Invisible Monsters Remix

by Chuck Palahniuk

  The paperback cover said Miss Rona.

  Brandy Alexander, her leg-hold trap shoes were getting dirt all over the waterbed’s white duvet, and Brandy said, “I’ve found out who the real God is.”

  The realtor was ten seconds away.

  Jump to all the wonders of nature blurring past us, rabbits, squirrels, plunging waterfalls. That’s the worst of it. Gophers digging subterranean dens underground. Birds nesting in nests.

  “The Princess B.A. is God,” Seth tells me in the rearview mirror.

  Jump to where the Spokane realtor yelled up the stairs. The people who owned the granite chateau were coming up the driveway.

  Brandy Alexander, her eyes dilated, barely breathing in a Spokane waterbed, said, “Rona Barrett. Rona Barrett is my new Supreme Being.”

  Jump to Brandy in the Lincoln Town Car saying, “Rona Barrett is God.”

  All around us, erosion and insects are just chewing up the world, never mind people and pollution. Everything biodegrades with or without you pushing. I check my purse for enough spironolactone for Seth’s afternoon snack. Another billboard goes by:

  Tasty Phase Magic Bran—Put Something Good in Your Mouth

  “In her autobiography,” Brandy Alexander testifies, “in Miss Rona, published by Bantam Books by arrangement with the Nash Publishing Corporation on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, California . . .” Brandy takes a deep breath of new-car-smelling air, “. . . copyright 1974, Miss Rona tells us how she started life as a fat little Jewish girl from Queens with a big nose and a mysterious muscle disease.”

  Brandy says, “This little fat brunette re-creates herself as a top celebrity superstar blonde whom a top sex symbol then begs to let him stick his penis in her just one inch.”

  There isn’t one native tongue left among us.

  Another billboard:

  Next Sundae, Scream for Tooter’s Ice Milk!

  “What that woman has gone through,” says Brandy. “Right here on page one hundred and twenty-five, she almost drowns in her own blood! Rona’s just had her nose job. She’s only making fifty bucks a story, but this woman saves enough for a thousand-dollar nose job! It’s her first miracle. So, Rona’s in the hospital, post–nose job, with her head wrapped up like a mummy, when a friend comes in and says how Hollywood says she’s a lesbian. Miss Rona, a lesbian! Of course this isn’t true. The woman is a she-god, so she screams and screams and screams until an artery in her throat just bursts.”

  “Hallelujah,” Seth says, all teared up again.

  “And here”—Brandy licks the pad of a big index finger and flips ahead a few pages—“on page two hundred and twenty-two, Rona is once more rejected by her sleazy boyfriend of eleven years. She’s been coughing for weeks so she takes a handful of pills and is found semicomatose and dying. Even the ambulance—”

  “Praise God,” Seth says.

  Various native plants are growing just wherever they want.

  “Seth, sweetness,” Brandy says. “Don’t step on my lines.” Her Plumbago lips say, “Even the ambulance driver thought our Miss Rona would be DOA.”

  Clouds composed of water vapor are up in the, you know, sky.

  Brandy says, “Now, Seth.”

  And Seth says, “Hallelujah!”

  The wild daisies and Indian paintbrush whizzing past are just the genitals of a different life-form.

  And Seth says, “So what are you saying?”

  “In the book Miss Rona, copyright 1974,” Brandy says, “Rona Barrett—who got her enormous breasts when she was nine years old and wanted to cut them off with scissors—she tells us in the prologue of her book that she’s like this animal, cut open with all its vital organs glistening and quivering, you know, like the liver and the large intestine. Such visuals, everything sort of dripping and pulsating. Anyway, she could wait for someone to sew her back up, but she knows no one will. She has to take a needle and thread and sew herself up.”

  “Gross,” says Seth.

  “Miss Rona says nothing is gross,” Brandy says. “Miss Rona says the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”

  Flocks of self-absorbed little native birds seem obsessed with finding food and picking it up with their mouths.

