Invisible Monsters

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Jump to me at the front desk of the Congress Hotel where I try and make my eyes alluring. They say what people notice first about you is your eyes. I have the attention of what must be the night auditor, the bellman, the manager, and a clerk. First impressions are so important. It must be the way I’m dressed or the rifle. Using the hole that’s the top of my throat, my tongue sticking out of it and all the scar tissue around it, I say, “Gerl terk nahdz gah sssid.”

  Everybody is just flash frozen by my alluring eyes.

  I don’t know how, but then the rifle’s up on the desk, pointing at nobody in particular.

  The manager steps up in his navy blue blazer with its little brass Mr. Baxter name tag, and he says, “We can give you all the money in the drawer, but no one here can open the safe in the office.”

  The gun on the desk points right at the brass Mr. Baxter nametag, a fact that hasn’t gone unnoticed. I snap my fingers and point at a piece of paper for him to give me. With the guest pen on a chain, I write: which suite are the rhea sisters in? don’t make me knock on every door on the fifteenth floor. it’s the middle of the night.

  “That would be Suite 15-G,” says Mr. Baxter, both his hands full of cash I don’t want and reached out across the desk toward me. “The elevators,” he says, “are to your right.”

  Jump to me being Daisy St. Patience the first day Brandy and I sat together. The day of the frozen turkey after the whole summer I waited for somebody to ask me what happened to my face, and I told Brandy everything.

  Brandy, when she sat me in the chair still hot from her ass and she locked the speech therapist door that first time, she named me out of my future. She named me Daisy St. Patience and never wanted to know what name I walked in the door with. I was the rightful heir to the international fashion house, the House of St. Patience.

  Brandy she just talked and talked. We were running out of air, she talked so much, and I don’t mean just we, Brandy and me. I mean the world. The world was running out of air, Brandy talked that much. The Amazon Basin just could not keep up.

  “Who you are moment to moment,” Brandy said, “is just a story.”

  What I needed was a new story.

  “Let me do for you,” Brandy said, “what the Rhea sisters did for me.”

  Give me courage.

  Flash.

  Give me heart.

  Flash.

  So jump to me being Daisy St. Patience going up in that elevator, and Daisy St. Patience walking down that wide carpeted hallway to Suite 15-G. Daisy knocks and nobody answers. Through the door, you can hear that cha-cha music.

  The door opens six inches, but the chain is on so it stops.

  Three white faces appear in the six-inch gap, one on top of the other, Kitty Litter, Sofonda Peters, and the vivacious Vivienne VaVane, their faces shining with moisturizer. Their short dark hair is matted down flat with bobby pins and wig caps.

  The Rhea sisters.

  Who’s who, I don’t know. The drag queen totem pole in the door crack says:

  “Don’t take the queen supreme from us.”

  “She’s all we have to do with our lives.”

  “She isn’t finished yet. We’re not half done, and there’s just so much more we have to do on her.”

  I give them a peekaboo pink chiffon flash of the rifle, and the door slams.

  Through the door, you can hear the chain come off. Then the door opens all the way.

  Jump to one time, late one night, driving between Nowhere, Wyoming, and WhoKnowsWhere, Montana, when Seth says how your being born makes your parents God. You owe them your life, and they can control you.

  “Then puberty makes you Satan,” he says, “just because you want something better.”

  Jump to inside suite 15-G with its blonde furniture and the bossa-nova cha-cha music and cigarette smoke, and the Rhea sisters are flying around the room in their nylon slips with the shoulder straps off one shoulder or the other. I don’t have to do anything but point the rifle.

  “We know who you are, Daisy St. Patience,” one of them says, lighting a cigarette, “With a face like that, you’re all Brandy talks about anymore.”

  All over the room are these big, big 1959 spatter glaze ashtrays so big you only have to empty them every couple years.

  The one with the cigarette gives me her long hand with its porcelain nails and says, “I’m Pie Rhea.”

  “I’m Die Rhea,” says another one, near the stereo.

  The one with the cigarette, Pie Rhea, says, “Those are our stagenames.” She points at the third Rhea, over on the sofa, eating Chinese out of a takeaway carton. “That,” she says and points, “This Miss Eating Herself To Fat, you can call her Gon Rhea.”

