Invisible Monsters

CHAPTER NINETEEN

When 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 lipo-sucked, 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 visa 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 lowers 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 backwardsfrom 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 six-teen-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 AM 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.

Not that I really love her. Him. Shane.

Already the word love is sounding pretty thin.

Hermes scarf on her head, Ray-Bans on her head, makeup on her face, I look at the queen supreme in the pulse- pulse, then pulse-pulse, then pulse-pulse of oncoming headlights. What I see when I look at Brandy, this is what Manus saw when he took me sailing.

Right now, looking at flashes of Brandy beside me in Manus's car, I know what it is I loved about her. What I love is myself. Brandy Alexander just looks exactly the way I looked before the accident. Why wouldn't she? She's my brother, Shane. Shane and I were almost the same height, born one year apart. The same coloring. The same features. The same hair, only Brandy's hair is in better shape.

Add to this her lipo, her silicone, her trachea shave, her brow shave, her scalp advance, her forehead realignment, her rhino contouring to smooth her nose, her maxomil-liary operations to shape her jaw. Add to all that years of electrolysis and a handful of hormones and antiandrogens every day, and it's no wonder I didn't recognize her.

Plus the idea my brother's been dead for years. You just don't expect to meet dead people.

What I love is myself. I was so beautiful.

My love cargo, Manus LockedInTheTrunk, Manus TryingToKillMe, how can I keep thinking I love Manus? Manus is just the last man who thought I was beautiful. Who kissed me on the lips. Who touched me. Manus is just the last man who ever told me he loved me.

You count down the facts and it's so depressing.

I can only eat baby food.

My best friend screwed my fiance.

My fiance almost stabbed me to death.

I've set fire to a house and been pointing a rifle at innocent people all night.

My brother I hate has come back from the dead to upstage me.

I'm an invisible monster, and I'm incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which is worse. Jump to me wetting a washcloth in the vanity sink. In the undersea bathroom grotto even the towels and washcloths are aqua and blue, with a scalloped shell motif along the hems. I put the cold, wet washcloth on Brandy's forehead and wake her up, so's she can take more pills. Die in the car instead of this bathroom.

I haul Brandy to her feet and stuff the princess back into her suit jacket.

We have to walk her around before anybody sees her this way.

I strap her high heels back on her feet. Brandy, she leans on me. She leans on the edge of the countertop. She picks up a handful of Bilax capsules and squints down at them.

"My back is killing me," Brandy says. " Why'd I ever let them give me such big tits?"

The queen supreme looks ready to swallow a handful of anything.

I shake my head, No.

Brandy squints at me, "But I need these."

In the Physicians' Desk Reference, I show her Bilax, bowel evacuant.

"Oh," Brandy turns her hand over to spill the Bilax into her purse, and some capsules fall but some stick to the sweat on her palm. "After they give you the tits, your nipples are cockeyed and way too high," she says, "they use a razor to shave the nipples off, and they relocate them.”

That's her word.

Relocate.

The Brandy Alexander Nipple Relocation Program.

My dead brother, the late Shane, shakes the last bowel evacuant off her damp palm. Rrandy says, "I have no sensation in my nipples."

Off the counter, I get my veils and put layer after layer over my head.

Thank you for not sharing.

We walk up and down the second floor hallways until Rrandy says she's ready for the stairs. Step at a time, quiet, we go down to the foyer. Across the foyer, through the double doors closed on the drawing room, you can hear Mr. Parker's deep voice saying something soft, over and over.

Brandy leaning on me, we tiptoe a slow three-legged race across the foyer, from the foot of the stairs to the drawing room doors. We crack the doors open some inches and poke our faces through the crack.

Ellis is laid out on the drawing room carpet.

Mr. Parker is sitting on Ellis's chest with a size seventeen wingtip planted on each side of Ellis's head.

Ellis's hands slap Parker's big ass, claw at the back of the double-breasted jacket. The single vent in Mr. Parker's jacket is torn open along the seam up the middle of his back to his collar.

