Invisible Monsters Remix

Chapter 40

ntil I met Brandy, all I wanted was for somebody to ask me what happened to my face.

“Birds ate it,” I wanted to tell them.

Birds ate my face.

But nobody wanted to know. Then nobody doesn’t include Brandy Alexander.

Just don’t think this was a big coincidence. We had to meet, Brandy and me. We had so many things in common. We had close to everything in common. Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible every day. Brandy was in the hospital for months and months, and so was I, and there’s only so many hospitals where you can go for major cosmetic surgery.

Jump back to the nuns. The nuns were the worst about always pushing, the nuns who were nurses. One nun would tell me about some patient on a different floor who was funny and charming. He was a lawyer and could do magic tricks with just his hands and a paper napkin. This day nurse was the kind of nun who wore a white nursing version of her regular nun uniform, and she’d told this lawyer all about me. This was Sister Katherine. She told him I was funny and bright, and she said how sweet it would be if the two of us could meet and fall madly in love.

Those were her words.

Halfway down the bridge of her nose, she’d look at me through wire-framed glasses, their lenses long and squared the way microscope slides look. Little broken veins kept the end of her nose red. Rosacea, she called this. It would be easier to see her living in a gingerbread house than a convent. Married to Santa Claus instead of God. The starched apron she wore over her habit was so glaring white that when I’d first arrived, fresh from my big car accident, I remembered how all the stains from my blood looked black.

They gave me a pen and paper so I could communicate. They wrapped my head in dressings, yards of tight gauze holding wads of cotton in place, metal butterfly sutures gripping all over so I wouldn’t unravel. They fingered on a thick layer of antibiotic gel, claustrophobic and toxic under the wads of cotton.

My hair they pulled back, forgotten and hot under the gauze where I couldn’t get at it. The invisible woman.

When Sister Katherine mentioned this other patient, I wondered if maybe I’d seen him around, her lawyer, the cute, funny magician.

“I didn’t say he was cute,” she said.

Sister Katherine said, “He’s still a little shy.”

On the pad of paper, I wrote:

still?

“Since his little mishap,” she said and smiled with her eyebrows arched and all her chins tucked down against her neck. “He wasn’t wearing his seat belt.”

She said, “His car rolled right over the top of him.”

She said, “That’s why he’d be so perfect for you.”

Early on, while I was still sedated, somebody had taken the mirror out of my bathroom. The nurses seemed to steer me away from polished anything the way they kept the suicides away from knives. The drunks away from drinks. The closest I had to a mirror was the television, and it only showed how I used to look.

If I asked to see the police photos from the accident, the day nurse would tell me, “No.” They kept the photos in a file at the nursing station, and it seemed anybody could ask to see them except me. This nurse, she’d say, “The doctor thinks you’ve suffered enough for the time being.”

This same day nurse tried to fix me up with an accountant whose hair and ears were burned off in a propane blunder. She introduced me to a graduate student who’d lost his throat and sinuses to a touch of cancer. A window washer after his three-story tumble headfirst onto concrete.

Those were all her words, blunder, touch, tumble. The lawyer’s mishap. My big accident.

Sister Katherine would be there to check my vital signs every six hours. To check my pulse against the sweep second hand on her man’s wristwatch, thick and silver. To wrap the blood pressure cuff around my arm. To check my temperature, she’d push some kind of electric gun in my ear.

Sister Katherine was the kind of nun who wears a wedding ring.

And married people always think love is the answer.

Jump back to the day of my big accident, when everybody was so considerate. The people, the folks who let me go ahead of them in the emergency room. What the police insisted. I mean, they gave me this hospital sheet with Property of La Paloma Memorial Hospital printed along the edge in indelible blue. First they gave me morphine, intravenously. Then they propped me up on a gurney.

I don’t remember much of this, but the day nurse told me about the police photos.

