Invisible Monsters Remix

by Chuck Palahniuk

Almost all the time, you tell yourself you’re loving somebody when you’re just using them.

  This only looks like love.

  Jump to Brandy on the bathroom floor, saying, “Sofonda and Vivienne and Kitty were all with me at the hospital.” Her hands curl up off the tile, and she runs them up and down the sides of her blouse. “All three of them wore those baggy green scrub suits, wearing hairnets over their wigs and with those Duchess of Windsor costume jewelry brooches pinned on their scrub suits,” Brandy says. “They were flying around behind the surgeon and the lights, and Sofonda was telling me to count backwards from one hundred. You know . . . 99 . . . 98 . . . 97 . . .”

  The Aubergine Dreams eyes close. Brandy, pulling long, even breaths, says, “The doctors, they took out the bottom rib on each side of my chest.” Her hands rub where, and she says, “I couldn’t sit up in bed for two months, but I had a sixteen-inch waist. I still have a sixteen-inch waist.”

  One of Brandy’s hands opens to full flower and slides over the flat land where her blouse tucks into the belt of her skirt. “They cut out two of my ribs, and I never saw them again,” Brandy says. “There’s something in the Bible about taking out your ribs.”

  The creation of Eve.

  Brandy says, “I don’t know why I let them do that to me.”

  And Brandy, she’s asleep.

  Jump back to the night Brandy and I started this road trip, the night we left the Congress Hotel with Brandy driving the way you can only drive at two-thirty A.M. in an open sports car with a loaded rifle and an overdosed hostage. Brandy hides her eyes behind Ray-Bans so she can drive in a little privacy. Instant glamour from another planet in the 1950s, Brandy pulls an Hermès scarf over her auburn hair and ties it under her chin.

  All I can see is myself reflected in Brandy’s Ray-Bans, tiny and horrible. Still strung out and pulled apart by the cold night air around the windshield. Bathrobe still dragging shut in the car door. My face, you touch my blasted, scar-tissue face and you’d swear you were touching chunks of orange peel and leather.

  Driving east, I’m not sure what we’re running from. Evie or the police or Mr. Baxter or the Rhea sisters. Or nobody. Or the future. Fate. Growing up, getting old. Picking up the pieces. As if by running we won’t have to get on with our lives. I’m with Brandy right now because I can’t imagine getting away with this without Brandy’s help. Because, right now, I need her.

  Not that I really love her. Him. Shane.

  Already the word “love” is sounding pretty thin.

  Hermès scarf on her head, Ray-Bans on her head, makeup on her face, I look at the queen supreme in the pulse-pulse, then pulse-pulse, then pulse-pulse of oncoming headlights. What I see when I look at Brandy, this is what Manus saw when he took me sailing.

  Right now, looking at flashes of Brandy beside me in Manus’s car, I know what it is I loved about her. What I love is myself. Brandy Alexander just looks exactly the way I looked before the accident. Why wouldn’t she? She’s my brother, Shane. Shane and I were almost the same height, born one year apart. The same coloring. The same features. The same hair, only Brandy’s hair is in better shape.

  Add to this her lipo, her silicone, her trachea shave, her brow shave, her scalp advance, her forehead realignment, her rhino contouring to smooth her nose, her maxomilliary operations to shape her jaw. Add to all that years of electrolysis and a handful of hormones and antiandrogens every day, and it’s no wonder I didn’t recognize her.

  Plus the idea my brother’s been dead for years. You just don’t expect to meet dead people.

  What I love is myself. I was so beautiful.

  My love cargo, Manus Locked in the Trunk, Manus Trying to Kill Me, how can I keep thinking I love Manus? Manus is just the last man who thought I was beautiful. Who kissed me on the lips. Who touched me. Manus is just the last man who ever told me he loved me.

  You count down the facts and it’s so depressing.

  I can only eat baby food.

  My best friend screwed my fiancé.

  My fiancé almost stabbed me to death.

  I’ve set fire to a house and been pointing a rifle at innocent people all night.

  My brother I hate has come back from the dead to upstage me.

  I’m an invisible monster, and I’m incapable of loving anybody. You don’t know which is worse.

