Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters Remix

In a nice hotel bar in Edmonton, Brandy says, “I hate it when you can see the seam in your martini glass. I mean, I can feel the mold line. It’s so cheap.”

Guys all over her. Like spotlights, I remember that kind of attention. That whole country, Brandy never had to buy her own drinks, not once.

Jump to Manus losing his assignment as an independent special contract vice operative to the detective division of the Metropolitan Police Department. My point is, he never really got over it.

He was running out of money. It’s not like there was a lot in the bank to begin with. Then the birds ate my face.

What I didn’t know is, there was Evie Cottrell living alone in her big lonesome house with all her Texas land and oil money, saying, hey, she had some work that needed doing. And Manus with his driving need to prove he can still pee on every tree. That mirror-mirror kind of power. The rest you already know.

Jump to us on the road, after the hospital, after the Rhea sisters, and I keep slipping the hormones, the Provera and Climara and Premarin, into what he ate and drank. Whiskey and estradiol. Vodka and ethinyl estradiol. It was so easy it was scary. He was all the time making big cow eyes at Brandy.

We were all running from something. Vaginoplasty. Aging. The future.

Jump to Los Angeles.

Jump to Spokane.

Jump to Boise and San Diego and Phoenix.

Jump to Vancouver, British Columbia, where we were Italian expatriates speaking English as a second language until there wasn’t a native tongue among us.

“You have two of the breasts of a young woman,” Alfa Romeo told a realtor I can’t remember in which house.

From Vancouver, we reentered the United States as Brandy, Seth, and Bubba-Joan via the Princess Princess’s very professional mouth. All the way to Seattle, Brandy read to us how a little Jewish girl with a mysterious muscle disease turned herself into Rona Barrett.

All of us looking at big rich houses, picking up drugs, renting cars, buying clothes, and taking clothes back.

“Tell us a gross personal story,” Brandy says en route to Seattle. Brandy all the time being the boss of me. Being this close to death herself.

Rip yourself open.

Tell me my life story before I die.

Sew yourself shut.

ump to this one time, nowhere special, just Brandy and me in the speech therapist office when Brandy catches me with my hands up under my veil, touching the seashells and ivory of my exposed molars, stroking the embossed leather of my scar tissue, dry and polished from my breath going back and forth across it. I’m touching the saliva where it dries sticky and raw down the sides of my neck, and Brandy says not to watch myself too close.

“Honey,” she says, “times like this, it helps to think of yourself as a sofa or a newspaper, something made by a lot of other people but not made to last forever.”

The open edge of my throat feels starched and plastic, ribbed-knitted and stiff with sizing and interfacing. It’s the same feel as the top edge of a strapless dress or maillot, held up with wire or plastic stays sewn inside. Hard but warm the way pink looks. Bony but covered in soft, touchable skin.

This kind of acute traumatic mandibulectomy without reconstruction, before decannulation of the tracheostomy tube can lead to sleep apnea, the doctors said. This was them talking to each other during morning rounds.

And people find me hard to understand.

What the doctors told me was unless they rebuilt me some kind of jaw, at least some kind of flap, they said, I could die anytime I fell asleep. I could just stop breathing and not wake up. A quick, painless death.

On my pad with my pen, I wrote:

don’t tease.

Us in the speech therapist office, Brandy says, “It helps to know you’re not any more responsible for how you look than a car is,” Brandy says. “You’re a product just as much. A product of a product of a product. The people who design cars, they’re products. Your parents are products. Their parents were products. Your teachers, products. The minister in your church, another product,” Brandy says.

Sometimes your best way to deal with shit, she says, is to not hold yourself as such a precious little prize.

“My point being,” Brandy says, “is you can’t escape the world, and you’re not responsible for how you look, if you look beauticious or butt-ugly. You’re not responsible for how you feel or what you say or how you act or anything you do. It’s all out of your hands,” Brandy says.

The same way a compact disk isn’t responsible for what’s recorded on it, that’s how we are. You’re about as free to act as a programmed computer. You’re about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill.

“There isn’t any real you in you ,” she says. “Even your physical body, all your cells will be replaced within eight years.”

Skin, bones, blood, and organs transplant from person to person. Even what’s inside you already, the colonies of microbes and bugs that eat your food for you, without them you’d die. Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited.

“Relax,” Brandy says, “Whatever you’re thinking, a million other folks are thinking. Whatever you do, they’re doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort.”

Up under my veil, I finger the wet poking stub of a tongue from some vandalized product. The doctors suggested using part of my small intestine to make my throat longer. They suggested carving the shinbones, the fibulas of this human product I am, shaping the bones and grafting them to build me, build the product, a new jawbone.

On my pad, I wrote:

the leg-bone connected to the head-bone?

The doctors didn’t get it.

Now hear the word of the Lord.

“You’re a product of our language,” Brandy says, “and how our laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you has already been thought out by some million people before you,” she says. “Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You’re safe because you’re so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it. You can’t imagine any way to escape. There’s no way you can get out,” Brandy says.

“The world,” Brandy says, “is your cradle and your trap.”

This is after I backslid. I wrote to my booker at the agency and asked about my chances of getting hand or foot work. Modeling watches and shoes. My booker had sent me some flowers in the hospital early on. Maybe I could pick up assignments as a leg model. How much Evie had blabbed to them, I didn’t know.

To be a hand model, he wrote back, you have to wear a size seven glove and a size five ring. A foot model must have perfect toenails and wear a size six shoe. A leg model can’t play any sports. She can’t have any visible veins. Unless your fingers and toes still look good printed in a magazine at three times their normal size, or billboarded at two hundred times their size, he wrote, don’t count on body part work.

My hand’s an eight. My foot, a seven.

Brandy says, “And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that’s a trap, too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.”

The books on plastic surgery, the pamphlets and brochures, all promised to help me live a more normal, happy life; but less and less this looked like what I’d want. What I wanted looked more and more like what I’d always been trained to want. What everybody wants.