Mr. Parker's hands, the heel of one hand crams a soggy, gnawed eel-skin wallet between Ellis's capped teeth.

Ellis's face is dark red and shining the way you'd look if you got the cherry pie in the pie eating contest. A runny finger painting mess of nosebleed and tears, snot and drool.

Mr. Parker, his hair is fallen over his eyes. His other hand is a fist around five inches of Ellis's pulled out-tongue.

Ellis's slapping and gagging between Mr. Parker's thick legs.

Broken Ming vases and other collectibles are all around them on the floor.

Mr. Parker says, "That's right. Just do that. That's nice. Just relax."

Brandy and me, watching.

Me wanting Ellis destroyed, this is all just too perfect to spoil.

I tug on Brandy. Brandy, honey. We better walk you back upstairs. Rest you some more. Give you a nice fresh handful of Benzedrine spansules.

and want to make them happy, but you still want to make up your own rules.

The surgeons said, you can't just cut off a lump of skin one place and bandage it on another. You're not grafting a tree. The blood supply, the veins and capillaries just wouldn't be hooked up to keep the graft alive. The lump would just die and fall off.

It's scary, but now when I see somebody blush, my reaction isn't: oh, how cute. A blush only reminds me how blood is just under the surface of everything.

Doing dermabrasion, this one plastic surgeon told me, is about the same as pressing a ripe tomato against a belt sander. What you're paying for most is the mess.

To relocate a piece of skin, to rebuild a jaw, you have to flay a long strip of skin from your neck. Cut up from the base of your neck, but don't sever the skin at the top.

Picture a sort of banner or strip of skin hanging down loose along your neck but still attached to the bottom of your face. The skin is still attached to you, so it still gets blood. This strip of skin is still alive. Take the strip of skin and roll it into a tube or column. Leave it rolled until it heals into a long, dangling lump of flesh, hanging from the bottom of your face. Living tissue. Full of fresh, healthy blood, flapping and dangling warm against your neck. This is a pedicle.

Just the healing part, that can take months.

Clatter and tintinnabulation of ringing metal against metal chimes and gongs in the car around us.

"Sorry, I guess," Brandy says. "There's shit on the floor, got under the brake pedal when I tried to stop."

Music bright as silver rolls out from under our car seats. Napkin rings and silver teaspoons rush forward against our feet. Brandy's got candlesticks between her feet. A silver platter bright with starlight is slid half out from under the front of Brandy's seat, looking up between her long legs.

Brandy looks at me. Her chin tucked down, Brandy lowers her Ray-Bans to the end of her nose and arches her penciled eyebrows.

I shrug. I get out to liberate my love cargo.

Even with the trunk open, Manus doesn't move. His knees are against his elbows, his hands clasped in his face, his feet tucked back under his butt; Manus could be a fetus in army fatigues. All around him, I hadn't noticed. I've been under a lot of stress tonight, so forgive me if I didn't notice back at Evie's house, but all around Manus flash pieces of silverware. Pirate treasure in the trunk of his Fiat, and other things.

Relics.

A long white candle, there's a candle.

Brandy slams out of her seat and comes to look, too.

"Oh my shit," Brandy says and rolls her eyes. "Oh my shit."

There's an ashtray, no, it's a plaster cast of a little hand, "It's okay."

There's a little rushing sound, the sound of rain on the roof of a tent or a closed convertible.

"Oh, God," Brandy steps back. "Oh, sweet Christ!"

Manus blinks and peers at Brandy, then at his lap. One leg of his army fatigues goes darker, darker, darker to the knee.

"Cute," Brandy says, "but he's just peed his pants."

Jump back to plastic surgery. Jump to the happy day you're healed. You've had this long strip of skin hanging off your neck for a couple months, only it's not just one strip. There are probably more like a half-dozen pedicles because you might as well do a lot at once so the plastic surgeon has more tissue to work with.

