Invisible Monsters Remix

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Three miles out, I’m walking into deck things. I’m falling down. Manus throws me a rope, and I miss it. Manus throws me a beer and I miss the beer. A headache, I get the kind of headache God would smote you with in the Old Testament. What I don’t know is that one of my sunglass lenses is darker than the other, almost opaque. I’m blind in one eye because of this lens, and I have no depth perception.

  Back then I don’t know this, that my perception is so fucked up. It’s the sun, I tell myself, so I just keep wearing the sunglasses and stumbling around blind and in pain.

  Jump to the second time Manus visits me in the hospital, he tells the eight-by-ten glossies of me in my sheet, Property of La Paloma Memorial Hospital, that I should think about getting back into my life. I should start making plans. You know, he says, take some classes. Finish my degree.

  He sits next to my bed and holds the photos between us so I can’t see either them or him. On my pad, with my pencil I ask Manus in writing to show me.

  “When I was little, we raised Doberman puppies,” he says from behind the photos. “And when a puppy is about six months old you get its ears and tail cropped. It’s the style for those dogs. You go to a motel where a man travels from state to state cutting the ears and tails off thousands of Doberman puppies or boxers or bull terriers.”

  On my pad with my pencil, I write:

  your point being?

  And I wave this in his direction.

  “The point is whoever cuts your ears off is the one you’ll hate for the rest of your life,” he says. “You don’t want your regular veterinarian to do the job so you pay a stranger.”

  Still looking at picture after picture, Manus says, “That’s the reason I can’t show you these.”

  Somewhere outside the hospital, in a motel room full of bloody towels with his toolbox of knives and needles, or driving down the highway to his next victim, or kneeling over a dog drugged and cut up in a dirty bathtub, is the man a million dogs must hate.

  Sitting next to my bed, Manus says, “You just need to archive your cover-girl dreams.”

  The fashion photographer inside my head yells:

  Give me pity.

  Flash.

  Give me another chance.

  Flash.

  That’s what I did before the accident. Call me a big liar, but before the accident I told people I was a college student. If you tell folks you’re a model, they shut down. Your being a model will mean they’re networking with some lower life-form. They start using baby talk. They dumb down. But if you tell folks you’re a college student, folks are so impressed. You can be a student in anything and not have to know anything. Just say toxicology or marine biokinesis, and the person you’re talking to will change the subject to himself. If this doesn’t work, mention the neural synapses of embryonic pigeons.

  It used to be I was a real college student. I have about sixteen hundred credits toward an undergraduate degree in personal fitness training. What I hear from my parents is that I could be a doctor by now.

  Sorry, Mom.

  Sorry, God.

  There was a time when Evie and me went out to dance clubs and bars and men would wait outside the ladies’ room door to catch us. Guys would say they were casting a television commercial. The guy would give me a business card and ask what agency I was with.

  There was a time when my mom came to visit. My mom smokes, and the first afternoon I came home from a shoot, she held out a matchbook and said, “What’s the meaning of this?”

  She said, “Please tell me you’re not as big a slut as your poor dead brother.”

  In the matchbook was a guy’s name I didn’t know and a telephone number.

  “This isn’t the only one I found,” Mom said. “What are you running here?”

  I don’t smoke. I tell her that. These matchbooks pile up because I’m too polite not to take them and I’m too frugal to just throw them away. That’s why it takes a whole kitchen drawer to hold them, all these men I can’t remember and their telephone numbers.

  Jump to no day special in the hospital, just outside the office of the hospital speech therapist. The nurse was leading me around by my elbow for exercise, and as we came around this one corner, just inside the open office doorway, boom, Brandy Alexander was just so there, glorious in a seated Princess Alexander pose, in an iridescent Vivienne Westwood cat suit changing colors with her every move.

  Vogue on location.

  The fashion photographer inside my head, yelling:

  Give me wonder, baby.

  Flash.

  Give me amazement.

  Flash.