  Jump to me wetting a washcloth in the vanity sink. In the undersea bathroom grotto even the towels and washcloths are aqua and blue, with a scalloped shell motif along the hems. I put the cold wet washcloth on Brandy’s forehead and wake her up, so’s she can take more pills. Die in the car instead of this bathroom.

  I haul Brandy to her feet and stuff the princess back into her suit jacket.

  We have to walk her around before anybody sees her this way.

  I strap her high heels back on her feet. Brandy, she leans on me. She leans on the edge of the countertop. She picks up a handful of Bilax capsules and squints down at them.

  “My back is killing me,” Brandy says. “Why’d I ever let them give me such big tits?”

  The queen supreme looks ready to swallow a handful of anything.

  I shake my head no.

  Brandy squints at me. “But I need these.”

  In the Physicians’ Desk Reference, I show her Bilax, bowel evacuant.

  “Oh.” Brandy turns her hand over to spill the Bilax into her purse, and some capsules fall but some stick to the sweat on her palm. “After they give you the tits, your nipples are cockeyed and way too high,” she says. “They use a razor to shave the nipples off, and they relocate them.”

  That’s her word.

  Relocate.

  The Brandy Alexander Nipple Relocation Program.

  My dead brother, the late Shane, shakes the last bowel evacuant off her damp palm. Brandy says, “I have no sensation in my nipples.”

  Off the counter, I get my veils and put layer after layer over my head.

  Thank you for not sharing.

  We walk up and down the second-floor hallways until Brandy says she’s ready for the stairs. Step at a time, quiet, we go down to the foyer. Across the foyer, through the double doors closed on the drawing room, you can hear Mr. Parker’s deep voice saying something soft, over and over.

  Brandy leaning on me, we tiptoe a slow three-legged race across the foyer, from the foot of the stairs to the drawing room doors. We crack the doors open some inches and poke our faces through the crack.

  Ellis is laid out on the drawing room carpet.

  Mr. Parker is sitting on Ellis’s chest with a size seventeen wingtip planted on each side of Ellis’s head.

  Ellis’s hands slap Parker’s big ass, claw at the back of the double-breasted jacket. The single vent in Mr. Parker’s jacket is torn open along the seam up the middle of his back to his collar.

  Mr. Parker’s hands, the heel of one hand crams a soggy, gnawed eel-skin wallet between Ellis’s capped teeth.

  Ellis’s face is dark red and shining the way you’d look if you got the cherry pie in the pie-eating contest. A runny finger-painting mess of nosebleed and tears, snot and drool.

  Mr. Parker, his hair is fallen over his eyes. His other hand is a fist around five inches of Ellis’s pulled-out tongue.

  Ellis is slapping and gagging between Mr. Parker’s thick legs.

  Broken Ming vases and other collectibles are all around them on the floor.

  Mr. Parker says, “That’s right. Just do that. That’s nice. Just relax.”

  Brandy and me, watching.

  Me wanting Ellis destroyed, this is all just too perfect to spoil.

  I tug on Brandy. Brandy, honey. We better walk you back upstairs. Rest you some more. Give you a nice fresh handful of Benzedrine spansules.

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Twelve

  hat you get with the Rhea sisters is three skin-and-bone white men who sit around a suite at the Congress Hotel all day in nylon slips with the shoulder straps fallen off one shoulder or the other, wearing high heels
and smoking cigarettes. Kitty Litter, Sofonda Peters, and the Vivacious Vivienne VaVane, their faces shining with moisturizer and egg-white facials, they listen to that step-two-three cha-cha music you only hear on elevators anymore. The Rhea sister hair, their hair is short and flat with grease and matted down bristling with bobby pins, flat on their heads. Maybe they have a wig cap stretched on over the pins if it’s not summer outside. Most of the time, they don’t know what season it is. The blinds aren’t ever open, and there are maybe a dozen of those cha-cha records stacked on the automatic record changer.

  All the furniture is blond, and the big four-legged RCA Philco console stereo. The stereo, you could plow a field with that old needle, and the metal tone arm weighs about two pounds.

  May I present them:

  Kitty Litter.

  Sofonda Peters.

  The Vivacious Vivienne VaVane.

