Invisible Monsters Remix

Chapter 21

ump back to the La Paloma emergency room. The intravenous morphine. The tiny operating-room manicure scissors cut Brandy’s suit off. My brother’s unhappy penis there blue and cold for the whole world to see. The police photos, and Sister Katherine screaming, “Take your pictures! Take your pictures now! He’s still losing blood!”

Jump to surgery. Jump to post-op. Jump to me taking Sister Katherine aside, little Sister Katherine hugging me so hard around the knees I almost buckle to the floor. She looks at me, both of us stained with the blood, and I ask her in writing:

please.

do this one special thing for me. please. if you really want to make me happy.

Jump to Evie installed talk-show–style under the hot track lights, downtown at Brumbach’s, chatting with her mother and Manus and her new husband about how she met Brandy years before all of us, in some transgender support group. About how everybody needs a big disaster every now and then.

Jump to someday down the road soon when Manus will get his breasts.

Jump to me kneeling beside my brother’s hospital bed. Shane’s skin, you don’t know where the faded blue hospital gown ends and Shane begins, he’s so pale. This is my brother, thin and pale with Shane’s thin arms and pigeon chest. The flat auburn hair across his forehead, this is who I remember growing up with. Put together out of sticks and bird bones. The Shane I’d forgotten. The Shane from before the hairspray accident. I don’t know why I forgot, but Shane had always looked so miserable.

Jump to our folks at home at night, showing home movies against the side of their white house. The windows from twenty years ago lined up perfect with the windows now. The grass lined up with the grass. The ghosts of Shane and me as toddlers running around, happy with each other.

Jump to the Rhea sisters crowded around the hospital bed. Hairnets pulled on over their wigs. Surgical masks on their faces. They’re wearing those faded green scrub suits, the Rheas have those Duchess of Windsor costume jewelry brooches pinned on their scrubs: leopards shimmering with diamond and topaz spots. Hummingbirds with pavé emerald bodies.

Me, I just want Shane to be happy. I’m tired of being me, hateful me.

Give me release.

I’m tired of this world of appearances. Pigs that only look fat. Families that look happy.

Give me deliverance.

From what only looks like generosity. What only looks like love.

Flash.

I don’t want to be me anymore. I want to be happy, and I want Brandy Alexander back. Here’s my first real dead end in my life. There’s nowhere to go, not the way I am right now, the person I am. Here’s my first real beginning.

As Shane sleeps, the Rhea sisters all crowd around, decorating him with little gifts. They’re misting Shane with L’Air du Temps as if he were a Boston fern.

New earrings. A new Hermès scarf around his head.

Cosmetics are spread in perfect rows on a surgical tray that hovers next to the bed, and Sofonda says, “Moisturizer!” and holds her hand out, palm up.

“Moisturizer,” Kitty Litter says, and slaps the tube into Sofonda’s palm.

Sofonda puts her hand out and says, “Concealer!”

And Vivienne slaps another tube into her palm and says, “Concealer.”

Shane, I know you can’t hear, but that’s okay, since I can’t talk.

With short, light strokes, Sofonda uses a little sponge to spread concealer on the dark bags under Shane’s eyes. Vivienne pins a diamond stickpin on Shane’s hospital gown.

Miss Rona saved your life, Shane. The book in your jacket pocket, it slowed the bullet enough that only your boobs exploded. It’s just a flesh wound, flesh and silicone.

Florists come in with sprays of irises and roses and stock.

Your silicone broke, Shane. The bullet popped your silicone so they had to take it out. Now you can have any sized breasts you want. The Rheas have said so.

“Foundation!” Sofonda says, blending the foundation into Shane’s hairline.

She says, “Eyebrow pencil!” with sweat beading on her forehead.

Kitty hands over the pencil, saying, “Eyebrow pencil.”

“Blot me!” Sofonda says.

And Vivienne blots her forehead with a sponge.

Sofonda says, “Eyeliner! Stat!”

And I have to go, Shane, while you’re still asleep. But I want to give you something. I want to give you life. This is my third chance, and I don’t want to blow it. I could’ve opened my bedroom window. I could’ve stopped Evie shooting you. The truth is I didn’t, so I’m giving you my life because I don’t want it anymore.

