Invisible Monsters Remix

Chapter 39

ump way back to one day outside Brumbach’s Department Store, where people are stopped to watch somebody’s dog lift its leg on the Nativity scene, Evie and me included. Then the dog sits and rolls back on its spine, licks its own lumpy dog-flavored butthole, and Evie elbows me. People applaud and throw money.

Then we’re inside Brumbach’s, testing lipsticks on the back of our hands, and I say, “Why is it dogs lick themselves?”

“Just because they can …” Evie says. “They’re not like people.”

This is just after we’ve killed an eight-hour day in modeling school, looking at our skin in mirrors, so I’m like, “Evie, do not even kid yourself.”

My passing grade in modeling school was just because Evie’d dragged down the curve. She’d wear shades of lipstick you’d expect to see around the base of a penis. She’d wear so much eye shadow you’d think she was a product-testing animal. Just from her hairspray, there’s a hole in the ozone over the Taylor Robberts Modeling Academy.

This is way back before my accident when I thought my life was so good.

At Brumbach’s Department Store, where we’d kill time after class, the whole ninth floor is furniture. Around the edges are display rooms: bedrooms, dining rooms, living rooms, dens, libraries, nurseries, family rooms, china hutches, home offices, all of them open to the inside of the store. The invisible fourth wall. All of them perfect, clean and carpeted, full of tasteful furniture, and hot with track lighting and too many lamps. There’s the hush of white noise from hidden speakers. Alongside the rooms, shoppers pass in the dim linoleum aisles that run between the display rooms and the down-lighted islands that fill the center of the floor, conversation pits and sofa suites grouped on area rugs with coordinated floor lamps and fake plants. Quiet islands of light and color in the darkness teeming with strangers.

“It’s just like a sound stage,” Evie would say. “The little sets all ready for somebody to shoot the next episode. The studio audience watching you from the dark.”

Customers would stroll by and there would be Evie and me sprawled on a pink canopy bed, calling for our horoscopes on her cell phone. We’d be curled on a tweedy sofa sectional, munching popcorn and watching our soaps on a console color television. Evie will pull up her T-shirt to show me another new belly button piercing. She’ll pull down the armhole of her blouse and show me the scars from her implants.

“It’s too lonely at my real house,” Evie would say, “and I hate how I don’t feel real enough unless people are watching.”

She says, “I don’t hang around Brumbach’s for privacy.”

At home in my apartment I’d have Manus with his magazines. His guy-on-guy porno magazines he had to buy for his job, he’d say. Over breakfast every morning, he’d show me glossy pictures of guys self-sucking. Curled up with their elbows hooked behind their knees and craning their necks to choke on themselves, each guy would be lost in his own little closed circuit. You can bet almost every guy in the world’s tried this. Then Manus would tell me, “This is what guys want.”

Give me romance.

Flash.

Give me denial.

Each little closed loop of one guy flexible enough or with a dick so big he doesn’t need anybody else in the world, Manus would point his toast at these pictures and tell me, “These guys don’t need to put up with jobs or relationships.” Manus would just chew, staring at each magazine. Forking up his scrambled egg whites, he’d say, “You could live and die this way.”

Then I’d go downtown to the Taylor Robberts Modeling Academy to get myself perfected. Dogs will lick their butts. Evie will self-mutilate. All this navel-gazing. At home, Evie had nobody except she had a ton of family money. The first time we rode a city bus to Brumbach’s, she offered the driver her credit card and asked for a window seat. She was worried her carry-on was too big.

Me with Manus or her alone, you don’t know who of us had it worse at home.

But at Brumbach’s, Evie and me, we’d catnap in any of the dozen perfect bedrooms. We’d stuff cotton between our toes and paint our nails in chintz-covered club chairs. Then we’d study our Taylor Robberts modeling textbook at a long polished dining table.

“Here’s the same as those fakey reproductions of natural habitats they build at zoos,” Evie would say. “You know, those concrete polar ice caps and those rain forests made of welded pipe trees holding sprinklers.”

Every afternoon, Evie and me, we’d star in our own personal unnatural habitat. The clerks would sneak off to find sex in the men’s room. We’d all soak up attention in our own little matinee life.

All’s I remember from Taylor Robberts is to lead with my pelvis when I walk. Keep your shoulders back. To model different-sized products, they’d tell you to draw an invisible sight line from yourself to the item. For toasters, draw a line through the air from your smile to the toaster. For a stove, draw the line from your breasts. For a new car, start the invisible line from your vagina. What it boils down to is professional modeling means getting paid to overreact to stuff like rice cakes and new shoes.

We’d drink diet colas on a big pink bed at Brumbach’s. Or sit at a vanity, using contouring powder to change the shape of our faces while the faint outline of people watched us from the darkness a few feet away. Maybe the track lights would flash off somebody’s glasses. With our every little move getting attention, every gesture, everything we said, it’s easy to pick up on the rush you’d get.

