Invisible Monsters Remix

by Chuck Palahniuk

  The word “love” tastes like earwax when I think it about Manus and Evie.

  I slam the butt of the rifle against the closet door, and the rifle goes off. Another inch, and I’d be dead. With me dead outside the locked door, Manus would burn.

  “Yes,” Manus screams. “I’ll do anything. Just, please, don’t let me burn to death or shoot me. Anything, just open the door!”

  With my shoe, I shove the poured-out Valiums through the crack under the closet door. With the rifle out in front of me, I unlock the door and stand back. In the light from the upstairs fire, you can see how the house is filling up with smoke. Manus stumbles out, power-blue-bug-eyed with his hands in the air, and I march him out to his car with the rifle pressed against his back. Even at the end of a rifle, Manus’s skin feels tight and sexy. Beyond this, I have no plan. All I know is I don’t want anything resolved for a while. Wherever we end up, I just won’t go back to normal.

  I lock Manus in the trunk of his Fiat Spider. A nice car, it’s a nice car, red, with the convertible top down. I slam the butt of the rifle against the trunk lid.

  Nothing comes back from my love cargo. Then I wonder if he still has to pee.

  I toss the rifle into the passenger seat and I go back into Evie’s plantation inferno. In the foyer, only now it’s a chimney, it’s a wind tunnel with the cold air rushing in the front door and up into the heat and light above me. The foyer still has that desk with the gold saxophone telephone. Smoke is everywhere, and a chorus of every smoke detector siren sirening is so loud it hurts.

  It’s just plain mean, making Evie in Cancún lie awake so long for her good news.

  So I call the number she left. You know Evie picks up on the first ring.

  And Evie says, “Hello?”

  There’s nothing but the sound of everything I’ve done, the smoke detectors and the flames, the tinkle of the chandelier as the breeze chimes through it, that’s all there is to hear from her end of the conversation.

  Evie says, “Manus?”

  Somewhere, the dining room maybe, the ceiling crashes down and sparks and embers rush out the dining room doorway and over the foyer floor.

  Evie says, “Manus, don’t play games. If this is you, I said I didn’t want to see you anymore.”

  And right then:

  Crash.

  A half ton of sparkling, flashing, white-light, hand-cut Austrian crystal, the big chandelier drops from the center of the foyer ceiling and explodes too close.

  Another inch, and I’d be dead.

  How can I not laugh? I’m already dead.

  “Listen, Manus,” Evie says. “I told you not to call me or I’ll tell the police about how you put my best friend in the hospital without a face. You got that?”

  Evie says, “You just went too far. I’ll get a restraining order if I have to.”

  Manus or Evie, I don’t know who to believe, all I know is my feathers are on fire.

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Ten

  ump to around midnight in Evie’s house, where I catch Seth Thomas trying to kill me.

  The way my face is without a jaw, my throat just ends in sort of a hole with my tongue hanging out. Around the hole, the skin is all scar tissue: dark red lumps and shiny the way you’d look if you got the cherry pie in a pie-eating contest. If I let my tongue hang down, you can see the roof of my mouth, pink and smooth as the inside of a crab’s back, and hanging down around the roof is the white vertebrae horseshoe of the upper teeth I have left.

  There are times to wear a veil and there are not. Other than this, I’m stunning when I meet Seth Thomas breaking into Evie’s big house at midnight.

  What Seth sees coming down the big circular staircase in Evie’s foyer is me wearing one of Evie’s peachy-pink satin and lace peignoir sets pieced on the bias. Evie’s bathrobe is this peachy-pink retro Zsa Zsa number that hides me the way cellophane hides a frozen turkey. At the cuffs and along the front of the bathrobe is the peachy-pink ozone haze of ostrich feathers that match the feathers on the high-heeled mules I’m wearing.

  Seth is just frozen at the foot of Evie’s big circular staircase with Evie’s best sixteen-inch carving knife in his hand. A pair of Evie’s control-top pantyhose is pulled down over Seth’s head. You can see Evie’s hygienic cotton crotch sitting across Seth’s face. The pantyhose legs drape the way a cocker spaniel’s ears would look down the front of his otherwise mix-and-match army fatigues ensemble.

