pink flanks of the Beautiful You building. Enshrouding it. Making the tower look like nothing less than a dark parody of the snowy paradise Penny had so recently left behind.

  The photocopied posters of missing women continued to paper every available public surface in the city. They climbed like kudzu up telephone poles and walls. But the harsh daylight had begun to fade the smiling photos—these beloved wives and adored mothers. These successful CFOs and CEOs, rain was washing away their career accomplishments. Their names were gradually disappearing. Already, they were half forgotten.

  With them, the hard-won political and social progress of all women seemed to be eroding. Vanishing.

  On the corner of Broadway and Forty-seventh Penny glimpsed a familiar face. A woman lay splayed on the sidewalk, leaning back against the base of a lamppost. From closer up Penny could see the afflicted stranger wore a gold-and-diamond Paloma Picasso brooch from Tiffany. Her hair was expertly highlighted although it hung in rank tendrils around the smudged ruins of her once expensively made-up face. She wore the tattered remains of a pink Chanel suit, the jacket hanging open, her breasts bared to passersby. Her skirt was wadded up around her waist as she stabbed at her exposed self with a Beautiful You toy. Her legs filmed with grime, she gripped the hilt of the toy in both hands. Her fingernails rimed with dirt, she stirred the smut-stained tool in circles, plunging and withdrawing it. Like an inmate in a Victorian asylum, she giggled and stammered to herself, oblivious to the crowds who passed, averting their eyes.

  Approaching this unfortunate spectacle, Penny ventured, “Brenda? Is your name Brenda?”

  Without slowing her carnal machinations, the woman looked up at Penny with a faint glimmer of comprehension in her eyes.

  “You’re engaged to marry Yuri, remember?” Penny held out her open, empty hands as if she could give the woman back her former life. “You were the CFO of Allied Chemical Corp.” The pleasure tool, Penny recognized as Beautiful You product number 2788, the Instant-Ecstasy Probe. Its silicone-and-latex casing was worn and stained almost beyond recognition. Even Yuri would struggle to identify it as the special birthday gift he’d once given so innocently. Penny quickly found Yuri’s number in her phone’s history. She dialed it and listened to his phone ringing at the other end.

  Simultaneously, she went to Brenda’s aid, pulling at the remnants of the woman’s jacket in an attempt to cover her bared bosom. Trying desperately to save her dignity, Penny insistently tugged the hem of the skirt down Brenda’s legs while offering soothing assurances. No one stopped to help. Everyone scurried past. All were men, and they cast furtive, mortified glances at the scene and kept walking. Yuri’s phone continued to ring.

  “Someone call nine-one-one,” Penny pleaded while she tried to match buttons with buttonholes. “Please.” She couldn’t help but notice that this slathering, maniacal creature wore a double strand of beautifully matched pearls. After her own 136 days among the glitterati, she could recognize that the ice-cube-size sparklers in this stranger’s earrings were flawless two-carat diamonds.

  In response, Brenda clung tightly to the phallus, bringing her knees to her chest, curling into a ball as if to protect her prize. She bared her teeth in a ferocious snarl.

  “Help me!” Penny begged a pin-striped businessman who stared in horror and quickly darted in another direction. She was gently trying to yank the woman’s fingers free of their task when she felt a sting in the side of her hand. This crazed stranger had sunk her capped teeth into Penny’s skin. Her cheeks smeared with blood, she gnawed at the tender flesh near Penny’s thumb like an enraged animal.

  A bicycle messenger paused only long enough to say, “Lady, I hope you’re current with your tetanus shots …” before jetting away.

  Shocked and in pain, Penny dropped her phone, but not before she heard a voice on the other end say, “Hello? Brenda?” It was Yuri, but the phone clattered into the gutter, out of reach.

  Penny wrestled to escape, but the woman’s teeth held fast. Her panting sprayed Penny’s blood from the corners of her mouth. Only when Penny launched herself away did she escape the madwoman’s toothy grip. Even as Penny fell backward, the lunatic leaped to her feet and scuttled a zigzag retreat. Blood still streaming down her face, Brenda lopped along Broadway, her soiled hands grasping the pink-plastic object of her insatiable obsession. The all-male crowds stepped aside as she scooted past.

  The only other females to be found were those haggard zombies standing in the miles-long line that stretched from the doors of the tapered pink tower on Fifth Avenue. The bedeviled wretches looked interchangeable. Their stringy hair had fallen out in clumps, and their fingernails were bitten down to the quick. To a woman, they each carried the same purse, wore identical shoes, dressed in look-alike outfits. These articles of clothing weren’t attractive or well made, Penny noted, but they were all products manufactured by DataMicroCom and its subsidiary companies.

