Beautiful You (22 page)

Inside, broken glass crunched under every step of her Kate Spade kitten heels. The vandals had broken the panes of several windows. Their ammunition—rocks wrapped in paper scrawled with angry messages—lay in the shards. Thank goodness stout security grilles of ornately cast bronze had prevented the attackers from bodily entering.

Rushing up the stairs two steps at a time, Penny shouted, “Monique? Monique, are you okay?”

She wielded a fire ax to bust down the locked door of her roommate’s bedroom. Within she found her once free-spirited friend lying across the sodden mattress of her bed, near death. The room stank of drool and stale blueberry Pop-Tarts. Penny nursed the girl, holding a cup of lichen tea to her chapped lips. If the batteries in her Beautiful You products had not failed from overuse, Monique would’ve died of exhaustion and dehydration long ago. As it was, the once sassy girl responded with hardly a whimper as Penny wiped her frail limbs with a salve made from eagle glands and rich reindeer tallow.

Penny spoon-fed the crippled girl a broth of plover eggs and fermented marrow. When her fallen comrade tried to speak, Penny hushed her. “You mustn’t feel ashamed of your hideously degraded circumstances,” she said. “You were the victim of primitive pleasures no untrained female could resist.”

Penny carried her famished, unresponsive housemate to the media room and arranged her limp form in a comfortable lounge chair. As the two young ladies had done while watching the Academy Awards, Penny popped popcorn and lavished it with salt and butter. She hand-fed Monique kernels, slowly, placing them between the girl’s chapped lips as, tonight, together, they watched CNN coverage of the world news.

Spread before them on the high-definition, seventy-two-inch plasma flat-screen was a panorama of global unrest. War and natural disasters were no longer the top stories. The Beautiful You effect had trumped every misfortune. Some men were
fast forging new roles for themselves in this rapidly evolving world. Most were not.

Among the first group were slimy lotharios. Self-proclaimed intimacy coaches warned that women who succumbed to Beautiful You products would be unhappy with the ordinary machinations of a human sexual partner. However, any male who could wield a Rotating Relaxation Rod, product number 3447, such a man was never lacking for the companionship of the fairer sex. The cunning pickup line was no longer, “Would you like to see my etchings?” For a successful come-on, a would-be lover need only mention that he possessed one of the rarer BY products. Any laborer who could utilize a power drill or chain saw, he could easily operate the Jiggle Whip or the Trembling Love Snake. Thus, displaced workers from all the construction trades were finding new careers demonstrating Maxwell’s personal care tools. In the retail shops. Or selling them door-to-door.

The CNN cameras panned across the showroom inside the Fifth Avenue store. Business was brisk as suave salesmen plied the female shoppers with products. And not just products, there were pricey warranties to sell. And financing schemes, the newscaster explained. Analysts claimed that DataMicroCom was making big money on the financing charges that customers accrued using their bright pink charge cards. Any desperate, libidinous lady wandering into that den of unscrupulous cads, Penny realized, she wouldn’t stand a chance! It was the career that every male in the city hotly coveted.

On television, the scene changed. The cameras displayed the miles-long line of shoppers outside the flagship store. Among them, Penny recognized the sales associate from Bonwit Teller, her elegant good looks gone, replaced by a gap-toothed, slack-jawed zombie woman. Likewise, Kwan Qxi and Esperanza, Penny’s former roommates, were there, bleary-eyed and clutching well-worn bright pink credit cards.

In recent weeks, according to CNN, the gender composition of the shoppers had shifted. Now an almost equal number of men stood waiting among the women. These were the profiteers.

Among the fastest to adapt, these usurious men sought to buy as many of the new products as possible. They were scalpers who, in turn, sold the toys to females at an astronomical markup. For rich women, crippled women, impatient gals, anyone who couldn’t or wouldn’t wait in the out-of-doors, it was an expensive godsend. Vibrators and dildos had become the world’s new form of underground currency. No day passed without reports of Beautiful You trucks being hijacked for their valuable cargos. Warehouses were looted. Security guards assassinated in drive-by shootings. Deliveries of new stock arrived at stores by armored car. Recent purchasers were targeted by street thugs, who openly stole the merchandise at gunpoint for resale on the black market.

Rival gangs fought over turf. Slave-labor sweatshops flooded the market with counterfeit products that failed to satisfy.

To Penny, the whole situation seemed almost as crazy as Beanie Babies or those Michael Jordan shoes had been. Almost.

As Monique began to listlessly gum her mouthful of calorie-rich corn, the CNN reporter ascended in a helicopter from midtown Manhattan and slowly made his way northward toward a huge plume of black smoke that rose from the Bronx. The New York below them looked, to Penny, like some contested third-world killing field. Mortar rounds seemed to jet across the neighborhoods, igniting fires in high-rise buildings. Police cars and ambulances bathed the streets in flashing red lights. Traffic was gridlocked by burning vehicles.

The camera shot hovered above East One Twenty-second Street, moving steadily toward the Harlem River Drive, slowly crossing into the Bronx. Suspended high above the grid of
streets, the helicopter swooped and tilted, dodging some kind of rocket or missile that came jetting directly at it. The weapon looked to be about the size of a bazooka shell. It blazed with flames and trailed an arc of black smoke. Another projectile raced directly at the chopper, and the pilot dived to avoid it.

On the media room television, the skies of the city were crisscrossed with these flaming warheads. Wherever they landed, each burst like an incendiary bomb, igniting buildings, cars, and trees. Turning the island into a war zone. By following the black arc of each, Penny could trace them all back to the source of the black plume.

The smoke rose from the center of Yankee Stadium. There, a massive fire appeared to be raging on the pitcher’s mound.

The aerial shot cut to a ground-level news crew broadcasting from the infield. The scene was chaos as mobs of people caroused. Everyone within sight was male, and most wore Promise Keepers T-shirts. Penny could discern long chains of men. These chains snaked toward the bonfire from every direction, spreading to fill the stadium like the spokes of a wheel. They were all-male versions of the customer lines that snaked away from every Beautiful You retailer in the world.

The frenzied men were singing a song Penny recognized from childhood. It was the religious hymn “Kumbaya.” Their measured, chain-gang movements were timed to the rhythm of the melody while they passed objects hand to hand. As each item reached the fire it was tossed into the flames.

The cameras drew closer, and Penny witnessed what looked like any male’s vision of hell. Innumerable multitudes of severed penises were writhing in the conflagration. Phalluses squirmed in the intense heat, blistering and twisting as if in prolonged torment. Aflame, some suffering man-parts crept, inchworm-like, from the fire as if attempting to escape to safety. They flopped. Flipped. Jumped and twitched. As if in agony. These
were caught by the surrounding men and summarily flung back to their doom. Still other dongs erupted in the heat, spouting pink molten lava.

They were all Beautiful You products, Penny recognized. The figures who capered and sang like savages around the inferno, they were men sacrificing their common rivals. As generations before them had torched books and disco records, these men yelped in cathartic abandon, passing the prods and love wands man to man, until they were heaped onto the bubbling, spitting flames. The stench and black smoke of this pyre hung over the streets, acrid as the poisonous reek of an unending tire fire.

Among the phalluses were withering Dragonflies and exploding douches. No product was overlooked. Batteries burst with a high-pitched squeal like butchered baby rabbits.

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.