Invisible Monsters Remix

by Chuck Palahniuk

  All that color. A whole shift in the beauty standard so that no one thing really stands out.

  The total being less than the sum of its parts.

  All that color all in one place.

  Except for that name-brand product rainbow, there’s nothing else to look at. When I look at people, all I can see is the back of everybody’s head. Even if I turn super fast, all I can catch is somebody’s ear turning away. And folks are talking to God.

  “Oh, God,” they say. “Did you see that?”

  And, “Was that a mask? Christ, it’s a bit early for Halloween.”

  Everybody is very busy reading the labels on French’s mustard and Rice-A-Roni.

  So I take a turkey.

  I don’t know why. I don’t have any money, but I take a turkey. I dig the big frozen turkeys around, those big flesh-tone lumps of ice in the freezer bin. I dig around until I find the biggest turkey, and I heft it up baby-style in its yellow plastic netting.

  I haul myself up to the front of the store, right through the check stands, and nobody stops me. Nobody’s even looking. They’re all reading those tabloid newspapers as if there’s hidden gold there.

  “Sejgfn di ofo utnbg,” I say. “Nei wucj iswisn sdnsud.”

  Nobody looks.

  “EVSF UYYB IUH,” I say in my best ventriloquist voice.

  Nobody even talks. Maybe just the clerks talk. Do you have two pieces of ID? they’re asking people writing checks.

  “Fgjrn iufnv si vuv,” I say. “Xidi cniwuw sis sacnc!”

  Then it is, it’s right then a boy says, “Look!”

  Everybody who’s not looking and not talking stops breathing.

  The little boy says, “Look, Mom, look over there! That monster’s stealing food!”

  Everybody gets all shrunken up with embarrassment. All their heads drop down into their shoulders the way they’d look on crutches. They’re reading tabloid headlines harder than ever.

  MONSTER GIRL STEALS

  FESTIVE HOLIDAY BIRD

  And there I am, deep-fried in my cotton crepe dress, a twenty-five pound turkey in my arms, the turkey sweating, my dress almost transparent. My nipples are rock-hard against the yellow-netted ice in my arms. Me under my butter crème frosting hairdo. Nobody looking at me as if I’ve won a big anything.

  A hand comes down and slaps the little boy, and the boy starts to wail.

  The boy’s wailing the way you cry if you’ve done nothing wrong but you got punished anyway. The sun’s setting outside. Inside, everything’s dead except this little voice screaming over and over: Why did you hit me? I didn’t do anything. Why did you hit me? What did I do?

  I took the turkey. I walked as fast as I could back to La Paloma Memorial Hospital. It was almost dark.

  The whole time I’m hugging the turkey, I’m telling myself: Turkeys. Seagulls. Magpies.

  Birds.

  Birds ate my face.

  Back in the hospital, coming down the hallway toward me is Sister Katherine leading a man and his IV stand, the man all wrapped in gauze and hung with drain tubes and plastic bags of yellow and red fluids leaking into and out of him.

  Birds ate my face.

  From closer and closer, Sister Katherine shouts, “Yoo-hoo! I have someone special here you’d just love to meet!”

  Birds ate my face.

  Between me and them is the speech therapist office, and when I go to duck inside, there’s Brandy Alexander for the third time. The queen of everything good and kind is wearing this sleeveless Versace kind of tank dress with this season’s overwhelming feel of despair and corrupt resignation. Body-conscious yet humiliated. Buoyant but crippled. The queen supreme is the most beautiful anything I’ve ever seen, so I just vogue there to watch from the doorway.

  “Men,” the therapist says, “stress the adjective when they speak.” The therapist says, “For instance, a man would say, ‘You are so attractive, today.’”

  Brandy is so attractive you could chop her head off and put it on blue velvet in the window at Tiffany’s and somebody would buy it for a million dollars.

  “A woman would say, ‘You are so attractive, today,’” the therapist says. “Now, you, Brandy. You say it. Stress the modifier, not the adjective.”