  And I am a vision. Descending step by step toward the point of the carving knife, with the slow step-pause-step of a showgirl in a big Vegas revue.

  Oh, I am just that fabulous. So sex furniture.

  Seth’s standing there, looking up, having a moment, afraid for the first time in his life because I’m holding Evie’s rifle. The butt is planted against my shoulder, and the barrel is out in both hands in front of me. The sight’s cross-haired right in the middle of Evie Cottrell’s cotton crotch.

  This is just Seth and me in Evie’s foyer with its beveled glass windows broken around the front door and Evie’s Austrian crystal chandelier that sparkles like so much costume jewelry for a house. The only other thing is a little desk in that Frenchy provincial white and gold.

  On the little French desk is a très ooh-la-la telephone where the receiver is as big as a gold saxophone and sits in a gold cradle on top of an ivory box. In the middle of the push-button circle is a cameo. So chic, Evie probably thinks.

  With the knife out in front of him, Seth goes, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  I’m doing that slow step-pause-step down the stairs.

  Seth says, “Let’s not anybody get killed, here.”

  And it’s so déjà vu.

  This was the exact way Manus Kelley would ask if I’d gotten my orgasm. Not the words, but the voice.

  Seth says through Evie’s crotch, “All’s I did was sleep with Evie.”

  So déjà vu.

  Let’s go sailing. It’s the exact same voice.

  Seth drops the carving knife and the tip of the blade sticks mumblety-peg straight down next to his combat boot in Evie’s foyer parquet floor. Seth says, “If Evie says it was me that shot you, she was lying.”

  On the desk next to the telephone is a pad and pencil for taking down messages.

  Seth says, “I knew the second I heard about you in the hospital that it was Evie’s doing.”

  Balancing the rifle with one arm, on the pad, I write:

  take off your pantyhose.

  “I mean, you can’t kill me,” Seth says. Seth’s pulling at the waistband of his pantyhose. “I’m just the reason why Evie shot you.”

  I step-pause-step the last ten feet to Seth and hook the end of the rifle barrel on the pantyhose waistband and pull them off Seth’s square-jawed face. Seth Thomas, who would be Alfa Romeo in Vancouver, British Columbia. Alfa Romeo, who was Nash Rambler, formerly Bergdorf Goodman, formerly Neiman Marcus, formerly Saks Fifth Avenue, formerly Christian Dior.

  Seth Thomas, who a long time before was named Manus Kelley, my fiancé from the infomercial. I couldn’t tell you this until now because I want you to know how discovering this felt. In my heart. My fiancé wanted to kill me. Even when he’s that much an asshole, I loved Manus. I still love Seth. A knife, it felt like a knife, and I’d discovered that despite everything that’s happened, I still had an endless untapped potential for getting hurt.

  It’s from this night we started on the road together and Manus Kelley would someday become Seth Thomas. In between, in Santa Barbara and San Francisco and Los Angles and Reno and Boise and Salt Lake City, Manus was other men. Between that night and now, tonight, me in bed in Seattle still in love with him, Seth was Lance Corporal and Chase Manhattan. He was Dow Corning and Herald Tribune and Morris Code.

  All courtesy of the Brandy Alexander Witness Reincarnation Project, as she calls it.

  Different names, but all these men started out as Manus Trying to Kill Me.

  Different men, but there’s always the same
special police vice operative good looks. The same power-blue eyes. Don’t shoot—Let’s go sailing—it’s the same voice. Different haircuts but it’s always the same thick black sexy dog hair.

  Seth Thomas is Manus. Manus cheated on me with Evie, but I still love him so much I’ll hide any amount of conjugated estrogen in his food. So much I’ll do anything to destroy him.

  You’d think I’d be smarter now after, what? Sixteen hundred college credits. I should be smarter. I could be a doctor by now.

  Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.

  Jump to me not feeling anything but stupid, trying to balance one of Evie’s gold saxophone telephones against my ear. Brandy Alexander, the inconvenient queen she is, isn’t listed in the phone book. All I know is she lives downtown at the Congress Hotel in a corner suite with three roommates:

  Kitty Litter.

