Invisible Monsters

by Chuck Palahniuk

  The camera stays on Evie, and what I can almost hear Evie saying is, Love me.

  Love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, I’ll be anybody you want me to be. Use me. Change me. I can be thin with big breasts and big hair. Take me apart. Make me into anything, but just love me.

  Jump way back to one time, Evie and me did this fashion shoot in a junk yard, in a slaughterhouse, in a mortuary. We’d go anywhere to look good by comparison, and what I realize is mostly what I hate about Evie is the fact that she’s so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she’s just like me. What I really hate is me so I hate pretty much everybody.

  Jump to the next day we hit a few houses, a mansion, a couple palaces, and a chateau full of drugs. Around three o’clock we meet a realtor in the baronial dining room of a West Hills manor house. All around us are caterers and florists. The dining room table is spread and heaping with silver and crystal, tea sets, samovars, candelabras, stemware. A woman in dowdy scarecrow social secretary tweeds is unwrapping these gifts of silver and crystal and making notes in a tiny red book.

  A constant stream of arriving flowers eddies around us, buckets of irises and roses and stock. The manor house is sweet with the smell of flowers and rich with the smell of little puff pastries and stuffed mushrooms.

  Not our style. Brandy looks at me. Way too many folks around.

  But the realtor’s already there, smiling. In a drawl as flat and drawn-out as the Texas horizon, the realtor introduces herself as Mrs. Leonard Cottrell. And she is so happy to meet us.

  This Cottrell woman takes Brandy by the elbow and steers her around the baronial first floor while I decide to fight or flight.

  Give me terror.

  Flash.

  Give me panic.

  Flash.

  This has to be Evie’s mother, oh, you know it is. And this must be Evie’s new house. And I’m wondering how it is we came here. Why today? What are the chances?

  The realty Cottrell steers us past the tweedy social secretary and all the wedding gifts. “This is my daughter’s house. But she spends almost all her days in the furniture department at Brumbach’s, downtown. So far we’ve gone along with her little obsessions, but enough’s enough, so now we’re gonna marry her off to some jackass.”

  She leans in close, “It was more difficult than you’d ever imagine, trying to settle her down. You know, she burned down the last house we bought her.”

  Beside the social secretary, there’s a stack of gold-engraved wedding invitations. These are the regrets. Sorry, but we can’t make it.

  There seem to be a lot of regrets. Nice invitations, though, gold engraved, hand-torn edges, a three-fold card with a dried violet inside. I steal one of the regrets, and I catch up with the realty Cottrell woman and Brandy and Ellis.

  “No,” Brandy’s saying. “there are too many people around. We couldn’t view the house under these conditions.”

  “Between you and me,” says the realty Cottrell, “The biggest wedding in the world is worth the cost if we can shove Evie off onto some poor man.”

  Brandy says, “We don’t want to keep you.”

  “But, then,” the Cottrell woman says, “there’s this subgroup of ‘men’ who like their ‘women’ the way Evie is now.”

  Brandy says, “We really must be going.”

  And Ellis says, “Men who like insane women?”

  “Why, it plum broke our hearts the day Evan came to us. Sixteen years old, and he says ‘Mommy, Daddy, I want to be a girl’,” says Mrs. Cottrell.

  “But we paid for it,” she says. “A tax deduction is a tax deduction. Evan wanted to be a world-famous fashion model, he told us. He started calling himself Evie, and I canceled my subscription to Vogue the next day. I felt it had done enough damage to my family.”

  Brandy says, “Well, congratulations,” and starts tugging me toward the front door.

  And Ellis says, “Evie was a man?”

  Evie was a man. And I just have to sit down. Evie was a man. And I saw her implant scars. Evie was a man. And I saw her naked in fitting rooms.

  Give me a complete late-stage revision of my adult life.

  Flash.

  Give me anything in this whole fucking world that is exactly what it looks like!

  Flash!

  Evie’s mother looks hard at Brandy, “Have you ever done any modeling?” she says. “You look so much like a friend of my son’s.”

  “Your daughter,” Brandy growls.

