Invisible Monsters

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Sister Katherine was the kind of nun who wears a wedding ring.

  And married people always think love is the answer.

  Jump back to the day of my big accident, when everybody was so considerate. The people, the folks who let me go ahead of them in the emergency room. What the police insisted. I mean, they gave me this hospital sheet with “Property of La Paloma Memorial Hospital” printed along the edge in indelible blue. First they gave me morphine, intravenously. Then they propped me up on a gurney.

  I don’t remember much of this, but the day nurse told me about the police photos.

  In the pictures, these big eight-by-ten glossies as nice as anything in my portfolio. Black and white, the nurse said. But in these eight-by-tens I’m sitting up on a gurney with my back against the emergency room wall. The attending nurse spent ten minutes cutting my dress off with those tiny operating room manicure scissors. The cutting, I remember. It was my cotton crepe sundress from Espre. I remember that when I ordered this dress from the catalogue I almost ordered two, they’re so comfortable, loose with the breeze trying to get inside the arm holes and lift the hem up around your waist. Then you’d sweat if there wasn’t a breeze, and the cotton crepe stuck on you like eleven herbs and spices, only on you the dress was almost transparent. You’d walk onto a patio, it was a great feeling, a million spotlights picking you out of the crowd, or walk into a restaurant when outside it was ninety degrees, and everyone would turn and look as if you’d just been awarded some major distinguished award for a major lifetime achievement.

  That’s how it felt. I can remember this kind of attention. It always felt ninety degrees hot.

  And I remember my underwear.

  Sorry, Mom, sorry, God, but I was wearing just this little patch up front with an elastic string waist and just one string running down the crack and back around to the bottom of the patch up front. Flesh-tone. That one string, the one down the crack, butt floss is what everybody calls that string. I wore the patch underwear because of when the cotton crepe sundress goes almost transparent. You just don’t plan on ending up in the emergency room with your dress cut off and detectives taking your picture, propped up on a gurney with a morphine drip in one arm and a Franciscan nun screaming in one ear. “Take your pictures! Take your pictures, now! She’s still losing blood!”

  No, really, it was funnier than it sounds.

  It got funny when there I was sprawled on this gurney, this anatomically correct rag doll with nothing but this little patch on and my face was the way it is now.

  The police, they had the nun hold this sheet up over my breasts. It’s so they can take pictures of my face, but the detectives are so embarrassed for me, being sprawled there topless.

  Jump to when they refuse to show me the pictures, one of the detectives says that if the bullet had been two inches higher, I’d be dead.

  I couldn’t see their point.

  Two inches lower, and I’d be deep fried in my spicy cotton crepe sundress, trying to get the insurance guy to wave the deductible and replace my car window. Then, I’d be by a swimming pool, wearing sunblock and telling a couple cute guys how I was driving on the freeway in my Stingray when a rock or I don’t know what, but my driver’s-side window just burst.

  And the cute guys would say, “Whoa.”

  Jump to another detective, the one who’d searched my car for the slug and bone fragments, that stuff, the detective saw how I’d been driving with the window half open. A car window, this guy tells me over the eight-by-ten glossies of me wearing a white sheet, a car window should always be all the way open or shut. He couldn’t remember how many motorists he’d seen decapitated by windows in car accidents.

  How could I not laugh.

  That was his word: Motorists.

  The way my mouth was, the only sound left I could do was laugh. I couldn’t not laugh.

  Jump to after there were the pictures, when people stopped looking at me.

  My boyfriend, Manus, came in that evening, after the emergency room, after I’d been wheeled off on my gurney to surgery, after the bleeding had stopped and I was in a private room. Then Manus showed up. Manus Kelley who was my fiancé until he saw what was left. Manus sat looking at the black-and-white glossies of my new face, shuffling and reshuffling them, turning them upsidedown and right side up the way you would one of those mystery pictures where one minute you have a beautiful woman, but when you look again you have a hag.

