Invisible Monsters

by Chuck Palahniuk

  If I was a gay guy, did I think he needed to trim back his pubic hair? Me being a gay guy, would I think he looked too desperate? Too aloof? Was his chest big enough? Too big, maybe?

  “I’d hate for guys to think I’m just a big dumb cow is all,” Manus would say.

  Did he look, you know, too gay? Gay guys only wanted guys who acted straight.

  “I don’t want guys to see me as a big passive bottom,” Manus would say. “It’s not like I’d just flop there and let just any guy bone me.”

  Manus would leave a ring of shaved hairs and bronzer scum around the bathtub and expect me to scrub.

  Always in the background was the idea of going back to an assignment where people shot at you, criminals with nothing to lose if you got killed.

  And maybe Manus could bust some old tourist who found the cruisy part of Washington Park by accident, but most days the precinct commander was on him to start training a younger replacement.

  Most days, Manus would untangle a silver metallic tiger stripe string bikini out of the knotted mess in his underwear drawer. He’d strain his ass into this little A-cup nothing and look at himself in the mirror sideways, front-ways, backwards, then tear it off and leave the stretched, dead little animal print on the bed for me to find. This would go on through zebra stripes, tiger stripes, leopard spots, then cheetah, panther, puma, ocelot, until he ran out of time.

  “These are my lucky lifeguard ’kinis,” he’d tell me. “Be honest.”

  And this is what I kept telling myself was love.

  Be honest? I wouldn’t know where to start. I was so out of practice.

  After Las Vegas, we rented one of those family vans. Eberhard Faber became Hewlett Packard. Brandy wore a long, white cotton piqué dress with open strappy sides and a high slit up the skirt that was totally inappropriate for the entire state of Utah. We stopped and tasted the Great Salt Lake.

  This just seemed like the thing to do.

  I was always writing in the sand, writing in the dust on the car:

  maybe your sister is in the next town.

  Writing: here, take a few more Vicodins.

  It was after Manus couldn’t get guys to approach him for sex that he started into buying man-on-man sex magazines and going out to gay clubs.

  “Research,” he’d say.

  “You can come with,” he’d tell me, “but don’t stand too close, I don’t want to send out the wrong signal.”

  After Utah, Brandy turned Hewlett Packard into Harper Collins in Butte. There in Montana, we rented a Ford Probe and Harper drove with me squashed in the back seat, and every once in a while Harper would say, “We’re going one hundred and ten miles an hour.”

  Brandy and me, we’d shrug.

  Speeding didn’t seem like anything in a place as big as Montana.

  maybe your sister’s not even in the united states, I wrote in lipstick on a bathroom mirror in a motel in Great Falls.

  So to keep Manus’s job, we went out to gay bars, and I sat alone and told myself that it was different for men, the good looks thing was. Manus flirted and danced and sent drinks down the bar to whoever looked like a challenge. Manus would slip onto the bar stool next to mine and whisper out the side of his mouth.

  “I can’t believe he’s with that guy,” he’d say.

  Manus would nod just enough for me to figure out which guy.

  “Last week, he wouldn’t give me the time of day,” Manus would rant under his breath. “I wasn’t good enough, and that trashy, bottle-blonde piece of garbage is supposed to be better?”

  Manus would hunch over his drink and say, “Guys are so fucked up.”

  And I’d be, like, no duh.

  And I told myself it was okay. Any relationship I could be in would have these rough times.

  Jump to Calgary, Alberta, where Brandy ate Nebalino suppositories wrapped in gold foil because she thought they were Almond Roca. She got so ripped, she turned Harper Collins into Addison Wesley. Most of Calgary, Brandy wore a white, quilted ski jacket with a faux fur collar and a white bikini bottom by Donna Karan. The look was fun and spirited and we felt light and popular.

  Evenings called for a black and white striped floor-length coat dress that Brandy could never keep buttoned up, with black wool hot pants on underneath. Addison Wesley turned into Nash Rambler, and we rented another Cadillac.

