Sarai Walker - Dietland

LEETA ALBRIDGE LINKED TO “JENNIFER”?

NEW YORK: . . . After a tip from her roommate, whose identity is being protected, the authorities have sought Ms. Albridge for questioning . . . FBI Agent Lopez explained that Albridge’s roommate said she confessed to knowing the identify of “Jennifer.” Albridge also claimed to have done something wrong, but provided no details . . . With no one else linked to this baffling series of crimes, Ms. Albridge is quickly becoming the face of the mysterious group referred to in the media as “Jennifer,” even though there is no evidence that she is involved . . .

WHEREABOUTS OF LEETA ALBRIDGE UNKNOWN

AMHERST, MA: The family of Amherst native Leeta Albridge, 23, held a press conference last night . . . “Leeta, please come forward. We know you’re not a criminal,” said her father, Richard Albridge . . . “There’s not a violent bone in her body,” said Albridge’s mother, Ruth . . . Ms. Albridge’s older half brother, Jakob Albridge, a Hampshire County police sharpshooter, said he taught his sister how to fire a gun, but “she was never any good at it” . . . Ms. Albridge graduated from the University of Southern California last summer and moved to New York City afterward . . . As a student in Los Angeles, she had volunteered as a rape crisis counselor and was considering graduate study in her home state of Massachusetts this fall . . .

AUSTEN SHOCK! WORRY SPREADS OVER “JENNIFER” INTERN

NEW YORK: . . . Albridge quit her internship at Austen Media before her disappearance . . . Editors liked the dark-haired young woman, though one recalled she had a penchant for snooping. A Glamour Bride editorial assistant claims she spotted Albridge photocopying a list of staff home addresses and telephone numbers . . . Austen Media chairman Stanley Austen has paid tribute to the company’s nearly 300 unpaid interns, who he said are not violent or political . . . counseling offered for Austen staff . . . Julia Cole, Albridge’s former supervisor in the cosmetics department, insists that Albridge has not done anything wrong . . . “I am simply shocked that her name has been connected to Jennifer,” Cole said. “Leeta has a bright future ahead of her in cosmetics management. I know she’ll be vindicated.”

Julia. She’d been forced out of hiding into the spotlight. I wondered how she would fare.

I read through the articles several times, trying to reconcile the Leeta from the news with the woman who’d written about me in her notebook. The notebook, despite its incisive observations, was also girlish and in some ways reminded me of the Dear Kitty letters. It seemed absurd that she could know anything about the mysterious “Jennifer,” but I had to admit that her behavior, at least according to the articles, was suspicious.

I left the kitchen with the articles, and once again the noises from yesterday filled the hall. This time they were louder. Could the person who’d left the articles and the food still be in the apartment? My stomach tensed at the thought of that room.

I moved down the dark corridor, approaching the light, and stepped through the archway into the circular room. Stella Cross appeared on the screens, undead, animated and full of life. I had never seen her in action before. She writhed around naked on a bed before the camera moved to a close-up of her bare vulva, framed by the insides of her white thighs. This image, repeated on every screen, appeared like a flock of white birds with their wings spread open.

Into Stella’s vagina went various objects: a penis, a dildo, and then other things—a Coke bottle, a string of rosary beads, a man’s fist. I closed my eyes, wanting to erase the images from my mind, but Stella’s vagina remained on the backs of my eyelids, as if imprinted there. She had nothing more than a sanitized slit between her legs, like the coin slot on a vending machine. All the women I’d seen on the screens looked that way. That’s not the way I looked.

I recalled another screen: my womb on the ultrasound monitor.

With my eyes still closed, I turned around in the direction of the door and crashed into someone. “Don’t close your eyes,” a woman’s voice said. “This room is about keeping your eyes wide open.”

The woman with the burned face was standing before me, smiling calmly. I had seen her in Calliope House the day I began the makeover with Marlowe. She’d been eating an apple. I’d thought of her as a freak.

“Sorry I scared you. I’m Sana,” she said. She pronounced Sana as sa- naw, the emphasis on the second part. She pushed a button on a control panel near the archway and the sound was muted, but the images continued to play. Without the sound for context, some of the scenes on the screens could have been from a horror movie, the women’s faces twisted in what looked to be terror.

“Can’t you turn off this porn?” I asked her.

“It doesn’t turn off,” she said. “It stays on all the time.”

Apparently, the pornography was like wallpaper.

Sana explained that she worked upstairs with Verena and had brought down my breakfast and the news articles. She looked Middle Eastern and spoke with an accent that was pleasing but faint. Only one side of her face was scarred, I assumed from a fire. The flesh below her right cheekbone looked as if it had caved in, like clay on a potter’s spinning wheel that had lost its shape and sunk. The scarring went from her face and down her neck and crept underneath her clothes. The left side of her face was unblemished, giving her two distinct profiles.

I didn’t know where to look. I was so uncomfortable that I almost turned to the screens, just to have something else to focus on. To stare at the burned flesh would have been rude, but to avoid staring might have also been rude.

“I’m worried you’re not eating,” Sana said. “The food we’ve left for you hasn’t been touched.”

She was worried about me, even though she didn’t know me. “I don’t have an appetite.”

“You’re going to get sick if you don’t eat. I’ll bring you something tasty for dinner. How about a burrito?”

“I don’t feel like eating.”

“Vietnamese? Thai? I’ll continue this tour of Southeast Asia until you tell me what you want.”

“What I want is to leave this room.”

“Don’t leave,” Sana said. “I know this room is crazy and sick, but it’s also necessary. It’s Marlowe’s creation.”

With the mention of Marlowe’s name, the room instantly made sense. “I should have known,” I said, feeling foolish for not seeing the connection sooner.

“She wrote Fuckability Theory in this room and she spends time down here working on the companion volume now. She says that if you’re going to write a book about the sexual objectification of women, you need to face it. She says too many women look away. They close their eyes, like you did.”

My eyes were open now. On the screens, Stella Cross was replaced by another woman. A man shoved his enormous penis so far down her throat that her face turned red. She gagged and choked. He went through a string of women this way. They lined up like baby birds with their mouths open, accepting whatever was shoved in.

“Does wanting to make yourself fuckable mean turning yourself into that?” I pointed to the open mouth on the screen. Not a face, not a body, just a mouth belonging to an anonymous woman.

“You’re thinking about it too literally,” Sana said. “Think of this room as the curtain pulled back.”

I would have preferred that the curtain remain closed. I moved away from Sana and took refuge under the archway.

“You’re lucky to experience this,” she said. I glanced at her skeptically. “Women come to this room from all over the world. Two Egyptian activists left the day before you arrived. They’d been down here for two weeks, living in this room practically day and night. They’ll never be the same again.”