Chuck Palahniuk

Invisible Monsters

For Geoff, who said, "This is how to steal drugs."

And Ina, who said, "This is lip liner." And Janet, who

said, "This is silk georgette." And my editor, Patricia,

who kept saying, "This is not good, enough."

CHAPTER O N E

Where you're supposed to be is some big West Hills

wedding reception in a big manor house with flower

arrangements and stuffed mushrooms all over the house. This

is called scene setting: where everybody is, who's alive, who's

dead. This is Evie Cottrell's big wedding reception moment.

Evie is standing halfway down the big staircase in the manor

house foyer, naked inside what's left of her wedding dress,

still holding her rifle.

Me, I'm standing at the bottom of the stairs but only in a

physical way. My mind is, I don't know where.

Nobody's all-the-way dead yet, but let's just say the clock

is ticking.

Not that anybody in this big drama is a real alive per-son,

either. You can trace everything about Evie Cottrell's look back

to some television commercial for an organic shampoo, except

right now Evie's wedding dress is burned down to just the

hoopskirt wires orbiting her hips and just the little wire

skeletons of all the silk flowers that were in her hair. And

Evie's blonde hair, her big, teased-up, backcombed rainbow in

every shade of blonde blown up with hairspray, well, Evie's

hair is burned off, too.

The only other character here is Brandy Alexander, who's

laid out, shotgunned, at the bottom of the staircase, bleeding

to death.

What I tell myself is the gush of red pumping out of

Brandy's bullet hole is less like blood than it's some

sociopolitical tool. The thing about being cloned from all

those shampoo commercials, well, that goes for me and

Brandy Alexander, too. Shotgunning anybody in this room

would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum

cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a

book. Probably that goes for killing anybody in the world.

We're all such products.

Brandy Alexander, the long-stemmed latte queen

supreme of the top-drawer party girls, Brandy is gushing her

insides out through a bullet hole in her amazing suit jacket.

The suit, it's this white Bob Mackie knock-off Brandy bought

in Seattle with a tight hobble skirt that squeezes her ass into

the perfect big heart shape. You would not believe how

much this suit cost. The mark-up is about a zillion percent. The

suit jacket has a little peplum

skirt and wide lapels and shoulders. The single-breasted

cut is symmetrical except for the hole pumping out blood.

Then Evie starts to sob, standing there halfway up the

staircase. Evie, that deadly virus of the moment. This is our

cue to all look at poor Evie, poor, sad Evie, hairless and wearing

nothing but ashes and circled by the wire cage of her burned-

up hoop skirt. Then Evie drops the rifle. With her dirty face in

her dirty hands, Evie sits down and starts to boo-hoo, as if

crying will solve anything. The rifle, this is a loaded thirty-

aught rifle, it clatters down the stairs and skids out into the

middle of the foyer floor, spinning on its side, pointing at me,

pointing at Brandy, pointing at Evie, crying.

It's not that I'm some detached lab animal just conditioned

to ignore violence, but my first instinct is maybe it's

not too late to dab club soda on the bloodstain.

Most of my adult life so far has been me standing on

seamless paper for a raft of bucks per hour, wearing clothes

and shoes, my hair done and some famous fashion

photographer telling me how to feel.

Him yelling, Give me lust, baby.

Flash.

Give me malice.

Flash.

Give me detached existentialist ennui.

Flash.

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

Flash.

Probably it's the shock of seeing my one worst enemy shoot

my other worst enemy is what it is. Boom, and it's a win-win

situation. This and being around Brandy, I've developed a

pretty big Jones for drama.

It only looks like I'm crying when I put a handkerchief up

under my veil to breathe through. To filter the air since you

can about not breathe for all the smoke since Evie's big

manor house is burning down around us.

Me, kneeling down beside Brandy, I could put my hands

anywhere in my gown and find Darvons and Demerols and

Darvocet 100s. This is everybody's cue to look at me. My gown

is a knock-off print of the Shroud of Turin, most of it brown

and white, draped and cut so the shiny red buttons will

button through the stigmata. Then I'm wearing yards and

yards of black organza veil wrapped around my face and

studded with little hand-cut Austrian crystal stars. You can't tell

how I look, face-wise, but that's the whole idea. The look is

elegant and sacrilegious and makes me feel sacred and

immoral.

Haute couture and getting hauler.

Fire inches down the foyer wallpaper. Me, for added set

dressing I started the fire. Special effects can go a long way to

heighten a mood, and it's not as if this is a real house. What's

burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house

patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock-Tudor big

manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from

anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?

Just before Evie comes screaming down the stairs and

shoots Brandy Alexander, what I did was pour out about a

gallon of Chanel Number Five and put a burning wedding

invitation to it, and boom, I'm recycling.

It's funny, but when you think about even the biggest

tragic fire it's just a sustained chemical reaction. The oxidation

of Joan of Arc.

Still spinning on the floor, the rifle points at me, points at

Brandy.

Another thing is no matter how much you think you love

somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood

edges up too close.

Except for all this high drama, it's a really nice day. This is

a warm, sunny day and the front door is open to the porch

and the lawn outside. The fire upstairs draws the warm smell

of the fresh-cut lawn into the foyer, and you can hear all the

wedding guests outside. All the guests, they took the gifts

they wanted, the crystal and silver and went out to wait on

the lawn for the firemen and paramedics to make their

entrance.

Brandy, she opens one of her huge, ring-beaded hands and

she touches the hole pouring her blood all over the marble

floor.

Brandy, she says, "Shit. There's no way the Bon Marche will

take this suit back."

Evie lifts her face, her face a finger-painting mess of soot

and snot and tears from her hands and screams, "I hate my

life being so boring!”

Evie screams down at Brandy Alexander, "Save me a

window table in hell!"

Tears rinse clean lines down Evie's cheeks, and she

screams, "Girlfriend! You need to be yelling some back at me!"

As if this isn't already drama, drama, drama, Brandy looks

up at me kneeling beside her. Brandy's aubergine eyes dilated

out to full flower, she says, "Brandy Alexander is going to die

now?"

Evie, Brandy and me, all this is just a power struggle for

the spotlight. Just each of us being me, me, me first. The

murderer, the victim, the witness, each of us thinks our role is

the lead.

Probably that goes for anybody in the world.

It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power

the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.

Anymore, when I see the picture of a twenty-something in

the newspaper who was abducted and sodomized and robbed

and then killed and here's a front-page picture of her young

and smiling, instead of me dwelling on this being a big, sad

crime, my gut reaction is, wow, she'd be really hot if she didn't

have such a big honker of a nose. My second reaction is I'd

better have some good head and shoulders shots handy in case

I get, you know, abducted and sodomized to death. My third

reaction is, well, at least that cuts down on the competition.

If that's not enough, my moisturizer I use is a suspension of

inert fetal solids in hydrogenated mineral oil. My point is

that, if I'm honest, my life is all about me.

My point is, unless the meter is running and some photographer

is yelling: Give me empathy.

Then the flash of the strobe.

Give me sympathy.

Flash.

Give me brutal honesty.

Flash.

"Don't let me die here on this floor," Brandy says, and

her big hands clutch at me. "My hair," she says, "My hair

will be flat in the back."

My point is I know Brandy is maybe probably going to

die, but I just can't get into it.

Evie sobs even louder. On top of this, the fire sirens

from way outside are crowning me queen of Migraine

Town.

The rifle is still spinning on the floor, but slower and

slower.

Brandy says, "This is not how Brandy Alexander wanted

her life to go. She's supposed to be famous, first. You know,

she's supposed to be on television during Super Bowl

halftime, drinking a diet cola naked in slow motion before

she died."

The rifle stops spinning and points at nobody.

At Evie sobbing, Brandy screams, "Shut up!"

" You shut up," Evie screams back. Behind her, the fire is

eating its way down the stairway carpet.

The sirens, you can hear them wandering and screaming all

over the West Hills. People will just knock each other down to dial

9-1-1 and be the big hero. Nobody looks ready for the big television

crew that's due to arrive any minute.

"This is your last chance, honey," Brandy says, and her blood is

getting all over the place. She says, "Do you love me?"

It's when folks ask questions like this that you lose the spotlight.

This is how folks trap you into a best-supporting role.

Even bigger than the house being on fire is this huge

expectation that I have to say the three most worn-out words

you'll find in any script. Just the words make me feel I'm severely

fingering myself. They're just words is all. Powerless. Vocabulary.

Dialogue.

"Tell me," Brandy says. "Do you? Do you really love me?"

This is the big hammy way Brandy has played her whole life.

The Brandy Alexander nonstop continuous live action theater, but

less and less live by the moment.

Just for a little stage business, I take Brandy's hand in mine. This

is a nice gesture, but then I'm freaked by the whole threat of

blood-borne pathogens, and then, boom, the ceiling in the dining

room crashes down and sparks and embers rush out at us from the

dining room doorway.

"Even if you can't love me, then tell me my life,”

Brandy says. "A girl can't die without her life flashing

before her eyes."

Pretty much nobody is getting their emotional needs

met.

It's then the fire eats down the stairway carpet to Evie's

bare ass, and Evie screams to her feet and pounds down the

stairs in her burned-up white high heels. Naked and hairless,

wearing wire and ashes, Evie Cottrell runs out the front door

to a larger audience, her wedding guests, the silver and

crystal and the arriving fire trucks. This is the world we live in.

Conditions change and we mutate.

So of course this'll be all about Brandy, hosted by me, with

guest appearances by Evelyn Cottrell and the deadly AIDS

virus. Brandy, Brandy, Brandy. Poor sad Brandy on her back,

Brandy touches the hole pouring her life out onto the marble

floor and says, "Please. Tell me my life. Tell me how we got

here."

So me, I'm here eating smoke just to document this

Brandy Alexander moment.

Give me attention.

Flash.

Give me adoration.

Flash.

Give me a break.

Flash.

CHAPTER T W O

Don't expect this to be the kind of story that goes: and

then, and then, and then.

What happens here will have more of that fashion

magazine feel, a Vogue or a Glamour magazine chaos with page

numbers on every second or fifth or third page. Perfume

cards falling out, and full-page naked women coming out of

nowhere to sell you make-up.

Don't look for a contents page, buried magazine-style

twenty pages back from the front. Don't expect to find

anything right off. There isn't a real pattern to anything,

either. Stories will start and then, three paragraphs later:

Jump to page whatever.

Then, jump back.

This will be ten thousand fashion separates that mix and

match to create maybe five tasteful outfits. A million trendy

accessories, scarves and belts, shoes and hats and gloves, and

no real clothes to wear them with.

And you really, really need to get used to that feeling,

here, on the freeway, at work, in your marriage. This is the

world we live in. Just go with the prompts.

Jump back twenty years to the white house where I grew

up with my father shooting super-8 movies of my brother and

me running around the yard.

Jump to present time with my folks sitting on lawn chairs

at night, and watching these same super-8 movies projected

on the white side of the same white house, twenty years later.

The house the same, the yard the same, the windows

projected in the movies lined up just perfect with the real

windows, the movie grass aligned with the real grass, and my

movie-projected brother and me being toddlers and running

around wild for the camera.

Jump to my big brother being all miserable and dead

from the big plague of AIDS.

Jump to me being grown up and fallen in love with a

police detective and moved away to become a famous

supermodel.

Just remember, the same as a spectacular Vogue magazine,

remember that no matter how close you follow the jumps:

Continued on page whatever.

No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the

sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your

skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen

heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments

where you should've been paying attention.

Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life

will feel some day.

This is all practice. None of this matters. We're just

warming up.

Jump to here and now, Brandy Alexander bleeding to

death on the floor with me kneeling beside her, telling this

story before here come the paramedics.

Jump backward just a few days to the living room of a

rich house in Vancouver, British Columbia. The room is lined

with the rococo hard candy of carved mahogany paneling

with marble baseboards and marble flooring and a very sort-

of curlicue carved marble fireplace. In rich houses where old

rich people live, everything is just what you'd think.

The rubrum lilies in the enameled vases are real, not silk.

The cream-colored drapes are silk, not polished cotton.

Mahogany is not pine stained to look like mahogany. No

pressed-glass chandeliers posing as cut crystal. The leather is

not vinyl.

All around us are these cliques of Louis-the-Fourteenth

chair-sofa-chair.

In front of us is yet another innocent real estate agent,

and Brandy's hand goes out: her wrist thick with bones and

veins, the mountain range of her knuckles, her wilted fingers,

her rings in their haze of marquise-cut green and red, her

porcelain nails painted sparkle pink, she says, "Charmed, I'm

sure."

If you have to start with any one detail, it has to be

Brandy's hands. Beaded with rings to make them look even

bigger, Brandy's hands are enormous. Beaded with rings, as if

they could be more obvious, hands are the one part about

Brandy Alexander the surgeons couldn't change.

So Brandy doesn't even try and hide her hands.

We've been in too many of this kind of house for me to

count, and the realtor we meet is always smiling. This one is

wearing the standard uniform, the navy blue suit with the

red, white, and blue scarf around the neck. The blue heels are

on her feet and the blue bag is hanging at the crook of her

elbow.

The realty woman looks from Brandy Alexander's big hand

to Signore Alfa Romeo standing at Brandy's side, and the

power blue eyes of Alfa attach themselves; those blue eyes you

never see close or look away, inside those eyes is the baby or

the bouquet of flowers, beautiful or vulnerable, that make a

beautiful man someone safe to love.

Alfa's just the latest in a year-long road trip of men

obsessed with Brandy, and any smart woman knows a

beautiful man is her best fashion accessory. The same way you'd

product model a new car or a toaster, Brandy's hand draws a

sight line through the air from her smile and big boobs to

Alfa. "May I introduce," Brandy says, "Signore Alfa Romeo,

professional male consort to the Princess Brandy Alexander."

The same way, Brandy's hand swings from her batting

eyelashes and rich hair in an invisible sight line to me.

All the realty woman is going to see is my veils, muslin and

cut-work velvet, brown and red, tulle threaded with silver,

layers of so much you'd think there's nobody inside. There's

nothing about me to look at so most people don't. It's a look

that says:

Thank you for not sharing.

"May I introduce," Brandy says, "Miss Kay Maclsaac,

personal secretary to the Princess Brandy Alexander."

The realty woman in her blue suit with its brass Chanel

buttons and the scarf tied around her neck to hide all her

loose skin, she smiles at Alfa.

When nobody will look at you, you can stare a hole in

them. Picking out all the little details you'd never stare long

enough to get if she'd ever just return your gaze, this, this is your

revenge. Through my veils, the realtor's glowing red and gold,

blurred at her edges.

"Miss Maclsaac," Brandy says, her big hand still open toward me,

"Miss Maclsaac is mute and cannot speak."

The realty woman with her lipstick on her teeth and her

powder and concealer layered in the crepe under her eyes, her preta-

porter teeth and machine-washable wig, she smiles at Brandy

Alexander.

"And this ... ," Brandy's big ring-beaded hand curls up to touch

Brandy's torpedo breasts.

"This ... ," Brandy's hand curls up to touch pearls at her

throat.

"This ... ," the enormous hand lifts to touch the billowing

piles of auburn hair.

"And this ... ," the hand touches thick moist lips.

"This," Brandy says, "is the Princess Brandy Alexander."

The realty woman drops to one knee in something between a

curtsy and what you'd do before an altar. Genuflecting. "This is

such an honor," she says. "I'm so sure this is the house for you. You

just have to love this house."

Icicle bitch she can be, Brandy just nods and turns back toward

the front hall where we came in.

"Her Highness and Miss Maclsaac," Alfa says, "they would like to

tour the house by themselves, while you and I discuss the details."

Alfa's little hands flutter up to explain," ... the transfer of

funds ... the exchange of lira for Canadian dollars."

"Loonies," the realty woman says.

Brandy and me and Alfa are all flash frozen. Maybe this

woman has seen through us. Maybe after the months we've

been on the road and the dozens of big houses we've hit,

maybe somebody has finally figured out our scam.

"Loonies," the woman says. Again, she genuflects. "We call

our dollars 'Loonies'," she says and jabs a hand in her blue

purse. "I'll show you. There's a picture of a bird on them," she

says. "It's a loon."

Brandy and me, we turn icicle again and start walking

away, back to the front hall. Back through the cliques of chair-

sofa-chair, past the carved marble. Our reflections smear, dim,

and squirm behind a lifetime of cigar smoke on the mahogany

paneling. Back to the front hallway, I follow the Princess

Brandy Alexander while Alfa's voice fills the realtor's blue-

suited attention with questions about the angle of the

morning sun into the dining room and whether the provincial

government will allow a personal heliport behind the

swimming pool.

Going toward the stairs is the exquisite back of Princess

Brandy, a silver fox jacket draped over Brandy's shoulders and

yards of a silk brocade scarf tied around her billowing pile of

Brandy Alexander auburn hair. The queen supreme's voice

and the shadow of L'Air du Temps are the invisible train

behind everything that is the world of Brandy Alexander.

The billowing auburn hair piled up inside her brocade silk

scarf reminds me of a bran muffin. A big cherry cupcake. This

is some strawberry auburn mushroom cloud rising over a

Pacific atoll.

Those princess feet are caught in two sort of gold lame

leg-hold traps with little gold straps and gold chains. These

are the trapped-on, stilted, spike-heeled feet of gold that

mount the first of about three hundred steps from the front

hall to the second floor. Then she mounts the next step, and

the next until all of her is far enough above me to risk

looking back. Only then will she turn the whole strawberry

cupcake of her head. Those big torpedo, Brandy Alexander

breasts silhouetted, the wordless beauty of that professional

mouth in full face.

"The owner of this house," Brandy says, "is very old and

supplementing her hormones and still lives here."

The carpet is so thick under my feet I could be climbing

loose dirt. One step after another, loose and sliding and

unstable. We, Brandy and Alfa and me, we've been speaking

English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it

as our first.

I have no native tongue.

We're eye level with the dirty stones of a dark chandelier.

On the other side of the handrail, the hallway's gray marble

floor looks as if we've climbed a stairway through the clouds.

Step after step. Far away, Alfa's demanding talk goes on

about wine cellars, about kennels for the Russian wolfhounds.

Alfa's constant demand for the realty woman's attention is as

faint as a radio call-in show bouncing back from outer space.

" ... the Princess Brandy Alexander," Alfa's warm, dark

words float up, "she is probable to remove her clothes and

scream like the wild horses in even the crowded restaurants

..."

The queen supreme's voice and the shadow of L'Air du

Temps says, "Next house," her Plumbago lips say, "Alfa will be

the mute."

" ... your breasts," Alfa is telling the realty woman, "you

have two of the breasts of a young woman ... "

Not one native tongue is left among us.

Jump to us being upstairs.

Jump to now anything being possible.

After the realtor is trapped by the blue eyes of Signore

Alfa Romeo, jump to when the real scamming starts. The

master bedroom will always be down the hallway in the

direction of the best view. This master bathroom is paneled in

pink mirror, every wall, even the ceiling. Princess Brandy and I

are everywhere, reflected on every surface. You can see

Brandy sitting on the pink counter at one side of the vanity

sink, me sitting at the other side of the sink.

One of us is sitting on each side of all the sinks in all the

mirrors. There are just too many Brandy Alexanders to count,

and they're all being the boss of me. They all open their

white calfskin clutch bags, and hundreds of those big ring-

beaded Brandy Alexander hands take out

new copies of the Physicians' Desk Reference with its red

cover, big as a Bible.