  The speech therapist said, “Brandy, you can raise the pitch of your voice if you raise your laryngeal cartilage. It’s that bump in your throat you feel going up as you sing ascending scales.” She said, “If you can keep your voice box raised high in your throat, your voice should stay between a G and a middle C. That’s about a hundred and sixty hertz.”

  Brandy Alexander and the way she looked turned the rest of the world into virtual reality. She changed color from every new angle. She turned green with my one step. Red with my next. She turned silver and gold and then she was dropped behind us, gone.

  “Poor, sad, misguided thing,” Sister Katherine said, and she spat on the concrete floor. She looked at me craning my neck to see back down the hall, and she asked if I had any family.

  I wrote: yeah, there’s my gay brother but he’s dead from AIDS.

  And she says, “Well, that’s for the best, then, isn’t it?”

  Jump to the week after Manus’s last visit, last meaning final, when Evie drops by the hospital. Evie looks at the glossies and talks to God and Jesus Christ.

  “You know,” Evie tells me across a stack of Vogue and Glamour magazines in her lap she brings me, “I talked to the agency and they said that if we redo your portfolio they’ll consider taking you back for hand work.”

  Evie means a hand model, modeling cocktail rings and diamond tennis bracelets and shit.

  Like I want to hear this.

  I can’t talk.

  All I can eat is liquids.

  Nobody will look at me. I’m invisible.

  All I want is somebody to ask me what happened. Then I’ll get on with my life.

  Evie tells the stack of magazines, “I want you to come live with me at my house when you get out.” She unzips her canvas bag on the edge of my bed and goes into it with both hands. Evie says, “It’ll be fun. You’ll see. I hate living all by my lonesome.”

  And says, “I’ve already moved your things into my spare bedroom.”

  Still in her bag, Evie says, “I’m on my way to a shoot. Any chance you have any agency vouchers you can lend me?”

  On my pad with my pencil, I write:

  is that my sweater you’re wearing?

  And I wave the pad in her face.

  “Yeah,” she says, “but I knew you wouldn’t mind.”

  I write:

  but it’s a size six.

  I write:

  and you’re a size nine.

  “Listen,” Evie says. “My call is for two o’clock. Why don’t I stop by sometime when you’re in a better mood?”

  Talking to her watch, she says, “I’m so sorry things had to go this way. It wasn’t all of it anybody’s fault.”

  Every day in the hospital goes like this:

  Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Sister Katherine falls in between.

  On television is one network running nothing but infomercials all day and all night, and there we are, Evie and me, together. We got a raft of bucks. For the snack factory thing, we do these big celebrity spokesmodel smiles, the ones where you make your face a big space heater. We’re wearing these sequined dresses that when you get them under a spotlight, the dress flashes like a million reporters taking your picture. So glamorous. I’m standing there in this twenty-pound dress, doing this big smile and dropping animal wastes into the Plexiglas funnel on top of the Num Num Snack Factory. This thing just poops out
little canapés like crazy, and Evie has to wade out into the studio audience and get folks to eat the canapés.

  Folks will eat anything to get on television.

  Then, off camera, Manus goes, “Let’s go sailing.”

  And I go, “Sure.”

  It was so stupid, my not knowing what was happening all along.

  Jump to Brandy on a folding chair just inside the office of the speech therapist, shaping her fingernails with the scratch pad from a book of matches. Her long legs could squeeze a motorcycle in half, and the legal minimum of her is shrink-wrapped in leopard-print stretch terry just screaming to get out.

  The speech therapist says, “Keep your glottis partially open as you speak. It’s the way Marilyn Monroe sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to President Kennedy. It makes your breath bypass your vocal chords for a more feminine, helpless quality.”

  The nurse leads me past in my cardboard slippers, my tight bandages and deep funk, and Brandy Alexander looks up at the last possible instant and winks. God should be able to wink that good. Like somebody taking your picture. Give me joy. Give me fun. Give me love.

  Flash.

  Angels in heaven should blow kisses the way Brandy Alexander does and lights up the rest of my week. Back in my room, I write:

  who is she?

