Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters

How I met Manus was when I was eighteen a great-

looking guy came to the door of my parents' house and asked, did we ever hear back from my brother after he ran away?

The guy was a little older, but not out of the ballpark. Twenty-five, tops. He gave me a card that said Manus Kelley. Independent Special Contract Vice Operative. The only thing else I noticed was he didn't wear a wedding ring. He said, "You know, you look a lot like your brother." He had a glorious smile and said, "What's your name?"

"Before we go back to the car," Brandy says, "I have to tell you something about your friend. Mr. White Westing- house."

Formerly Mr. Chase Manhattan, formerly Nash Rambler, formerly Denver Omelet, formerly independent special contract vice operative Manus Kelley. I do the homework:

Manus is thirty years old. Brandy's twenty-four. When Brandy was sixteen I was fifteen. When Brandy was sixteen, maybe Manus was already part of our lives.

I don't want to hear this.

The most beautiful ancient perfect dress is gone. The silk and tulle have slipped, dropped, slumped to the fitting room floor, and the wire and boning is broken and sprung away, leaving just some red marks already fading on Brandy's skin with Brandy left standing way too close to me in just her underwear.

"It's funny," Brandy says, "but this isn't the first time I've destroyed somebody's beautiful dress," and a big Aubergine Dreams eye winks at me. Her breath and skin feel warm, she's that close.

"The night I ran away from home," Brandy says, "I burned almost every stitch of clothing my family had hanging on the clothesline."

Brandy knows about me, or she doesn't know. She's confessing her heart, or she's teasing me. If she knows, she could be lying to me about Manus. If she doesn't know, then the man I love is a freaky creepy sexual predator.

Either Manus or Brandy is being a sleazy liar to me, me, the paragon of virtue and truth here. Manus or Brandy, I don't know who to hate.

Me and Manus or Me and Brandy. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't love.

I here had to be some better way to kill Brandy. To set me free. Some quick permanent closure. Some kind of crossfire I could walk away from. Evie hates me by now. Brandy looks just like I used to. Manus is still so in love with Brandy he'd follow her anywhere, even if he's not sure why. All I'd have to do is get Brandy cross-haired in front of Evie's rifle.

Bathroom talk.

Brandy's suit jacket with its sanitary little waist and mod three-quarter sleeves is still folded on the aquamarine countertop beside the big clamshell sink. I pick up the jacket, and my souvenir from the future falls out. It's a postcard of clean, sun-bleached 1962 skies and an opening day Space Needle. You could look out the bathroom's porthole windows and see what's become of the future. Overrun with Goths wearing sandals and soaking lentils at home, the future I wanted is gone. The future I was promised. Everything I expected. The way everything was supposed to turn out. Happiness and peace and love and comfort.

When did the future, Ellis once wrote on the back of a postcard, switch from being a promise to a threat?

I tuck the postcard between the vaginoplasty brochures and the labiaplasty handouts stuck between the pages of the Miss Rona book. On the cover is a satellite photo of Hurricane Blonde just off the West Coast of her face. The blonde is crowded with pearls and what could be diamonds sparkle here and there.

She looks very happy. I put the book back in the inside pocket of Brandy's jacket. I pick up the cosmetics and drugs scattered across the countertops and I put them away. Sun comes through the porthole windows at a low, low angle, and the post office will be closing soon. There's still Evie's insurance money to pick up. At least a half million dollars, I figure. What you can do with all that money, I don't know, but I'm sure I'll find out.

Brandy's lapsed into major hair emergency status so I shake her.

Brandy's Aubergine Dreams eyes flicker, blink, flicker, squint.

Her hair, it's gotten all flat in the back.

Brandy comes up on one elbow. "You know," she says, "I'm on drugs so it's all right if I tell you this." Brandy looks at me bent over her, offering a hand up. "I have to tell you," Brandy says, "but I do love you." She says, "I can't tell how this is for you, but I want us to be a family."

My brother wants to marry me.

I give Brandy a hand up. Brandy leans on me, Brandy, she leans on the edge of the countertop. She says, "This wouldn't be a sister thing." Brandy says, "I still have some days left in my Real Life Training."

Stealing drugs, selling drugs, buying clothes, renting luxury cars, taking clothes back, ordering blender drinks, this isn't what I'd call Real Life, not by a long shot.

Brandy's ring-beaded hands open to full flower and spread the fabric of her skirt across her front. "I still have all my original equipment," she says.

The big hands are still patting and smoothing Brandy's crotch as she turns sideways to the mirror and looks at her profile. "It was supposed to come off after a year, but then I met you," she says. "I had my bags packed in the Congress Hotel for weeks just hoping you'd come to rescue me." Brandy turns her other side to the mirror and searches. "I just loved you so much, I thought maybe it's not too late?"

Brandy spreads pot gloss across her top lip and then her bottom lip, blots her lips on a tissue, and drops the big lumbago kiss into the snail shell toilet. Brandy says with her new lips. "Any idea how to flush this thing?"

Hours I sat on that toilet, and no, I never saw how to flush it. I step out into the hallway so if Brandy wants to blab at me she'll have to follow.

Brandy stumbles in the bathroom doorway where the tile meets the hallway carpet. Her one shoe, the heel is broken. Her stocking is run where it rubbed the doorframe. She's grabbed at a towel rack for balance and chipped her nail polish.

Shining anal queen of perfection, she says, "Fuck."

Princess Princess, she yells after me, "It's not that I really want to be a woman." She yells, "Wait up!" Brandy yells, "I'm only doing this because it's just the biggest mistake I can think to make. It's stupid and destructive, and anybody you ask will tell you I'm wrong. That's why I have to go through with it."

Brandy says, "Don't you see? Because we're so trained to do life the right way. To not make mistakes" Brandy says, "I figure, the bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life."

Like Christopher Columbus sailing toward disaster at the edge of the world.

Like Fleming and his bread mold.

"Our real discoveries come from chaos," Brandy yells, "from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish."

Her imperial voice everywhere in the house, she yells, "You do not walk away from me when I take a minute to explain myself!"

Her example is a woman who climbs a mountain, there's no rational reason for climbing that hard, and to some people it's a stupid folly, a misadventure, a mistake. A mountain climber, maybe she starves and freezes, exhausted and in pain for days, and climbs all the way to the top. And maybe she's changed by that, but all she has to show for it is her story.

"But me," Brandy says, still in the bathroom doorway, still looking at her chipped nail polish, "I'm making the same mistake only so much worse, the pain, the money, the time, and being dumped by my old friends, and in the end my whole body is my story."

A sexual reassignment surgery is a miracle for some people, but if you don't want one, it's the ultimate form of self-mutilation.

She says, "Not that it's bad being a woman. This might be wonderful, if I wanted to be a woman. The point is," Brandy says, "being a woman is the last thing I want. It's just the biggest mistake I could think to make."