Invisible Monsters Remix

of total accuracy. You, who are always trying to get everything “right,” he could teach you a thing or ten. For example: don’t be in such an all-fired hurry to get everything wrapped up.

Witness how Manus recounts the story of his all-time favorite movie: Billy Zane is riding a boat with Dolores Claiborne. Also aboard are Kate Winslet and that demented kid from Gilbert Grape. The lavish interiors are spectacular, but the exteriors make the boat look a little computer-generated—genuinely video- gamey—not that you could do much better. The boat, itself, wow, this boat is gigantic, plowing through the North Atlantic, escorted by leaping porpoises, but most of what you’ll notice is how much air pollution it generates. It’s as if the entire reason for this trip is to draw a fat line of coal smoke between Southampton and Ellis Island. Inside the grand salon, Billy Zane gives Kate Winslet a big blue diamond and slugs her in the chops. The kid from Gilbert Grape draws a naked picture of her boobs. This, this is just not Kate Winslet’s day! Finally, an iceberg takes a bite out of the boat’s hull, well below the waterline. It’s exactly like Jaws but in slow motion and with ice. This grand metaphor—it’s sinking fast. As the boat stands straight up in the water, panic ensues. This gesture mimics, strangely, the moment Kate Winslet stood on her tiptoes, ballerina-style, and fell down drunk. To save two thousand Irish people from drowning, Kate shoots Billy Zane and stuffs his corpse in the leak. Nobody sees that coming. At this point there’s still three days to kill before anyone will see the Statue of Liberty; most of the actors are playing a card game called “bridge.” Hereabouts, usually Manus gets up to use the bathroom or microwave a snack. When he comes back to watch, the boat is swarming with vampires. Sometimes Manus channel-surfs, splicing in the better parts of other films. Martians blast the boat with death rays. Charleton Heston tries to rescue Ava Gardner but is washed away to a martyr’s offscreen death. The kid from Gilbert Grape dies every time—BUT NEVER SOON ENOUGH.

As far as Manus is concerned, Bill Paxton should’ve made Aliens II and quit while he was ahead. Instead, Paxton finds the naked drawing of Kate Winslet locked in an underwater safe. This is not what he wanted. He wanted the big blue diamond that a littering old woman doesn’t think to recycle. She simply heaves it into the ocean, where human beings throw all their Styrofoam cups and used diapers. Bankrupt, Bill Paxton smiles at a skinny blond girl.

That …that’s the wonderful freedom you had when you were six years old, before you caved in to logic. You had authority but you forgot it. There is no truth. Not really. There’s only the best truth.

The happy ending is that, time and time again, Manus falls asleep.

Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Three

Chapter 31

hen you go out with a drunk, you’ll notice how a drunk fills your glass so he can empty his own. As long as you’re drinking, drinking is okay. Two’s company. Drinking is fun. If there’s a bottle, even if your glass isn’t empty, a drunk, he’ll pour a little in your glass before he fills his own.

This only looks like generosity.

That Brandy Alexander, she’s always on me about plastic surgery. Why don’t I, you know, just look at what’s out there? With her chest siliconed, her hips liposucked, the 46-16-26 Katty Kathy hourglass thing she is, the fairy godmother makeover, my fair lady, Pygmalion thing she is, my brother back from the dead, Brandy Alexander is very invested in plastic surgery.

And vice versa.

Bathroom talk.

Brandy’s still laid out on the cold tile floor, high atop Capitol Hill in Seattle. Mr. Parker has come and gone. Just Brandy and me all afternoon. I’m still sitting on the open end of a huge ceramic snail shell bolted to the wall. Trying to kill her in my half-assed way. Brandy’s auburn head of hair is between my feet. Lipsticks and Demerols, blushes and Percocet 5, Aubergine Dreams and Nembutal Sodium capsules are spread out all over the aquamarine countertops around the vanity sink.

My hand, I’ve been holding a handful of Valiums so long my palm has gone Tiffany’s light blue. Just Brandy and me all afternoon with the sun coming in at lower and lower angles through the big brass porthole windows.

“My waist,” Brandy says. The Plumbago mouth looks a little too blue, Tiffany’s light blue, if you ask me. Overdose baby blue. “Sofonda said I had to have a sixteen-inch waist,” Brandy says. “I said, ‘Miss Sofonda, I am big-boned. I am six feet tall. No way am I getting down to a sixteen-inch waistline.”

Sitting on the snail shell, I’m only half listening.

“Sofonda,” Brandy says, “Sofonda says, there’s a way, but I have to trust her. When I wake up in the recovery room, I’ll have a sixteen-inch waist.”

It’s not like I haven’t heard this story in a dozen other bathrooms. Another bottle off the countertop, Bilax capsules, I look it up in the Phyicians’ Desk Reference book.

Bilax capsules. A bowel evacuant.

Maybe I should drop a few of these into that nonstop mouth between my feet.

Jump to Manus watching me do that infomercial. We were so beautiful. Me with a face. Him not so full of conjugated estrogens.

I thought we were a real love relationship. I did. I was very invested in love, but it was just this long, long sex thing that could end at any moment because, after all, it’s just about getting off. Manus would close his power-blue eyes and twist his head just so, side to side, and swallow.

And, Yes, I’d tell Manus. I came right when he did.

Pillow talk.

Almost all the time, you tell yourself you’re loving somebody when you’re just using them.

This only looks like love.

Jump to Brandy on the bathroom floor, saying, “Sofonda and Vivienne and Kitty were all with me at the hospital.” Her hands curl up off the tile, and she runs them up and down the sides of her blouse. “All three of them wore those baggy green scrub suits, wearing hairnets over their wigs and with those Duchess of Windsor costume jewelry brooches pinned on their scrub suits,” Brandy says. “They were flying around behind the surgeon and the lights, and Sofonda was telling me to count backwards from one hundred. You know …99 …98 …97 …”

The Aubergine Dreams eyes close. Brandy, pulling long, even breaths, says, “The doctors, they took out the bottom rib on each side of my chest.” Her hands rub where, and she says, “I couldn’t sit up in bed for two months, but I had a sixteen-inch waist. I still have a sixteen-inch waist.”

One of Brandy’s hands opens to full flower and slides over the flat land where her blouse tucks into the belt of her skirt. “They cut out two of my ribs, and I never saw them again,” Brandy says. “There’s something in the Bible about taking out your ribs.”

The creation of Eve.

Brandy says, “I don’t know why I let them do that to me.”

And Brandy, she’s asleep.

Jump back to the night Brandy and I started this road trip, the night we left the Congress Hotel with Brandy driving the way you can only drive at two-thirty A.M. in an open sports car with a loaded rifle and an overdosed hostage. Brandy hides her eyes behind Ray-Bans so she can drive in a little privacy. Instant glamour from another planet in the 1950s, Brandy pulls an Hermes scarf over her auburn hair and ties it under her chin.

All I can see is myself reflected in Brandy’s Ray-Bans, tiny and horrible. Still strung out and pulled apart by the cold night air around the windshield. Bathrobe still dragging shut in the car door. My face, you touch my blasted, scar-tissue face and you’d swear you were touching chunks of orange peel and leather.

Driving east, I’m not sure what we’re running from. Evie or the police or Mr. Baxter or the Rhea sisters. Or nobody. Or the future. Fate. Growing up, getting old. Picking up the pieces. As if by running we won’t have to get on with our lives. I’m with Brandy right now because I can’t imagine getting away with this without Brandy’s help. Because, right now, I need her.