Invisible Monsters Remix

by Chuck Palahniuk

  She sleeps with the angles

  With no overhead, the profit margin is stupendous. With such an income stream Daisy St. Patience need do nothing except count her money, and it’s this cash flow from Spitefield Park that gives her some elbow room. Daisy can take her own sweet time to assemble a top-notch stable. Daisy St. Patience: Loving Do-Gooder. Empathetic Hand-Holder.

  It was Daisy who went to the Blue Girls everyone had forgotten about. Candy-Striper Daisy volunteered to bring cheer to those living nightmares consigned by next-of-kin to state hospitals, to locked wards, to watching television with their runny eyes for a lifetime on account of having a lumpy head the size of a microwave oven carved from gouda cheese. The Elephant Women. Those twisted, shambling gals with faces like torched Halloween masks. Their smiles like lumpy, red, knobby pomegranates turned inside out. The Born-That-Way girls. The In-a-Terrible-Accident girls, and the There-But-for-the-Grace-of-God girls. Like no one you’d want to meet in a dark alley late at night. Those horror movie ladies with heartbreaking names like “Fern” and “Penny,” Daisy sought them out and mentored them. These young cripples who crawled toward her on legs like boneless tentacles, and looked at her with their blue eyes set in faces like blood-red cauliflower, for them Lady Daisy lifted the hem of her own veil like a stage curtain. This is what Daisy St. Patience did after the end of the end of the last chapter. She did not don a veil and become a belly dancer. Nor did she take up playing ice hockey as a lifetime excuse to wear a goalie mask. Lady Daisy went to these wretched young ladies. Girls who, from their faces, you’d scarcely guess were still human. Daisy St. Patience reached out to gently, warmly, passionately grasp hold of their hands or claws or flippers, and she said, “I’d like to propose a partnership . . .”

  Of these evolutionary dead ends, these mistakes of Mother Nature, Lady Daisy asked, “How would you like to see the world?” Adding, “And vice versa.”

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Eighteen

  ump way back to a fashion shoot at this junkyard full of dirty wrecked cars where Evie and me have to climb around on the wrecks wearing Hermaun Mancing thong swimwear so narrow you have to wear a “pussy strip” of surgical tape underneath, and Evie starts in with, “About your mutilated brother . . . ?”

  It’s not my favorite photographer or art director, either.

  And I’m going back to Evie, “Yeah?” Busy sticking out my butt.

  And the photographer goes, “Evie? That’s not pouting!”

  The uglier the fashions, the worse places we’d have to pose to make them look good. Junkyards. Slaughterhouses. Sewage treatment plants. It’s the ugly bridesmaid tactic where you only look good by comparison. One shoot for Industry JeansWear, I was sure we’d have to pose kissing dead bodies.

  These junked cars all have rusted holes through them, serrated edges, and I’m this close to naked and trying to remember when was my last tetanus shot. The photographer lowers his camera and says, “I’m only wasting film until you girls decide to pull in your stomachs.”

  More and more, being beautiful took so much effort. Just the razor bumps would make you want to cry. The bikini waxes. Evie came out of her collagen lip injection saying she no longer had any fear of hell. The next worse thing is Manus yanking off your pussy strip if you’re not close-shaved.

  About hell, I told Evie, “We’re shooting there tomorrow.”

  So, now the art director says, “Evie, could you climb up a couple cars higher on the pile?” And this is wearing high heels, but Evie goes up. Little diamonds of safety glass are scattered on everywhere you might fall.

  Through her big cheesy smile, Evie says, “How exactly did your brother get mutilated?” You can only hold a real smile for so long, after that it’s just teeth.

  The art director steps up with his little foam applicator and retouches where the bronzer is streaked on my butt cheeks.

  “It was a hairspray can somebody threw away in our family’s burn barrel,” I say. “He was burning the trash and it exploded.”

  And Evie says, “Somebody?”

  And I say, “You’d think it was my mom, the way she screamed and tried to stop him bleeding.”

  And the photographer says, “Girls, can you go up on your toes just a little?”

  Evie goes, “A big thirty-two-ounce can of HairShell hairspray? I bet it peeled half his face off.”