  And I finger the invitation I stole. The wedding, the union of Miss Evelyn Cottrell and Mr. Allen Skinner, is tomorrow. At eleven ante meridiem, according to the gold engraving. To be followed by a reception at the bride’s home.

  To be followed by a house fire.

  To be followed by a murder.

  Dress formal.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  My dress I carry my ass around Evie’s wedding in is tighter than skin tight. It’s what you’d call bone tight. It’s that knock-off print of the Shroud of Turin, most of it brown and white, draped and cut so the shiny red buttons all button through the stigmata. Then I’m wearing yards and yards of black silk gloves bunched up on my arms. My heels are nosebleed high. I wrap Brandy’s half mile of black tulle studded with sparkle up around my scar tissue, over the shining cherry pie where my face used to be, wrapped tight, until only my eyes are out. It’s a look that’s bleak and morbid. The feeling is we’ve got a little out of control.

  It takes more effort to hate Evie than it used to. My whole life is moving farther away from any reason to hate her. It’s moving far away from reason itself. It takes a cup of coffee and a Dexedrine capsule to feel even vaguely pissed about anything.

  Brandy, she wears the knock-off Bob Mackie suit with the little peplum skirt and the big, I don’t know, and the thin, narrow I couldn’t care less. She wears a hat, since it’s a wedding, after all. Got some shoes on her feet made from the skin of some animal. Accessorized including jewelry, you know, stones dug out of the earth, polished and cut to reflect light, set in alloys of gold and copper, atomic weight, melted and beat with hammers, all of it so labor intensive. Meaning, all of Brandy Alexander.

  Ellis, he wears a double-breasted, whatever, a suit, a single vent in the back, black. He looks the way you’d imagine yourself dead in a casket if you’re a guy, not a problem for me, since Ellis has outlived his role in my life.

  Ellis’s strutting around now that he’s proved he can seduce something in every category. Not that knobbing Mr. Parker makes him King of Fag Town, but now he’s got Evie under his belt, and maybe enough time’s gone by Ellis can go back on duty, get his old beat back in Washington Park.

  So we take the gold-engraved wedding invitation that I stole, Brandy and Ellis each take a Percodan, and we go to Evie’s wedding reception moment.

  Jump to eleven o’clock ante meridiem at the baronial West Hills manor house of crazy Evie Cottrell, gun-happy Evie, newly united Mrs. Evelyn Cottrell Skinner, as if I could care at this point. And. This is oh so dazzling. Evie, she could be the wedding cake, in tier on tier of sashes and flowers rising around her big hoop skirt, up and up to her cinched waist, then her big Texas breasts popped out the top of a strapless bodice. There’s so much of her to decorate, the same as Christmas at a shopping mall. Silk flowers are bunched at one side of her waist. Silk flowers over both ears anchor a veil thrown back over her blonde on blonde sprayed-up hair. In that hoop skirt and those pushed-up Texas grapefruit, the girl walks around riding her own parade float.

  Full of Champagne and Percodan interactions, Brandy is looking at me.

  And I’m amazed I never saw it before, how Evie was a man. A big blonde, the same as she is here, but with one of those ugly wrinkled, you know, scrotums.

  Ellis is hiding from Evie, trying to scope out if her new husband as yet another notch in his special contract vice operative resume. Ellis, how this story looks from his point of view is he’s still major sport bait winning proof
he can bust any man after the long fight. Everybody here thinks the whole story is about them. Definitely that goes for everybody in the world.

  Oh, and this is gone way beyond sorry, Mom. Sorry, God. At this point, I’m not sorry for anything. Or anybody.

  No, really, everybody here’s just itching to be cremated.

  Jump to upstairs. In the master bedroom, Evie’s trousseau is laid out ready to be packed. I brought my own matches this time, and I light the hand-torn edge of the gold-engraved invitation, and I carry the invitation from the bedspread to the trousseau to the curtains. It’s the sweetest of moments when the fire takes control, and you’re no longer responsible for anything.

  I take a big bottle of Chanel Number Five from Evie’s bathroom and a big bottle of Joy and a big bottle of White Shoulders, and I slosh the smell of a million parade float flowers all over the bedroom.