  Brandy Alexander looks her Burning Blueberry eyes at me in the doorway and says, “Posing girl, you are so god-awful ugly. Did you let an elephant sit on your face or what?”

  Brandy’s voice, I barely hear what she says. At that instant, I just adore Brandy so much. Everything about her feels as good as being beautiful and looking in a mirror. Brandy is my instant royal family. My only everything to live for.

  I go, “Cfoieb svns ois,” and I pile the cold, wet turkey into the speech therapist’s lap, her sitting pinned under twenty-five pounds of dead meat in her roll-around leather desk chair.

  From closer down the hallway, Sister Katherine is yelling, “Yoo-hoo!”

  “Mriuvn wsi sjaoi aj,” I go, and wheel the therapist and her chair into the hallway. I say, “Jownd winc sm fdo dcncw.”

  The speech therapist, she’s smiling up at me and says, “You don’t have to thank me, it’s just my job is all.”

  The nun’s arrived with the man and his IV stand, a new man with no skin or crushed features or all his teeth bashed out, a man who’d be perfect for me. My one true love. My deformed or mutilated or diseased Prince Charming. My unhappily ever after. My hideous future. The monstrous rest of my life.

  I slam the office door and lock myself inside with Brandy Alexander. There’s the speech therapist’s notebook on her desk, and I grab it.

  save me, I write, and wave it in Brandy’s face. I write:

  please.

  Jump to Brandy Alexander’s hands. This always starts with her hands. Brandy Alexander puts a hand out, one of those hairy pig-knuckled hands with the veins of her arm crowded and squeezed to the elbow with bangle bracelets of every color. Just by herself, Brandy Alexander is such a shift in the beauty standard that no one thing stands out. Not even you.

  “So, girl,” Brandy says. “What all happened to your face?”

  Birds.

  I write:

  birds. birds ate my face.

  And I start to laugh.

  Brandy doesn’t laugh. Brandy says, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  And I’m still laughing.

  i was driving on the freeway, I write.

  And I’m still laughing.

  someone shot a 30-caliber bullet from a rifle.

  the bullet tore my entire jawbone off my face.

  Still laughing.

  i came to the hospital, I write.

  i did not die.

  Laughing.

  they couldn’t put my jaw back because seagulls had eaten it.

  And I stop laughing.

  “Girl, your handwriting is terrible,” Brandy says. “Now tell me what else.”

  And I start to cry.

  what else, I write, is i have to eat baby food.

  i can’t talk.

  i have no career.

  i have no home.

  my fiancé left me.

  nobody will look at me.

  all my clothes, my best friend ruined them.

  I’m still crying.

  “What else?” Brandy says. “Tell me everything.”

  a boy, I write.

  a little boy in the supermarket called me a monster.

  Those Burning Blueberry eyes look right at me the way no eyes have all summer. “Your perception is all fucked up,” Brandy says. “All you can talk about is trash that’s already happened.”

  She says, “You can’t base your life on the past or the present.”

  Brandy says, “You have to tell me about your future.”

  Brandy Alexander, she stands up on her gold lamé leg-hold trap shoes. The queen supreme takes a jeweled compact out of her clutch bag and snaps the compact open to look at the mirror inside.

  “That therapist,” those Plumbago lips say, “the sp
eech therapist can be so stupid about these situations.”

  The big jeweled arm muscles of Brandy sit me down in the seat still hot from her ass, and she holds the compact so I can see inside. Instead of face powder, it’s full of white capsules. Where there should be a mirror, there’s a close-up photo of Brandy Alexander smiling and looking terrific.

  “They’re Vicodins, dear,” she says. “It’s the Marilyn Monroe school of medicine where enough of any drug will cure any disease.”

  She says, “Dig in. Help yourself.”

  The thin and eternal goddess that she is, Brandy’s picture smiles up at me over a sea of painkillers. This is how I met Brandy Alexander. This is how I found the strength not to get on with my former life. This is how I found the courage not to pick up the same old pieces.

