Invisible Monsters Remix

Chapter 4

n the planet Brandy Alexander, the universe is run by a fairly elaborate system of gods and she-gods. Some evil. Some are ultimate goodness. Marilyn Monroe, for example. Then there’s Nancy Reagan and Wallis Warfield Simpson. Some of the gods and she-gods are dead. Some are alive. A lot are plastic surgeons.

The system changes. Gods and she-gods come and go and leapfrog each other for a change of status.

Abraham Lincoln is in his heaven to make our car a floating bubble of new-car–smelling air: driving as smooth as advertising copy. These days, Brandy says Marlene Dietrich is in charge of the weather. Now is the autumn of our ennui. We’re carried down Interstate 5 under gray skies, inside the blue casket interior of a rented Lincoln Town Car. Seth is driving. This is how we always sit, with Brandy up front and me in the back. Three hours of scenic beauty between Vancouver, British Columbia, and Seattle is what we’re driving through. Asphalt and internal combustion carry us and the Lincoln Town Car south.

Traveling this way, you might as well be watching the world on television. The electric windows are hummed all the way up so the planet Brandy Alexander has an atmosphere of warm, still, silent blue. It’s an even seventy degrees Fahrenheit, with the whole outside world of trees and rocks scrolling by in miniature behind curved glass. Live by satellite. We’re the little world of Brandy Alexander rocketing past it all.

Driving, driving, Seth says, “Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?”

Our rule is that when Seth’s driving, no radio. What happens is a Dionne Warwick song comes on, and Seth starts to cry so hard, crying those big Estinyl tears, shaking with those big Provera sobs. If Dionne Warwick comes on singing a Burt Bacharach song, we just have to pull over or it’s sure we’ll get car-wrecked.

The tears, the way his dumpling face has lost the chiseled shadows that used to pool under his brow and cheekbones, the way Seth’s hand will sneak up and tweak his nipple through his shirt and his mouth will drop open and his eyes roll backward, it’s the hormones. The conjugated estrogens, the Premarin, the estradiol, the ethinyl estradiol, they’ve all found their way into Seth’s diet cola. Of course, there’s the danger of liver damage at his current daily overdose levels. There could already be liver damage or cancer or blood clots, thrombosis if you’re a doctor, but I’m willing to take that chance. Sure, it’s all just for fun. Watching for his breasts to develop. Seeing his macho babe-magnet swagger go to fat and him taking naps in the afternoon. All that’s great, but his being dead would let me move on to explore other interests.

Driving, driving, Seth says, “Don’t you think that somehow television makes us God?”

This introspection is new. His beard growth is lightened up. It must be the antiandrogens choking back his testosterone. The water retention, he can ignore. The moodiness. A tear slips out of one eye in the rearview mirror and rolls down his face.

“Am I the only one who cares about these issues?” he says. “Am I the only one here in this car who feels anything real?”

Brandy’s reading a paperback book. Most times, Brandy is reading some plastic surgeon’s glossy hard-sell brochure about vaginas complete with color pictures showing the picture-perfect way a urethra should be aligned to ensure a downward stream of urine. Other pictures show how a top-quality clitoris should be hooded. These are five-figure, ten- and twenty-thousand-dollar vaginas, better than the real thing, and most days Brandy will pass the pictures around.

Jump to three weeks before, when we were in a big house in Spokane, Washington. We were in a South Hill granite chateau with Spokane spread out under the bathroom windows. I was shaking Percodans out of their brown bottle and into my purse pocket for Percodans. Brandy Alexander, she was digging around under the bathroom sink for a clean emery board when she found this paperback book.

Now all the other gods and she-gods have been eclipsed by some new deity.

Jump back to Seth looking at my breasts in the rearview mirror. “Television really does make us God,” he says.

Give me tolerance.

Flash.

Give me understanding.

Flash.

Even after all these weeks on the road with me, Seth’s glorious vulnerable blue eyes still won’t meet my eyes. His new wistful introspection, he can ignore. The way the orals have already side-effected his eyes, steepened the corneal curve so he can’t wear his contact lenses without them popping out. This has to be the conjugated estrogens in his orange juice every morning. He can ignore all that.

This has to be the Androcur in his iced tea at lunch, but he’ll never figure it out. He’ll never catch me.

Brandy Alexander, her nylon stocking feet up on the dashboard, the queen supreme’s still reading her paperback.

“When you watch daytime dramas,” Seth tells me, “you can look in on anybody. There’s a different life on every channel, and almost every hour the lives change. It’s the same as those live video Web sites. You can watch the whole world without it knowing.”

