Invisible Monsters Remix

Chapter 11

alf my life I spend hiding in the bathrooms of the rich.

Jump back to Seattle, to the time Brandy and Seth and I are on the road hunting drugs. Jump to the day after the night we went to the Space Needle, where right now Brandy is laid out flat on a master bathroom floor. First I helped her off with her suit jacket and unbuttoned the back of her blouse, and now I’m sitting on a toilet overdosing Valiums as steady as Chinese water torture into her Plumbago mouth. The thing about Valiums, the Brandy girl says, is they don’t kill the pain but at least you’re not pissed off about being hurt.

“Hit me,” Brandy says and makes a fish lips.

The thing about Brandy is she’s got such a tolerance for drugs it takes forever to kill her. That, and she’s so big, most of her being muscle, it would take bottles and bottles of anything.

I drop a Valium. A little baby-blue Valium, another powder-blue Valium, Tiffany’s light blue, like a gift from Tiffany’s, the Valium falls end over end into Brandy’s interior.

This suit I help Brandy out of, it’s a Pierre Cardin Space-Age style of just bold white, the straight tube skirt being fresh and sterile to just above her knees, the jacket being timeless and clinical in its simple cut and three-quarter sleeves. Her blouse underneath is sleeveless. Her shoes are box-toe white vinyl boots. It’s an outfit you’d accessorize with a Geiger counter instead of a purse.

At the Bon Marché, when she catwalks out of the fitting room, all I can do is applaud. There’s going to be postpartum depression next week when she goes to take this one back.

Jump to breakfast, this morning when Brandy and Seth were flush with drug money, we were eating room service and Seth says Brandy could time-travel to Las Vegas on another planet in the 1950s and fit right in. The planet Krylon, he says, where synthetic bendable glam-bots would lipo-suck your fat and makeover you.

And Brandy says, “What fat?”

And Seth says, “I love how you could just be visiting from the distant future via the 1960s.”

And I put more Premarin in Seth’s next coffee refill. More Darvon in Brandy’s champagne.

Jump back to us in the bathroom, Brandy and me.

“Hit me,” Brandy says.

Her lips look all loose and stretched out, and I drop another gift from Tiffany’s.

This bathroom we’re hiding in, it goes way the other side of decorative touches. The whole deal is an undersea grotto. Even the princess phone is aqua, but when you look out the big brass porthole windows, you see Seattle from the top of Capitol Hill.

The toilet I’m sitting on, just sitting, the lid’s closed under my ass thank you, but the toilet’s a big ceramic snail shell bolted to the wall. The sink is a big ceramic half a clam bolted to the wall.

Brandy-land, sexual playground to the stars, she says, “Hit me.”

Jump to when we got here and the realtor was just a big tooth. One of those football scholarships where the eyebrows grow together in the middle and they forget to get a degree in anything.

As if I can talk, me with sixteen hundred credits.

Here’s this million-dollar-club realtor who got thrown his job by a grateful alumnus who just wanted a son-in-law who could stay awake through six or seven holiday bowl games. But maybe I’m being a touch judgmental.

Brandy was beside herself for feminine wetness. Here’s this extra-Y-chromosome guy in a double-breasted blue serge suit, a guy whose paws make even Brandy’s big hands look little.

“Mr. Parker,” Brandy says, her hand hidden inside his big paw. You can see the Henry Mancini soundtrack of love in her eyes. “We spoke this morning.”

We’re in the drawing room of a house on Capitol Hill. This is another rich house where everything is exactly what it looks like. The elaborate Tudor roses carved in the ceilings are plaster, not pressed tin, not fiberglass. The torsos of battered Greek nudes are marble, not marbleized plaster. The boxes in the breakfront are not enameled in the manner of Fabergé. The boxes are Fabergé pillboxes, and there are eleven of them. The lace under the boxes was not tatted by a machine.

Not just the spines, but the entire front and back covers of all the books on all the shelves in the library are bound in leather, and the pages are cut. You don’t have to pull a single book to know this.

The realtor, Mr. Parker, his legs are still flat on the sides of his ass. In the front, there’s just enough more in one pant leg to spell boxers instead of briefs.

Brandy nods my way. “This is Miss Arden Scotia, of the Denver River Logging and Paper Scotias.” Another victim of the Brandy Alexander Witness Reincarnation Project.

Parker’s big hand swallows my little hand, big fish and little fish, whole.

Parker’s starched white shirt makes you think of eating off a clean tablecloth, so flat and stuck out you could serve drinks off the shelf of his barrel chest.

“This”—Brandy nods toward Seth—“is Miss Scotia’s half-brother, Ellis Island.”

Parker’s big fish eats Ellis’s little fish.

Brandy says, “Miss Scotia and I would like to tour the house ourselves. Ellis is mentally and emotionally disturbed.”

Ellis smiles.

“We had hoped you would watch him,” Brandy says.

“It’s a go,” Parker says. He says, “Sure thing.”

Ellis smiles and tugs with two fingers at the sleeve of Brandy’s suit jacket. Ellis says, “Don’t leave me too long, miss. If I don’t get enough of my pills, I’ll have one of my fits.”

“Fits?” says Parker.