In the pictures, these big eight-by-ten glossies as nice as anything in my portfolio. Black-and-white, the nurse said. But in these eight-by-tens I’m sitting up on a gurney with my back against the emergency room wall. The attending nurse spent ten minutes cutting my dress off with those tiny operating-room manicure scissors. The cutting, I remember. It was my cotton crepe sundress from Espre. I remember that when I ordered this dress from the catalogue I almost ordered two, they’re so comfortable, loose with the breeze trying to get inside the armholes and lift the hem up around your waist. Then you’d sweat if there wasn’t a breeze, and the cotton crepe stuck on you like eleven herbs and spices, only on you the dress was almost transparent. You’d walk onto a patio, it was a great feeling, a million spotlights picking you out of the crowd, or walk into a restaurant when outside it was ninety degrees, and everyone would turn and look as if you’d just been awarded some major distinguished award for a major lifetime achievement.

That’s how it felt. I can remember this kind of attention. It always felt ninety degrees hot.

And I remember my underwear.

Sorry, Mom, sorry, God, but I was wearing just this little patch up front with an elastic string waist and just one string running down the crack and back around to the bottom of the patch up front. Flesh-tone. That one string, the one down the crack, butt floss is what everybody calls that string. I wore the patch underwear because of when the cotton crepe sundress goes almost transparent. You just don’t plan on ending up in the emergency room with your dress cut off and detectives taking your picture, propped up on a gurney with a morphine drip in one arm and a Franciscan nun screaming in one ear. “Take your pictures! Take your pictures, now! She’s still losing blood!”

No, really, it was funnier than it sounds.

It got funny when there I was sprawled on this gurney, this anatomically correct rag doll with nothing but this little patch on and my face was the way it is now.

The police, they had the nun hold this sheet up over my breasts. It’s so they can take pictures of my face, but the detectives are so embarrassed for me, being sprawled there topless.

Jump to when they refuse to show me the pictures, one of the detectives says that if the bullet had been two inches higher, I’d be dead.

I couldn’t see their point.

Two inches lower, and I’d be deep-fried in my spicy cotton crepe sundress, trying to get the insurance guy to waive the deductible and replace my car window. Then I’d be by a swimming pool, wearing sunblock and telling a couple cute guys how I was driving on the freeway in my Stingray when a rock or I don’t know what, but my driver’s-side window just burst.

And the cute guys would say, “Whoa.”

Jump to another detective, the one who’d searched my car for the slug and bone fragments, that stuff, the detective saw how I’d been driving with the window half open. A car window, this guy tells me over the eight-by-ten glossies of me wearing a white sheet, a car window should always be all the way open or shut. He couldn’t remember how many motorists he’d seen decapitated by windows in car accidents.

How could I not laugh?

That was his word: Motorists.

The way my mouth was, the only sound left I could do was laugh. I couldn’t not laugh.

Jump to after there were the pictures, when people stopped looking at me.

My boyfriend, Manus, came in that evening, after the emergency room, after I’d been wheeled off on my gurney to surgery, after the bleeding had stopped and I was in a private room. Then Manus showed up. Manus Kelley, who was my fiancé until he saw what was left. Manus sat looking at the black-and-white glossies of my new face, shuffling and reshuffling them, turning them upside down and right-side up the way you would one of those mystery pictures where one minute you have a beautiful woman, but when you look again you have a hag.

Manus says, “Oh, God.”

Then says, “Oh, sweet, sweet Jesus.”

Then says, “Christ.”

The first date I ever had with Manus, I was still living with my folks. Manus showed me a badge in his wallet. At home, he had a gun. He was a police detective, and he was really successful in vice. This was a May and December thing. Manus was twenty-five and I was eighteen, but we went out. This is the world we live in. We went sailing one time, and he wore a Speedo, and any smart woman should know that means bisexual at least.

My best friend, Evie Cottrell, she’s a model. Evie says that beautiful people should never date each other. Together, they just don’t generate enough attention. Evie says there’s a whole shift in the beauty standard when they’re together. You can feel this, Evie says. When both of you are beautiful, neither of you is beautiful. Together, as a couple, you’re less than the sum of your parts.

Nobody really gets noticed, not anymore.