For three weeks, Brandy’s been reading that book.

“Television lets you spy on even the sexy parts of everybody’s life,” Seth says. “Doesn’t it make sense?”

Maybe, but only if you’re on five hundred milligrams of micronized progesterone every day.

A few minutes of scenery go by behind glass. Just some towering mountains, old dead volcanoes, mostly the kind of stuff you find outside. Those timeless natural nature themes. Raw materials at their rawest. Unrefined. Unimproved rivers. Poorly maintained mountains. Filth. Plants growing in dirt. Weather.

“And if you believe that we really have free will, then you know that God can’t really control us,” Seth says. Seth’s hands are off the steering wheel and flutter around to make his point. “And since God can’t control us,” he says, “all God does is watch and change channels when He gets bored.”

Somewhere in heaven, you’re live on a video Web site for God to surf.

Brandycam.

Brandy with her empty leg-hold trap shoes on the floor, Brandy licks an index finger and slow turns a page.

Ancient aboriginal petroglyphs and junk are just whizzing past.

“My point,” Seths says, “is that maybe TV makes you God.” Seth says, “And it could be that all we are is God’s television.”

Standing on the gravel shoulder are some moose or whatnot just trudging along on all four feet.

“Or Santa Claus,” says Brandy from behind her book. “Santa Claus sees everything.”

“Santa Claus is just a story,” says Seth. “He’s just the opening band to God. There is no Santa Claus.”

Jump to drug hunting three weeks ago in Spokane, Washington, when Brandy Alexander flopped down in the master bedroom and started reading. I took thirty-two Nembutals. Thirty-two Nembutals went in my purse. I don’t eat the merchandise. Brandy was still reading. I tried all the lipsticks on the back of my hand, and Brandy was still propped on a zillion eyelet lace pillows in the center of a king-sized waterbed. Still reading.

I put some expired estradiol and a half stick of Plumbago in my bag. The realtor called up the stairs, was everything all right?

Jump to us on Interstate 5 where a billboard goes by:

Clean Food and Family Prices Coming Up at the Karver Stage Stop Café

Jump to no Burning Blueberry, no Rusty Rose or Aubergine Dreams in Spokane.

He didn’t want to rush us, the realtor called up the stairs, but was there anything we needed to know? Did we have any questions about anything?

I stuck my head in the master bedroom, and the waterbed’s white duvet held a reading Brandy Alexander that was dead for as much as she was breathing.

Oh, clipped lilac satin of the beaded rice pearl hemline.

Oh, layered amber cashmere trimmed in faceted topaz marabou.

Oh, slithering underwired free-range mink bolero.

We had to go.

Brandy clutched her paperback open against her straight-up torpedo boob job. The Rusty Rose face pillowed in auburn hair and eyelet lace pillow shams, the aubergine eyes had the dilated look of a Thorazine overdose.

First thing I want to know is what drug she’s taken.

The paperback cover showed a pretty blond babe. Thin as a spaghetti strap. With a pretty, thin little smile. The babe’s hair was a satellite photo of Hurricane Blonde just off the west coast of her face. The face was a Greek she-god with great lash, big eyeliner eyes the same as Betty and Veronica and all the other Archie gals had at Riverdale High. White pearls are wrapped up her arms and around her neck. What could be diamonds sparkle here and there.

The paperback cover said Miss Rona.

Brandy Alexander, her leg-hold trap shoes were getting dirt all over the waterbed’s white duvet, and Brandy said, “I’ve found out who the real God is.”

The realtor was ten seconds away.

Jump to all the wonders of nature blurring past us, rabbits, squirrels, plunging waterfalls. That’s the worst of it. Gophers digging subterranean dens underground. Birds nesting in nests.

“The Princess B.A. is God,” Seth tells me in the rearview mirror.

Jump to where the Spokane realtor yelled up the stairs. The people who owned the granite chateau were coming up the driveway.

Brandy Alexander, her eyes dilated, barely breathing in a Spokane waterbed, said, “Rona Barrett. Rona Barrett is my new Supreme Being.”

Jump to Brandy in the Lincoln Town Car saying, “Rona Barrett is God.”

All around us, erosion and insects are just chewing up the world, never mind people and pollution. Everything biodegrades with or without you pushing. I check my purse for enough spironolactone for Seth’s afternoon snack. Another billboard goes by:

Tasty Phase Magic Bran—Put Something Good in Your Mouth

“In her autobiography,” Brandy Alexander testifies, “in Miss Rona, published by Bantam Books by arrangement with the Nash Publishing Corporation on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, California …” Brandy takes a deep breath of new-car-smelling air, “…copyright 1974, Miss Rona tells us how she started life as a fat little Jewish girl from Queens with a big nose and a mysterious muscle disease.”

