Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters Remix

“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.”

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.

This will get gruesome. Even here in black-and-white.

For all I learned, I could be a doctor.

Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.

Manus once said that your folks are God. You love them and want to make them happy, but you still want to make up your own rules.

The surgeons said, you can’t just cut off a lump of skin one place and bandage it on another. You’re not grafting a tree. The blood supply, the veins and capillaries, just wouldn’t be hooked up to keep the graft alive. The lump would just die and fall off.

It’s scary, but now when I see somebody blush, my reaction isn’t: Oh, how cute. A blush only reminds me how blood is just under the surface of everything.

Doing dermabrasion, this one plastic surgeon told me, is about the same as pressing a ripe tomato against a belt sander. What you’re paying for most is the mess.

To relocate a piece of skin, to rebuild a jaw, you have to flay a long strip of skin from your neck. Cut up from the base of your neck, but don’t sever the skin at the top.

Picture a sort of banner or strip of skin hanging down loose along your neck but still attached to the bottom of your face. The skin is still attached to you, so it still gets blood. This strip of skin is still alive. Take the strip of skin and roll it into a tube or column. Leave it rolled until it heals into a long, dangling lump of flesh, hanging from the bottom of your face. Living tissue. Full of fresh, healthy blood, flapping and dangling warm against your neck. This is a pedicle.

Just the healing part, that can take months.

Jump backward to the red Fiat with Brandy behind her sunglasses and Manus locked in the trunk, and Brandy drives us to the top of Rocky Butte, the hilltop ruins of some lookout fort where if this weren’t a school night kids from Parkrose and Grant and Madison high schools would be breaking beer bottles and enjoying unsafe sex up here in the old ruins.

Friday nights, this hilltop would be full of kids saying: Look, over there, you can see my house. That blue light in the window, that’s my folks watching TV.

The ruins are just a few layers of stone blocks still on top of each other. Inside the ruins, the ground is flat and rocky, covered with broken glass and coarse orchard grass. Around us, in all directions except the road coming up, the sides of Rocky Butte are cliffs rising from the dot-to-dot streetlight grid.

You could choke on the silence.

What we need is a place to stay. Until I figure out what’s next. Until we can come up with some money. We have two, maybe three days until Evie gets home and we have to be gone. Then I figure I’ll just call Evie and blackmail her.

Evie owes me big.

I can get away with this.

Brandy races the Fiat into the darkest part of the ruins, then she kills the headlights and hits the brakes. Brandy and me, we stop so fast only our seat belts keep us off the dashboard.

Clatter and tintinnabulation of ringing metal against metal chimes and gongs in the car around us.

“Sorry, I guess,” Brandy says. “There’s shit on the floor, got under the brake pedal when I tried to stop.”

Music bright as silver rolls out from under our car seats. Napkin rings and silver teaspoons rush forward against our feet. Brandy’s got candlesticks between her feet. A silver platter bright with starlight is slid half out from under the front of Brandy’s seat, looking up between her long legs.

Brandy looks at me. Her chin tucked down, Brandy lowers her Ray-Bans to the end of her nose and arches her penciled eyebrows.

I shrug. I get out to liberate my love cargo.

Even with the trunk open, Manus doesn’t move. His knees are against his elbows, his hands clasped in his face, his feet tucked back under his butt; Manus could be a fetus in army fatigues. All around him, I hadn’t noticed. I’ve been under a lot of stress tonight, so forgive me if I didn’t notice back at Evie’s house, but all around Manus flash pieces of silverware. Pirate treasure in the trunk of his Fiat, and other things.

Relics.

A long white candle, there’s a candle.

Brandy slams out of her seat and comes to look, too.

“Oh, my shit,” Brandy says and rolls her eyes. “ Oh, my shit. ”

There’s an ashtray, no, it’s a plaster cast of a little hand, right next to Manus’s unconscious butt. It’s the kind of cast you make in grade school when you press your hand into a pie tin of wet plaster for a Mother’s Day gift.

Brandy brushes a little hair off Manus’s forehead. “He’s really, really cute,” she says, “but I think this one’s going to be brain-damaged.”

It’s way too much trouble to explain tonight to Brandy in writing, but Manus getting brain-damaged would be redundant.

Too bad it’s just the Valiums.

Brandy takes off her Ray-Bans for a better look. She takes off her Hermès scarf and shakes her hair out full, looking good, biting her lips, wetting her lips with her tongue just in case Manus wakes up. “With cute guys,” Brandy says, “it’s usually better to give them barbiturates.”

Guess I’ll remember that.

I haul Manus up until he’s sitting in the trunk with his legs hanging out over the bumper. Manus’s eyes, power blue, flicker, blink, flicker, squint.

Brandy leans in to give him a good look. My brother out to steal my fiancé. At this point, I just want everybody dead.

“Wake up, honey,” Brandy says with a hand cupped under Manus’s chin.

And Manus squints. “Mommy?”

“Wake up, honey,” Brandy says. “It’s okay.”

“Now?” Manus says.

“It’s okay.”

There’s a little rushing sound, the sound of rain on the roof of a tent or a closed convertible.

“Oh, God.” Brandy steps back. “Oh, sweet Christ!”

Manus blinks and peers at Brandy, then at his lap. One leg of his army fatigues goes darker, darker, darker to the knee.

“Cute,” Brandy says, “but he’s just peed his pants.”

Jump back to plastic surgery. Jump to the happy day you’re healed. You’ve had this long strip of skin hanging off your neck for a couple months, only it’s not just one strip. There are probably more like a half dozen pedicles because you might as well do a lot at once so the plastic surgeon has more tissue to work with.

For reconstruction, you’ll have these long dangling strips of skin hanging off the bottom of your face for about two months.

They say that what people notice first about you is your eyes. You’ll give up that hope. You look like some meat by-product ground up and pooped out by the Num Num Snack Factory.

A mummy coming apart in the rain.

A broken piñata.

These strips of warm skin flapping around your neck are good, blood-fed, living tissue. The surgeon lifts each strip and attaches the healed end to your face. This way, the bulk of the tissue is transferred, grafted to your face without ever stopping its blood supply. They pull all this loose skin up and bunch it into the rough shape of a jaw. Your neck is the scars of where the skin used to lay. Your jaw is this mass of grafted tissue the surgeons hope will grow together and stay in place.