All her hundreds of Burning Blueberry eye shadow eyes

look at me from all over the room.

"You know the drill," all her hundreds of Plumbago

mouths command. Those big hands start pulling open

drawers and cabinet doors. "Remember where you got

everything, and put it back exactly where you found it," the

mouths say. "We'll do the drugs first, then the makeup. Now

start hunting."

I take out the first bottle. It's Valium, and I hold the

bottle so all the hundred Brandys can read the label.

"Take what we can get away with," Brandy says, "then get

on to the next bottle."

I shake a few of the little blue pills into my purse pocket

with the other Valiums. The next bottle I find is Darvons.

"Honey, those are heaven in your mouth," all the

Brandys look up to peer at the bottle I'm holding. "Does it

look safe to take too many?"

The expiration date on the label is only a month away, and

the bottle is still almost full. I figure we can take about half.

"Here," a big ring-beaded hand comes at me from every

direction. One hundred big hands come at me, palm up. "Give

Brandy a couple. The princess is having lower back pain again."

I shake ten capsules out, and a hundred hands toss a

thousand tranquilizers onto the red carpet tongues of those

Plumbago mouths. A suicide load of Darvon slides down into

the dark interior of the continents that make up a world of

Brandy Alexander.

Inside the next bottle are the little purple ovals of 2.5 milligram—sized Premarin.

That's short for Pregnant Mare Urine. That's short for

thousands of miserable horses in North Dakota and Central

Canada, forced to stand in cramped dark stalls with a

catheter stuck on them to catch every drop of urine and only

getting let outside to get fucked again. What's funny is that

describes pretty much any good long stay in a hospital, but

that's only been my experience.

"Don't look at me that way," Brandy says. "My not taking

those pills won't bring any baby horses back from the dead."

In the next bottle are round, peach-colored little scored

tablets of 100-milligram Aldactone. Our homeowner must be a

junkie for female hormones.

Painkillers and estrogen are pretty much Brandy's only two

food groups, and she says, "Gimme, gimme, gimme." She snacks

on some little pink-coated Estinyls. She pops a few of the

turquoise-blue Estrace tablets. She's using some vaginal

Premarin as a hand cream when she says, "Miss Kay?" She

says, "I can't seem to make a fist, Sweetness. Do you think,

maybe you can wrap things up without me while I lie down?"

The hundreds of me cloned in the pink bathroom mirrors,

we check out the make-up while the princess goes off to cat nap in

the cabbage rose and old canopy bed glory of the master bedroom. I

find Darvocets and Percodans and Compazines, Nembutals and

Percocets. Oral estrogens. Anti-androgens. Progestons. Transdermal

estrogen patches. I find none of Brandy's colors, no Rusty Rose

blusher. No Burning Blueberry eye shadow. I find a vibrator with the

dead batteries swollen and leaking acid inside.

It's an old woman who owns this house, I figure. Ignored and

aging and drugged-out old women, older and more invisible to the

world every minute, they must not wear a lot of make-up. Not go

out to fun hot spots. Not boogie to a party froth. My breath smells

hot and sour inside my veils, inside the damp layers of silk and mesh

and cotton georgette I lift for the first time all day; and in the

mirrors, I look at the pink reflection of what's left of my face.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest one of all?

The evil queen was stupid to play Snow White's game. There's

an age where a woman has to move on to another kind of power.

Money, for example. Or a gun.

I'm living the life I love, I tell myself, and loving the life I live.

I tell myself: I deserved this.

This is exactly what I wanted.

CHAPTER THREE

Until 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 everyday. 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 seatbelt."

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 head first 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 arm holes 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 Stingray when a

rock or I don't know what, but my dri-ver'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 gur-ney

to surgery, after the bleeding had stopped and I was in a

private room. Then Manus showed up. Manus Kelley who was

my fiance 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 any more.

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 tool box 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 160 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 Vogues, and

Glamour magazines in her lap she brings me, "I talked to the

agency and they said that if we re-do 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 some time 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 canapes

like crazy, and Evie has to wade out into the studio audience

and get folks to eat the canapes.

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 pureed 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 I.D. 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 window's, 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

cinderblock 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.

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 creme frosting

hairdo, this big off-the-face hairdo. Then Evie brought some make

up 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 were 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 speed-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 I.D.? 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 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 Godawful 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, "Yoohoo!"

"Mriuvn wsi sjaoi aj," I go, and wheel the therapist and her chair

into the hallway. I say, "Jownd wine 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 I.V. 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 fiance 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 lame 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 trashcan," Brandy says, "then we'll figure out

who you're going to be.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Jump to the Canadian border.

Jump to the three of us in a rented Lincoln Town Car, waiting to

drive south from Vancouver, British Columbia, into the United States,

waiting, with Signore Romeo in the driver's seat, waiting with

Brandy next to him in the front, waiting, with me alone in the

back.

"The police have microphones," Brandy tells us.

The plan is if we make it through the border, we'll drive south

to Seattle where there are nightclubs and dance clubs where go-

go boys and go-go girls will line up to buy the pockets of my purse

clean. We have to be quiet because the police, they have

microphones on both sides of the border, United States and

Canadian. This way, they

can listen in on people waiting to cross. We could have Cuban

cigars. Fresh fruit. Diamonds. Diseases. Drugs, Brandy says. Brandy,

she tells us to shut up a mile before the border, and we wait in line,

quiet.

Brandy unwinds the yards and yards of brocade scarf around her

head. Brandy, she shakes her hair down her back and ties the scarf

over her shoulders to hide her torpedo cleavage. Brandy switches to

simple gold earrings. She takes off her pearls and puts on a little

chain with a gold cross. This is a moment before the border guard.

"Your nationalities?" the border-guard guy sitting inside his

little window, behind his computer terminal with his clipboard and

his blue suit behind his mirrored sunglasses, and behind his gold

badge says.

"Sir," Brandy says, and her new voice is as bland and drawled out

as grits without salt or butter. She says, "Sir, we are citizens of the

United States of America, what used to be called the greatest

country on earth until the homosexuals and child pornographers—

"Your names?" says the border guy.

Brandy leans across Alfa to look up at the border guy, "My

husband," she says, "is an innocent man."

"Your name, please," he says, no doubt looking up our license

plate, finding it's a rental car, rented in Billings, Montana, three

weeks ago, maybe even finding the truth about who we really are.

Maybe finding bulletin after bulletin from all over western

Canada about three nut cases stealing drugs at big houses up for

sale. Maybe all this is spooling onto his computer screen, maybe

none of it. You never know.

"I am married," Brandy is almost yelling to get his attention. "I

am the wife of the Reverend Scooter Alexander," she says, still half

laid across Alfa's lap.

"And this," she says and draws the invisible line from her smile

to Alfa, "this is my son-in-law, Seth Thomas." Her big hand flies

toward me in the backseat. "This," she says, "is my daughter,

Bubba-Joan."

Some days, I hate it when Brandy changes our lives without

warning. Sometimes, twice in one day, you have to live up to a new

identity. A new name. New relationships. Handicaps. It's hard to

remember who I started this road trip being.

No doubt, this is the kind of stress the constantly mutating

AIDS virus must feel.

"Sir?" the border guy says to Seth, formerly Alfa Romeo,

formerly Chase Manhattan, formerly Nash Rambler, formerly Wells

Fargo, formerly Eberhard Faber. The guard says, "Sir, are you

bringing any purchases back with you into the United States?"

My pointed little toe of my shoe reaches under the front seat and

gooses my new husband. The details of everything have us

surrounded. The mud flats left by low tide are just over there, with

little waves arriving one after another. The flower beds on our other

side are planted to spell out words you can only read from a long

ways off. Up close, it's just so many red and yellow wax begonias.

"Don't tell me you've never watched our Christian Healing

Network'?" Brandy says. She fiddles with the little gold cross at her

throat. "If you just watched one show, you'd know that God in his

wisdom has made my son-in-law a mute, and he cannot speak."

The border guy keyboards some quick strokes. This could be

"CRIME" he's typed. Or "DRUGS." Or SHOOT. It could be SMUGGLERS.

Or ARREST.

"Not a word," Brandy whispers next to Seth's ear, "You talk and

in Seattle, I'll change you into Harvey Wallbanger."

The border guy says, "To admit you to the United States, I'm

going to have to see your passports, please."

Brandy licks her lips wet and shining, her eyes moist and bright.

Her brocade scarf slips low to reveal her cleavage as she looks up at

the border guy and says, "Would you excuse us a moment."

Brandy sits back in her own seat, and Seth's window hums all

the way up.

Brandy's big torpedoes inhale big and then exhale. "Don't

anybody panic," she says, and pops her lipstick open. She makes a

kiss in the rearview mirror and pokes the lipstick around the edge

of her big Plumbago mouth, trembling so much that her one big

hand has to hold her lipstick hand steady.

"I can get us back into the States," she says, "but I'm going to

need a condom and a breath mint."

Around her lipstick she says, "Bubba-Joan, be a sweetheart and

hand me up one of those Estraderms, will you?"

Seth gives her the mint and a condom.

She says, "Let's guess how long it takes him to find a week's

supply of girl juice soaking into his ass."

She pops the lipstick shut and says, "Blot me, please."

I hand her up a tissue and an estrogen patch.

CHAPTER FIVE

Jump 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 hair spray, 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 arid 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 cat nap 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 rainforests 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 wrist-watch.

"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 is 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.”

CHAPTER SIX

On 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 70 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 is 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 estradi-ol, 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 500 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 Glaus," says Brandy from behind her book.

"Santa Glaus sees everything."

"Santa Glaus is just a story," says Seth. "He's just the

opening band to God. There is no Santa Glaus."

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 Cafe

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 water-

bed'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 blonde 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.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Jump way back to the last Thanksgiving before my accident

when I go home to eat dinner with my folks. This is back

when I still had a face so I wasn't so confronted by solid food.

On the dining room table, covering it all over is a tablecloth I

don't remember, a really nice dark blue damask with a lace

edge. This isn't something I'd expect my mom to buy so I ask,

did somebody give this to her?

Mom's just pulling up to the table and unfolding her blue

damask napkin with everything steaming between us: her,

me, and my dad. The sweet potatoes under their layer of

marshmallows. The big brown turkey. The rolls are inside a

quilted cozy sewed to look like a hen. You lift the wings to take

a roll out. There's the cut-glass tray of sweet pickles and celery

filled with peanut butter.

"Give what?" my mom says.

The new tablecloth. It's really nice.

My father sighs and plunges a knife into the turkey.

"It wasn't going to be a tablecloth at first," Mom says. "Your

father and I pretty much dropped the ball on our original project."

The knife goes in again and again and my father starts to

dismember our dinner.

My mom says, "Do you know what the AIDS memorial quilt is all

about?"

Jump to how much I hate my brother at this moment.

"I bought this fabric because I thought it would make a nice

panel for Shane," Mom says. "We just ran into some problems

with what to sew on it."

Give me amnesia.

Flash.

Give me new parents.

Flash.

"Your mother didn't want to step on any toes," Dad says. He

twists a drumstick off and starts scraping the meat onto a plate.

"With gay stuff you have to be so careful since everything

means something in secret code. I mean, we didn't want to give

people the wrong idea."

My mom leans over to scoop yams onto my plate, and says,

"Your father wanted a black border, but black on a field of blue

would mean Shane was excited by leather sex, you know,

bondage and discipline, sado and masochism." She says,

"Really these panels are to help the people left behind."

"Strangers are going to see us and see Shane's name," my

dad says. "We didn't want them thinking things."

The dishes all start their slow clockwise march around the

table. The stuffing. The olives. The cranberry sauce.

"I wanted pink triangles but all the panels have pink

triangles," my mom says. "It's the Nazi symbol for homosexuals."

She says, "Your father suggested black triangles, but

that would mean Shane was a lesbian. It looks like the female

pubic hair. The black triangle does."

My father says, "Then I wanted a green border, but it

turns out that would mean Shane was a male prostitute."

My mom says, "We almost chose a red border, but that

would mean fisting. Brown would mean either scat or

rimming, we couldn't figure which."

"Yellow," my father says, "means watersports."

"A lighter shade of blue," Mom says, "would mean just

regular oral sex."

"Regular white," my father says, "would mean anal.

White could also mean Shane was excited by men wearing

underwear." He says, "I can't remember which."

My mother passes me the quilted chicken with the rolls still

warm inside.

We're supposed to sit and eat with Shane dead all over the

table in front of us.

"Finally we just gave up," my mom says, "and I made a nice

tablecloth out of the material."

Between the yams and the stuffing, Dad looks down at his plate

and says, "Do you know about rimming?"

I know it isn't table talk.

"And fisting?" my mom asks.

I say, I know. I don't mention Manus and his vocational porno

magazines.

We sit there, all of us around a blue shroud with the turkey

more like a big dead baked animal than ever, the stuffing chock

full of organs you can still recognize, the heart and gizzard and

liver, the gravy thick with cooked fat and blood. The flower

centerpiece could be a casket spray.

"Would you pass the butter, please?" my mother says. To my

father she says, "Do you know what felchirig is?"

This, it's too much. Shane's dead, but he's more the center of

attention than he ever was. My folks wonder why I never come

home, and this is why. All this sick horrible sex talk over

Thanksgiving dinner, I can't take this. It's just Shane this and Shane

that. It's sad, but what happened to Shane was not something I did.

I know everybody thinks it's my fault, what happened. The truth is

Shane destroyed this family. Shane was bad and mean, and he's

dead. I'm good and obedient and I'm ignored.

Silence.

All that happened was I was fourteen years old. Somebody

put a full can of hairspray in the trash by mistake. It was Shane's

job to burn the trash. He was fifteen. He was dumping the

kitchen trash into the burning barrel while the bathroom

trash was on fire, and the hair-spray exploded. It was an

accident.

Silence.

Now what I wanted my folks to talk about was me. I'd tell

them how Evie and me were shooting a new infomer-cial. My

modeling career was taking off. I wanted to tell them about

my new boyfriend, Manus, but no. Whether he's good or bad,

alive or dead, Shane still gets all the attention. All I ever get is

angry.

"Listen," I say. This just blurts out. "Me," I say, "I'm the

last child you people have left alive so you'd better start

paying me some attention."

Silence.

"Felching," I lower my voice. I'm calm now. "Felching is

when a man fucks you up the butt without a rubber. He

shoots his load, and then plants his mouth on your anus and

sucks out his own warm sperm, plus whatever lubricant and

feces are present. That's felching. It may or may not," I add,

"include kissing you to pass the sperm and fecal matter into

your mouth."

Silence.

Give me control. Give me calm. Give me restraint.

Flash.

The yams are just the way I like them, sugary sweet but

crunchy on top. The stuffing is a little dry. I pass my mother

the butter.

My father clears his throat. "Bump," he says, "I think

'fletching' is the word your mother meant." He says, "It

means to slice the turkey into very thin strips."

Silence.

I say, oh. I say, sorry.

We eat.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Don't look for me to ever tell my folks about the accident. You

know, a whole long-distance telephone crying jag about the bullet

and the emergency room. That's not anywhere we're going. I told my

folks, as soon as I could write them a letter that I was going on a

catalogue shoot in Cancun, Mexico, for Espre.

Six months of fun, sand, and me trying to suck the lime wedges

out of long-necked bottles of Mexican beer. Guys just love watching

babes do that. Go figure. Guys.

She loves clothes from Espre, my mom writes back. She writes

how, since I'll be in the Espre catalogue, could I maybe get her a

discount on her Christmas order.

Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.

She writes back: Well, be pretty for us. Love and kisses.

Most times, it's just a lot easier not to let the world know what's

wrong. My folks, they call me Bump. I was the bump inside my

Mom's stomach for nine months; they've called me Bump from since

before I was born. They live a two-hour drive from me, but I never

visit. What I mean is they don't need to know every little hair about

me.

In one letter my mom writes:

"At least with your brother, we know whether he's dead or

alive."

My dead brother, the King of Fag Town. The voted best at

everything. The basketball king until he was sixteen and his test

for strep throat came back as gonorrhea, I only know I hated him.

"It's not that we don't love you," my mom writes in one letter,

"it's just that we don't show it."

Besides, hysteria is only possible with an audience. You know

what you need to do to keep alive. Folks will just screw you up with

their reactions about how what happened is so horrible. First the

emergency room folks letting you go ahead of them. Then the

Franciscan nun screaming. Then the police with their hospital

sheet.

Jump to how life was when you were a baby and you could only

eat baby food. You'd stagger over to the coffee table. You're up on

your feet and you have to keep waddling along on those Vienna

sausage legs or fall down. Then you get to the coffee table and

bounce your big soft baby head on the sharp corner.

You're down, and man, oh man, it hurts. Still it isn't

anything tragic until Morn and Dad run over. Oh, you poor,

brave thing. Only then do you cry.

Jump to Brandy and me and Seth going to the top of the

Space Needle thing in Seattle, Washington. This is our first

stop after the Canadian border except us stopping so I could

run buy Seth a coffee—cream, sugar and Climara—and a

Coca Cola—extra Estrace, no ice. It's eleven, and the Space

Needle closes at midnight, and Seth says there are two types of

people in the world.

The Princess Alexander wanted to find a nice hotel first,

some place with valet parking and tile bathrooms. We might

have time for a nap before she has to go out and sell

medications.

"If you were on a game show," Seth says about his two

types of people. Seth has already pulled off the freeway and

we're driving between dark warehouses, turning toward

every glimpse we get of the Space Needle. "So you're the

winner of this game show," Seth says, "and you get a choice

between a five-piece living room set from Broyhill, suggested

retail price three thousand dollars— or—a ten-day trip to the

old world charm of Europe."

Most people, Seth says, would take the living room set.

"It's just that people want something to show for their

effort," Seth says. "Like the pharaohs and their pyramids.

Given the choice, very few people would choose the trip even if

they already had a nice living room set."

No one's parked on the streets around Seattle Center, people

are all home watching television, or being television if you believe

in God.

"I have to show you where the future ended," says Seth. "I

want us to be the people who choose the trip."

According to Seth, the future ended in 1962 at the Seattle

World's Fair. This was everything we should've inherited: the

whole man on the moon within this decade—asbestos is our

miracle friend—nuclear-powered and fossil-fueled world of the Space

Age where you could go up to visit the Jetsons' flying saucer

apartment building and then ride the monorail downtown for fun

pillbox hat fashions at the Bon Marche.

All his hope and science and research and glamour left here in

ruins:

The Space Needle.

The Science Center with its lacy domes and hanging light

globes.

The Monorail streaking along covered in brushed aluminum.

This is how our lives were supposed to turn out.

Go there. Take the trip, Seth says. It will break your heart

because the Jetsons with their robot maid, Rosie, and their flying-

saucer cars and toaster beds that spit you out in the morning, it's

like the Jetsons have sublet the Space Needle to the Flintstones.

"You know," says Seth, "Fred and Wilma. The garbage

disposal that's really a pig that lives under the sink. All their

furniture made out of bones and rocks and tiger-skin

lampshades. Wilma vacuums with a baby elephant and fluffs

the rocks. They named their baby 'Pebbles'."

Here was our future of cheese-food and aerosol propellants,

Styrofoam and Club Med on the moon, roast beef

served in a toothpaste tube.

"Tang," says Seth, "you know, breakfast with the astronauts.

