Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters

The open edge of my throat feels starched and plastic, ribbed- knitted and stiff with sizing and interfacing. It's the same feel as the top edge of a strapless dress or maillot, held up with wire or plastic stays sewn inside. Hard but warm the way pink looks. Bony but covered in soft, touchable skin.

This kind of acute traumatic mandibulectomy without reconstruction, before decannulation of the tracheostomy tube can lead to sleep apnea, the doctors said. This was them talking to each other during morning rounds.

And people find me hard to understand.

What the doctors told me was unless they rebuilt me some kind of jaw, at least some kind of flap, they said, I could die any time I fell asleep. I could just stop breathing and not wake up. A quick, painless death.

On my pad with my pen, I wrote:

don't tease.

Us in the speech therapist office, Brandy says, "It helps to know you're not any more responsible for how you look than a car is," Brandy says. "You're a product just as much. A product of a product of a product. The people who design cars, they're products. Your parents are products. Their parents were products. Your teachers, products. The minister in your church, another product," Brandy says.

Sometimes your best way to deal with shit, she says, is to not hold yourself as such a precious little prize.

"My point being," Brandy says, "is you can't escape the world, and you're not responsible for how you look, if you look beauticious or butt ugly. You're not responsible for how you feel or what you say or how you act or anything you do. It's all out of your hands," Brandy says.

The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill.

"There isn't any Teal you in you," she says. "Even your physical body, all your cells will be replaced within eight years."

Skin, bones, blood, and organs transplant from person to person. Even what's inside you already, the colonies of microbes and bugs that eat your food for you, without them you'd die. Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited.

"Relax," Brandy says, "Whatever you're thinking, a million other folks are thinking. Whatever you do, they're doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort."

Up under my veil, I finger the wet poking stub of a tongue from some vandalized product. The doctors suggested using part of my small intestine to make my throat longer. They suggested carving the shinbones, the fibulas of this human product I am, shaping the bones and grafting them to build me, build the product, a new jawbone.

On my pad, I wrote:

the leg-bone connected to the head-bone?

The doctors didn't get it.

Now hear the word of the Lord.

"You're a product of our language," Brandy says, "arid how our laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you has already been thought out by some million people before you," she says. "Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it. You can't imagine any way to escape. There's no way you can get out," Brandy says.

"The world," Brandy says, "is your cradle and your trap."

This is after I backslid. I wrote to my hooker at the agency and asked about my chances of getting hand or foot work. Modeling watches and shoes. My hooker had sent me some flowers in the hospital early on. Maybe I could pick up assignments as a leg model. How much Evie had blabbed to them, I didn't know.

To be a hand model, he wrote back, you have to wear a size seven glove and a size five ring. A foot model must have perfect toenails and wear a size six shoe. A leg model can't play any sports. She can't have any visible veins. Unless your fingers and toes still look good printed in a magazine at three times their normal size, or billboarded at two hundred times their size, he wrote, don't count on body part work.

My hand's an eight. My foot, a seven.

Brandy says, "And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap, too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap."

The books on plastic surgery, the pamphlets and brochures all promised to help me live a more normal, happy life; but less and less, this looked like what I'd want. What I wanted looked more and more like what I'd always been trained to want. What everybody wants.

Give me attention.

Flash.

Give me beauty.

Flash.

Give me peace and happiness, a loving relationship, and a perfect home.

Flash.

Brandy says, "The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.”

She says, "Don't do what you want." She says, "Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want."

It's the opposite of following your bliss.

Brandy tells me, "Do the things that scare you the most.”

In Seattle, I've been watching Brandy nap in our undersea grotto for more than one hundred and sixty years. Me, I'm sitting here with a glossy pile of brochures from surgeons showing sexual reassignment surgeries. Transitional transgender operations. Sex changes.

The color pictures show pretty much the same shot of different-quality vaginas. Camera shots focused straight into the dark vaginal introitus. Fingers with red nail polish cupped against each thigh to spread the labia. The urethral meatus soft and pink. The pubic hair clipped down to stubble on some. The vaginal depth given as six inches, eight inches, two inches. Unresected corpus spon-giosum mounding around the urethral opening on some.

The clitoris hooded, the frenulum of the clitoris, the tiny folds of skin under the hood that join the clitoris to the labia.

Bad, cheap vaginas with hair-growing scrotal skin used inside, still growing hair, choked with hair.

Picture perfect, state-of-the-art vaginas lengthened using sections of colon, self-cleaning and lubricated with its own mucosa. Sensate clitorises made by cropping and rerouting bits of the glans penis. The Cadillac of vagino-plasty. Some of these Cadillacs turn out so successful the flood of colon mucosa means wearing a maxi-pad every day.

Some are old-style vaginas where you had to stretch and dilate them every day with a plastic mold. All these brochures are souvenirs of Brandy's near future.

After we saw Mr. Parker sitting on Ellis, I helped the drug- induced dead body Brandy might as well be back upstairs and took her out of her clothes again. She coughed them back up when I tried to slip any more Darvons down her throat, so I settled her back on the bathroom floor, and when I folded her suit jacket over my arm there was something cardboard tucked in the inside pocket. The Miss Rona book. Tucked in the book is a souvenir of my own future.

Kicked back on the big ceramic snail shell, I read: Hove Seth Thomas so much I have to destroy him. I over-compensate by worshiping the queen supreme. Seth will never love me. No one will ever love me ever again.

How embarrassing.

Give me needy emotional whining bullshit.

Flash.

Give me self-absorbed egocentric twaddle.

Christ.

Fuck me. I'm so tired of being me. Me beautiful. Me ugly. Blonde. Brunette. A million fucking fashion makeovers that only leave me trapped being me.

Who I was before the accident is just a story now. Everything before now, before now, before now, is just a story I carry around. I guess that would apply to anybody in the world. What I need is a new story about who I am.