Invisible Monsters Remix

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Then I’d go downtown to the Taylor Robberts Modeling Academy to get myself perfected. Dogs will lick their butts. Evie will self-mutilate. All this navel-gazing. At home, Evie had nobody except she had a ton of family money. The first time we rode a city bus to Brumbach’s, she offered the driver her credit card and asked for a window seat. She was worried her carry-on was too big.

  Me with Manus or her alone, you don’t know who of us had it worse at home.

  But at Brumbach’s, Evie and me, we’d catnap in any of the dozen perfect bedrooms. We’d stuff cotton between our toes and paint our nails in chintz-covered club chairs. Then we’d study our Taylor Robberts modeling textbook at a long polished dining table.

  “Here’s the same as those fakey reproductions of natural habitats they build at zoos,” Evie would say. “You know, those concrete polar ice caps and those rain forests made of welded pipe trees holding sprinklers.”

  Every afternoon, Evie and me, we’d star in our own personal unnatural habitat. The clerks would sneak off to find sex in the men’s room. We’d all soak up attention in our own little matinee life.

  All’s I remember from Taylor Robberts is to lead with my pelvis when I walk. Keep your shoulders back. To model different-sized products, they’d tell you to draw an invisible sight line from yourself to the item. For toasters, draw a line through the air from your smile to the toaster. For a stove, draw the line from your breasts. For a new car, start the invisible line from your vagina. What it boils down to is professional modeling means getting paid to overreact to stuff like rice cakes and new shoes.

  We’d drink diet colas on a big pink bed at Brumbach’s. Or sit at a vanity, using contouring powder to change the shape of our faces while the faint outline of people watched us from the darkness a few feet away. Maybe the track lights would flash off somebody’s glasses. With our every little move getting attention, every gesture, everything we said, it’s easy to pick up on the rush you’d get.

  “It’s so safe and peaceful here,” Evie’d say, smoothing the pink satin comforter and fluffing the pillows. “Nothing very bad could ever happen to you here. Not like at school. Or at home.”

  Total strangers would stand there with their coats on, watching us. The same’s those talk shows on television, it’s so easy to be honest with a big enough audience. You can say anything if enough people will listen.

  “Evie, honey,” I’d say. “There’s lots worse models in our class. You just need to not have an edge to your blusher.” We’d be looking at ourselves in a vanity mirror, a triple row of nobodies watching us from behind.

  “Here, sweetie,” I’d say, and give her a little sponge, “blend.”

  And Evie would start to cry. Your every emotion goes right over the top with a big audience. It’s either laughter or tears, with no in-between. Those tigers in zoos, they must just live a big opera all the time.

  “It’s not just my wanting to be a glamorous fashion model,” Evie would say. “It’s when I think of my growing up, I’m so sad.” Evie would choke back her tears. She’d clutch her little sponge and say, “When I was little, my parents wanted me to be a boy.” She’d say, “I just never want to be that miserable again.”

  Other times, we’d wear high heels and pretend to slap each other hard across the mouth because of some guy we both wanted. Some afternoons we’d confess to each other that we were vampires.

  “Yeah,” I’d say. “My parents used to abuse me, too.”

  You had to play to the crowd.

  Evie would turn her fingers through her hair. “I’m getting my guiche pierced,” she’d say. “It’s that little ridge of skin running between your asshole and the bottom of your vagina.”

  I’d go to flop on the bed, center stage, hugging a pillow and looking up into the black tangle of ducts and sprinkler pipes you had to imagine was a bedroom ceiling.

  “It’s not like they hit me or made me drink satanic blood or anything,” I’d say. “They just liked my brother more because he was mutilated.”

  And Evie would cross to center stage by the Early American nightstand to upstage me.

  “You had a mutilated brother?” she’d say.

  Somebody watching us would cough. Maybe the light would glint off a wristwatch.

  “Yeah, he was pretty mutilated, but not in a sexy way. Still, there’s a happy ending,” I’d say. “He’s dead now.”