And now people come here wearing sandals they

made themselves out of leather. They name their kids Zilpah

and Zebulun out of the Old Testament. Lentils are a big deal."

Seth sniffs and drags a hand across the tears in his eyes. It's

the Estrace is all. He must be getting premenstrual.

"The folks who go to the Space Needle now," Seth says,

"they have lentils soaking at home and they're walking

around the ruins of the future the way barbarians did when

they found Grecian ruins and told themselves that God

must've built them."

Seth parks us under one big steel leg of the Space

Needle's three legs. We get out and look up at the legs going

up to the Space Needle, the low restaurant, the high

restaurant that revolves, then the observation deck at the

top. Then the stars.Jump to the sad moment when we buy

our tickets and get on the big glass elevator that slides up

the middle of the Space Needle. We're in this glass and

brass go-go cage dance party to the stars. Going up, I want

to hear hypoal-lergenic Telestar music, untouched by

human hands. Anything computer-generated and played on

a Moog synthesizer. I want to dance the frug on a TWA

commuter flight go-go dance party to the moon where

cool dudes and chicks do the mash potato under zero

gravity and eat delicious snack pills.

I want this.

I tell Brandy Alexander this, and she goes right up to

the brass and glass windows and does the frug even

though going up, the G forces make this like dancing the

frug on Mars where you weigh eight hundred pounds.

The sad part is when the guy in a poly-blend uniform

who runs the elevator misses the whole point of the

future. The whole fun, fun, fun of the moment is wasted

on him, and this guy looks at us as if we're those puppies

you see behind glass in suburban mall pet stores. Like

we're those puppies with yellow ooze on their eyes and

buttholes, and you know they'll never have another solid

bowel movement but they're still for sale for six hundred

dollars apiece. Those puppies are so sad that even the

overweight girls with bad beauty college perms will tap on

the glass for hours and say, "I loves you, little one. Mommy

loves you, tiny one."

The future is just wasted on some people.

Jump to the observation deck at the top of the Space

Needle, where you can't see the steel legs so it's as if you're

hovering over Seattle on a flying saucer with a lot of souvenirs

for sale. Still, most of this isn't souvenirs of the future. It's the

ecology T-shirts and batiks and tie-dyed all-natural cotton

fiber stuff you can't wash with anything else because it's never

really colorfast. Tapes of whales singing while they do sex.

More stuff I hate.

Brandy goes off in search of relics and artifacts from the

future. Acrylic. Plexiglas. Aluminum. Styrofoam. Radium.

Seth goes to the railing and leans out over the suicide nets

and spits. The spit falls back down into the twenty-first

century. The wind blows my hair out over the darkness and

Seattle and my hands are clutched white on the steel railing

where about a million hands before me have clutched the

paint off.

Inside his clothes, instead of the plates of hard muscle that

used to drive me crazy, now the fat pushes his shirt out over

the top of his belt. It's the Premarin. His sexy five o'clock

shadow is fading from the Provera. Even his fingers swell

around his old letterman's ring.

The photographer in my head says:

Give me peace.

Flash.

Give me release.

She gives us each an Aubergine Dreams eyebrow pencil and

says, "Save the world with some advice from the future."

Seth writes on the back of a card and hands the card to Brandy

for her to read.

On game shows, Brandy reads, some people will take the trip to

France, but most people will take the washer dryer pair.

Brandy puts a big Plumbago kiss on the little square for the

stamp and lets the wind lift the card and sail it off toward the

towers of downtown Seattle.

Seth hands her another, and Brandy reads:

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random,

useless facts that are all we have left of our education.

A kiss, and the card's on its way toward Lake Washington.

From Seth:

When did the future switch from being a promise to being a

threat?

A kiss, and it's off on the wind toward Ballard.

Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another. We'll

be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.

Interstate 5 snakes by in the distance. From high atop the Space

Needle, the southbound lanes are red chase lights, and the

northbound lanes are white chase lights. I take a card and write:

CHAPTER NINE

Jump to us going down fast in a TWA return trip home from

the moon, Brandy and Seth and me dancing our dance party frug

in the zero-gravity brass and glass go-go cage elevator. Brandy

makes a big ring-beaded fist and tells the poly-blend service droid

who tries to stop us to chill out unless he wants to die on reentry.

Back on earth in the twenty-first century, our rented Lincoln

with its blue casket interior is waiting to take us to a nice hotel. On

the windshield is a ticket, but when Brandy storms over to tear it

up, the ticket is a postcard from the future.

Maybe my worst fears.

For Brandy to read out loud to Seth. I love Seth so much I have to

destroy him ...

Even if I overcompensate, nobody will ever want me. Not Seth.

Not my folks. You can't kiss someone who has no lips. Oh, love me, love

me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me. I'll be

anybody you want me to be.

Brandy Alexander, her big hand lifts the postcard. The queen

supreme reads it to herself, silent, and slips the postcard into her

handbag. Princess Princess, she says, "At this rate, we'll never get to

the future.”

the fluorescent light coming through in broken exploded bits.

"Veils," Brandy says as each color settles over me. "You need to

look like you're keeping secrets," she says. "If you're going to do

the outside world, Miss St. Patience, you need to not let people see

your face," she says.

"You can go anywhere in the world," Brandy goes on and on.

You just can't let people know who you really are.

"You can live a completely normal, regular life," she says.

You just can't let anybody get close enough to you to learn the

truth.

"In a word," she says, "veils."

Take-charge princess who she is, Brandy Alexander never does

ask my real name. The name who I was born. Miss Bossy Pants right

away gives me a new name, a new past. She invents another future

for me with no connections, except to her, a cult all by herself.

"Your name is Daisy St. Patience," she tells me. "You're the

lost heiress to the House of St. Patience, the very haute couture

fashion showroom, and this season we're doing hats," she says.

"Hats with veils."

I ask her, "Jsfssjf ciacb sxi?"

"You come from escaped French aristocrat blood," Brandy says.

"Gwdcn aixa gklgfnv?"

"You grew up in Paris, and went to a school run by nuns,"

Brandy says.

Give me homesickness.

Flash.

Give me nostalgic childhood yearnings.

Flash.

What's the word for the opposite of glamour?

Brandy never asked about my folks, were they living or dead, and

why weren't they here to gnash their teeth.

"Your father and mother, Rainier and Honoraria St. Patience,

were assassinated by fashion terrorists," she says.

B.B., before Brandy, my father took his pigs to market every fall.

His secret is to spend all summer driving his flatbed truck around

Idaho and the other upper, left-hand corner states, stopping at all

the day-old bakery outlets selling expired snack foods, individual

fruit pies and cupcakes with creamy fillings, little loaves of sponge

cake injected with artificial whipped cream and lumps of devil's

food cake covered with marshmallow and shredded coconut dyed

pink. Old birthday cakes that didn't sell. Stale cakes wishing

Congratulations. Happy Mother's Day. Be My Valentine. My father

still brings it all home, heaped in a dense sticky pile or heat-sealed

inside cellophane. That's the hardest part, opening these

thousands of old snacks and dropping them to the pigs.

My father who Brandy didn't want to hear about, his secret is to

feed the pigs these pies and cakes and snacks the last two weeks

before they go to market. The snacks have no nutrition, and the

pigs gobble them until there isn't an expired snack left within five

hundred miles.

These snacks don't have any real fiber to them so every fall,

every three-hundred-pound pig goes to market with an extra

ninety pounds in its colon. My father makes a fortune at auction,

and who knows how long after that, but the pigs all take a big

sugary crap when they see inside whatever slaughterhouse where

they end up.

I say, "Kwvne wivnuw fw sojaoa."

"No," Brandy says and puts up her foot-long index finger, six

cocktail rings stacked on just this one finger, and she presses her

jeweled hotdog up and down across my mouth the moment I try

and say anything.

"Not a word," Brandy says. "You're still too connected to your

past. Your saying anything is pointless."

From out of her sewing basket, Brandy draws a streamer of white

and gold, a magic act, a layer of sheer white silk patterned with a

Greek key design in gold she casts over my head.

Behind another veil, the real world is that much farther away.

"Guess how they do the gold design," Brandy says.

The fabric is so light my breath blows it out in front; the silk

lays across my eyelashes without bending them. Even my face, where

every nerve in your body comes to an end, even my face can't feel

it.

It takes a team of kids in India, Brandy says, four- and five-year-old

kids sitting all day on wooden benches, being vegetarians, they have to

tweeze out most of about a zillion gold threads to leave the pattern of

just the gold left behind.

"You don't see kids any older than ten doing this job," Brandy

says, "because by then most kids go blind."

Just the veil Brandy takes out of her basket must be six feet

square. The precious eyesight of all those darling children, lost. The

precious days of their fragile childhood spent tweezing silk threads

out.

Give me pity.

Flash.

Give me empathy.

Flash.

Oh, I wish I could make my poor heart just bust.

I say, "Vswf siws cm eiuvn sines."

No, it's okay, Brandy says. She doesn't want to reward anybody

for exploiting children. She got it on sale.

Caged behind my silk, settled inside my cloud of organza and

georgette, the idea that I can't share my problems with other people

makes me not give a shit about their problems.

"Oh, and don't worry," Brandy says. "You'll still get attention.

You have a dynamite tits and ass combo. You just can't talk to

anybody."

People just can't stand not knowing something, she tells me.

Especially men can't bear not climbing every mountain, mapping

everywhere. Labeling everything. Peeing on every tree and then

never calling you back.

"Behind a veil, you're the great unknown," she says. "Most guys

will fight to know you. Some guys will deny you're a real person,

and some will just ignore you.”

The zealot. The atheist. The agnostic.

Even if somebody is only wearing an eye patch, you always want

to look. To see if he's faking. The man in the Hathaway Shirt. Or to

see the horror underneath.

The photographer in my head says:

Give me a voice.

Flash.

Give me a face.

Brandy's answer was little hats with veils. And big hats with veils.

Pancake hats and pillbox hats edged all around with clouds of tulle

and gauze. Parachute silk or heavy crepe or dense net dotted with

chenille pompoms.

"The most boring thing in the entire world," Brandy says, "is

nudity."

The second most boring thing, she says, is honesty.

"Think of this as a tease. It's lingerie for your face," she says. "A

peekaboo nightgown you wear over your whole identity."

The third most boring thing in the entire world is your sorry-assed

past. So Brandy never asked me anything. Bulldozer alpha bitch she

can be, we meet again and again in the speech therapist office

and Brandy tells me everything I need to know about myself.

CHAPTER T E N

Jump to Brandy Alexander tucking me into a Seattle bed.

This is the night of the Space Needle, the night the future doesn't

happen. Brandy, she's wearing yards and yards of black tulle

wrapped around her legs, twisted up and around her hourglass

waist. Black veil crosses her torpedo breasts and loops up and over

the top of her auburn hair. All this sparkle that bends over beside

my bed could be the trial-sized mock-up for the original summer

night sky.

Little rhinestones, not the plastic ones pooped out by a factory

in Calcutta but the Austrian crystal ones cut by elves in the Black

Forest, these little star-shaped rhinestones are set all over the black

tulle. The queen supreme's face is the moon in the night sky that

bends over and kisses me good night. My hotel room is dark, and

the television at the foot of my bed is turned on so the handmade

stars twinkle in all the colors the television is trying to show us.

Seth's right, the television does make me God. I can look in on

anybody and every hour the lives change. Here in the real world,

that's not always the case.

"I will always love you," the queen of the night sky says, and I

know which postcard she's found.

The hotel sheets feel the same as the hospital sheets. This is

thousands of miles since we met, and the big fingers of Brandy are

still smoothing the blankets under where my chin used to be. My

face is the last thing the go-go boys and girls want to meet when

they go into a dark alley looking to buy drugs.

Brandy says, "We'll be back as soon as we sell out."

Seth is silhouetted in the open doorway to the hall. How he

looks from my bed is the terrific outline of a superhero against the

neon green and gray and pink tropical leaves of the hallway

wallpaper. His coat, the long black leather coat Seth wears, is

fitted tight until the waist and then flares from there down so in

outline you think it's a cape.

And maybe when he kisses Brandy Alexander's royal butt he's

not just pretending. Maybe it's the two of them in love when I'm

not around. This wouldn't be the first time I've lost him.

The face surrounded in black veil that leans over me is a

surprise of color. The skin is a lot of pink around a Plumbago

mouth, and the eyes are too aubergine. Even these colors are

too garish right now, too saturated, too intense. Lurid. You

think of cartoon characters. Fashion dolls have pink skin like

this, like plastic bandages. Flesh tone. Too aubergine eyes,

cheekbones too defined by Rusty Rose blusher. Nothing is left

to your imagination.

Maybe this is what guys want. I just want Brandy

Alexander to leave.

I want Seth's belt around my neck. I want Seth's fingers in

my mouth and his hands pulling my knees apart and then his

wet fingers prying me open.

"If you want something to read," Brandy says, "that Miss

Rona Barrett book is in my room. I can run get it."

I want to be rubbed so raw by the stubble around Seth's

mouth that it will hurt when I pee.

Seth says, "Are you coming?"

A ring-beaded hand tosses the television remote control

onto the bed.

"Come on, Princess Princess," Seth says. "The night's not

getting any younger."

And I want Seth dead. Worse than dead, I want him fat

and bloated with water and insecure and emotional. If Seth

doesn't want me, I want to not want him.

"If the police or anything happens," the moon tells me,

"the money is all in my make-up case."

The one I love is already gone out to warm up the car.

The one who will love me forever says, "Sleep tight," and closes

the door behind her.

Jump to once a long time ago, Manus, my fiance who dumped

me, Manus Kelley, the police detective, he told me that your folks

are like God because you want to know they're out there and you

want them to approve of your life, still you only call them when

you're in crisis and need something.

Jump back to me in bed in Seattle, alone with the TV remote

control I hit a button on and make the television mute.

On television are three or four people in chairs sitting on a low

stage in front of a television audience. This is on television like an

infomercial, but as the camera zooms in on each person for a close-

up, a little caption appears across the person's chest. Each caption

on each close-up is a first name followed by three or four words like

a last name, the sort of literal who-they-really-are last names that

Indians give to each other, but instead of Heather Runs With Bison

... Trisha Hunts By Moonlight, these names are:

Cristy Drank Human Blood

Roger Lived With Dead Mother

Brenda Ate Her Baby

I change channels.

I change channels.

I change channels and here are another three people:

Gwen Works As Hooker

Neville Was Raped In Prison

Brent Slept With His Father

People are all over the world telling their one dramatic

story and how their life has turned into getting over this

one event. Now their lives are more about the past than

their future. I hit a button and give Gwen WorksAsHooker

her voice back for a little soundbite of prostitute talk.

Gwen shapes her story with her hands as she talks. She

leans forward out of her chair. Her eyes are watching

something up and to the right, just off camera. I know it's the

monitor. Gwen's watching herself tell her story.

Gwen balls her fingers until only the left index finger is

out, and she slowly twists her hand to show both sides of her

fingernail as she talks.

" ... to protect themselves, most girls on the street break

off a little bit of razor blade and glue it under their

fingernail. Girls paint the razor nail so it looks like a regular

fingernail." Here, Gwen sees something in the monitor. She

frowns and tosses her red hair back off what look like pearl

earrings.

"When they go to jail," Gwen tells herself in the monitor,

"or when they're not attractive anymore, some girls use the

razor nails to slash their wrists.”

I make Gwen WorksAsHooker mute again.

I change channels.

I change channels.

I change channels.

Sixteen channels away, a beautiful young woman in a

sequined dress is smiling and dropping animal wastes into a

Num. Num Snack Factory.

Evie and me, we did this infomercial. It's one of those

television commercials you think is a real program except it's

just a thirty-minute pitch. The television camera cuts to

another girl in a sequined dress, this one is wading through

an audience of snow birds and Midwest tourists. The girl

offers a golden anniversary couple in matching Hawaiian

shirts a selection of canapes from a silver tray, but the couple

and everybody else in their double knits and camera

necklaces, they're staring up and to the right at something

off camera.

You know it's the monitor.

It's eerie, but what's happening is the folks are staring at

themselves in the monitor staring at themselves in the

monitor staring at themselves in the monitor, on and on,

completely trapped in a reality loop that never ends.

The girl with the tray, her desperate eyes are contact lens

too green and her lips are heavy red outside the natural lip

line. The blonde hair is thick and teased up so the girl's

shoulders don't look so big-boned. The canapes she keeps

waving under all the old noses are soda crackers pooped on

with meat by-products. Waving her tray, the girl wades further

up into the studio audience bleachers with her too green eyes and

big-boned hair. This is my best friend, Evie Cottrell.

This has to be Evie because here comes Manus stepping up to save

her with his good looks. Manus, special police vice operative that he

is, he takes one of those pooped-on soda crackers and puts it

between his capped teeth. And chews. And tilts his handsome

square-jawed face back and closes his eyes, Manus closes his power-

blue eyes and twists his head just so much side to side and swallows.

Thick black hair like Manus has, it reminds you how people's

hair is just vestigial fur with mousse on it. Such a sexy hair dog,

Manus is.

The square-jawed face rocks down to give the camera a full-face

eyes-open look of complete and total love and satisfaction. So deja

vu. This was exactly the same look Manus used to give me when

he'd ask if I got my orgasm.

Then Manus turns to give the exact same look to Evie while the

studio audience all looks off in another direction, watching

themselves watch themselves watch themselves watch Manus smile

with total and complete love and satisfaction at Evie.

Evie smiles back her red outside the natural lipline smile at

Manus, and I'm this tiny sparkling figure in the background. That's

me just over Manus's shoulder, tiny me smiling away like a space

heater and dropping animal matter into the Plexiglas funnel on top

of the Num Num Snack Factory.

How could I be so dumb.

Let's go sailing.

Sure.

I should've known the deal was Manus and Evie all the time.

Even here, lying in a hotel bed a year after the whole story is

over, I'm making fists. I could've just watched the stupid infomercial

and known Manus and Evie had some tortured sick relationship

they wanted to think was true love.

Okay, I did watch it. Okay, about a hundred times I watched it,

but I was only watching myself. That reality loop thing.

The camera comes back to the first girl, the one on stage, and

she's me. And I'm so beautiful. On television, I demonstrate the easy

cleanability of the snack factory, and I'm so beautiful. I snap the

blades out of the Plexiglas cover and rinse off the chewed-up animal

waste under running water. And, jeez, I'm beautiful.

The disembodied voiceover is saying how the Num Num Snack

Factory takes meat by-products, whatever you have—your tongues

or hearts or lips or genitals—chews them up, seasons them, and

poops them out in the shape of a spade or a diamond or a club

onto your choice of cracker for you to eat yourself. Here in bed, I'm

crying.

Bubba-Joan GotHerJawShotOff.

All these thousands of miles later, all these different

people I've been, and it's still the same story. Why is it you feel

like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end

up crying? How is it you can keep mutating and still be the

same deadly virus?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Jump back to when I first got out of the hospital without a

career or a fiance or an apartment, and I had to sleep at Evie's big

house, her real house where even she didn't like to live, it was so

lonely, stuck way out in some rainforest with nobody paying

attention.

Jump to me being on Evie's bed, on my back that first night, but

I can't sleep.

Wind lifts the curtains, lace curtains. All Evie's furniture is that

curlicue Frenchy provincial stuff painted white and gold. There

isn't a moon, but the sky is full of stars, so everything—Evie's house,

the rose hedges, the bedroom curtains, the backs of my hands

against the bedspread—are all either black or gray.