  Brandy pulls the rearview mirror around until she finds me reflected and says, “Bubba-Joan, sweetness?”

  It’s obvious the native birds have to build their own do-it-yourself nests using materials they source locally. The little sticks and leaves are just sort of heaped together.

  “Bubba-Joan,” Brandy Alexander says. “Why don’t you open up to us with a story?”

  Seth says, “Remember the time in Missoula when the princess got so ripped she ate Nebalino suppositories wrapped in gold foil because she thought they were Almond Roca? Talk about your semiconscious DOAs.”

  Pine trees are producing pine cones. Squirrels and mammals of all sexes spend all day trying to get laid. Or giving birth live. Or eating their young.

  Brandy says, “Seth, sweetness?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  What only looks like bulimia is how bald eagles feed their young.

  Brandy says, “Why is it you have to seduce every living thing you come across?”

  Another billboard:

  Nubby’s Is the BBQ Gotta-Stop for Savory, Flavory Chicken Wings

  Another billboard:

  Dairy Bite—The Chewing Gum Flavored with the Low-Fat Goodness of Real Cheese

  Seth giggles. Seth blushes and twists some of his hair around a finger. He says, “You make me sound so sexually compulsive.”

  Mercy. Next to him, I feel so butch.

  “Oh, baby,” Brandy says, “you don’t remember half of who you’ve been with.” She says, “Well, I only wish I could forget it.”

  To my breasts in the rearview mirror, Seth says, “The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.”

  I figure, a few more days of increased micronized progesterone, and Seth should pop out his own nice rack of hooters. Side effects I need to watch for include nausea, vomiting, jaundice, migraine, abdominal cramps, and dizziness. You try to remember the exact toxicity levels, but why bother.

  A sign goes by saying: Seattle 130 miles.

  “Come on, let’s see those glistening, quivering innards, Bubba-Joan,” Brandy Alexander, God and mother of us all, commands. “Tell us a gross personal story.”

  She says, “Rip yourself open. Sew yourself shut,” and she hands a prescription pad and an Aubergine Dreams eyebrow pencil to me in the backseat.

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Thirty-eight

  on’t look for me to ever tell my folks about the accident. You know, a whole long-distance telephone crying jag about the bullet and the emergency room. That’s not anywhere we’re going. I told my folks, as soon as I could write them a letter, that I was going on a catalogue shoot in Cancún, Mexico, for Espre.

  Six months of fun, sand, and me trying to suck the lime wedges out of long-necked bottles of Mexican beer. Guys just love watching babes do that. Go figure. Guys.

  She loves clothes from Espre, my mom writes back. She writes how, since I’ll be in the Espre catalogue, could I maybe get her a discount on her Christmas order.

  Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.

  She writes back: Well, be pretty for us. Love and kisses.

  Most times, it’s just a lot easier not to let the world know what’s wrong. My folks, they call me Bump. I was the bump inside my Mom’s stomach for nine months; they’ve called me Bump from since before I was born. They live a two-hour drive from me, but I never visit. What I mean is they don’t need to know every little hair about me.

  In one letter my mom writes:

  At least with your brother, we know whether he’s dead or alive.

  My dead brother, the King of Fag Town. The voted best at everything. The basketball king until he was sixteen and his test for strep throat came back as gonorrhea, I only know I hated him.
>
  It’s not that we don’t love you, my mom writes in one letter, it’s just that we don’t show it.

  Besides, hysteria is only possible with an audience. You know what you need to do to keep alive. Folks will just screw you up with their reactions about how what happened is so horrible. First the emergency room folks letting you go ahead of them. Then the Franciscan nun screaming. Then the police with their hospital sheet.

  Jump to how life was when you were a baby and you could only eat baby food. You’d stagger over to the coffee table. You’re up on your feet and you have to keep waddling along on those Vienna sausage legs or fall down. Then you get to the coffee table and bounce your big soft baby head on the sharp corner.

  You’re down, and man, oh, man, it hurts. Still it isn’t anything tragic until Mom and Dad run over.