  And really intense, Evie would say, “Mutilated how? Was he your only brother? Older or younger?”

  And I’d throw myself off the bed and shake my hair. “No, it’s too painful.”

  “No, really,” Evie would say. “I’m not kidding.”

  “He was my big brother by a couple years. His face was all exploded in a hairspray accident, and you’d think my folks totally forgot they even had a second child,” I’d dab my eyes on the pillow shams and tell the audience. “So I just kept working harder and harder for them to love me.”

  Evie would be looking at nothing and saying, “Oh, my shit! Oh, my shit!” And her acting, her delivery would be so true it would just bury mine.

  “Yeah,” I’d say. “He didn’t have to work at it. It was so easy. Just by being all burned and slashed up with scars, he hogged all the attention.”

  Evie would go close-up on me and say, “So where’s he now, your brother, do you even know?”

  “Dead,” I’d say, and I’d turn to address the audience. “Dead of AIDS.”

  And Evie says, “How sure are you?”

  And I’d say, “Evie!”

  “No, really,” she’d say. “I’m asking for a reason.”

  “You just don’t joke about AIDS,” I’d say.

  And Evie’d say, “This is so next-to-impossible.”

  This is how easy the plot gets pumped out of control. With all these shoppers expecting real drama, of course, I think Evie’s just making stuff up.

  “Your brother,” Evie says, “did you really see him die? For real? Or did you see him dead? In a coffin, you know, with music. Or a death certificate?”

  All those people were watching.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Pretty much.” Like I’d want to get caught lying?

  Evie’s all over me. “So you saw him dead or you didn’t?”

  All those people watching.

  “Dead enough.”

  Evie says, “Where?”

  “This is very painful,” I say, and I cross stage right to the living room.

  Evie chases after me, saying, “Where?”

  All those people watching.

  “The hospice,” I say.

  “What hospice?”

  I keep crossing stage right to the next living room, the next dining room, the next bedroom, den, home office, with Evie dogging me and the audience hovering along next to us.

  “You know how it is,” I say. “If you don’t see a gay guy for so long, it’s a pretty safe bet.”

  And Evie says, “So you don’t really know that he’s dead?”

  We’re sprinting through the next bedroom, living room, dining room, nursery, and I say, “It’s AIDS, Evie. Fade to black.”

  And then Evie just stops and says, “Why?”

  And the audience has started to abandon me in a thousand directions.

  Because I really, really, really want my brother to be dead. Because my folks want him dead. Because life is just easier if he’s dead. Because this way, I’m an only child. Because it’s my turn, damn it. My turn.

  And the crowd of shoppers has bailed, leaving just us and the security cameras instead of God watching to catch us when we fuck up.

  “Why is this such a big deal to you?” I say.

  And Evie’s already wandering away from me, leaving me alone and saying, “No reason.” Lost in her own little closed circuit. Licking her own butthole, Evie says, “It’s nothing.” Saying, “Forget it.”

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Four

  ntil I met Brandy, all I wanted was for somebody to ask me what happened to my face.
<
br />   “Birds ate it,” I wanted to tell them.

  Birds ate my face.

  But nobody wanted to know. Then nobody doesn’t include Brandy Alexander.

  Just don’t think this was a big coincidence. We had to meet, Brandy and me. We had so many things in common. We had close to everything in common. Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible every day. Brandy was in the hospital for months and months, and so was I, and there’s only so many hospitals where you can go for major cosmetic surgery.

  Jump back to the nuns. The nuns were the worst about always pushing, the nuns who were nurses. One nun would tell me about some patient on a different floor who was funny and charming. He was a lawyer and could do magic tricks with just his hands and a paper napkin. This day nurse was the kind of nun who wore a white nursing version of her regular nun uniform, and she’d told this lawyer all about me. This was Sister Katherine. She told him I was funny and bright, and she said how sweet it would be if the two of us could meet and fall madly in love.

