Invisible Monsters

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Sometimes your best way to deal with shit, she says, is to not hold yourself as such a precious little prize.

  “My point being,” Brandy says, “is you can’t escape the world, and you’re not responsible for how you look, if you look beauticious or butt ugly. You’re not responsible for how you feel or what you say or how you act or anything you do. It’s all out of your hands,” Brandy says.

  The same way a compact disk isn’t responsible for what’s recorded on it, that’s how we are. You’re about as free to act as a programmed computer. You’re about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill.

  “There isn’t any real you in you,” she says. “Even your physical body, all your cells will be replaced within eight years.”

  Skin, bones, blood, and organs transplant from person to person. Even what’s inside you already, the colonies of microbes and bugs that eat your food for you, without them you’d die. Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited.

  “Relax,” Brandy says, “Whatever you’re thinking, a million other folks are thinking. Whatever you do, they’re doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort.”

  Up under my veil, I finger the wet poking stub of a tongue from some vandalized product. The doctors suggested using part of my small intestine to make my throat longer. They suggested carving the shinbones, the fibulas of this human product I am, shaping the bones and grafting them to build me, build the product, a new jawbone.

  On my pad, I wrote:

  the leg-bone connected to the head-bone?

  The doctors didn’t get it.

  Now hear the word of the Lord.

  “You’re a product of our language,” Brandy says, “and how our laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you has already been thought out by some million people before you,” she says. “Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You’re safe because you’re so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it. You can’t imagine any way to escape. There’s no way you can get out,” Brandy says.

  “The world,” Brandy says, “is your cradle and your trap.”

  This is after I backslid. I wrote to my booker at the agency and asked about my chances of getting hand or foot work. Modeling watches and shoes. My booker had sent me some flowers in the hospital early on. Maybe I could pick up assignments as a leg model. How much Evie had blabbed to them, I didn’t know.

  To be a hand model, he wrote back, you have to wear a size seven glove and a size five ring. A foot model must have perfect toenails and wear a size six shoe. A leg model can’t play any sports. She can’t have any visible veins. Unless your fingers and toes still look good printed in a magazine at three times their normal size, or billboarded at two hundred times their size, he wrote, don’t count on body part work.

  My hand’s an eight. My foot, a seven.

  Brandy says, “And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that’s a trap, too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.”

  The books on plastic surgery, the pamphlets and brochures all promised to help me live a more normal, happy life; but less and less, this looked like what I’d want. What I wanted looked more and more like what I’d always been trained to want. What everybody wants.

  Give me attention.

  Flash.

  Give me beauty.

  Flash.

  Give me peace and happiness, a loving relationship, and a perfect home.

  Flash.

  Brandy says, “The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don’t be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.”

  She says, “Don’t do what you want.” She says, “Do what you don’t want. Do what you’re trained not to want.”

  It’s the opposite of following your bliss.

  Brandy tells me, “Do the things that scare you the most.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  In Seattle, I’ve been watching Brandy nap in our undersea grotto for more than one hundred and sixty years. Me, I’m sitting here with a glossy pile of brochures from surgeons showing sexual reassignment surgeries. Transitional transgender operations. Sex changes.

  The color pictures show pretty much the same shot of different-quality vaginas. Camera shots focused straight into the dark vaginal introitus. Fingers with red nail polish cupped against each thigh to spread the labia. The urethral meatus soft and pink. The pubic hair clipped down to stubble on some. The vaginal depth given as six inches, eight inches, two inches. Unresected corpus spongiosum mounding around the urethral opening on some. The clitoris hooded, the frenulum of the clitoris, the tiny folds of skin under the hood that join the clitoris to the labia.

  Bad, cheap vaginas with hair-growing scrotal skin used inside, still growing hair, choked with hair.

