Invisible Monsters Remix

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Brandy says, “This is cotton voile.”

  She throws another handful of fog, and the world blurs behind gold and green.

  “Silk georgette,” Brandy says.

  She throws a handful of sparkle, and the world, Brandy sitting in front of me with her wicker sewing basket open in her lap. The two of us alone, locked in the speech therapist office. The poster of a kitten on the cinder-block wall. All this goes star-filter soft and bright, every sharp edge erased or smeared behind the green and gold, and the fluorescent light coming through in broken exploded bits.

  “Veils,” Brandy says as each color settles over me. “You need to look like you’re keeping secrets,” she says. “If you’re going to do the outside world, Miss St. Patience, you need to not let people see your face,” she says.

  “You can go anywhere in the world,” Brandy goes on and on.

  You just can’t let people know who you really are.

  “You can live a completely normal, regular life,” she says.

  You just can’t let anybody get close enough to you to learn the truth.

  “In a word,” she says, “veils.”

  Take-charge princess who she is, Brandy Alexander never does ask my real name. The name who I was born. Miss Bossy Pants right away gives me a new name, a new past. She invents another future for me with no connections, except to her, a cult all by herself.

  “Your name is Daisy St. Patience,” she tells me. “You’re the lost heiress to the House of St. Patience, the very haute couture fashion showroom, and this season we’re doing hats,” she says. “Hats with veils.”

  I ask her, “Jsfssjf ciacb sxi?”

  “You come from escaped French aristocrat blood,” Brandy says.

  “Gwdcn aixa gklgfnv?”

  “You grew up in Paris, and went to a school run by nuns,” Brandy says.

  Hard at work, planning stylist that she is, Brandy Alexander is already pulling tulle out of her purse, pink tulle and lace and crochet doily netting, and settling it over my head.

  She says, “You don’t have to wear makeup. You don’t even have to wash. A good veil is the equivalent of mirrored sunglasses, but for your whole head.”

  A good veil is the same as staying indoors, Brandy tells me. Cloistered. Private. She throws sheer yellow chiffon. She drapes red patterned nylon over me. In the way our world is, everybody shoulder to shoulder, people knowing everything about you at first glance, a good veil is your tinted limousine window. The unlisted number for your face. Behind a good veil, you could be anyone. A movie star. A saint. A good veil says:

  We Have Not Been Properly Introduced.

  You’re the prize behind door number three.

  You’re the lady or the tiger.

  In our world where nobody can keep a secret anymore, a good veil says:

  Thank You For NOT Sharing.

  “Don’t worry,” Brandy says. “Other people will fill in the blanks.”

  The same as how they do with God, she says.

  What I never told Brandy is I grew up near a farm. This was a farm that grew pigs. Daisy St. Patience used to come home from school every sunny afternoon and had to feed the pigs with her brother.

  Give me homesickness.

  Flash.

  Give me nostalgic childhood yearnings.

  Flash.

  What’s the word for the opposite of glamour?

  Brandy never asked about my folks, were they living or dead, and why weren’t they here to gnash their teeth.

  “Your father and mother, Rainier and Honoraria St. Patience, were assassinated by fashion terrorists,” she says.

  B.B., before Brandy, my father took his pigs to market every fall. His secret is to spend all summer driving his flatbed truck around Idaho and the other upper left-hand corner states, stopping at all the day-old bakery outlets selling expired snack foods, individual fruit pies and cupcakes with creamy fillings, little loaves of sponge cake injected with artificial whipped cream, and lumps of devil’s food cake covered with marshmallow and shredded coconut dyed pink. Old birthday cakes that didn’t sell. Stale cakes wishing Congratulations. Happy Mother’s Day. Be My Valentine. My father still brings it all home, heaped in a dense sticky pile or heat-sealed inside cellophane. That’s the hardest part, opening these thousands of old snacks and dropping them to the pigs.

  My father who Brandy didn’t want to hear about, his secret is to feed the pigs these pies and cakes and snacks the last two weeks before they go to market. The snacks have no nutrition, and the pigs gobble them until there isn’t an expired snack left within five hundred miles.