  Aka the Rhea sisters when they’re onstage, these are her family, Brandy Alexander told me in the speech therapist office. Not the first time we met, this wasn’t the time I cried and told Brandy how I lost my face. This wasn’t the second time, either, the time Brandy brought her sewing basket full of ways to hide my being a monster. This was one of the other tons of times we snuck off while I was still in the hospital. The speech therapist office was just where we’d meet.

  “Usually,” Brandy tells me, “Kitty Litter is bleaching and tweezing away unwanted facial hair. This unsightly hair thing can tie up a bathroom for hours, but Kitty would wear her Ray-Bans inside out, she loves looking at her reflection so much.”

  The Rheas, they made Brandy what she is. Brandy, she owes them everything.

  Brandy would lock the speech therapist door, and if somebody would knock, Brandy and me, we’d fake loud orgasm noises. We’d scream and yip and slap the floor. I’d clap my hands to make that special spanking sound that everybody knows. Whoever knocks, they’d go away fast.

  Then we’d go back to just us using up makeup and talking.

  “Sofonda,” Brandy would tell me, “Sofonda Peters, she’s the brains, Sofonda is. Miss Peters is all day with her porcelain nails stuck in the rotary-dial Princess phone to an agent or a merchandiser, selling, selling, selling.”

  Somebody would knock on the speech therapist door, so I’d give out with a cat scream and slap my thigh.

  The Rhea sisters, Brandy would tell me, she’d be dead without them. When they’d found her, the princess queen supreme, she’d been a size twenty-six, lip-synching at amateur-night open-mike shows. Lip-synching “Thumbelina.”

  Her hair, her figure, her hippy, hippy-forward Brandy Alexander walk, the Rhea sisters invented all that.

  Jump to two fire engines passing me in the opposite direction as I drive the freeway toward downtown, away from Evie’s house on fire. In the rearview mirror of Manus’s Fiat Spider, Evie’s house is a smaller and smaller bonfire. The peachy-pink hem of Evie’s bathrobe is shut in the car door, and the ostrich feathers whip me in the cool night air pouring around the convertible’s windshield.

  Smoke is all I smell like. The rifle on the passenger seat is pointing at the floor.

  There’s not one word from my love cargo in the trunk.

  And there’s only one place left to go.

  No way could I call and just ask the operator to ring Brandy. No way would the operator understand me, so we’re on our way downtown to the Congress Hotel.

  Jump to how all the Rhea sister money comes from a doll named Katty Kathy. This is what else Brandy told me between faking orgasms in the speech therapist office. She’s a doll, Katty Kathy is one of those foot-high flesh-tone dolls with the impossible measurements. What she would be as a real woman is 46-16-26. As a real woman, Katty Kathy could buy a total of nothing off the rack. You know you’ve seen this doll. Comes naked in a plastic bubble pack for a dollar, but her clothes cost a fortune, that’s how realistic she is. You can buy about four hundred tiny fashion separates that mix and match to create three tasteful outfits. In that way, the doll is incredibly lifelike. Chilling, even.

  Sofonda Peters came up with the idea. Invented Katty Kathy, made the prototype, sold the doll, and cut all the deals. Still, Sofonda is about married to Kitty and Vivian and there’s enough money to support them all.

  What sold Katty Kathy is that she’s a talking doll, but instead of a string, she’s got this little gold chain coming out of her back. You pull her chain, and she says:

  “That dress is fine, I mean, if that’s really how you want to look.”

  “Your heart is my piñata.”

  “Is that what you’re going to wear?”

  “I think it would be good for our relationship if we dated other people.”

  “Kiss kiss.”

  And, “Don’t touch my hair!”

  The Rhea sisters, they made a bundle. Katty Kathy’s little bolero jacket alone, they have that jacket sewn in Cambodia for a dime and sell it here in America for sixteen dollars. People pay that.

  Jump to me parking the Fiat with its trunk full of my love cargo on a side street, and me walking up Broadway toward the doorman at the Congress Hotel. I’m a woman with half a face arriving at a luxury hotel, one of those big glazed terra-cotta palace hotels built a hundred years ago, where the doormen wear tailcoats with gold braid on the shoulders. I’m wearing a peignoir set and a bathrobe. No veils. Half the bathrobe has been shut in a car door, dragging on the freeway for the past twenty miles. My ostrich feathers smell like smoke, and I’m trying to keep it a big secret that I have a rifle tucked up crutchlike under my arm.