  Manus says, “Oh, God.”

  Then says, “Oh, sweet, sweet Jesus.”

  Then says, “Christ.”

  The first date I ever had with Manus, I was still living with my folks. Manus showed me a badge in his wallet. At home, he had a gun. He was a police detective, and he was really successful in Vice. This was a May and December thing. Manus was twenty-five and I was eighteen, but we went out. This is the world we live in. We went sailing one time, and he wore a Speedo, and any smart woman should know that means bisexual at least.

  My best friend, Evie Cottrell, she’s a model. Evie says that beautiful people should never date each other. Together, they just don’t generate enough attention. Evie says there’s a whole shift in the beauty standard when they’re together. You can feel this, Evie says. When both of you are beautiful, neither of you is beautiful. Together, as a couple, you’re less than the sum of your parts.

  Nobody really gets noticed, not any more.

  Still, there I was one time, taping this infomercial, one of those long-long commercials you think will end at any moment because after all it’s just a commercial, but it’s actually thirty minutes long. Me and Evie, we’re hired to be walking sex furniture to wear tight evening dresses all afternoon and entice the television audience into buying the Num Num Snack Factory. Manus comes to sit in the studio audience, and after the shoot he goes, “Let’s go sailing,” and I go, “Sure!”

  So we went sailing, and I forgot my sunglasses, so Manus buys me a pair on the dock. My new sunglasses are the exact same as Manus’s Vuarnets, except mine are made in Korea not Switzerland and cost two dollars.

  Three miles out, I’m walking into deck things. I’m falling down. Manus throws me a rope, and I miss it. Manus throws me a beer and I miss the beer. A headache, I get the kind of headache God would smote you with in the Old Testament. What I don’t know is that one of my sunglass lenses is darker than the other, almost opaque. I’m blind in one eye because of this lens, and I have no depth perception.

  Back then I don’t know this, that my perception is so fucked up. It’s the sun, I tell myself, so I just keep wearing the sunglasses and stumbling around blind and in pain.

  Jump to the second time Manus visits me in the hospital, he tells the eight-by-ten glossies of me in my sheet, Property of La Paloma Memorial Hospital, that I should think about getting back into my life. I should start making plans. You know, he says, take some classes. Finish my degree.

  He sits next to my bed and holds the photos between us so I can’t see either them or him. On my pad, with my pencil I ask Manus in writing to show me.

  “When I was little, we raised Doberman puppies,” he says from behind the photos. “And when a puppy is about six months old you get its ears and tail cropped. It’s the style for those dogs. You go to a motel where a man travels from state to state cutting the ears and tails off thousands of Doberman puppies or boxers or bull terriers.”

  On my pad with my pencil, I write:

  your point being?

  And I wave this in his direction.

  “The point is whoever cuts your ears off is the one you’ll hate for the rest of your life,” he says. “You don’t want your regular veterinarian to do the job so you pay a stranger.”

  Still looking at picture after picture, Manus says, “That’s the reason I can’t show you these.”

  Somewhere outside the hospital, in a motel room full of bloody towels with his tool box of knives and needles, or driving down the highway to his next victim, or kneeling over a dog, drugged and cut u
p in a dirty bathtub, is the man a million dogs must hate.

  Sitting next to my bed, Manus says, “You just need to archive your cover-girl dreams.”

  The fashion photographer inside my head, yells:

  Give me pity.

  Flash.

  Give me another chance.

  Flash.

  That’s what I did before the accident. Call me a big liar, but before the accident I told people I was a college student. If you tell folks you’re a model, they shut down. Your being a model will mean they’re networking with some lower life form. They start using baby talk. They dumb down. But if you tell folks you’re a college student, folks are so impressed. You can be a student in anything and not have to know anything. Just say toxicology or marine biokinesis, and the person you’re talking to will change the subject to himself. If this doesn’t work, mention the neural synapses of embryonic pigeons.