  Picture perfect, state-of-the-art vaginas lengthened using sections of colon, self-cleaning and lubricated with its own mucosa. Sensate clitorises made by cropping and rerouting bits of the glans penis. The Cadillac of vaginoplasty. Some of these Cadillacs turn out so successful the flood of colon mucosa means wearing a maxi-pad every day.

  Some are old-style vaginas where you had to stretch and dilate them every day with a plastic mold. All these brochures are souvenirs of Brandy’s near future.

  After we saw Mr. Parker sitting on Ellis, I helped the drug-induced dead body Brandy might as well be back upstairs and took her out of her clothes again. She coughed them back up when I tried to slip any more Darvons down her throat, so I settled her back on the bathroom floor, and when I folded her suit jacket over my arm there was something cardboard tucked in the inside pocket. The Miss Rona book. Tucked in the book is a souvenir of my own future.

  Kicked back on the big ceramic snail shell, I read:

  I love Seth Thomas so much I have to destroy him. I over-compensate by worshiping the queen supreme. Seth will never love me. No one will ever love me ever again.

  How embarrassing.

  Give me needy emotional whining bullshit.

  Flash.

  Give me self-absorbed egocentric twaddle.

  Christ.

  Fuck me. I’m so tired of being me. Me beautiful. Me ugly. Blonde. Brunette. A million fucking fashion makeovers that only leave me trapped being me.

  Who I was before the accident is just a story now. Everything before now, before now, before now, is just a story I carry around. I guess that would apply to anybody in the world. What I need is a new story about who I am.

  What I need to do is fuck up so bad I can’t save myself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  So this is life in the Brandy Alexander Witness Reincarnation Project.

  In Santa Barbara, Manus who was Denver taught us how to get drugs. The three of us were squeezed into that Fiat Spider from Portland to Santa Barbara, and Brandy just wanted to die. All the time, holding both hands pressed on her lower back, Brandy kept saying, “Stop the car. I got to stretch. I am spaz-am-ing. We have to stop.”

  It took us two days to drive from Oregon to California, and the two states are right next door to each other. Manus being all the time looking at Brandy, listening to her, in love with her so obvious I only wanted to kill them in worse and more painful ways.

  In Santa Barbara, we’re just into town when Brandy wants to get out and walk a little. Trouble is, this is a really good neighborhood in California. Right up in the hills over Santa Barbara. You walk around up here, the police or some private security patrol cruises you and wants to know who you are and see some I.D., please.

  Still, Brandy, she’s spasming again, and the hysterical princess has one leg over the door, half climbed out of the Spider before Denver Omelet will even stop. What Brandy wants are the Tylox capsules she left in Suite 15-G at the Congress Hotel.

  “You can’t be beautiful,” Brandy says about a thousand times, “until you feel beautiful.�
��

  Up here in the hills, we pull up curbside to an OPEN HOUSE sign. The house looking down on us is a big hacienda, Spanish enough to make you want to dance the flamenco on a table, swing on a wrought-iron chandelier, wear a sombrero and a bandoleer.

  “Here,” Denver says to her. “Get yourselves pretty, and I’ll show you how we can scam some prescription painkillers.”

  Jump back to the three days we hid out in Denver’s apartment until we could get some cash together. Brandy, she’s cooked up some new plan. Before she goes under the knife she’s decided to find her sister.

  The me who wants to dance on her grave.

  “A vaginoplasty is pretty much forever,” she says. “It can wait while I figure some things out.”

  She’s decided to find her sister and tell her everything, about the gonorrhea, about why Shane’s not dead, what happened, everything. Make a clean break of it. Probably she’d be surprised how much her sister already knows.

  I just want to be out of town in case a felony arson arrest warrant is in the pipeline, so I threaten Denver, if he won’t come with us, I’ll run to the police and accuse him. Of arson, of kidnapping, of attempted murder. To Evie, I mail a letter.

  To Brandy, I write:

  let’s drive around some. see what happens. chill.