  A defeated crew of stoop-shouldered men wearing Promise Keepers T-shirts were staging a protest march and vigil near the store’s entrance. They trudged in a ragged circle, carrying picket signs that read, “Personal Fulfillment Doesn’t Make a Family!” Other signs declared, “Babies Should Come Before Orgasms!” Around and around they shuffled, beleaguered and ignored.

  To confront the mob of ladies outside the flagship store, Penny stood with her feet planted wide apart and her shoulders thrown back. Her arms akimbo, she rested a fist on each hip. “Sisters,” she shouted. “Hear me, my sister women! You
must quit abusing your loins!”

  The women squinted, observing her through narrowed, hostile eyes. They clutched bright pink shopping bags to their chests like talismans. No one spoke, but many hissed loudly.

  “You’re accessing a power you do not understand,” Penny called. “An ancient practice of self-stimulation that requires decades to learn and utilize safely without resulting in permanent harm to the user.” Penny stared boldly back into their slavering, snarling faces. “Most of you,” she continued, “have also been infected with legions of tiny robots.”

  In response, many heckled. Others spit. In their uniform weakness none could launch an outright attack.

  “Tomorrow,” Penny decreed, “I shall make public the heinous scheme with which C. Linus Maxwell has plundered the sex secrets of the past in order to enslave all women.” In response to their growing catcalls, she shouted, “Beautiful You squanders your endorphins. We must boycott all products made and sold by DataMicroCom.” She urged, “I will school you in how to craft safe rudimentary personal care tools from the raw materials provided by nature.” She offered, “I bring unguents to soothe your inflamed, overtaxed vulvas!”

  Instead of joining her or attacking her, this time the mob turned away. Their jeering dropped to general grumbling. The gambit had failed.

  Clearly Penny had misjudged the crowd. Their only interest lay in returning to the mother ship store and acquiring additional products. Reevaluating her strategy, Penny redirected her offense. “Sisters,” she cried. “Pleasure is a human right! We must storm the bastions of pleasure and take what is due to us!” She shook a fist in the air, the teeth marks still visible, her hand stained red with her own dried blood.

  This drew a positive response. Many in the crowd now cheered.

  “Do not wait like passive sheep for your corporate masters to dole out dribs and drabs of ecstasy!” she railed. “Take it! Batter down those doors and take it all!”

  Thus Penny rallied the ragtag queue into a rioting army. She whipped their hunger into a frenzied rage. Those thousands of desperate women surged forward and crashed against the pink-mirror facade of the building, hammering at the glass with the clunky heels of their ugly shoes. They wielded their worn erotic tools as truncheons. They beat with their fists until ominous cracks raced in every direction and the windows and doors bowed inward, ready to collapse.

  Unnoticed, a black limousine had arrived at the curb near Penny. A rear window of the car rolled down, revealing the high cheekbones of a pale, almost reptilian face. Inside sat Maxwell. Speaking only to Penny, he said, “Get in.”

  “Hah!” she laughed, indicating her mob. Even now the store’s crumbling exterior was crushed underfoot as the angry rioters swarmed inside to loot the shelves and display cases. “You cannot control our numbers, Max!” Victorious, Penny gloated, “We will take what must belong to us!”

  In response, the figure seated in the back of the limo lifted a small black device. It was square and could easily be mistaken for a telephone or a gaming system. It was the device he’d been fingering in the audience the night of Alouette’s death. He thumbed a few buttons as if composing a text message. He thumbed a few more.

  “Go ahead,” Penny challenged. “Call in the police. Call your thugs. Even they cannot stem this revolution!”

  “Get in, bitch,” Max repeated. “This is the last time I’ll ask you nicely.”

  “Fuck you!” Penny screamed.

  “No,” Max said flatly. “Fuck you, my dear.” At this he pressed a button and the looters all hesitated in their actions.

  Some, including Penny, clutched themselves. The knees of most buckled and they fell, gripping their crotches in both hands. Soon all were writhing on the ground, making voracious noises, without human dignity. The army of the revolution broke ranks and collapsed into hedonistic wriggling. In place of the valiant rebels, here was an undulating carpet of human bodies. Their cries of victory dropped to a chorus of sensual moans. These occurred in synch with violent pelvic thrusts skyward.

  With the push of another button more women frothed at the mouth and twitched in spasmodic convulsions. They were about to die as Alouette had died, of cardiac arrest or brain aneurysms brought on by too much erotic stimulation.

  Even as the crippling spasms of pleasure rippled through her, Penny beseeched, “Set them free!” She began to crawl toward the car. Within her body, she tried to block the erotic force, to block it or redirect it back toward Maxwell. She made an angry, clenched fist of her pelvic floor. She meditated as the Baba had taught her. She tried all the tantric methods, but none seemed to work. Dragging herself across the concrete sidewalk, she arrived beside the car. Defeated, she whispered, “Release them, Maxwell. Spare their lives, and I will go with you now.”