Evie's house was what a Texas girl would buy if her parents

kept giving her about ten million dollars all the time. It's like

the Cottrells know Evie will never make the big-time runways.

So Evie, she lives here. Not New York. Not Milan. The suburbs,

right out in the nowhere of professional modeling. This is

pretty far from doing the Paris collections. Being stuck in

nowhere is the excuse Evie needs, living here is, for a big-

boned girl who'd never be a big-time success anywhere.

The doors are locked tonight. The cat is inside. When I look,

the cat looks back at me the way dogs and some cars look

when people say they're smiling.

Just that afternoon, Evie was on the telephone begging

me to check myself out of the hospital and come visit.

Evie's house was big—white with hunter green shutters,

a three-story plantation house fronted with big pillars.

Needlepoint ivy and climbing roses—yellow roses— were

climbed up around the bottom ten feet of each big pillar.

You'd imagine Ashley Wilkes mowing the grass here, or Rhett

Butler taking down the storm windows, but Evie, she has

these minimum-wage slave Laotians who refuse to live in.

Jump to the day before, Evie driving me from the hospital.

Evie really is Evelyn Cottrell, Inc. No, really. She's traded

publicly now. Everybody's favorite write-off. The Cottrells

made a private stock offering in her career when Evie was twenty-

one, and all the Cottrell relatives with their Texas land and oil

money are heavily invested in Evie's being a model failure.

Most times it was an embarrassment going to modeling look-see

auditions with Evie. Sure, I'd get work, but then the art director or

the stylist would start screaming at Evie that, no, in his expert

opinion she was not a perfect size six. Most times, some assistant

stylist had to wrestle Evie out the door. Evie would be screaming

back over her shoulder about how I shouldn't let them treat me

like a piece of meat. I should just walk out.

"Fuck 'em," Evie's screaming by this point. "Fuck 'em all."

Me, I'm not angry. I'd be getting strapped into this incredible

leather corset by Poopie Cadole and leather pants by Chrome

Hearts. Life was good back then. I'd have three hours of work,

maybe four or five.

At the photo studio doorway, before she'd get thrown out of

the shoot, Evie would swing the assistant stylist into the door

jamb, and the little guy would just crumple up at her feet. It's then

Evie would scream, "You people can all suck the crap out of my

sweet Texas ass." Then she'd go out to her Ferrari and wait the

three or four or five hours so she could drive me home.

Evie, that Evie was my best friend in the whole world. Moments

like that, Evie was fun and quirky, almost like she had a life of her

own.

Okay, so I didn't know about Evie and Manus and their complete

and total love and satisfaction. So kill me.

Jump to before that, Evie calling me at the hospital and

begging me, please, could I discharge myself and come stay at her

house, she was so lonely, please.

My health insurance had a two-million-dollar lifetime ceiling,

and the meter had just run and run all summer. No social service

contact had the guts to transition me into God only knows where.

Begging me on the telephone, Evie said she had plane

reservations. She was going to Cancun for a catalogue shoot so

would I, could I, please, just house-sit for her?

When she picked me up, on my pad I wrote:

is that my halter top? you know you're stretching it.

"You'll need to feed my cat is all," Evie says.

i don't like being alone so far out from town, I write, i don't

know how you can live here.

Evie says, "It's not living alone if you keep a rifle under the bed."

I write:

i know girls who say that about their dildos.

And Evie says, "Gross! I'm not that way at all with my rifle!”

So jump to Evie being flown off to Cancun, Mexico, and

when I go to look under her bed, there's the thirty-aught rifle

and scope. In her closets are what's left of my clothes, stretched

and tortured to death and hanging there on wire hangers,

dead.

Then jump to me in Evie's bed that night. It's midnight.

The wind lifts the bedroom curtains, lace curtains, and the cat

jumps up on the windowsill to see who's just pulled up in the

gravel driveway. With the stars behind it, the cat looks back at

me. Downstairs, you hear a window break.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Jump way back to the last Christmas before my accident, when I

go home to open presents with my folks. My folks put up the same

fake tree every year, scratchy green and making that hot polyplastic

smell that gives you a dizzy flu headache when the lights are

plugged in too long. The tree's all magic and sparkle, crowded with

our red and gold glass ornaments and those strands of silver plastic

loaded with static electricity that people call icicles. It's the same

ratty angel with a rubber doll face on top of the tree. Covering the

mantel is the same spun fiberglass angel hair that works into your

skin and gives you an infected rash if you even touch it. It's the

same Perry Como Christmas album on the stereo. This is back when

I still had a face so I wasn't so confronted by singing Christmas

carols.

My brother Shane's still dead so I try not to expect much

attention, just a quiet Christmas. By this point, my boyfriend,

Manus was getting weird about losing his police job, and what I

needed was a couple days out of the spotlight. We all talked, my

mom, my dad, and me, and agreed to not buy big gifts for each

other this year. Maybe just little gifts, my folks say, just stocking

stuffers.

Perry Como is singing "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like

Christmas."

The red felt stockings my mom sewed for each of us, for Shane

and me, are hanging on the fireplace, each one red felt with our

names spelled out, top to bottom, in fancy white felt letters. Each

one lumpy with the gifts stuffed inside. It's Christmas morning,

and we're all sitting around the tree, my father ready with his

jackknife for the knotted ribbons. My mom has a brown paper shopping

bag and says, "Before things get out of hand, the wrapping

paper goes in here, not all over the place."

My mom and dad sit in recliner chairs. I sit on the floor in front of

the fireplace with the stockings by me. This scene is always blocked

this way. Them sitting with coffee, leaned down over me, watching

for my reaction. Me Indian-sitting on the floor. All of us in

bathrobes and pajamas still.

Perry Como is singing "I'll Be Home for Christmas."

The first thing out of my stocking is a little stuffed koala

bear, the kind that grips your pencil with its spring-loaded

hands and feet. This is who my folks think I am. My mom

hands me hot chocolate in a mug with miniature

marshmallows floating on top. I say, "Thanks." Under the

little koala is a box I take out.

My folks stop everything, lean over their cups of coffee, and

just watch me.

Perry Como is singing "Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful."

The little box is condoms.

Sitting right next to our sparkling, magic Christmas tree,

my father says, "We don't know how many partners you have

every year, but we want you to play safe."

I stash the condoms in my bathrobe pocket and look down

at the miniature marshmallows melting. I say, "Thanks."

"Those are latex," says my mom. "You need to use only a

water-based sexual lubricant. If you need a lubricant at your

age. Not petroleum jelly or shortenings or any kind of lotion."

She says, "We didn't get you the kind made from sheep

intestines because those have tiny pores that can allow the

transmission of HIV."

Next inside my stocking is another little box. This is more

condoms. The color marked on the box is Nude. This seems

redundant. Next to that, the label says odorless and tasteless.

Oh, I could tell you all about tasteless.

"A study," my father says, "a telephone survey of heterosexuals

in urban areas with a high incidence of HIV

infection showed that thirty-five percent of people are

uncomfortable buying their own condoms."

And getting them from Santa Claus is better? I say, "Got it."

"This isn't just about AIDS," my mom says. "There's gonorrhea.

There's syphilis. There's the human papilloma virus. That's genital

warts." She says, "You do know to put the condom on as soon as the

penis is erect, don't you?"

She says, "I paid a fortune for bananas out of season in case you

need the practice."

This is a trap. If I say, Oh, yeah, I roll rubbers onto new dry

erections all the time, I'll get the slut lecture from my father. But if I

tell them, No, we'll get to spend Christmas Day practicing to protect

me from fruit.

My dad says, "There's tons more to this than AIDS." He says,

"There's the herpes simplex virus II with symptoms that include

small painful blisters that burst on your genitals." He looks at Mom.

"Body aches," she says.

"Yes, you get body aches," he says, "and fever. You get vaginal

discharge. It hurts to urinate." He looks at my mom.

Perry Como is singing "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town."

Under the next box of condoms is another box of condoms.

Jeez, three boxes should last me right into menopause.

Jump to how much I want my brother alive right now so I can

kill him for wrecking my Christmas. Perry Como is singing "Up

on the Housetop."

"There's hepatitis B," my mom says. To my dad, she says,

"What's the others?"

"Chlamydia," my father says. "And lymphogranuloma."

"Yes," my rnom says, "and mucal purulent cervicitis and

nongonococcal urethritis."

My dad looks at my mom and says, "But that's usually

caused by an allergy to a latex condom or a spermicide."

My mom drinks some coffee. She looks down at both her

hands around her cup, then looks up at me sitting here.

"What your father's trying to say," she says, "is we realize

now that we made some mistakes with your brother." She says,

"We're just trying to keep you safe."

There's a fourth box of condoms in my stocking. Perry

Como is singing "It Came upon a Midnight Clear." The box is

labeled . .. safe and strong enough even for prolonged anal

intercourse... .

"There's granuloma inguinale," my father says to my

mother, "and bacterial vaginosis." He opens one hand and

counts the fingers, then counts them again, then says,

"there's molluscum contagiosum."

Some of the condoms are white. Some are assorted colors.

Some are ribbed to feel like serrated bread knives, I guess.

Some are extra large. Some glow in the dark. This is flattering

in a creepy way. My folks must think I'm wildly popular.

Perry Como is singing "Oh Come, Oh Come,

Emmanuel."

"We don't want to scare you," my mom says, "but you're

young. We can't expect you to just sit home nights."

"And if you ever can't sleep," my father says, "it could be

pinworms."

My mom says, "We just don't want you to end up like your

brother is all."

My brother's dead, but he still has a stocking full of

presents and you can bet they're not rubbers. He's dead, but

you can bet he's laughing his head off right now.

"With pinworms," my father says, "the females

migrate down the colon to the perianal area to lay their eggs

at night." He says, "If you suspect worm activity, it works best

to press clear adhesive tape against the rectum, then look at

the tape under a magnifying glass. The worms should be

about a quarter-inch long."

My mom says, "Bob, hush."

My dad leans toward me and says, "Ten percent of the men

in this country can give you these worms." He says, "You just

remember that."

Almost everything in my stocking is condoms, in boxes, in

little gold foil coins, in long strips of a hundred with

perforations so you can tear them apart. My only other gifts

are a rape whistle and a pocket-sized spray canister of Mace.

That looks like I'm set for the worst, but I'm afraid to ask if

there's more. There could be a vibrator to keep me at home

and celibate every night. There could be dental dams in case

of cunnilingus. Saran Wrap. Rubber gloves.

Perry Como is singing "Nuttin' for Christmas."

I look at Shane's stocking still lumpy with presents and ask,

"You guys bought for Shane?"

If it's condoms, they're a little late.

My mom and dad look at each other. To my mom, my dad

says, "You tell her."

"That's what you got for your brother," my mom says. "Go

ahead and look."

Jump to me being being confused as hell

Give me clarity. Give me reasons. Give me answers.

Flash.

I reach up to unhook Shane's stocking from the mantel,

and inside it's filled with crumpled tissue paper.

"Keep digging," my dad says.

In with the tissue, there's a sealed envelope.

"Open it," my mom says.

Inside the envelope is a printed letter with right at the

top the words "Thank You."

"It's really a gift to both our children," my dad says.

I can't believe what I'm reading.

"Instead of buying you a big present," my mom says, "we

made a donation in your name to the World AIDS Research

Fund."

Inside the stocking is a second letter I take out.

"That," my dad says, "is Shane's present to you."

Oh, this is too much.

Perry Como is singing "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus."

I say, "That crafty old dead brother of mine, he's so

thoughtful." I say, "He shouldn't have. He really, really shouldn't

have gone to all this trouble. He needs to maybe move away from

denial and coping and just get on with being dead. Maybe

reincarnate." I say, "His pretending he's still alive can't be

healthy."

Inside, I'm ranting. What I really wanted this year was a new

Prada handbag. It wasn't my fault that some hair-spray can

exploded in Shane's face. Boom, and he came staggering into the

house with his forehead already turning black and blue. The long

drive to the hospital with his one eye swoll shut and the face around

it just getting bigger and bigger with every vein inside broken and

bleeding under the skin, Shane didn't say a word.

It wasn't my fault how the social service people at the hospital

took one look at Shane's face and came down on my father with

both feet. Suspicion of child abuse. Criminal neglect. Family

intervention. It wasn't any of it my fault. Police statements. A

caseworker went around interviewing our neighbors, our school

friends, our teachers until everybody we knew treated me like, you

poor brave thing.

Sitting here Christmas morning with all these gifts I need a penis

to enjoy, everybody doesn't know the half of it.

Even after the police investigation was done, and nothing was

proved, even then, our family was wrecked. And everybody still

thinks I'm the one who threw away the hair-spray. And since I

started this, it was all my fault. The explosion. The police.

Shane's running away. His death.

And it wasn't my fault.

"Really," I say, "if Shane really wanted to give me a

present, he'd come back from the dead and buy me the new

wardrobe he owes me. That would give me a merry Christmas.

That I could really say 'thank you' for."

Silence.

As I fish out the second envelope, my mom says, "We're

officially 'outing' you."

"In your brother's name," my dad says, "we bought you a

membership in P.F.L.A.G.

"Fee-flag?" I say.

"Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays," my mom says.

Perry Como is singing "There's No Place Like Home for the

Holidays."

Silence.

My mother starts up from her chair and says, "I'll go run

get those bananas." She says, "Just to be on the safe side,

your father and I can't wait to see you try on some of your

presents.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Jump to around midnight in Evie's house where I catch Seth

Thomas trying to kill me.

The way my face is without a jaw, my throat just ends in sort of

a hole with my tongue hanging out. Around the hole, the skin is all

scar tissue: dark red lumps and shiny the way you'd look if you got

the cherry pie in a pie eating contest. If I let my tongue hang down,

you can see the roof of my mouth, pink arid smooth as the inside

of a crab's back, and hanging down around the roof is the white

vertebrae horseshoe of the upper teeth I have left. There are times

to wear a veil and there are not. Other than this, I'm stunning

when I meet Seth Thomas breaking into Evie's big house at

midnight.

What Seth sees coming down the big circular staircase in

Evie's foyer is me wearing one of Evie's peachy-pink satin and

lace peignoir sets pieced on the bias. Evie's bathrobe is this

peachy-pink retro Zsa Zsa number that hides me the way

cellophane hides a frozen turkey. At the cuffs and along the

front of the bathrobe is the peachy-pink ozone haze of

ostrich feathers that match the feathers on the high-heeled

mules I'm wearing.

Seth is just frozen at the foot of Evie's big circular staircase

with Evie's best sixteen-inch carving knife in his hand. A pair

of Evie's control top pantyhose is pulled down over Seth's

head. You can see Evie's hygienic cotton crotch sitting across

Seth's face. The pantyhose legs drape the way a cocker spaniel's

ears would look down the front of his otherwise mix-andmatch

army fatigues ensemble.

And I am a vision. Descending step by step toward the

point of the carving knife, with the slow step-pause-step of a

showgirl in a big Vegas revue.

Oh, I am just that fabulous. So sex furniture.

Seth's standing there, looking up, having a moment,

afraid for the first time in his life because I'm holding Evie's

rifle. The butt is planted against my shoulder, and the barrel

is out in both hands in front of me. The sight's cross-haired

right in the middle of Evie Cottrell's cotton crotch.

This is just Seth and me in Evie's foyer with its beveled glass

windows broken around the front door and Evie's Austrian

crystal chandelier that sparkles like so much costume jewelry for

a house. The only other thing is a little desk in that Frenchy

provincial white and gold.

On the little French desk is a tres ooh-la-la telephone where

the receiver is as big as a gold saxophone and sits in a gold cradle

on top of an ivory box. In the middle of the push-button circle is a

cameo. So chic, Evie probably thinks.

With the knife out in front of him, Seth goes, "I'm not going to

hurt you."

I'm doing that slow step-pause-step down the stairs.

Seth says, "Let's not anybody get killed, here."

And it's so deja vu.

This was the exact way Manus Kelley would ask if I'd gotten my

orgasm. Not the words, but the voice.

Seth says through Evie's crotch, "All's I did was sleep with Evie."

So deja vu.

Let's go sailing. It's the exact same voice.

Seth drops the carving knife and the tip of the blade sticks

mumblety-peg straight down next to his combat boot in Evie's

foyer parquet floor. Seth says, "If Evie says it was me that shot you,

she was lying."

On the desk next to the telephone is a pad and pencil for

taking down messages.

Seth says, "I knew the second I heard about you in the hospital

that it was Evie's doing."

Balancing the rifle with one arm, on the pad, I write:

take off your pantyhose.

"I mean you can't kill me," Seth says. Seth's pulling at the

waistband of his pantyhose. "I'm just the reason why Evie shot

you."

I step-pause-step the last ten feet to Seth and hook the

end of the rifle barrel on the pantyhose waistband and pull

them off Seth's square-jawed face. Seth Thomas who would be

Alfa Romeo in Vancouver, British Columbia. Alfa Romeo who

was Nash Rambler, formerly Bergdorf Goodman, formerly

Neiman Marcus, formerly Saks Fifth Avenue, formerly Christian

Dior.

Seth Thomas who a long time before was named Manus

Kelley, my fiance from the infomercial. I couldn't tell you this

until now because I want you to know how discovering this

felt. In my heart. My fiance wanted to kill me. Even when

he's that much an asshole, I loved Manus. I still love Seth. A

knife, it felt like a knife, and I'd discovered that despite

everything that's happened, I still had an endless untapped

potential for getting hurt.

It's from this night we started on the road together and

Manus Kelley would someday become Seth Thomas. In

between, in Santa Barbara and San Francisco and Los Angles

and Reno and Boise and Salt Lake City, Manus was other

men. Between that night and now, tonight, me in bed in

Seattle still in love with him, Seth was Lance Corporal and

Chase Manhattan. He was Dow Corning and Herald Tribune

and Morris Code.

All courtesy of the Brandy Alexander Witness

Reincarnation Project, as she calls it.

Different names, but all these men started out as Manus

TryingToKillMe.

Different men, but there's always the same special police

vice operative good looks. The same power blue eyes. Don't

shoot—Let's go sailing—it's the same voice. Different haircuts

but it's always the same thick black sexy dog hair.

Seth Thomas is Manus. Manus cheated on me with Evie,

but I still love him so much I'll hide any amount of conjugated

estrogen in his food. So much I'll do anything to destroy him.

You'd think I'd be smarter now after, what? Sixteen

hundred college credits. I should be smarter. I could be a

doctor by now.

Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.

Jump to me not feeling anything but stupid, trying to balance

one of Evie's gold saxophone telephones against my ear.

Brandy Alexander, the inconvenient queen she is, isn't listed in

the phone book. All I know is she lives downtown at the

Congress Hotel in a corner suite with three roommates:

Kitty Litter.

Sofonda Peters.

And the vivacious Vivienne VaVane.

AKA the Rhea sisters, three drag guys who worship the

quality queen deluxe but would kill each other for more closet

space. The Brandy queen told me that much.

It should be Brandy I talk to, but I call my folks. What's gone

on is I lock my killer fiance in the coat closet, and when I go

to put him inside there's more of my beautiful clothes but all

stretched out three sizes. Those clothes were every penny I

ever made. After all that, I have to call somebody.

For so many reasons, no way can I just go back to bed. So I

call, and my call goes out across mountains and deserts to

where my father answers, and in my best ventriloquist voice,

avoiding the consonants you really need a jaw to say, I tell him,

"Gflerb sorlfd qortk, erd sairk. Srd. Erd, korts derk sairk?