  We both go up on our toes.

  I go, “It wasn’t so bad.”

  “Wait a sec,” the art director says, “I need your feet to be not so close together.” Then he says, “Wider.” Then, “A little wider, please.” Then he hands up big chrome tools for us to hold.

  Mine must weigh fifteen pounds.

  “It’s a ball-peen hammer,” Evie says, “and you’re holding it wrong.”

  “Honey,” the photographer says to Evie, “could you hold the chain saw a bit closer to your mouth, please?”

  The sun is warm on the metal of the cars, their tops crushed under the weight of being piled on top of each other. These are cars with buckled front ends you know nobody walked away from. Cars with T-boned sides where whole familes died together. Rear-ended cars with the backseats pushed up tight against the dashboard. Cars from before seat belts. Cars from before air bags. Before the Jaws of Life. Before paramedics. These are cars peeled open around their exploded gas tanks.

  “This is so rich,” Evie says, “how this is the place I’ve worked my whole life to get.”

  The art director says to go ahead and push our breasts against the cars.

  “The whole time, growing up,” Evie says, “I just thought being a woman would be . . . not such a disappointment.”

  All I ever wanted was to be an only child.

  The photographer says, “Perfecto.”

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Thirty-two

  alf my life I spend hiding in the bathrooms of the rich.

  Jump back to Seattle, to the time Brandy and Seth and I are on the road hunting drugs. Jump to the day after the night we went to the Space Needle, where right now Brandy is laid out flat on a master bathroom floor. First I helped her off with her suit jacket and unbuttoned the back of her blouse, and now I’m sitting on a toilet overdosing Valiums as steady as Chinese water torture into her Plumbago mouth. The thing about Valiums, the Brandy girl says, is they don’t kill the pain but at least you’re not pissed off about being hurt.

  “Hit me,” Brandy says and makes a fish lips.

  The thing about Brandy is she’s got such a tolerance for drugs it takes forever to kill her. That, and she’s so big, most of her being muscle, it would take bottles and bottles of anything.

  I drop a Valium. A little baby-blue Valium, another powder-blue Valium, Tiffany’s light blue, like a gift from Tiffany’s, the Valium falls end over end into Brandy’s interior.

  This suit I help Brandy out of, it’s a Pierre Cardin Space-Age style of just bold white, the straight tube skirt being fresh and sterile to just above her knees, the jacket being timeless and clinical in its simple cut and three-quarter sleeves. Her blouse underneath is sleeveless. Her shoes are box-toe white vinyl boots. It’s an outfit you’d accessorize with a Geiger counter instead of a purse.

  At the Bon Marché, when she catwalks out of the fitting room, all I can do is applaud. There’s going to be postpartum depression next week when she goes to take this one back.

  Jump to breakfast, this morning when Brandy and Seth were flush with drug money, we were eating room service and Seth says Brandy could time-travel to Las Vegas on another planet in the 1950s and fit right in. The planet Krylon, he says, where synthetic bendable glam-bots would lipo-suck your fat and makeover you.

  And Brandy says, “What fat?”

  And Seth says, “I love how you could just be visiting from the distant future via the 1960s.”

  And I put more Premarin in Seth’s next coffee refill. More Darvon in Brandy’s champagne.

  Jump back to us in the bathroom, Brandy and me.

  “Hit me,�
�� Brandy says.

  Her lips look all loose and stretched out, and I drop another gift from Tiffany’s.

  This bathroom we’re hiding in, it goes way the other side of decorative touches. The whole deal is an undersea grotto. Even the princess phone is aqua, but when you look out the big brass porthole windows, you see Seattle from the top of Capitol Hill.

  The toilet I’m sitting on, just sitting, the lid’s closed under my ass thank you, but the toilet’s a big ceramic snail shell bolted to the wall. The sink is a big ceramic half a clam bolted to the wall.

  Brandy-land, sexual playground to the stars, she says, “Hit me.”

  Jump to when we got here and the realtor was just a big tooth. One of those football scholarships where the eyebrows grow together in the middle and they forget to get a degree in anything.

  As if I can talk, me with sixteen hundred credits.