  Jump to Edmonton, Alberta, Nash Rambler turned into Alfa Romeo. Brandy wore these crinoline shorty-short square dance petticoats over black tights tucked into cowboy boots. Brandy wore this push-up bustier made of leather with local cattle brands burned all over it.

  In a nice hotel bar in Edmonton, Brandy says, “I hate it when you can see the seam in your martini glass. I mean, I can feel the mold line. It’s so cheap.”

  Guys all over her. Like spotlights, I remember that kind of attention. That whole country, Brandy never had to buy her own drinks, not once.

  Jump to Manus losing his assignment as an independent special contract vice operative to the detective division of the Metropolitan police department. My point is, he never really got over it.

  He was running out of money. It’s not like there was a lot in the bank to begin with. Then the birds ate my face. What I didn’t know is, there was Evie Cottrell living alone in her big lonesome house with all her Texas land and oil money, saying, hey, she had some work that needed doing. And Manus with his driving need to prove he can still pee on every tree. That mirror-mirror kind of power. The rest you already know.

  Jump to us on the road, after the hospital, after the Rhea sisters, and I keep slipping the hormones, the Provera and Climara and Premarin, into what he ate and drank. Whiskey and estradiol. Vodka and ethinyl estradiol. It was so easy it was scary. He was all the time making big cow eyes at Brandy.

  We were all running from something. Vaginoplasty. Aging. The future.

  Jump to Los Angeles.

  Jump to Spokane.

  Jump to Boise and San Diego and Phoenix.

  Jump to Vancouver, British Columbia, where we were Italian expatriates speaking English as a second language until there wasn’t a native tongue among us.

  “You have two of the breasts of a young woman,” Alfa Romeo told a realtor I can’t remember in which house.

  From Vancouver, we reentered the United States as Brandy, Seth, and Bubba-Joan via the Princess Princess’s very professional mouth. All the way to Seattle, Brandy read to us how a little Jewish girl with a mysterious muscle disease turned herself into Rona Barrett.

  All of us looking at big rich houses, picking up drugs, renting cars, buying clothes, and taking clothes back.

  “Tell us a gross personal story,” Brandy says en route to Seattle. Brandy all the time being the boss of me. Being this close to death herself.

  Rip yourself open.

  Tell me my life story before I die.

  Sew yourself shut.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Jump way back to a fashion shoot at this slaughterhouse where whole pigs without their insides hang as thick as fringe from a moving chain. Evie and me wear Bibo Kelley stainless steel party dresses while the chain zips by behind us at about a hundred pigs an hour, and Evie says, “After your brother was mutilated, then what?”

  The photographer looks at his light meter and says, “Nope. No way.”

  The art director says, “Girls, we’re getting too much glare off the carcasses.”

  Each pig goes by big as a hollow tree, all red and shining inside and covered in this really nice pigskin on the outside just after someone’s singed the hair off with a blowtorch. This makes me feel all stubbly by comparison, and I have to count back to my last waxing.

  And Evie goes, “Your brother?”

  And I’m, like, counting Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday…

  “How did he go from being mutilated to being dead?” Evie says.

  These pigs keep going by too fast for the art director to powder down their shine. You have to wonder how pigs keep their skin so ni
ce. If now farmers use sunblock or what. Probably, I figure it’s been a month since I was as smooth as they are. The way some salons use their new lasers, even with the cooling gel, they might as well use a blowtorch.

  “Space girl,” Evie says to me. “Phone home.”

  The whole pig place is refrigerated too much to wear a stainless steel dress around. Guys in white A-line coats and boots with low heels get to spray super-heated steam in where the pigs insides were, and I’m ready to trade them jobs. I’m ready to trade jobs with the pigs, even. To Evie, I say, “The police wouldn’t buy the hairspray story. They were sure my father had raged on Shane’s face. Or my mom had put the hairspray can in the trash. They called it ‘neglect.’”