For reconstruction, you'll have these long dangling strips of skin hanging off the bottom of your face for about two months.

They say that what people notice first about you is your eyes. You'll give up that hope. You look like some meat byproduct ground up and pooped out by the Num Num Snack Factory.

A mummy coming apart in the rain.

A broken pinata.

These strips of warm skin flapping around your neck are good, blood-fed living tissue. The surgeon lifts each strip and attaches the healed end to your face. This way,

Now Manus peers at me, sits up and scrapes his head on the open trunk lid. Man, oh, man, you know this hurts, still it isn't anything tragic until Brandy Alexander chimes in with her overreaction. "Oh, you poor thing," she says.

Then Manus boo-hoos. Manus Kelley, the last person who has any right to, is crying.

I hate this.

Jump to the day the skin grafts take, and even then the tissue will need some support. Even if the grafts heal to where they look like a crude, lumpy jaw, you'll still need a jawbone. Without a mandible, the soft mass of tissue, living and viable as it is, might just reabsorb.

That's the word the plastic surgeons used.

Reabsorb.

Into my face, as if I'm just a sponge made of skin.

Jump to Manus crying and Brandy bent over him, cooing and petting his sexy hair.

In the trunk, there's a pair of bronze baby shoes, a silver chafing dish, a turkey picture made of macaroni glued to construction paper.

"You know," Manus sniffs and wipes the back of his hand under his nose. "I'm high right now so it's okay if I tell you this." Manus looks at Brandy bent over him and me crouched in the dirt. "First," Manus says, "your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life."

To make you a jawbone, the surgeons will break off parts of your shinbones, complete with the attached artery. First they expose the bone and sculpt it right there on your leg.

Another way is the surgeons will break several other bones, probably long bones in your legs and arms. Inside these bones is the soft cancellous bone pulp.

That was the surgeons' word and the word from the books.

Cancellous.

"My mom," Manus says, "and her new husband—my mom gets married a lot—they just bought this resort condo in Bowling River in Florida. People younger than sixty can't buy property there. That's a law they have."

I'm looking at Brandy, who's still the overreactive mother, kneeling down, brushing the hair off Manus's forehead. I'm looking over the cliff edge next to us. Those little blue lights in all the houses, that's people watching television. Tiffany's light blue. Valium blue. People in captivity.

First my best friend and now my brother is trying to steal my fiance.

Jump to Manus sitting in his piss and silver in the trunk of his red sports car. Potty training flashback. It happens.

Me, I'm crouched in front of him, looking for the bulge of his wallet.

Manus just stares at Brandy. Probably thinking Brandy's me, the old me with a face.

Brandy's lost interest. "He doesn't remember. He thinks

I'm his mother," Brandy says. "Sister, maybe, but mother?"

So deja vu. Try brother.

We need a place to stay, and Manus must have a new place. Not thp ???

"I went to visit them at Christmas, last year," Manus says. "My mom, their condo is right on the eighth green, and they love it. It's like the whole age standard in Bowling River is fucked. My mom and stepdad are just turned sixty, so they're just youngsters. Me, all these oldsters are scoping me out like an odds-on car burglary."

Brandy licks her lips.

"According to the Bowling River age standard," Manus says, "I haven't been born yet."

You have to break out large enough slivers of this soft, bloody bone pulp. The cancellous stuff. Then you have to insert these shards and slivers of bone into the soft mass of tissue you've grafted onto your face.

Really, you don't do this, the surgeons do it all while you're asleep.

If the slivers are close enough together, they'll form fibroblast cells to bond with each other. Again, a word from the books.

Fibroblast.

Again, this takes months.

"My mom and her husband," Manus says, sitting in the open trunk of his Fiat Spider on top of Rocky Butte, "for Christmas, their biggest present to me is this box all wrapped up. It's the size of a high-end stereo system or a wide-screen television. This is what I'm hoping. I mean, it could've been anything else, and I would've liked it more."