Still, there I was one time, taping this infomercial, one of those long-long commercials you think will end at any moment because after all it’s just a commercial, but it’s actually thirty minutes long. Me and Evie, we’re hired to be walking sex furniture to wear tight evening dresses all afternoon and entice the television audience into buying the Num Num Snack Factory. Manus comes to sit in the studio audience, and after the shoot he goes, “Let’s go sailing,” and I go, “Sure!”

So we went sailing, and I forgot my sunglasses, so Manus buys me a pair on the dock. My new sunglasses are the exact same as Manus’s Vuarnets, except mine are made in Korea not Switzerland and cost two dollars.

Three miles out, I’m walking into deck things. I’m falling down. Manus throws me a rope, and I miss it. Manus throws me a beer and I miss the beer. A headache, I get the kind of headache God would smote you with in the Old Testament. What I don’t know is that one of my sunglass lenses is darker than the other, almost opaque. I’m blind in one eye because of this lens, and I have no depth perception.

Back then I don’t know this, that my perception is so fucked up. It’s the sun, I tell myself, so I just keep wearing the sunglasses and stumbling around blind and in pain.

Jump to the second time Manus visits me in the hospital, he tells the eight-by-ten glossies of me in my sheet, Property of La Paloma Memorial Hospital, that I should think about getting back into my life. I should start making plans. You know, he says, take some classes. Finish my degree.

He sits next to my bed and holds the photos between us so I can’t see either them or him. On my pad, with my pencil I ask Manus in writing to show me.

“When I was little, we raised Doberman puppies,” he says from behind the photos. “And when a puppy is about six months old you get its ears and tail cropped. It’s the style for those dogs. You go to a motel where a man travels from state to state cutting the ears and tails off thousands of Doberman puppies or boxers or bull terriers.”

On my pad with my pencil, I write:

your point being?

And I wave this in his direction.

“The point is whoever cuts your ears off is the one you’ll hate for the rest of your life,” he says. “You don’t want your regular veterinarian to do the job so you pay a stranger.”

Still looking at picture after picture, Manus says, “That’s the reason I can’t show you these.”

Somewhere outside the hospital, in a motel room full of bloody towels with his toolbox of knives and needles, or driving down the highway to his next victim, or kneeling over a dog drugged and cut up in a dirty bathtub, is the man a million dogs must hate.

Sitting next to my bed, Manus says, “You just need to archive your cover-girl dreams.”

The fashion photographer inside my head yells:

Give me pity.

Flash.

Give me another chance.

Flash.

That’s what I did before the accident. Call me a big liar, but before the accident I told people I was a college student. If you tell folks you’re a model, they shut down. Your being a model will mean they’re networking with some lower life-form. They start using baby talk. They dumb down. But if you tell folks you’re a college student, folks are so impressed. You can be a student in anything and not have to know anything. Just say toxicology or marine biokinesis, and the person you’re talking to will change the subject to himself. If this doesn’t work, mention the neural synapses of embryonic pigeons.

It used to be I was a real college student. I have about sixteen hundred credits toward an undergraduate degree in personal fitness training. What I hear from my parents is that I could be a doctor by now.

Sorry, Mom.

Sorry, God.

There was a time when Evie and me went out to dance clubs and bars and men would wait outside the ladies’ room door to catch us. Guys would say they were casting a television commercial. The guy would give me a business card and ask what agency I was with.

There was a time when my mom came to visit. My mom smokes, and the first afternoon I came home from a shoot, she held out a matchbook and said, “What’s the meaning of this?”

She said, “Please tell me you’re not as big a slut as your poor dead brother.”

In the matchbook was a guy’s name I didn’t know and a telephone number.

“This isn’t the only one I found,” Mom said. “What are you running here?”

I don’t smoke. I tell her that. These matchbooks pile up because I’m too polite not to take them and I’m too frugal to just throw them away. That’s why it takes a whole kitchen drawer to hold them, all these men I can’t remember and their telephone numbers.

