Invisible Monsters Remix

by Chuck Palahniuk

  “There’s granuloma inguinale,” my father says to my mother, “and bacterial vaginosis.” He opens one hand and counts the fingers, then counts them again, then says, “There’s molluscum contagiosum.”

  Some of the condoms are white. Some are assorted colors. Some are ribbed to feel like serrated bread knives, I guess. Some are extra large. Some glow in the dark. This is flattering in a creepy way. My folks must think I’m wildly popular.

  Perry Como is singing “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”

  “We don’t want to scare you,” my mom says, “but you’re young. We can’t expect you to just sit home nights.”

  “And if you ever can’t sleep,” my father says, “it could be pinworms.”

  My mom says, “We just don’t want you to end up like your brother is all.”

  My brother’s dead, but he still has a stocking full of presents and you can bet they’re not rubbers. He’s dead, but you can bet he’s laughing his head off right now.

  “With pinworms,” my father says, “the females migrate down the colon to the perianal area to lay their eggs at night.” He says, “If you suspect worm activity, it works best to press clear adhesive tape against the rectum, then look at the tape under a magnifying glass. The worms should be about a quarter-inch long.”

  My mom says, “Bob, hush.”

  My dad leans toward me and says, “Ten percent of the men in this country can give you these worms.” He says, “You just remember that.”

  Almost everything in my stocking is condoms, in boxes, in little gold foil coins, in long strips of a hundred with perforations so you can tear them apart. My only other gifts are a rape whistle and a pocket-sized spray canister of Mace. That looks like I’m set for the worst, but I’m afraid to ask if there’s more. There could be a vibrator to keep me at home and celibate every night. There could be dental dams in case of cunnilingus. Saran Wrap. Rubber gloves.

  Perry Como is singing “Nuttin’ for Christmas.”

  I look at Shane’s stocking still lumpy with presents and ask, “You guys bought for Shane?”

  If it’s condoms, they’re a little late.

  My mom and dad look at each other. To my mom, my dad says, “You tell her.”

  “That’s what you got for your brother,” my mom says. “Go ahead and look.”

  Jump to me being confused as hell.

  Give me clarity. Give me reasons. Give me answers.

  Flash.

  I reach up to unhook Shane’s stocking from the mantel, and inside it’s filled with crumpled tissue paper.

  “Keep digging,” my dad says.

  In with the tissue, there’s a sealed envelope.

  “Open it,” my mom says.

  Inside the envelope is a printed letter with right at the top the words Thank You.

  “It’s really a gift to both our children,” my dad says.

  I can’t believe what I’m reading.

  “Instead of buying you a big present,” my mom says, “we made a donation in your name to the World AIDS Research Fund.”

  Inside the stocking is a second letter I take out.

  “That,” my dad says, “is Shane’s present to you.”

  Oh, this is too much.

  Perry Como is singing “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”

  I say, “That crafty old dead brother of mine, he’s so thoughtful.” I say, “He shouldn’t have. He really, really shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble. He needs to maybe move away from denial and coping and just get on with being dead. Maybe reincarnate.” I say, “His pretending he’s still alive can’t be healthy.”

  Inside, I’m ranting. What I really wanted this year was a new Prada handbag. It wasn’t my fault that some hairspray can exploded in Shane’s face. Boom, and he came staggering into the house with his forehead already turning black and blue. The long drive to the hospital with his one eye swoll shut and the face around it just getting bigger and bigger with every vein inside broken and bleeding under the skin, Shane didn’t say a word.

  It wasn’t my fault how the social service people at the hospital took one look at Shane’s face and came down on my father with both feet. Suspicion of child abuse. Criminal neglect. Family intervention. It wasn’t any of it my fault. Police statements. A caseworker went around interviewing our neighbors, our school friends, our teachers, until everybody we knew treated me like, You poor brave thing.

  Sitting here Christmas morning with all these gifts I need a penis to enjoy, everybody doesn’t know the half of it.