  “No one you should have any truck with,” the nurse says. “You’ll have problems enough as it is.”

  but who is she? I write.

  “If you can believe it,” the nurse says, “that one is someone different every week.”

  It’s after that Sister Katherine starts matchmaking. To save me from Brandy Alexander, she offers me the lawyer without a nose. She offers a mountain-climbing dentist whose fingers and facial features are eaten down to little hard shining bumps by frostbite. A missionary with dark patches of some tropical fungus just under his skin. A mechanic who leaned over a battery the moment it exploded and the acid left his lips and cheeks gone and his yellow teeth showing in a permanent snarl.

  I look at the nun’s wedding ring and write:

  i guess you got the last really buff guy.

  The whole time I was in the hospital, no way could I fall in love. I just couldn’t go there yet. Settle for less. I didn’t want to process through anything. I didn’t want to pick up any pieces. Lower my expectations. Get on with my less-than life. I didn’t want to feel better about being still alive. Start compensating. I just wanted my face fixed, if that was possible, which it wasn’t.

  When it’s time to reintroduce me to solid foods, their words again, it’s puréed chicken and strained carrots. Baby foods. Everything mashed or pulverized or crushed.

  You are what you eat.

  The nurse brings me the personal classified ads from a newsletter. Sister Katherine peers down her nose and through her glasses to read: Guys seeking slim, adventurous girls for fun and romance. And, yes, it’s true, not one single guy specifically excludes hideous mutilated girls with growing medical bills.

  Sister Katherine tells me, “These men you can write to in prison don’t need to know how you really look.”

  It’s just too much trouble to try and explain my feelings to her in writing.

  Sister Katherine reads me the singles columns while I spoon up my roast beef. She offers arsonists. Burglars. Tax cheats. She says, “You probably don’t want to date a rapist, not right off. Nobody’s that desperate.”

  Between the lonely men behind bars for armed robbery and second-degree manslaughter, she stops to ask what’s the matter. She takes my hand and talks to the name on my plastic bracelet, such a hand model I am already, cocktail rings, plastic ID bracelets so beautiful even a bride of Christ can’t take her eyes off them. She says, “What’re you feeling?”

  This is hilarious.

  She says, “Don’t you want to fall in love?”

  The photographer in my head says: Give me patience.

  Flash.

  Give me control.

  Flash.

  The situation is I have half a face.

  Inside my bandages, my face still bleeds tiny little spots of blood onto the wads of cotton. One doctor, the one making rounds every morning who checks my dressing, he says my wound is still weeping. That’s his word.

  I still can’t talk.

  I have no career.

  I can only eat baby food. Nobody will ever look at me like I’ve won a big prize ever again.

  nothing, I write on my pad.

  nothing’s wrong.

  “You haven’t mourned,” Sister Katherine says. “You need to have a good cry and then get on with your life. You’re being too calm about this.”

  I write:

  don’t make me laugh. my face, I write, the doctor sez my wound will weep.

  Still, at least somebody had noticed. This whole time, I was calm. I was the picture of calm. I never, never panicked. I saw my blood and snot and teeth splashed all over the dashboard the moment after the accident, but hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.

  The instant the accident happened, I knew I would die if I didn’t take the next exit off the freeway, turn right on Northwest Gower, go twelve blocks, and turn into the La Paloma Memorial Hospital emergency room parking lot. I parked. I took my keys and my bag and I walked. The glass doors slid aside before I could see myself reflected in them. The crowd inside, all the people waiting with broken legs and choking babies, they all slid aside, too, when they saw me.

  After that, the intravenous morphine. The tiny operating-room manicure scissors cut my dress up. The flesh-tone little patch panties. The police photos.

  The detective, the one who searched my car for bone fragments, the guy who’d seen all those people get their heads cut off in half-open car windows, he comes back one day and says there’s nothing left to find. Birds, seagulls, maybe magpies, too. They got into the car where it was parked at the hospital, through the broken window. The magpies ate all of what the detective calls the soft-tissue evidence. The bones they probably carried away.

