I’d go to flop on the bed, center stage, hugging a pillow and looking up into the black tangle of ducts and sprinkler pipes you had to imagine was a bedroom ceiling.
“It’s not like they hit me or made me drink satanic blood or anything,” I’d say. “They just liked my brother more because he was mutilated.”
And Evie would cross to center stage by the Early American nightstand to upstage me.
“You had a mutilated brother?” she’d say.
Somebody watching us would cough. Maybe the light would glint off a wristwatch.
“Yeah, he was pretty mutilated, but not in a sexy way. Still, there’s a happy ending,” I’d say. “He’s dead now.”
And really intense, Evie would say, “Mutilated how? Was he your only brother? Older or younger?”
And I’d throw myself off the bed and shake my hair. “No, it’s too painful.”
“No, really,” Evie would say. “I’m not kidding.”
“He was my big brother by a couple years. His face was all exploded in a hairspray accident, and you’d think my folks totally forgot they even had a second child,” I’d dab my eyes on the pillow shams and tell the audience. “So I just kept working harder and harder for them to love me.”
Evie would be looking at nothing and saying, “Oh, my shit!
“Yeah,” I’d say. “He didn’t have to work at it. It was so easy. Just by being all burned and slashed up with scars, he hogged all the attention.”
Evie would go close-up on me and say, “So where’s he now, your brother, do you even know?”
“Dead,” I’d say, and I’d turn to address the audience. “Dead of AIDS.”
And Evie says, “How sure are you?”
And I’d say, “Evie!”
“No, really,” she’d say. “I’m asking for a reason.”
“You just don’t joke about AIDS,” I’d say.
And Evie’d say, “This is
This is how easy the plot gets pumped out of control. With all these shoppers expecting real drama, of course, I think Evie’s just making stuff up.
“Your brother,” Evie says, “did you really see him die? For real? Or did you see him dead? In a coffin, you know, with music. Or a death certificate?”
All those people were watching.
“Yeah,” I say. “Pretty much.” Like I’d want to get caught lying?
Evie’s all over me. “So you saw him dead or you didn’t?”
All those people watching.
“Dead enough.”
Evie says, “Where?”
“This is very painful,” I say, and I cross stage right to the living room.
Evie chases after me, saying, “Where?”
All those people watching.
“The hospice,” I say.
“What hospice?”
I keep crossing stage right to the next living room, the next dining room, the next bedroom, den, home office, with Evie dogging me and the audience hovering along next to us.
“You know how it is,” I say. “If you don’t see a gay guy for so long, it’s a pretty safe bet.”
And Evie says, “So you don’t really know that he’s dead?”
We’re sprinting through the next bedroom, living room, dining room, nursery, and I say, “It’s AIDS, Evie. Fade to black.”
And then Evie just stops and says, “Why?”
And the audience has started to abandon me in a thousand directions.
Because I really, really, really want my brother to be dead. Because my folks want him dead. Because life is just
And the crowd of shoppers has bailed, leaving just us and the security cameras instead of God watching to catch us when we fuck up.
“Why is this such a big deal to you?” I say.
And Evie’s already wandering away from me, leaving me alone and saying, “No reason.” Lost in her own little closed circuit. Licking her own butthole, Evie says, “It’s nothing.” Saying, “Forget it.”
Chapter 40
ntil I met Brandy, all I wanted was for somebody to ask me what happened to my face.
“Birds ate it,” I wanted to tell them.
Birds ate my face.
But nobody wanted to know. Then nobody doesn’t include Brandy Alexander.
Just don’t think this was a big coincidence. We had to meet, Brandy and me. We had so many things in common. We had close to everything in common. Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible every day. Brandy was in the hospital for months and months, and so was I, and there’s only so many hospitals where you can go for major cosmetic surgery.
Jump back to the nuns. The nuns were the worst about always pushing, the nuns who were nurses. One nun would tell me about some patient on a different floor who was funny and charming. He was a lawyer and could do magic tricks with just his hands and a paper napkin. This day nurse was the kind of nun who wore a white nursing version of her regular nun uniform, and she’d told this lawyer all about me. This was Sister Katherine. She told him I was funny and bright, and she said how sweet it would be if the two of us could meet and fall madly in love.
Those were her words.
Halfway down the bridge of her nose, she’d look at me through wire-framed glasses, their lenses long and squared the way microscope slides look. Little broken veins kept the end of her nose red. Rosacea, she called this. It would be easier to see her living in a gingerbread house than a convent. Married to Santa Claus instead of God. The starched apron she wore over her habit was so glaring white that when I’d first arrived, fresh from my big car accident, I remembered how all the stains from my blood looked black.
They gave me a pen and paper so I could communicate. They wrapped my head in dressings, yards of tight gauze holding wads of cotton in place, metal butterfly sutures gripping all over so I wouldn’t unravel. They fingered on a thick layer of antibiotic gel, claustrophobic and toxic under the wads of cotton.
My hair they pulled back, forgotten and hot under the gauze where I couldn’t get at it. The invisible woman.
When Sister Katherine mentioned this other patient, I wondered if maybe I’d seen him around, her lawyer, the cute, funny magician.
“I didn’t say he was cute,” she said.
Sister Katherine said, “He’s still a little shy.”
On the pad of paper, I wrote:
“Since his little mishap,” she said and smiled with her eyebrows arched and all her chins tucked down against her neck. “He wasn’t wearing his seat belt.”