Jump to no day special in the hospital, just outside the office of the hospital speech therapist. The nurse was leading me around by my elbow for exercise, and as we came around this one corner, just inside the open office doorway, boom, Brandy Alexander was just so there, glorious in a seated Princess Alexander pose, in an iridescent Vivienne Westwood cat suit changing colors with her every move.

Vogue on location.

The fashion photographer inside my head, yelling:

Give me wonder, baby.

Flash.

Give me amazement.

Flash.

The speech therapist said, “Brandy, you can raise the pitch of your voice if you raise your laryngeal cartilage. It’s that bump in your throat you feel going up as you sing ascending scales.” She said, “If you can keep your voice box raised high in your throat, your voice should stay between a G and a middle C. That’s about a hundred and sixty hertz.”

Brandy Alexander and the way she looked turned the rest of the world into virtual reality. She changed color from every new angle. She turned green with my one step. Red with my next. She turned silver and gold and then she was dropped behind us, gone.

“Poor, sad, misguided thing,” Sister Katherine said, and she spat on the concrete floor. She looked at me craning my neck to see back down the hall, and she asked if I had any family.

I wrote: yeah, there’s my gay brother but he’s dead from AIDS.

And she says, “Well, that’s for the best, then, isn’t it?”

Jump to the week after Manus’s last visit, last meaning final, when Evie drops by the hospital. Evie looks at the glossies and talks to God and Jesus Christ.

“You know,” Evie tells me across a stack of Vogue and Glamour magazines in her lap she brings me, “I talked to the agency and they said that if we redo your portfolio they’ll consider taking you back for hand work.”

Evie means a hand model, modeling cocktail rings and diamond tennis bracelets and shit.

Like I want to hear this.

I can’t talk.

All I can eat is liquids.

Nobody will look at me. I’m invisible.

All I want is somebody to ask me what happened. Then I’ll get on with my life.

Evie tells the stack of magazines, “I want you to come live with me at my house when you get out.” She unzips her canvas bag on the edge of my bed and goes into it with both hands. Evie says, “It’ll be fun. You’ll see. I hate living all by my lonesome.”

And says, “I’ve already moved your things into my spare bedroom.”

Still in her bag, Evie says, “I’m on my way to a shoot. Any chance you have any agency vouchers you can lend me?”

On my pad with my pencil, I write:

is that my sweater you’re wearing?

And I wave the pad in her face.

“Yeah,” she says, “but I knew you wouldn’t mind.”

I write:

but it’s a size six.

I write:

and you’re a size nine.

“Listen,” Evie says. “My call is for two o’clock. Why don’t I stop by sometime when you’re in a better mood?”

Talking to her watch, she says, “I’m so sorry things had to go this way. It wasn’t all of it anybody’s fault.”

Every day in the hospital goes like this:

Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Sister Katherine falls in between.

On television is one network running nothing but infomercials all day and all night, and there we are, Evie and me, together. We got a raft of bucks. For the snack factory thing, we do these big celebrity spokesmodel smiles, the ones where you make your face a big space heater. We’re wearing these sequined dresses that when you get them under a spotlight, the dress flashes like a million reporters taking your picture. So glamorous. I’m standing there in this twenty-pound dress, doing this big smile and dropping animal wastes into the Plexiglas funnel on top of the Num Num Snack Factory. This thing just poops out little canapés like crazy, and Evie has to wade out into the studio audience and get folks to eat the canapés.

Folks will eat anything to get on television.

Then, off camera, Manus goes, “Let’s go sailing.”

And I go, “Sure.”

It was so stupid, my not knowing what was happening all along.

Jump to Brandy on a folding chair just inside the office of the speech therapist, shaping her fingernails with the scratch pad from a book of matches. Her long legs could squeeze a motorcycle in half, and the legal minimum of her is shrink-wrapped in leopard-print stretch terry just screaming to get out.

The speech therapist says, “Keep your glottis partially open as you speak. It’s the way Marilyn Monroe sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to President Kennedy. It makes your breath bypass your vocal chords for a more feminine, helpless quality.”

