Invisible Monsters Remix

by Chuck Palahniuk

“Who you are moment to moment,” Brandy said, “is just a story.” What I needed was a new story. “Let me do for you,” Brandy said, “what the Rhea sisters did for me.” Give me courage. Flash. Give me heart. Flash.

“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.”

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?

I’d discovered that despite everything that’s happened, I still had an endless untapped potential for getting hurt.

“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.”

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.

“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.

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

“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.

And married people always think love is the answer.

indelible

When both of you are beautiful, neither of you is beautiful. Together, as a couple, you’re less than the sum of your parts. Nobody really gets noticed, not anymore.

The whole time I was in the hospital, no way could I fall in love. I just couldn’t go there yet. Settle for less. I didn’t want to process through anything. I didn’t want to pick up any pieces. Lower my expectations. Get on with my less-than life. I didn’t want to feel better about being still alive. Start compensating. I just wanted my face fixed, if that was possible, which it wasn’t.

When it’s time to reintroduce me to solid foods, their words again, it’s puréed chicken and strained carrots. Baby foods. Everything mashed or pulverized or crushed. You are what you eat.

saw my blood and snot and teeth splashed all over the dashboard the moment after the accident, but hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.

And sometimes being mutilated can work to your advantage. All those people now with piercings and tattoos and brandings and scarification . . . What I mean is, attention is attention.

“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.”

“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.”

“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 crumb...

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.

It’s a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is, aren’t we all?

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.

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.

She says, “Do you love me?” It’s when folks ask questions like this that you lose the spotlight. This is how folks trap you into a best-supporting role.

This is the world we live in. Conditions change and we mutate.