“Now,” Eva said, as she led Hannah down the hallway, “I expect you will want to know your next steps.”
Hannah, naked and drenched in sweat, was nonplussed. “I thought it was all supposed to surprise me.”
Eva laughed, in the same melodic rhythm as her faintly Scandinavian accent. “Not really. I’m afraid all the other women here just hate you enough that they prefer to spring traps on you. Of course, there is the initial surprise—the sudden stripping. But we don’t do this to be cruel.”
Eva paused, while Hannah caught up with her. The assistant’s strides were longer and quicker than Hannah’s, despite Eva being handicapped by stiletto heels.
“I know,” Hannah said. “It’s to see if I can be publicly naked. If I can handle the basic tasks. I wouldn’t be worth much as a client if I couldn’t parade around naked or masturbate on cue.”
Eva smiled. “You’re smart, although our girls always are. There’s no money in hurting or humiliating you. Only in having you pretend to be hurt and humiliated on camera. Which of course only makes you stronger, more powerful. The ultimate act of agency, no pun intended.”
If I’m so smart, Hannah thought, then why can’t I understand how this is good for me?
“Do you believe all that stuff, you know, the standard feminist line?” she asked, impulsively. It was probably foolish to start asking questions, in her position.
Eva put her arm around Hannah’s shoulder. As the P.A. stood at least eight inches taller than Hannah, with proportionally lengthy arms, this meant that her cherry-red manicured nails were lightly grazing Hannah’s right breast.
“Hannah, lovely sweet Hannah, I know this is all new to you, but I’ve seen so many girls, and a fair few boys, go through exactly what you’re going to. At about this stage there’s always that moment where people start questioning everything they’ve ever believed in. It’s natural. Your little hermetic world has been upturned, enormously. We select for that. The market likes an eighteen year old who has led a sheltered, innocent life. Who is new to all this, who shows some shyness, some sense of insecurity. That’s harder to find every year, mind you, but we do still manage to find a few gems among the thousands of jaded teenage sluts who try to join our roster.”
Eva moved her arm down and squeezed Hannah’s bottom reassuringly. “But this will pass. Once the shock wears out, you’ll realize how freeing it is that you’ve had the secret to success, to financial security, within you all along. That you are your own greatest asset. And you’ll begin to start living in practice what I’m sure a smart girl like has always adhered to in theory—an appreciation of the triumph of feminine power.”
Eva gently steered Hannah into a left turn. “Now, before this tangent, I think I was about to tell you what to expect. Well, right now you’re going to meet our branding and style team. They will look over every inch of your beautiful body and start figuring out a look for you, and how we can add a few touches of Hollywood glamor to highlight the evident charm and seduction you already have. Then, you’ll be meeting with your tutor—that will be a wonderful time, and then just some promotional shoots and you’re home free for the day.”
Hannah didn’t know what a tutor would possibly teach at an agency, but nodded. She didn’t feel like asking more questions.
Eva stopped at a double door and kissed Hannah’s forehead. “Now, my lovely little kanelbulle, I have to say goodbye. Poor Victor is probably already having a fit with me away for this long. He does so depend on me. But remember, I am right here, in the same building, cheering for you in my heart.”
The strange relationship between the tall blonde P.A. and her short and vaguely autistic principal was another matter of curiosity for Hannah, but, again, questions didn’t seem in order.
Eva knocked, opened the door, and ushered Hannah inside. The room was roughly circular, with a foot-high podium in the center. Aside from a clear space around the podium, the room was a cluttered mix of tables, monitors, assorted gadgets and even a pile of binders, with uneven glossy paper contents spilling out at the edges.
A man, wearing an expensive-looking suit garnished with an electric blue pocket square, looked up from one of the tables. He was olive-skinned, with dark curly hair, and an aquiline nose that anchored a thin, almost gaunt face. Behind him were two redheaded women, wearing identical elaborate dresses with odd gashes in titillating places, made with the characteristic eccentricity of high fashion.
