Beautiful You: A Novel

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Rising from his chair, Tad approached. “Miss Harrigan,” he began, “are you a virgin?”

  Penny wasn’t shocked. She knew his entire line of questioning. Their strategy was to make her look like a brilliant coinventor, not a young flower led astray. “No,” she answered. “I am not a virgin.”

  “Were you a virgin when you met Mr. Maxwell?”

  Penny shook her head. “No, I was not.” The pleasurable sensations continued to course through her. Her heart had begun to beat so heavily that she could almost feel the ruby pendant bouncing against her chest.

  Tad fixed her with a stern look. “Did you participate in sexual encounters with Mr. Maxwell?”

  Max’s fingertips hovered as if waiting for her to betray him.

  Penny nodded.

  The judge interjected, “Let the record state that the witness answered in the affirmative.”

  Tad continued, “Did you freely engage in the use of tools intended to heighten erotic experience?”

  The remote-controlled pleasuring ceased abruptly. The warm buzzing in her nipples and groin, it hadn’t been her imagination. It had been a warning. In response to Tad’s last question Penny said, “Yes, I permitted Mr. Maxwell to test many of his ideas on me.”

  Without taking his eyes off of her, Max nimbly touched a series of buttons.

  Penny felt her underarms grow damp. Her clothes felt as if the fabric were smoldering, about to catch fire. A trickle of sweat crept down the cleft between her buttocks. A long, sensual moan rose up in her throat but she choked it back.

  Tad asked, “Were you compensated for the labor you performed for Mr. Maxwell?”

  At the word labor, Max laughed quietly, tucking his chin to his chest.

  Angered, Penny replied, “No. He gave me specific gifts of a personal nature—haute couture clothes, for example—but I was not formally compensated or recognized as his colleague and coresearcher.”

  Max glared at her. It was easy to read the rage in his face. How dared she assume equal status with him? He tapped several keys on his control box.

  In the same instant, Penny gasped. Her heart stuttered. Her body strained to be free of her snug garments. Every inch of her skin grew so sensitive that even her silken underwear became as binding as barbed wire. Her fingers struggled to subtly undo various buttons and zippers, to find relief without betraying her arousal. She couldn’t give Max the satisfaction. Besides, wriggling like a revved-up pole dancer would hardly win her sympathy with the all-male jury.

  Tad didn’t seem to notice. He asked, “Are you aware of the defendant’s alias, ‘Climax-Well’?”

  Penny quelled a fresh rush of passion. She rotated her hips against her chair in what she hoped was an inconspicuous fashion. She said, “The tabloids called him that. But he owns all those tabloids!”

  Tad continued, “Strictly in your own opinion, Miss Harrigan, what would you say is the chief source of Mr. Maxwell’s extensive sexual expertise?”

  Here it was, the opportunity to denounce him. Penny quickly swallowed the hot saliva that flooded her mouth. She discreetly lifted a tissue to blot at the beads of sweat that were welling up on her forehead. With the entire world listening, she would explain about Maxwell’s journey to Nepal and the apprenticeship he’d served at the knee of the Baba. She’d describe how his truncated tragic marriage had motivated him. And Penny would state for the public record how Beautiful You intimate care products were modeled after the desiccated bones of crazed pilgrims who’d pleasured themselves to death. The world would soon know how Maxwell had looted the sensual secrets of all human history in order to enslave female consumers and control their spending habits. Those degraded ladies were captive to an erotic power beyond their comprehension, and Penny would rescue them. Max would be unmasked.

  Even as the words formed on her lips, her breathing grew slow and heavy. Penny’s thighs wiggled to be free from her moistened underpants. Her feet kicked off the shoes that seemed to trap them. In subconscious response the male onlookers eagerly edged forward in their seats. Their lustful eyes devoured her.

  “Tell us,” Tad encouraged. He really looked yummy in his lawyer clothes. Penny couldn’t wait to marry him once this ordeal was behind them. Their honeymoon sex was going to be fantastic.