  Here’s this million-dollar-club realtor who got thrown his job by a grateful alumnus who just wanted a son-in-law who could stay awake through six or seven holiday bowl games. But maybe I’m being a touch judgmental.

  Brandy was beside herself for feminine wetness. Here’s this extra-Y-chromosome guy in a double-breasted blue serge suit, a guy whose paws make even Brandy’s big hands look little.

  “Mr. Parker,” Brandy says, her hand hidden inside his big paw. You can see the Henry Mancini soundtrack of love in her eyes. “We spoke this morning.”

  We’re in the drawing room of a house on Capitol Hill. This is another rich house where everything is exactly what it looks like. The elaborate Tudor roses carved in the ceilings are plaster, not pressed tin, not fiberglass. The torsos of battered Greek nudes are marble, not marbleized plaster. The boxes in the breakfront are not enameled in the manner of Fabergé. The boxes are Fabergé pillboxes, and there are eleven of them. The lace under the boxes was not tatted by a machine.

  Not just the spines, but the entire front and back covers of all the books on all the shelves in the library are bound in leather, and the pages are cut. You don’t have to pull a single book to know this.

  The realtor, Mr. Parker, his legs are still flat on the sides of his ass. In the front, there’s just enough more in one pant leg to spell boxers instead of briefs.

  Brandy nods my way. “This is Miss Arden Scotia, of the Denver River Logging and Paper Scotias.” Another victim of the Brandy Alexander Witness Reincarnation Project.

  Parker’s big hand swallows my little hand, big fish and little fish, whole.

  Parker’s starched white shirt makes you think of eating off a clean tablecloth, so flat and stuck out you could serve drinks off the shelf of his barrel chest.

  “This”—Brandy nods toward Seth—“is Miss Scotia’s half-brother, Ellis Island.”

  Parker’s big fish eats Ellis’s little fish.

  Brandy says, “Miss Scotia and I would like to tour the house ourselves. Ellis is mentally and emotionally disturbed.”

  Ellis smiles.

  “We had hoped you would watch him,” Brandy says.

  “It’s a go,” Parker says. He says, “Sure thing.”

  Ellis smiles and tugs with two fingers at the sleeve of Brandy’s suit jacket. Ellis says, “Don’t leave me too long, miss. If I don’t get enough of my pills, I’ll have one of my fits.”

  “Fits?” says Parker.

  Ellis says, “Sometimes, Miss Alexander, she forgets I’m waiting, and she doesn’t get me any medication.”

  “You have fits?” Parker says.

  “This is news to me,” Brandy says and smiles. “You will not have a fit,” Brandy tells my new half-brother. “Ellis, I forbid you to have a fit.”

  Jump to us camped out in the undersea grotto.

  “Hit me.”

  The floor under Brandy’s back, it’s cold tile shaped like fish and laid out so they fit together, one fish tail between the heads of two fish, the way some sardines are canned, all the way across the bathroom floor.

  I drop a Valium between Plumbago lips.

  “Did I ever tell you how my family threw me out?” says Brandy after her little blue swallow. “My original family, I mean. My birth family. Did I ever tell you that messy little story?”

  I put my head between my knees and look straight down at the queen supreme with her head between my feet.

  “My throat was hurting for a couple of days, so I got out of school and everything,” Brandy says. She says, “Miss Arden? Hello?”

  I look down at her. It’s so easy to imagine her dead.

  “Miss Arden, please,” she says. “Hit me?”

  I drop another Valium.

  Brandy swallows. “It was like I couldn’t swallow for days,” she says. “My throat was that sore. I could barely talk. My folks, they thought, of course, it was strep throat.”

  Brandy’s head is almost straight under mine as I look down. Only Brandy’s face is upside down. My eyes look right into the dark interior of her Plumbago mouth, dark wet going inside to her works and organs and everything behind the scenes. Brandy Alexander Backstage. Upside down she could be a complete stranger.

  And Ellis was right, you only ask people about themselves so you can tell them about yourself.