Brandy says, “This little fat brunette re-creates herself as a top celebrity superstar blonde whom a top sex symbol then begs to let him stick his penis in her just one inch.”

There isn’t one native tongue left among us.

Another billboard:

Next Sundae, Scream for Tooter’s Ice Milk!

“What that woman has gone through,” says Brandy. “Right here on page one hundred and twenty-five, she almost drowns in her own blood! Rona’s just had her nose job. She’s only making fifty bucks a story, but this woman saves enough for a thousand-dollar nose job! It’s her first miracle. So, Rona’s in the hospital, post–nose job, with her head wrapped up like a mummy, when a friend comes in and says how Hollywood says she’s a lesbian. Miss Rona, a lesbian! Of course this isn’t true. The woman is a she-god, so she screams and screams and screams until an artery in her throat just bursts.”

“Hallelujah,” Seth says, all teared up again.

“And here”—Brandy licks the pad of a big index finger and flips ahead a few pages—“on page two hundred and twenty-two, Rona is once more rejected by her sleazy boyfriend of eleven years. She’s been coughing for weeks so she takes a handful of pills and is found semicomatose and dying. Even the ambulance—”

“Praise God,” Seth says.

Various native plants are growing just wherever they want.

“Seth, sweetness,” Brandy says. “Don’t step on my lines.” Her Plumbago lips say, “Even the ambulance driver thought our Miss Rona would be DOA.”

Clouds composed of water vapor are up in the, you know, sky.

Brandy says, “Now, Seth.”

And Seth says, “Hallelujah!”

The wild daisies and Indian paintbrush whizzing past are just the genitals of a different life-form.

And Seth says, “So what are you saying?”

“In the book Miss Rona, copyright 1974,” Brandy says, “Rona Barrett—who got her enormous breasts when she was nine years old and wanted to cut them off with scissors—she tells us in the prologue of her book that she’s like this animal, cut open with all its vital organs glistening and quivering, you know, like the liver and the large intestine. Such visuals, everything sort of dripping and pulsating. Anyway, she could wait for someone to sew her back up, but she knows no one will. She has to take a needle and thread and sew herself up.”

“Gross,” says Seth.

“Miss Rona says nothing is gross,” Brandy says. “Miss Rona says the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”

Flocks of self-absorbed little native birds seem obsessed with finding food and picking it up with their mouths.

Brandy pulls the rearview mirror around until she finds me reflected and says, “Bubba-Joan, sweetness?”

It’s obvious the native birds have to build their own do-it-yourself nests using materials they source locally. The little sticks and leaves are just sort of heaped together.

“Bubba-Joan,” Brandy Alexander says. “Why don’t you open up to us with a story?”

Seth says, “Remember the time in Missoula when the princess got so ripped she ate Nebalino suppositories wrapped in gold foil because she thought they were Almond Roca? Talk about your semiconscious DOAs.”

Pine trees are producing pine cones. Squirrels and mammals of all sexes spend all day trying to get laid. Or giving birth live. Or eating their young.

Brandy says, “Seth, sweetness?”

“Yes, Mother.”

What only looks like bulimia is how bald eagles feed their young.

Brandy says, “Why is it you have to seduce every living thing you come across?”

Another billboard:

Nubby’s Is the BBQ Gotta-Stop for Savory, Flavory Chicken Wings

Another billboard:

Dairy Bite—The Chewing Gum Flavored with the Low-Fat Goodness of Real Cheese

Seth giggles. Seth blushes and twists some of his hair around a finger. He says, “You make me sound so sexually compulsive.”

Mercy. Next to him, I feel so butch.

“Oh, baby,” Brandy says, “you don’t remember half of who you’ve been with.” She says, “Well, I only wish I could forget it.”

To my breasts in the rearview mirror, Seth says, “The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.”

I figure, a few more days of increased micronized progesterone, and Seth should pop out his own nice rack of hooters. Side effects I need to watch for include nausea, vomiting, jaundice, migraine, abdominal cramps, and dizziness. You try to remember the exact toxicity levels, but why bother.

A sign goes by saying: Seattle 130 miles.

“Come on, let’s see those glistening, quivering innards, Bubba-Joan,” Brandy Alexander, God and mother of us all, commands. “Tell us a gross personal story.”

She says, “Rip yourself open. Sew yourself shut,” and she hands a prescription pad and an Aubergine Dreams eyebrow pencil to me in the backseat.