  Yeah, and I lost a shoe, one of those high-heeled mules, too.

  The doorman in his tailcoat doesn’t even look at me. Yeah, and my hair, I see it reflected in the big brass plaque that says The Congress Hotel. The cool night air has pulled my butter crème frosting hairdo out into a ratted stringy mess.

  Jump to me at the front desk of the Congress Hotel where I try and make my eyes alluring. They say what people notice first about you is your eyes. I have the attention of what must be the night auditor, the bellman, the manager, and a clerk. First impressions are so important. It must be the way I’m dressed or the rifle. Using the hole that’s the top of my throat, my tongue sticking out of it and all the scar tissue around it, I say, “Gerl terk nahdz gah sssid.”

  Everybody is just flash-frozen by my alluring eyes.

  I don’t know how, but then the rifle’s up on the desk, pointing at nobody in particular.

  The manager steps up in his navy blue blazer with its little brass Mr. Baxter name tag, and he says, “We can give you all the money in the drawer, but no one here can open the safe in the office.”

  The gun on the desk points right at the brass Mr. Baxter name tag, a fact that hasn’t gone unnoticed. I snap my fingers and point at a piece of paper for him to give me. With the guest pen on a chain, I write:

  which suite are the rhea sisters in? don’t make me knock on every door on the fifteenth floor. it’s the middle of the night.

  “That would be Suite 15-G,” says Mr. Baxter, both his hands full of cash I don’t want and reached out across the desk toward me. “The elevators,” he says, “are to your right.”

  Jump to me being Daisy St. Patience the first day Brandy and I sat together. The day of the frozen turkey after the whole summer I waited for somebody to ask me what happened to my face, and I told Brandy everything.

  Brandy, when she sat me in the chair still hot from her ass and she locked the speech therapist door that first time, she named me out of my future. She named me Daisy St. Patience and never wanted to know what name I walked in the door with. I was the rightful heir to the international fashion house the House of St. Patience.

  Brandy, she just talked and talked. We were running out of air, she talked so much, and I don’t mean just we, Brandy and me. I mean the world. The world was running out of air, Brandy talked that much. The Amazon Basin just could not keep up.

  “Who you are moment to moment,” Brandy said, “is j
ust a story.”

  What I needed was a new story.

  “Let me do for you,” Brandy said, “what the Rhea sisters did for me.”

  Give me courage.

  Flash.

  Give me heart.

  Flash.

  So jump to me being Daisy St. Patience going up in that elevator, and Daisy St. Patience walking down that wide carpeted hallway to Suite 15-G. Daisy knocks and nobody answers. Through the door, you can hear that cha-cha music.

  The door opens six inches, but the chain is on so it stops.

  Three white faces appear in the six-inch gap, one on top of the other, Kitty Litter, Sofonda Peters, and the Vivacious Vivienne VaVane, their faces shining with moisturizer. Their short dark hair is matted down flat with bobby pins and wig caps.

  The Rhea sisters.

  Who’s who, I don’t know. The drag queen totem pole in the door crack says:

  “Don’t take the queen supreme from us.”

  “She’s all we have to do with our lives.”

  “She isn’t finished yet. We’re not half done, and there’s just so much more we have to do on her.”

  I give them a peekaboo pink chiffon flash of the rifle, and the door slams.

  Through the door, you can hear the chain come off. Then the door opens all the way.

  Jump to one time, late one night, driving between Nowhere, Wyoming, and WhoKnowsWhere, Montana, when Seth says how your being born makes your parents God. You owe them your life, and they can control you.

  “Then puberty makes you Satan,” he says, “just because you want something better.”

  Jump to inside suite 15-G with its blond furniture and the bossa-nova cha-cha music and cigarette smoke, and the Rhea sisters are flying around the room in their nylon slips with the shoulder straps off one shoulder or the other. I don’t have to do anything but point the rifle.

  “We know who you are, Daisy St. Patience,” one of them says, lighting a cigarette. “With a face like that, you’re all Brandy talks about anymore.”

  All over the room are these big, big 1959 spatter-glaze ashtrays, so big you only have to empty them every couple years.