The nurse leads me past in my cardboard slippers, my tight bandages and deep funk, and Brandy Alexander looks up at the last possible instant and winks. God should be able to wink that good. Like somebody taking your picture. Give me joy. Give me fun. Give me love.

Flash.

Angels in heaven should blow kisses the way Brandy Alexander does and lights up the rest of my week. Back in my room, I write:

who is she?

“No one you should have any truck with,” the nurse says. “You’ll have problems enough as it is.”

but who is she? I write.

“If you can believe it,” the nurse says, “that one is someone different every week.”

It’s after that Sister Katherine starts matchmaking. To save me from Brandy Alexander, she offers me the lawyer without a nose. She offers a mountain-climbing dentist whose fingers and facial features are eaten down to little hard shining bumps by frostbite. A missionary with dark patches of some tropical fungus just under his skin. A mechanic who leaned over a battery the moment it exploded and the acid left his lips and cheeks gone and his yellow teeth showing in a permanent snarl.

I look at the nun’s wedding ring and write:

i guess you got the last really buff guy.

The whole time I was in the hospital, no way could I fall in love. I just couldn’t go there yet. Settle for less. I didn’t want to process through anything. I didn’t want to pick up any pieces. Lower my expectations. Get on with my less-than life. I didn’t want to feel better about being still alive. Start compensating. I just wanted my face fixed, if that was possible, which it wasn’t.

When it’s time to reintroduce me to solid foods, their words again, it’s puréed chicken and strained carrots. Baby foods. Everything mashed or pulverized or crushed.

You are what you eat.

The nurse brings me the personal classified ads from a newsletter. Sister Katherine peers down her nose and through her glasses to read: Guys seeking slim, adventurous girls for fun and romance. And, yes, it’s true, not one single guy specifically excludes hideous mutilated girls with growing medical bills.

Sister Katherine tells me, “These men you can write to in prison don’t need to know how you really look.”

It’s just too much trouble to try and explain my feelings to her in writing.

Sister Katherine reads me the singles columns while I spoon up my roast beef. She offers arsonists. Burglars. Tax cheats. She says, “You probably don’t want to date a rapist, not right off. Nobody’s that desperate.”

Between the lonely men behind bars for armed robbery and second-degree manslaughter, she stops to ask what’s the matter. She takes my hand and talks to the name on my plastic bracelet, such a hand model I am already, cocktail rings, plastic ID bracelets so beautiful even a bride of Christ can’t take her eyes off them. She says, “What’re you feeling?”

This is hilarious.

She says, “Don’t you want to fall in love?”

The photographer in my head says: Give me patience.

Flash.

Give me control.

Flash.

The situation is I have half a face.

Inside my bandages, my face still bleeds tiny little spots of blood onto the wads of cotton. One doctor, the one making rounds every morning who checks my dressing, he says my wound is still weeping. That’s his word.

I still can’t talk.

I have no career.

I can only eat baby food. Nobody will ever look at me like I’ve won a big prize ever again.

nothing, I write on my pad.

nothing’s wrong.

“You haven’t mourned,” Sister Katherine says. “You need to have a good cry and then get on with your life. You’re being too calm about this.”

I write:

don’t make me laugh. my face, I write, the doctor sez my wound will weep.

Still, at least somebody had noticed. This whole time, I was calm. I was the picture of calm. I never, never panicked. I saw my blood and snot and teeth splashed all over the dashboard the moment after the accident, but hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.

The instant the accident happened, I knew I would die if I didn’t take the next exit off the freeway, turn right on Northwest Gower, go twelve blocks, and turn into the La Paloma Memorial Hospital emergency room parking lot. I parked. I took my keys and my bag and I walked. The glass doors slid aside before I could see myself reflected in them. The crowd inside, all the people waiting with broken legs and choking babies, they all slid aside, too, when they saw me.

After that, the intravenous morphine. The tiny operating-room manicure scissors cut my dress up. The flesh-tone little patch panties. The police photos.