  With her mouth full of nothing you’d want to see, Gon Rhea says, “Charmed, I’m sure.”

  Putting her cigarette everywhere but in her mouth, Pie Rhea says, “The queen just does not need your problems, not tonight.” She says, “We’re all the family the top girl needs.”

  On the stereo is a picture in a silver frame of a girl, beautiful in front of seamless paper, smiling into an unseen camera, an invisible photographer telling her:

  Give me passion.

  Flash.

  Give me joy.

  Flash.

  Give me youth and energy and innocence and beauty.

  Flash.

  “Brandy’s first family, her birth family, didn’t want her, so we adopted her,” says Die Rhea. Pointing her long finger at the picture smiling on the blonde stereo, Die Rhea says, “Her birth family thinks she’s dead.”

  Jump to one time back when I had a face and I did this magazine cover shoot for BabeWear magazine.

  Jump back to Suite 15-G and the picture on the blonde stereo is me, my cover, the BabeWear magazine cover, framed with Die Rhea pointing her finger at me.

  Jump back to us in the speech therapist office with the door locked and Brandy saying how lucky she was the Rhea sisters found her. It’s not everybody who gets a second chance to be born again and raised a second time, but this time by a family that loves her.

  “Kitty Litter, Sofonda, and Vivienne,” Brandy says, “I owe them everything.”

  Jump to Suite 15-G and Gon Rhea waving her chopsticks at me and saying, “Don’t you try and take her from us. We’re not finished with her yet.”

  “If Brandy goes with you,” says Pie Rhea, “she can pay for her own conjugated estrogens. And her vaginoplasty. And her labiaplasty. Not to mention her scrotal electrolysis.”

  To the picture on the stereo, to the smiling stupid face in the silver frame, Die Rhea says, “None of that is cheap.” Die Rhea lifts the picture and holds it up to me, my past looking me eye to eye, and Die Rhea says, “This, this is how Brandy wanted to look, like her bitch sister. That was two years ago, before she had laser surgery to thin her vocal cords and then her trachea shave. She had her scalp advanced three centimeters to give her the right hairline. We paid for her brow shave to get rid of the bone ridge above her eyes that the Miss Male used to have. We paid for her jaw contouring and her forehead feminization.”

  “And,” Gon Rhea says with her mouth full of chewed-up Chinese, “and every time she came home from the hospital with her forehead broken and realigned or her Adam’s apple shaved down to a ladylike nothing, who do you think took care of her for those two years?”

  Jump to my folks asleep in their bed across mountains and deserts away from here. Jump to them and their telephone and years ago some crazy man, some screeching awful pervert, calling them and screaming that their son was dead. Their son they didn’t want, Shane, he was dead of AIDS and this man wouldn’t say where or when and then he laughed and hung up.

  Jump back to inside Suite 15-G and Die Rhea waving an old picture of me in my face and saying, “This is how she wanted to look, and tens of thousands of Katty Kathy dollars later, this is how she looks.”

  Gon Rhea says, “Hell. Brandy looks better than that.”

  “We’re the ones who love Brandy A
lexander,” says Pie Rhea.

  “But you’re the one Brandy loves because you need her,” says Die Rhea.

  Gon Rhea says, “The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.” She says, “Brandy will leave us if she thinks you need her, but we need her, too.”

  The one I love is locked in the trunk of a car outside with a stomach full of Valiums, and I wonder if he still has to pee. My brother I hate is come back from the dead. Shane’s being dead was just too good to be true.

  First the exploding hairspray can didn’t kill him.

  Then our family couldn’t just forget him.

  Now even the deadly AIDS virus has failed me.

  My brother is nothing but one bitter fucking disappointment after another.

  You can hear a door opening and shutting somewheres, then another door, then another door opens and Brandy’s there saying, “Daisy, honey,” and steps into the smoke and cha-cha music wearing this amazing sort of Bill Blass First Lady type of traveling suit made out of solid kelly green trimmed with white piping and green high heels and a really smart green purse. On her head is an eco-incorrect tasty sort of spray of rainforest green parrot feathers made into a hat, and Brandy says, “Daisy, honey, don’t point a gun at the people who I love.”