  It used to be I was a real college student. I have about sixteen hundred credits toward an undergraduate degree in personal fitness training. What I hear from my parents is that I could be a doctor by now.

  Sorry, Mom.

  Sorry, God.

  There was a time when Evie and me went out to dance clubs and bars and men would wait outside the ladies’ room door to catch us. Guys would say they were casting a television commercial. The guy would give me a business card and ask what agency I was with.

  There was a time when my mom came to visit. My mom smokes, and the first afternoon I came home from a shoot, she held out a matchbook and said, “What’s the meaning of this?”

  She said, “Please tell me you’re not as big a slut as your poor dead brother.”

  In the matchbook was a guy’s name I didn’t know and a telephone number.

  “This isn’t the only one I found,” Mom said. “What are you running here?”

  I don’t smoke. I tell her that. These matchbooks pile up because I’m too polite not to take them and I’m too frugal to just throw them away. That’s why it takes a whole kitchen drawer to hold them, all these men I can’t remember and their telephone numbers.

  Jump to no day special in the hospital, just outside the office of the hospital speech therapist. The nurse was leading me around by my elbow for exercise, and as we came around this one corner, just inside the open office doorway, boom, Brandy Alexander was just so there, glorious in a seated Princess Alexander pose, in an iridescent Vivienne Westwood cat suit changing colors with her every move.

  Vogue on location.

  The fashion photographer inside my head, yelling:

  Give me wonder, baby.

  Flash.

  Give me amazement.

  Flash.

  The speech therapist said, “Brandy, you can raise the pitch of your voice if you raise your laryngeal cartilage. It’s that bump in your throat you feel going up as you sing ascending scales.” She said, “If you can keep your voice-box raised high in your throat, your voice should stay between a G and a middle C. That’s about 160 Hertz.”

  Brandy Alexander and the way she looked turned the rest of the world into virtual reality. She changed color from every new angle. She turned green with my one step. Red with my next. She turned silver and gold and then she was dropped behind us, gone.

  “Poor, sad misguided thing,” Sister Katherine said, and she spat on the concrete floor. She looked at me craning my neck to see back down the hall, and she asked if I had any family.

  I wrote: yeah, there’s my gay brother but he’s dead from AIDS.

  And she says, “Well, that’s for the best, then, isn’t it?”

  Jump to the week after Manus’s last visit, last meaning final, when Evie drops by the hospital. Evie looks at the glossies and talks to God and Jesus Christ.

  “You know,” Evie tells me across a stack of Vogues and Glamour magazines in her lap she brings me, “I talked to the agency and they said that if we re-do your portfolio they’ll consider taking you back for hand work.”

  Evie means a hand model, modeling cocktail rings and diamond tennis bracelets and shit.

  Like I want to hear this.

  I can’t talk.

  All I can eat is liquids.

  Nobody will look at me. I’m invisible.

  All I want is somebody to ask me what happened. Then, I’ll get on with my life.

  Evie tells the stack of magazines, “I want you to come live with me at my house when you get out.” She unzips her canvas bag on the edge of my bed and goes into it with both hands. Evie says, “It’ll be fun. You’ll see. I hate living all by my lonesome.”

  And says, “I’ve already moved your things into my spare bedroom.”

  Still in her bag, Evie says, “I’m on my way to a shoot. Any chance you have any agency vouchers you can lend me?”

  On my pad with my pencil, I write:

  is that my sweater you’re wearing?

  And I wave the pad in her face.

  “Yeah,” she says, “but I knew you wouldn’t mind.”

  I write:

  but it’s a size six.

  I write:

  and you’re a size nine.

  “Listen,” Evie says. “My call is for two o’clock. Why don’t I stop by some time when you’re in a better mood?”

  Talking to her watch, she says, “I’m so sorry things had to go this way. It wasn’t all of it anybody’s fault.”