  This seems a little labor intensive, but we’ve all got something to run from. And when I say we, I mean everybody in the world. So Brandy thinks we’re on tour to find her sister, and Denver’s come along by blackmail. My letter to Evie’s sitting in her mailbox at the end of her driveway leading up to her burned-up ruins of a house. Evie’s in Cancún, maybe.

  The letter to Evie says:

  To Miss Evelyn Cottrell,

  Manus says he shot me and you helped him ’cuz of your filthy relationship. In order for you to stay out of PRISON, please seek an insurance settlement for the damage to your home and personal property as soon as possible. Convert this entire settlement into United States funds, tens and twenties, and mail them to me care of General Delivery in Seattle, Washington. I am the person you are responsible for being without a fiancé, your former best friend, no matter what lies you tell yourself. Send the money and I will consider the matter dealt with and will not go to the police and have you arrested and sent to PRISON, where you will have to fight day and night for your dignity and life but no doubt lose them both. Yes, and I’ve had major reconstructive surgery, so I look even better than myself, and I have Manus Kelley with me and he still loves me and says he hates you and will testify against you in court that you’re a bitch.

  Signed, Me

  Jump to above the edge of the Pacific Ocean, parked curbside at the Spanish hacienda OPEN HOUSE. Denver tells Brandy and me how to go upstairs while he keeps the realtor busy. The master bedroom will have the best view, that’s how to find it. The master bathroom will have the best drugs.

  Sure, Manus used to be a police vice detective, if you consider wagging your butt around the bushes in Washington Park wearing a Speedo bikini a size too small and hoping some lonely sex hound will whip his dick out, if that’s detective work, then, sure, Manus was a detective.

  Because beauty is power the way money is power the way a loaded gun is power. And Manus with his square-jawed, cheekboned good looks could be a Nazi recruiting poster.

  While Manus was still fighting crime, I found him cutting the crust off a slice of bread one morning. Bread without crust made me remember being little. This was so sweet, but I thought he was making me toast. Then Manus goes to in front of a mirror in the apartment we used to share, wearing his white Speedo, and he asks, if I were a gay guy would I want to bang him up the butt? Then he changed to a red Speedo and asked again. You know, he says, really stuff his poop chute? Plow the cowboy? It’s not a morning I would want on video.

  “What I need,” Manus said, “is for my basket to look big, but my ass to look adolescent.” He takes the slice of bread and stuffs it inside between himself and the crotch of the Speedo. “Don’t worry, this is how underwear models get a better look,” he says. “You get a smooth unoffensive bulge this way.” He stands sideways to the mirror and says, “You think I need another slice?”

  His being a detective meant he crunched around in good weather, in his sandals and his lucky red Speedo, while two plainclothes men nearby in a parked car waited for somebody to take the bait. This happened more than you’d imagine. Manus was a one-man campaign to clean up Washington Park. He’d never been this successful as a regular policeman and this way nobody ever shot at him.

  It all felt very Bond, James Bond. Very cloak and dagger. Very spy versus spy. Plus he was getting a great tan. Plus he got to tax deduct his gym membership and his buying new Speedos.

  Jump to the realtor in Santa Barbara shaking my hand and saying my name, Daisy St. Patience, over and over the way you do when you want to make a good impression but not looking at me in my veils. He’s looking at Brandy and Denver.

  Charmed, I’m sure.

  The house is just what you’d expect from the outside. There’s a big scarred mission-style trestle table in the dining room, under a wrought-iron chandelier you could swing on. Laid across the table is a silver-embroidered, fringed Spanish shawl.

  We represent a television personality who wishes to remain nameless, Denver tells the realtor. We’re an advance team scouting for a weekend home for this nameless celebrity. Miss Alexander, she’s an expert in product toxicity, you know, the lethal fumes and secretions given off by homes.

  “New carpet,” Denver says, “will exude poisonous formaldehyde for up to two years after it’s been laid.”

  Brandy says, “I know that feeling.”