Kirdo!"

Anymore, the telephone is just not my friend.

And my father says, "Please don't hang up. Let me get my

wife."

Away from the receiver, he says, "Leslie, wake up, we're

being hate-crimed finally."

And in the background is my mother's voice saying, "Don't

even talk to them. Tell them we loved and treasured our dead

homosexual child."

It's the middle of the night here. They must be in bed.

"Lot. Ordilj," I say. "Serta ish ka alt. Serta ish ka alt!"

"Here," my father says as his voice drifts away. "Leslie, you

give them what for."

The gold saxophone receiver feels heavy and stagy, a

prop, as if this call needs any more drama. From back in the coat

closet, Seth yells, "Please. Don't be calling the police until you've

talked to Evie."

Then from the telephone, "Hello?" And it's my mother.

"The world is big enough we can all love each other." she says,

"There's room in God's heart for all His children. Gay, lesbian,

bisexual, and transgendered. Just because it's anal intercourse

doesn't mean it's not love."

She says, "I hear a lot of hurt from you. I want to help you deal

with these issues."

And Seth yells, "I wasn't going to kill you. I was here to

confront Evie because of what she did to you. I was only trying to

protect myself."

On the telephone, a two-hour drive from here, there's a toilet

flush, then my father's voice, "You still talking to those lunatics?"

And my mother, "It's so exciting! I think one of them says he's

going to kill us."

And Seth yells, "It had to be Evie who shot you."

Then in the telephone is my father's voice, roaring so loud that I

have to hold the receiver away from my ear, he says, "You, you're the

one who should be dead." He says, "You killed my son, you

goddamned perverts."

And Seth yells, "What I had with Evie was just sex."

I might as well not even be in the room, or just hand the

phone to Seth.

Seth says, "Please don't think for one minute that I could just

stab you in your sleep.”

And in the phone, my father shouts, "You just try it,

mister. I've got a gun here and I'll keep it loaded and next to

me day and night." He says, "We're through letting you

torture us." He says, "We're proud to be the parents of a

dead gay son."

And Seth yells, "Please, just put the phone down."

And I go, "Aht! Oahk!"

But my father hangs up.

My inventory of people who can save me is down to just

me. Not my best friend. Or my old boyfriend. Not the doctors

or the nuns. Maybe the police, but not yet. It isn't time to

wrap this whole mess into a neat legal package and get on

with my less-than life. Hideous and invisible forever and

picking up pieces.

Things are still all messy and up in the air, but I'm not

ready to settle them. My comfort zone was getting bigger by

the minute. My threshold for drama was bumping out. It was

time to keep pushing the envelope. It felt like I could do

anything, and I was only getting started.

My rifle was loaded, and I had my first hostage.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Jump way back to the last time I ever went home to see

my parents. It was my last birthday before the accident. What

with Shane still being dead, I wasn't expecting presents. I'm

not expecting a cake. This last time, I go home just to see

them, my folks. This is when I still have a mouth so I'm not so

stymied by the idea of blowing out candles.

The house, the brown living room sofa and reclining

chairs, everything is the same except my father's put big Xs of

duct tape across the inside of all the windows. Mom's car

isn't in the driveway where they usually park it. The car's

locked in the garage. There's a big deadbolt I don't remember

being on the front door. On the front gate is a big "Beware of

Dog" sign and a smaller sign for a home security system.

When I first get home, Mom waves me inside fast and says,

"Stay back from the windows, Bump. Hate crimes are up sixty-

seven percent this year over last year."

She says, "After it gets dark at night, try and not let your

shadow fall across the blinds so it can be seen from outside."

She cooks dinner by flashlight. When I open the oven or

the fridge, she panics fast, body blocking me to one side and

closing whatever I open.

"It's the bright light inside," she says. "Anti-gay violence

is up over one hundred percent in the last five years."

My father comes home and parks his car a half block

away. His keys rattle against the outside of the new dead-bolt

while Mom stands frozen in the kitchen doorway, holding me

back. The keys stop, and my father knocks, three fast knocks,

then two slow ones.

"That's his knock," Mom says, "but look through the

peephole, anyway."

My father comes in, looking back over his shoulder to the

dark street, watching. A car passes, and he says, "Romeo

Tango Foxtrot six seven four. Quick, write it down."

My mother writes this on the pad by the phone.

"Make?" she says. "Model?"

"Mercury, blue," my father says. "Sable.”

Mom says, "It's on the record."

I say maybe they're overreacting some.

And my father says, "Don't marginalize our oppression."

Jump to what a big mistake this was, coming home. Jump

to how Shane should see this, how weird our folks are being.

My father turns off the lamp I turned on in the living room.

The drapes on the picture window are shut and pinned

together in the middle. They know all the furniture in the

dark, but me, I stumble against every chair and end table. I

knock a candy dish to the floor, smash, and my mother screams

and drops to the kitchen linoleum.

My father comes up from where he's crouched behind the

sofa and says, "You'll have to cut your mother some slack.

We're expecting to get hate-crimed any day soon."

From the kitchen, Mom yells, "Was it a rock? Is anything

on fire?"

And my father yells, "Don't press the panic button, Leslie.

The next false alarm, and we have to start paying for them."

Now I know why they put a headlight on some kinds of

vacuum cleaners. First, I'm picking up broken glass in the pitch

dark. Then I'm asking my father for bandages. I just stand in

one place, keeping my cut hand raised above my heart, and

wait. My father comes out of the dark with alcohol and

bandages.

"This is a war we're fighting," he says, "all of us in pee-

flag.”

P.F.L.A.G. Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. I know.

I know. I know. Thank you, Shane.

I say, "You shouldn't even be in PFLAG. Your gay son is dead,

so he doesn't count anymore." This sounds pretty hurtful,

but I'm bleeding here. I say, "Sorry."

The bandages are tight and the alcohol stings in the dark,

and my father says, "The Wilsons put a PFLAG sign in their

yard. Two nights later, someone drove right through their

lawn, ruined everything."

My folks don't have any PFLAG signs.

"We took ours down," my father says. "Your mother has a

PFLAG bumper sticker, so we keep her car in the garage. Us

taking pride in your brother has put us right on the front

lines."

Out of the dark, my mother says, "Don't forget the

Bradfords. They got a burning bag of dog feces on their front

porch. It could've burned their whole house down with them

sleeping in bed, all because they hung a rainbow PFLAG wind

sock in their backyard." Mom says, "Not even their front yard,

in their backyard."

"Hate," my father says, "is all around us, Bump. Do you

know that?"

My mom says, "Come on, troops. It's chow time."

Dinner is some casserole from the PFLAG cookbook. It's

good, but God only knows what it looks like. Twice, I knock

over my glass in the dark. I sprinkle salt in my lap. Any time I

say a word, my folks shush me. My mom says, "Did you hear

something? Did that come from outside?”

In a whisper, I ask if they remember what tomorrow is. Just to

see if they remember, what with all the tension. It's not as if I'm

expecting a cake with candles and a present.

"Tomorrow," my dad says. "Of course, we know. That's why we're

nervous as cats."

"We wanted to talk to you about tomorrow," my mom says.

"We know how upset you are about your brother still, and we

think it would be good for you if you'd march with our group in the

parade."

Jump to another weird sick disappointment just coming over

the horizon.

Jump to me getting swept up in their big compensation, their

big penance for all those years ago, my father yelling, "We don't

know what kind of filthy diseases you're bringing into this house,

mister, but you can just find another place to sleep, tonight."

They called this tough love.

This is the same dinner table where Mom told Shane, "Doctor

Peterson's office called today." To me she said, "You can go to your

room and read, young lady."

I could've gone to the moon and still heard all the yelling.

Shane and my folks were in the dining room, me, I was behind

my bedroom door. My clothes, most of my school clothes were

outside on the clothesline. Inside, my father said, "It's not strep

throat you've got, mister, and we'd like to know where you've been

and what you've been up to.”

"Drugs," my mom said, "we could deal with."

Shane never said a word. His face still shiny and creased

with scars.

"Teenage pregnancy," my mom said, "we could deal

with."

Not one word.

"Doctor Peterson," she said. "He said there's just about

only one way you could get the disease the way you have it,

but I told him, no, not our child, not you, Shane."

My father said, "We called Coach Ludlow, and he said you

dropped basketball two months ago."

"You'll need to go down to the county health department,

tomorrow," my mom said.

"Tonight," my father said. "We want you out of here."

Our father.

These same people being so good and kind and caring and

involved, these same people finding identity and personal

fulfillment in the fight on the front lines for equality and

personal dignity and equal rights for their dead son, these

are the same people I hear yelling through my bedroom door.

"We don't know what kind of filthy diseases you're

bringing into this house, mister, but you can just find another

place to sleep tonight."

I remember I wanted to go out and get my clothes, iron

then, fold them, and put them away.

Give me any sense of control.

Flash.

I remember how the front door just opened and shut, it

didn't slam. With the light on in my room, all I could see was

myself reflected in my bedroom window. When I turned out

the light, there was Shane, standing just outside the window,

looking in at me, his face all monster movie hacked and

distorted, dark and hard from the hair-spray blow-up.

Give rne terror.

Flash.

He didn't ever smoke that I knew about, but he lit a

match and put it to a cigarette in his mouth. He knocked on

the window.

He said, "Hey, let me in."

Give me denial.

He said, "Hey, it's cold."

Give me ignorance.

I turned on the bedroom light so I could only see myself

in the window. Then I shut the curtains. I never saw Shane

again.

Tonight, with the lights off, with the curtains shut and the

front door locked, with Shane gone except for the ghost of

him, I ask, "What parade?"

My mom says, "It's the Gay Pride Parade."

My dad says, "We're marching with PFLAG."

And they'd like me to march with them. They'd like me

to sit here in the dark and pretend it's the outside world

we're hiding from. It's some hateful stranger that's going to

come get us in the night. It's some alien fatal sex

disease. They'd like to think it's some bigoted homophobe

they're terrified of. It's not any of it their fault. They'd like me to

think I have something to make up for.

I did not throw away that can of hairspray. All I did was turn out

the bedroom lights. Then there were the fire engines coming in

the distance. There was orange flashing across the outside of my

curtains, and when I got out of bed to look, there were my school

clothes on fire. Hanging dry on the clothesline and layered with

air. Dresses and jumpers and pants and blouses, all of them blazing

and coming apart in the breeze. In a few seconds, everything I loved,

gone.

Flash.

Jump ahead a few years to me being grown up and moving out.

Give me a new start.

Jump to one night, somebody calling from a pay phone to ask

my folks, were they the parents of Shane McFarland? My

parents saying, maybe. The caller won't say where, but he says Shane

is dead.

A voice behind the caller saying, tell them the rest.

Another voice behind the caller saying, tell them Miss Shane

hated their hateful guts and her last words -were: this isn't over yet,

not by a long shot. Then somebody laughing.

Jump to us alone here in the dark with a casserole.

My father says, "So, honey, will you march with your mother and

me?"

My mom says, "It would mean so much for gay rights.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Jump to the moment around one o'clock in the morning in

Evie's big silent house when Manus stops screaming and I can

finally think.

Evie is in Cancun, probably waiting for the police to call her and

say: Your house-sitter, the monster without a jaw, well, she's shot

your secret boyfriend to death when he broke in with a butcher

knife is our best guess.

You know that Evie's wide awake right now. In some Mexican

hotel room, Evie's trying to figure out if there's a three-hour or a

four-hour time difference between her big house where I'm

stabbed to death, dead, and Cancun, where Evie's supposed to be

on a catalogue shoot. It's not like Evie is entered in the biggest brain

category. Nobody shoots a catalogue in Cancun in the peak season,

especially not with big-boned cowgirls like Evie Cottrell.

But me being dead, that opens up a whole world of possibility.

I'm an invisible nobody sitting on a white damask sofa facing

another white sofa across a coffee table that looks like a big block

of malachite from Geology 101.

Evie slept with my fiance, so now I can do anything to her.

In the movie, where somebody is invisible all the sudden—you

know, a nuclear radiation fluke or a mad scientist recipe—and you

think, what would I do if I was invisible ... ? Like go into the guy's

locker room at Gold's gym or, better yet, the Oakland Raiders'

locker room. Stuff like that. Scope things out. Go to Tiffany's and

shoplift diamond tiaras and stuff.

Just by his being so dumb, Manus could've stabbed me, tonight,

thinking I was Evie, thinking Evie shot me, while I was asleep in

the dark in her bed.

My dad, he'd go to my funeral and talk to everybody about how

I was always about to go back to college and finish my personal

fitness training degree and then no doubt go on to medical

school. Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Daddy, I couldn't get past the fetal

pig in Biology 101. Now I'm the cadaver.

Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.

Evie would be right next to my Mom, next to the open casket.

Evie would stagger up leaning on Manus. You know, Evie

would've found something totally grotesque for the undertaker to

dress me in. So Evie throws an arm around my mom, and Manus

can't get away from the open casket fast enough, and I'm laying

there in this blue velveteen casket like the interior of a Lincoln Town

Car. Of course, thank you, Evie, I'm wearing this concubine evening

wear Chinese yellow silk kimono slit up the side to my waist with

black fishnet stockings and red Chinese dragons embroidered across

the pelvic region and my breasts.

And red high heels. And no jawbone.

Of course, Evie says to my mom: "She always loved this dress. This

kimono was her favorite." Sensitive Evie would say, "Guess this

makes you oh for two."

I could kill Evie.

I would pay snakes to bite her.

Evie would be wearing this little black cocktail number with an

asymmetrical hemline satin skirt and a strapless bodice by Rei

Kawakubo. The shoulders and sleeves would be sheer black chiffon.

Evie, you know she has jewelry, big emeralds for her too green eyes

and a change of accessories in her black clutch bag so she can wear

this dress later, dancing.

I hate Evie.

Me, I'm rotting with my blood pumped out in this slut-ty Suzie

Wong Tokyo Rose concubine drag dress where it didn't fit so they

had to pin all the extra together behind my back.

I look like shit, dead.

I look like dead shit.

I would stab Evie right now over the telephone.

No, really, I'd tell Mrs. Cottrell as we placed Evie's urn in a family

vault somewhere in Godawful, Texas. Really, Evie wanted to be

cremated.

Me, at Evie's funeral, I'd be wearing this tourniquet-tight black

leather mini dress by Gianni Versace with yards and yards of black

silk gloves bunched up on my arms. I'd sit next to Manus in the back

of the mortuary's big black Caddy, and I'd have on this wagon

wheel of a black Christian Lacroix hat with a black veil you could

take off later and go to a swell auction preview or estate sale or

something and then, lunch.

Evie, Evie would be dirt. Okay, ashes.

Alone in her living room, I pick up a crystal cigarette box off the

table that looks like a block of malachite, and I overhand fast-pitch

this little treasure against the fireplace bricks. There's a smash with

cigarettes and matches everywhere.

Bourgeoise dead girl that I am, I wish all of the sudden I hadn't

done this, and I kneel down and start to pick up the mess. The glass

and cigarettes. Only Evie ... a cigarette box. It's just so last-

generational.

And matches.

A little tug hits my finger, and I'm cut on a shard so thin and

clear it's invisible.

Oh, this is dazzling.

Only when the blood comes out to outline the shard in red,

only then can I see what cut me. It's my blood on the broken

glass I pull out. My blood on a book of matches.

No, Mrs. Cottrell. No, really, Evie wanted to be cremated.

I get up out of my mess, and run around leaving blood on

every light switch and lamp, turning them all off. I run past

the coat closet, and Manus calls, "Please," but what I have in

mind is too exciting.

I turn out all the first-floor lights, and Manus calls. He has

to go to the bathroom, he calls. "Please."

Evie's big plantation house with its big pillars in front is all

the way dark as I feel my way back to the dining room. I can

feel the door frame and count ten slow, blind footsteps across

the Oriental carpet to the dining room table with its lace

tablecloth.

I light a match. I light one of the candles in the big silver

candelabra.

Okay, it's so Gothic Novel, but I light all five candles in the

silver candelabra so heavy it takes both hands for me to lift.

Still wearing my satin peignoir set and ostrich feather

bathrobe, what I am is the ghost of a beautiful dead girl

carrying this candle thing up Evie's long circular staircase. Up

past all the oil paintings, then down the second floor hallway.

In the master bedroom, the beautiful ghost girl in her

candlelit satin opens the armoires and the closets full of her

own clothes, stretched to death by the giant evil Evie Cottrell.

The tortured bodies of dresses and sweaters and dresses and

slacks and dresses and jeans and

gowns and shoes and dresses, almost everything mutilated

and misshapen and begging to be put out of its misery.

The photographer in my head says: Give me anger.

Flash.

Give me vengeance.

Flash.

Give me total and complete justified retribution.

Flash.

The already dead ghost I am, the not-occurring, the

completely empowered invisible nothing I've become, I wave

the candelabra past all that fabric and:

Flash.

What we have is Evie's enormous fashion inferno.

Which is dazzling.

Which is just too much fun! I try the bedspread, it's this

antique Belgian lace duvet, and it burns.

The drapes, Miss Evie's green velvet portieres, they burn.

Lampshades burn.

Big shit. The chiffon I'm wearing, it's burning, too. I slap

out my smoldering feathers and step backwards from Evie's

master bedroom fashion furnace and into the second-floor

hallway.

There are ten other bedrooms and some bathrooms, and

I go room to room. Towels burn. Bathroom inferno! Chanel

Number Five, it burns. Oil paintings of race horses and dead

pheasants burn. The reproduction Oriental carpets burn.

Evie's bad dried flower arrangements, they're these little

tabletop infernos. Too cute! Evie's Katty Kathy doll, it melts,

then it burns. Evie's collection of big carnival stuffed

animals—Cootie, Poochie, Pam-Pam, Mr. Bunnits, Choochie,

Poo Poo, and Ringer—it's a fun-fur holocaust. Too sweet. Too

precious.

Back in the bathroom, I snatch one of the few things not

on fire:

A bottle of Valiums.

I start down the big circular staircase. Manus, when he

broke in to kill me, he left the front door open, and the

second-floor inferno sucks a cool breeze of night air up the

stairs around me. Blowing my candles out. Now, the only light

is the inferno, a giant space heater smiling down on me, me

deep fried in my eleven herbs and spices of singed chiffon.

The feeling is that I've just won some major distinguished

award for a major lifetime achievement.

Like, here she is, Miss America.

Come on down.

And this kind of attention, I still love it.

At the closet door, Manus is whining about how he can

smell smoke, and please, please, please don't let him die. As if I

could even care right now.

No, really, Manus wanted to be cremated.

On the telephone message pad, I write

in a minute ill open the door, but i still have the gun.

before that, i'm shoving valiums under the door, eat them,

do this or I'll kill you.

And I put the note under the door.

We're going out to his car in the driveway. I'm taking him

away. He'll do everything I want, or wherever we end up, I'll

tell the police that he broke into the house. He set the fire

and used the rifle to kidnap me. I'll blab everything about

Manus and Evie and their sick love affair.

The word love tastes like earwax when I think it about

Manus and Evie.

I slam the butt of the rifle against the closet door, and the

rifle goes off. Another inch, and I'd be dead. With me dead

outside the locked door, Manus would burn.

"Yes," Manus screams. "I'll do anything. Just, please, don't

let me burn to death or shoot me. Anything, just open the

door!"

