Invisible Monsters Remix

by Chuck Palahniuk

  One of us is sitting on each side of all the sinks in all the mirrors. There are just too many Brandy Alexanders to count, and they’re all being the boss of me. They all open their white calfskin clutch bags, and hundreds of those big ring-beaded Brandy Alexander hands take out new copies of the Physicians’ Desk Reference with its red cover, big as a Bible.

  All her hundreds of Burning Blueberry eye shadow eyes look at me from all over the room.

  “You know the drill,” all her hundreds of Plumbago mouths command. Those big hands start pulling open drawers and cabinet doors. “Remember where you got everything, and put it back exactly where you found it,” the mouths say. “We’ll do the drugs first, then the makeup. Now start hunting.”

  I take out the first bottle. It’s Valium, and I hold the bottle so all the hundred Brandys can read the label.

  “Take what we can get away with,” Brandy says, “then get on to the next bottle.”

  I shake a few of the little blue pills into my purse pocket with the other Valiums. The next bottle I find is Darvon.

  “Honey, those are heaven in your mouth.” All the Brandys look up to peer at the bottle I’m holding. “Does it look safe to take too many?”

  The expiration date on the label is only a month away, and the bottle is still almost full. I figure we can take about half.

  “Here.” A big ring-beaded hand comes at me from every direction. One hundred big hands come at me, palms up. “Give Brandy a couple. The princess is having lower back pain again.”

  I shake ten capsules out, and a hundred hands toss a thousand tranquilizers onto the red carpet tongues of those Plumbago mouths. A suicide load of Darvon slides down into the dark interior of the continents that make up a world of Brandy Alexander.

  Inside the next bottle are the little purple ovals of 2.5-milligram–sized Premarin.

  That’s short for Pregnant Mare Urine. That’s short for thousands of miserable horses in North Dakota and central Canada, forced to stand in cramped dark stalls with a catheter stuck on them to catch every drop of urine and only getting let outside to get fucked again. What’s funny is that describes pretty much any good long stay in a hospital, but that’s only been my experience.

  “Don’t look at me that way,” Brandy says. “My not taking those pills won’t bring any baby horses back from the dead.”

  In the next bottle are round, peach-colored little scored tablets of one-hundred-milligram Aldactone. Our homeowner must be a junkie for female hormones.

  Painkillers and estrogen are pretty much Brandy’s only two food groups, and she says, “Gimme, gimme, gimme.” She snacks on some little pink-coated Estinyls. She pops a few of the turquoise-blue Estrace tablets. She’s using some vaginal Premarin as a hand cream when she says, “Miss Kay?” She says, “I can’t seem to make a fist, sweetness. Do you think maybe you can wrap things up without me while I lie down?”

  The hundreds of me cloned in the pink bathroom mirrors, we check out the makeup while the princess goes off to catnap in the cabbage rose and old canopy bed glory of the master bedroom. I find Darvocets and Percodans and Compazines, Nembutals and Percocets. Oral estrogens. Antiandrogens. Progestons. Transdermal estrogen patches. I find none of Brandy’s colors, no Rusty Rose blusher. No Burning Blueberry eye shadow. I find a vibrator with the dead batteries swollen and leaking acid inside.

  It’s an old woman who owns this house, I figure. Ignored and aging and drugged-out old women, older and more invisible to the world every minute, they must not wear a lot of makeup. Not go out to fun hot spots. Not boogie to a party froth. My breath smells hot and sour inside my veils, inside the damp layers of silk and mesh and cotton georgette I lift for the first time all day; and in the mirrors, I look at the pink reflection of what’s left of my face.

  Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all?

  The evil queen was stupid to play Snow White’s game. There’s an age where a woman has to move on to another kind of power. Money, for example. Or a gun.

  I’m living the life I love, I tell myself, and loving the life I live.

  I tell myself: I deserved this.

  This is exactly what I wanted.

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Forty

  ump to the Canadian border.

  Jump to the three of us in a rented Lincoln Town Car, waiting to drive south from Vancouver, British Columbia, into the United States, waiting, with Signore Romeo in the driver’s seat, waiting with Brandy next to him in the front, waiting, with me alone in the back.

