Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters

We have to walk her around before anybody sees her this way.

I strap her high heels back on her feet. Brandy, she leans on me. She leans on the edge of the countertop. She picks up a handful of Bilax capsules and squints down at them.

"My back is killing me," Brandy says. " Why'd I ever let them give me such big tits?"

The queen supreme looks ready to swallow a handful of anything.

I shake my head, No.

Brandy squints at me, "But I need these."

In the Physicians' Desk Reference, I show her Bilax, bowel evacuant.

"Oh," Brandy turns her hand over to spill the Bilax into her purse, and some capsules fall but some stick to the sweat on her palm. "After they give you the tits, your nipples are cockeyed and way too high," she says, "they use a razor to shave the nipples off, and they relocate them.”

That's her word.

Relocate.

The Brandy Alexander Nipple Relocation Program.

My dead brother, the late Shane, shakes the last bowel evacuant off her damp palm. Rrandy says, "I have no sensation in my nipples."

Off the counter, I get my veils and put layer after layer over my head.

Thank you for not sharing.

We walk up and down the second floor hallways until Rrandy says she's ready for the stairs. Step at a time, quiet, we go down to the foyer. Across the foyer, through the double doors closed on the drawing room, you can hear Mr. Parker's deep voice saying something soft, over and over.

Brandy leaning on me, we tiptoe a slow three-legged race across the foyer, from the foot of the stairs to the drawing room doors. We crack the doors open some inches and poke our faces through the crack.

Ellis is laid out on the drawing room carpet.

Mr. Parker is sitting on Ellis's chest with a size seventeen wingtip planted on each side of Ellis's head.

Ellis's hands slap Parker's big ass, claw at the back of the double-breasted jacket. The single vent in Mr. Parker's jacket is torn open along the seam up the middle of his back to his collar.

Mr. Parker's hands, the heel of one hand crams a soggy, gnawed eel-skin wallet between Ellis's capped teeth.

Ellis's face is dark red and shining the way you'd look if you got the cherry pie in the pie eating contest. A runny finger painting mess of nosebleed and tears, snot and drool.

Mr. Parker, his hair is fallen over his eyes. His other hand is a fist around five inches of Ellis's pulled out-tongue.

Ellis's slapping and gagging between Mr. Parker's thick legs.

Broken Ming vases and other collectibles are all around them on the floor.

Mr. Parker says, "That's right. Just do that. That's nice. Just relax."

Brandy and me, watching.

Me wanting Ellis destroyed, this is all just too perfect to spoil.

I tug on Brandy. Brandy, honey. We better walk you back upstairs. Rest you some more. Give you a nice fresh handful of Benzedrine spansules.

and want to make them happy, but you still want to make up your own rules.

The surgeons said, you can't just cut off a lump of skin one place and bandage it on another. You're not grafting a tree. The blood supply, the veins and capillaries just wouldn't be hooked up to keep the graft alive. The lump would just die and fall off.

It's scary, but now when I see somebody blush, my reaction isn't: oh, how cute. A blush only reminds me how blood is just under the surface of everything.

Doing dermabrasion, this one plastic surgeon told me, is about the same as pressing a ripe tomato against a belt sander. What you're paying for most is the mess.

To relocate a piece of skin, to rebuild a jaw, you have to flay a long strip of skin from your neck. Cut up from the base of your neck, but don't sever the skin at the top.

Picture a sort of banner or strip of skin hanging down loose along your neck but still attached to the bottom of your face. The skin is still attached to you, so it still gets blood. This strip of skin is still alive. Take the strip of skin and roll it into a tube or column. Leave it rolled until it heals into a long, dangling lump of flesh, hanging from the bottom of your face. Living tissue. Full of fresh, healthy blood, flapping and dangling warm against your neck. This is a pedicle.

Just the healing part, that can take months.

Clatter and tintinnabulation of ringing metal against metal chimes and gongs in the car around us.

"Sorry, I guess," Brandy says. "There's shit on the floor, got under the brake pedal when I tried to stop."

Music bright as silver rolls out from under our car seats. Napkin rings and silver teaspoons rush forward against our feet. Brandy's got candlesticks between her feet. A silver platter bright with starlight is slid half out from under the front of Brandy's seat, looking up between her long legs.

Brandy looks at me. Her chin tucked down, Brandy lowers her Ray-Bans to the end of her nose and arches her penciled eyebrows.

I shrug. I get out to liberate my love cargo.

Even with the trunk open, Manus doesn't move. His knees are against his elbows, his hands clasped in his face, his feet tucked back under his butt; Manus could be a fetus in army fatigues. All around him, I hadn't noticed. I've been under a lot of stress tonight, so forgive me if I didn't notice back at Evie's house, but all around Manus flash pieces of silverware. Pirate treasure in the trunk of his Fiat, and other things.

Relics.

A long white candle, there's a candle.

Brandy slams out of her seat and comes to look, too.

"Oh my shit," Brandy says and rolls her eyes. "Oh my shit."

There's an ashtray, no, it's a plaster cast of a little hand, "It's okay."

There's a little rushing sound, the sound of rain on the roof of a tent or a closed convertible.

"Oh, God," Brandy steps back. "Oh, sweet Christ!"

Manus blinks and peers at Brandy, then at his lap. One leg of his army fatigues goes darker, darker, darker to the knee.

"Cute," Brandy says, "but he's just peed his pants."

Jump back to plastic surgery. Jump to the happy day you're healed. You've had this long strip of skin hanging off your neck for a couple months, only it's not just one strip. There are probably more like a half-dozen pedicles because you might as well do a lot at once so the plastic surgeon has more tissue to work with.

For reconstruction, you'll have these long dangling strips of skin hanging off the bottom of your face for about two months.

They say that what people notice first about you is your eyes. You'll give up that hope. You look like some meat byproduct ground up and pooped out by the Num Num Snack Factory.

A mummy coming apart in the rain.

A broken pinata.

These strips of warm skin flapping around your neck are good, blood-fed living tissue. The surgeon lifts each strip and attaches the healed end to your face. This way,

Now Manus peers at me, sits up and scrapes his head on the open trunk lid. Man, oh, man, you know this hurts, still it isn't anything tragic until Brandy Alexander chimes in with her overreaction. "Oh, you poor thing," she says.

Then Manus boo-hoos. Manus Kelley, the last person who has any right to, is crying.

I hate this.

Jump to the day the skin grafts take, and even then the tissue will need some support. Even if the grafts heal to where they look like a crude, lumpy jaw, you'll still need a jawbone. Without a mandible, the soft mass of tissue, living and viable as it is, might just reabsorb.

That's the word the plastic surgeons used.

Reabsorb.

Into my face, as if I'm just a sponge made of skin.

Jump to Manus crying and Brandy bent over him, cooing and petting his sexy hair.

In the trunk, there's a pair of bronze baby shoes, a silver chafing dish, a turkey picture made of macaroni glued to construction paper.

"You know," Manus sniffs and wipes the back of his hand under his nose. "I'm high right now so it's okay if I tell you this." Manus looks at Brandy bent over him and me crouched in the dirt. "First," Manus says, "your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life."