Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters

Mine must weigh fifteen pounds.

"It's a ball-peen hammer," Evie says, "and you're holding it wrong."

"Honey," the photographer says to Evie, "could you hold the chainsaw a bit closer to your mouth, please?"

The sun is warm on the metal of the cars, their tops crushed under the weight of being piled on top each other. These are cars with buckled front ends you know nobody walked away from. Cars with T-boned sides where whole familes died together. Rear-ended cars with the back seats pushed up tight against the dashboard. Cars from before seatbelts. Cars from before air bags. Before the Jaws of Life. Before paramedics. These are cars peeled open around their exploded gas tanks.

"This is so rich," Evie says, "how this is the place I've worked my whole life to get."

The art director says to go ahead and push our breasts against the cars.

"The whole time, growing up," Evie says, "I just thought being a woman would be ... not such a disappointment."

All I ever wanted was to be an only child.

The photographer says, "Perfecto.”

What you get with the Rhea sisters is three skin-andbone white men who sit around a suite at the Congress Hotel all day in nylon slips with the shoulder straps fallen off one shoulder or the other, wearing high heels and smoking cigarettes. Kitty Litter, Sofonda Peters, and the Vivacious Vivienne VaVane, their faces shining with moisturizer and egg- white facials, they listen to that step-to-three cha-cha music you only hear on elevators anymore. The Rhea sister hair, their hair is short and flat with grease and matted down bristling with bobby pins, flat on their heads. Maybe they have a wig cap stretched on over the pins if it's not summer outside. Most of the time, they don't know what season it is. The blinds aren't ever open, and there are maybe a dozen of those chacha records stacked on the automatic record changer.

All the furniture is blonde and the big four-legged RCA Philco console stereo. The stereo, you could plow a field with that old needle, and the metal tone arm weighs about two pounds.

May I present them:

Kitty Litter.

Sofonda Peters.

The Vivacious Vivienne VaVane.

AKA the Rhea sisters when they're onstage, these are her family, Brandy Alexander told me in the speech therapist office. Not the first time we met, this wasn't the time I cried and told Brandy how I lost my face. This wasn't the second time, either, the time Brandy brought her sewing basket full of ways to hide my being a monster. This was one of the other tons of times we snuck off while I was still in the hospital. The speech therapist office was just where we'd meet.

"Usually," Brandy tells me, "Kitty Litter is bleaching and tweezing away unwanted facial hair. This unsightly hair thing can tie up a bathroom for hours, but Kitty would wear her Ray-Bans inside out, she loves looking at her reflection so much."

The Rheas, they made Brandy what she is. Brandy, she owes them everything.

Brandy would lock the speech therapist door, and if somebody would knock, Brandy and me, we'd fake loud orgasm noises. We'd scream and yip and slap the floor. I'd clap my hands to make that special spanking sound that everybody knows. Whoever knocks, they'd go away fast.

Then we'd go back to just us using up make-up and talking.

"Sofonda," Brandy would tell me, "Sofonda Peters, she's the brains, Sofonda is. Miss Peters is all day with her porcelain nails stuck in the rotary-dial princess phone to an agent or a merchandiser, selling, selling, selling."

Somebody would knock on the speech therapist door, so I'd give out with a cat scream and slap my thigh.

The Rhea sisters, Brandy would tell me, she'd be dead without them. When they'd found her, the princess queen supreme, she'd been a size twenty-six, lip-synching at amateur-night, open-mike shows. Lip-synching "Thumbelina."

Her hair, her figure, her hippy, hippy forward Brandy Alexander walk, the Rhea sisters invented all that.

Jump to two fire engines passing me in the opposite direction as I drive the freeway toward downtown, away from Evie's house on fire. In the rearview mirror of Manus's Fiat Spider, Evie's house is a smaller and smaller bonfire. The peachy-pink hem of Evie's bathrobe is shut in the car door, and the ostrich feathers whip me in the cool night air pouring around the convertible's windshield.

Smoke is all I smell like. The rifle on the passenger seat is pointing at the floor.

There's not one word from my love cargo in the trunk.

And there's only one place left to go.

No way could I call and just ask the operator to ring Brandy. No way would the operator understand me, so we're on our way downtown to the Congress Hotel.

Jump to how all the Rhea sister money comes from a doll named Katty Kathy. This is what else Brandy told me between faking orgasms in the speech therapist office. She's a doll, Katty Kathy is one of those foot-high flesh-tone dolls with the impossible measurements. What she would be as a real woman is 46-16-26. As a real woman, Katty Kathy could buy a total of nothing off the rack. You know you've seen this doll. Comes naked in a plastic bubble pack for a dollar, but her clothes cost a fortune, that's how realistic she is. You can buy about four hundred tiny fashion separates that mix and match to create three tasteful outfits. In that way, the doll is incredibly lifelike. Chilling, even.

Sofonda Peters came up with the idea. Invented Katty Kathy, made the prototype, sold the doll, and cut all the deals. Still, Sofonda is about married to Kitty and Vivian and there's enough money to support them all.

What sold Katty Kathy is that she's a talking doll, but instead of a string, she's got this little gold chain coming out of her back. You pull her chain, and she says:

"That dress is fine, I mean, if that's really how you want to look.”

"Your heart is my pinata."

"Is that what you're going to wear?"

"I think it would be good for our relationship if we dated other people."

"Kiss kiss."

And, "Don't touch my hair!"

The Rhea sisters, they made a bundle. Katty Kathy's little bolero jacket alone, they have that jacket sewn in Cambodia for a dime and sell it here in America for sixteen dollars. People pay that.

Jump to me parking the Fiat with its trunk full of my love cargo on a side street, and me walking up Broadway toward the doorman at the Congress Hotel. I'm a woman with half a face arriving at a luxury hotel, one of those big glazed terra cotta palace hotels built a hundred years ago, where the doormen wear tailcoats with gold braid on the shoulders. I'm wearing a peignoir set and a bathrobe. No veils. Half the bathrobe has been shut in a car door, dragging on the freeway for the past twenty miles. My ostrich feathers smell like smoke, and I'm trying to keep it a big secret that I have a rifle tucked up crutch-like under my arm.

Yeah, and I lost a shoe, one of those high-heeled mules, too.

The doorman in his tailcoat doesn't even look at me. Yeah, and my hair, I see it reflected in the big brass plaque that says The Congress Hotel. The cool night air has pulled my butter creme frosting hairdo out into a ratted stringy mess.

Jump to me at the front desk of the Congress Hotel where I try and make my eyes alluring. They say what people notice first about you is your eyes. I have the attention of what must be the night auditor, the bellman, the manager, and a clerk. First impressions are so important. It must be the way I'm dressed or the rifle. Using the hole that's the top of my throat, my tongue sticking out of it and all the scar tissue around it, I say, "Gerl terk nahdz gah sssid."

Everybody is just flash frozen by my alluring eyes.

I don't know how, but then the rifle's up on the desk, pointing at nobody in particular.