Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters

Jump to Edmonton, Alberta, Nash Rambler turned into Alfa Romeo. Brandy wore these crinoline shorty-short square dance petticoats over black tights tucked into cowboy boots. Brandy wore this push-up bustier made of leather with local cattle brands burned all over it.

In a nice hotel bar in Edmonton, Brandy says, "I hate it when you can see the seam in your martini glass. I mean, I can feel the mold line. It's so cheap."

Guys all over her. Like spotlights, I remember that kind of attention. That whole country, Brandy never had to buy her own drinks, not once.

Jump to Manus losing his assignment as an independent special contract vice operative to the detective division of the Metropolitan police department. My point is, he never really got over it.

He was running out of money. It's not like there was a lot in the bank to begin with. Then the birds ate my face.

What I didn't know is, there was Evie Cottrell living alone in her big lonesome house with all her Texas land and oil money, saying, hey, she had some work that needed doing. And Manus with his driving need to prove he can still pee on every tree. That mirror-mirror kind of power. The rest you already know.

Jump to us on the road, after the hospital, after the Rhea sisters, and I keep slipping the hormones, the Provera and Climara and Premarin, into what he ate and drank. Whiskey and estradiol. Vodka and ethinyl estradiol. It was so easy it was scary. He was all the time making big cow eyes at Brandy.

We were all running from something. Vaginoplasty. Aging. The future.

Jump to Los Angeles.

Jump to Spokane.

Jump to Boise and San Diego and Phoenix.

Jump to Vancouver, British Columbia, where we were Italian expatriates speaking English as a second language until there wasn't a native tongue among us.

"You have two of the breasts of a young woman," Alfa Romeo told a realtor I can't remember in which house.

From Vancouver, we reentered the United States as Brandy, Seth, and Bubba-Joan via the Princess Princess's very professional mouth. All the way to Seattle, Brandy read to us how a little Jewish girl with a mysterious muscle disease turned herself into Rona Barrett.

All of us looking at big rich houses, picking up drugs, renting cars, buying clothes, and taking clothes back.

"Tell us a gross personal story," Brandy says en route to Seattle. Brandy all the time being the boss of me. Being this close to death herself.

Rip yourself open.

Tell me my life story before I die.

Sew yourself shut.

Jump way back to a fashion shoot at this slaughterhouse where whole pigs without their insides hang as thick as fringe from a moving chain. Evie and me wear Bibo Kelley stainless steel party dresses while the chain zips by behind us at about a hundred pigs an hour, and Evie says, "After your brother was mutilated, then what?"

The photographer looks at his light meter and says, "Nope. No way."

The art director says, "Girls, we're getting too much glare off the carcasses."

Each pig goes by big as a hollow tree, all red and shining inside and covered in this really nice pigskin on the outside just after someone's singed the hair off with a blowtorch. This makes me feel all stubbly by comparison, and I have to count back to my last waxing.

And Evie goes, "Your brother?"

And I'm, like, counting Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday ...

"How did he go from being mutilated to being dead?" Evie says.

These pigs keep going by too fast for the art director to powder down their shine. You have to wonder how pigs keep their skin so nice. If now farmers use sunblock or what. Probably, I figure it's been a month since I was as smooth as they are. The way some salons use their new lasers, even with the cooling gel, they might as well use a blowtorch.

"Space girl," Evie says to me. "Phone home."

The whole pig place is refrigerated too much to wear a stainless steel dress around. Guys in white A-line coats and boots with low heels get to spray super-heated steam in where the pigs insides were, and I'm ready to trade them jobs. I'm ready to trade jobs with the pigs, even. To Evie, I say, "The police wouldn't buy the hairspray story. They were sure my father had raged on Shane's face. Or my mom had put the hairspray can in the trash. They called it 'neglect.'"

The photographer says, "What if we regroup and backlight the carcasses?"

"Too much strobe effect as they go past," the art director says.

Evie says, "Why'd the police think that?"

"Beats me," I say. "Somebody just kept making anonymous calls to them."

The photographer says, "Can we stop the chain?"

The art director says, "Not unless we can stop people from eating meat."

We're still hours away from taking a real break, and Evie says, "Somebody lied to the police?"

The pig guys are checking us out, and some are pretty cute. They laugh and slide their hands up and down fast on their shiny black steamhoses. Curling their tongues at us. Flirting.

"Then Shane ran away," I tell Evie. "Simple as that. A couple years ago, my folks got a call he was dead."

We step back as close as we can to the pigs going by, still warm. The floor seems to be really greasy, and Evie starts telling me about an idea she has for a remake of Cinderella, only instead of the little birds and animals making her a dress, they do cosmetic surgery. Bluebirds give her a facelift. Squirrels give her implants. Snakes, liposuction. Plus, Cinderella starts out as a lonely little boy.

"As much attention as he got," I tell Evie, "I'd bet my brother put that hairspray can in the fire himself.”

Jump to one time, nowhere special, just Brandy and me shopping along a main street of stores in some Idaho town with a Sears outlet, a diner, a day-old bakery store, and a realtor's office with our own Mr. White Westing-house gone inside to hustle some realtor. We go into a secondhand dress shop. This is next door to the day-old bargain bakery, and Brandy says how her father used to pull this stunt with pigs just before he took them to market. She says how he used to feed them expired desserts he bought by the truckload from this kind of bakery outlet. Sunlight comes down on us through clean air. Bears and mountains are within walking distance.

Brandy looks at me over a rack of secondhand dresses.

"You know about that kind of scam? The one with the pigs, sweetness?" she says.

He used to stovepipe potatoes, her father. You hold the burlap bag open and stand a length of stovepipe inside. All around the pipe, you put big potatoes from this year's crop. Inside the pipe you put last year's soft, bruised, cut, and rotting potatoes so folks can't see them from through the burlap. You pull the stovepipe out, and you stitch the bag shut tight so nothing inside can shift. You sell them roadside with your kids helping, and even at a cheap price, you're making money.

We had a Ford that day in Idaho. It was brown inside and out.

Brandy pushes the hangers apart, checking out every dress on the rack and says, "You ever hear of anything in your whole life so underhanded?"

Jump to Brandy and me in a secondhand store on that same main street, behind a curtain, crowded together in a fitting room the size of a phone booth. Most of the crowding is a ball gown Brandy needs me to help get her into, a real Grace Kelly of a dress with Charles James written all over it. Baffles and plenums and all that high-stressed skeletoning engineered inside a skin of shot pink organza or ice blue velveteen.

These most incredible dresses, Brandy tells me, the constructed ball gowns, the engineered evening dresses with their hoops and strapless bodices, their stand-up horseshoe collars and flaring shoulders, nipped waists, their stand-away peplums and bones, they never last very long. The tension, the push and pull of satin and crepe de Chine trying to control the wire and boning inside, the battle of fabric against metal, this tension will shred them. As the outsides age, the fabric, the part you can see, as it gets weak, the insides start to poke and tear their way out.