  “The police have microphones,” Brandy tells us.

  The plan is if we make it through the border, we’ll drive south to Seattle, where there are nightclubs and dance clubs where go-go boys and go-go girls will line up to buy the pockets of my purse clean. We have to be quiet because the police, they have microphones on both sides of the border, United States and Canadian. This way they can listen in on people waiting to cross. We could have Cuban cigars. Fresh fruit. Diamonds. Diseases. Drugs, Brandy says. Brandy, she tells us to shut up a mile before the border, and we wait in line, quiet.

  Brandy unwinds the yards and yards of brocade scarf around her head. Brandy, she shakes her hair down her back and ties the scarf over her shoulders to hide her torpedo cleavage. Brandy switches to simple gold earrings. She takes off her pearls and puts on a little chain with a gold cross. This is a moment before the border guard.

  “Your nationalities?” the border-guard guy sitting inside his little window, behind his computer terminal with his clipboard and his blue suit, behind his mirrored sunglasses, and behind his gold badge says.

  “Sir,” Brandy says, and her new voice is as bland and drawled out as grits without salt or butter. She says, “Sir, we are citizens of the United States of America, what used to be called the greatest country on earth until the homosexuals and child pornographers—”

  “Your names?” says the border guy.

  Brandy leans across Alfa to look up at the border guy. “My husband,” she says, “is an innocent man.”

  “Your name, please,” he says, no doubt looking up our license plate, finding it’s a rental car, rented in Billings, Montana, three weeks ago, maybe even finding the truth about who we really are. Maybe finding bulletin after bulletin from all over western Canada about three nutcases stealing drugs at big houses up for sale. Maybe all this is spooling onto his computer screen, maybe none of it. You never know.

  “I am married,” Brandy is almost yelling to get his attention. “I am the wife of the Reverend Scooter Alexander,” she says, still half laid across Alfa’s lap.

  “And this,” she says and draws the invisible line from her smile to Alfa, “this is my son-in-law, Seth Thomas.” Her big hand flies toward me in the backseat. “This,” she says, “is my daughter, Bubba-Joan.”

  Some days, I hate it when Brandy changes our lives without warning. Sometimes, twice in one day, you have to live up to a new identity. A new name. New relationships. Handicaps. It’s hard to remember who I started this road trip being.

  No doubt this is the kind of stress the constantly mutating AIDS virus must feel.

  “Sir?” the border guy says to Seth, formerly Alfa Romeo, formerly Chase Manhattan, formerly Nash Rambler, formerly Wells Fargo, formerly Eberhard Faber. The guard says, “Sir, are you bringing any purchases back with you into the United States?”

  My pointed little toe of my shoe reaches under the front seat and gooses my new husband. The details of everything have us surrounded. The mudflats left by low tide are just over there, with little waves arriving one after another. The flower beds on our other side are planted to spell out words you can only read from a long ways off. Up close, it’s just so many red and yellow wax begonias.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never watched our Christian Healing Network?” Brandy says. She fiddles with the little gold cross at her throat. “If you just watched one show, you’d know that God in his wisdom has made my son-in-law a mute, and he cannot speak.”


  The border guy keyboards some quick strokes. This could be CRIME he’s typed. Or DRUGS. Or SHOOT. It could be SMUGGLERS. Or ARREST.

  “Not a word,” Brandy whispers next to Seth’s ear, “You talk and in Seattle, I’ll change you into Harvey Wallbanger.”

  The border guy says, “To admit you to the United States, I’m going to have to see your passports, please.”

  Brandy licks her lips wet and shining, her eyes moist and bright. Her brocade scarf slips low to reveal her cleavage as she looks up at the border guy and says, “Would you excuse us a moment?”

  Brandy sits back in her own seat, and Seth’s window hums all the way up.

  Brandy’s big torpedoes inhale big and then exhale. “Don’t anybody panic,” she says, and pops her lipstick open. She makes a kiss in the rearview mirror and pokes the lipstick around the edge of her big Plumbago mouth, trembling so much that her one big hand has to hold her lipstick hand steady.

  “I can get us back into the States,” she says, “but I’m going to need a condom and a breath mint.”