  She was only vaguely aware of how Max was pressing buttons, frantically trying to stem her testimony with a larger wave of ecstasy. He might even be trying to kill her with a pleasure-induced stroke or heart attack. He grimly punched keys, never taking his eyes off of her physical reaction.

  The nanbots that were implanted within her nervous system, they were most likely feeding Max all of her vital signs. The black box he held, it would be relaying her heart rate, blood pressure, hormone levels—everything.

  His powers went far beyond what she’d anticipated. Max pressed one button, and she instantly tasted phantom chocolate. The best dark chocolate she’d ever known; her mouth was brimming with the delicious flavor. He pressed another button, and Penny smelled the heady perfume of a beautiful rose garden. The nanobots he’d delivered via the infamous Dragonfly, they rallied to stimulate all of her senses. Vast symphonies of violin music played in her ears. The thrilling effects of the pink champagne douche seemed to swell afresh within her.

  Still, Penny fought to speak. Her hands roamed unbidden in her hair. Her back arched to thrust her breasts forward. “He’s controlling the world …” she said in a quavering voice. She pointed a shaky finger. “Look! With his telephone!”

  Noticing her distress, Tad cut in. “Your Honor,” he addressed the judge, “it appears that the witness is falling ill.”

  “Please stop him,” Penny wailed. “He’s controlling my mind!” Of their own volition, her hands were stripping away her blouse. Her violent rubbing and shimmying made her slacks flutter down to collect around her ankles. A cacophony of savory tastes—foie gras and Grand Marnier and caramel lattes—tickled her palate. Deafening Mozart arias rang in her ears. Her sinuses were inflamed with the sweet odors of jasmine and puppies. To the world he looked like he was playing Tetris, but Maxwell was spurring all of these exquisite sensations to occur as his fingers fiddled with keys like a virtuoso concert pianist.

  Helpless, Penny felt her body respond to an invisible attacker. Her orifices ached as if she were being violated by hundreds of erect penises. Her legs and lips were forced apart, and she could taste and feel a multitude of unseen tongues invading her. Phantom teeth nibbled playfully at her nipples, and she felt hot panting against her neck.

  She screamed, but no one came to her rescue. The court stenographer recorded her pleading. The sketch artists drew her struggles.

  Tad stared at her in shocked disbelief. She was no longer the accomplished sex witch. As before, she was the sweaty slab of meat under someone else’s erotic control.

  The paramedics arrived and lifted her onto a gurney. They asked her for the year, the president. They asked her name and recognized her with delight: “the Nerd’s Cinderella.”

  All the way to the mental hospital one of them kept marveling, “You should’ve married him.…”

  Despite a steady downpour of cold rain, a bedraggled line of shoppers stretched along Fifth Avenue. The drops flattened their hair into lank ribbons that hung over their faces, hiding their dulled, glassy eyes. Their ruined shoes stood, brimming, in puddles. Every few minutes a tragic scarecrow would stagger a step forward. One end of the line vanished through the pink-mirrored doors of a shop. The opposite end of the line stretched to the horizon. Here and there a shopper had collapsed, but even those feeble ladies continued to inch forward on their hands and knees.

  Few if any of them looked up as a superstretch limousine carried a wedding party to the front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. There, a canopy protected the arriving guests. Among them were world leaders, the queen of England, a Chinese media baron, prizewinning lady artists of every ilk. Legions of journalists crowded the sidewalk. It was the news story of the decade. The world’s riche
st, most powerful man was getting married.

  En route to her nuptials, the bride was driven past the miles and miles of haggard shoppers. She kept her veils lowered, hoping that she wouldn’t be recognized. She, Penny Harrigan, had failed to save anyone, and now she would pay the ultimate price. She would break no new ground for the next generation of women. She’d open no new frontier for feminism. Adorned in a voluptuous Priscilla of Boston wedding gown, she steeled herself to walk down the aisle and pledge her troth to C. Linus Maxwell.

  On every corner, sidewalk newsstands displayed the day’s banner tabloid headlines: “Nerd King Marries His Evil Queen.” Another headline: “All Hail Queen Penny.” Yet other tabloids trumpeted: “Climax-Well Plots to Take Over World” and “Corny Maxwell Builds Secret Sex Robots.” Only Penny could recognize his strategy. He’d planted these stories in order to present the truth as a ludicrous joke. He was undermining the credibility of her discovery. Now no one would ever believe her.