  “The culture,” Brandy says. “The swab they did for strep throat came back positive for the clap. You know, the third Rhea sister. Gonorrhea,” she says. “That little tiny gonococcus bug. I was sixteen years old and had the clap. My folks did not deal with it well.”

  No. No, they didn’t.

  “They freaked,” Brandy says.

  They threw him out of the house.

  “They yelled about how diseased I was being,” Brandy says.

  Then they threw him out.

  “By ‘diseased’ I think they meant ‘gay,’” she says.

  Then they threw him out.

  “Miss Scotia?” she says. “Hit me.”

  So I hit her.

  “Then they threw me out of the damn house.”

  Jump to Mr. Parker outside the bathroom door saying, “Miss Alexander? It’s me, Miss Alexander. Miss Scotia, are you in there?”

  Brandy starts to sit up and props herself on one elbow.

  “It’s Ellis,” Mr. Parker says through the door. “I think you should come downstairs. Miss Scotia, your brother’s having a seizure or something.”

  Drugs and cosmetics are spread out all over the aquamarine countertops, and Brandy’s sprawled half naked on the floor in a sprinkling of pills and capsules and tablets.

  “He’s her half-brother,” Brandy calls back.

  The doorknob rattles. “You have to help me,” Parker says.

  “Stop right there, Mr. Parker!” Brandy shouts and the doorknob stops turning. “Calm yourself. Do not come in here,” Brandy says. “What you need to do . . .” Brandy looks at me while she says this. “What you need to do is pin Ellis to the floor so he doesn’t hurt himself. I’ll be down in a moment.”

  Brandy looks at me and smiles her Plumbago lips into a big bow. “Parker?” she says. “Are you listening?”

  “Please, hurry,” comes through the door.

  “After you have Ellis pinned to the floor,” Brandy says, “wedge his mouth open with something. Do you have a wallet?”

  There’s a moment.

  “It’s eel skin, Miss Alexander.”

  “Then you must be very proud of it,” says Brandy. “You’re going to have to jam it between his teeth to keep his mouth open. Sit on him if you have to.” Brandy, she’s just smiling evil incarnate at my feet.

  The shatter of some real lead crystal comes through the door from downstairs.

  “Hurry!” Parker shouts. “He’s breaking things!”

  Brandy licks her lips. “After you have his mouth pried open, Parker, reach in and grab his tongue. If you don’t, he’ll choke, and then you’ll be sitting on a dead body.”

  Silence.

  “Do you hear me?” Brandy says.

  “Grab his tongue?”

  Something else real and expensi
ve and far away shatters.

  “Mr. Parker, honey, I hope you’re bonded,” the Princess Alexander says, her face all bloated red with choking back laughter. “Yes,” she says, “grab Ellis’s tongue. Pin him to the floor, keep his mouth open, and pull his tongue out as far as you can until I come down to help you.”

  The doorknob turns.

  My veils are all on the vanity counter out of my reach.

  The door opens far enough to hit the high-heeled foot of Brandy, sprawled giggling and half full of Valiums, there half naked in drugs on the floor. This is far enough for me to see Parker’s face with its one grown-together eyebrow, and far enough for the face to see me sitting on the toilet.

  Brandy screams, “I am attending to Miss Arden Scotia!”

  Given the choice between grabbing a strange tongue and watching a monster poop into a giant snail shell, the face retreats and slams the door behind it.

  Football scholarship footsteps charge off down the hallway.

  Then pound down the stairs.

  The big tooth that Parker is, his footsteps pound across the foyer to the living room.

  Ellis’s scream, real and sudden and far away, comes through the floor from downstairs. And, suddenly, stops.

  “Now,” says Brandy, “where were we?”

  She lies back down with her head between my feet.

  “Have you thought any more about plastic surgery?” Brandy says. Then she says, “Hit me.”

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Thirty-one

  bout plastic surgery, I spent a whole summer as property of La Paloma Memorial Hospital looking into what plastic surgery could do for me.

  There were plastic surgeons, a lot of them, and there were the books the surgeons brought. With pictures. The pictures I saw were black-and-white, thank You, God, and the surgeons told me how after years of pain I might look.

  Almost all plastic surgery starts with something called pedicles. Recipe to follow.