“You are late,” the man said. It was a statement, made without apparent emotion and inviting no answer. “Now get out so we can get to work.”
Obeying without hesitation, Eva let go of Hannah and exited silently.
“I,” the man said, “am Quentin Panielli. You are Hannah Norris. There, introductions are done. Now get on the stand so we can begin.”
As he spoke, in flat unaccented tones, Panielli’s eyes wandered over Hannah’s body. There was no sign of prurience in his gaze. Instead, he was studying her, the way a philatelist might examine a familiar stamp specimen. With interest, certainly, but lacking in passion.
Although frightened by Panielli’s cold detachment, Hannah complied. Asking a question of Eva had seemed risky. Failing to listen to Panielli seemed suicidal. There was an air of menace about him. Intellectually, Hannah was fairly sure T&A wouldn’t kill her. No money in murdering the merchandise, after all. But she did not feel like testing that particular hypothesis with Panielli.
As soon as Hannah stood on the podium, ceiling lights flicked on. The heat of the bulbs did nothing to stop her shivering.
Panielli was pulling on a pair of gloves, and checking a computer. Meanwhile, one of the redheads walked up to Hannah and thrust a tablet forward. “Sign and date, then stand still, you stupid cunt,” the P.A. said.
Hannah didn’t bother to even glance at the consent form before giving her finger-drawn signature. Remember, this is much better treatment than you’d get at the downmarket agencies, she thought. She had friends a year ahead of her, with high bodycounts and low sexual market value, who had been subject to violent gangbangs on signing up. A “Welcoming Ceremony”, she had heard it called. At least T&A paid lip service to empowering its higher S.M.V. clientele.
Hannah jumped as she felt hands around her neck. She tried to turn her head, but a woman’s voice–it had to be the other redhead–whispered, “The more you squirm, the more we have to restrain you. And we can go quite far in doing that after the form you just signed.”
So, Hannah stood still as her hair was lifted and collar fitted around her neck. From recessed points in the podium, small poles arose, and before long, Hannah was chained by the neck to a poll behind her, her handcuffed arms spread in a “V” shape above her head chained to links descending from the ceiling, and her legs in a spreader bar hooked to the podium floor.
Panielli was staring at her, stroking his chin. His black eyes darted over every inch of Hannah’s sweating body, but his face showed only clinical detachment.
Hannah had fantasized about bondage, though she knew little about it beyond vague archetypes of chains and whips. Try to think of this as sexy, she thought, hoping to find some reassurance.
The problem was Panielli. There was no way to imagine him as an alluring dominant. He was interested in Hannah, but it was the pedestrian focus of a man studying a menu, not a rapacious lover admiring his latest conquest.
After an uncertain interim, Panielli spoke. His enunciation was careful, but seemed to leave every syllable unstressed. “I am going to examine you. You are going to comply. I am an artist. My job is to chisel from… this”—he gestured with annoyance at the cuffed teen—”raw material a statute. To create from the unpleasant, fetid, and ill-formed female body an ideal. The woman, not as she is, but as men dream her to be. I will reshape you into a sculpture worthy of the interest of our patrons. To take raw teenage mediocrity and produce the smooth, clean, and delightsome flesh on which men may feast.”
A half-remembered story from A.P. Art History flashed into Hannah’s mind. John Ruskin and Effie Gray—that the artist had supposedly fled his nuptial bed because (depending on the telling) the odor or pubic hair or period blood or some other feature of real women was traumatic to an artist who had encountered the feminine form only in marble. Maybe if poor Effie had gone through Panielli’s process, Ruskin would have fucked her.
“Are you recording?” Panielli said. He was presumably addressing one of his assistants, but his eyes never left Hannah.
“Yes, sir,” replied one of the indistinguishable redheads. The two assistants clearly weren’t twins, but were so similar in appearance that they seem to have been molded in the same atelier, differing only in the usual imperfections of hand artistry.
