Invisible Monsters Remix

until an artery in her throat just bursts.”

“Hallelujah,” Seth says, all teared up again.

“And here”—Brandy licks the pad of a big index finger and flips ahead a few pages—“on page two hundred and twenty-two, Rona is once more rejected by her sleazy boyfriend of eleven years. She’s been coughing for weeks so she takes a handful of pills and is found semicomatose and dying. Even the ambulance—”

“Praise God,” Seth says.

Various native plants are growing just wherever they want.

“Seth, sweetness,” Brandy says. “Don’t step on my lines.” Her Plumbago lips say, “Even the ambulance driver thought our Miss Rona would be DOA.”

Clouds composed of water vapor are up in the, you know, sky.

Brandy says, “Now, Seth.”

And Seth says, “Hallelujah!”

The wild daisies and Indian paintbrush whizzing past are just the genitals of a different life-form.

And Seth says, “So what are you saying?”

“In the book Miss Rona, copyright 1974,” Brandy says, “Rona Barrett—who got her enormous breasts when she was nine years old and wanted to cut them off with scissors—she tells us in the prologue of her book that she’s like this animal, cut open with all its vital organs glistening and quivering, you know, like the liver and the large intestine. Such visuals, everything sort of dripping and pulsating. Anyway, she could wait for someone to sew her back up, but she knows no one will. She has to take a needle and thread and sew herself up.”

“Gross,” says Seth.

“Miss Rona says nothing is gross,” Brandy says. “Miss Rona says the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”

Flocks of self-absorbed little native birds seem obsessed with finding food and picking it up with their mouths.

Brandy pulls the rearview mirror around until she finds me reflected and says, “Bubba-Joan, sweetness?”

It’s obvious the native birds have to build their own do-it-yourself nests using materials they source locally. The little sticks and leaves are just sort of heaped together.

“Bubba-Joan,” Brandy Alexander says. “Why don’t you open up to us with a story?”

Seth says, “Remember the time in Missoula when the princess got so ripped she ate Nebalino suppositories wrapped in gold foil because she thought they were Almond Roca? Talk about your semiconscious DOAs.”

Pine trees are producing pine cones. Squirrels and mammals of all sexes spend all day trying to get laid. Or giving birth live. Or eating their young.

Brandy says, “Seth, sweetness?”

“Yes, Mother.”

What only looks like bulimia is how bald eagles feed their young.

Brandy says, “Why is it you have to seduce every living thing you come across?”

Another billboard:

Nubby’s Is the BBQ Gotta-Stop for Savory, Flavory Chicken Wings

Another billboard:

Dairy Bite—The Chewing Gum Flavored with the Low-Fat Goodness of Real Cheese

Seth giggles. Seth blushes and twists some of his hair around a finger. He says, “You make me sound so sexually compulsive.”

Mercy. Next to him, I feel so butch.

“Oh, baby,” Brandy says, “you don’t remember half of who you’ve been with.” She says, “Well, I only wish I could forget it.”

To my breasts in the rearview mirror, Seth says, “The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.”

I figure, a few more days of increased micronized progesterone, and Seth should pop out his own nice rack of hooters. Side effects I need to watch for include nausea, vomiting, jaundice, migraine, abdominal cramps, and dizziness. You try to remember the exact toxicity levels, but why bother.

A sign goes by saying: Seattle 130 miles.

“Come on, let’s see those glistening, quivering innards, Bubba-Joan,” Brandy Alexander, God and mother of us all, commands. “Tell us a gross personal story.”

She says, “Rip yourself open. Sew yourself shut,” and she hands a prescription pad and an Aubergine Dreams eyebrow pencil to me in the backseat.

Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter 5

on’t look for me to ever tell my folks about the accident. You know, a whole long-distance telephone crying jag about the bullet and the emergency room. That’s not anywhere we’re going. I told my folks, as soon as I could write them a letter, that I was going on a catalogue shoot in Cancun, Mexico, for Espre.

Six months of fun, sand, and me trying to suck the lime wedges out of long-necked bottles of Mexican beer. Guys just love watching babes do that. Go figure. Guys.

She loves clothes from Espre, my mom writes back. She writes how, since I’ll be in the Espre catalogue, could I maybe get her a discount on her Christmas order.

Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.

She writes back: Well, be pretty for us. Love and kisses.

Most times, it’s just a lot easier not to let the world know what’s wrong. My folks, they call me Bump. I was the bump inside my Mom’s stomach for nine months; they’ve called me Bump from since before I was born. They live a two-hour drive from me, but I never visit. What I mean is they don’t need to know every little hair about me.

In one letter my mom writes:

At least with your brother, we know whether he’s dead or alive.

My dead brother, the King of Fag Town. The voted best at everything. The basketball king until he was sixteen and his test for strep throat came back as gonorrhea, I only know I hated him.

It’s not that we don’t love you, my mom writes in one letter, it’s just that we don’t show it.

Besides, hysteria is only possible with an audience. You know what you need to do to keep alive. Folks will just screw you up with their reactions about how what happened is so horrible. First the emergency room folks letting you go ahead of them. Then the Franciscan nun screaming. Then the police with their hospital sheet.

Jump to how life was when you were a baby and you could only eat baby food. You’d stagger over to the coffee table. You’re up on your feet and you have to keep waddling along on those Vienna sausage legs or fall down. Then you get to the coffee table and bounce your big soft baby head on the sharp corner.

You’re down, and man, oh, man, it hurts. Still it isn’t anything tragic until Mom and Dad run over.

Oh, you poor, brave thing.

Only then do you cry.

Jump to Brandy and me and Seth going to the top of the Space Needle thing in Seattle, Washington. This is our first stop after the Canadian border except us stopping so I could run buy Seth a coffee—cream, sugar, and Climara—and a Coca-Cola—extra Estrace, no ice. It’s eleven, and the Space Needle closes at midnight, and Seth says there are two types of people in the world.

The Princess Alexander wanted to find a nice hotel first, someplace with valet parking and tile bathrooms. We might have time for a nap before she has to go out and sell medications.