  Around her lipstick she says, “Bubba-Joan, be a sweetheart and hand me up one of those Estraderms, will you?”

  Seth gives her the mint and a condom.

  She says, “Let’s guess how long it takes him to find a week’s supply of girl juice soaking into his ass.”

  She pops the lipstick shut and says, “Blot me, please.”

  I hand her up a tissue and an estrogen patch.

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Thirty-nine

  n the planet Brandy Alexander, the universe is run by a fairly elaborate system of gods and she-gods. Some evil. Some are ultimate goodness. Marilyn Monroe, for example. Then there’s Nancy Reagan and Wallis Warfield Simpson. Some of the gods and she-gods are dead. Some are alive. A lot are plastic surgeons.

  The system changes. Gods and she-gods come and go and leapfrog each other for a change of status.

  Abraham Lincoln is in his heaven to make our car a floating bubble of new-car–smelling air: driving as smooth as advertising copy. These days, Brandy says Marlene Dietrich is in charge of the weather. Now is the autumn of our ennui. We’re carried down Interstate 5 under gray skies, inside the blue casket interior of a rented Lincoln Town Car. Seth is driving. This is how we always sit, with Brandy up front and me in the back. Three hours of scenic beauty between Vancouver, British Columbia, and Seattle is what we’re driving through. Asphalt and internal combustion carry us and the Lincoln Town Car south.

  Traveling this way, you might as well be watching the world on television. The electric windows are hummed all the way up so the planet Brandy Alexander has an atmosphere of warm, still, silent blue. It’s an even seventy degrees Fahrenheit, with the whole outside world of trees and rocks scrolling by in miniature behind curved glass. Live by satellite. We’re the little world of Brandy Alexander rocketing past it all.

  Driving, driving, Seth says, “Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?”

  Our rule is that when Seth’s driving, no radio. What happens is a Dionne Warwick song comes on, and Seth starts to cry so hard, crying those big Estinyl tears, shaking with those big Provera sobs. If Dionne Warwick comes on singing a Burt Bacharach song, we just have to pull over or it’s sure we’ll get car-wrecked.

  The tears, the way his dumpling face has lost the chiseled shadows that used to pool under his brow and cheekbones, the way Seth’s hand will sneak up and tweak his nipple through his shirt and his mouth will drop open and his eyes roll backward, it’s the hormones. The conjugated estrogens, the Premarin, the estradiol, the ethinyl estradiol, they’ve all found their way into Seth’s diet cola. Of course, there’s the danger of liver damage at his current daily overdose levels. There could already be liver damage or cancer or blood clots, thrombosis if you’re a doctor, but I’m willing to take that chance. Sure, it’s all just for fun. Watching for his breasts to develop. Seeing his macho babe-magnet swagger go to fat and him taking naps in the afternoon. All that’s great, but his being dead would let me move on to explore other interests.

  Driving, driving, Seth says, “Don’t you think that somehow television makes us God?”

  This introspection is new. His beard growth is lightened up. It must be the antiandrogens choking back his testosterone. The water retention, he can ignore. The moodiness. A tear slips out of one eye in the rearview mirror and rolls down his face.

  “Am I the only one who cares about these issues?” he says. “Am I the only one here in this car who feels anything real?”

  Brandy’s reading a paperback book. Most times, Brandy is reading some plastic surgeon’s glossy hard-sell brochure about vaginas complete with color pictures showing the picture-perfect way a urethra should be aligned to ensure a downward stream of urine. Other pictures show how a top-quality clitoris should be hooded. These are five-figure, ten- and twenty-thousand-dollar vaginas, better than the real thing, and most days Brandy will pass the pictures around.

  Jump to three weeks before, when we were in a big house in Spokane, Washington. We were in a South Hill granite chateau with Spokane spread out under the bathroom windows. I was shaking Percodans out of their brown bottle and into my purse pocket for Percodans. Brandy Alexander, she was digging around under the bathroom sink for a clean emery board when she found this paperback book.

  Now all the other gods and she-gods have been eclipsed by some new deity.

  Jump back to Seth looking at my breasts in the rearview mirror. “Television really does make us God,” he says.

  Give me tolerance.

  Flash.