The detective, the one who searched my car for bone fragments, the guy who’d seen all those people get their heads cut off in half-open car windows, he comes back one day and says there’s nothing left to find. Birds, seagulls, maybe magpies, too. They got into the car where it was parked at the hospital, through the broken window. The magpies ate all of what the detective calls the soft-tissue evidence. The bones they probably carried away.

“You know, miss,” he says, “to break them on rocks. For the marrow.”

On the pad, with the pencil, I write:

ha, ha, ha.

Jump to just before my bandages come off, when a speech therapist says I should get down on my knees and thank God for leaving my tongue in my head, unharmed. We sit in her cinder-block office with half the room filled by her steel desk between us, and the therapist, she teaches me how a ventriloquist makes a dummy talk. You see, the ventriloquist can’t let you see his mouth move. He can’t really use his lips, so he presses his tongue against the roof of his mouth to make words.

Instead of a window, the therapist has a poster of a kitten covered in spaghetti above the words:

Accentuate the Positive

She says that if you can’t make a certain sound without using your lips, substitute a similar sound, the therapist says; for instance, use the sound eth instead of the sound eff. The context in which you use the sound will make you understandable.

“I’d rather be thishing,” the therapist says.

then go thishing, I write.

“No,” she says, “repeat.”

My throat is always raw and dry even after a million liquids through straws all day. The scar tissue is rippled hard and polished around my unharmed tongue.

The therapist says, “I’d rather be thishing.”

I say, “Salghrew jfwoiew fjfowi sdkifj.”

“No, not that way,” the therapist says. “You’re not doing it right.”

I say, “Solfjf gjoie ddd oslidjf?”

She says, “No, that’s not right, either.”

She looks at her watch.

“Digri vrior gmjgi g giel,” I say.

“You’ll need to practice a lot, but on your own time,” she says. “Now, again.”

I say, “Jrogier fi fkgoewir mfofeinf fcfd.”

She says, “Good! Great! See how easy?”

On my pad with my pencil, I write:

fuck off.

Jump to the day they cut off the bandages.

You don’t know what to expect, but every doctor and nurse and intern and orderly, janitor, and cook in the hospital stopped by for a peek from the doorway, and if you caught them they’d bark, Congratulations, the corners of their mouths spread wide apart and trembling in a stiff, watery smile. Bug-eyed. That’s my word for it. And I held up the same cardboard sign again and again that told them:

thank you.

And then I ran away. This is after my new cotton crepe sundress arrives from Espre. Sister Katherine stood over me all morning with a curling iron until my hair was this big butter crème frosting hairdo, this big off-the-face hairdo. Then Evie brought some makeup and did my eyes. I put on my spicy new dress and couldn’t wait to start sweating. This whole summer, I hadn’t seen a mirror, or if I did I never realized the reflection was me. I hadn’t seen the police photos. When Evie and Sister Katherine are done, I say, “De foil iowa fog geoff.”

And Evie says, “You’re welcome.”

Sister Katherine says, “But you just ate lunch.”

It’s clear enough, nobody understands me here.

I say, “Kong wimmer nay pee golly.”

And Evie says, “Yeah, these are your shoes, but I’m not hurting them any.”

And Sister Katherine says, “No, no mail yet, but we can write to prisoners after you’ve had your nap, dear.”

They left. And. I left, alone. And. How bad could it be, my face?

And sometimes being mutilated can work to your advantage. All those people now with piercings and tattoos and brandings and scarification …What I mean is, attention is attention.

Going outside is the first time I feel I’ve missed something. I mean, a whole summer had just disappeared. All those pool parties and lying around on metal-flake speedboat bows. Catching rays. Finding guys with convertibles. I get that all the picnics and softball games and concerts are just sort of trickled down into a few snapshots that Evie won’t have developed until around Thanksgiving.

Going outside, the world is all color after the white-on-white of the hospital. It’s going over the rainbow. I walk up to a supermarket, and shopping feels like a game I haven’t played since I was a little girl. Here are all my favorite name-brand products, all those colors, French’s mustard, Rice-A-Roni, Top Ramen, everything trying to catch your attention.