  The photographer says, “What if we regroup and backlight the carcasses?”

  “Too much strobe effect as they go past,” the art director says.

  Evie says, “Why’d the police think that?”

  “Beats me,” I say. “Somebody just kept making anonymous calls to them.”

  The photographer says, “Can we stop the chain?”

  The art director says, “Not unless we can stop people from eating meat.”

  We’re still hours away from taking a real break, and Evie says, “Somebody lied to the police?”

  The pig guys are checking us out, and some are pretty cute. They laugh and slide their hands up and down fast on their shiny black steamhoses. Curling their tongues at us. Flirting.

  “Then Shane ran away,” I tell Evie. “Simple as that. A couple years ago, my folks got a call he was dead.”

  We step back as close as we can to the pigs going by, still warm. The floor seems to be really greasy, and Evie starts telling me about an idea she has for a remake of Cinderella, only instead of the little birds and animals making her a dress, they do cosmetic surgery. Bluebirds give her a facelift. Squirrels give her implants. Snakes, liposuction. Plus, Cinderella starts out as a lonely little boy.

  “As much attention as he got,” I tell Evie, “I’d bet my brother put that hairspray can in the fire himself.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Jump to one time, nowhere special, just Brandy and me shopping along a main street of stores in some Idaho town with a Sears outlet, a diner, a day-old bakery store, and a realtor’s office with our own Mr. White Westinghouse gone inside to hustle some realtor. We go into a secondhand dress shop. This is next door to the day-old bargain bakery, and Brandy says how her father used to pull this stunt with pigs just before he took them to market. She says how he used to feed them expired desserts he bought by the truckload from this kind of bakery outlet. Sunlight comes down on us through clean air. Bears and mountains are within walking distance.

  Brandy looks at me over a rack of secondhand dresses. “You know about that kind of scam? The one with the pigs, sweetness?” she says.

  He used to stovepipe potatoes, her father. You hold the burlap bag open and stand a length of stovepipe inside. All around the pipe, you put big potatoes from this year’s crop. Inside the pipe you put last year’s soft, bruised, cut, and rotting potatoes so folks can’t see them from through the burlap. You pull the stovepipe out, and you stitch the bag shut tight so nothing inside can shift. You sell them roadside with your kids helping, and even at a cheap price, you’re making money.

  We had a Ford that day in Idaho. It was brown inside and out.

  Brandy pushes the hangers apart, checking out every dress on the rack and says, “You ever hear of anything in your whole life so underhanded?”

  Jump to Brandy and me in a secondhand store on that same main street, behind a curtain, crowded together in a fitting room the size of a phone booth. Most of the crowding is a ball gown Brandy needs me to help get her into, a real Grace Kelly of a dress with Charles James written all over it. Baffles and plenums and all that high-stressed skeletoning engineered inside a skin of shot pink organza or ice blue velveteen.

  These most incredible dresses, Brandy tells me, the constructed ball gowns, the engineered evening dresses with their hoops and strapless bodices, their stand-up horseshoe collars and flaring shoulders, nipped waists, their stand-away peplums and bones, they never last very long. The tension, the push and pull of satin and crepe de Chine trying to control the wire and boning inside, the battle of fabric against metal, this tension will shred them. As the outsides age, the fabric, the part you can see, as it gets weak, the insides start to poke and tear their way out.

  Princess Princess, she says, “It will take at least three Darvons to get me into this dress.”

  She opens her hand, and I shake out the prescription.

  Her father, Brandy says, he used to grind his beef with crushed ice to force it full of water before he sold it. He’d grind beef with what’s called bull meal to force it full of cereal.

  “He wasn’t a bad person,” she says. “Not outside of following the rules a little too much.”

  Not the rules about being fair and honest, she says, so much as the rules about protecting your family from poverty. And disease.

  Some nights, Brandy says, her father used to creep into her room while she was asleep.