Ellis says, “Sometimes, Miss Alexander, she forgets I’m waiting, and she doesn’t get me any medication.”

“You have fits?” Parker says.

“This is news to me,” Brandy says and smiles. “You will not have a fit,” Brandy tells my new half-brother. “Ellis, I forbid you to have a fit.”

Jump to us camped out in the undersea grotto.

“Hit me.”

The floor under Brandy’s back, it’s cold tile shaped like fish and laid out so they fit together, one fish tail between the heads of two fish, the way some sardines are canned, all the way across the bathroom floor.

I drop a Valium between Plumbago lips.

“Did I ever tell you how my family threw me out?” says Brandy after her little blue swallow. “My original family, I mean. My birth family. Did I ever tell you that messy little story?”

I put my head between my knees and look straight down at the queen supreme with her head between my feet.

“My throat was hurting for a couple of days, so I got out of school and everything,” Brandy says. She says, “Miss Arden? Hello?”

I look down at her. It’s so easy to imagine her dead.

“Miss Arden, please,” she says. “Hit me?”

I drop another Valium.

Brandy swallows. “It was like I couldn’t swallow for days,” she says. “My throat was that sore. I could barely talk. My folks, they thought, of course, it was strep throat.”

Brandy’s head is almost straight under mine as I look down. Only Brandy’s face is upside down. My eyes look right into the dark interior of her Plumbago mouth, dark wet going inside to her works and organs and everything behind the scenes. Brandy Alexander Backstage. Upside down she could be a complete stranger.

And Ellis was right, you only ask people about themselves so you can tell them about yourself.

“The culture,” Brandy says. “The swab they did for strep throat came back positive for the clap. You know, the third Rhea sister. Gonorrhea,” she says. “That little tiny gonococcus bug. I was sixteen years old and had the clap. My folks did not deal with it well.”

No. No, they didn’t.

“They freaked,” Brandy says.

They threw him out of the house.

“They yelled about how diseased I was being,” Brandy says.

Then they threw him out.

“By ‘diseased’ I think they meant ‘gay,’” she says.

Then they threw him out.

“Miss Scotia?” she says. “Hit me.”

So I hit her.

“Then they threw me out of the damn house.”

Jump to Mr. Parker outside the bathroom door saying, “Miss Alexander? It’s me, Miss Alexander. Miss Scotia, are you in there?”

Brandy starts to sit up and props herself on one elbow.

“It’s Ellis,” Mr. Parker says through the door. “I think you should come downstairs. Miss Scotia, your brother’s having a seizure or something.”

Drugs and cosmetics are spread out all over the aquamarine countertops, and Brandy’s sprawled half naked on the floor in a sprinkling of pills and capsules and tablets.

“He’s her half-brother,” Brandy calls back.

The doorknob rattles. “You have to help me,” Parker says.

“Stop right there, Mr. Parker!” Brandy shouts and the doorknob stops turning. “Calm yourself. Do not come in here,” Brandy says. “What you need to do …” Brandy looks at me while she says this. “What you need to do is pin Ellis to the floor so he doesn’t hurt himself. I’ll be down in a moment.”

Brandy looks at me and smiles her Plumbago lips into a big bow. “Parker?” she says. “Are you listening?”

“Please, hurry,” comes through the door.

“After you have Ellis pinned to the floor,” Brandy says, “wedge his mouth open with something. Do you have a wallet?”

There’s a moment.

“It’s eel skin, Miss Alexander.”

“Then you must be very proud of it,” says Brandy. “You’re going to have to jam it between his teeth to keep his mouth open. Sit on him if you have to.” Brandy, she’s just smiling evil incarnate at my feet.

The shatter of some real lead crystal comes through the door from downstairs.

“Hurry!” Parker shouts. “He’s breaking things!”

Brandy licks her lips. “After you have his mouth pried open, Parker, reach in and grab his tongue. If you don’t, he’ll choke, and then you’ll be sitting on a dead body.”

Silence.

“Do you hear me?” Brandy says.

“Grab his tongue?”

Something else real and expensive and far away shatters.

“Mr. Parker, honey, I hope you’re bonded,” the Princess Alexander says, her face all bloated red with choking back laughter. “Yes,” she says, “grab Ellis’s tongue. Pin him to the floor, keep his mouth open, and pull his tongue out as far as you can until I come down to help you.”

The doorknob turns.

My veils are all on the vanity counter out of my reach.

The door opens far enough to hit the high-heeled foot of Brandy, sprawled giggling and half full of Valiums, there half naked in drugs on the floor. This is far enough for me to see Parker’s face with its one grown-together eyebrow, and far enough for the face to see me sitting on the toilet.

Brandy screams, “I am attending to Miss Arden Scotia!”

Given the choice between grabbing a strange tongue and watching a monster poop into a giant snail shell, the face retreats and slams the door behind it.

Football scholarship footsteps charge off down the hallway.

Then pound down the stairs.

The big tooth that Parker is, his footsteps pound across the foyer to the living room.

Ellis’s scream, real and sudden and far away, comes through the floor from downstairs. And, suddenly, stops.

“Now,” says Brandy, “where were we?”

She lies back down with her head between my feet.

“Have you thought any more about plastic surgery?” Brandy says. Then she says, “Hit me.”