  In each of Brandy’s big ring-beaded hands is a sassy off-white American Tourister luggage. “Give us a hand, somebody. These are just the royal hormones.” She says, “My clothes I need are in the other room.”

  To Sofonda, Brandy says, “Miss Pie Rhea, I have just got to get.”

  To Kitty, Brandy says, “Miss Die Rhea, I’ve done everything we can do for now. We’ve done the scalp advancement, the brow lift, the brow bone shave. We’ve done the trachea shave, the nose contouring, the jawline contouring, the forehead realignment…”

  Like it’s any wonder I didn’t recognize my old mutilated brother.

  To Vivienne, Brandy says, “Miss Gon Rhea, I’ve got months left on my Real Life Training and I’m not spending them holed up here in this hotel.”

  Jump to us driving away with the Fiat Spider just piled with luggage. Imagine desperate refugees from Beverly Hills with seventeen pieces of matched luggage migrating cross-country to start a new life in the Okie Midwest. Everything very elegant and tasteful, one of those epic Joad family vacations, only backwards. Leaving a trail of cast-off accessories, shoes and gloves and chokers and hats to lighten their load so’s they can cross the Rocky Mountains, that would be us.

  This is after the police showed up, no doubt after the hotel manager called and said a mutilated psycho with a gun was menacing everybody up on the fifteenth floor. This is after the Rhea sisters ran all Brandy’s luggage down the fire stairs. This is after Brandy says she has to go, she needs to think about things, you know, before her big surgery. You know. The transformation.

  This is after I keep looking at Brandy and wondering, Shane?

  “It’s just such a big commitment,” Brandy says, “being a girl, you know. Forever.”

  Taking the hormones. For the rest of her life. The pills, the patches, the injections, for the rest of her life. And what if there was someone, just one person who would love her, who could make her life happy, just the way she was, without the hormones and make-up and the clothes and shoes and surgery? She has to at least look around the world a little. Brandy explains all this, and the Rhea sisters start to cry and wave and pile the American Touristers into the car.

  And the whole scene would be just heartbreaking, and I would be boo-hooing too, if I didn’t know Brandy was my dead brother and the person he wants to love him is me, his hateful sister, already plotting to kill him. Yes. Plotting me, plotting to kill Brandy Alexander. Me with nothing left to lose, plotting my big revenge in the spotlight.

  Give me violent revenge fantasies as a coping mechanism.

  Flash.

  Just give me my first opportunity.

  Flash.

  Brandy behind the wheel, she turns to me, her eyes all spidery with tears and mascara, and says, “Do you know what the Benjamin Standard Guidelines are?”

  Brandy starts the car and puts it in gear. She drops the parking brake and cranes her neck to see for traffic. She says, “I have to live one whole year on hormones in my new gender role before my vaginoplasty. They call it Real Life Training.”

  Brandy pulls out into the street and we’re almost escaped. Police SWAT teams in chic basic black accessorized with tear gas and semiautomatic weapons are charging in past the doorman holding the door in his gold braid. The Rheas run after us, waving and throwing kisses and doing pretty much ugly bridesmaid behavior until they stumble, panting, in the street, their high heels shot to hell.

  There’s a moon in the sky. Office buildings are canyoned along either side of the street. There’s still Manus in the trunk, and we’re already putting gross distance between me and my getting caught.

  Brandy puts her big hand open on my leg and squeezes.

  Arson, kidnapping, I think I’m up to murder. Maybe all this will get me just a glimmer of attention, not the good, glorious kind, but still the national media kind.

  Monster Girl Slays Secret Brother Gal Pal

  “I’ve got eight months left to my R.L.T. year,” Brandy says. “Think you can keep me busy for the next eight months?”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Half my life I spend hiding in the bathrooms of the rich.