  I don’t want to hear this. Brandy’s diet of Provera and Darvon has side-effected her with this kind of emotional bulimia where she can’t keep down any nasty secret. I smooth my veils over my ears. Thank you for not sharing.

  “My father used to sit on my bed some nights,” she says, “and wake me up.”

  Our father.

  The ball gown is resurrected glorious on Brandy’s shoulders, brought back to life, larger than life and fairy tale impossible to wear any place in the past fifty years. A zipper thick as my spine goes up the side to just under Brandy’s arm. The panels of the bodice pinch Brandy off at her waist and explode her out the top, her breasts, her bare arms and long neck. The skirt is layered pale yellow silk faille and tulle. It’s so much gold embroidery and seed pearls would make any bit of jewelry too much.

  “It’s a palace of a dress,” Brandy says, “but even with the drugs, it hurts.”

  The broke ends of the wire stays poke out around the neck, poke in at the waist. Panels of plastic whalebone, their corners and sharp edges jab and cut. The silk is hot, the tulle, rough. Just her breathing in and out makes the clashing steel and celluloid tucked inside, hidden, just Brandy being alive makes it bite and chew at the fabric and her skin.

  Jump to at night, Brandy’s father, he used to say, hurry. Get dressed. Wake your sister.

  Me.

  Get your coats on and get in the back of the truck, he’d say.

  And we would, late after the TV stations had done the national anthem and gone off the air. Concluded their broadcast day. Nothing was on the road except us, our folks in the cab of the pickup and us two in the back, Brandy and his sister, curled on our sides against the corrugated floor of the truck bed, the squeak of the leaf springs, the hum of the driveline coming right into us. The potholes bounce our pumpkin heads hard on the floor of the bed. Our hands clamp tight over our faces to keep from breathing the sawdust and dried manure blowing around leftover. Our eyes shut tight to keep out the same. We were going we didn’t know where, but tried to figure out. A right turn, then a left turn, then a long straight stretch going we didn’t know how fast, then another right turn would roll us over on our left sides. We didn’t know how long. You couldn’t sleep.

  Wearing the dress to shreds and holding very still, Brandy says, “You know, I’ve been on my own pretty much since I was sixteen.”

  With every breath, even her taking shallow Darvon overdosed little gulps of air, Brandy winces. She says, “There was an accident when I was fifteen, and at the hospital, the police accused my father of abusing me. It just went on and on. I couldn’t tell them anything because there was nothing to tell.”

  She inhales and winces, “The interviews, the counseling, the intervention therapy, it just went on and on.”

  The pickup truck slowed and bounced off the edge of the blacktop, onto gravel or wash
board dirt, and the whole truck bounced and rattled a while farther, then stopped.

  This is how poor we were.

  Still in the truck bed, you took your hands off your face, and we’d be stopped. The dust and manure would settle. Brandy’s father would drop the tailgate of the truck, and you’d be on a dirt road alongside a looming broken wall of boxcars laying this way and that off their tracks. Boxcars would be broken open. Flatcars would be rolled over with their loads of logs or two-by-fours scattered. Tanker cars buckled and leaking. Hoppers full of coal or wood chips would be heaved over and dumped out in black or gold piles. The fierce smell of ammonia. The good smell of cedar. The sun would be just under the horizon with light coming around to us from underneath the world.

  There’d be lumber to load on the truck. Cases of instant butterscotch pudding. Cases of typing paper, toilet paper, double-A batteries, toothpaste, canned peaches, books. Crushed diamonds of safety glass’d be everywhere around car carriers tipped sideways with the brand-new cars inside wrecked, with their clean, black tires in the air.

  Brandy lifts the gown’s neckline and peeks inside at her Estraderm patch on one breast. She peels the backing off another patch and pastes it on her other breast, then takes another stabbing breath and winces.

  “The whole mess died down after about three months, the whole child abuse investigation,” Brandy says. “Then one basketball practice, I’m getting out of the gym and a man comes up. He’s with the police, he says, and this is a confidential follow-up interview.”