Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters Remix

Full of champagne and Percodan interactions, Brandy is looking at me.

And I’m amazed I never saw it before, how Evie was a man. A big blonde, the same as she is here, but with one of those ugly wrinkled, you know, scrotums.

Ellis is hiding from Evie, trying to scope out if her new husband has yet another notch in his special contract vice operative résumé. Ellis, how this story looks from his point of view is he’s still major sport bait winning proof he can bust any man after the long fight. Everybody here thinks the whole story is about them. Definitely that goes for everybody in the world.

Oh, and this is gone way beyond sorry, Mom. Sorry, God. At this point, I’m not sorry for anything. Or anybody.

No, really, everybody here’s just itching to be cremated.

Jump to upstairs. In the master bedroom, Evie’s trousseau is laid out ready to be packed. I brought my own matches this time, and I light the hand-torn edge of the gold-engraved invitation, and I carry the invitation from the bedspread to the trousseau to the curtains. It’s the sweetest of moments when the fire takes control, and you’re no longer responsible for anything.

I take a big bottle of Chanel No. 5 from Evie’s bathroom and a big bottle of Joy and a big bottle of White Shoulders, and I slosh the smell of a million parade float flowers all over the bedroom.

The fire, Evie’s wedding inferno, finds the trail of flowers in alcohol and chases me out into the hallway. That’s what I love about fire, how it would kill me as quick as anybody else. How it can’t know I’m its mother. It’s so beautiful and powerful and beyond feeling anything for anybody, that’s what I love about fire.

You can’t stop any of this. You can’t control. The fire in Evie’s clothes is just more and more every second, and now the plot moves along without you pushing.

And I descend. Step-pause-step. The invisible showgirl. For once, what’s happening is what I want. Even better than I expected. Nobody’s noticed.

Our world is speeding straight ahead into the future. Flowers and stuffed mushrooms, wedding guests and string quartet, we’re all going there together on the planet Brandy Alexander. In the front hall, there’s the Princess Princess thinking she’s still in control.

The feeling is of supreme and ultimate control over all. Jump to the day we’ll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won’t know we ever happened.

“Where did you go?” Brandy says.

The immediate future , I would tell her.

“ y life,” Brandy says. “I’m dying, and I’m supposed to see my whole life.”

Nobody’s dying here. Give me denial.

Evie’s shot her wad, dropped the rifle, and gone outside.

The police and paramedics are on their way, and the rest of the wedding guests are outside fighting over the wedding gifts, who gave what and who now has the right to take it back. All of it good messy fun.

Blood is pretty much all over Brandy Alexander, and she says, “I want to see my life.”

From some back room, Ellis says, “You have the right to remain silent.”

Jump to me, I let go from holding Brandy’s hand, my hand warm red with blood-borne pathogens, I write on the burning wallpaper.

Your Name Is Shane McFarland.

You Were Born Twenty-Four Years Ago.

You Have A Sister, One Year Younger.

The fire’s already eating my top line.

You Got Gonorrhea From A Special Contract Vice Operative And Your Family Threw You Out.

You Met Three Drag Queens Who Paid You To Start A Sex Change Because You Couldn’t Think Of Anything You Wanted Less.

The fire’s already eating my second line.

You Met Me.

I Am Your Sister, Shannon McFarland.

Me writing the truth in blood just minutes ahead of the fire eating it.

You Loved Me Because Even If You Didn’t Recognize Me, You Knew I Was Your Sister. On Some Level, You Knew Right Away So You Loved Me.

We traveled all over the West and grew up together again.

I’ve hated you for as long as I can remember.

And You Are Not Going To Die.

I could’ve saved you.

And you are not going to die.

The fire and my writing are now neck-and-neck.

Jump to Brandy half-bled on the floor, most of her blood wiped up by me to write with, Brandy squints to read as the fire eats our whole family history, line by line. The line And You Are Not Going To Die is almost at the floor, right in Brandy’s face.

“Honey,” Brandy says, “Shannon, sweetness, I knew all that. It was Miss Evie’s doing. She told me about you being in the hospital. About your accident.”

Such a hand model I am already. And such a rube.

“Now,” Brandy says. “Tell me everything.”

I write: I’ve Been Feeding Ellis Island Female Hormones For The Past Eight Months.

And Brandy laughs blood. “Me too!” she says.

How can I not laugh?

“Now,” Brandy says, “quick, before I die, what else?”

I write: Everybody Just Loved You More After The Hairspray Accident.

And:

And I Did Not Make That Hairspray Can Explode.

Brandy says, “I know. I did it. I was so miserable being a normal average child. I wanted something to save me. I wanted the opposite of a miracle.”

From some other room, Ellis says, “Anything you say can and may be used against you in a court of law.” And on the baseboard, I write:

The Truth Is I Shot Myself In The Face.

There’s no more room to write, no more blood to write with, and nothing left to say, and Brandy says, “You shot your own face off?”

I nod.

“That,” says Brandy, “that, I didn’t know.”

ump back to the La Paloma emergency room. The intravenous morphine. The tiny operating-room manicure scissors cut Brandy’s suit off. My brother’s unhappy penis there blue and cold for the whole world to see. The police photos, and Sister Katherine screaming, “Take your pictures! Take your pictures now! He’s still losing blood!”

Jump to surgery. Jump to post-op. Jump to me taking Sister Katherine aside, little Sister Katherine hugging me so hard around the knees I almost buckle to the floor. She looks at me, both of us stained with the blood, and I ask her in writing:

please.

do this one special thing for me. please. if you really want to make me happy.

Jump to Evie installed talk-show–style under the hot track lights, downtown at Brumbach’s, chatting with her mother and Manus and her new husband about how she met Brandy years before all of us, in some transgender support group. About how everybody needs a big disaster every now and then.

Jump to someday down the road soon when Manus will get his breasts.

Jump to me kneeling beside my brother’s hospital bed. Shane’s skin, you don’t know where the faded blue hospital gown ends and Shane begins, he’s so pale. This is my brother, thin and pale with Shane’s thin arms and pigeon chest. The flat auburn hair across his forehead, this is who I remember growing up with. Put together out of sticks and bird bones. The Shane I’d forgotten. The Shane from before the hairspray accident. I don’t know why I forgot, but Shane had always looked so miserable.