“Some people in this business will tell you that rejection is something to be faced philosophically. That rejection is something that shouldn’t be taken personally. You will not find that attitude on this show. On this show, rejection by the viewers is strictly personal, very personal. I take it personally, and I can assure you that you will do the same. Those who fail on my show, those who remain unsold, receive no condolences. They are not told, ‘Better luck next time.’ Rejection on this show is followed by recrimination, humiliation, misery, and pain. I hope that you all fully understand that.”
The women all stood transfixed, but this wasn’t the response that Fat Ari was looking for. He singled out one woman, just beside Semple, and he and his caftan bore down on her like an angry galleon in full sail. “Well? Do you understand?”
The woman’s eyes widened as though she were about to die on the spot. “Ye-yes.”
Fat Ari rolled his eyes heavenward. “I don’t know why I waste my time.” He gestured to the entourage around him. “Get this worthless trash into makeup. Tonight is going to be a disaster. I know that for a fact. We are beyond help. Just get them to makeup and pray for a miracle.”
Makeup was by far the most elaborate phase of the preparations. Out on the studio floor, the black-cowled techno-priests might sweat over the positioning of lights and struggle with their bulky cameras, but for Semple and the other women the long narrow makeup room-with its bright lights and greasepaint smells, lines of mirrors and milling bodies-was the hub of the universe. Inside that hub, they were both the core and the focus. They were greased and teased, oiled and manicured, painted, powdered, and latexed, with ultimate attention to detail, all the way to the trimming and shaping of their pubic hair. All blemishes were eradicated, anything unsightly disguised. At regular intervals Fat Ari’s immediate underlings would storm through, checking the work and demanding that some particular woman be done over.
Semple wondered if this was how it had felt to be a Las Vegas showgirl, or a top-line Paris stripper, like one of the girls at the Crazy Horse, waiting backstage to go on, anxious amid all the bustle and excitement. She found that she could almost stop thinking of herself as naked and helpless and take a weird pride in becoming an object, a product, something to be desired, to have her true worth actually measured out in hard currency.
At least in the TV studio, unlike the jail, they were allowed to talk, although it seemed as though the makeup people did most of the talking. An effeminate and motherly man called Remu even went to some pains to explain that it wouldn’t be half as bad as they imagined. “Actually a girl can do very well for herself if she puts her mind to it. Get bought by some horny old idiot and you’ll have him bent around your little finger in no time. Next thing you know, he’ll be springing for your freedom and a pardon and you can go your own sweet way.”
One of the women from the prison was less than convinced. “Yeah, but what happens if you get bought by some psycho who wants to do all kinds of terrible stuff to you?”
Remu plainly didn’t think the girl was taking a sufficiently positive attitude. “Well, my dear, accidents do happen. I mean, if you didn’t want a few problems and uncertainties, you should never have got yourself put in prison in the first place, should you? Nobody said there were any guarantees. You’re lucky this isn’t the old days, when it was really rough and ready. Back in the Dark Ages, before we even had color, the Fat One sold anything. Domestic servants, big strapping quarry slaves, huge Nubian overseers with whips, you name it and he had it up on the runway. The entire place smelled of sweat, toil, semen, and the gods only knew what else. At least, since he discovered that the big score was in sex toy auctions, most everyone who comes in here is reasonably decorative and unthreatening.” He rolled his eyes. “Unless, of course, you count the specialist oddities.”
The woman with the negative attitude, far from being reassured, was becoming increasingly agitated by what Remu was saying. “I don’t want to be a sex toy.”
Remu’s eyebrows arched. “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it, darling.”
“But it’s all a mistake. All I did was cheat on a devotional audit.”
“With that attitude, girl, you’ll wind up not getting sold at all. And then Heaven help you. You heard Fatso’s little speech of welcome. He wasn’t flapping his gums to be nasty, you know? He gets very disappointed with the unsold.” He looked at his chronometer, which hung from a collar fob. “But I can’t stay here all day chatting. I have to go to the other side and see that they’re not making too much of a mess of the boys.”
According to the gossip in the makeup room, a dozen young men had been brought to the show at approximately the same time as the women. It may have been that the young men were being processed and prepared for sale separately, but at no time had the women been allowed to set eyes on them, any more than the men were allowed a glimpse of the women. Semple could hardly believe that, in a sink of ethical and moral degeneracy like Necropolis, slaves of different sexes were segregated, but different places did have their different quirks.
Since the makeup crew working on Semple and the others was composed almost entirely of women or gay men, the conversation frequently strayed back to the subject of what might be going on in that other makeup room. One of the women on the crew who specialized in doing eyes had winked at Semple while she was carefully tracing the contours of her right upper lid with a fine brush. “Of course, doing the boys is a lot more fun, if you know what I mean. There’s always the bit about the size of their cocks just before they go on camera.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Keep still, dear, or you’ll fuck up all my good work.” The eye expert tilted Semple’s head back. “Fat Ari’s got this thing about how the boy merch has to be well hung. So we have this little exercise just to slightly enlarge the size. Not a full erection, you realize, nothing . . . how can I put it? Nothing overt. Just a little manual enhancement at the last moment. That’s not to say that every so often somebody doesn’t take it a tad too far, or one of the boys doesn’t get a bit overexcited, and then the obvious happens and the boss has a shit fit.”
As showtime grew closer, the level of tension escalated. For a while, as long as the merchandise kept themselves still and quiet, they were exempt from most of the last-minute yelling and vitriol. When, however, the time came for their first walk-through on the runway, they were irrevocably drawn into Fat Ari’s orbit of fury. For Semple, this fury reached its crescendo when the twelve naked but lavishly packaged ex-prisoners were paraded for final inspection. Fat Ari advanced down the line with the grim determination of Napoleon before Austerlitz. As he glared at each woman in turn, each did her best to look desirable. To Semple’s horror, Fat Ari chose to stop dead in front of her. He leaned forward and peered into her face, then he rounded angrily on his nearest assistant. “And what the holy fuck is this supposed to be?”
The assistant looked blank. “She’s number five on the roster.”
Fat Ari’s expression turned corrosive. “I can count that far on my fingers.” He seized the assistant by the back of his head and thrust his face right into Semple’s. While Semple wished that the studio floor would open up and swallow her, Fat Ari quizzed his assistant like a retarded child. “And what’s wrong with this picture?”
Semple wasn’t sure if she or the assistant was more terrified. The pitch of the assistant’s voice climbed in direct proportion to his desperation. “She doesn’t have a barcode.”
“Very good. She doesn’t have a barcode.”
“But we already knew that.”
“We did?”
“I thought we did.”
Fat Ari let go of the assistant. “It’s the first I heard about it.”