Invisible Monsters Remix

by Chuck Palahniuk

  The one with the cigarette gives me her long hand with its porcelain nails and says, “I’m Pie Rhea.”

  “I’m Die Rhea,” says another one, near the stereo.

  The one with the cigarette, Pie Rhea, says, “Those are our stage names.” She points at the third Rhea, over on the sofa, eating Chinese out of a takeaway carton. “That,” she says and points, “this Miss Eating Herself to Fat, you can call her Gon Rhea.”

  With her mouth full of nothing you’d want to see, Gon Rhea says, “Charmed, I’m sure.”

  Putting her cigarette everywhere but in her mouth, Pie Rhea says, “The queen just does not need your problems, not tonight.” She says, “We’re all the family the top girl needs.”

  On the stereo is a picture in a silver frame of a girl, beautiful in front of seamless paper, smiling into an unseen camera, an invisible photographer telling her:

  Give me passion.

  Flash.

  Give me joy.

  Flash.

  Give me youth and energy and innocence and beauty.

  Flash.

  “Brandy’s first family, her birth family, didn’t want her, so we adopted her,” says Die Rhea. Pointing her long finger at the picture smiling on the blond stereo, Die Rhea says, “Her birth family thinks she’s dead.”

  Jump to one time back when I had a face and I did this magazine cover shoot for BabeWear magazine.

  Jump back to Suite 15-G and the picture on the blond stereo is me, my cover, the BabeWear magazine cover, framed with Die Rhea pointing her finger at me.

  Jump back to us in the speech therapist office with the door locked and Brandy saying how lucky she was the Rhea sisters found her. It’s not everybody who gets a second chance to be born again and raised a second time, but this time by a family that loves her.

  “Kitty Litter, Sofonda, and Vivienne,” Brandy says, “I owe them everything.”

  Jump to Suite 15-G and Gon Rhea waving her chopsticks at me and saying, “Don’t you try and take her from us. We’re not finished with her yet.”

  “If Brandy goes with you,” says Pie Rhea, “she can pay for her own conjugated estrogens. And her vaginoplasty. And her labiaplasty. Not to mention her scrotal electrolysis.”

  To the picture on the stereo, to the smiling stupid face in the silver frame, Die Rhea says, “None of that is cheap.” Die Rhea lifts the picture and holds it up to me, my past looking me eye to eye, and Die Rhea says, “This, this is how Brandy wanted to look, like her bitch sister. That was two years ago, before she had laser surgery to thin her vocal cords and then her trachea shave. She had her scalp advanced three centimeters to give her the right hairline. We paid for her brow shave to get rid of the bone ridge above her eyes that the Miss Male used to have. We paid for her jaw contouring and her forehead feminization.”

  “And,” Gon Rhea says with her mouth full of chewed-up Chinese, “and every time she came home from the hospital with her forehead broken and realigned or her Adam’s apple shaved down to a ladylike nothing, who do you think took care of her for those two years?”

  Jump to my folks asleep in their bed across mountains and deserts away from here. Jump to them and their telephone and years ago some crazy man, some screeching awful pervert, calling them and screaming that their son was dead. Their son they didn’t want, Shane, he was dead of AIDS and this man wouldn’t say where or when and then he laughed and hung up.

  Jump back to inside Suite 15-G and Die Rhea waving an old picture of me in my face and saying, “This is how she wanted to look, and tens of thousands of Katty Kathy dollars later, this is how she looks.”

  Gon Rhea says, “Hell. Brandy looks better than that.”

  “We’re the ones who love Brandy Alexander,” says Pie Rhea.

  “But you’re the one Brandy loves because you need her,” says Die Rhea.

  Gon Rhea says, “The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.” She says, “Brandy will leave us if she thinks you need her, but we need her, too.”

  The one I love is locked in the trunk of a car outside with a stomach full of Valiums, and I wonder if he still has to pee. My brother I hate is come back from the dead. Shane’s being dead was just too good to be true.

  First the exploding hairspray can didn’t kill him.

  Then our family couldn’t just forget him.

  Now even the deadly AIDS virus has failed me.

  My brother is nothing but one bitter fucking disappointment after another.