  These snacks don’t have any real fiber to them so every fall, every three-hundred-pound pig goes to market with an extra ninety pounds in its colon. My father makes a fortune at auction, and who knows how long after that, but the pigs all take a big sugary crap when they see inside whatever slaughterhouse where they end up.

  I say, “Kwvne wivnuw fw sojaoa.”

  “No,” Brandy says and puts up her foot-long index finger, six cocktail rings stacked on just this one finger, and she presses her jeweled hot dog up and down across my mouth the moment I try and say anything.

  “Not a word,” Brandy says. “You’re still too connected to your past. Your saying anything is pointless.”

  From out of her sewing basket, Brandy draws a streamer of white and gold, a magic act, a layer of sheer white silk patterned with a Greek key design in gold she casts over my head.

  Behind another veil, the real world is that much farther away.

  “Guess how they do the gold design,” Brandy says.

  The fabric is so light my breath blows it out in front; the silk lays across my eyelashes without bending them. Even my face, where every nerve in your body comes to an end, even my face can’t feel it.

  It takes a team of kids in India, Brandy says, four- and five-year-old kids sitting all day on wooden benches, being vegetarians, they have to tweeze out most of about a zillion gold threads to leave the pattern of just the gold left behind.

  “You don’t see kids any older than ten doing this job,” Brandy says, “because by then most kids go blind.”

  Just the veil Brandy takes out of her basket must be six feet square. The precious eyesight of all those darling children, lost. The precious days of their fragile childhood spent tweezing silk threads out.

  Give me pity.

  Flash.

  Give me empathy.

  Flash.

  Oh, I wish I could make my poor heart just bust.

  I say, “Vswf siws cm eiuvn sincs.”

  No, it’s okay, Brandy says. She doesn’t want to reward anybody for exploiting children. She got it on sale.

  Caged behind my silk, settled inside my cloud of organza and georgette, the idea that I can’t share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems.

  “Oh, and don’t worry,” Brandy says. “You’ll still get attention. You have a dynamite tits-and-ass combo. You just can’t talk to anybody.”

  People just can’t stand not knowing something, she tells me. Especially men can’t bear not climbing every mountain, mapping everywhere. Labeling everything. Peeing on every tree and then never calling you back.

  “Behind a veil, you’re the great unknown,” she says. “Most guys will fight to know you. Some guys will deny you’re a real person, and some will just ignore you.”

  The zealot. The atheist. The agnostic.

  Even if somebody is only wearing an eye patch, you always want to look. To see if he’s faking. The man in the Hathaway shirt. Or to see the horror underneath.

  The photographer in my head says:

  Give me a voice.

  Flash.

  Give me a face.

  Brandy’s answer was little hats with veils. And big hats with veils. Pancake hats and pillbox hats edged all around with clouds of tulle and gauze. Parachute silk or heavy crepe or dense net dotted with chenille pom-poms.

  “The most boring thing in
the entire world,” Brandy says, “is nudity.”

  The second most boring thing, she says, is honesty.

  “Think of this as a tease. It’s lingerie for your face,” she says. “A peekaboo nightgown you wear over your whole identity.”

  The third most boring thing in the entire world is your sorry-assed past. So Brandy never asked me anything. Bulldozer alpha bitch she can be, we meet again and again in the speech therapist office and Brandy tells me everything I need to know about myself.

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Six

  ump way back to the last Thanksgiving before my accident when I go home to eat dinner with my folks. This is back when I still had a face so I wasn’t so confronted by solid food. On the dining room table, covering it all over, is a tablecloth I don’t remember, a really nice dark blue damask with a lace edge. This isn’t something I’d expect my mom to buy, so I ask, did somebody give this to her?

  Mom’s just pulling up to the table and unfolding her blue damask napkin with everything steaming between us: her, me, and my dad. The sweet potatoes under their layer of marshmallows. The big brown turkey. The rolls are inside a quilted cozy sewed to look like a hen. You lift the wings to take a roll out. There’s the cut-glass tray of sweet pickles and celery filled with peanut butter.