With my shoe, I shove the poured-out Valiums through the

crack under the closet door. With the rifle out in front of me, I

unlock the door and stand back. In the light from the upstairs

fire, you can see how the house is filling up with smoke.

Manus stumbles out, power blue bug-eyed with his hands in

the air, and I march him out to his car with the rifle pressed

against his back. Even at the end of a rifle, Manus's skin feels

tight and sexy. Beyond this, I have no plan. All I know is I don't

want anything resolved for a while. Wherever we end up, I

just won't go back to normal.

I lock Manus in the trunk of his Fiat Spider. A nice car, it's a

nice car, red, with the convertible top down. I slam the butt

of the rifle against the trunk lid.

Nothing comes back from my love cargo. Then I wonder if

he still has to pee.

I toss the rifle into the passenger seat and I go back into

Evie's plantation inferno. In the foyer, only now it's a

chimney, it's a wind tunnel with the cold air rushing in the

front door and up into the heat and light above me. The

foyer still has that desk with the gold saxophone telephone.

Smoke is everywhere, and a chorus of every smoke detector

siren sirening is so loud it hurts.

It's just plain mean, making Evie in Cancun lay awake so

long for her good news.

So I call the number she left. You know Evie picks up on

the first ring.

And Evie says, "Hello?"

There's nothing but the sound of everything I've done, the

smoke detectors and the flames, the tinkle of the chandelier

as the breeze chimes through it, that's all there is to hear from

her end of the conversation.

Evie says, "Manus?"

Somewhere, the dining room maybe, the ceiling crashes

down and sparks and embers rush out the dining room

doorway and over the foyer floor.

Evie says, "Manus, don't play games. If this is you, I said I

didn't want to see you anymore."

And right then:

Crash.

A half ton of sparkling, flashing, white-light, hand-cut

Austrian crystal, the big chandelier drops from the center of

the foyer ceiling and explodes too close.

Another inch, and I'd be dead.

How can I not laugh. I'm already dead.

"Listen, Manus," Evie says. "I told you not to call me or I'll

tell the police about how you put my best friend in the

hospital without a face. You got that?"

Evie says, "You just went too far. I'll get a restraining

order if I have too."

Manus or Evie, I don't know who to believe, all I know is

my feathers are on fire.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Jump way back to a fashion shoot at this junkyard full of dirty

wrecked cars where Evie and me have to climb around on the

wrecks wearing Hermaun Mancing thong swimwear so narrow you

have to wear a "pussy strip" of surgical tape underneath, and Evie

starts in with, "About your mutilated brother ... ?"

It's not my favorite photographer or art director, either.

And I'm going back to Evie, "Yeah?" Busy sticking out my butt.

And the photographer goes, "Evie? That's not pouting!

The uglier the fashions, the worse places we'd have to pose to

make them look good. Junkyards. Slaughterhouses.

Sewage treatment plants. It's the ugly bridesmaid tactic

where you only look good by comparison. One shoot for

Industry Jeans Wear, I was sure we'd have to pose kissing dead

bodies.

These junked cars all have rusted holes through them,

serrated edges, and I'm this close to naked and trying to

remember when was my last tetanus shot. The photographer

lowers his camera and says, "I'm only wasting film until you

girls decide to pull in your stomachs."

More and more, being beautiful took so much effort. Just

the razor bumps would make you want to cry. The bikini

waxes. Evie came out of her collagen lip injection saying she

no longer had any fear of hell. The next worse thing is Manus

yanking off your pussy strip if you're not close-shaved.

About hell, I told Evie, "We're shooting there tomorrow."

So, now the art director says, "Evie, could you climb up a

couple cars higher on the pile?" And this is wearing high

heels, but Evie goes up. Little diamonds of safety glass are

scattered on everywhere you might fall.

Through her big cheesy smile, Evie says, "How exactly did

your brother get mutilated?" You can only hold a real smile

for so long, after that it's just teeth.

The art director steps up with his little foam applicator and

retouches where the bronzer is streaked on my butt cheeks.

"It was a hairspray can somebody threw away in our

family's burning barrel," I say. "He was burning the trash and

it exploded."

And Evie says, "Somebody?"

And I say, "You'd think it was my mom, the way she

screamed and tried to stop him bleeding."

And the photographer says, "Girls, can you go up on your

toes just a little?"

Evie goes, "A big thirty-two-ounce can of HairShell

hairspray? I bet it peeled half his face off."

We both go up on our toes.

I go, "It wasn't so bad."

"Wait a sec," the art director says, "I need your feet to be

not so close together." Then he says, "Wider." Then, "A little

wider, please." Then he hands up big chrome tools for us to

hold.

Mine must weigh fifteen pounds.

"It's a ball-peen hammer," Evie says, "and you're holding it

wrong."

"Honey," the photographer says to Evie, "could you hold

the chainsaw a bit closer to your mouth, please?"

The sun is warm on the metal of the cars, their tops

crushed under the weight of being piled on top each

other. These are cars with buckled front ends you know

nobody walked away from. Cars with T-boned sides where

whole familes died together. Rear-ended cars with the back

seats pushed up tight against the dashboard. Cars from

before seatbelts. Cars from before air bags. Before the Jaws of Life.

Before paramedics. These are cars peeled open around their

exploded gas tanks.

"This is so rich," Evie says, "how this is the place I've worked my

whole life to get."

The art director says to go ahead and push our breasts against

the cars.

"The whole time, growing up," Evie says, "I just thought

being a woman would be ... not such a disappointment."

All I ever wanted was to be an only child.

The photographer says, "Perfecto.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

What you get with the Rhea sisters is three skin-andbone

white men who sit around a suite at the Congress Hotel

all day in nylon slips with the shoulder straps fallen off one

shoulder or the other, wearing high heels and smoking

cigarettes. Kitty Litter, Sofonda Peters, and the Vivacious

Vivienne VaVane, their faces shining with moisturizer and egg-

white facials, they listen to that step-to-three cha-cha music

you only hear on elevators anymore. The Rhea sister hair,

their hair is short and flat with grease and matted down

bristling with bobby pins, flat on their heads. Maybe they have

a wig cap stretched on over the pins if it's not summer outside.

Most of the time, they don't know what season it is. The blinds

aren't ever open, and there are maybe a dozen of those chacha

records stacked on the automatic record changer.

All the furniture is blonde and the big four-legged RCA

Philco console stereo. The stereo, you could plow a field with

that old needle, and the metal tone arm weighs about two

pounds.

May I present them:

Kitty Litter.

Sofonda Peters.

The Vivacious Vivienne VaVane.

AKA the Rhea sisters when they're onstage, these are her

family, Brandy Alexander told me in the speech therapist

office. Not the first time we met, this wasn't the time I cried

and told Brandy how I lost my face. This wasn't the second

time, either, the time Brandy brought her sewing basket full

of ways to hide my being a monster. This was one of the other

tons of times we snuck off while I was still in the hospital. The

speech therapist office was just where we'd meet.

"Usually," Brandy tells me, "Kitty Litter is bleaching and

tweezing away unwanted facial hair. This unsightly hair

thing can tie up a bathroom for hours, but Kitty would

wear her Ray-Bans inside out, she loves looking at her

reflection so much."

The Rheas, they made Brandy what she is. Brandy, she owes

them everything.

Brandy would lock the speech therapist door, and if

somebody would knock, Brandy and me, we'd fake loud

orgasm noises. We'd scream and yip and slap the floor. I'd clap my

hands to make that special spanking sound that everybody knows.

Whoever knocks, they'd go away fast.

Then we'd go back to just us using up make-up and talking.

"Sofonda," Brandy would tell me, "Sofonda Peters, she's the

brains, Sofonda is. Miss Peters is all day with her porcelain nails stuck

in the rotary-dial princess phone to an agent or a merchandiser,

selling, selling, selling."

Somebody would knock on the speech therapist door, so I'd give

out with a cat scream and slap my thigh.

The Rhea sisters, Brandy would tell me, she'd be dead without

them. When they'd found her, the princess queen supreme, she'd

been a size twenty-six, lip-synching at amateur-night, open-mike

shows. Lip-synching "Thumbelina."

Her hair, her figure, her hippy, hippy forward Brandy Alexander

walk, the Rhea sisters invented all that.

Jump to two fire engines passing me in the opposite direction as I

drive the freeway toward downtown, away from Evie's house on

fire. In the rearview mirror of Manus's Fiat Spider, Evie's house is a

smaller and smaller bonfire. The peachy-pink hem of Evie's bathrobe

is shut in the car door, and the ostrich feathers whip me in the cool

night air pouring around the convertible's windshield.

Smoke is all I smell like. The rifle on the passenger seat is pointing

at the floor.

There's not one word from my love cargo in the trunk.

And there's only one place left to go.

No way could I call and just ask the operator to ring Brandy. No

way would the operator understand me, so we're on our way

downtown to the Congress Hotel.

Jump to how all the Rhea sister money comes from a doll named

Katty Kathy. This is what else Brandy told me between faking

orgasms in the speech therapist office. She's a doll, Katty Kathy is one of

those foot-high flesh-tone dolls with the impossible measurements.

What she would be as a real woman is 46-16-26. As a real woman,

Katty Kathy could buy a total of nothing off the rack. You know

you've seen this doll. Comes naked in a plastic bubble pack for a

dollar, but her clothes cost a fortune, that's how realistic she is. You can

buy about four hundred tiny fashion separates that mix and match to

create three tasteful outfits. In that way, the doll is incredibly lifelike.

Chilling, even.

Sofonda Peters came up with the idea. Invented Katty Kathy,

made the prototype, sold the doll, and cut all the deals. Still,

Sofonda is about married to Kitty and Vivian and there's enough

money to support them all.

What sold Katty Kathy is that she's a talking doll, but instead of

a string, she's got this little gold chain coming out of her back. You

pull her chain, and she says:

"That dress is fine, I mean, if that's really how you want to

look.”

"Your heart is my pinata."

"Is that what you're going to wear?"

"I think it would be good for our relationship if we dated

other people."

"Kiss kiss."

And, "Don't touch my hair!"

The Rhea sisters, they made a bundle. Katty Kathy's little

bolero jacket alone, they have that jacket sewn in Cambodia

for a dime and sell it here in America for sixteen dollars.

People pay that.

Jump to me parking the Fiat with its trunk full of my love

cargo on a side street, and me walking up Broadway toward

the doorman at the Congress Hotel. I'm a woman with half a

face arriving at a luxury hotel, one of those big glazed terra

cotta palace hotels built a hundred years ago, where the

doormen wear tailcoats with gold braid on the shoulders. I'm

wearing a peignoir set and a bathrobe. No veils. Half the

bathrobe has been shut in a car door, dragging on the

freeway for the past twenty miles. My ostrich feathers smell

like smoke, and I'm trying to keep it a big secret that I have a

rifle tucked up crutch-like under my arm.

Yeah, and I lost a shoe, one of those high-heeled mules, too.

The doorman in his tailcoat doesn't even look at me.

Yeah, and my hair, I see it reflected in the big brass plaque that

says The Congress Hotel. The cool night air has pulled my

butter creme frosting hairdo out into a ratted stringy mess.

Jump to me at the front desk of the Congress Hotel

where I try and make my eyes alluring. They say what people

notice first about you is your eyes. I have the attention of what

must be the night auditor, the bellman, the manager, and a

clerk. First impressions are so important. It must be the way

I'm dressed or the rifle. Using the hole that's the top of my

throat, my tongue sticking out of it and all the scar tissue

around it, I say, "Gerl terk nahdz gah sssid."

Everybody is just flash frozen by my alluring eyes.

I don't know how, but then the rifle's up on the desk,

pointing at nobody in particular.

The manager steps up in his navy blue blazer with its little

brass Mr. Baxter name tag, and he says, "We can give you all

the money in the drawer, but no one here can open the safe

in the office."

The gun on the desk points right at the brass Mr. Baxter

nametag, a fact that hasn't gone unnoticed. I snap my fingers

and point at a piece of paper for him to give me. With the

guest pen on a chain, I write:

which suite are the rhea sisters in? don't make me knock

on every door on the fifteenth floor, it's the middle of the

night.

"That would be Suite 15-G," says Mr. Baxter, both his hands

full of cash I don't want and reached out across the desk

toward me. "The elevators," he says, "are to your right."

Jump to me being Daisy St. Patience the first day Brandy and I

sat together. The day of the frozen turkey after the whole summer

I waited for somebody to ask me what happened to my face, and I

told Brandy everything.

Brandy, when she sat me in the chair still hot from her ass and

she locked the speech therapist door that first time, she named

me out of my future. She named me Daisy St. Patience and never

wanted to know what name I walked in the door with. I was the

rightful heir to the international fashion house, the House of St.

Patience.

Brandy she just talked and talked. We were running out of air,

she talked so much, and I don't mean just we, Brandy and me. I

mean the world. The world was running out of air, Brandy talked

that much. The Amazon Basin just could not keep up.

"Who you are moment to moment," Brandy said, "is just a

story."

What I needed was a new story.

"Let me do for you," Brandy said, "what the Rhea sisters did for

me."

Give me courage.

Flash.

Give me heart.

Flash.

So jump to me being Daisy St. Patience going up in that

elevator, and Daisy St. Patience walking down that wide

carpeted hallway to Suite 15-G. Daisy knocks and nobody

answers. Through the door, you can hear that cha-cha music.

The door opens six inches, but the chain is on so it stops.

Three white faces appear in the six-inch gap, one on top

of the other, Kitty Litter, Sofonda Peters, and the vivacious

Vivienne VaVane, their faces shining with moisturizer. Their

short dark hair is matted down flat with bobby pins and wig

caps.

The Rhea sisters.

Who's who, I don't know. The drag queen totem pole in the

door crack says:

"Don't take the queen supreme from us."

"She's all we have to do with our lives."

"She isn't finished yet. We're not half done, and there's just

so much more we have to do on her."

I give them a peekaboo pink chiffon flash of the rifle, and

the door slams.

Through the door, you can hear the chain come off. Then

the door opens all the way.

Jump to one time, late one night, driving between

Nowhere, Wyoming, and WhoKnowsWhere, Montana, when

Seth says how your being born makes your parents God. You

owe them your life, and they can control you.

"Then puberty makes you Satan," he says, "just

because you want something better."

Jump to inside suite 15-G with its blonde furniture and

the bossa-nova cha-cha music and cigarette smoke, and the

Rhea sisters are flying around the room in their nylon slips

with the shoulder straps off one shoulder or the other. I

don't have to do anything but point the rifle.

"We know who you are, Daisy St. Patience," one of them

says, lighting a cigarette, "With a face like that, you're all

Brandy talks about anymore."

All over the room are these big, big 1959 spatter glaze

ashtrays so big you only have to empty them every couple years.

The one with the cigarette gives me her long hand with

its porcelain nails and says, "I'm Pie Rhea."

"I'm Die Rhea," says another one, near the stereo.

The one with the cigarette, Pie Rhea, says, "Those are our

stagenames." She points at the third Rhea, over on the sofa,

eating Chinese out of a takeaway carton. "That," she says and

points, "This Miss Eating Herself To Fat, you can call her Gon

Rhea."

With her mouth full of nothing you'd want to see, Gon

Rhea says, "Charmed, I'm sure."

Putting her cigarette everywhere but in her mouth, Pie Rhea says,

"The queen just does not need your problems, not tonight." She

says, "We're all the family the top girl needs."

On the stereo is a picture in a silver frame of a girl,

beautiful in front of seamless paper, smiling into an unseen

camera, an invisible photographer telling her:

Give me passion.

Flash.

Give me joy.

Flash.

Give me youth and energy and innocence and beauty.

Flash.

"Brandy's first family, her birth family, didn't want her, so

we adopted her," says Die Rhea. Pointing her long finger at

the picture smiling on the blonde stereo, Die Rhea says, "Her

birth family thinks she's dead."

Jump to one time back when I had a face and I did this

magazine cover shoot for BabeWear magazine.

Jump back to Suite 15-G and the picture on the blonde

stereo is me, my cover, the BabeWear magazine cover, framed

with Die Rhea pointing her finger at me.

Jump back to us in the speech therapist office with the

door locked and Brandy saying how lucky she was the Rhea

sisters found her. It's not everybody who gets a second chance

to be born again and raised a second time, but this time by a

family that loves her.

"Kitty Litter, Sofonda, and Vivienne," Brandy says, "I owe

them everything."

Jump to Suite 15-G and Gon Rhea waving her chopsticks at

me and saying, "Don't you try and take her from us. We're

not finished with her yet."

"If Brandy goes with you," says Pie Rhea, "she can pay for

her own conjugated estrogens. And her vaginoplasty. And her

labiaplasty. Not to mention her scrotal electrolysis."

To the picture on the stereo, to the smiling stupid face in

the silver frame, Die Rhea says, "None of that is cheap."

Die Rhea lifts the picture and holds it up to me, my past

looking me eye to eye, and Die Rhea says, "This, this is how

Brandy wanted to look, like her bitch sister. That was two

years ago, before she had laser surgery to thin her vocal cords

and then her trachea shave. She had her scalp advanced three

centimeters to give her the right hairline. We paid for her

brow shave to get rid of the bone ridge above her eyes that

the Miss Male used to have. We paid for her jaw contouring

and her forehead feminiza-tion."

"And," Gon Rhea says with her mouth full of chewed-up

Chinese, "and every time she came home from the hospital

with her forehead broken and realigned or her Adam's apple

shaved down to a ladylike nothing, who do you think took care of

her for those two years?"

Jump to nay folks asleep in their bed across mountains and

deserts away from here. Jump to them and their telephone and

years ago some crazy man, some screeching awful pervert, calling

them and screaming that their son was dead. Their son they didn't

want, Shane, he was dead of AIDS and this man wouldn't say where

or when and then he laughed and hung up.

Jump back to inside Suite 15-G and Die Rhea waving an old

picture of me in my face and saying, "This is how she wanted to

look, and tens of thousands of Katty Kathy dollars later, this is how

she looks."

Gon Rhea says, "Hell. Brandy looks better than that."

"We're the ones who love Brandy Alexander," says Pie Rhea.

"But you're the one Brandy loves because you need her," says

Die Rhea.

Gon Rhea says, "The one you love and the one who loves you

are never, ever the same person." She says, "Brandy will leave us if

she thinks you need her, but we need her, too.”

The one I love is locked in the trunk of a car outside with

a stomach full of Valiums, and I wonder if he still has to pee.

My brother I hate is come back from the dead. Shane's being

dead was just too good to be true.

First the exploding hairspray can didn't kill him.

Then our family couldn't just forget him.

Now even the deadly AIDS virus has failed me.

My brother is nothing but one bitter fucking disappointment

after another.

You can hear a door opening and shutting somewheres,

then another door, then another door opens and Brandy's

there saying, "Daisy, honey," and steps into the smoke and cha

cha music wearing this amazing sort of Bill Blass First Lady

type of traveling suit made out of solid kelly green trimmed

with white piping and green high heels and a really smart

green purse. On her head is an eco-incorrect tasty sort of

spray of rainforest green parrot feathers made into a hat, and

Brandy says, "Daisy, honey, don't point a gun at the people

who I love."

In each of Brandy's big ring-beaded hands is a sassy off-

white American Tourister luggage. "Give us a hand,

somebody. These are just the royal hormones." She says, "My

clothes I need are in the other room."