  Those were her words.

  Halfway down the bridge of her nose, she’d look at me through wire-framed glasses, their lenses long and squared the way microscope slides look. Little broken veins kept the end of her nose red. Rosacea, she called this. It would be easier to see her living in a gingerbread house than a convent. Married to Santa Claus instead of God. The starched apron she wore over her habit was so glaring white that when I’d first arrived, fresh from my big car accident, I remembered how all the stains from my blood looked black.

  They gave me a pen and paper so I could communicate. They wrapped my head in dressings, yards of tight gauze holding wads of cotton in place, metal butterfly sutures gripping all over so I wouldn’t unravel. They fingered on a thick layer of antibiotic gel, claustrophobic and toxic under the wads of cotton.

  My hair they pulled back, forgotten and hot under the gauze where I couldn’t get at it. The invisible woman.

  When Sister Katherine mentioned this other patient, I wondered if maybe I’d seen him around, her lawyer, the cute, funny magician.

  “I didn’t say he was cute,” she said.

  Sister Katherine said, “He’s still a little shy.”

  On the pad of paper, I wrote:

  still?

  “Since his little mishap,” she said and smiled with her eyebrows arched and all her chins tucked down against her neck. “He wasn’t wearing his seat belt.”

  She said, “His car rolled right over the top of him.”

  She said, “That’s why he’d be so perfect for you.”

  Early on, while I was still sedated, somebody had taken the mirror out of my bathroom. The nurses seemed to steer me away from polished anything the way they kept the suicides away from knives. The drunks away from drinks. The closest I had to a mirror was the television, and it only showed how I used to look.

  If I asked to see the police photos from the accident, the day nurse would tell me, “No.” They kept the photos in a file at the nursing station, and it seemed anybody could ask to see them except me. This nurse, she’d say, “The doctor thinks you’ve suffered enough for the time being.”

  This same day nurse tried to fix me up with an accountant whose hair and ears were burned off in a propane blunder. She introduced me to a graduate student who’d lost his throat and sinuses to a touch of cancer. A window washer after his three-story tumble headfirst onto concrete.

  Those were all her words, blunder, touch, tumble. The lawyer’s mishap. My big accident.

  Sister Katherine would be there to check my vital signs every six hours. To check my pulse against the sweep second hand on her man’s wristwatch, thick and silver. To wrap the blood pressure cuff around my arm. To check my temperature, she’d push some kind of electric gun in my ear.

  Sister Katherine was the kind of nun who wears a wedding ring.

  And married people always think love is the answer.

  Jump back to the day of my big accident, when everybody was so considerate. The people, the folks who let me go ahead of them in the emergency room. What the police insisted. I mean, they gave me this hospital sheet with Property of La Paloma Memorial Hospital printed along the edge in indelible blue. First they gave me morphine, intravenously. Then they propped me up on a gurney.

  I don’t remember much of this, but the day nurse told me about the police photos.

  In the pictures, these big eight-by-ten glossies as nice as anything in my portfolio. Black-and-white, the nurse said. But in these eight-by-tens I’m sitting up on a gurney with my back against the emergency room wall. The attending nurse spent ten minutes cutting my dress off with those tiny operating-room manicure scissors. The cutting, I remember. It was my cotton crepe sundress from Espre. I remember that when I ordered this dress from the catalogue I almost ordered two, they’re so comfortable, loose with the breeze trying to get inside the armholes and lift the hem up around your waist. Then you’d sweat if there wasn’t a breeze, and the cotton crepe stuck on you like eleven herbs and spices, only on you the dress was almost transparent. You’d walk onto a patio, it was a great feeling, a million spotlights picking you out of the crowd, or walk into a restaurant when outside it was ninety degrees, and everyone would turn and look as if you’d just been awarded some major distinguished award for a major lifetime achievement.

  That’s how it felt. I can remember this kind of attention. It always felt ninety degrees hot.