  The car’s door opened, and Max said, “Get in, or I will press another button and they will all die.”

  Pulling herself into the car’s interior, Penny saw her face reflected in Max’s polished shoe. Reflect his power, she told herself, but nothing happened. Once she was fully incapacitated, shivering and depleted on the car’s carpeted floor, Max pulled the door shut and instructed the driver to make a slow circuit of Central Park.

  Gradually the unbearable pleasure lessened. Max dialed it back, using his small remote. To any onlooker it would appear he was merely thumbing the buttons of a computer game. No longer subjected to the full brunt of the stimulation, Penny pulled herself up to sit beside him. He poured a glass of champagne at the car’s small bar and offered it to her. Pink champagne. She eyed it warily.

  “Do not worry, my girl,” he crooned. “I don’t need to drug you. I already possess complete control over your body.”

  Penny accepted the glass. The wine tasted so foreign after the many cups of healthy lichen tea and pickled cliff rats. Her vaginal walls relaxed, exhausted. “I know about the nanobots,” she gasped. “I know they were delivered inside the Dragonfly.”

  “Clever girl,” Max said. “You’ll make an excellent president of DataMicroCom.”

  “I will not serve as your puppet,” Penny swore.

  “Poor Clarissa,” Max said. “She never wanted to be president. That was something I bullied her into.”

  He explained how he’d met Clarissa when she was a simple Avon lady selling lipsticks door-to-door. She was nothing to him. A cipher. But he saw how, with the power of life or death, he could bully her into becoming anything. After they’d had their 136 days of romance, it was too late. She was implanted. She no longer had any choice except to be what he wanted her to become—or to die. She’d never wanted to become a senator, much less the president, but if she refused—or if she’d failed in her bids for election—Max would’ve killed her and begun the process with another woman.

  “It was the same with Alouette,” he said wistfully. “She was a pretty face, happy to be nothing but a simple fashion model.…”

  But after being implanted with battalions of nanobots, she had no choice. If she failed to give a brilliant performance, Max would punish her with debilitating levels of pleasure. He would drive her to the brink of insanity by blasting her clitoris with ecstasy for days so she couldn’t eat or sleep. Failure ceased to be an option, and Alouette grew terrified of her own genitalia.

  “To survive, both women became what I decreed. If either had told anyone about the hold I had over her,” Max said, “I would have killed her.”

  “Is that why you murdered Alouette?” asked Penny.

  “She was going to tell you,” Max confirmed.

  Max’s chauffeur steered them in an endless loop through the smoky, war-torn setting. It seemed like centuries since she’d taken the romantic horse-drawn carriage ride with Tad down this same leafy route.

  Through the limousine’s tinted windows she could see the park. The unchaperoned packs of children still roamed, abandoned by their wayward nannies. The wheelchair-bound geriatrics were still parked like aged Eskimos left to die on arctic ice floes. Standing among them was Yuri, the
jilted bridegroom deserted by his pleasure-obsessed fiancée. Bearded, alone in his anger, his clothes disheveled, he continued to leaflet the passing crowds with his pale-green handouts. His photo of Brenda, like his memory of her, would be fainter with every generation of photocopies. Penny yearned to leap from the car and rush to him. She dreamed of showing him the teeth marks on her hand as proof that his beloved was still alive somewhere. Those toothy scars would instill him with renewed hope.

  Max followed her gaze to the bereft man. Dismissively, Maxwell shook his head. “I will not let some lunatic murder you.” He waved his hand in a sweep that seemed to encompass the entire city. Perhaps the entire world. “Wherever you walk … every moment of your life since your birth … my security forces have been constantly watching over you. My guards prevented those ruffians from setting fire to your town house … once, they saved you from a tornado.” Less warmly, he added, “You belong to me. If anyone ends your life, it will be me.”

  Penny sighed in resignation. “And what is to be my purpose in your grand design?”

  Max smiled with a strange mixture of pity and affection. “You will serve as the permanent CEO of DataMicroCom. Every day for the rest of your life you will wear panty hose and carry a briefcase. You will wear your hair as a lacquered helmet and eat salads. You will sit through board meetings so tedious that they will test your sanity.”

  Max fixed her with a smug smile. “Every woman in the world dreams of becoming my wife.”

  “Are you hitting on me?” Penny asked, stunned.

  “Don’t be silly. I’m proposing.” He shrugged as if to dismiss any argument. “You’ll make a stalwart consort. There’s no reason why either of us ought to spend our life alone.”

  The queen of England, the Chinese media baron, the steel magnate, all of his earlier conquests were living similar chaste lives of duty to him and only him. This network of powerful women gave Maxwell dominion over the entire human race.