Invisible Monsters

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Jump to the moment around one o'clock in the morning in Evie's big silent house when Manus stops screaming and I can finally think.

Evie is in Cancun, probably waiting for the police to call her and say: Your house-sitter, the monster without a jaw, well, she's shot your secret boyfriend to death when he broke in with a butcher knife is our best guess.

You know that Evie's wide awake right now. In some Mexican hotel room, Evie's trying to figure out if there's a three-hour or a four-hour time difference between her big house where I'm stabbed to death, dead, and Cancun, where Evie's supposed to be on a catalogue shoot. It's not like Evie is entered in the biggest brain category. Nobody shoots a catalogue in Cancun in the peak season, especially not with big-boned cowgirls like Evie Cottrell.

But me being dead, that opens up a whole world of possibility.

I'm an invisible nobody sitting on a white damask sofa facing another white sofa across a coffee table that looks like a big block of malachite from Geology 101.

Evie slept with my fiance, so now I can do anything to her.

In the movie, where somebody is invisible all the sudden—you know, a nuclear radiation fluke or a mad scientist recipe—and you think, what would I do if I was invisible ... ? Like go into the guy's locker room at Gold's gym or, better yet, the Oakland Raiders' locker room. Stuff like that. Scope things out. Go to Tiffany's and shoplift diamond tiaras and stuff.

Just by his being so dumb, Manus could've stabbed me, tonight, thinking I was Evie, thinking Evie shot me, while I was asleep in the dark in her bed.

My dad, he'd go to my funeral and talk to everybody about how I was always about to go back to college and finish my personal fitness training degree and then no doubt go on to medical school. Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Daddy, I couldn't get past the fetal pig in Biology 101. Now I'm the cadaver.

Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.

Evie would be right next to my Mom, next to the open casket. Evie would stagger up leaning on Manus. You know, Evie would've found something totally grotesque for the undertaker to dress me in. So Evie throws an arm around my mom, and Manus can't get away from the open casket fast enough, and I'm laying there in this blue velveteen casket like the interior of a Lincoln Town Car. Of course, thank you, Evie, I'm wearing this concubine evening wear Chinese yellow silk kimono slit up the side to my waist with black fishnet stockings and red Chinese dragons embroidered across the pelvic region and my breasts.

And red high heels. And no jawbone.

Of course, Evie says to my mom: "She always loved this dress. This kimono was her favorite." Sensitive Evie would say, "Guess this makes you oh for two."

I could kill Evie.

I would pay snakes to bite her.

Evie would be wearing this little black cocktail number with an asymmetrical hemline satin skirt and a strapless bodice by Rei Kawakubo. The shoulders and sleeves would be sheer black chiffon. Evie, you know she has jewelry, big emeralds for her too green eyes and a change of accessories in her black clutch bag so she can wear this dress later, dancing.

I hate Evie.

Me, I'm rotting with my blood pumped out in this slut-ty Suzie Wong Tokyo Rose concubine drag dress where it didn't fit so they had to pin all the extra together behind my back.

I look like shit, dead.

I look like dead shit.

I would stab Evie right now over the telephone.

No, really, I'd tell Mrs. Cottrell as we placed Evie's urn in a family vault somewhere in Godawful, Texas. Really, Evie wanted to be cremated.

Me, at Evie's funeral, I'd be wearing this tourniquet-tight black leather mini dress by Gianni Versace with yards and yards of black silk gloves bunched up on my arms. I'd sit next to Manus in the back of the mortuary's big black Caddy, and I'd have on this wagon wheel of a black Christian Lacroix hat with a black veil you could take off later and go to a swell auction preview or estate sale or something and then, lunch.

Evie, Evie would be dirt. Okay, ashes.

Alone in her living room, I pick up a crystal cigarette box off the table that looks like a block of malachite, and I overhand fast-pitch this little treasure against the fireplace bricks. There's a smash with cigarettes and matches everywhere.

Bourgeoise dead girl that I am, I wish all of the sudden I hadn't done this, and I kneel down and start to pick up the mess. The glass and cigarettes. Only Evie ... a cigarette box. It's just so last- generational.

And matches.

A little tug hits my finger, and I'm cut on a shard so thin and clear it's invisible.

Oh, this is dazzling.

Only when the blood comes out to outline the shard in red, only then can I see what cut me. It's my blood on the broken glass I pull out. My blood on a book of matches.

No, Mrs. Cottrell. No, really, Evie wanted to be cremated.

I get up out of my mess, and run around leaving blood on every light switch and lamp, turning them all off. I run past the coat closet, and Manus calls, "Please," but what I have in mind is too exciting.

I turn out all the first-floor lights, and Manus calls. He has to go to the bathroom, he calls. "Please."

Evie's big plantation house with its big pillars in front is all the way dark as I feel my way back to the dining room. I can feel the door frame and count ten slow, blind footsteps across the Oriental carpet to the dining room table with its lace tablecloth.

I light a match. I light one of the candles in the big silver candelabra.

Okay, it's so Gothic Novel, but I light all five candles in the silver candelabra so heavy it takes both hands for me to lift.

