Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters Remix

I’ll just keep wearing my veils.

If I can’t be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

Jump to the silver punch ladle flying off to nowhere.

Jump to each teaspoon, gone.

Jump to all the grade school report cards and class pictures sailed off.

Manus crumples a thick piece of paper.

His birth certificate. And chucks it out of existence. Then Manus stands rocking heel-toe, heel-toe, hugging himself.

Brandy is looking at me to say something. In the dirt, with my finger I write:

manus where do you live these days?

Little cold touches land on my hair and peachy-pink shoulders. It’s raining.

Brandy says, “Listen, I don’t want to know who you are, but if you could be anybody, who would you be?”

“I’m not getting old, that’s for sure,” Manus says, shaking his head. “No way.” Arms crossed, he rocks heel-toe, heel-toe. Manus tucks his chin to his chest and rocks, looking down at all the broken bottles.

It’s raining harder. You can’t smell my smoky ostrich feathers or Brandy’s L’Air du Temps.

“Then you’re Mr. Denver Omelet,” Brandy says. “Denver Omelet, meet Daisy St. Patience.” Brandy’s ring-beaded hand opens to full flower and lays itself across her forty-six inches of siliconed glory. “These,” she says, “this is Brandy Alexander.”

already wish I hadn’t written this. Let’s take that as a good sign because most truth is like that.

The part of this book that takes place in Canada is based on a road trip I took with two college friends, driving from Eugene, Oregon, to Vancouver, British Columbia. Their names were Robin and Franz. You already know my name. We were all undergraduate students at the University of Oregon. Robin bought tabs of Ecstasy for us to enjoy and to sell at nightclubs and—he hoped—pay some tuition. We drove Franz’s car and hid the tabs in his ashtray, buried under some ash, never imagining that border agents might check there. We were all liberal arts majors, plodding along with crushing student loan balances, registered for the draft, that’s how dumb we were. Franz didn’t even know we were carrying drugs.

Not a radio song after we’d cleared the Canadian border, Robin dug the Ecstasy out of the ash. Franz was furious, yelling, “Please tell me you did not just use my car to smuggle drugs!” The rush we felt from not being arrested was better than any bought chemicals. Instead of packing suitcases, we went every day to the big department store on Granville Street, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and bought new clothes. Each subsequent day we exchanged those clothes for even newer clothes, using that huge store as our “Canadian Closet.” This being 1985, you can only imagine the billowing Hammer pants and Flashdance ripped tops. For daytime, preppy knit polo shirts embroidered with alligators. The Bay took back everything, though it was reeking of disco sweat and clove cigarettes. Honestly, my biggest problem was what to do with my hands while I danced.

We stayed in the Nelson Place Hotel, but we never slept. Ecstasy will do that. After the bars closed, we’d sit in our dark hotel room and tell about the strangest parts of our lives so far. When it came Franz’s turn, he told about the summer his family had sent him hundreds of miles away to work for some people who ran a florist shop. That August, the florists loaded their vans before dawn and drove for hours across a desert to a desolate railroad siding in the middle of nowhere. As the sun rose, an Amtrak train called the Empire Builder arrived over the horizon and rumbled to a stop. With the sleepy passengers watching from their windows, Franz and his employers hung flowers and bunting down the length of the train. They hung a banner that read “Wedding Bells Express.” At the time, Franz was only eleven or twelve years old. Even that young, he was appalled as wedding guests approached on dirt roads and began to park their pickup trucks trainside. A bride and groom climbed atop the locomotive with a wedding party of two bridesmaids and two groomsmen. Someone played bagpipes, and a minister conducted the ceremony while the delayed passengers groused. Within an hour, the train was on its way to Spokane and St. Louis. The event had happened so quickly, at such an early hour, and Franz had been so young, that by 1985 it seemed like a bad dream.

In our room of the Nelson Place Hotel, I hoped this story was only the Ecstasy happening. Franz and I didn’t officially meet until college. In 1983? Was it 1984? His bad dream wasn’t a dream, because a decade before we first met …we’d already met. The man getting married on top of that train had been my father, and my brother and I had been the two groomsmen. That had been the beginning of my father’s second marriage, after divorcing my mother, and he’d wanted to put on a good show. Over a decade later, Franz and I would realize that our childhoods had had that uncomfortable hour in common. Even the bagpipe? Everything.

That’s the worst aspect of being a writer: managing plausibility. Everything else about that road trip, I could use in Invisible Monsters . But that’s the kind of actual miracle that, if I wrote it into a novel, you’d instantly cry, “Bullshit!”

n Seattle, I’ve been watching Brandy nap in our undersea grotto for more than one hundred and sixty years. Me, I’m sitting here with a glossy pile of brochures from surgeons showing sexual reassignment surgeries. Transitional transgender operations. Sex changes.

The color pictures show pretty much the same shot of different-quality vaginas. Camera shots focused straight into the dark vaginal introitus. Fingers with red nail polish cupped against each thigh to spread the labia. The urethral meatus soft and pink. The pubic hair clipped down to stubble on some. The vaginal depth given as six inches, eight inches, two inches. Unresected corpus spongiosum mounding around the urethral opening on some. The clitoris hooded, the frenulum of the clitoris, the tiny folds of skin under the hood that join the clitoris to the labia.

Bad, cheap vaginas with hair-growing scrotal skin used inside, still growing hair, choked with hair.

Picture-perfect, state-of-the-art vaginas lengthened using sections of colon, self-cleaning and lubricated with its own mucosa. Sensate clitorises made by cropping and rerouting bits of the glans penis. The Cadillac of vaginoplasty. Some of these Cadillacs turn out so successful the flood of colon mucosa means wearing a maxi-pad every day.

Some are old-style vaginas where you had to stretch and dilate them every day with a plastic mold. All these brochures are souvenirs of Brandy’s near future.

After we saw Mr. Parker sitting on Ellis, I helped the drug-induced dead body Brandy might as well be back upstairs and took her out of her clothes again. She coughed them back up when I tried to slip any more Darvons down her throat, so I settled her back on the bathroom floor, and when I folded her suit jacket over my arm there was something cardboard tucked in the inside pocket. The Miss Rona book. Tucked in the book is a souvenir of my own future.

Kicked back on the big ceramic snail shell, I read:

I love Seth Thomas so much I have to destroy him. I overcompensate by worshipping the queen supreme. Seth will never love me. No one will ever love me ever again.