  Oh, you poor, brave thing.

  Only then do you cry.

  Jump to Brandy and me and Seth going to the top of the Space Needle thing in Seattle, Washington. This is our first stop after the Canadian border except us stopping so I could run buy Seth a coffee—cream, sugar, and Climara—and a Coca-Cola—extra Estrace, no ice. It’s eleven, and the Space Needle closes at midnight, and Seth says there are two types of people in the world.

  The Princess Alexander wanted to find a nice hotel first, someplace with valet parking and tile bathrooms. We might have time for a nap before she has to go out and sell medications.

  “If you were on a game show,” Seth says about his two types of people. Seth has already pulled off the freeway and we’re driving between dark warehouses, turning toward every glimpse we get of the Space Needle. “So you’re the winner of this game show,” Seth says, “and you get a choice between a five-piece living room set from Broyhill, suggested retail price three thousand dollars . . . or . . . a ten-day trip to the Old World charm of Europe.”

  Most people, Seth says, would take the living room set.

  “It’s just that people want something to show for their effort,” Seth says. “Like the pharaohs and their pyramids. Given the choice, very few people would choose the trip even if they already had a nice living room set.”

  No one’s parked on the streets around Seattle Center, people are all home watching television, or being television if you believe in God.

  “I have to show you where the future ended,” says Seth. “I want us to be the people who choose the trip.”

  According to Seth, the future ended in 1962 at the Seattle World’s Fair. This was everything we should’ve inherited: the whole man-on-the-moon-within-this-decade, asbestos-is-our-miracle-friend, nuclear-powered and fossil-fueled world of the Space Age where you could go up to visit the Jetsons’ flying saucer apartment building and then ride the monorail downtown for fun pillbox hat fashions at the Bon Marché.

  All his hope and science and research and glamour left here in ruins:

  The Space Needle.

  The Science Center with its lacy domes and hanging light globes.

  The monorail streaking along covered in brushed aluminum.

  This is how our lives were supposed to turn out.

  Go there. Take the trip, Seth says. It will break your heart because the Jetsons with their robot maid, Rosie, and their flying-saucer cars and toaster beds that spit you out in the morning, it’s like the Jetsons have sublet the Space Needle to the Flintstones.

  “You know,” says Seth, “Fred and Wilma. The garbage disposal that’s really a pig that lives under the sink. All their furniture made out of bones and rocks and tiger-skin lampshades. Wilma vacuums with a baby elephant and fluffs the rocks. They named their baby ‘Pebbles.’”

  Here was our future of cheese-food and aerosol propellants, Styrofoam and Club Med on the moon, roast beef served in a toothpaste tube.

  “Tang,” says Seth, “you know, breakfast with the astronauts. And now people come here wearing sandals they made themselves out of leather. They name their kids Zilpah and Zebulun out of the Old Testament. Lentils are a big deal.”

  Seth sniffs and drags a hand across the tears in his eyes. It’s the Estrace is all. He must be getting premenstrual.

  “The folks who go to the Space Needle now,” Seth says, “they have lentils soaking at home and they’re walking around the ruins of the future the way barbarians did when they found Grecian ruins and told themselves that God must’ve built them.”

  Seth parks us under one big steel leg of the Space Needle’s three legs. We get out and look up at the legs going up to the Space Needle, the low restaurant, the high restaurant that revolves, then the observation deck at the top. Then the stars.

  Jump to the sad moment when we buy our tickets and get on the big glass elevator that slides up the middle of the Space Needle. We’re in this glass and brass go-go cage dance party to the stars. Going up, I want to hear hypoallergenic “Telestar” music, untouched by human hands. Anything computer-generated and played on a Moog synthesizer. I want to dance the frug on a TWA commuter flight go-go dance party to the moon where cool dudes and chicks do the Mashed Potato under zero gravity and eat delicious snack pills.

  I want this.

  I tell Brandy Alexander this, and she goes right up to the brass and glass windows and does the frug even though going up, the G forces make this like dancing the frug on Mars where you weigh eight hundred pounds.