  The fire, Evie’s wedding inferno finds the trail of flowers in alcohol and chases me out into the hallway. That’s what I love about fire, how it would kill me as quick as anybody else. How it can’t know I’m its mother. It’s so beautiful and powerful and beyond feeling anything for anybody, that’s what I love about fire.

  You can’t stop any of this. You can’t control. The fire in Evie’s clothes is just more and more every second, and now the plot moves along without you pushing.

  And I descend. Step-pause-step. The invisible showgirl. For once, what’s happening is what I want. Even better than I expected. Nobody’s noticed.

  Our world is speeding straight ahead into the future. Flowers and stuffed mushrooms, wedding guests and string quartet, we’re all going there together on the Planet Brandy Alexander. In the front hall, there’s the Princess Princess thinking she’s still in control.

  The feeling is of supreme and ultimate control over all. Jump to the day we’ll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won’t know we ever happened.

  “Where did you go?” Brandy says.

  The immediate future, I would tell her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Jump to Brandy and me, we can’t find Ellis anywhere. Evie and all the Texas Cottrells can’t find their groom, either, everybody laughing that nervous laughter. What bridesmaid has run off with him, everybody wants to know. Ha, ha.

  I tug Brandy toward the door, but she shushes me. Ellis and the groom both missing…a hundred Texans drinking hard…that ridiculous bride in her big drag wedding dress…this is just too much fun for Brandy to walk out now.

  Jump to Evie riding her big parade float out of the butler’s pantry, her hands all fisted up, her veil and hair flying straight out behind her. Evie’s shouting about how she done found her butt-sucking fag-assed new husband face-downed enjoying butt sex with everybody’s old boyfriend in the butler’s pantry.

  Oh, Ellis.

  I remember all his porno magazines, and all the details of anal, oral, rimming, fisting, felching. You could put yourself in the hospital trying to self-suck.

  Oh, this is dazzling.

  Of course, Evie’s answer to everything is to heft her hoop skirt and run upstairs after a rifle except by now most of her bedroom is a Chanel Number Five perfumed wall of flames Evie has to ride her parade float right into. Everybody cell phones 9-1-1 for help. Nobody’s bothered enough to go into the butler’s pantry and check out the action. Folks don’t want to know what might be going on in there.

  Go figure, but Texans seem to be a lot more comfortable around disastrous house fires than they are around anal sex.

  I remember my folks. Scat and water sports. Sado and masochism.

  Waiting for Evie to burn to death, everybody gets a fresh drink and goes to stand in the foyer at the foot of the stairs. You hear loud spanking from the butler’s pantry. The painful kind where you spit on your hand first.

  Brandy, the socially inappropriate thing she is, Brandy starts laughing. “This is going to be messy good fun,” Brandy tells me out the side of her Plumbago mouth. “I put a handful of Bilax bowel evacuant in Ellis’s last drink.”

  Oh, Ellis.

  With all that’s going on, Brandy could’ve gotten away if she hadn’t started laughing.

  You see, since right then, Evie steps out of that wall of flame at the top of the stairs. A rifle in her hands, her wedding dress burned down to the steel hoops, the silk flowers in her hair burned down to their wire skeletons, all her blonde hair burned off, Evie does her slow step-pause-step down the stairs with a rifle pointed right at Brandy Alexander.

  With everybody looking up the stairs at Evie wearing nothing but wire and ashes, sweat and soot smeared all over her lucious hourglass transgender bod, we all watch Evelyn Cottrell in her big incorporated moment, and Evie screams, “You!”

  She screams at Brandy Alexander down the barrel of the rifle, “You did it to me again. Another fire!”

  Step-pause-step.

  “I thought we were best friends,” she says. “Sure, yes, I slept with your boyfriend, but who hasn’t?” Evie says, with the gun and everything.

  Step-pause-step.

  “It’s just not enough for you to be the best and most beautiful,” Evie says. “Most people, if they looked as good as you, they’d tread water for the rest of their lives.”

  Step-pause-step.

  “But no,” Evie says, “Here you have to destroy everyone else.”