  Jump back to Seattle, to the time Brandy and Seth and I are on the road hunting drugs. Jump to the day after the night we went to the Space Needle, where right now Brandy is laid out flat on a master bathroom floor. First I helped her off with her suit jacket and unbuttoned the back of her blouse, and now I’m sitting on a toilet overdosing Valiums as steady as Chinese water torture into her Plumbago mouth. The thing about Valiums, the Brandy girl says, is they don’t kill the pain but at least you’re not pissed off about being hurt.

  “Hit me,” Brandy says and makes a fish lips.

  The thing about Brandy is she’s got such a tolerance for drugs it takes forever to kill her. That, and she’s so big, most of her being muscle, it would take bottles and bottles of anything.

  I drop a Valium. A little baby-blue Valium, another powder blue Valium, Tiffany’s light blue, like a gift from Tiffany’s, the Valium falls end over end into Brandy’s interior.

  This suit I help Brandy out of, it’s a Pierre Cardin Space Age style of just bold white, the straight tube skirt being fresh and sterile to just above her knees, the jacket being timeless and clinical in its simple cut and three-quarter sleeves. Her blouse underneath is sleeveless. Her shoes are box-toe white vinyl boots. It’s an outfit you’d accessorize with a Geiger counter instead of a purse.

  At the Bon Marché, when she catwalks out of the fitting room, all I can do is applaud. There’s going to be postpartum depression next week when she goes to take this one back.

  Jump to breakfast, this morning when Brandy and Seth were flush with drug money, we were eating room service and Seth says Brandy could time travel to Las Vegas on another planet in the 1950s and fit right in. The planet Krylon, he says, where synthetic bendable glam-bots would lipo-suck your fat and makeover you.

  And Brandy says, “What fat?”

  And Seth says, “I love how you could just be visiting from the distant future via the 1960s.”

  And I put more Premarin in Seth’s next coffee refill. More Darvon in Brandy’s Champagne.

  Jump back to us in the bathroom, Brandy and me.

  “Hit me,” Brandy says.

  Her lips look all loose and stretched-out, and I drop another gift from Tiffany’s.

  This bathroom we’re hiding in, it goes way the other side of decorative touches. The whole deal is an undersea grotto. Even the princess phone is aqua, but when you look out the big brass porthole windows, you see Seattle from the top of Capitol Hill.

  The toilet I’m sitting on, just sitting, the lid’s closed under my ass thank you, but the toilet’s a big ce
ramic snail shell bolted to the wall. The sink is a big ceramic half a clam bolted to the wall.

  Brandy-land, sexual playground to the stars, she says, “Hit me.”

  Jump to when we got here and the realtor was just a big tooth. One of those football scholarships where the eyebrows grow together in the middle and they forget to get a degree in anything.

  As if I can talk, me with sixteen hundred credits.

  Here’s this million-dollar-club realtor who got thrown his job by a grateful alumnus who just wanted a son-in-law who could stay awake through six or seven holiday bowl games. But maybe I’m being a touch judgmental.

  Brandy was beside herself for feminine wetness. Here’s this extra-Y chromosome guy in a double-breasted blue serge suit, a guy whose paws make even Brandy’s big hands look little.

  “Mr. Parker,” Brandy says, her hand hidden inside his big paw. You can see the Hank Mancini soundtrack of love in her eyes. “We spoke this morning.”

  We’re in the drawing room of a house on Capitol Hill. This is another rich house where everything is exactly what it looks like. The elaborate Tudor roses carved in the ceilings are plaster, not pressed tin, not fiberglass. The torsos of battered Greek nudes are marble, not marbleized plaster. The boxes in the breakfront are not enameled in the manner of Fabergé. The boxes are Fabergé pillboxes, and there are eleven of them. The lace under the boxes was not tatted by a machine.

  Not just the spines, but the entire front and back covers of all the books on all the shelves in the library are bound in leather, and the pages are cut. You don’t have to pull a single book to know this.

  The realtor, Mr. Parker, his legs are still flat on the sides of his ass. In the front, there’s just enough more in one pant leg to spell boxers instead of briefs.

  Brandy nods my way. “This is Miss Arden Scotia, of the Denver River Logging and Paper Scotias.” Another victim of the Brandy Alexander Witness Reincarnation Project.