All that color. A whole shift in the beauty standard so that no one thing really stands out.

The total being less than the sum of its parts.

All that color all in one place.

Except for that name-brand product rainbow, there’s nothing else to look at. When I look at people, all I can see is the back of everybody’s head. Even if I turn super fast, all I can catch is somebody’s ear turning away. And folks are talking to God.

“Oh, God,” they say. “Did you see that?”

And, “Was that a mask? Christ, it’s a bit early for Halloween.”

Everybody is very busy reading the labels on French’s mustard and Rice-A-Roni.

So I take a turkey.

I don’t know why. I don’t have any money, but I take a turkey. I dig the big frozen turkeys around, those big flesh-tone lumps of ice in the freezer bin. I dig around until I find the biggest turkey, and I heft it up baby-style in its yellow plastic netting.

I haul myself up to the front of the store, right through the check stands, and nobody stops me. Nobody’s even looking. They’re all reading those tabloid newspapers as if there’s hidden gold there.

“Sejgfn di ofo utnbg,” I say. “Nei wucj iswisn sdnsud.”

Nobody looks.

“EVSF UYYB IUH,” I say in my best ventriloquist voice.

Nobody even talks. Maybe just the clerks talk. Do you have two pieces of ID? they’re asking people writing checks.

“Fgjrn iufnv si vuv,” I say. “Xidi cniwuw sis sacnc!”

Then it is, it’s right then a boy says, “Look!”

Everybody who’s not looking and not talking stops breathing.

The little boy says, “Look, Mom, look over there! That monster’s stealing food!”

Everybody gets all shrunken up with embarrassment. All their heads drop down into their shoulders the way they’d look on crutches. They’re reading tabloid headlines harder than ever.

MONSTER GIRL STEALS FESTIVE HOLIDAY BIRD

And there I am, deep-fried in my cotton crepe dress, a twenty-five pound turkey in my arms, the turkey sweating, my dress almost transparent. My nipples are rock-hard against the yellow-netted ice in my arms. Me under my butter crème frosting hairdo. Nobody looking at me as if I’ve won a big anything.

A hand comes down and slaps the little boy, and the boy starts to wail.

The boy’s wailing the way you cry if you’ve done nothing wrong but you got punished anyway. The sun’s setting outside. Inside, everything’s dead except this little voice screaming over and over: Why did you hit me? I didn’t do anything. Why did you hit me? What did I do?

I took the turkey. I walked as fast as I could back to La Paloma Memorial Hospital. It was almost dark.

The whole time I’m hugging the turkey, I’m telling myself: Turkeys. Seagulls. Magpies.

Birds.

Birds ate my face.

Back in the hospital, coming down the hallway toward me is Sister Katherine leading a man and his IV stand, the man all wrapped in gauze and hung with drain tubes and plastic bags of yellow and red fluids leaking into and out of him.

Birds ate my face.

From closer and closer, Sister Katherine shouts, “Yoo-hoo! I have someone special here you’d just love to meet!”

Birds ate my face.

Between me and them is the speech therapist office, and when I go to duck inside, there’s Brandy Alexander for the third time. The queen of everything good and kind is wearing this sleeveless Versace kind of tank dress with this season’s overwhelming feel of despair and corrupt resignation. Body-conscious yet humiliated. Buoyant but crippled. The queen supreme is the most beautiful anything I’ve ever seen, so I just vogue there to watch from the doorway.

“Men,” the therapist says, “stress the adjective when they speak.” The therapist says, “For instance, a man would say, ‘You are so attractive, today.’”

Brandy is so attractive you could chop her head off and put it on blue velvet in the window at Tiffany’s and somebody would buy it for a million dollars.

“A woman would say, ‘You are so attractive, today,’” the therapist says. “Now, you, Brandy. You say it. Stress the modifier, not the adjective.”

Brandy Alexander looks her Burning Blueberry eyes at me in the doorway and says, “Posing girl, you are so god-awful ugly. Did you let an elephant sit on your face or what?”