  “Now,” those Plumbago lips say, “you are going to tell me your story like you just did. Write it all down. Tell that story over and over. Tell me your sad-assed story all night.” That Brandy queen points a long bony finger at me.

  “When you understand,” Brandy says, “that what you’re telling is just a story. It isn’t happening anymore. When you realize the story you’re telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trash can,” Brandy says, “then we’ll figure out who you’re going to be.”

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Two

  here you’re supposed to be is some big West Hills wedding reception in a big manor house with flower arrangements and stuffed mushrooms all over the house. This is called scene setting: where everybody is, who’s alive, who’s dead. This is Evie Cottrell’s big wedding reception moment. Evie is standing halfway down the big staircase in the manor house foyer, naked inside what’s left of her wedding dress, still holding her rifle.

  Me, I’m standing at the bottom of the stairs but only in a physical way. My mind is, I don’t know where.

  Nobody’s all-the-way dead yet, but let’s just say the clock is ticking.

  Not that anybody in this big drama is a real alive person, either. You can trace everything about Evie Cottrell’s look back to some television commercial for an organic shampoo, except right now Evie’s wedding dress is burned down to just the hoopskirt wires orbiting her hips and just the little wire skeletons of all the silk flowers that were in her hair. And Evie’s blond hair, her big, teased-up, back-combed rainbow in every shade of blond blown up with hairspray, well, Evie’s hair is burned off, too.

  The only other character here is Brandy Alexander, who’s laid out, shotgunned, at the bottom of the staircase, bleeding to death.

  What I tell myself is the gush of red pumping out of Brandy’s bullet hole is less like blood than it’s some sociopolitical tool. The thing about being cloned from all those shampoo commercials, well, that goes for me and Brandy Alexander, too. Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anybody in the world. We’re all such products.

  Brandy Alexander, the long-stemmed latte queen supreme of the top-drawer party girls, Brandy is gushing her insides out through a bullet hole in her amazing suit jacket. The suit, it’s this white Bob Mackie knockoff Brandy bought in Seattle with a tight hobble skirt that squeezes her ass into the perfect big heart shape. You would not believe how much this suit cost. The markup is about a zillion percent. The suit jacket has a little peplum skirt and wide lapels and shoulders. The single-breasted cut is symmetrical except for the hole pumping out blood.

  Then Evie starts to sob, standing there halfway up the staircase. Evie, that deadly virus of the moment. This is our cue to all look at poor Evie, poor, sad Evie, hairless and wearing nothing but ashes and circled by the wire cage of her burned-up hoopskirt. Then Evie drops the rifle. With her dirty face in her dirty hands, Evie sits down and starts to boo-hoo, as if crying will solve anything. The rifle, this is a loaded thirty-aught rifle, it clatters down the stairs and skids out into the middle of the foyer floor, spinning on its side, pointing at me, pointing at Brandy, pointing at Evie, crying.

  It’s not that I’m some detached lab animal just conditioned to ignore violence, but my first instinct is maybe it’s not too late to dab club soda on the bloodstain.

  Most of my adult life so far has been me standing on seamless paper for a raft of bucks per hour, wearing clothes and shoes, my hair done and some famous fashion photographer telling me how to feel.

  Him yelling, Give me lust, baby.

  Flash.

  Give me malice.

  Flash.

  Give me detached existentialist ennui.

  Flash.

  Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

  Flash.

  Probably it’s the shock of seeing my one worst enemy shoot my other worst enemy is what it is. Boom, and it’s a win-win situation. This and, being around Brandy, I’ve developed a pretty big jones for drama.

  It only looks like I’m crying when I put a handkerchief up under my veil to breathe through. To filter the air since you can about not breathe for all the smoke since Evie’s big manor house is burning down around us.