  Give me understanding.

  Flash.

  Even after all these weeks on the road with me, Seth’s glorious vulnerable blue eyes still won’t meet my eyes. His new wistful introspection, he can ignore. The way the orals have already side-effected his eyes, steepened the corneal curve so he can’t wear his contact lenses without them popping out. This has to be the conjugated estrogens in his orange juice every morning. He can ignore all that.

  This has to be the Androcur in his iced tea at lunch, but he’ll never figure it out. He’ll never catch me.

  Brandy Alexander, her nylon stocking feet up on the dashboard, the queen supreme’s still reading her paperback.

  “When you watch daytime dramas,” Seth tells me, “you can look in on anybody. There’s a different life on every channel, and almost every hour the lives change. It’s the same as those live video Web sites. You can watch the whole world without it knowing.”

  For three weeks, Brandy’s been reading that book.

  “Television lets you spy on even the sexy parts of everybody’s life,” Seth says. “Doesn’t it make sense?”

  Maybe, but only if you’re on five hundred milligrams of micronized progesterone every day.

  A few minutes of scenery go by behind glass. Just some towering mountains, old dead volcanoes, mostly the kind of stuff you find outside. Those timeless natural nature themes. Raw materials at their rawest. Unrefined. Unimproved rivers. Poorly maintained mountains. Filth. Plants growing in dirt. Weather.

  “And if you believe that we really have free will, then you know that God can’t really control us,” Seth says. Seth’s hands are off the steering wheel and flutter around to make his point. “And since God can’t control us,” he says, “all God does is watch and change channels when He gets bored.”

  Somewhere in heaven, you’re live on a video Web site for God to surf.

  Brandycam.

  Brandy with her empty leg-hold trap shoes on the floor, Brandy licks an index finger and slow turns a page.

  Ancient aboriginal petroglyphs and junk are just whizzing past.

  “My point,” Seths says, “is that maybe TV makes you God.” Seth says, “And it could be that all we are is God’s television.”

  Standing on the gravel shoulder are some moose or whatnot just trudging along on all four feet.

  “Or Santa Claus,” says Brandy from behind her book. “Santa C
laus sees everything.”

  “Santa Claus is just a story,” says Seth. “He’s just the opening band to God. There is no Santa Claus.”

  Jump to drug hunting three weeks ago in Spokane, Washington, when Brandy Alexander flopped down in the master bedroom and started reading. I took thirty-two Nembutals. Thirty-two Nembutals went in my purse. I don’t eat the merchandise. Brandy was still reading. I tried all the lipsticks on the back of my hand, and Brandy was still propped on a zillion eyelet lace pillows in the center of a king-sized waterbed. Still reading.

  I put some expired estradiol and a half stick of Plumbago in my bag. The realtor called up the stairs, was everything all right?

  Jump to us on Interstate 5 where a billboard goes by:

  Clean Food and Family Prices Coming Up at the Karver Stage Stop Café

  Jump to no Burning Blueberry, no Rusty Rose or Aubergine Dreams in Spokane.

  He didn’t want to rush us, the realtor called up the stairs, but was there anything we needed to know? Did we have any questions about anything?

  I stuck my head in the master bedroom, and the waterbed’s white duvet held a reading Brandy Alexander that was dead for as much as she was breathing.

  Oh, clipped lilac satin of the beaded rice pearl hemline.

  Oh, layered amber cashmere trimmed in faceted topaz marabou.

  Oh, slithering underwired free-range mink bolero.

  We had to go.

  Brandy clutched her paperback open against her straight-up torpedo boob job. The Rusty Rose face pillowed in auburn hair and eyelet lace pillow shams, the aubergine eyes had the dilated look of a Thorazine overdose.

  First thing I want to know is what drug she’s taken.

  The paperback cover showed a pretty blond babe. Thin as a spaghetti strap. With a pretty, thin little smile. The babe’s hair was a satellite photo of Hurricane Blonde just off the west coast of her face. The face was a Greek she-god with great lash, big eyeliner eyes the same as Betty and Veronica and all the other Archie gals had at Riverdale High. White pearls are wrapped up her arms and around her neck. What could be diamonds sparkle here and there.