  The second floor fire inches down the foyer wallpaper, and wedding guests are scrambling for their wraps and bags, all of them headed outdoors with the wedding gifts, the silver and the crystal.

  You hear that butt slapping sound from the butler’s pantry.

  “Shut up in there!” Evie yells. Back to Brandy, Evie says, “So maybe I’ll spend some years in prison, but you’ll have a big head start on me in hell!”

  You hear the rifle cock.

  The fire inches down the walls.

  “Oh, God, yes, Jesus Christ,” Ellis yells. “Oh, God, I’m coming!”

  Brandy stops laughing. Bigger and prettier than ever, looking regal and annoyed and put-upon as if this is all a big joke, Brandy Alexander lifts a giant hand and looks at her watch.

  And I’m about to become an only child.

  And I could stop everything at this moment. I could throw off my veil, tell the truth, save lives. I’m me. Brandy’s innocent. Here’s my second chance. I could’ve opened my bedroom window years ago and let Shane inside. I could’ve not called the police all those times to suggest Shane’s accident wasn’t. What stands in my way is the story how Shane burned my clothes. How being mutilated made Shane the center of attention. And if I throw off my veil now, I’ll just be a monster, a less than perfect, mutilated victim. I’ll be only how I look. Just the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Honesty being the most boring thing in the planet Brandy Alexander.

  And. Evie aims.

  “Yes!” Ellis yells from the pantry. “Yes, do it, big guy! Give it to me! Shoot it!”

  Evie squints down the barrel.

  “Now!” Ellis is yelling. “Shoot it right in my mouth!”

  Brandy smiles.

  And I do nothing.

  And Evie shoots Brandy Alexander right in the heart.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “My life,” Brandy says. “I’m dying, and I’m supposed to see my whole life.”

  Nobody’s dying here. Give me denial.

  Evie’s shot her wad, dropped the rifle, and gone outside.

  The police and paramedics are on their way, and the rest of the wedding guests are outside fighting over the wedding gifts, who gave what and who now has the right to take it back. All of it good messy fun.

  Blood is pretty much all over Brandy Alexander, and she says, “I want to see my life.”

  From some back room, Ellis says, “You have the right to remain silent.”

  Jump to me, I let go from holding Brandy’s hand, my hand warm red with blood-born pathogens, I write on the burning wallpaper.


  Your Name Is Shane McFarland.

  You Were Born Twenty-Four Years Ago.

  You Have A Sister, One Year Younger.

  The fire’s already eating my top line.

  You Got Gonorrhea From A Special Contract Vice Operative And Your Family Threw You Out.

  You Met Three Drag Queens Who Paid You To Start A Sex Change Because You Couldn’t Think Of Anything You Wanted Less.

  The fire’s already eating my second line.

  You Met Me.

  I Am Your Sister, Shannon McFarland.

  Me writing the truth in blood just minutes ahead of the fire eating it.

  You Loved Me Because Even If You Didn’t Recognize Me, You Knew I Was Your Sister. On Some Level, You Knew Right Away So You Loved Me.

  We traveled all over the West and grew up together again.

  I’ve hated you for as long as I can remember.

  And You Are Not Going To Die.

  I could’ve saved you.

  And you are not going to die.

  The fire and my writing are now neck and neck.

  Jump to Brandy half-bled on the floor, most of her blood wiped up by me to write with, Brandy squints to read as the fire eats our whole family history, line by line. The line And You Are Not Going To Die is almost at the floor, right in Brandy’s face.

  “Honey,” Brandy says, “Shannon, sweetness, I knew all that. It was Miss Evie’s doing. She told me about you being in the hospital. About your accident.”

  Such a hand model I am already. And such a rube.

  “Now,” Brandy says. “Tell me everything.”

  I write: I’ve Been Feeding Ellis Island Female Hormones For The Past Eight Months.

  And Brandy laughs blood. “Me too!” she says.

  How can I not laugh?

  “Now,” Brandy says, “quick, before I die, what else?”

  I write: Everybody Just Loved You More After The Hairspray Accident.

  And:

  And I Did Not Make That Hairspray Can Explode.