“It’s so safe and peaceful here,” Evie’d say, smoothing the pink satin comforter and fluffing the pillows. “Nothing very bad could ever happen to you here. Not like at school. Or at home.”

Total strangers would stand there with their coats on, watching us. The same’s those talk shows on television, it’s so easy to be honest with a big enough audience. You can say anything if enough people will listen.

“Evie, honey,” I’d say. “There’s lots worse models in our class. You just need to not have an edge to your blusher.” We’d be looking at ourselves in a vanity mirror, a triple row of nobodies watching us from behind.

“Here, sweetie,” I’d say, and give her a little sponge, “blend.”

And Evie would start to cry. Your every emotion goes right over the top with a big audience. It’s either laughter or tears, with no in-between. Those tigers in zoos, they must just live a big opera all the time.

“It’s not just my wanting to be a glamorous fashion model,” Evie would say. “It’s when I think of my growing up, I’m so sad.” Evie would choke back her tears. She’d clutch her little sponge and say, “When I was little, my parents wanted me to be a boy.” She’d say, “I just never want to be that miserable again.”

Other times, we’d wear high heels and pretend to slap each other hard across the mouth because of some guy we both wanted. Some afternoons we’d confess to each other that we were vampires.

“Yeah,” I’d say. “My parents used to abuse me, too.”

You had to play to the crowd.

Evie would turn her fingers through her hair. “I’m getting my guiche pierced,” she’d say. “It’s that little ridge of skin running between your asshole and the bottom of your vagina.”

I’d go to flop on the bed, center stage, hugging a pillow and looking up into the black tangle of ducts and sprinkler pipes you had to imagine was a bedroom ceiling.

“It’s not like they hit me or made me drink satanic blood or anything,” I’d say. “They just liked my brother more because he was mutilated.”

And Evie would cross to center stage by the Early American nightstand to upstage me.

“You had a mutilated brother?” she’d say.

Somebody watching us would cough. Maybe the light would glint off a wristwatch.

“Yeah, he was pretty mutilated, but not in a sexy way. Still, there’s a happy ending,” I’d say. “He’s dead now.”

And really intense, Evie would say, “Mutilated how? Was he your only brother? Older or younger?”

And I’d throw myself off the bed and shake my hair. “No, it’s too painful.”

“No, really,” Evie would say. “I’m not kidding.”

“He was my big brother by a couple years. His face was all exploded in a hairspray accident, and you’d think my folks totally forgot they even had a second child,” I’d dab my eyes on the pillow shams and tell the audience. “So I just kept working harder and harder for them to love me.”

Evie would be looking at nothing and saying, “Oh, my shit! Oh, my shit!” And her acting, her delivery would be so true it would just bury mine.

“Yeah,” I’d say. “He didn’t have to work at it. It was so easy. Just by being all burned and slashed up with scars, he hogged all the attention.”

Evie would go close-up on me and say, “So where’s he now, your brother, do you even know?”

“Dead,” I’d say, and I’d turn to address the audience. “Dead of AIDS.”

And Evie says, “How sure are you?”

And I’d say, “Evie!”

“No, really,” she’d say. “I’m asking for a reason.”

“You just don’t joke about AIDS,” I’d say.

And Evie’d say, “This is so next-to-impossible.”

This is how easy the plot gets pumped out of control. With all these shoppers expecting real drama, of course, I think Evie’s just making stuff up.

“Your brother,” Evie says, “did you really see him die? For real? Or did you see him dead? In a coffin, you know, with music. Or a death certificate?”

All those people were watching.

“Yeah,” I say. “Pretty much.” Like I’d want to get caught lying?

Evie’s all over me. “So you saw him dead or you didn’t?”

All those people watching.

“Dead enough.”

Evie says, “Where?”

“This is very painful,” I say, and I cross stage right to the living room.

Evie chases after me, saying, “Where?”

All those people watching.

“The hospice,” I say.

“What hospice?”

I keep crossing stage right to the next living room, the next dining room, the next bedroom, den, home office, with Evie dogging me and the audience hovering along next to us.

“You know how it is,” I say. “If you don’t see a gay guy for so long, it’s a pretty safe bet.”

And Evie says, “So you don’t really know that he’s dead?”

We’re sprinting through the next bedroom, living room, dining room, nursery, and I say, “It’s AIDS, Evie. Fade to black.”

And then Evie just stops and says, “Why?”

And the audience has started to abandon me in a thousand directions.

Because I really, really, really want my brother to be dead. Because my folks want him dead. Because life is just easier if he’s dead. Because this way, I’m an only child. Because it’s my turn, damn it. My turn.

And the crowd of shoppers has bailed, leaving just us and the security cameras instead of God watching to catch us when we fuck up.

“Why is this such a big deal to you?” I say.

And Evie’s already wandering away from me, leaving me alone and saying, “No reason.” Lost in her own little closed circuit. Licking her own butthole, Evie says, “It’s nothing.” Saying, “Forget it.”