“Then we begin,” said Panielli, without any enthusiasm. He held out his hand. With sycophantic speed, one of the redheads put a camera into it. Hannah recognized it as one of the digital Polaroid types, the sort hipsters at her school, who used paper as an aesthetic, liked.
Panielli walked up to Hannah and knelt, studying her toes. “Lift her,” he said. To Hannah’s horror, she felt herself being pulled up by her arms, so that she dangled from her wrist restraints. The metal cut into her wrist painfully. She gasped and almost screamed. She was stopped only by the look of anticipatory delight on one of the assistant’s faces. Hannah wasn’t sure what she had consented to in that form, but she had a queasy feeling there was some level of punishment to which she could be subjected if she interrupted the process.
Panielli moved to look at Hannah’s soles. With cold precision he felt her heels and then spread her toes apart. “No potential in the foot market,” he said. “But put her in for a standard foot bleaching, full pedicure, and of course, those little hairs will have to go.”
He waved a hand and Hannah was again standing on her feet. Panielli was scribbling notes on various pictures, but soon turned his attention back to Hannah.
Without a word, he squeezed Hannah’s right calf and then slapped it, the camera noisily printing as he did so. The noise was supposed to be part of the appeal of such cameras, the sound of the little imperfections of classic analog tech. In this context, it only added to the industrial feel of the process, the sense of being a product on an assembly line.
“You run middle distances?” Panielli asked.
Hannah didn’t immediately process that the question was to her. She hadn’t expected to converse with this man.
With a smile, one of the assistants tapped her phone. An electric shock surged Hannah in the neck, producing solitons of squirming that propelled out through the rest of her body.
“Y-y-yes,” Hannah gasped, trying to recover some small measure of composure. “Cross-country. We do five-kays. And then I do the 1500 meter in the spring on track, though I’m not varsity for track. Just cross-country. And I’m not doing it as an NCAA thing or anything.”
She was rambling, lacking the power to limit her answers to that about which Panielli might care. Little twitches were still springing up in her muscles.
“That will stop,” Panielli said. “Your calves are all wrong. A program of sprints will be assigned to you, with one of our trainers. A proper calf should bespeak the swift grace of the gazelle. Yours have the utilitarian stockiness of a draft mule.”
He began running his hands up Hannah’s thighs, taking pictures as he did so and occasionally pausing to jot down notes on them. “At least you have a thigh gap, or you should with this circumference. Your posture was poor when you walked in and the way you stand might preclude it. You’ll need yoga.”
He grabbed Hannah’s lower thighs, pinching each painfully. “Some injections and work on the lower thighs will be needed, along with the usual exercises,” he mused. “They are too thin. A common fault—this mess of evenly distributed leg fat. It is a trite and common cliché, but nonetheless true: contrast creates the thigh.”
Hannah had never heard that saying before, but she was in no state to dispute linguistics.
Panielli took out a marker and drew lines a few inches above Hannah’s knees. “It’s all from the Greeks,” he mused. “Entasis—the subtle swelling of the column to bring perfection to the eye. The interplay of grace, frailty, and strength. Do they teach that in schools anymore? I can still recall first seeing images of the Parthenon as a boy—the first time my eyes beheld how man could invite the gods unto earth by means of the sublime.”
One shock was all the conditioning Hannah needed to learn to answer promptly. “Yes,” she said. “It’s all in A.P. Art History, but we even did a bit on Greek columns in the sixth grade or maybe earlier, I think.”
“Then why,” Panielli said, with the accusatory tone of an attorney eviscerating a witness, “have you been so indolent as to come to me with these uniform shafts? Where was your diet, your exercise, your care? Did you think you could simply strip and immediately be acclaimed into the ranks of the virgule une? Or did you simply expect to leave all the labor to poor artists like me?”