I tuck my clutch bag under Shane’s big ring-beaded hand. You see, the size of a man’s hands are the one thing a plastic surgeon can’t change. The one thing that will always give away a girl like Brandy Alexander. There’s just no way to hide those hands.

This is all my identification, my birth certificate, my everything. You can be Shannon McFarland from now on. My career. The ninety-degree attention. It’s yours. All of it. Everyone. I hope it’s enough for you. It’s everything I have left.

“Base color!” Sofonda says, and Vivienne hands her the lightest shade of Aubergine Dreams eye shadow.

“Lid color!” Sofonda says, and Kitty hands her the next eye shadow.

“Contour color!” Sofonda says, and Kitty hands her the darkest shade.

Shane, you go back to my career. You make Sofonda get you a top contract, no local charity benefit runway shit. You’re Shannon fucking McFarland now. You go right to the top. A year from now, I want to turn on the TV and see you drinking a diet cola naked in slow motion. Make Sofonda get you big national contracts.

Be famous. Be a big social experiment in getting what you don’t want. Find value in what we’ve been taught is worthless. Find good in what the world says is evil. I’m giving you my life because I want the whole world to know you. I wish the whole world would embrace what it hates.

Find what you’re afraid of most and go live there.

“Lash curler!” says Sofonda, and she curls Shane’s sleeping eyelashes.

“Mascara!” she says, combing mascara into the lashes.

“Exquisite,” says Kitty.

And Sofonda says, “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

Shane, I’m giving you my life, my driver’s license, my old report cards, because you look more like me than I can ever remember looking. Because I’m tired of hating and preening and telling myself old stories that were never true in the first place. I’m tired of always being me, me, me first.

Mirror, mirror on the wall.

And please don’t come after me. Be the new center of attention. Be a big success, be beautiful and loved and everything else I wanted to be. I’m over that now. I just want to be invisible. Maybe I’ll become a belly dancer in my veils. Become a nun and work in a leper colony where nobody is complete. I’ll be an ice hockey goalie and wear a mask. Those big amusement parks will only hire women to wear the cartoon character costumes, since folks don’t want to chance a strange molester guy hugging their kid. Maybe I’ll be a big cartoon mouse. Or a dog. Or a duck. I don’t know, but I’m sure I’ll find out. There’s no escaping fate, it just keeps going. Day and night, the future just keeps coming at you.

I stroke Shane’s pale hand.

I’m giving you my life to prove to myself I can, I really can love somebody. Even when I’m not getting paid, I can give love and happiness and charm. You see, I can handle the baby food and the not talking and being homeless and invisible, but I have to know that I can love somebody. Completely and totally, permanently and without hope of reward, just as an act of will, I will love somebody.

I lean in, as if I could kiss my brother’s face.

I leave my purse and any idea of who I am tucked under Shane’s hand. And I leave behind the story that I was ever this beautiful, that I could walk into a room deep-fried in a tight dress and everybody would turn and look at me. A million reporters would take my picture. And I leave behind the idea that this attention was worth what I did to get it.

What I need is a new story.

What the Rhea sisters did for Brandy Alexander.

What Brandy’s been doing for me.

What I need to learn to do for myself. To write my own story.

Let my brother be Shannon McFarland.

I don’t need that kind of attention. Not anymore.

“Lip liner!” Sofonda says.

“Lip gloss!” she says.

She says, “We’ve got a bleeder!”

And Vivienne leans in with a tissue to blot the extra Plumbago off Shane’s chin.

Sister Katherine brings me what I asked for, please, and it’s the pictures, the eight-by-ten glossies of me in my white sheet. They aren’t good or bad, ugly or beautiful. They’re just the way I look. The truth. My future. Just regular reality. And I take off my veils, the cut-work and muslin and lace, and leave them for Shane to find at his feet.

I don’t need them at this moment, or the next, or the next, forever.

Sofonda sets the makeup with powder and then Shane’s gone. My brother, thin and pale, sticks and bird bones and miserable, is gone.

The Rhea sisters slowly peel off their surgical masks.

“Brandy Alexander,” says Kitty, “queen supreme.”

“Total quality girl,” Vivienne says.

“Forever and ever,” says Sofonda, “and that’s enough.”

Completely and totally, permanently and without hope, forever and ever I love Brandy Alexander.

And that’s enough.

(The end)