  Every day in the hospital goes like this:

  Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Sister Katherine falls in between.

  On television is one network running nothing but infomercials all day and all night, and there we are, Evie and me, together. We got a raft of bucks. For the snack factory thing, we do these big celebrity spokesmodel smiles, the ones where you make your face a big space heater. We’re wearing these sequined dresses that when you get them under a spotlight, the dress flashes like a million reporters taking your picture. So glamorous. I’m standing there in this twenty-pound dress, doing this big smile and dropping animal wastes into the Plexiglas funnel on top of the Num Num Snack Factory. This thing just poops out little canapés like crazy, and Evie has to wade out into the studio audience and get folks to eat the canapés.

  Folks will eat anything to get on television.

  Then, off camera, Manus goes, “Let’s go sailing.”

  And I go, “Sure.”

  It was so stupid, my not knowing what was happening all along.

  Jump to Brandy on a folding chair just inside the office of the speech therapist, shaping her fingernails with the scratch pad from a book of matches. Her long legs could squeeze a motorcycle in half, and the legal minimum of her is shrink wrapped in leopard-print stretch terry just screaming to get out.

  The speech therapist says, “Keep your glottis partially open as you speak. It’s the way Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy. It makes your breath bypass your vocal chords for a more feminine, helpless quality.”

  The nurse leads me past in my cardboard slippers, my tight bandages and deep funk, and Brandy Alexander looks up at the last possible instant and winks. God should be able to wink that good. Like somebody taking your picture. Give me joy. Give me fun. Give me love.

  Flash.

  Angels in heaven should blow kisses the way Brandy Alexander does and lights up the rest of my week. Back in my room, I write:

  who is she?

  “No one you should have any truck with,” the nurse says. “You’ll have problems enough as it is.”

  but who is she? I write.

  “If you can believe it,” the nurse says, “that one is someone different every week.”

  It’s after that Sister Katherine starts matchmaking. To save me from Brandy Alexander, she offers me the lawyer without a nose. She offers a mountain climbing dentist whose fingers and facial features are eaten down to little hard shining bumps by frostbite. A missionary with dark patches of some tropical fungus just under his skin. A mechanic who leaned over a battery the moment it exploded and the acid left his lips and
cheeks gone and his yellow teeth showing in a permanent snarl.

  I look at the nun’s wedding ring and write:

  i guess you got the last really buff guy.

  The whole time I was in the hospital, no way could I fall in love. I just couldn’t go there yet. Settle for less. I didn’t want to process through anything. I didn’t want to pick up any pieces. Lower my expectations. Get on with my less-than life. I didn’t want to feel better about being still alive. Start compensating. I just wanted my face fixed, if that was possible, which it wasn’t.

  When it’s time to reintroduce me to solid foods, their words again, it’s puréed chicken and strained carrots. Baby foods. Everything mashed or pulverized or crushed.

  You are what you eat.

  The nurse brings me the personal classified ads from a newsletter. Sister Katherine peers down her nose and through her glasses to read: Guys seeking slim, adventurous girls for fun and romance. And, yes, it’s true, not one single guy specifically excludes hideous mutilated girls with growing medical bills.

  Sister Katherine tells me, “These men you can write to in prison don’t need to know how you really look.”

  It’s just too much trouble to try and explain my feelings to her in writing.

  Sister Katherine reads me the singles columns while I spoon up my roast beef. She offers arsonists. Burglars. Tax cheats. She says, “You probably don’t want to date a rapist, not right off. Nobody’s that desperate.”

  Between the lonely men behind bars for armed robbery and second-degree manslaughter, she stops to ask what’s the matter. She takes my hand and talks to the name on my plastic bracelet, such a hand model I am already, cocktail rings, plastic I.D. bracelets so beautiful even a bride of Christ can’t take her eyes off them. She says, “What’re you feeling?”

  This is hilarious.

  She says, “Don’t you want to fall in love?”