  You can hear a door opening and shutting somewheres, then another door, then another door opens and Brandy’s there saying, “Daisy, honey,” and steps into the smoke and cha-cha music wearing this amazing sort of Bill Blass First Lady type of traveling suit made out of solid kelly green trimmed with white piping and green high heels and a really smart green purse. On her head is an eco-incorrect tasty sort of spray of rain-forest-green parrot feathers made into a hat, and Brandy says, “Daisy, honey, don’t point a gun at the people who I love.”

  In each of Brandy’s big ring-beaded hands is a sassy off-white American Tourister luggage. “Give us a hand, somebody. These are just the royal hormones.” She says, “My clothes I need are in the other room.”

  To Sofonda, Brandy says, “Miss Pie Rhea, I have just got to get.”

  To Kitty, Brandy says, “Miss Die Rhea, I’ve done everything we can do for now. We’ve done the scalp advancement, the brow lift, the brow bone shave. We’ve done the trachea shave, the nose contouring, the jawline contouring, the forehead realignment . . . ”

  Like it’s any wonder I didn’t recognize my old mutilated brother.

  To Vivienne, Brandy says, “Miss Gon Rhea, I’ve got months left on my Real Life Training and I’m not spending them holed up here in this hotel.”

  Jump to us driving away with the Fiat Spider just piled with luggage. Imagine desperate refugees from Beverly Hills with seventeen pieces of matched luggage migrating cross-country to start a new life in the Okie Midwest. Everything very elegant and tasteful, one of those epic Joad family vacations, only backward. Leaving a trail of cast-off accessories, shoes and gloves and chokers and hats to lighten their load so’s they can cross the Rocky Mountains, that would be us.

  This is after the police showed up, no doubt after the hotel manager called and said a mutilated psycho with a gun was menacing everybody up on the fifteenth floor. This is after the Rhea sisters ran all Brandy’s luggage down the fire stairs. This is after Brandy says she has to go, she needs to think about things, you know, before her big surgery. You know. The transformation.

  This is after I keep looking at Brandy and wondering, Shane?

  “It’s just such a big commitment,” Brandy says, “being a girl, you know. Forever.”

  Taking the hormones. For the rest of her life. The pills, the patches, the injections, for the rest of her life. And what if there was someone, just one person who would love her, who could make her life happy, just the way she was, without the hormones and makeup and the clothes and shoes and surgery? She has to at least look around the world a little. Brandy explains all this, and the Rhea sisters start to cry and wave and pile the American Touristers into the car.

  And the whole scene would be just heartbreaking, and I would be boo-hooing, too, if I didn’t know Brandy was my dead brother and the person he wants to love him is me, his hateful sister, already plotting to kill him. Yes. Plotting me, plotting to kill Brandy Alexander. Me with nothing left to lose, plotting my big revenge in the spotlight.

  Give me violent revenge fantasies as a coping mechanism.

  Flash.

  Just give me my first opportunity.

  Flash.

  Brandy behind the wheel, she turns to me, her eyes all spidery with tears and mascara, and says, “Do you know what the Benjamin Standards guidelines are?”

  Brandy starts the car and puts it in gear. She drops the parking brake and cranes her neck to see for traffic. She says, “I have to live one whole year on hormones in my n
ew gender role before my vaginoplasty. They call it Real Life Training.”

  Brandy pulls out into the street and we’re almost escaped. Police SWAT teams in chic basic black accessorized with tear gas and semiautomatic weapons are charging in past the doorman holding the door in his gold braid. The Rheas run after us, waving and throwing kisses and doing pretty much ugly bridesmaid behavior until they stumble, panting, in the street, their high heels shot to hell.

  There’s a moon in the sky. Office buildings are canyoned along either side of the street. There’s still Manus in the trunk, and we’re already putting gross distance between me and my getting caught.

  Brandy puts her big hand open on my leg and squeezes.

  Arson, kidnapping, I think I’m up to murder. Maybe all this will get me just a glimmer of attention, not the good, glorious kind, but still the national media kind.

  MONSTER GIRL SLAYS SECRET BROTHER

  GAL PAL

  “I’ve got eight months left to my RLT year,” Brandy says. “Think you can keep me busy for the next eight months?”