  Sofonda Peters.

  And the Vivacious Vivienne VaVane.

  Aka the Rhea sisters, three drag guys who worship the quality queen deluxe but would kill each other for more closet space. The Brandy queen told me that much.

  It should be Brandy I talk to, but I call my folks. What’s gone on is I lock my killer fiancé in the coat closet, and when I go to put him inside there’s more of my beautiful clothes but all stretched out three sizes. Those clothes were every penny I ever made. After all that, I have to call somebody.

  For so many reasons, no way can I just go back to bed. So I call, and my call goes out across mountains and deserts to where my father answers, and in my best ventriloquist voice, avoiding the consonants you really need a jaw to say, I tell him, “Gflerb sorlfd qortk, erd sairk. Srd. Erd, korts derk sairk? Kirdo!”

  Anymore, the telephone is just not my friend.

  And my father says, “Please don’t hang up. Let me get my wife.”

  Away from the receiver, he says, “Leslie, wake up, we’re being hate-crimed finally.”

  And in the background is my mother’s voice saying, “Don’t even talk to them. Tell them we loved and treasured our dead homosexual child.”

  It’s the middle of the night here. They must be in bed.

  “Lot. Ordilj,” I say. “Serta ish ka alt. Serta ish ka alt!”

  “Here,” my father says as his voice drifts away. “Leslie, you give them what-for.”

  The gold saxophone receiver feels heavy and stagy, a prop, as if this call needs any more drama. From back in the coat closet, Seth yells, “Please. Don’t be calling the police until you’ve talked to Evie.”

  Then from the telephone, “Hello?” And it’s my mother.

  “The world is big enough we can all love each other.” she says, “There’s room in God’s heart for all His children. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered. Just because it’s anal intercourse doesn’t mean it’s not love.”

  She says, “I hear a lot of hurt from you. I want to help you deal with these issues.”

  And Seth yells, “I wasn’t going to kill you. I was here to confront Evie because of what she did to you. I was only trying to protect myself.”

  On the telephone, a two-hour drive from here, there’s a toilet flush, then my father’s voice. “You still talking to those lunatics?”

  And my mother, “It’s so exciting! I think one of them says he’s going to kill us.”

  And Seth yells, “It had to be Evie who shot you.”

  Then in the telephone is my father’s voice, roaring so loud that I have to hold the receiver away from my ear, he says, “You, you’re the one who should be dead.” He says, “You killed my son, you goddamned perverts.”

  And Seth yells, “What I had with Evie was just sex.”

  I might as well not even be in the room, or just hand the phone to Seth.

  Seth says, “Please don’t think for one minute that I could just stab you in your sleep.”

  And in the phone, my father shouts, “You just try it, mister. I’ve got a gun here and I’ll keep it loaded and next to me day and night.” He says, “We’re through letting you torture us.” He says, “We’re proud to be the parents of a dead gay son.”

  And Seth yells, “Please, just put the phone down.”

  And I go, “Aht! Oahk!”

  But my father hangs up.

  My inventory of people who can save me is down to just me. Not my best friend. Or my old boyfriend. Not the doctors or the nuns. Maybe the police, but not yet. It isn’t time to wrap this whole mess into a neat legal package and get on with my less-than life. Hideous and invisible forever and picking up pieces.

  Things are still all messy and up in the air, but I’m not ready to settle them. My comfort zone was getting bigger by the minute. My threshold for drama was bumping out. It was time to keep pushing the envelope. It felt like I could do anything, and I was only getting started.

  My rifle was loaded, and I had my first hostage.

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Eight

  ump back to when I first got out of the hospital without a career or a fiancé or an apartment, and I had to sleep at Evie’s big house, her real house where even she didn’t like to live, it was so lonely, stuck way out in some rain forest with nobody paying attention.

  Jump to me being on Evie’s bed, on my back that first night, but I can’t sleep.

  Wind lifts the curtains, lace curtains. All Evie’s furniture is that curlicue Frenchy provincial stuff painted white and gold. There isn’t a moon, but the sky is full of stars, so everything—Evie’s house, the rose hedges, the bedroom curtains, the backs of my hands against the bedspread—is all either black or gray.