Panielli glanced sideways and another shock propagated itself through Hannah. Tremors upon tremors. As awareness slowly returned, she realized dimly that she had inadvertently urinated. She had not thought it possible to feel further embarrassment after being strung up nude and having her every bodily flaw pointed out, but the small puddle coalescing below her legs triggered the taboo, ingrained since childhood, about wetting oneself. She longed to cross her legs, even though that would do nothing to undo the fait accompli of her urination.
She felt something… no, someone between her legs. Her ability to crane her neck was constrained by the collar, but she heard the sounds of thorough scrubbing. Then, with vicious roughness, a towel was pressing onto her vagina. Before Hannah could react, one of the assistants spat in her face, only to immediately wipe the saliva off. Holding a rag disdainfully before Hannah’s face, the redhead said, with venom, “If we didn’t need to inspect your face, I would rub your nose in this, you stupid cunt. Were you never housetrained?”
Hannah didn’t trust herself to reply without inviting another shock. Instead, she lowered her eyes, hoping to convey some sense of contrition.
“It’s done, sir,” the assistant said. Panielli looked up from one of his binders, seeming annoyed at being distracted from whatever scrap of design he was studying.
“Fine,” he said, with a sigh. The self-proclaimed artist pulled on a pair of latex gloves and strode back to Hannah, camera in hand.
Bending so he stood at eye level with Hannah’s vagina, Panielli began to take pictures and jot notes. “The usual razor burns,” he said mournfully. “Of course we’ve scheduled the full laser-electrolysis course but we’ll probably also need to do some correcting for how irritated the skin is around the mons pubis and labia.”
He pinched and spread Hannah’s labia, snapping more pictures and inspecting them as they were printed. “Slight puffiness without sufficient extrusion to qualify for distinction,” he said to himself. “I would do a labiaplasty but we’ll have to see if accounting will judge her sexual market value warrants the expense. At the least, some injections to tighten some of these folds are needed.”
He inspected Hannah’s vagina and its environs further. “The minora and the clitoris are a mess but there’s not much we can do there. The former is too abstruse for any but the connoisseur to note, and the latter prohibited by law, though I rather think eventually Sacramento will see sense and allow some cosmetic clitoroplasty. But by the time that gets through, this will have depreciated so much there’s little point.”
He walked around, out of Hannah’s vision, and smacked her bottom. There was no playfulness in it, nor malice. It was done with the precision of a laboratory test. The camera snapped away, leaving Hannah to wonder what Panielli thought of how her ass jiggled (or failed to). Then, gloved fingers were parting her ass cheeks, feeling between the glutei and down to her perineum. “Again the negative Goldilocks,” Panielli said. “Not firm enough nor round enough. I suspect we’ll never get roundness without lifts and I doubt accounting will approve. The standard squat program and full calisthenics, then, to maximize firmness. Thorough bleaching, of course, and I will insist to accounting that we do something about the gluteal fold. The recovery is quick enough and it’s utterly horrendous. Our patrons may not know the name for the area, but they will, if they have even the least discernment, immediately clock the misshapen horror of it.”
He pressed his fingers against the small of Hannah’s back and moved them up her spine. “Shoulder definition is weak and back muscles underdeveloped for lithesomeness,” he said. After pausing to write more notes and hand a bundle of photos to one of the assistants (a process Hannah could only slightly glimpse from the corner of an eye), he moved back around to face Hannah’s navel.
“Your abdomen is a wreck,” he said disapprovingly. “I know exactly your type—you think because your stomach is flat you’ll do fine. Well, it’s not enough to lack flab; you need the musculature to frame and present your slenderness. It’s remarkable how many of the SoCal girls get to being the proper stick thin and then think they’ve perfected the stomach. A thorough training program will be needed.”
Hannah was actually relieved. She had feared he would call her fat. That would be too much from any man, even one as impersonal and seemingly asexual as Panielli. She could live with being termed abdominally underdeveloped.