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Eleven

  ump to the moment around one o’clock in the morning in Evie’s big silent house when Manus stops screaming and I can finally think.

  Evie is in Cancún, probably waiting for the police to call her and say: Your house sitter, the monster without a jaw, well, she’s shot your secret boyfriend to death when he broke in with a butcher knife is our best guess.

  You know that Evie’s wide awake right now. In some Mexican hotel room, Evie’s trying to figure out if there’s a three-hour or a four-hour time difference between her big house where I’m stabbed to death, dead, and Cancún, where Evie’s supposed to be on a catalogue shoot. It’s not like Evie is entered in the biggest brain category. Nobody shoots a catalogue in Cancún in the peak season, especially not with big-boned cowgirls like Evie Cottrell.

  But me being dead, that opens up a whole world of possibility.

  I’m an invisible nobody sitting on a white damask sofa facing another white sofa across a coffee table that looks like a big block of malachite from Geology 101.

  Evie slept with my fiancé, so now I can do anything to her.

  In the movie, where somebody is invisible all the sudden—you know, a nuclear radiation fluke or a mad scientist recipe—and you think, what would I do if I was invisible . . . ? Like go into the guy’s locker room at Gold’s Gym or, better yet, the Oakland Raiders’ locker room. Stuff like that. Scope things out. Go to Tiffany’s and shoplift diamond tiaras and stuff.

  Just by his being so dumb, Manus could’ve stabbed me, tonight, thinking I was Evie, thinking Evie shot me, while I was asleep in the dark in her bed.

  My dad, he’d go to my funeral and talk to everybody about how I was always about to go back to college and finish my personal fitness training degree and then no doubt go on to medical school. Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Daddy, I couldn’t get past the fetal pig in Biology 101. Now I’m the cadaver.

  Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.

  Evie would be right next to my mom, next to the open casket. Evie would stagger up leaning on Manus. You know, Evie would’ve found something totally grotesque for the undertaker to dress me in. So Evie throws an arm around my mom, and Manus can’t get away from the open casket fast enough, and I’m lying there in this blue velveteen casket like the interior of a Lincoln Town Car. Of course, thank you, Evie, I’m wearing this concubine evening wear Chinese yellow silk kimono slit up the side to my waist with black fishnet stockings and red Chinese dragons embroidered across the pelvic region and my breasts.

  And red high heels. And no jawbone.

  Of course, Evie says to my mom: “She always loved this dress. This kimono was her favorite.” Sensitive Evie would say, “Guess this makes you oh for two.”

  I could kill Evie.

  I would pay snakes to bite her.

  Evie would be wearing this little black cocktail number with an asymmetrical hemline satin skirt and a strapless bodice by Rei Kawakubo. The shoulders and sleeves would be sheer black chiffon. Evie, you know she has jewelry, big emeralds for her too-green eyes and a change of accessories in her black clutch bag so she can wear this dress later, dancing.

  I hate Evie.

  Me, I’m rotting with my blood pumped out in this slutty Suzie Wong Tokyo Rose concubine drag dress where it didn’t fit so they had to pin all the extra together behind my back.

  I look like shit, dead.

  I look like dead shit.

  I would stab Evie right now over the telephone.

  No, really, I’d tell Mrs. Cottrell as we placed Evie’s urn in a family vault somewhere in Godawful, Texas. Really, Evie wanted to be cremated.

  Me, at Evie’s funeral, I’d be wearing this tourniquet-tight black leather minidress by Gianni Versace with yards and yards of black silk gloves bunched up on my arms. I’d sit next to Manus in the back of the mortuary’s big black Caddy, and I’d have on this wagon wheel of a black Christian Lacroix hat with a black veil you could take off later and go to a swell auction preview or estate sale or something and then, lunch.

  Evie, Evie would be dirt. Okay, ashes.

  Alone in her living room, I pick up a crystal cigarette box off the table that looks like a block of malachite, and I overhand fast-pitch this little treasure against the fireplace bricks. There’s a smash with cigarettes and matches everywhere.

  Bourgeois dead girl that I am, I wish all of the sudden I hadn’t done this, and I kneel down and start to pick up the mess. The glass and cigarettes. Only Evie . . . a cigarette box. It’s just so last-generational.