  “You know, miss,” he says, “to break them on rocks. For the marrow.”

  On the pad, with the pencil, I write:

  ha, ha, ha.

  Jump to just before my bandages come off, when a speech therapist says I should get down on my knees and thank God for leaving my tongue in my head, unharmed. We sit in her cinder-block office with half the room filled by her steel desk between us, and the therapist, she teaches me how a ventriloquist makes a dummy talk. You see, the ventriloquist can’t let you see his mouth move. He can’t really use his lips, so he presses his tongue against the roof of his mouth to make words.

  Instead of a window, the therapist has a poster of a kitten covered in spaghetti above the words:

  Accentuate the Positive

  She says that if you can’t make a certain sound without using your lips, substitute a similar sound, the therapist says; for instance, use the sound eth instead of the sound eff. The context in which you use the sound will make you understandable.

  “I’d rather be thishing,” the therapist says.

  then go thishing, I write.

  “No,” she says, “repeat.”

  My throat is always raw and dry even after a million liquids through straws all day. The scar tissue is rippled hard and polished around my unharmed tongue.

  The therapist says, “I’d rather be thishing.”

  I say, “Salghrew jfwoiew fjfowi sdkifj.”

  “No, not that way,” the therapist says. “You’re not doing it right.”

  I say, “Solfjf gjoie ddd oslidjf?”

  She says, “No, that’s not right, either.”

  She looks at her watch.

  “Digri vrior gmjgi g giel,” I say.

  “You’ll need to practice a lot, but on your own time,” she says. “Now, again.”

  I say, “Jrogier fi fkgoewir mfofeinf fcfd.”

  She says, “Good! Great! See how easy?�
��

  On my pad with my pencil, I write:

  fuck off.

  Jump to the day they cut off the bandages.

  You don’t know what to expect, but every doctor and nurse and intern and orderly, janitor, and cook in the hospital stopped by for a peek from the doorway, and if you caught them they’d bark, Congratulations, the corners of their mouths spread wide apart and trembling in a stiff, watery smile. Bug-eyed. That’s my word for it. And I held up the same cardboard sign again and again that told them:

  thank you.

  And then I ran away. This is after my new cotton crepe sundress arrives from Espre. Sister Katherine stood over me all morning with a curling iron until my hair was this big butter crème frosting hairdo, this big off-the-face hairdo. Then Evie brought some makeup and did my eyes. I put on my spicy new dress and couldn’t wait to start sweating. This whole summer, I hadn’t seen a mirror, or if I did I never realized the reflection was me. I hadn’t seen the police photos. When Evie and Sister Katherine are done, I say, “De foil iowa fog geoff.”

  And Evie says, “You’re welcome.”

  Sister Katherine says, “But you just ate lunch.”

  It’s clear enough, nobody understands me here.

  I say, “Kong wimmer nay pee golly.”

  And Evie says, “Yeah, these are your shoes, but I’m not hurting them any.”

  And Sister Katherine says, “No, no mail yet, but we can write to prisoners after you’ve had your nap, dear.”

  They left. And. I left, alone. And. How bad could it be, my face?

  And sometimes being mutilated can work to your advantage. All those people now with piercings and tattoos and brandings and scarification . . . What I mean is, attention is attention.

  Going outside is the first time I feel I’ve missed something. I mean, a whole summer had just disappeared. All those pool parties and lying around on metal-flake speedboat bows. Catching rays. Finding guys with convertibles. I get that all the picnics and softball games and concerts are just sort of trickled down into a few snapshots that Evie won’t have developed until around Thanksgiving.

  Going outside, the world is all color after the white-on-white of the hospital. It’s going over the rainbow. I walk up to a supermarket, and shopping feels like a game I haven’t played since I was a little girl. Here are all my favorite name-brand products, all those colors, French’s mustard, Rice-A-Roni, Top Ramen, everything trying to catch your attention.