To Sofonda, Brandy says, "Miss Pie Rhea, I have just got to

get."

To Kitty, Brandy says, "Miss Die Rhea, I've done everything

we can do for now. We've done the scalp advance-merit, the

brow lift, the brow bone shave. We've done the trachea shave,

the nose contouring, the jawline contouring, the forehead

realignment ..."

Like it's any wonder I didn't recognize my old mutilated

brother.

To Vivienne, Brandy says, "Miss Gon Rhea, I've got months

left on my Real Life Training and I'm not spending them holed

up here in this hotel."

Jump to us driving away with the Fiat Spider just piled

with luggage. Imagine desperate refugees from Beverly Hills

with seventeen pieces of matched luggage migrating cross-

country to start a new life in the Okie Midwest. Everything

very elegant and tasteful, one of those epic Joad family

vacations, only backwards. Leaving a trail of cast-off accessories,

shoes and gloves and chokers and hats to lighten their load

so's they can cross the Rocky Mountains, that would be us.

This is after the police showed up, no doubt after the

hotel manager called and said a mutilated psycho with a gun

was menacing everybody up on the fifteenth floor. This is

after the Rhea sisters ran all Brandy's luggage down the fire

stairs. This is after Brandy says she has to go, she needs to

think about things, you know, before her big surgery. You

know. The transformation.

This is after I keep looking at Brandy and wondering,

Shane?

"It's just such a big commitment," Brandy says, "being a

girl, you know. Forever."

Taking the hormones. For the rest of her life. The pills, the

patches, the injections, for the rest of her life. And what if

there was someone, just one person who would love her, who

could make her life happy, just the way she was, without the

hormones and make-up and the clothes and shoes and

surgery? She has to at least look around the world a little.

Brandy explains all this, and the Rhea sisters start to cry and

wave and pile the American Touristers into the car.

And the whole scene would be just heartbreaking, and I

would be boo-hooing too, if I didn't know Brandy was my

dead brother and the person he wants to love him is me, his

hateful sister, already plotting to kill him. Yes. Plotting me,

plotting to kill Brandy Alexander. Me with nothing left to

lose, plotting my big revenge in the spotlight.

Give me violent revenge fantasies as a coping mechanism.

Flash.

Just give me my first opportunity.

Flash.

Brandy behind the wheel, she turns to me, her eyes all

spidery with tears and mascara, and says, "Do you know what

the Benjamin Standard Guidelines are?"

Brandy starts the car and puts it in gear. She drops the

parking brake and cranes her neck to see for traffic. She says,

"I have to live one whole year on hormones in my new gender

role before my vaginoplasty. They call it Real Life Training."

Brandy pulls out into the street and we're almost

escaped. Police SWAT teams in chic basic black accessorized

with tear gas and semiautomatic weapons are charging in past

the doorman holding the door in his gold braid. The Rheas run

after us, waving and throwing kisses and doing pretty much

ugly bridesmaid behavior until they stumble, panting, in the

street, their high heels shot to hell.

There's a moon in the sky. Office buildings are

canyoned along either side of the street. There's still Manus

in the trunk, and we're already putting gross distance

between me and my getting caught.

Brandy puts her big hand open on my leg and squeezes.

Arson, kidnapping, I think I'm up to murder. Maybe all this

will get me just a glimmer of attention, not the good, glorious

kind, but still the national media kind.

Monster Girl Slays Secret Brother Gal Pal

"I've got eight months left to my R.L.T. year," Brandy says.

"Think you can keep me busy for the next eight months?”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Half 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 Marche, 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 Hank 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 Faberge. The boxes are Faberge

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 tell 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.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

When you go out with a drunk, you'll notice how a

drunk fills your glass so he can empty his own. As long as

you're drinking, drinking is okay. Two's company. Drinking

is fun. If there's a bottle, even if your glass isn't empty, a

drunk, he'll pour a little in your glass before he fills his own.

This only looks like generosity.

That Brandy Alexander, she's always on me about plastic

surgery. Why don't I, you know, just look at what's out there.

With her chest siliconed, her hips lipo-sucked, the 46-16-26

Katty Kathy hourglass thing she is, the fairy godmother

makeover, my fair lady, Pygmalion thing she is, my brother back

from the dead, Brandy Alexander is very invested in plastic surgery.

And visa versa.

Bathroom talk.

Brandy's still laid out on the cold tile floor, high atop Capitol

Hill in Seattle. Mr. Parker has come and gone. Just Brandy and me

all afternoon. I'm still sitting on the open end of a huge ceramic

snail shell bolted to the wall. Trying to kill her in my half-assed way.

Brandy's auburn head of hair is between my feet. Lipsticks and

Demerols, blushes and Percocet-5, Aubergine Dreams and Nembutal

Sodium capsules are spread out all over the aquamarine

countertops around the vanity sink.

My hand, I've been holding a handful of Valiums so long my

palm has gone Tiffany's light blue. Just Brandy and me all

afternoon with the sun coming in at lower and lowers angles

through the big brass porthole windows.

"My waist," Brandy says. The Plumbago mouth looks a little too

blue, Tiffany's light blue if you ask me. Overdose baby blue.

"Sofonda said I had to have a sixteen -inch waist," Brandy says. "I said,

'Miss Sofonda, I am big-boned. I am six feet tall. No way am I

getting down to a sixteen-inch waistline."

Sitting on the snail shell, I'm only half listening.

"Sofonda," Brandy says, "Sofonda says, there's a way, but I have

to trust her. When I wake up in the recovery room, I'll have a

sixteen-inch waist."

It's not like I haven't heard this story in a dozen other

bathrooms. Another bottle off the countertop, Bilax capsules,

I look it up in the Phyicians'Desk Reference book.

Bilax capsules. A bowel evacuant.

Maybe I should drop a few of these into that nonstop

mouth between my feet.

Jump to Manus watching me do that infomercial. We

were so beautiful. Me with a face. Him not so full of conjugated

estrogens.

I thought we were a real love relationship. I did. I was very

invested in love, but it was just this long, long sex thing that

could end at any moment because, after all, it's just about

getting off. Manus would close his power blue eyes and twist

his head just so, side to side, and swallow.

And, Yes, I'd tell Manus. I came right when he did.

Pillow talk.

Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving

somebody when you're just using them.

This only looks like love.

Jump to Brandy on the bathroom floor, saying, "Sofonda

and Vivienne and Kitty were all with me at the hospital." Her

hands curl up off the tile, and she runs them up and down

the sides of her blouse. "All three of them wore those baggy

green scrub suits, wearing hairnets over their wigs and with

those Duchess of Windsor costume jewelry brooches pinned on

their scrub suits," Brandy says. "They were flying around behind

the surgeon and the lights, and Sofonda was telling me to count

backwardsfrom one hundred. You know ... 99... 98... 97..."

The Aubergine Dreams eyes close. Brandy, pulling long, even

breaths, says, "The doctors, they took out the bottom rib on each

side of my chest." Her hands rub where, and she says, "I couldn't

sit up in bed for two months, but I had a sixteen-inch waist. I still

have a six-teen-inch waist."

One of Brandy's hands opens to full flower and slides over the

flat land where her blouse tucks into the belt of her skirt. "They cut

out two of my ribs, and I never saw them again," Brandy says.

"There's something in the Bible about taking out your ribs."

The creation of Eve.

Brandy says, "I don't know why I let them do that to me."

And Brandy, she's asleep.

Jump back to the night Brandy and I started this road trip, the

night we left the Congress Hotel with Brandy driving the way you

can only drive at two-thirty AM in an open sports car with a loaded

rifle and an overdosed hostage. Brandy hides her eyes behind Ray-

Bans so she can drive in a little privacy. Instant glamour from

another planet in the 1950s, Brandy pulls an Hermes scarf over

her auburn hair and ties it under her chin.

All I can see is myself reflected in Brandy's Ray-Bans, tiny

and horrible. Still strung out and pulled apart by the cold

night air around the windshield. Bathrobe still dragging shut

in the car door. My face, you touch my blasted, scar-tissue face

and you'd swear you were touching chunks of orange peel and

leather.

Driving east, I'm not sure what we're running from. Evie

or the police or Mr. Baxter or the Rhea sisters. Or nobody. Or

the future. Fate. Growing up, getting old. Picking up the

pieces. As if by running we won't have to get on with our

lives. I'm with Brandy right now because I can't imagine

getting away with this without Brandy's help. Because, right

now, I need her.

Not that I really love her. Him. Shane.

Already the word love is sounding pretty thin.

Hermes scarf on her head, Ray-Bans on her head, makeup

on her face, I look at the queen supreme in the pulse-

pulse, then pulse-pulse, then pulse-pulse of oncoming

headlights. What I see when I look at Brandy, this is what

Manus saw when he took me sailing.

Right now, looking at flashes of Brandy beside me in

Manus's car, I know what it is I loved about her. What I love

is myself. Brandy Alexander just looks exactly the way I looked

before the accident. Why wouldn't she? She's my brother,

Shane. Shane and I were almost the same height, born one

year apart. The same coloring. The same features. The same

hair, only Brandy's hair is in better shape.

Add to this her lipo, her silicone, her trachea shave, her brow

shave, her scalp advance, her forehead realignment, her rhino

contouring to smooth her nose, her maxomil-liary operations to

shape her jaw. Add to all that years of electrolysis and a handful of

hormones and antiandrogens every day, and it's no wonder I didn't

recognize her.

Plus the idea my brother's been dead for years. You just don't

expect to meet dead people.

What I love is myself. I was so beautiful.

My love cargo, Manus LockedInTheTrunk, Manus

TryingToKillMe, how can I keep thinking I love Manus? Manus is just

the last man who thought I was beautiful. Who kissed me on the

lips. Who touched me. Manus is just the last man who ever told me

he loved me.

You count down the facts and it's so depressing.

I can only eat baby food.

My best friend screwed my fiance.

My fiance almost stabbed me to death.

I've set fire to a house and been pointing a rifle at innocent

people all night.

My brother I hate has come back from the dead to upstage me.

I'm an invisible monster, and I'm incapable of loving anybody.

You don't know which is worse. Jump to me wetting a washcloth

in the vanity sink. In the undersea bathroom grotto even the

towels and washcloths are aqua and blue, with a scalloped

shell motif along the hems. I put the cold, wet washcloth on

Brandy's forehead and wake her up, so's she can take more

pills. Die in the car instead of this bathroom.

I haul Brandy to her feet and stuff the princess back into

her suit jacket.

We have to walk her around before anybody sees her this

way.

I strap her high heels back on her feet. Brandy, she leans

on me. She leans on the edge of the countertop. She picks up

a handful of Bilax capsules and squints down at them.

"My back is killing me," Brandy says. " Why'd I ever let them

give me such big tits?"

The queen supreme looks ready to swallow a handful of

anything.

I shake my head, No.

Brandy squints at me, "But I need these."

In the Physicians' Desk Reference, I show her Bilax, bowel

evacuant.

"Oh," Brandy turns her hand over to spill the Bilax into

her purse, and some capsules fall but some stick to the sweat

on her palm. "After they give you the tits, your nipples are

cockeyed and way too high," she says, "they use a razor to

shave the nipples off, and they relocate them.”

That's her word.

Relocate.

The Brandy Alexander Nipple Relocation Program.

My dead brother, the late Shane, shakes the last bowel evacuant

off her damp palm. Rrandy says, "I have no sensation in my nipples."

Off the counter, I get my veils and put layer after layer over my

head.

Thank you for not sharing.

We walk up and down the second floor hallways until Rrandy

says she's ready for the stairs. Step at a time, quiet, we go down to

the foyer. Across the foyer, through the double doors closed on the

drawing room, you can hear Mr. Parker's deep voice saying

something soft, over and over.

Brandy leaning on me, we tiptoe a slow three-legged race

across the foyer, from the foot of the stairs to the drawing room

doors. We crack the doors open some inches and poke our faces

through the crack.

Ellis is laid out on the drawing room carpet.

Mr. Parker is sitting on Ellis's chest with a size seventeen wingtip

planted on each side of Ellis's head.

Ellis's hands slap Parker's big ass, claw at the back of the

double-breasted jacket. The single vent in Mr. Parker's jacket is

torn open along the seam up the middle of his back to his collar.

Mr. Parker's hands, the heel of one hand crams a soggy, gnawed

eel-skin wallet between Ellis's capped teeth.

Ellis's face is dark red and shining the way you'd look if you got

the cherry pie in the pie eating contest. A runny finger painting

mess of nosebleed and tears, snot and drool.

Mr. Parker, his hair is fallen over his eyes. His other hand is a fist

around five inches of Ellis's pulled out-tongue.

Ellis's slapping and gagging between Mr. Parker's thick legs.

Broken Ming vases and other collectibles are all around them on

the floor.

Mr. Parker says, "That's right. Just do that. That's nice. Just

relax."

Brandy and me, watching.

Me wanting Ellis destroyed, this is all just too perfect to spoil.

I tug on Brandy. Brandy, honey. We better walk you back

upstairs. Rest you some more. Give you a nice fresh handful of

Benzedrine spansules.

and want to make them happy, but you still want to

make up your own rules.

The surgeons said, you can't just cut off a lump of skin

one place and bandage it on another. You're not grafting

a tree. The blood supply, the veins and capillaries just

wouldn't be hooked up to keep the graft alive. The lump

would just die and fall off.

It's scary, but now when I see somebody blush, my reaction

isn't: oh, how cute. A blush only reminds me how

blood is just under the surface of everything.

Doing dermabrasion, this one plastic surgeon told me, is

about the same as pressing a ripe tomato against a belt

sander. What you're paying for most is the mess.

To relocate a piece of skin, to rebuild a jaw, you have to

flay a long strip of skin from your neck. Cut up from the

base of your neck, but don't sever the skin at the top.

Picture a sort of banner or strip of skin hanging down

loose along your neck but still attached to the bottom of

your face. The skin is still attached to you, so it still gets

blood. This strip of skin is still alive. Take the strip of skin and

roll it into a tube or column. Leave it rolled until it heals

into a long, dangling lump of flesh, hanging from the

bottom of your face. Living tissue. Full of fresh, healthy

blood, flapping and dangling warm against your neck. This

is a pedicle.

Just the healing part, that can take months.

Clatter and tintinnabulation of ringing metal against

metal chimes and gongs in the car around us.

"Sorry, I guess," Brandy says. "There's shit on the floor, got

under the brake pedal when I tried to stop."

Music bright as silver rolls out from under our car seats.

Napkin rings and silver teaspoons rush forward against our

feet. Brandy's got candlesticks between her feet. A silver

platter bright with starlight is slid half out from under the

front of Brandy's seat, looking up between her long legs.

Brandy looks at me. Her chin tucked down, Brandy lowers

her Ray-Bans to the end of her nose and arches her penciled

eyebrows.

I shrug. I get out to liberate my love cargo.

Even with the trunk open, Manus doesn't move. His knees

are against his elbows, his hands clasped in his face, his feet

tucked back under his butt; Manus could be a fetus in army

fatigues. All around him, I hadn't noticed. I've been under a

lot of stress tonight, so forgive me if I didn't notice back at

Evie's house, but all around Manus flash pieces of silverware.

Pirate treasure in the trunk of his Fiat, and other things.

Relics.

A long white candle, there's a candle.

Brandy slams out of her seat and comes to look, too.

"Oh my shit," Brandy says and rolls her eyes. "Oh my shit."

There's an ashtray, no, it's a plaster cast of a little hand, "It's

okay."

There's a little rushing sound, the sound of rain on the roof of a

tent or a closed convertible.

"Oh, God," Brandy steps back. "Oh, sweet Christ!"

Manus blinks and peers at Brandy, then at his lap. One leg of his

army fatigues goes darker, darker, darker to the knee.

"Cute," Brandy says, "but he's just peed his pants."

Jump back to plastic surgery. Jump to the happy day you're

healed. You've had this long strip of skin hanging off your neck for

a couple months, only it's not just one strip. There are probably

more like a half-dozen pedicles because you might as well do a lot

at once so the plastic surgeon has more tissue to work with.

For reconstruction, you'll have these long dangling strips of

skin hanging off the bottom of your face for about two months.

They say that what people notice first about you is your eyes.

You'll give up that hope. You look like some meat byproduct ground

up and pooped out by the Num Num Snack Factory.

A mummy coming apart in the rain.

A broken pinata.

These strips of warm skin flapping around your neck are good,

blood-fed living tissue. The surgeon lifts each strip and attaches the

healed end to your face. This way,

Now Manus peers at me, sits up and scrapes his head on the

open trunk lid. Man, oh, man, you know this hurts, still it

isn't anything tragic until Brandy Alexander chimes in with

her overreaction. "Oh, you poor thing," she says.

Then Manus boo-hoos. Manus Kelley, the last person who

has any right to, is crying.

I hate this.

Jump to the day the skin grafts take, and even then the

tissue will need some support. Even if the grafts heal to

where they look like a crude, lumpy jaw, you'll still need a

jawbone. Without a mandible, the soft mass of tissue, living

and viable as it is, might just reabsorb.

That's the word the plastic surgeons used.

Reabsorb.

Into my face, as if I'm just a sponge made of skin.

Jump to Manus crying and Brandy bent over him, cooing

and petting his sexy hair.

In the trunk, there's a pair of bronze baby shoes, a silver

chafing dish, a turkey picture made of macaroni glued to

construction paper.

"You know," Manus sniffs and wipes the back of his hand

under his nose. "I'm high right now so it's okay if I tell you

this." Manus looks at Brandy bent over him and me crouched

in the dirt. "First," Manus says, "your parents, they give you

your life, but then they try to give you their life."

To make you a jawbone, the surgeons will break off parts

of your shinbones, complete with the attached artery. First

they expose the bone and sculpt it right there on your leg.

Another way is the surgeons will break several other

bones, probably long bones in your legs and arms. Inside these

bones is the soft cancellous bone pulp.

That was the surgeons' word and the word from the

books.

Cancellous.

"My mom," Manus says, "and her new husband—my

mom gets married a lot—they just bought this resort condo

in Bowling River in Florida. People younger than sixty can't

buy property there. That's a law they have."

I'm looking at Brandy, who's still the overreactive mother,

kneeling down, brushing the hair off Manus's forehead. I'm

looking over the cliff edge next to us. Those little blue lights in

all the houses, that's people watching television. Tiffany's light

blue. Valium blue. People in captivity.

First my best friend and now my brother is trying to steal

my fiance.

Jump to Manus sitting in his piss and silver in the trunk of

his red sports car. Potty training flashback. It happens.

Me, I'm crouched in front of him, looking for the bulge of

his wallet.

Manus just stares at Brandy. Probably thinking Brandy's

me, the old me with a face.

Brandy's lost interest. "He doesn't remember. He thinks

I'm his mother," Brandy says. "Sister, maybe, but mother?"

So deja vu. Try brother.

We need a place to stay, and Manus must have a new

place. Not thp ???

"I went to visit them at Christmas, last year," Manus says. "My

mom, their condo is right on the eighth green, and they love it. It's

like the whole age standard in Bowling River is fucked. My mom

and stepdad are just turned sixty, so they're just youngsters. Me, all

these oldsters are scoping me out like an odds-on car burglary."

Brandy licks her lips.

"According to the Bowling River age standard," Manus says, "I

haven't been born yet."

You have to break out large enough slivers of this soft, bloody

bone pulp. The cancellous stuff. Then you have to insert these

shards and slivers of bone into the soft mass of tissue you've

grafted onto your face.