  Even after the police investigation was done, and nothing was proved, even then, our family was wrecked. And everybody still thinks I’m the one who threw away the hairspray. And since I started this, it was all my fault. The explosion. The police. Shane’s running away. His death.

  And it wasn’t my fault.

  “Really,” I say, “if Shane really wanted to give me a present, he’d come back from the dead and buy me the new wardrobe he owes me. That would give me a merry Christmas. That I could really say ‘thank you’ for.”

  Silence.

  As I fish out the second envelope, my mom says, “We’re officially ‘outing’ you.”

  “In your brother’s name,” my dad says, “we bought you a membership in PFLAG.

  “Pee-flag?” I say.

  “Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays,” my mom says.

  Perry Como is singing “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays.”

  Silence.

  My mother starts up from her chair and says, “I’ll go run get those bananas.” She says, “Just to be on the safe side, your father and I can’t wait to see you try on some of your presents.”

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Thirty-four

  ump way back to the last time I ever went home to see my parents. It was my last birthday before the accident. What with Shane still being dead, I wasn’t expecting presents. I’m not expecting a cake. This last time, I go home just to see them, my folks. This is when I still have a mouth, so I’m not so stymied by the idea of blowing out candles.

  The house, the brown living room sofa and reclining chairs, everything is the same except my father’s put big X’s of duct tape across the inside of all the windows. Mom’s car isn’t in the driveway where they usually park it. The car’s locked in the garage. There’s a big deadbolt I don’t remember being on the front door. On the front gate is a big “Beware of Dog” sign and a smaller sign for a home security system.

  When I first get home, Mom waves me inside fast and says, “Stay back from the windows, Bump. Hate crimes are up sixty-seven percent this year over last year.”

  She says, “After it gets dark at night, try and not let your shadow fall across the blinds so it can be seen from outside.”

  She cooks dinner by flashlight. When I open the oven or the fridge, she panics fast, body blocking me to one side and closing whatever I open.

  “It’s the bright light inside,” she says. “Anti-gay violence is up over one hundred percent in the last five years.”

  My father comes home and parks his car a half block away. His keys rattle against the outside of the new deadbolt while Mom stands frozen in the kitchen doorway, holding me back. The keys stop, and my father knocks, three fast knocks, then two slow ones.

  “That’s his knock,” Mom says, “but look through the peephole, anyway.”

  My father comes in, looking back over his shoulder to the dark street, watching. A car passes, and he says, “Romeo Tango Foxtrot six seven four. Quick, write it down.”

  My mother writes this on the pad by the phone. “Make?” she says. “Model?”

  “Mercury, blue,” my father says. “Sable.”

  Mom says, “It’s on the record.”

  I say maybe they’re overreacting some.

  And my father says, “Don’t marginalize our oppression.”

  Jump to what a big mistake this was, coming home. Jump to how Shane should see this, how weird our folks are being. My father turns off t
he lamp I turned on in the living room. The drapes on the picture window are shut and pinned together in the middle. They know all the furniture in the dark, but me, I stumble against every chair and end table. I knock a candy dish to the floor, smash, and my mother screams and drops to the kitchen linoleum.

  My father comes up from where he’s crouched behind the sofa and says, “You’ll have to cut your mother some slack. We’re expecting to get hate-crimed any day soon.”

  From the kitchen, Mom yells, “Was it a rock? Is anything on fire?”

  And my father yells, “Don’t press the panic button, Leslie. The next false alarm, and we have to start paying for them.”

  Now I know why they put a headlight on some kinds of vacuum cleaners. First, I’m picking up broken glass in the pitch-dark. Then I’m asking my father for bandages. I just stand in one place, keeping my cut hand raised above my heart, and wait. My father comes out of the dark with alcohol and bandages.

  “This is a war we’re fighting,” he says, “all of us in pee-flag.”

  PFLAG. Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. I know. I know. I know. Thank you, Shane.

  I say, “You shouldn’t even be in PFLAG. Your gay son is dead, so he doesn’t count anymore.” This sounds pretty hurtful, but I’m bleeding here. I say, “Sorry.”

