Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters Remix

Jump to us driving away with the Fiat Spider just piled with luggage. Imagine desperate refugees from Beverly Hills with seventeen pieces of matched luggage migrating cross-country to start a new life in the Okie Midwest. Everything very elegant and tasteful, one of those epic Joad family vacations, only backward. Leaving a trail of cast-off accessories, shoes and gloves and chokers and hats to lighten their load so’s they can cross the Rocky Mountains, that would be us.

This is after the police showed up, no doubt after the hotel manager called and said a mutilated psycho with a gun was menacing everybody up on the fifteenth floor. This is after the Rhea sisters ran all Brandy’s luggage down the fire stairs. This is after Brandy says she has to go, she needs to think about things, you know, before her big surgery. You know. The transformation.

This is after I keep looking at Brandy and wondering, Shane?

“It’s just such a big commitment,” Brandy says, “being a girl, you know. Forever.”

Taking the hormones. For the rest of her life. The pills, the patches, the injections, for the rest of her life. And what if there was someone, just one person who would love her, who could make her life happy, just the way she was, without the hormones and makeup and the clothes and shoes and surgery? She has to at least look around the world a little. Brandy explains all this, and the Rhea sisters start to cry and wave and pile the American Touristers into the car.

And the whole scene would be just heartbreaking, and I would be boo-hooing, too, if I didn’t know Brandy was my dead brother and the person he wants to love him is me, his hateful sister, already plotting to kill him. Yes. Plotting me, plotting to kill Brandy Alexander. Me with nothing left to lose, plotting my big revenge in the spotlight.

Give me violent revenge fantasies as a coping mechanism.

Flash.

Just give me my first opportunity.

Flash.

Brandy behind the wheel, she turns to me, her eyes all spidery with tears and mascara, and says, “Do you know what the Benjamin Standards guidelines are?”

Brandy starts the car and puts it in gear. She drops the parking brake and cranes her neck to see for traffic. She says, “I have to live one whole year on hormones in my new gender role before my vaginoplasty. They call it Real Life Training.”

Brandy pulls out into the street and we’re almost escaped. Police SWAT teams in chic basic black accessorized with tear gas and semiautomatic weapons are charging in past the doorman holding the door in his gold braid. The Rheas run after us, waving and throwing kisses and doing pretty much ugly bridesmaid behavior until they stumble, panting, in the street, their high heels shot to hell.

There’s a moon in the sky. Office buildings are canyoned along either side of the street. There’s still Manus in the trunk, and we’re already putting gross distance between me and my getting caught.

Brandy puts her big hand open on my leg and squeezes.

Arson, kidnapping, I think I’m up to murder. Maybe all this will get me just a glimmer of attention, not the good, glorious kind, but still the national media kind.

MONSTER GIRL SLAYS SECRET BROTHER GAL PAL

“I’ve got eight months left to my RLT year,” Brandy says. “Think you can keep me busy for the next eight months?”

ump to the moment around one o’clock in the morning in Evie’s big silent house when Manus stops screaming and I can finally think.

Evie is in Cancún, probably waiting for the police to call her and say: Your house sitter, the monster without a jaw, well, she’s shot your secret boyfriend to death when he broke in with a butcher knife is our best guess.

You know that Evie’s wide awake right now. In some Mexican hotel room, Evie’s trying to figure out if there’s a three-hour or a four-hour time difference between her big house where I’m stabbed to death, dead, and Cancún, where Evie’s supposed to be on a catalogue shoot. It’s not like Evie is entered in the biggest brain category. Nobody shoots a catalogue in Cancún in the peak season, especially not with big-boned cowgirls like Evie Cottrell.

But me being dead, that opens up a whole world of possibility.

I’m an invisible nobody sitting on a white damask sofa facing another white sofa across a coffee table that looks like a big block of malachite from Geology 101.

Evie slept with my fiancé, so now I can do anything to her.

In the movie, where somebody is invisible all the sudden—you know, a nuclear radiation fluke or a mad scientist recipe—and you think, what would I do if I was invisible …? Like go into the guy’s locker room at Gold’s Gym or, better yet, the Oakland Raiders’ locker room. Stuff like that. Scope things out. Go to Tiffany’s and shoplift diamond tiaras and stuff.

Just by his being so dumb, Manus could’ve stabbed me, tonight, thinking I was Evie, thinking Evie shot me, while I was asleep in the dark in her bed.

My dad, he’d go to my funeral and talk to everybody about how I was always about to go back to college and finish my personal fitness training degree and then no doubt go on to medical school. Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Daddy, I couldn’t get past the fetal pig in Biology 101. Now I’m the cadaver.

Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.

Evie would be right next to my mom, next to the open casket. Evie would stagger up leaning on Manus. You know, Evie would’ve found something totally grotesque for the undertaker to dress me in. So Evie throws an arm around my mom, and Manus can’t get away from the open casket fast enough, and I’m lying there in this blue velveteen casket like the interior of a Lincoln Town Car. Of course, thank you, Evie, I’m wearing this concubine evening wear Chinese yellow silk kimono slit up the side to my waist with black fishnet stockings and red Chinese dragons embroidered across the pelvic region and my breasts.

And red high heels. And no jawbone.

Of course, Evie says to my mom: “She always loved this dress. This kimono was her favorite.” Sensitive Evie would say, “Guess this makes you oh for two.”

I could kill Evie.

I would pay snakes to bite her.

Evie would be wearing this little black cocktail number with an asymmetrical hemline satin skirt and a strapless bodice by Rei Kawakubo. The shoulders and sleeves would be sheer black chiffon. Evie, you know she has jewelry, big emeralds for her too-green eyes and a change of accessories in her black clutch bag so she can wear this dress later, dancing.

I hate Evie.

Me, I’m rotting with my blood pumped out in this slutty Suzie Wong Tokyo Rose concubine drag dress where it didn’t fit so they had to pin all the extra together behind my back.

I look like shit, dead.

I look like dead shit.

I would stab Evie right now over the telephone.

No, really, I’d tell Mrs. Cottrell as we placed Evie’s urn in a family vault somewhere in Godawful, Texas. Really, Evie wanted to be cremated.

Me, at Evie’s funeral, I’d be wearing this tourniquet-tight black leather minidress by Gianni Versace with yards and yards of black silk gloves bunched up on my arms. I’d sit next to Manus in the back of the mortuary’s big black Caddy, and I’d have on this wagon wheel of a black Christian Lacroix hat with a black veil you could take off later and go to a swell auction preview or estate sale or something and then, lunch.

Evie, Evie would be dirt. Okay, ashes.

Alone in her living room, I pick up a crystal cigarette box off the table that looks like a block of malachite, and I overhand fast-pitch this little treasure against the fireplace bricks. There’s a smash with cigarettes and matches everywhere.