  The sad part is when the guy in a poly-blend uniform who runs the elevator misses the whole point of the future. The whole fun, fun, fun of the moment is wasted on him, and this guy looks at us as if we’re those puppies you see behind glass in suburban mall pet stores. Like we’re those puppies with yellow ooze on their eyes and buttholes, and you know they’ll never have another solid bowel movement but they’re still for sale for six hundred dollars apiece. Those puppies are so sad that even the overweight girls with bad beauty college perms will tap on the glass for hours and say, “I loves you, little one. Mommy loves you, tiny one.”

  The future is just wasted on some people.

  Jump to the observation deck at the top of the Space Needle, where you can’t see the steel legs so it’s as if you’re hovering over Seattle on a flying saucer with a lot of souvenirs for sale. Still, most of this isn’t souvenirs of the future. It’s the ecology T-shirts and batiks and tie-dyed all-natural cotton fiber stuff you can’t wash with anything else because it’s never really color-fast. Tapes of whales singing while they do sex. More stuff I hate.

  Brandy goes off in search of relics and artifacts from the future. Acrylic. Plexiglas. Aluminum. Styrofoam. Radium.

  Seth goes to the railing and leans out over the suicide nets and spits. The spit falls back down into the twenty-first century. The wind blows my hair out over the darkness and Seattle and my hands are clutched white on the steel railing where about a million hands before me have clutched the paint off.

  Inside his clothes, instead of the plates of hard muscle that used to drive me crazy, now the fat pushes his shirt out over the top of his belt. It’s the Premarin. His sexy five o’clock shadow is fading from the Provera. Even his fingers swell around his old letterman’s ring.

  The photographer in my head says:

  Give me peace.

  Flash.

  Give me release.

  Flash.

  Seth hauls his water-retaining self up to sit on the railing. His kiltie tassel loafers swing above the nets. His tie blows straight out above the nothing and darkness.

  “I’m not afraid,” he says. He straightens one leg and lets a kiltie tassel loafer dangle from his toes.

  I clutch the veils tight around my neck so people who don’t know me will think like my parents that I’m still happy.

  Seth says, “The last time I’ll ever be scared was the night you caught me trying to kill you,” and Seth looks out over the lights of Seattle and smiles.

  I’d smile, too, you know, if I had any lips.

  In the future, in the wind, in the dark on the observation deck at the top of the Space Needle, Brandy Alexander, that brand
-name queen supreme that she is, Brandy comes out to Seth and I with souvenirs of the future. These are postcards. Brandy Alexander gives us each a stack of postcards so faded and dog-eared and picked over and ignored that they’ve survived in the back of a revolving wire rack for years. Here are pictures of the future with clean, sun-bleached skies behind an opening-day Space Needle. Here’s the monorail full of smiling babes in Jackie O pink mohair suits with three huge cloth-covered buttons down the front. Children in striped T-shirts and blond astronaut crew cuts run through a Science Center where all the fountains still work.

  “Tell the world what scares you most,” says Brandy. She gives us each an Aubergine Dreams eyebrow pencil and says, “Save the world with some advice from the future.”

  Seth writes on the back of a card and hands the card to Brandy for her to read.

  “On game shows,” Brandy reads, “some people will take the trip to France, but most people will take the washer-dryer pair.”

  Brandy puts a big Plumbago kiss on the little square for the stamp and lets the wind lift the card and sail it off toward the towers of downtown Seattle.

  Seth hands her another, and Brandy reads:

  “Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.”

  A kiss, and the card’s on its way toward Lake Washington.

  From Seth:

  “When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?”

  A kiss, and it’s off on the wind toward Ballard.

  “Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another. We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.”

  Interstate 5 snakes by in the distance. From high atop the Space Needle, the southbound lanes are red chase lights, and the northbound lanes are white chase lights. I take a card and write:

  I love Seth Thomas so much I have to destroy him. I overcompensate by worshipping the queen supreme. Seth will never love me. No one will ever love me ever again.