Still wearing my satin peignoir set and ostrich feather bathrobe, what I am is the ghost of a beautiful dead girl carrying this candle thing up Evie's long circular staircase. Up past all the oil paintings, then down the second floor hallway. In the master bedroom, the beautiful ghost girl in her candlelit satin opens the armoires and the closets full of her own clothes, stretched to death by the giant evil Evie Cottrell. The tortured bodies of dresses and sweaters and dresses and slacks and dresses and jeans and

gowns and shoes and dresses, almost everything mutilated and misshapen and begging to be put out of its misery.

The photographer in my head says: Give me anger.

Flash.

Give me vengeance.

Flash.

Give me total and complete justified retribution.

Flash.

The already dead ghost I am, the not-occurring, the completely empowered invisible nothing I've become, I wave the candelabra past all that fabric and:

Flash.

What we have is Evie's enormous fashion inferno.

Which is dazzling.

Which is just too much fun! I try the bedspread, it's this antique Belgian lace duvet, and it burns.

The drapes, Miss Evie's green velvet portieres, they burn.

Lampshades burn.

Big shit. The chiffon I'm wearing, it's burning, too. I slap out my smoldering feathers and step backwards from Evie's master bedroom fashion furnace and into the second-floor hallway.

There are ten other bedrooms and some bathrooms, and I go room to room. Towels burn. Bathroom inferno! Chanel Number Five, it burns. Oil paintings of race horses and dead pheasants burn. The reproduction Oriental carpets burn. Evie's bad dried flower arrangements, they're these little tabletop infernos. Too cute! Evie's Katty Kathy doll, it melts, then it burns. Evie's collection of big carnival stuffed animals—Cootie, Poochie, Pam-Pam, Mr. Bunnits, Choochie, Poo Poo, and Ringer—it's a fun-fur holocaust. Too sweet. Too precious.

Back in the bathroom, I snatch one of the few things not on fire:

A bottle of Valiums.

I start down the big circular staircase. Manus, when he broke in to kill me, he left the front door open, and the second-floor inferno sucks a cool breeze of night air up the stairs around me. Blowing my candles out. Now, the only light is the inferno, a giant space heater smiling down on me, me deep fried in my eleven herbs and spices of singed chiffon.

The feeling is that I've just won some major distinguished award for a major lifetime achievement.

Like, here she is, Miss America.

Come on down.

And this kind of attention, I still love it.

At the closet door, Manus is whining about how he can smell smoke, and please, please, please don't let him die. As if I could even care right now.

No, really, Manus wanted to be cremated.

On the telephone message pad, I write

in a minute ill open the door, but i still have the gun.

before that, i'm shoving valiums under the door, eat them, do this or I'll kill you.

And I put the note under the door.

We're going out to his car in the driveway. I'm taking him away. He'll do everything I want, or wherever we end up, I'll tell the police that he broke into the house. He set the fire and used the rifle to kidnap me. I'll blab everything about Manus and Evie and their sick love affair.

The word love tastes like earwax when I think it about Manus and Evie.

I slam the butt of the rifle against the closet door, and the rifle goes off. Another inch, and I'd be dead. With me dead outside the locked door, Manus would burn.

"Yes," Manus screams. "I'll do anything. Just, please, don't let me burn to death or shoot me. Anything, just open the door!"

With my shoe, I shove the poured-out Valiums through the crack under the closet door. With the rifle out in front of me, I unlock the door and stand back. In the light from the upstairs fire, you can see how the house is filling up with smoke. Manus stumbles out, power blue bug-eyed with his hands in the air, and I march him out to his car with the rifle pressed against his back. Even at the end of a rifle, Manus's skin feels tight and sexy. Beyond this, I have no plan. All I know is I don't want anything resolved for a while. Wherever we end up, I just won't go back to normal.

I lock Manus in the trunk of his Fiat Spider. A nice car, it's a nice car, red, with the convertible top down. I slam the butt of the rifle against the trunk lid.

Nothing comes back from my love cargo. Then I wonder if he still has to pee.

I toss the rifle into the passenger seat and I go back into

Evie's plantation inferno. In the foyer, only now it's a chimney, it's a wind tunnel with the cold air rushing in the front door and up into the heat and light above me. The foyer still has that desk with the gold saxophone telephone. Smoke is everywhere, and a chorus of every smoke detector siren sirening is so loud it hurts.

It's just plain mean, making Evie in Cancun lay awake so long for her good news.

So I call the number she left. You know Evie picks up on the first ring.

And Evie says, "Hello?"

There's nothing but the sound of everything I've done, the smoke detectors and the flames, the tinkle of the chandelier as the breeze chimes through it, that's all there is to hear from her end of the conversation.

Evie says, "Manus?"

Somewhere, the dining room maybe, the ceiling crashes down and sparks and embers rush out the dining room doorway and over the foyer floor.

Evie says, "Manus, don't play games. If this is you, I said I didn't want to see you anymore."

And right then:

Crash.

A half ton of sparkling, flashing, white-light, hand-cut Austrian crystal, the big chandelier drops from the center of the foyer ceiling and explodes too close.

Another inch, and I'd be dead.

How can I not laugh. I'm already dead.

"Listen, Manus," Evie says. "I told you not to call me or I'll tell the police about how you put my best friend in the hospital without a face. You got that?"

Evie says, "You just went too far. I'll get a restraining order if I have too."

Manus or Evie, I don't know who to believe, all I know is my feathers are on fire.