  “Give what?” my mom says.

  The new tablecloth. It’s really nice.

  My father sighs and plunges a knife into the turkey.

  “It wasn’t going to be a tablecloth at first,” Mom says. “Your father and I pretty much dropped the ball on our original project.”

  The knife goes in again and again and my father starts to dismember our dinner.

  My mom says, “Do you know what the AIDS memorial quilt is all about?”

  Jump to how much I hate my brother at this moment.

  “I bought this fabric because I thought it would make a nice panel for Shane,” Mom says. “We just ran into some problems with what to sew on it.”

  Give me amnesia.

  Flash.

  Give me new parents.

  Flash.

  “Your mother didn’t want to step on any toes,” Dad says. He twists a drumstick off and starts scraping the meat onto a plate. “With gay stuff you have to be so careful since everything means something in secret code. I mean, we didn’t want to give people the wrong idea.”

  My mom leans over to scoop yams onto my plate, and says, “Your father wanted a black border, but black on a field of blue would mean Shane was excited by leather sex, you know, bondage and discipline, sado- and masochism.” She says, “Really these panels are to help the people left behind.”

  “Strangers are going to see us and see Shane’s name,” my dad says. “We didn’t want them thinking things.”

  The dishes all start their slow clockwise march around the table. The stuffing. The olives. The cranberry sauce.

  “I wanted pink triangles but all the panels have pink triangles,” my mom says. “It’s the symbol for Nazi homosexuals.” She says, “Your father suggested black triangles, but that would mean Shane was a lesbian. It looks like the female pubic hair. The black triangle does.”

  My father says, “Then I wanted a green border, but it turns out that would mean Shane was a male prostitute.”

  My mom says, “We almost chose a red border, but that would mean fisting. Brown would mean either scat or rimming, we couldn’t figure which.”

  “Yellow,” my father says, “means watersports.”

  “A lighter shade of blue,” Mom says, “would mean just regular oral sex.”

  “Regular white,” my father says, “would mean anal. White could also mean Shane was excited by men wearing underwear.” He says, “I can’t remember which.”

  My mother passes me the quilted chicken with the rolls still warm inside.

  We’re supposed to sit and eat with Shane dead all over the table in front of us.

  “Finally we just gave up,” my mom says, “and I made a nice tablecloth out of the material.”

  Between the yams and the stuffing, Dad looks down at his plate and says, “Do you know about rimming?”

  I know it isn’t table talk.

  “And fisting?” my mom asks.

  I say, I know. I don’t mention Manus and his vocational porno magazines.

  We sit there, all of us around a blue shroud with the turkey more like a big dead baked animal than ever, the stuffing chock-full of organs you can still recognize, the heart and gizzard and liver, the gravy thick with cooked fat and blood. The flower centerpiece could be a casket spray.

  “Would you pass the butter, please?” my mother says. To my father she says, “Do you know what felching is?”

  This, it’s too much. Shane’s dead, but he’s more the center of attention than he ever was. My folks wonder why I never come home, and this is why. All this sick horrible sex talk over Thanksgiving dinner, I can’t take this. It’s just Shane this and Shane that. It’s sad, but what happened to Shane was not something I did. I know everybody thinks it’s my fault, what happened. The truth is Shane destroyed this family. Shane was bad and mean, and he’s dead. I’m good and obedient and I’m ignored.

  Silence.

  All that happened was I was fourteen years old. Somebody put a full can of hairspray in the trash by mistake. It was Shane’s job to burn the trash. He was fifteen. He was dumping the kitchen trash into the burn barrel while the bathroom trash was on fire, and the hairspray exploded. It was an accident.

  Silence.

  Now what I wanted my folks to talk about was me. I’d tell them how Evie and me were shooting a new infomercial. My modeling career was taking off. I wanted to tell them about my new boyfriend, Manus, but no. Whether he’s good or bad, alive or dead, Shane still gets all the attention. All I ever get is angry.