  It got so that when Manus’s crotch wasn’t leading men to their doom, Manus was three-piece-suited in court on the witness stand, saying how the defendant approached him in some lurid exposed public masturbating way and asked for a cigarette.

  “Like anybody could look at me and think I smoke,” Manus would say.

  You didn’t know what vice he objected to more.

  After Santa Barbara, we drove to San Francisco and sold the Fiat Spider. Me, I’m writing on cocktail napkins all the time: maybe your sister’s in the next city. she could be anywhere.

  In the Santa Barbara hacienda, Brandy and me found Benzedrine and Dexedrine and old Quaaludes and Soma and some Dialose capsules that turned out to be a fecal softener. And some Solaquin Forte cream that turned out to be a skin bleach.

  In San Francisco, we sold the Fiat and some drugs and bought a big red Physicians’ Desk Reference book so we wouldn’t be stealing worthless fecal softeners and skin bleaches. In San Francisco, old people are all over selling their big rich houses full of drugs and hormones. We had Demerol and Darvocet-Ns. Not the puny little Darvocet-N 50s. Brandy was feeling beautiful with me trying to O.D. her on big Darvocet 100-milligram jobbers.

  After the Fiat, we rented a big Seville convertible. Just between us, we were the Zine kids:

  Me, I was Comp Zine.

  Denver was Thor Zine.

  Brandy, Stella Zine.

  It was in San Francisco I started Denver on his own secret hormone therapy to destroy him.

  Manus’s detective career had started to peter out when his arrest rate dropped to one per day, then one per week, then zero, then still zero. The problem was the sun, the tanning, and the fact he was getting older and he was a known bait, none of the older men he had already arrested went near him. The younger men just thought he was too old.

  So Manus got bold. More and more his Speedos got smaller, which wasn’t a good look, either. The pressure was on to replace him with a new model. So now he’d have to start conversations. Talk. Be funny. Really work at meeting guys. Develop a personality, and still the younger men, the only ones who didn’t run when they saw him, a younger man would still decline when Manus suggested they take a walk back into the trees, into the bushes.

  Even the most horny young men with their eyes scamming everybody else would s
ay, “Uh, no thanks.”

  Or, “I just want to be alone right now.”

  Or worse, “Back off, you old troll, or I’ll call a cop.”

  After San Francisco and San Jose and Sacramento, we went to Reno and Brandy turned Denver Omelet into Chase Manhattan. We zigzagged everywhere I thought we’d find enough drugs. Evie’s money could wait.

  Jump to Las Vegas and Brandy turns Chase Manhattan into Eberhard Faber. We drive the Seville down the gut of Las Vegas. All that spasming neon, the red chase lights going one direction, white chase lights going the other direction. Las Vegas looks the way you’d imagine heaven must look at night. We never put the top up on the Seville, had it two weeks, never put the top up.

  Cruising the gut of Las Vegas, Brandy sat on the boot with her ass up on the trunk lid and her feet on the back seat, wearing this strapless metallic brocade sheath as pink as the burning center of a road flare with a bejeweled bodice and a detachable long silk taffeta cape with balloon sleeves.

  With her looking that good, Las Vegas with all its flash and dazzle was just another Brandy Alexander brand fashion accessory.

  Brandy puts her arms up, wearing these long, pink opera gloves, and just howls. She just looks and feels so good at that moment. And the detachable long silk taffeta cape with balloon sleeves, it detaches.

  And sails off into Las Vegas traffic.

  “Go around the block,” Brandy screams. “That cape has to go back to Bullock’s in the morning.”

  After Manus’s detective career started downhill, we’d have to work out in the gym every day, twice on some days. Aerobics, tanning, nutrition, every station of the cross. He was a bodybuilder, if what that means is you drink your meal replacement shakes right out of the blender six times a day over the kitchen sink. Then Manus would get swimwear through the mail you couldn’t buy in this country, little pouches on strings and microfilament technology he’d put on the moment we got home from the gym, then follow me around asking, did I think his butt looked too flat?