  Her vintage wedding dress was appropriately cumbersome. She was hobbled by its weight of petticoats and flounces. But it was necessary for the mythology taking place. To everyone else in history, this would look like a storybook ending: Cinderella wedding her Prince Charming. Max needed that to bolster the illusion he’d crafted for so many years.

  Overall, the inky smoke of burning latex blanketed the city. Flaming dildos continued to pelt down, dealing random death.

  The Beautiful You stragglers plodded along like an army in endless retreat from some distant battlefield. Wounded and dispirited. Their sodden clothes streaming, they had no idea that they were pawns in a worldwide plot. Penny had not only failed to help them, she’d been actively complicit in their defeat. It had been in her bed that the weapons of their downfall had been perfected. Penny’s feedback had honed the tools that now devastated her gender. So it was only fitting that she must pledge herself to Max.

  The most intelligent, talented, determined women in the world were now subject to his whims. With the push of a button he could put incredible tastes in their mouths. He could make them hear glorious music that didn’t exist. He controlled their reality. Today marked the beginning of a dark age for women everywhere, and Penny hoped it would last for only one generation. Once the truth came to be widely known, maybe the next generation would steer clear of Beautiful You products.

  But, Penny thought, if the nanobots were self-replicating, each mother might pass the tiny masters to her daughters. Perhaps to her sons as well. Within a generation the entire industrialized world would belong to Max. Evil Max.

  If, as he’d said, he’d had a vasectomy, there would be no one to inherit his legacy. Knowing him, Penny assumed the reins of power would eventually pass to a fully automated supercomputer. Soon some software program would be telling everyone what they felt and tasted, doling out artificial orgasms and sweet, faked music via the nervous-system robots.

  By then, Penny realized that it wouldn’t matter how anything tasted. DataMicroCom could put any ingredients in the foods they sold. Actual flavor and mouth feel wouldn’t matter, because the nanobots would control how the consumers perceived all products.

  Penny recalled the cab ride to her first dinner date at Chez Romaine. In contrast to walking that first red carpet ignored, this morning a dense wall of newshounds filled the sidewalk, vying to get a photograph of her in her wedding finery. Scores of Max’s lackeys carried the train of her dress and held black umbrellas to prevent even a single raindrop from marring her appearance. A scrum of blue-suited bodyguards escorted her through the crowd.

  Rushing up the steps of the cathedral, Penny tasted spicy barbecued ribs. She heard sweet birds singing. She knew none of it was real. Max was only putting the perceptions in her head. To comfort her, she supposed. Her mind would never again be her own.

  Entering the foyer of the church she caught sight of three familiar faces but dismissed them as more Max-induced hallucinations. They smiled. She smiled back, asking, “Are you guys for real?”

  They were her parents and her housemate. Her mom and Monique looked fragile and emaciated, but apparently Max had given them enough strength to be here today. The two women were less wedding guests than they were hostages brought to ensure the ceremony would go through without a hitch. Penny might attempt another rebellion, but not if the people she loved were in constant danger.

  It seemed ironic how not long ago her mom and Monique had been badgering Penny to throw away her birth control and trap Max into marriage. Now she was the one who was trapped. And this morning they looked like mourners at a funeral. They all four hugged warmly.

  As the ushers stood ready to seat her parents, Penny’s mother whispered, “Here, take this.” She pressed something into her daughter’s hand. “Read it.”

  Penny noticed with horror that her mom’s wrists were raw with rope burns. Her bare arms were polka-dotted with the red scabs marking hypodermic injection sites. What she offered was a folded square of paper. Smoothing it flat, Penny found it was a yellowed page from an ages-old back issue of the National Enquirer. Nervously, she asked a bodyguard whether there was a toilet she could use.