  And I remember my underwear.

  Sorry, Mom, sorry, God, but I was wearing just this little patch up front with an elastic string waist and just one string running down the crack and back around to the bottom of the patch up front. Flesh-tone. That one string, the one down the crack, butt floss is what everybody calls that string. I wore the patch underwear because of when the cotton crepe sundress goes almost transparent. You just don’t plan on ending up in the emergency room with your dress cut off and detectives taking your picture, propped up on a gurney with a morphine drip in one arm and a Franciscan nun screaming in one ear. “Take your pictures! Take your pictures, now! She’s still losing blood!”

  No, really, it was funnier than it sounds.

  It got funny when there I was sprawled on this gurney, this anatomically correct rag doll with nothing but this little patch on and my face was the way it is now.

  The police, they had the nun hold this sheet up over my breasts. It’s so they can take pictures of my face, but the detectives are so embarrassed for me, being sprawled there topless.

  Jump to when they refuse to show me the pictures, one of the detectives says that if the bullet had been two inches higher, I’d be dead.

  I couldn’t see their point.

  Two inches lower, and I’d be deep-fried in my spicy cotton crepe sundress, trying to get the insurance guy to waive the deductible and replace my car window. Then I’d be by a swimming pool, wearing sunblock and telling a couple cute guys how I was driving on the freeway in my Stingray when a rock or I don’t know what, but my driver’s-side window just burst.

  And the cute guys would say, “Whoa.”

  Jump to another detective, the one who’d searched my car for the slug and bone fragments, that stuff, the detective saw how I’d been driving with the window half open. A car window, this guy tells me over the eight-by-ten glossies of me wearing a white sheet, a car window should always be all the way open or shut. He couldn’t remember how many motorists he’d seen decapitated by windows in car accidents.

  How could I not laugh?

  That was his word: Motorists.

  The way my mouth was, the only sound left I could do was laugh. I couldn’t not laugh.

  Jump to after there were the pictures, when people stopped looking at me.

  My boyfriend, Manus, came in that evening, after the emergency room, after I’d been wheeled off on my gurney to surgery, after the bleeding had stopped and I was in a priva
te room. Then Manus showed up. Manus Kelley, who was my fiancé until he saw what was left. Manus sat looking at the black-and-white glossies of my new face, shuffling and reshuffling them, turning them upside down and right-side up the way you would one of those mystery pictures where one minute you have a beautiful woman, but when you look again you have a hag.

  Manus says, “Oh, God.”

  Then says, “Oh, sweet, sweet Jesus.”

  Then says, “Christ.”

  The first date I ever had with Manus, I was still living with my folks. Manus showed me a badge in his wallet. At home, he had a gun. He was a police detective, and he was really successful in vice. This was a May and December thing. Manus was twenty-five and I was eighteen, but we went out. This is the world we live in. We went sailing one time, and he wore a Speedo, and any smart woman should know that means bisexual at least.

  My best friend, Evie Cottrell, she’s a model. Evie says that beautiful people should never date each other. Together, they just don’t generate enough attention. Evie says there’s a whole shift in the beauty standard when they’re together. You can feel this, Evie says. When both of you are beautiful, neither of you is beautiful. Together, as a couple, you’re less than the sum of your parts.

  Nobody really gets noticed, not anymore.

  Still, there I was one time, taping this infomercial, one of those long-long commercials you think will end at any moment because after all it’s just a commercial, but it’s actually thirty minutes long. Me and Evie, we’re hired to be walking sex furniture to wear tight evening dresses all afternoon and entice the television audience into buying the Num Num Snack Factory. Manus comes to sit in the studio audience, and after the shoot he goes, “Let’s go sailing,” and I go, “Sure!”

  So we went sailing, and I forgot my sunglasses, so Manus buys me a pair on the dock. My new sunglasses are the exact same as Manus’s Vuarnets, except mine are made in Korea not Switzerland and cost two dollars.