Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters

Neville Was Raped In Prison

Brent Slept With His Father

People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future. I hit a button and give Gwen WorksAsHooker her voice back for a little soundbite of prostitute talk.

Gwen shapes her story with her hands as she talks. She leans forward out of her chair. Her eyes are watching something up and to the right, just off camera. I know it's the monitor. Gwen's watching herself tell her story.

Gwen balls her fingers until only the left index finger is out, and she slowly twists her hand to show both sides of her fingernail as she talks.

" ... to protect themselves, most girls on the street break off a little bit of razor blade and glue it under their fingernail. Girls paint the razor nail so it looks like a regular fingernail." Here, Gwen sees something in the monitor. She frowns and tosses her red hair back off what look like pearl earrings.

"When they go to jail," Gwen tells herself in the monitor, "or when they're not attractive anymore, some girls use the razor nails to slash their wrists.”

I make Gwen WorksAsHooker mute again.

I change channels.

I change channels.

I change channels.

Sixteen channels away, a beautiful young woman in a sequined dress is smiling and dropping animal wastes into a Num. Num Snack Factory.

Evie and me, we did this infomercial. It's one of those television commercials you think is a real program except it's just a thirty-minute pitch. The television camera cuts to another girl in a sequined dress, this one is wading through an audience of snow birds and Midwest tourists. The girl offers a golden anniversary couple in matching Hawaiian shirts a selection of canapes from a silver tray, but the couple and everybody else in their double knits and camera necklaces, they're staring up and to the right at something off camera.

You know it's the monitor.

It's eerie, but what's happening is the folks are staring at themselves in the monitor staring at themselves in the monitor staring at themselves in the monitor, on and on, completely trapped in a reality loop that never ends.

The girl with the tray, her desperate eyes are contact lens too green and her lips are heavy red outside the natural lip line. The blonde hair is thick and teased up so the girl's shoulders don't look so big-boned. The canapes she keeps waving under all the old noses are soda crackers pooped on with meat by-products. Waving her tray, the girl wades further up into the studio audience bleachers with her too green eyes and big-boned hair. This is my best friend, Evie Cottrell.

This has to be Evie because here comes Manus stepping up to save her with his good looks. Manus, special police vice operative that he is, he takes one of those pooped-on soda crackers and puts it between his capped teeth. And chews. And tilts his handsome square-jawed face back and closes his eyes, Manus closes his power- blue eyes and twists his head just so much side to side and swallows.

Thick black hair like Manus has, it reminds you how people's hair is just vestigial fur with mousse on it. Such a sexy hair dog, Manus is.

The square-jawed face rocks down to give the camera a full-face eyes-open look of complete and total love and satisfaction. So deja vu. This was exactly the same look Manus used to give me when he'd ask if I got my orgasm.

Then Manus turns to give the exact same look to Evie while the studio audience all looks off in another direction, watching themselves watch themselves watch themselves watch Manus smile with total and complete love and satisfaction at Evie.

Evie smiles back her red outside the natural lipline smile at Manus, and I'm this tiny sparkling figure in the background. That's me just over Manus's shoulder, tiny me smiling away like a space heater and dropping animal matter into the Plexiglas funnel on top of the Num Num Snack Factory.

How could I be so dumb.

Let's go sailing.

Sure.

I should've known the deal was Manus and Evie all the time.

Even here, lying in a hotel bed a year after the whole story is over, I'm making fists. I could've just watched the stupid infomercial and known Manus and Evie had some tortured sick relationship they wanted to think was true love.

Okay, I did watch it. Okay, about a hundred times I watched it, but I was only watching myself. That reality loop thing.

The camera comes back to the first girl, the one on stage, and she's me. And I'm so beautiful. On television, I demonstrate the easy cleanability of the snack factory, and I'm so beautiful. I snap the blades out of the Plexiglas cover and rinse off the chewed-up animal waste under running water. And, jeez, I'm beautiful.

The disembodied voiceover is saying how the Num Num Snack Factory takes meat by-products, whatever you have—your tongues or hearts or lips or genitals—chews them up, seasons them, and poops them out in the shape of a spade or a diamond or a club onto your choice of cracker for you to eat yourself. Here in bed, I'm crying.

Bubba-Joan GotHerJawShotOff.

All these thousands of miles later, all these different people I've been, and it's still the same story. Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end up crying? How is it you can keep mutating and still be the same deadly virus?

Jump back to when I first got out of the hospital without a career or a fiance or an apartment, and I had to sleep at Evie's big house, her real house where even she didn't like to live, it was so lonely, stuck way out in some rainforest with nobody paying attention.

Jump to me being on Evie's bed, on my back that first night, but I can't sleep.

Wind lifts the curtains, lace curtains. All Evie's furniture is that curlicue Frenchy provincial stuff painted white and gold. There isn't a moon, but the sky is full of stars, so everything—Evie's house, the rose hedges, the bedroom curtains, the backs of my hands against the bedspread—are all either black or gray.

Evie's house was what a Texas girl would buy if her parents kept giving her about ten million dollars all the time. It's like the Cottrells know Evie will never make the big-time runways. So Evie, she lives here. Not New York. Not Milan. The suburbs, right out in the nowhere of professional modeling. This is pretty far from doing the Paris collections. Being stuck in nowhere is the excuse Evie needs, living here is, for a big- boned girl who'd never be a big-time success anywhere.

The doors are locked tonight. The cat is inside. When I look, the cat looks back at me the way dogs and some cars look when people say they're smiling.

Just that afternoon, Evie was on the telephone begging me to check myself out of the hospital and come visit.

Evie's house was big—white with hunter green shutters, a three-story plantation house fronted with big pillars. Needlepoint ivy and climbing roses—yellow roses— were climbed up around the bottom ten feet of each big pillar. You'd imagine Ashley Wilkes mowing the grass here, or Rhett Butler taking down the storm windows, but Evie, she has these minimum-wage slave Laotians who refuse to live in.

Jump to the day before, Evie driving me from the hospital. Evie really is Evelyn Cottrell, Inc. No, really. She's traded publicly now. Everybody's favorite write-off. The Cottrells made a private stock offering in her career when Evie was twenty- one, and all the Cottrell relatives with their Texas land and oil money are heavily invested in Evie's being a model failure.

Most times it was an embarrassment going to modeling look-see auditions with Evie. Sure, I'd get work, but then the art director or the stylist would start screaming at Evie that, no, in his expert opinion she was not a perfect size six. Most times, some assistant stylist had to wrestle Evie out the door. Evie would be screaming back over her shoulder about how I shouldn't let them treat me