  The bandages are tight and the alcohol stings in the dark, and my father says, “The Wilsons put a PFLAG sign in their yard. Two nights later, someone drove right through their lawn, ruined everything.”

  My folks don’t have any PFLAG signs.

  “We took ours down,” my father says. “Your mother has a PFLAG bumper sticker, so we keep her car in the garage. Us taking pride in your brother has put us right on the front lines.”

  Out of the dark, my mother says, “Don’t forget the Bradfords. They got a burning bag of dog feces on their front porch. It could’ve burned their whole house down with them sleeping in bed, all because they hung a rainbow PFLAG wind sock in their backyard.” Mom says, “Not even their front yard, in their backyard.”

  “Hate,” my father says, “is all around us, Bump. Do you know that?”

  My mom says, “Come on, troops. It’s chow time.”

  Dinner is some casserole from the PFLAG cookbook. It’s good, but God only knows what it looks like. Twice, I knock over my glass in the dark. I sprinkle salt in my lap. Anytime I say a word, my folks shush me. My mom says, “Did you hear something? Did that come from outside?”

  In a whisper, I ask if they remember what tomorrow is. Just to see if they remember, what with all the tension. It’s not as if I’m expecting a cake with candles and a present.

  “Tomorrow,” my dad says. “Of course we know. That’s why we’re nervous as cats.”

  “We wanted to talk to you about tomorrow,” my mom says. “We know how upset you are about your brother still, and we think it would be good for you if you’d march with our group in the parade.”

  Jump to another weird sick disappointment just coming over the horizon.

  Jump to me getting swept up in their big compensation, their big penance for, all those years ago, my father yelling, “We don’t know what kind of filthy diseases you’re bringing into this house, mister, but you can just find another place to sleep tonight.”

  They called this tough love.

  This is the same dinner table where Mom told Shane, “Dr. Peterson’s office called today.” To me she said, “You can go to your room and read, young lady.”

  I could’ve gone to the moon and still heard all the yelling.

  Shane and my folks were in the dining room, me, I was behind my bedroom door. My clothes, most of my school clothes were outside on the clothesline. Inside, my father said, “It’s not strep throat you’ve got, mister, and we’d like to know where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to.”

  “Drugs,” my mom said, “we could deal with.”

  Shane never said a word. His face still shiny and creased with scars.

  “Teenage pregnancy,” my mom said, “we could deal with.”

  Not one word.

  “Dr. Peterson,” she said. “He said there’s just about only one way you could get the disease the way you have it, but I told him, no, not our child, not you, Shane.”

  My father said, “We called Coach Ludlow, and he said you dropped basketball two months ago.”

  “You’ll need to go down to the county health department tomorrow,” my mom said.

  “Tonight,” my father said, “we want you out of here.”

  Our father.

  These same people being so good and kind and caring and involved, these same people finding identity and personal fulfillment in the fight on the front lines for equality and personal dignity and equal rights for their dead son, these are the same people I hear yelling through my bedroom door.

  “We don’t know what kind of filthy diseases you’re bringing into this house, mister, but you can just find another place to sleep tonight.”

  I remember I wanted to go out and get my clothes, iron them, fold them, and put them away.

  Give me any sense of control.

  Flash.

  I remember how the front door just opened and shut, it didn’t slam. With the light on in my room, all I could see was myself reflected in my bedroom window. When I turned out the light, there was Shane, standing just outside the window, looking in at me, his face all monster-movie hacked and distorted, dark and hard from the hairspray blowup.

  Give me terror.

  Flash.

  He didn’t ever smoke that I knew about, but he lit a match and put it to a cigarette in his mouth. He knocked on the window.

  He said, “Hey, let me in.”

  Give me denial.

  He said, “Hey, it’s cold.”

  Give me ignorance.

  I turned on the bedroom light so I could only see myself in the window. Then I shut the curtains. I never saw Shane again.

