The Guest Room



Here is how you do all three of those things: you take the teenage girl from the Moscow airport to a carefully selected Moscow hotel where you own or have rented all the rooms on a corridor. Then you rape her so violently that when you’re done, the girl just puts the sheet with the bloodstain in the gray plastic trash bag that was in the wastepaper basket, so that later she can secretly throw it away.

That is what Andrei did to me.

Then you take away her luggage and her passport and her cell phone, and you have someone stand guard all night long outside her hotel room door so the teenage girl can’t run away.

So none of the girls in the other rooms can run away.

Then the next morning, after the teenage girl has somehow cried herself to sleep in the middle of the night, you return with some other young thug and say to the teenage girl, “You take clothes off and suck dick and then we take you home. We promise. This was all big mistake. You are not ready for this life.” The girl resists, but then she sees it as her only hope, and so she does it. Somehow she stifles her desire to throw up. She does just what you tell her to do. She does it on her knees for both men. Then for a third. She does more—far more, things she never imagined people did—because this is what you are demanding and because she sees it as her only way home.

Then when she is done, you show her the video you have made. There she is. There you are. Her face is clear. Recognizable. Your face? No one ever sees your face in the video. How clever. You tell her that you will show the video to the whole world—including the girl’s grandmother and the reverent fathers and her dance teacher and her schoolteachers and all of her friends—if she doesn’t follow your instructions to the letter and do everything you say.

Then, that night, you bring in a woman to convince the teenage girl to eat a little something—and to explain to her just how fucked she really is.





Chapter Four


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