  “Listen,” I say. This just blurts out. “Me,” I say, “I’m the last child you people have left alive so you’d better start paying me some attention.”

  Silence.

  “Felching . . .” I lower my voice. I’m calm now. “Felching is when a man fucks you up the butt without a rubber. He shoots his load, and then plants his mouth on your anus and sucks out his own warm sperm, plus whatever lubricant and feces are present. That’s felching. It may or may not,” I add, “include kissing you to pass the sperm and fecal matter into your mouth.”

  Silence.

  Give me control. Give me calm. Give me restraint.

  Flash.

  The yams are just the way I like them, sugary sweet but crunchy on top. The stuffing is a little dry. I pass my mother the butter.

  My father clears his throat. “Bump,” he says, “I think ‘fletching’ is the word your mother meant.” He says, “It means to slice the turkey into very thin strips.”

  Silence.

  I say, Oh. I say, Sorry.

  We eat.

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Five

  ump way back to one day outside Brumbach’s Department Store, where people are stopped to watch somebody’s dog lift its leg on the Nativity scene, Evie and me included. Then the dog sits and rolls back on its spine, licks its own lumpy dog-flavored butthole, and Evie elbows me. People applaud and throw money.

  Then we’re inside Brumbach’s, testing lipsticks on the back of our hands, and I say, “Why is it dogs lick themselves?”

  “Just because they can . . .” Evie says. “They’re not like people.”

  This is just after we’ve killed an eight-hour day in modeling school, looking at our skin in mirrors, so I’m like, “Evie, do not even kid yourself.”

  My passing grade in modeling school was just because Evie’d dragged down the curve. She’d wear shades of lipstick you’d expect to see around the base of a penis. She’d wear so much eye shadow you’d think she was a product-testing animal. Just from her hairspray, there’s a hole in the ozone over the Taylor Robberts Modeling Academy.

  This is way back before my accident when I thought my life was so good.

  At Brumb
ach’s Department Store, where we’d kill time after class, the whole ninth floor is furniture. Around the edges are display rooms: bedrooms, dining rooms, living rooms, dens, libraries, nurseries, family rooms, china hutches, home offices, all of them open to the inside of the store. The invisible fourth wall. All of them perfect, clean and carpeted, full of tasteful furniture, and hot with track lighting and too many lamps. There’s the hush of white noise from hidden speakers. Alongside the rooms, shoppers pass in the dim linoleum aisles that run between the display rooms and the down-lighted islands that fill the center of the floor, conversation pits and sofa suites grouped on area rugs with coordinated floor lamps and fake plants. Quiet islands of light and color in the darkness teeming with strangers.

  “It’s just like a sound stage,” Evie would say. “The little sets all ready for somebody to shoot the next episode. The studio audience watching you from the dark.”

  Customers would stroll by and there would be Evie and me sprawled on a pink canopy bed, calling for our horoscopes on her cell phone. We’d be curled on a tweedy sofa sectional, munching popcorn and watching our soaps on a console color television. Evie will pull up her T-shirt to show me another new belly button piercing. She’ll pull down the armhole of her blouse and show me the scars from her implants.

  “It’s too lonely at my real house,” Evie would say, “and I hate how I don’t feel real enough unless people are watching.”

  She says, “I don’t hang around Brumbach’s for privacy.”

  At home in my apartment I’d have Manus with his magazines. His guy-on-guy porno magazines he had to buy for his job, he’d say. Over breakfast every morning, he’d show me glossy pictures of guys self-sucking. Curled up with their elbows hooked behind their knees and craning their necks to choke on themselves, each guy would be lost in his own little closed circuit. You can bet almost every guy in the world’s tried this. Then Manus would tell me, “This is what guys want.”

  Give me romance.

  Flash.

  Give me denial.

  Each little closed loop of one guy flexible enough or with a dick so big he doesn’t need anybody else in the world, Manus would point his toast at these pictures and tell me, “These guys don’t need to put up with jobs or relationships.” Manus would just chew, staring at each magazine. Forking up his scrambled egg whites, he’d say, “You could live and die this way.”