Brandy’s voice, I barely hear what she says. At that instant, I just adore Brandy so much. Everything about her feels as good as being beautiful and looking in a mirror. Brandy is my instant royal family. My only everything to live for.

I go, “Cfoieb svns ois,” and I pile the cold, wet turkey into the speech therapist’s lap, her sitting pinned under twenty-five pounds of dead meat in her roll-around leather desk chair.

From closer down the hallway, Sister Katherine is yelling, “Yoo-hoo!”

“Mriuvn wsi sjaoi aj,” I go, and wheel the therapist and her chair into the hallway. I say, “Jownd winc sm fdo dcncw.”

The speech therapist, she’s smiling up at me and says, “You don’t have to thank me, it’s just my job is all.”

The nun’s arrived with the man and his IV stand, a new man with no skin or crushed features or all his teeth bashed out, a man who’d be perfect for me. My one true love. My deformed or mutilated or diseased Prince Charming. My unhappily ever after. My hideous future. The monstrous rest of my life.

I slam the office door and lock myself inside with Brandy Alexander. There’s the speech therapist’s notebook on her desk, and I grab it.

save me, I write, and wave it in Brandy’s face. I write:

please.

Jump to Brandy Alexander’s hands. This always starts with her hands. Brandy Alexander puts a hand out, one of those hairy pig-knuckled hands with the veins of her arm crowded and squeezed to the elbow with bangle bracelets of every color. Just by herself, Brandy Alexander is such a shift in the beauty standard that no one thing stands out. Not even you.

“So, girl,” Brandy says. “What all happened to your face?”

Birds.

I write:

birds. birds ate my face.

And I start to laugh.

Brandy doesn’t laugh. Brandy says, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

And I’m still laughing.

i was driving on the freeway, I write.

And I’m still laughing.

someone shot a 30-caliber bullet from a rifle.

the bullet tore my entire jawbone off my face.

Still laughing.

i came to the hospital, I write.

i did not die.

Laughing.

they couldn’t put my jaw back because seagulls had eaten it.

And I stop laughing.

“Girl, your handwriting is terrible,” Brandy says. “Now tell me what else.”

And I start to cry.

what else, I write, is i have to eat baby food.

i can’t talk.

i have no career.

i have no home.

my fiancé left me.

nobody will look at me.

all my clothes, my best friend ruined them.

I’m still crying.

“What else?” Brandy says. “Tell me everything.”

a boy, I write.

a little boy in the supermarket called me a monster.

Those Burning Blueberry eyes look right at me the way no eyes have all summer. “Your perception is all fucked up,” Brandy says. “All you can talk about is trash that’s already happened.”

She says, “You can’t base your life on the past or the present.”

Brandy says, “You have to tell me about your future.”

Brandy Alexander, she stands up on her gold lamé leg-hold trap shoes. The queen supreme takes a jeweled compact out of her clutch bag and snaps the compact open to look at the mirror inside.

“That therapist,” those Plumbago lips say, “the speech therapist can be so stupid about these situations.”

The big jeweled arm muscles of Brandy sit me down in the seat still hot from her ass, and she holds the compact so I can see inside. Instead of face powder, it’s full of white capsules. Where there should be a mirror, there’s a close-up photo of Brandy Alexander smiling and looking terrific.

“They’re Vicodins, dear,” she says. “It’s the Marilyn Monroe school of medicine where enough of any drug will cure any disease.”

She says, “Dig in. Help yourself.”

The thin and eternal goddess that she is, Brandy’s picture smiles up at me over a sea of painkillers. This is how I met Brandy Alexander. This is how I found the strength not to get on with my former life. This is how I found the courage not to pick up the same old pieces.

“Now,” those Plumbago lips say, “you are going to tell me your story like you just did. Write it all down. Tell that story over and over. Tell me your sad-assed story all night.” That Brandy queen points a long bony finger at me.

“When you understand,” Brandy says, “that what you’re telling is just a story. It isn’t happening anymore. When you realize the story you’re telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trash can,” Brandy says, “then we’ll figure out who you’re going to be.”