Invisible Monsters Remix

twenty-five pounds of dead meat in her roll-around leather desk chair.

From closer down the hallway, Sister Katherine is yelling, “Yoo-hoo!”

“Mriuvn wsi sjaoi aj,” I go, and wheel the therapist and her chair into the hallway. I say, “Jownd winc sm fdo dcncw.”

The speech therapist, she’s smiling up at me and says, “You don’t have to thank me, it’s just my job is all.”

The nun’s arrived with the man and his IV stand, a new man with no skin or crushed features or all his teeth bashed out, a man who’d be perfect for me. My one true love. My deformed or mutilated or diseased Prince Charming. My unhappily ever after. My hideous future. The monstrous rest of my life.

I slam the office door and lock myself inside with Brandy Alexander. There’s the speech therapist’s notebook on her desk, and I grab it.

save me, I write, and wave it in Brandy’s face. I write:

please.

Jump to Brandy Alexander’s hands. This always starts with her hands. Brandy Alexander puts a hand out, one of those hairy pig-knuckled hands with the veins of her arm crowded and squeezed to the elbow with bangle bracelets of every color. Just by herself, Brandy Alexander is such a shift in the beauty standard that no one thing stands out. Not even you.

“So, girl,” Brandy says. “What all happened to your face?”

Birds.

I write:

birds. birds ate my face.

And I start to laugh.

Brandy doesn’t laugh. Brandy says, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

And I’m still laughing.

i was driving on the freeway, I write.

And I’m still laughing.

someone shot a 30-caliber bullet from a rifle.

the bullet tore my entire jawbone off my face.

Still laughing.

i came to the hospital, I write.

i did not die.

Laughing.

they couldn’t put my jaw back because seagulls had eaten it.

And I stop laughing.

“Girl, your handwriting is terrible,” Brandy says. “Now tell me what else.”

And I start to cry.

what else, I write, is i have to eat baby food.

i can’t talk.

i have no career.

i have no home.

my fiance left me.

nobody will look at me.

all my clothes, my best friend ruined them.

I’m still crying.

“What else?” Brandy says. “Tell me everything.”

a boy, I write.

a little boy in the supermarket called me a monster.

Those Burning Blueberry eyes look right at me the way no eyes have all summer. “Your perception is all fucked up,” Brandy says. “All you can talk about is trash that’s already happened.”

She says, “You can’t base your life on the past or the present.”

Brandy says, “You have to tell me about your future.”

Brandy Alexander, she stands up on her gold lame leg-hold trap shoes. The queen supreme takes a jeweled compact out of her clutch bag and snaps the compact open to look at the mirror inside.

“That therapist,” those Plumbago lips say, “the speech therapist can be so stupid about these situations.”

The big jeweled arm muscles of Brandy sit me down in the seat still hot from her ass, and she holds the compact so I can see inside. Instead of face powder, it’s full of white capsules. Where there should be a mirror, there’s a close-up photo of Brandy Alexander smiling and looking terrific.

“They’re Vicodins, dear,” she says. “It’s the Marilyn Monroe school of medicine where enough of any drug will cure any disease.”

She says, “Dig in. Help yourself.”

The thin and eternal goddess that she is, Brandy’s picture smiles up at me over a sea of painkillers. This is how I met Brandy Alexander. This is how I found the strength not to get on with my former life. This is how I found the courage not to pick up the same old pieces.

“Now,” those Plumbago lips say, “you are going to tell me your story like you just did. Write it all down. Tell that story over and over. Tell me your sad-assed story all night.” That Brandy queen points a long bony finger at me.

“When you understand,” Brandy says, “that what you’re telling is just a story. It isn’t happening anymore. When you realize the story you’re telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trash can,” Brandy says, “then we’ll figure out who you’re going to be.”

Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Two

Chapter 41

here you’re supposed to be is some big West Hills wedding reception in a big manor house with flower arrangements and stuffed mushrooms all over the house. This is called scene setting: where everybody is, who’s alive, who’s dead. This is Evie Cottrell’s big wedding reception moment. Evie is standing halfway down the big staircase in the manor house foyer, naked inside what’s left of her wedding dress, still holding her rifle.

Me, I’m standing at the bottom of the stairs but only in a physical way. My mind is, I don’t know where.

Nobody’s all-the-way dead yet, but let’s just say the clock is ticking.

Not that anybody in this big drama is a real alive person, either. You can trace everything about Evie Cottrell’s look back to some television commercial for an organic shampoo, except right now Evie’s wedding dress is burned down to just the hoopskirt wires orbiting her hips and just the little wire skeletons of all the silk flowers that were in her hair. And Evie’s blond hair, her big, teased-up, back-combed rainbow in every shade of blond blown up with hairspray, well, Evie’s hair is burned off, too.

The only other character here is Brandy Alexander, who’s laid out, shotgunned, at the bottom of the staircase, bleeding to death.

What I tell myself is the gush of red pumping out of Brandy’s bullet hole is less like blood than it’s some sociopolitical tool. The thing about being cloned from all those shampoo commercials, well, that goes for me and Brandy Alexander, too. Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anybody in the world. We’re all such products.

Brandy Alexander, the long-stemmed latte queen supreme of the top-drawer party girls, Brandy is gushing her insides out through a bullet hole in her amazing suit jacket. The suit, it’s this white Bob Mackie knockoff Brandy