  Evie’s house was what a Texas girl would buy if her parents kept giving her about ten million dollars all the time. It’s like the Cottrells know Evie will never make the big-time runways. So Evie, she lives here. Not New York. Not Milan. The suburbs, right out in the nowhere of professional modeling. This is pretty far from doing the Paris collections. Being stuck in nowhere is the excuse Evie needs, living here is, for a big-boned girl who’d never be a big-time success anywhere.

  The doors are locked tonight. The cat is inside. When I look, the cat looks back at me the way dogs and some cars look when people say they’re smiling.

  Just that afternoon, Evie was on the telephone begging me to check myself out of the hospital and come visit.

  Evie’s house was big—white with hunter-green shutters, a three-story plantation house fronted with big pillars. Needlepoint ivy and climbing roses—yellow roses—were climbed up around the bottom ten feet of each big pillar. You’d imagine Ashley Wilkes mowing the grass here, or Rhett Butler taking down the storm windows, but Evie, she has these minimum-wage slave Laotians who refuse to live in.

  Jump to the day before, Evie driving me from the hospital. Evie really is Evelyn Cottrell, Inc. No, really. She’s traded publicly now. Everybody’s favorite write-off. The Cottrells made a private stock offering in her career when Evie was twenty-one, and all the Cottrell relatives with their Texas land and oil money are heavily invested in Evie’s being a model failure.

  Most times it was an embarrassment going to modeling look-see auditions with Evie. Sure, I’d get work, but then the art director or the stylist would start screaming at Evie that, no, in his expert opinion she was not a perfect size six. Most times, some assistant stylist had to wrestle Evie out the door. Evie would be screaming back over her shoulder about how I shouldn’t let them treat me like a piece of meat. I should just walk out.

  “Fuck ’em,” Evie’s screaming by this point. “Fuck ’em all.”

  Me, I’m not angry. I’d be getting strapped into this incredible leather corset by Poupie Cadole and leather pants by Chrome Hearts. Life was good back then. I’d have three hours of work, maybe four or five.

  At the photo studio doorway, before she’d get thrown out of the shoot, Evie would swing the assistant stylist into the doorjamb, and the little guy would just crumple up at her feet. It’s then Evie would scream, “You people can all suck the crap out of my sweet Texas ass.” Then she’d go out to her Ferra
ri and wait the three or four or five hours so she could drive me home.

  Evie, that Evie was my best friend in the whole world. Moments like that, Evie was fun and quirky, almost like she had a life of her own.

  Okay, so I didn’t know about Evie and Manus and their complete and total love and satisfaction. So kill me.

  Jump to before that, Evie calling me at the hospital and begging me, please, could I discharge myself and come stay at her house, she was so lonely, please.

  My health insurance had a two-million-dollar lifetime ceiling, and the meter had just run and run all summer. No social service contact had the guts to transition me into God only knows where.

  Begging me on the telephone, Evie said she had plane reservations. She was going to Cancún for a catalogue shoot so would I, could I, please, just house-sit for her?

  When she picked me up, on my pad I wrote:

  is that my halter top? you know you’re stretching it.

  “You’ll need to feed my cat is all,” Evie says.

  i don’t like being alone so far out from town, I write. i don’t know how you can live here.

  Evie says, “It’s not living alone if you keep a rifle under the bed.”

  I write:

  i know girls who say that about their dildos.

  And Evie says, “Gross! I’m not that way at all with my rifle!”

  So jump to Evie being flown off to Cancún, Mexico, and when I go to look under her bed, there’s the thirty-aught rifle and scope. In her closets are what’s left of my clothes, stretched and tortured to death and hanging there on wire hangers, dead.

  Then jump to me in Evie’s bed that night. It’s midnight. The wind lifts the bedroom curtains, lace curtains, and the cat jumps up on the windowsill to see who’s just pulled up in the gravel driveway. With the stars behind it, the cat looks back at me. Downstairs, you hear a window break.

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Seven

  ump back to the day Brandy chucks a handful of shimmering nothing into the air above my head, and the speech therapist office around me turns gold.