Invisible Monsters Remix

Chapter 9

here you’re supposed to be is Spitefield Park, a hundred acres on the edge of town. If it were an oil well, you’d call Spitefield a gusher. It’s a hundred acres of nowhere that Daisy turned into a gold mine. It’s world-famous, in a quiet sort of way. The place makes money hand over fist, and more or less takes care of itself. Spitefield is a cemetery. A boneyard. What gives it a leg up on its competitors is Lady Daisy’s liberal epitaph policy. Other cemeteries, bone orchards, what have you, they’re run by proper world religions, obsessed with decorum. Daisy’s competition wasn’t ever going to let you carve on your tombstone the words:

So I’m dead. It beats working retail at Christmas

At Spitefield Park, you can carve whatever sentiments you want. Mostly people buy graves there for their loved ones—using that term strictly as a euphemism. They pay huge sums for extra-large grave markers, granite billboards, really, that say things like:

I was a shitty husband and father. I couldn’t die fast enough

Guilt and sadness sell a lot of big-ticket caskets. Mausoleums. Solid mahogany and burnished-brass handles and great, huge wreathes of carnations. But anger …revenge …that’s where the big spenders flock. The mourners, when they go to plant Grandma under a headstone that says:

Cunt

…they don’t care if you mow the grass and maintain the lovely landscaping. Daisy made her original fortune from this type of payback. These survivors don’t care if homeless people camp on the grave or off-leash dogs defecate there. Rambunctious teenagers go marauding on Halloween, pushing over a few tombstones, and nobody will raise a fuss. People who inter their dead at Spitefield Park, they never come back for a second look. They never bring flowers or miniature decorated trees on Christmas or bunches of helium balloons to bob and flutter their flashy Mylar in celebration of a dead person’s birthday. Oh, but the tourists come. The you-gotta-see-this local hipsters bring their snarky tourist friends for a laugh. For an I-can’t-believe-somebody-did-this tour. Art students snap the kind of ironic pictures you’d expect. No bereaved survivors check for correct spelling or dates. Sometimes they pay extra—sometimes a lot extra, that’s where the pure profit is: the add-on expenses—to get names misspelled. Letters transposed. Freudian slips chiseled into marble.

She sleeps with the angles

With no overhead, the profit margin is stupendous. With such an income stream Daisy St. Patience need do nothing except count her money, and it’s this cash flow from Spitefield Park that gives her some elbow room. Daisy can take her own sweet time to assemble a top-notch stable. Daisy St. Patience: Loving Do-Gooder. Empathetic Hand-Holder.

It was Daisy who went to the Blue Girls everyone had forgotten about. Candy-Striper Daisy volunteered to bring cheer to those living nightmares consigned by next-of-kin to state hospitals, to locked wards, to watching television with their runny eyes for a lifetime on account of having a lumpy head the size of a microwave oven carved from gouda cheese. The Elephant Women. Those twisted, shambling gals with faces like torched Halloween masks. Their smiles like lumpy, red, knobby pomegranates turned inside out. The Born-That-Way girls. The In-a-Terrible-Accident girls, and the There-But-for-the-Grace-of-God girls. Like no one you’d want to meet in a dark alley late at night. Those horror movie ladies with heartbreaking names like “Fern” and “Penny,” Daisy sought them out and mentored them. These young cripples who crawled toward her on legs like boneless tentacles, and looked at her with their blue eyes set in faces like blood-red cauliflower, for them Lady Daisy lifted the hem of her own veil like a stage curtain. This is what Daisy St. Patience did after the end of the end of the last chapter. She did not don a veil and become a belly dancer. Nor did she take up playing ice hockey as a lifetime excuse to wear a goalie mask. Lady Daisy went to these wretched young ladies. Girls who, from their faces, you’d scarcely guess were still human. Daisy St. Patience reached out to gently, warmly, passionately grasp hold of their hands or claws or flippers, and she said, “I’d like to propose a partnership …”

Of these evolutionary dead ends, these mistakes of Mother Nature, Lady Daisy asked, “How would you like to see the world?” Adding, “And vice versa.”