Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters Remix

For another month, you and the surgeons hope. Another month, you hide in the hospital and wait.

Jump to Manus sitting in his piss and silver in the trunk of his red sports car. Potty-training flashback. It happens.

Me, I’m crouched in front of him, looking for the bulge of his wallet.

Manus just stares at Brandy. Probably thinking Brandy’s me, the old me with a face.

Brandy’s lost interest. “He doesn’t remember. He thinks I’m his mother,” Brandy says. “Sister, maybe, but mother?”

So déjà vu. Try brother.

We need a place to stay, and Manus must have a new place. Not the old place he and I shared. He lets us hide at his place, or I tell the cops he kidnapped me and burned down Evie’s house. Manus won’t know about Mr. Baxter and the Rhea sisters seeing me with a gun all over town.

With my finger, I write in the dirt:

we need to find his wallet.

“His pants,” Brandy says, “are wet.”

Now Manus peers at me, sits up, and scrapes his head on the open trunk lid. Man, oh, man, you know this hurts, still it isn’t anything tragic until Brandy Alexander chimes in with her overreaction. “Oh, you poor thing,” she says.

Then Manus boo-hoos. Manus Kelley, the last person who has any right to, is crying.

I hate this.

Jump to the day the skin grafts take, and even then the tissue will need some support. Even if the grafts heal to where they look like a crude, lumpy jaw, you’ll still need a jawbone. Without a mandible, the soft mass of tissue, living and viable as it is, might just reabsorb.

That’s the word the plastic surgeons used.

Reabsorb.

Into my face, as if I’m just a sponge made of skin.

Jump to Manus crying and Brandy bent over him, cooing and petting his sexy hair.

In the trunk, there’s a pair of bronze baby shoes, a silver chafing dish, a turkey picture made of macaroni glued to construction paper.

“You know”—Manus sniffs and wipes the back of his hand under his nose—“I’m high right now, so it’s okay if I tell you this.” Manus looks at Brandy bent over him and me crouched in the dirt. “First,” Manus says, “your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.”

To make you a jawbone, the surgeons will break off parts of your shinbones, complete with the attached artery. First they expose the bone and sculpt it right there on your leg.

Another way is the surgeons will break several other bones, probably long bones in your legs and arms. Inside these bones is the soft cancellous bone pulp.

That was the surgeons’ word and the word from the books.

Cancellous.

“My mom,” Manus says, “and her new husband—my mom gets married a lot—they just bought this resort condo in Bowling River in Florida. People younger than sixty can’t buy property there. That’s a law they have.”

I’m looking at Brandy, who’s still the overreactive mother, kneeling down, brushing the hair off Manus’s forehead. I’m looking over the cliff edge next to us. Those little blue lights in all the houses, that’s people watching television. Tiffany’s light blue. Valium blue. People in captivity.

First my best friend and now my brother is trying to steal my fiancé.

“I went to visit them at Christmas, last year,” Manus says. “My mom, their condo is right on the eighth green, and they love it. It’s like the whole age standard in Bowling River is fucked. My mom and stepdad are just turned sixty, so they’re just youngsters. Me, all these oldsters are scoping me out like an odds-on car burglary.”

Brandy licks her lips.

“According to the Bowling River age standard,” Manus says, “I haven’t been born yet.”

You have to break out large enough slivers of this soft, bloody bone pulp. The cancellous stuff. Then you have to insert these shards and slivers of bone into the soft mass of tissue you’ve grafted onto your face.

Really, you don’t do this, the surgeons do it all while you’re asleep.

If the slivers are close enough together, they’ll form fibroblast cells to bond with each other. Again, a word from the books.

Fibroblast.

Again, this takes months.

“My mom and her husband,” Manus says, sitting in the open trunk of his Fiat Spider on top of Rocky Butte, “for Christmas, their biggest present to me is this box all wrapped up. It’s the size of a high-end stereo system or a wide-screen television. This is what I’m hoping. I mean, it could’ve been anything else, and I would’ve liked it more.”

Manus slides one foot down to the ground, then the other. On his feet, Manus turns back to the Fiat full of silver.

“No,” Manus says. “They give me this shit.”

Manus in his commando boots and army fatigues takes a big fat-belly silver teapot out of the trunk and looks at himself reflected fat in the convex side. “The whole box,” Manus says, “is full of all this shit and heirlooms that nobody else wants.”

Just like me pitching Evie’s crystal cigarette box against the fireplace, Manus hauls off and fast-pitches the teapot out into the darkness. Over the cliff, out over the darkness and the lights of suburbia, the teapot flies so far that you can’t hear it land.

Not turning around, Manus reaches back and grabs another something. A silver candlestick. “This is my legacy,” Manus says. Pitched overhand into the darkness, the candlestick turns end over end, silent the way you imagine satellites fly.

“You know”—Manus pitches a glittering handful of napkin rings—“how your parents are sort of like God. Sure, you love them and want to know they’re still around, but you never really see them unless they want something.”

The silver chafing dish flies up, up, up to the stars, and then falls down to land somewhere among the blue TV lights.

And after the shards of bone have grown together to give you a new jawbone inside the lump of grafted skin, then the surgeon can try to shape this into something you can talk with and eat with and keep slathered in makeup.

This is years of pain later.

Years of living in the hope that what you’ll get will be better than what you have. Years of looking and feeling worse in the hope that you might look better.

Manus grabs the candle, the white candle from the trunk.

“My mom,” Manus says, “her number two Christmas present to me was a box full of all the stuff from when I was a kid that she saved.” Manus says, “Check it out,” and holds up the candle, “my baptism candle.”

Off into the darkness Manus pitches the candle.

The bronze baby shoes go next.

Wrapped in a christening gown.

Then a scattering handful of baby teeth.

“Fuck,” Manus says, “the damn tooth fairy.”

A lock of blond hair inside a locket on a chain, the chain swinging and let go bola-style from Manus’s hand, disappears into the dark.

“She said she was giving me this stuff because she just didn’t have any room for it,” Manus says. “It’s not that she didn’t want it.”

The plaster print of the second-grade hand goes end over end, off into the darkness.

“Well, Mom, if it isn’t good enough for you,” Manus says, “I don’t want to carry this shit around, either.”

Jump to all the times when Brandy Alexander gets on me about plastic surgery, then I think of pedicles. Reabsorbtion. Fibroblast cells. Cancellous bone. Years of pain and hope, and how can I not laugh?

Laughter is the only sound left I can make that people will understand.

Brandy, the well-meaning queen supreme with her tits siliconed to the point she can’t stand straight, she says: Just look to see what’s out there.

How can I stop laughing?

I mean it, Shane, I don’t need the attention that bad.