  Me, kneeling down beside Brandy, I could put my hands anywhere in my gown and find Darvons and Demerols and Darvocet 100s. This is everybody’s cue to look at me. My gown is a knockoff print of the Shroud of Turin, most of it brown and white, draped and cut so the shiny red buttons will button through the stigmata. Then I’m wearing yards and yards of black organza veil wrapped around my face and studded with little hand-cut Austrian crystal stars. You can’t tell how I look, face-wise, but that’s the whole idea. The look is elegant and sacrilegious and makes me feel sacred and immoral.

  Haute couture and getting hauter.

  Fire inches down the foyer wallpaper. Me, for added set dressing I started the fire. Special effects can go a long way to heighten a mood, and it’s not as if this is a real house. What’s burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock-Tudor big manor house. It’s a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is, aren’t we all?

  Just before Evie comes screaming down the stairs and shoots Brandy Alexander, what I did was pour out about a gallon of Chanel No. 5 and put a burning wedding invitation to it, and boom, I’m recycling.

  It’s funny, but when you think about even the biggest tragic fire, it’s just a sustained chemical reaction. The oxidation of Joan of Arc.

  Still spinning on the floor, the rifle points at me, points at Brandy.

  Another thing is no matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.

  Except for all this high drama, it’s a really nice day. This is a warm, sunny day and the front door is open to the porch and the lawn outside. The fire upstairs draws the warm smell of the fresh-cut lawn into the foyer, and you can hear all the wedding guests outside. All the guests, they took the gifts they wanted, the crystal and silver, and went out to wait on the lawn for the firemen and paramedics to make their entrance.

  Brandy, she opens one of her huge, ring-beaded hands and she touches the hole pouring her blood all over the marble floor.

  Brandy, she says, “Shit. There’s no way the Bon Marché will take this suit back.”

  Evie lifts her face, her face a finger-painting mess of soot and snot and tears, from her hands and screams, “I hate my life being so boring!”

  Evie screams down at Brandy Alexander, “Save me a window table in hell!”

  Tears rinse clean lines down Evie’s cheeks, and she screams, “Girlfriend! You need to be yelling some back at me!”

  As if this isn’t already drama, drama, drama, Brandy looks up at me kneeling beside her. Brandy’s aubergine eyes dilated out to full flower, she says, “Brandy Alexander is going to die now?”

  Evie, Brandy, and me, all this is just a power struggle for the spotlight. Just each of us being me, me, me
first. The murderer, the victim, the witness, each of us thinks our role is the lead.

  Probably that goes for anybody in the world.

  It’s all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.

  Anymore, when I see the picture of a twenty-something in the newspaper who was abducted and sodomized and robbed and then killed and here’s a front-page picture of her young and smiling, instead of me dwelling on this being a big, sad crime, my gut reaction is, wow, she’d be really hot if she didn’t have such a big honker of a nose. My second reaction is I’d better have some good head-and-shoulders shots handy in case I get, you know, abducted and sodomized to death. My third reaction is, well, at least that cuts down on the competition.

  If that’s not enough, my moisturizer I use is a suspension of inert fetal solids in hydrogenated mineral oil. My point is that, if I’m honest, my life is all about me.

  My point is, unless the meter is running and some photographer is yelling: Give me empathy.

  Then the flash of the strobe.

  Give me sympathy.

  Flash.

  Give me brutal honesty.

  Flash.

  “Don’t let me die here on this floor,” Brandy says, and her big hands clutch at me. “My hair,” she says, “my hair will be flat in the back.”

  My point is I know Brandy is maybe probably going to die, but I just can’t get into it.

  Evie sobs even louder. On top of this, the fire sirens from way outside are crowning me queen of Migraine Town.

  The rifle is still spinning on the floor, but slower and slower.

  Brandy says, “This is not how Brandy Alexander wanted her life to go. She’s supposed to be famous, first. You know, she’s supposed to be on television during Super Bowl halftime, drinking a diet cola naked in slow motion before she died.”

  The rifle stops spinning and points at nobody.