  And matches.

  A little tug hits my finger, and I’m cut on a shard so thin and clear it’s invisible.

  Oh, this is dazzling.

  Only when the blood comes out to outline the shard in red, only then can I see what cut me. It’s my blood on the broken glass I pull out. My blood on a book of matches.

  No, Mrs. Cottrell. No, really, Evie wanted to be cremated.

  I get up out of my mess, and run around leaving blood on every light switch and lamp, turning them all off. I run past the coat closet, and Manus calls, “Please,” but what I have in mind is too exciting.

  I turn out all the first-floor lights, and Manus calls. He has to go to the bathroom, he calls. “Please.”

  Evie’s big plantation house with its big pillars in front is all the way dark as I feel my way back to the dining room. I can feel the doorframe and count ten slow, blind footsteps across the Oriental carpet to the dining room table with its lace tablecloth.

  I light a match. I light one of the candles in the big silver candelabra.

  Okay, it’s so Gothic Novel, but I light all five candles in the silver candelabra so heavy it takes both hands for me to lift.

  Still wearing my satin peignoir set and ostrich feather bathrobe, what I am is the ghost of a beautiful dead girl carrying this candle thing up Evie’s long circular staircase. Up past all the oil paintings, then down the second-floor hallway. In the master bedroom, the beautiful ghost girl in her candlelit satin opens the armoires and the closets full of her own clothes, stretched to death by the giant evil Evie Cottrell. The tortured bodies of dresses and sweaters and dresses and slacks and dresses and jeans and gowns and shoes and dresses, almost everything mutilated and misshapen and begging to be put out of its misery.

  The photographer in my head says: Give me anger.

  Flash.

  Give me vengeance.

  Flash.

  Give me total and complete justified retribution.

  Flash.

  The already dead ghost I am, the not-occurring, the completely empowered invisible nothing I’ve become, I wave the candelabra past all that fabric and:

  Flash.

  What we have is Evie’s enormous fashion inferno.

  Which is dazzling.

  Which is just too much fun! I try the bedspread, it’s this antique Belgian lace duvet, and it burns.

  The drapes, Miss
Evie’s green velvet portieres, they burn.

  Lampshades burn.

  Big shit. The chiffon I’m wearing, it’s burning, too. I slap out my smoldering feathers and step backward from Evie’s master bedroom fashion furnace and into the second-floor hallway.

  There are ten other bedrooms and some bathrooms, and I go room to room. Towels burn. Bathroom inferno! Chanel No. 5, it burns. Oil paintings of racehorses and dead pheasants burn. The reproduction Oriental carpets burn. Evie’s bad dried flower arrangements, they’re these little tabletop infernos. Too cute! Evie’s Katty Kathy doll, it melts, then it burns. Evie’s collection of big carnival stuffed animals—Cootie, Poochie, Pam-Pam, Mr. Bunnits, Choochie, Poo Poo, and Ringer—it’s a fun-fur holocaust. Too sweet. Too precious.

  Back in the bathroom, I snatch one of the few things not on fire:

  A bottle of Valiums.

  I start down the big circular staircase. Manus, when he broke in to kill me, he left the front door open, and the second-floor inferno sucks a cool breeze of night air up the stairs around me. Blowing my candles out. Now the only light is the inferno, a giant space heater smiling down on me, me deep-fried in my eleven herbs and spices of singed chiffon.

  The feeling is that I’ve just won some major distinguished award for a major lifetime achievement.

  Like, here she is, Miss America.

  Come on down.

  And this kind of attention, I still love it.

  At the closet door, Manus is whining about how he can smell smoke, and please, please, please don’t let him die. As if I could even care right now.

  No, really, Manus wanted to be cremated.

  On the telephone message pad, I write:

  in a minute i’ll open the door, but i still have the gun. before that, i’m shoving valiums under the door. eat them. do this or I’ll kill you.

  And I put the note under the door.

  We’re going out to his car in the driveway. I’m taking him away. He’ll do everything I want, or wherever we end up, I’ll tell the police that he broke into the house. He set the fire and used the rifle to kidnap me. I’ll blab everything about Manus and Evie and their sick love affair.