  Not one of the parish’s pious cleaning ladies had reported to work in weeks, Penny noted with disdain. Maneuvering her gigantic hoop skirt into a filthy toilet cubicle took some doing. Every movement caused the elegant satin to wick up unclean water from the urine-stinking floor. Penny could hear the first strains of the “Wedding March” as her eyes furiously scanned the tabloid page. The headline of the article read, “DataMicroCom Gambles Big on Cloning Technology.” According to the piece that followed, Max’s company had made massive investments in researching how to create a viable human embryo and clone it. This research had taken place during the same era as the nanobot research. According to the National Enquirer’s science writer, the company’s stated long-term goal was to generate a microscopic clone. That clone would be sealed in suspended animation. It could be implanted and gestate to maturity within a surrogate womb.

  Penny read and reread the article before flushing it down the toilet.

  If Max could sneak mind-controlling nanobots into women, why couldn’t he smuggle a suspended embryonic clone into them as well? Including her! Without a doubt this would be a clone of himself. That, that was his master plan. To control world population growth … to perpetuate his global corporate power … like some parasite, he planned to hatch thousands, possibly millions of identical Maxes in the uteruses of unsuspecting women. That was his scheme to bring peace to mankind. His perfect world would be populated by a billion versions of him!

  Maxwell was standing at the altar. Her parents were sitting in the front pew, waiting with the hundreds of dignitaries and celebrities for the bride to come down the aisle.

  Every woman in the church smiled raptly. Clearly Max was bombarding their senses with every enjoyable sensation imaginable. Penny’s mom sighed as if lost in the rapture of fresh-baked brownies. Monique’s eyes slowly closed as if she were carried aloft on a magic carpet of waltz music. Only Penny was exempt from whatever pleasures Max was using to keep the other women docile as the ceremony progressed.

  Soon she’d become Mrs. C. Linus Maxwell. She’d found her destiny, or it had found her. From this day forward she’d be at the helm of the largest corporation in the world. She’d be wife to the richest man on the globe. Penny took her place at his side. Veiled. Implanted. To love, honor, cherish, but most important—to obey.

  The bishop asked, “If anyone here can give just cause for why these two should not be joined in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  A murmur came from the rear of the church. The multitude of elegant necks swiveled to watch as a stooped figure slowly trudged down the center aisle. Its scraggly gray tresses were streaming with rainwater. Its withered body inched along, unclothed. A trailing abundance of gray pubic hair hung so far down it brushed the red carpet. To judge from his expression of surprise and fear, Max knew instantly who this uninvite
d apparition was. The approaching hag lifted her blind, whitened eyes in his direction and spoke. Her crone’s nose sniffing the air, she cried, “Maxwell, I can smell your fear!” Her voice a rusty croak, her toothless mouth bade, “Stop this … travesty!”

  Warily Maxwell dipped a hand inside his tux jacket and brought forth the black control box. His touch could torture or kill millions.

  The ever-encroaching hag commanded, “Tell her, Maxwell!” The witch pointed a gnarled finger and ordered, “If you can wed the girl then tell her the truth! Tell your young bride the true nature of her existence!”

  Max’s eyes bulged in horror.

  Now halfway down the aisle, the ragged cadaver-woman bade, “Tell her the secret which I could not. This knowledge must come from you. Tell her!”

  Penny stood, confused, glancing between the ragged accuser and the man who was about to become her husband.

  Of course this was the Baba, come all the way from Nepal to New York. Her lips parted and she said, “Tell her why you’ve dedicated your life to the service of pleasuring women!”

  Max lifted his controller for all to see. “Take another step, old mother, and the death of a billion women will be on your head!”

  The Baba quelled her progress.

  Here Penny interjected. “Baba,” she cried boldly, “I know the reason Maxwell stole the sensual secrets of the ancients. I know why he’s wagered his lifetime to gain access to the world’s best vaginas!”

  The women present continued to swoon heavily in their waking pleasure dreams. The male guests seemed nicely surprised to have some unexpected interruption in an otherwise tedious wedding ceremony. If they were aware of the women’s pleasure they were studiously ignoring it. These men, for the most part, appeared to be the scurrilous lotharios and black-market profiteers who were exploiting the Beautiful You effect.