  Tonight, with the lights off, with the curtains shut and the front door locked, with Shane gone except for the ghost of him, I ask, “What parade?”

  My mom says, “It’s the Gay Pride Parade.”

  My dad says, “We’re marching with PFLAG.”

  And they’d like me to march with them. They’d like me to sit here in the dark and pretend it’s the outside world we’re hiding from. It’s some hateful stranger that’s going to come get us in the night. It’s some alien fatal sex disease. They’d like to think it’s some bigoted homophobe they’re terrified of. It’s not any of it their fault. They’d like me to think I have something to make up for.

  I did not throw away that can of hairspray. All I did was turn out the bedroom lights. Then there were the fire engines coming in the distance. There was orange flashing across the outside of my curtains, and when I got out of bed to look, there were my school clothes on fire. Hanging dry on the clothesline and layered with air. Dresses and jumpers and pants and blouses, all of them blazing and coming apart in the breeze. In a few seconds, everything I loved, gone.

  Flash.

  Jump ahead a few years to me being grown up and moving out. Give me a new start.

  Jump to one night, somebody calling from a pay phone to ask my folks, were they the parents of Shane McFarland? My parents saying, maybe. The caller won’t say where, but he says Shane is dead.

  A voice behind the caller saying, Tell them the rest.

  Another voice behind the caller saying, Tell them Miss Shane hated their hateful guts and her last words were: This isn’t over yet, not by a long shot. Then somebody laughing.

  Jump to us alone here in the dark with a casserole.

  My father says, “So, honey, will you march with your mother and me?”

  My mom says, “It would mean so much for gay rights.”

  Give me courage.

  Flash.

  Give me tolerance.

  Flash.

  Give me wisdom.

  Flash.

  Jump to the truth. And I say:

&n
bsp; “No.”

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Thirty-three

  here you’re supposed to be is Spitefield Park, a hundred acres on the edge of town. If it were an oil well, you’d call Spitefield a gusher. It’s a hundred acres of nowhere that Daisy turned into a gold mine. It’s world-famous, in a quiet sort of way. The place makes money hand over fist, and more or less takes care of itself. Spitefield is a cemetery. A boneyard. What gives it a leg up on its competitors is Lady Daisy’s liberal epitaph policy. Other cemeteries, bone orchards, what have you, they’re run by proper world religions, obsessed with decorum. Daisy’s competition wasn’t ever going to let you carve on your tombstone the words:

  So I’m dead.

  It beats working retail at Christmas

  At Spitefield Park, you can carve whatever sentiments you want. Mostly people buy graves there for their loved ones—using that term strictly as a euphemism. They pay huge sums for extra-large grave markers, granite billboards, really, that say things like:

  I was a shitty husband and father.

  I couldn’t die fast enough

  Guilt and sadness sell a lot of big-ticket caskets. Mausoleums. Solid mahogany and burnished-brass handles and great, huge wreathes of carnations. But anger . . . revenge . . . that’s where the big spenders flock. The mourners, when they go to plant Grandma under a headstone that says:

  Cunt

  . . . they don’t care if you mow the grass and maintain the lovely landscaping. Daisy made her original fortune from this type of payback. These survivors don’t care if homeless people camp on the grave or off-leash dogs defecate there. Rambunctious teenagers go marauding on Halloween, pushing over a few tombstones, and nobody will raise a fuss. People who inter their dead at Spitefield Park, they never come back for a second look. They never bring flowers or miniature decorated trees on Christmas or bunches of helium balloons to bob and flutter their flashy Mylar in celebration of a dead person’s birthday. Oh, but the tourists come. The you-gotta-see-this local hipsters bring their snarky tourist friends for a laugh. For an I-can’t-believe-somebody-did-this tour. Art students snap the kind of ironic pictures you’d expect. No bereaved survivors check for correct spelling or dates. Sometimes they pay extra—sometimes a lot extra, that’s where the pure profit is: the add-on expenses—to get names misspelled. Letters transposed. Freudian slips chiseled into marble.