Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters

The manager steps up in his navy blue blazer with its little brass Mr. Baxter name tag, and he says, "We can give you all the money in the drawer, but no one here can open the safe in the office."

The gun on the desk points right at the brass Mr. Baxter nametag, a fact that hasn't gone unnoticed. I snap my fingers and point at a piece of paper for him to give me. With the guest pen on a chain, I write:

which suite are the rhea sisters in? don't make me knock on every door on the fifteenth floor, it's the middle of the night.

"That would be Suite 15-G," says Mr. Baxter, both his hands full of cash I don't want and reached out across the desk toward me. "The elevators," he says, "are to your right."

Jump to me being Daisy St. Patience the first day Brandy and I sat together. The day of the frozen turkey after the whole summer I waited for somebody to ask me what happened to my face, and I told Brandy everything.

Brandy, when she sat me in the chair still hot from her ass and she locked the speech therapist door that first time, she named me out of my future. She named me Daisy St. Patience and never wanted to know what name I walked in the door with. I was the rightful heir to the international fashion house, the House of St. Patience.

Brandy she just talked and talked. We were running out of air, she talked so much, and I don't mean just we, Brandy and me. I mean the world. The world was running out of air, Brandy talked that much. The Amazon Basin just could not keep up.

"Who you are moment to moment," Brandy said, "is just a story."

What I needed was a new story.

"Let me do for you," Brandy said, "what the Rhea sisters did for me."

Give me courage.

Flash.

Give me heart.

Flash.

So jump to me being Daisy St. Patience going up in that elevator, and Daisy St. Patience walking down that wide carpeted hallway to Suite 15-G. Daisy knocks and nobody answers. Through the door, you can hear that cha-cha music.

The door opens six inches, but the chain is on so it stops.

Three white faces appear in the six-inch gap, one on top of the other, Kitty Litter, Sofonda Peters, and the vivacious Vivienne VaVane, their faces shining with moisturizer. Their short dark hair is matted down flat with bobby pins and wig caps.

The Rhea sisters.

Who's who, I don't know. The drag queen totem pole in the door crack says:

"Don't take the queen supreme from us."

"She's all we have to do with our lives."

"She isn't finished yet. We're not half done, and there's just so much more we have to do on her."

I give them a peekaboo pink chiffon flash of the rifle, and the door slams.

Through the door, you can hear the chain come off. Then the door opens all the way.

Jump to one time, late one night, driving between Nowhere, Wyoming, and WhoKnowsWhere, Montana, when Seth says how your being born makes your parents God. You owe them your life, and they can control you.

"Then puberty makes you Satan," he says, "just because you want something better."

Jump to inside suite 15-G with its blonde furniture and the bossa-nova cha-cha music and cigarette smoke, and the Rhea sisters are flying around the room in their nylon slips with the shoulder straps off one shoulder or the other. I don't have to do anything but point the rifle.

"We know who you are, Daisy St. Patience," one of them says, lighting a cigarette, "With a face like that, you're all Brandy talks about anymore."

All over the room are these big, big 1959 spatter glaze ashtrays so big you only have to empty them every couple years.

The one with the cigarette gives me her long hand with its porcelain nails and says, "I'm Pie Rhea."

"I'm Die Rhea," says another one, near the stereo.

The one with the cigarette, Pie Rhea, says, "Those are our stagenames." She points at the third Rhea, over on the sofa, eating Chinese out of a takeaway carton. "That," she says and points, "This Miss Eating Herself To Fat, you can call her Gon Rhea."

With her mouth full of nothing you'd want to see, Gon Rhea says, "Charmed, I'm sure."

Putting her cigarette everywhere but in her mouth, Pie Rhea says, "The queen just does not need your problems, not tonight." She says, "We're all the family the top girl needs."

On the stereo is a picture in a silver frame of a girl, beautiful in front of seamless paper, smiling into an unseen camera, an invisible photographer telling her:

Give me passion.

Flash.

Give me joy.

Flash.

Give me youth and energy and innocence and beauty.

Flash.

"Brandy's first family, her birth family, didn't want her, so we adopted her," says Die Rhea. Pointing her long finger at the picture smiling on the blonde stereo, Die Rhea says, "Her birth family thinks she's dead."

Jump to one time back when I had a face and I did this magazine cover shoot for BabeWear magazine.

Jump back to Suite 15-G and the picture on the blonde stereo is me, my cover, the BabeWear magazine cover, framed with Die Rhea pointing her finger at me.

Jump back to us in the speech therapist office with the door locked and Brandy saying how lucky she was the Rhea sisters found her. It's not everybody who gets a second chance to be born again and raised a second time, but this time by a family that loves her.

"Kitty Litter, Sofonda, and Vivienne," Brandy says, "I owe them everything."

Jump to Suite 15-G and Gon Rhea waving her chopsticks at me and saying, "Don't you try and take her from us. We're not finished with her yet."

"If Brandy goes with you," says Pie Rhea, "she can pay for her own conjugated estrogens. And her vaginoplasty. And her labiaplasty. Not to mention her scrotal electrolysis."

To the picture on the stereo, to the smiling stupid face in the silver frame, Die Rhea says, "None of that is cheap." Die Rhea lifts the picture and holds it up to me, my past looking me eye to eye, and Die Rhea says, "This, this is how Brandy wanted to look, like her bitch sister. That was two years ago, before she had laser surgery to thin her vocal cords and then her trachea shave. She had her scalp advanced three centimeters to give her the right hairline. We paid for her brow shave to get rid of the bone ridge above her eyes that the Miss Male used to have. We paid for her jaw contouring and her forehead feminiza-tion."

"And," Gon Rhea says with her mouth full of chewed-up Chinese, "and every time she came home from the hospital with her forehead broken and realigned or her Adam's apple shaved down to a ladylike nothing, who do you think took care of her for those two years?"

Jump to nay folks asleep in their bed across mountains and deserts away from here. Jump to them and their telephone and years ago some crazy man, some screeching awful pervert, calling them and screaming that their son was dead. Their son they didn't want, Shane, he was dead of AIDS and this man wouldn't say where or when and then he laughed and hung up.

Jump back to inside Suite 15-G and Die Rhea waving an old picture of me in my face and saying, "This is how she wanted to look, and tens of thousands of Katty Kathy dollars later, this is how she looks."

Gon Rhea says, "Hell. Brandy looks better than that."

"We're the ones who love Brandy Alexander," says Pie Rhea.

"But you're the one Brandy loves because you need her," says Die Rhea.

Gon Rhea says, "The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person." She says, "Brandy will leave us if she thinks you need her, but we need her, too.”

The one I love is locked in the trunk of a car outside with a stomach full of Valiums, and I wonder if he still has to pee. My brother I hate is come back from the dead. Shane's being dead was just too good to be true.

First the exploding hairspray can didn't kill him.