Invisible Monsters Remix

Your Name Is Shane McFarland.

You Were Born Twenty-Four Years Ago.

You Have A Sister, One Year Younger.

The fire’s already eating my top line.

You Got Gonorrhea From A Special Contract Vice Operative And Your Family Threw You Out.

You Met Three Drag Queens Who Paid You To Start A Sex Change Because You Couldn’t Think Of Anything You Wanted Less.

The fire’s already eating my second line.

You Met Me.

I Am Your Sister, Shannon McFarland.

Me writing the truth in blood just minutes ahead of the fire eating it.

You Loved Me Because Even If You Didn’t Recognize Me, You Knew I Was Your Sister. On Some Level, You Knew Right Away So You Loved Me.

We traveled all over the West and grew up together again.

I’ve hated you for as long as I can remember.

And You Are Not Going To Die.

I could’ve saved you.

And you are not going to die.

The fire and my writing are now neck-and-neck.

Jump to Brandy half-bled on the floor, most of her blood wiped up by me to write with, Brandy squints to read as the fire eats our whole family history, line by line. The line And You Are Not Going To Die is almost at the floor, right in Brandy’s face.

“Honey,” Brandy says, “Shannon, sweetness, I knew all that. It was Miss Evie’s doing. She told me about you being in the hospital. About your accident.”

Such a hand model I am already. And such a rube.

“Now,” Brandy says. “Tell me everything.”

I write: I’ve Been Feeding Ellis Island Female Hormones For The Past Eight Months.

And Brandy laughs blood. “Me too!” she says.

How can I not laugh?

“Now,” Brandy says, “quick, before I die, what else?”

I write: Everybody Just Loved You More After The Hairspray Accident.

And:

And I Did Not Make That Hairspray Can Explode.

Brandy says, “I know. I did it. I was so miserable being a normal average child. I wanted something to save me. I wanted the opposite of a miracle.”

From some other room, Ellis says, “Anything you say can and may be used against you in a court of law.” And on the baseboard, I write:

The Truth Is I Shot Myself In The Face.

There’s no more room to write, no more blood to write with, and nothing left to say, and Brandy says, “You shot your own face off?”

I nod.

“That,” says Brandy, “that, I didn’t know.”

Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter 21

ump back to the La Paloma emergency room. The intravenous morphine. The tiny operating-room manicure scissors cut Brandy’s suit off. My brother’s unhappy penis there blue and cold for the whole world to see. The police photos, and Sister Katherine screaming, “Take your pictures! Take your pictures now! He’s still losing blood!”

Jump to surgery. Jump to post-op. Jump to me taking Sister Katherine aside, little Sister Katherine hugging me so hard around the knees I almost buckle to the floor. She looks at me, both of us stained with the blood, and I ask her in writing:

please.

do this one special thing for me. please. if you really want to make me happy.

Jump to Evie installed talk-show–style under the hot track lights, downtown at Brumbach’s, chatting with her mother and Manus and her new husband about how she met Brandy years before all of us, in some transgender support group. About how everybody needs a big disaster every now and then.

Jump to someday down the road soon when Manus will get his breasts.

Jump to me kneeling beside my brother’s hospital bed. Shane’s skin, you don’t know where the faded blue hospital gown ends and Shane begins, he’s so pale. This is my brother, thin and pale with Shane’s thin arms and pigeon chest. The flat auburn hair across his forehead, this is who I remember growing up with. Put together out of sticks and bird bones. The Shane I’d forgotten. The Shane from before the hairspray accident. I don’t know why I forgot, but Shane had always looked so miserable.

Jump to our folks at home at night, showing home movies against the side of their white house. The windows from twenty years ago lined up perfect with the windows now. The grass lined up with the grass. The ghosts of Shane and me as toddlers running around, happy with each other.

Jump to the Rhea sisters crowded around the hospital bed. Hairnets pulled on over their wigs. Surgical masks on their faces. They’re wearing those faded green scrub suits, the Rheas have those Duchess of Windsor costume jewelry brooches pinned on their scrubs: leopards shimmering with diamond and topaz spots. Hummingbirds with pave emerald bodies.

Me, I just want Shane to be happy. I’m tired of being me, hateful me.

Give me release.

I’m tired of this world of appearances. Pigs that only look fat. Families that look happy.

Give me deliverance.

From what only looks like generosity. What only looks like love.

Flash.

I don’t want to be me anymore. I want to be happy, and I want Brandy Alexander back. Here’s my first real dead end in my life. There’s nowhere to go, not the way I am right now, the person I am. Here’s my first real beginning.

As Shane sleeps, the Rhea sisters all crowd around, decorating him with little gifts. They’re misting Shane with L’Air du Temps as if he were a Boston fern.

New earrings. A new Hermes scarf around his head.

Cosmetics are spread in perfect rows on a surgical tray that hovers next to the bed, and Sofonda says, “Moisturizer!” and holds her hand out, palm up.

“Moisturizer,” Kitty Litter says, and slaps the tube into Sofonda’s palm.

Sofonda puts her hand out and says, “Concealer!”

And Vivienne slaps another tube into her palm and says, “Concealer.”

Shane, I know you can’t hear, but that’s okay, since I can’t talk.

With short, light strokes, Sofonda uses a little sponge to spread concealer on the dark bags under Shane’s eyes. Vivienne pins a diamond stickpin on Shane’s hospital gown.

Miss Rona saved your life, Shane. The book in your jacket pocket, it slowed the bullet enough that only your boobs exploded. It’s just a flesh wound, flesh and silicone.