Now, Panielli, the gloves removed, began to move and pinch Hannah’s breasts. “Nipple and areola coloration will have to be redone,” he said. “Perhaps some slight tuck under the breasts… but again I fear accounting will be pennywise and pound foolish on this. They have no sense of artistry, nor do they grasp that one need not master design or critique to instinctively know when a breast swings in precisely the right manner. I won’t even try to ask for reduction or enhancement, although it’s again the negative Goldilocks, neither big nor small enough to hit the optimal form.”
He then examined Hannah’s armpits and collarbone, making more impenetrable remarks about artistry. Hannah had no idea what he was getting at with mentions of sub-scapular curvature, but what did a canvas need to know about painterly technique? She was there to be reshaped, not to learn.
Then, the moment she had been dreading approached. Panielli was moving up each arm. The critique of her biceps she barely heard. He would see them soon. Would they fire her on the spot? What would an artist think of a canvas which slashed itself?
“Ah, forearm scarring, consistent with moderate self-harm,” Panielli said. “Clean razor blade, no infections, light but visible marks in most lighting, though at some brightness they’d fade from view.”
“I’m sorry,” Hannah blurted out. “I can try to cover them up more… I got this cream from Rite Aid but it probably wasn’t good… but I haven’t done it in two years and I think they’re fading and if accounting won’t finance their removal I can try to see if I can buy a better cream or something or maybe pose so they can’t be seen or—”
Panielli held up a solitary finger. “Stop rambling, you foolish girl. These scars are one of your few good features. Perhaps we could emphasize them a little more—I’m afraid again Sacramento doesn’t allow us to make new ones—but they’re very good.”
Hannah tried to express surprise but it came out as incoherent mumbling.
Panielli sighed. “I deal with this every time; for some reason, every girl who went through the usual—and it is fairly usual—moody period of self-harm at fourteen thinks it renders her worthless. Yet, leaving aside the artistic merit in the flowing pattern of most such scars, which I think is considerable, our marketing team—and for all my artistry, this is still a business—has very thoroughly confirmed that mild self-harm scars increase S.M.V. The patrons like the vulnerability, the fear, the self-doubt. They want a broken bird for them to nurse and repair, who will then owe them perpetual gratitude. It signals you aren’t some confident pornographic image, that you might be more easily charmed by kindness from an older and wealthier patron, having had so turbulent a youth. And if men like it, then T&A will sell it.”
Hannah didn’t know what to say. Relief from Panielli’s endorsement of what she had heretofore regarded as marks of shame mixed uncomfortably with her rage at a world that saw female suffering merely in terms of commodification. Remember, all this is so you can change things, she thought. College, law school, and then setting the world right. So I’m in the last generation that goes through this.
She barely noticed Panielli’s biting remarks about her face and recommendations for injections, abrasions, and smoothing. The dental inspection was unpleasant but at least her teeth were good. Then, after a long monologue about the myriad problems with her ears—men cannot possibly care about ears, she thought to herself—Panielli turned away and began sorting through the photographs. “Get her out of here,” he said. “I need to type this all up and put things into terms the clerisy in accounting can understand… such is the lot of an artist forced to make a living.”
Roughly, the assistants let Hannah down and shoved her off the podium. “Your turn for cuntwalking,” one redhead said to the other.
The one to Hannah’s right sighed. “Fine,” she said. Turning to Hannah, she said, “Crawl behind me, bitch. You can walk once we reach the hall.”
This, unlike the strictly market-oriented treatment from the men at T&A, was just wanton cruelty, borne of jealousy rather than sound capitalist motives. However, Hannah was past the point of caring what the assistants did to act out their frustration at not being talent. They hate you because you’ve got higher S.M.V., she thought. Then she squashed her momentary pride. That was a dangerous path. If she started thinking that her S.M.V. made her superior, she was accepting that S.M.V. was a valid concept on which to judge a human being. That was how the industry seduced you—by getting you to glory in how valuable your assets—what in men was called a body—were.
Fortunately, the door was not far and Hannah was soon back on her feet. The assistant did not deign to look behind her to see if Hannah was following. Hannah was grateful simply to be ignored.