Manus slides one foot down to the ground, then the other. On his feet, Manus turns back to the Fiat full of silver.

"No," Manus says, "they give me this shit."

Manus in his commando boots and army fatigues takes a big fat-belly silver teapot out of the trunk and looks at himself reflected fat in the convex side. "The whole box," Manus says, "is full of all this shit and heirlooms that nobody else wants."

Just like me pitching Evie's crystal cigarette box against the fireplace, Manus hauls off and fast pitches the teapot out into the darkness. Over the cliff, out over the darkness and the lights of suburbia, the teapot flies so far that you can't hear it land.

Not turning around, Manus reaches back and grabs another something. A silver candlestick. "This is my legacy," Manus says. Pitched overhand into the darkness, the candlestick turns end over end, silent the way you imagine satellites fly.

"You know," Manus pitches a glittering handful of napkin rings, "how your parents are sort of like God. Sure, you love them and want to know they're still around, but you never really see them unless they want something."

The silver chafing dish flies up, up, up, to the stars and then falls down to land somewhere among the blue TV lights.

And after the shards of bone have grown together to give you a new jawbone inside the lump of grafted skin, then the surgeon can try to shape this into something you can talk with and eat with and keep slathered in make-up.

This is years of pain later.

Years of living in the hope that what you'll get will be better than what you have. Years of looking and feeling

worse in the hope that you might look better.

Manus grabs the candle, the white candle from the trunk.

"My mom," Manus says, "her number two Christmas present to me was a box full of all the stuff from when I was a kid that she saved." Manus says, "Check it out," and holds up the candle, "my baptism candle."

Off into the darkness, Manus pitches the candle.

The bronze baby shoes go next.

Wrapped in a christening gown.

Then a scattering handful of baby teeth.

"Fuck," Manus says, "the damn tooth fairy."

A lock of blond hair inside a locket on a chain, the chain swinging and let go bola-style from Manus's hand, disappears into the dark.

"She said she was giving me this stuff because she just didn't have any room for it," Manus says. "It's not that she didn't want it."

The plaster print of the second-grade hand goes end over end, off into the darkness.

"Well, Mom, if it isn't good enough for you," Manus says, "I don't want to carry this shit around, either."

Jump to all the times when Brandy Alexander gets on me about plastic surgery, then I think of pedicles. Reabsorb-tion. Fibroblast cells. Cancellous bone. Years of pain and hope, and how can I not laugh.

Laughter is the only sound left I can make that people will understand.

Brandy, the well-meaning queen supreme with her tits siliconed to the point she can't stand straight, she says: Just look to see what's out there.

How can I stop laughing.

I mean it, Shane, I don't need the attention that bad.

I'll just keep wearing my veils.

If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

Jump to the silver punch ladle flying off to nowhere.

Jump to each teaspoon, gone.

Jump to all the grade school report cards and class pictures sailed off.

Manus crumbles a thick piece of paper.

His birth certificate. And chucks it out of existence. Then Manus stands rocking heel-toe, heel-toe, hugging himself.

Brandy is looking at me to say something. In the dirt, with my finger I write:

manus where do you live these days?

Little cold touches land on my hair and peachy-pink shoulders. It's raining.

Brandy says, "Listen, I don't want to know who you are, but if you could be anybody, who would you be?"

"I'm not getting old, that's for sure" Manus says, shaking his head. "No way." Arms crossed, he rocks heel-toe, heel-toe. Manus tucks his chin to his chest and rocks, looking down at all the broken bottles.

It's raining harder. You can't smell my smoky ostrich feathers or Brandy's L'Air du Temps.

"Then you're Mr. Denver Omelet," Brandy says. "Denver Omelet, meet Daisy St. Patience." Brandy's ring-beaded hand opens to full flower and lays itself across her forty-six inches of siliconed glory. "These," she says, "this is Brandy Alexander.”