Invisible Monsters

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

My dress I carry my ass around Evie's wedding in is tighter than skin tight. It's what you'd call bone tight. It's that knockoff print of the Shroud of Turin, most of it brown and white, draped and cut so the shiny red buttons all button through the stigmata. Then I'm wearing yards and yards of black silk gloves bunched up on my arms. My heels are nosebleed high. I wrap Brandy's half mile of black tulle studded with sparkle up around my scar tissue, over the shining cherry pie where my face used to be, wrapped tight, until only my eyes are out. It's a look that's bleak and morbid. The feeling is we've got a little out of control.

It takes more effort to hate Evie than it used to. My whole life is moving farther away from any reason to hate her. It's moving far away from reason itself. It takes a cup of coffee and a Dexedrine capsule to feel even vaguely pissed about anything.

Brandy, she wears the knock-off Bob Mackie suit with the little peplum skirt and the big, I don't know, and the thin, narrow I couldn't care less. She wears a hat, since it's a wedding, after all. Got some shoes on her feet made from the skin of some animal. Accessorized including jewelry, you know, stones dug out of the earth, polished and cut to reflect light, set in alloys of gold and copper, atomic weight, melted and beat with hammers, all of it so labor intensive. Meaning, all of Brandy Alexander.

Ellis, he wears a double-breasted, whatever, a suit, a single vent in the back, black. He looks the way you'd imagine yourself dead in a casket if you're a guy, not a problem for me, since Ellis has outlived his role in my life.

Ellis's strutting around now that he's proved he can seduce something in every category. Not that knobbing Mr. Parker makes him King of Fag Town, but now he's got Evie under his belt, and maybe enough time's gone by Ellis can go back on duty, get his old beat back in Washington Park.

So we take the gold-engraved wedding invitation that I stole, Brandy and Ellis each take a Percodan, and we go to Evie's wedding reception moment.

Jump to eleven o'clock ante meridiem at the baronial West Hills manor house of crazy Evie Cottrell, gun-happy Evie, newly united Mrs. Evelyn Cottrell Skinner, as if I could care at this point. And. This is oh so dazzling. Evie, she could be the wedding cake, in tier on tier of sashes and flowers rising around her big hoop skirt, up and up to her cinched waist, then her big Texas breasts popped out the top of a strapless bodice. There's so much of her to decorate, the same as Christmas at a shopping mall. Silk flowers are bunched at one side of her waist. Silk flowers over both ears anchor a veil thrown back over her blonde on blonde sprayed-up hair. In that hoop skirt and those pushed-up Texas grapefruit, the girl walks around riding her own parade float.

Full of Champagne and Percodan interactions, Brandy is looking at me.

And I'm amazed I never saw it before, how Evie was a man. A big blonde, the same as she is here, but with one of those ugly wrinkled, you know, scrotums.

Ellis is hiding from Evie, trying to scope out if her new husband as yet another notch in his special contract vice operative resume. Ellis, how this story looks from his point of view is he's still major sport bait winning proof he can bust any man after the long fight. Everybody here thinks the whole story is about them. Definitely that goes for everybody in the world.

Oh, and this is gone way beyond sorry, Mom. Sorry,

God. At this point, I'm not sorry for anything. Or anybody.

No, really, everybody here's just itching to be cremated.

Jump to upstairs. In the master bedroom, Evie's trousseau is laid out ready to be packed. I brought my own matches this time, and I light the hand-torn edge of the gold-engraved invitation, and I carry the invitation from the bedspread to the trousseau to the curtains. It's the sweetest of moments when the fire takes control, and you're no longer responsible for anything.

I take a big bottle of Chanel Number Five from Evie's bathroom and a big bottle of Joy and a big bottle of White Shoulders, and I slosh the smell of a million parade float flowers all over the bedroom.

The fire, Evie's wedding inferno finds the trail of flowers in alcohol and chases me out into the hallway. That's what I love about fire, how it would kill me as quick as anybody else. How it can't know I'm its mother. It's so beautiful and powerful and beyond feeling anything for anybody, that's what I love about fire.

You can't stop any of this. You can't control. The fire in Evie's clothes is just more and more every second, and now the plot moves along without you pushing.

And I descend. Step-pause-step. The invisible showgirl. For once, what's happening is what I want. Even better than I expected. Nobody's noticed.

Our world is speeding straight ahead into the future. Flowers and stuffed mushrooms, wedding guests and string quartet, we're all going there together on the Planet Brandy Alexander. In the front hall, there's the Princess Princess thinking she's still in control.

The feeling is of supreme and ultimate control over all. Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.

"Where did you go?" Brandy says.

The immediate future, I would tell her.