Really, you don't do this, the surgeons do it all while you're

asleep.

If the slivers are close enough together, they'll form fibroblast

cells to bond with each other. Again, a word from the books.

Fibroblast.

Again, this takes months.

"My mom and her husband," Manus says, sitting in the open

trunk of his Fiat Spider on top of Rocky Butte, "for Christmas, their

biggest present to me is this box all wrapped up. It's the size of a

high-end stereo system or a wide-screen television. This is what

I'm hoping. I mean, it could've been anything else, and I

would've liked it more."

Manus slides one foot down to the ground, then the

other. On his feet, Manus turns back to the Fiat full of silver.

"No," Manus says, "they give me this shit."

Manus in his commando boots and army fatigues takes a

big fat-belly silver teapot out of the trunk and looks at himself

reflected fat in the convex side. "The whole box," Manus says,

"is full of all this shit and heirlooms that nobody else wants."

Just like me pitching Evie's crystal cigarette box against

the fireplace, Manus hauls off and fast pitches the teapot out

into the darkness. Over the cliff, out over the darkness and

the lights of suburbia, the teapot flies so far that you can't

hear it land.

Not turning around, Manus reaches back and grabs

another something. A silver candlestick. "This is my legacy,"

Manus says. Pitched overhand into the darkness, the

candlestick turns end over end, silent the way you imagine

satellites fly.

"You know," Manus pitches a glittering handful of

napkin rings, "how your parents are sort of like God. Sure,

you love them and want to know they're still around, but

you never really see them unless they want something."

The silver chafing dish flies up, up, up, to the stars and then

falls down to land somewhere among the blue TV lights.

And after the shards of bone have grown together to give

you a new jawbone inside the lump of grafted skin, then the

surgeon can try to shape this into something you can talk

with and eat with and keep slathered in make-up.

This is years of pain later.

Years of living in the hope that what you'll get will be

better than what you have. Years of looking and feeling

worse in the hope that you might look better.

Manus grabs the candle, the white candle from the trunk.

"My mom," Manus says, "her number two Christmas

present to me was a box full of all the stuff from when I was

a kid that she saved." Manus says, "Check it out," and holds up

the candle, "my baptism candle."

Off into the darkness, Manus pitches the candle.

The bronze baby shoes go next.

Wrapped in a christening gown.

Then a scattering handful of baby teeth.

"Fuck," Manus says, "the damn tooth fairy."

A lock of blond hair inside a locket on a chain, the chain

swinging and let go bola-style from Manus's hand, disappears

into the dark.

"She said she was giving me this stuff because she just didn't have

any room for it," Manus says. "It's not that she didn't want it."

The plaster print of the second-grade hand goes end over

end, off into the darkness.

"Well, Mom, if it isn't good enough for you," Manus says,

"I don't want to carry this shit around, either."

Jump to all the times when Brandy Alexander gets on me

about plastic surgery, then I think of pedicles. Reabsorb-tion.

Fibroblast cells. Cancellous bone. Years of pain and hope, and

how can I not laugh.

Laughter is the only sound left I can make that people will

understand.

Brandy, the well-meaning queen supreme with her tits

siliconed to the point she can't stand straight, she says: Just

look to see what's out there.

How can I stop laughing.

I mean it, Shane, I don't need the attention that bad.

I'll just keep wearing my veils.

If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

Jump to the silver punch ladle flying off to nowhere.

Jump to each teaspoon, gone.

Jump to all the grade school report cards and class pictures

sailed off.

Manus crumbles a thick piece of paper.

His birth certificate. And chucks it out of existence. Then Manus

stands rocking heel-toe, heel-toe, hugging himself.

Brandy is looking at me to say something. In the dirt, with my

finger I write:

manus where do you live these days?

Little cold touches land on my hair and peachy-pink shoulders.

It's raining.

Brandy says, "Listen, I don't want to know who you are, but if you

could be anybody, who would you be?"

"I'm not getting old, that's for sure" Manus says, shaking his

head. "No way." Arms crossed, he rocks heel-toe, heel-toe. Manus

tucks his chin to his chest and rocks, looking down at all the broken

bottles.

It's raining harder. You can't smell my smoky ostrich feathers or

Brandy's L'Air du Temps.

"Then you're Mr. Denver Omelet," Brandy says. "Denver

Omelet, meet Daisy St. Patience." Brandy's ring-beaded hand opens

to full flower and lays itself across her forty-six inches of siliconed

glory. "These," she says, "this is Brandy Alexander.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Jump to this one time, nowhere special, just Brandy and

me in the speech therapist office when Brandy catches me with

my hands up under my veil, touching the seashells and ivory of my

exposed molars, stroking the embossed leather of my scar tissue,

dry and polished from my breath going back and forth across it.

I'm touching the saliva where it dries sticky and raw down the sides

of my neck, and Brandy says not to watch myself too close.

"Honey," she says, "times like this, it helps to think of yourself

as a sofa or a newspaper, something made by a lot of other people

but not made to last forever."

The open edge of my throat feels starched and plastic, ribbed-

knitted and stiff with sizing and interfacing. It's the same feel as

the top edge of a strapless dress or maillot, held up with wire

or plastic stays sewn inside. Hard but warm the way pink

looks. Bony but covered in soft, touchable skin.

This kind of acute traumatic mandibulectomy without

reconstruction, before decannulation of the tracheostomy

tube can lead to sleep apnea, the doctors said. This was them

talking to each other during morning rounds.

And people find me hard to understand.

What the doctors told me was unless they rebuilt me

some kind of jaw, at least some kind of flap, they said, I could

die any time I fell asleep. I could just stop breathing and not

wake up. A quick, painless death.

On my pad with my pen, I wrote:

don't tease.

Us in the speech therapist office, Brandy says, "It helps to

know you're not any more responsible for how you look than

a car is," Brandy says. "You're a product just as much. A

product of a product of a product. The people who design

cars, they're products. Your parents are products. Their parents

were products. Your teachers, products. The minister in your

church, another product," Brandy says.

Sometimes your best way to deal with shit, she says, is to

not hold yourself as such a precious little prize.

"My point being," Brandy says, "is you can't escape the

world, and you're not responsible for how you look, if you look

beauticious or butt ugly. You're not responsible for how you feel or

what you say or how you act or anything you do. It's all out of your

hands," Brandy says.

The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's

recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a

programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar

bill.

"There isn't any Teal you in you," she says. "Even your physical

body, all your cells will be replaced within eight years."

Skin, bones, blood, and organs transplant from person to

person. Even what's inside you already, the colonies of microbes and

bugs that eat your food for you, without them you'd die. Nothing

of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited.

"Relax," Brandy says, "Whatever you're thinking, a million

other folks are thinking. Whatever you do, they're doing, and none

of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort."

Up under my veil, I finger the wet poking stub of a tongue

from some vandalized product. The doctors suggested using part of

my small intestine to make my throat longer. They suggested carving

the shinbones, the fibulas of this human product I am, shaping the

bones and grafting them to build me, build the product, a new

jawbone.

On my pad, I wrote:

the leg-bone connected to the head-bone?

The doctors didn't get it.

Now hear the word of the Lord.

"You're a product of our language," Brandy says, "arid how our

laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule

about you has already been thought out by some million people

before you," she says. "Anything you can do is boring and old and

perfectly okay. You're safe because you're so trapped inside your

culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive

of it. You can't imagine any way to escape. There's no way you can

get out," Brandy says.

"The world," Brandy says, "is your cradle and your trap."

This is after I backslid. I wrote to my hooker at the agency and

asked about my chances of getting hand or foot work. Modeling

watches and shoes. My hooker had sent me some flowers in the

hospital early on. Maybe I could pick up assignments as a leg

model. How much Evie had blabbed to them, I didn't know.

To be a hand model, he wrote back, you have to wear a size

seven glove and a size five ring. A foot model must have perfect

toenails and wear a size six shoe. A leg model can't play any sports.

She can't have any visible veins. Unless your fingers and toes

still look good printed in a magazine at three times their

normal size, or billboarded at two hundred times their size,

he wrote, don't count on body part work.

My hand's an eight. My foot, a seven.

Brandy says, "And if you can find any way out of our culture,

then that's a trap, too. Just wanting to get out of the

trap reinforces the trap."

The books on plastic surgery, the pamphlets and

brochures all promised to help me live a more normal, happy

life; but less and less, this looked like what I'd want. What I

wanted looked more and more like what I'd always been

trained to want. What everybody wants.

Give me attention.

Flash.

Give me beauty.

Flash.

Give me peace and happiness, a loving relationship, and a

perfect home.

Flash.

Brandy says, "The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't

be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only

stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only

make it stronger.”

She says, "Don't do what you want." She says, "Do what you

don't want. Do what you're trained not to want."

It's the opposite of following your bliss.

Brandy tells me, "Do the things that scare you the most.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

In Seattle, I've been watching Brandy nap in our undersea

grotto for more than one hundred and sixty years. Me, I'm

sitting here with a glossy pile of brochures from surgeons

showing sexual reassignment surgeries. Transitional

transgender operations. Sex changes.

The color pictures show pretty much the same shot of

different-quality vaginas. Camera shots focused straight into

the dark vaginal introitus. Fingers with red nail polish cupped

against each thigh to spread the labia. The urethral meatus

soft and pink. The pubic hair clipped down to stubble on

some. The vaginal depth given as six inches, eight inches, two

inches. Unresected corpus spon-giosum mounding around the

urethral opening on some.

The clitoris hooded, the frenulum of the clitoris, the tiny folds

of skin under the hood that join the clitoris to the labia.

Bad, cheap vaginas with hair-growing scrotal skin used inside,

still growing hair, choked with hair.

Picture perfect, state-of-the-art vaginas lengthened using

sections of colon, self-cleaning and lubricated with its own mucosa.

Sensate clitorises made by cropping and rerouting bits of the glans

penis. The Cadillac of vagino-plasty. Some of these Cadillacs turn out

so successful the flood of colon mucosa means wearing a maxi-pad

every day.

Some are old-style vaginas where you had to stretch and dilate

them every day with a plastic mold. All these brochures are

souvenirs of Brandy's near future.

After we saw Mr. Parker sitting on Ellis, I helped the drug-

induced dead body Brandy might as well be back upstairs and took

her out of her clothes again. She coughed them back up when I

tried to slip any more Darvons down her throat, so I settled her

back on the bathroom floor, and when I folded her suit jacket over

my arm there was something cardboard tucked in the inside pocket.

The Miss Rona book. Tucked in the book is a souvenir of my own

future.

Kicked back on the big ceramic snail shell, I read: Hove Seth

Thomas so much I have to destroy him. I over-compensate by

worshiping the queen supreme. Seth will never love me. No one will

ever love me ever again.

How embarrassing.

Give me needy emotional whining bullshit.

Flash.

Give me self-absorbed egocentric twaddle.

Christ.

Fuck me. I'm so tired of being me. Me beautiful. Me ugly.

Blonde. Brunette. A million fucking fashion makeovers that

only leave me trapped being me.

Who I was before the accident is just a story now.

Everything before now, before now, before now, is just a story

I carry around. I guess that would apply to anybody in the

world. What I need is a new story about who I am.

What I need to do is fuck up so bad I can't save myself.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

So this is life in the Brandy Alexander Witness Reincarnation

Project.

In Santa Barbara, Manus who was Denver taught us how

to get drugs. The three of us were squeezed into that Fiat

Spider from Portland to Santa Barbara, and Brandy just

wanted to die. All the time, holding both hands pressed on

her lower back, Brandy kept saying, "Stop the car. I got to

stretch. I am spaz-am-ing. We have to stop."

It took us two days to drive from Oregon to California, and

the two states are right next door to each other. Manus

being all the time looking at Brandy, listening to her, in love

with her so obvious I only wanted to kill them in worse and

more painful ways.

In Santa Barbara, we're just into town when Brandy wants to

get out arid walk a little. Trouble is, this is a really good

neighborhood in California. Right up in the hills over Santa Barbara.

You walk around up here, the police or some private security patrol

cruises you and wants to know who you are and see some I.D.,

please.

Still, Brandy, she's spasming again, and the hysterical princess

has one leg over the door, half climbed out of the Spider before

Denver Omelet will even stop. What Brandy wants are the Tylox

capsules she left in Suite 15-G at the Congress Hotel.

"You can't be beautiful," Brandy says about a thousand times,

"until you feel beautiful."

Up here in the hills, we pull up curbside to an OPEN HOUSE

sign. The house looking down on us is a big hacienda, Spanish

enough to make you want to dance the flamenco on a table, swing

on a wrought-iron chandelier, wear a sombrero and a bandoleer.

"Here," Denver says to her. "Get yourselves pretty, and I'll show

you how we can scam some prescription painkillers."

Jump back to the three days we hid out in Denver's apartment

until we could get some cash together. Brandy, she's cooked up some

new plan. Before she goes under the knife she's decided to find her

sister.

The me who wants to dance on her grave.

"A vaginoplasty is pretty much forever," she says. "It can

wait while I figure some things out."

She's decided to find her sister and tell her everything,

about the gonorrhea, about why Shane's not dead, what

happened, everything. Make a clean break of it. Probably

she'd be surprised how much her sister already knows.

I just want to be out of town in case a felony arson arrest

warrant is in the pipeline, so I threaten Denver, if he won't

come with us, I'll run to the police and accuse him. Of arson,

of kidnapping, of attempted murder. To Evie, I mail a letter.

To Brandy, I write:

let's drive around some, see what happens, chill.

This seems a little labor intensive, but we've all got

something to run from. And when I say we, I mean everybody in

the world. So Brandy thinks we're on tour to find her sister,

and Denver's come along by blackmail. My letter to Evie's

sitting in her mailbox at the end of her driveway leading up

to her burned-up ruins of a house. Evie's in Cancun, maybe.

The letter to Evie says:

To Miss Evelyn Cottrell,

Manus says he shot me and you helped him 'cuz of your filthy

relationship. In order for you to stay out of PRISON, please seek

an insurance settlement for the damage to your home and

personal property as soon as possible. Convert this entire

settlement into United

States funds, tens and twenties, and mail them to me

care of General Delivery in Seattle, Washington. I am the

person you are responsible for being without a fiance, your

former best friend, no matter what lies you tell yourself. Send

the money and I will consider the matter dealt with and will

not go to the police and have you arrested and sent to

PRISON, where you will have to fight day and night for your

dignity and life but no doubt lose them both. Yes, and I've

had major reconstructive surgery, so I look even better than

myself, and I have Manus Kelley with me and he still loves me

and says he hates you and will testify against you in court

that you're a bitch. Signed, Me

Jump to above the edge of the Pacific Ocean, parked

curb-side at the Spanish hacienda OPEN HOUSE. Denver tells

Brandy and me how to go upstairs while he keeps the

realtor busy. The master bedroom will have the best view,

that's how to find it. The master bathroom will have the

best drugs.

Sure, Manus used to be a police vice detective, if you

consider wagging your butt around the bushes in

Washington Park wearing a Speedo bikini a size too small

and hoping some lonely sex hound will whip his dick out, if

that's detective work, then, sure, Manus was a detective.

Because beauty is power the way money is power the way

a loaded gun is power. And Manus with his square-jawed,

cheekboned good looks could be a Nazi recruiting poster.

While Manus was still fighting crime, I found him cutting

the crust off a slice of bread one morning. Bread without

crust made me remember being little. This was so sweet, but

I thought he was making me toast. Then Manus goes to in

front of a mirror in the apartment we used to share, wearing

his white Speedo, and he asks, if I were a gay guy would I

want to bang him up the butt? Then he changed to a red

Speedo and asked again. You know, he says, really stuff his

poop chute? Plow the cowboy? It's not a morning I would

want on video.

"What I need," Manus said, "is for my basket to look big,

but my ass to look adolescent." He takes the slice of bread

and stuffs it inside between himself and the crotch of the

Speedo. "Don't worry, this is how underwear models get a

better look," he says. "You get a smooth unoffen-sive bulge

this way." He stands sideways to the mirror and says, "You

think I need another slice?"

His being a detective meant he crunched around in good

weather, in his sandals and his lucky red Speedo, while two

plainclothes men nearby in a parked car waited for

somebody to take the bait. This happened more than you'd

imagine. Manus was a one-man campaign to clean up

Washington Park. He'd never been this successful as a regular

policeman and this way nobody ever shot at him.

It all felt very Bond, James Bond. Very cloak and dagger. Very spy

versus spy. Plus he was getting a great tan. Plus he got to tax

deduct his gym membership and his buying new Speedos.

Jump to the realtor in Santa Barbara shaking my hand and

saying my name, Daisy St. Patience, over and over the way you do

when you want to make a good impression but not looking at me in

my veils. He's looking at Brandy and Denver.

Charmed, I'm sure.

The house is just what you'd expect from the outside. There's a

big scarred mission-style trestle table in the dining room, under a

wrought-iron chandelier you could swing on. Laid across the table

is a silver-embroidered, fringed Spanish shawl.

We represent a television personality who wishes to remain

nameless, Denver tells the realtor. We're an advance team

scouting for a weekend home for this nameless celebrity. Miss

Alexander, she's an expert in product toxicity, you know, the lethal

fumes and secretions given off by homes.

"New carpet," Denver says, "will exude poisonous formaldehyde

for up to two years after it's been laid."

Brandy says, "I know that feeling.”

It got so that when Manus's crotch wasn't leading men to

their doom, Manus was three-piece-suited in court on the

witness stand, saying how the defendant approached him in

some lurid exposed public masturbating way and asked for a

cigarette.

"Like anybody could look at me and think I smoke,"

Manus would say.

You didn't know what vice he objected to more.

After Santa Barbara, we drove to San Francisco and sold the

Fiat Spider. Me, I'm writing on cocktail napkins all the time:

maybe your sister's in the next city, she could be anywhere.

In the Santa Barbara hacienda, Brandy and me found

Benzedrine and Dexedrine and old Quaaludes and Soma and

some Dialose capsules that turned out to be a fecal softener.

And some Solaquin Forte cream that turned out to be a skin

bleach.

In San Francisco, we sold the Fiat and some drugs and

bought a big red Physicians' Desk Reference book so we

wouldn't be stealing worthless fecal softeners and skin

bleaches. In San Francisco, old people are all over selling their

big rich houses full of drugs and hormones. We had Demerol

and Darvocet-Ns. Not the puny little Darvocet-N 50s. Brandy

was feeling beautiful with me trying to O.D. her on big

Darvocet 100-milligram jobbers.

After the Fiat, we rented a big Seville convertible. Just between

us, we were the Zine kids:

Me, I was Comp Zine.

Denver was Thor Zine.

Brandy, Stella Zine.

It was in San Francisco I started Denver on his own secret

hormone therapy to destroy him.

Manus's detective career had started to peter out when his arrest

rate dropped to one per day, then one per week, then zero, then still

zero. The problem was the sun, the tanning, and the fact he was

getting older and he was a known bait, none of the older men he

had already arrested went near him. The younger men just thought

he was too old.

So Manus got bold. More and more his Speedos got smaller,

which wasn't a good look, either. The pressure was on to replace

him with a new model. So now he'd have to start conversations.

Talk. Be funny. Really work at meeting guys. Develop a personality,

and still the younger men, the only ones who didn't run when they

saw him, a younger man would still decline when Manus suggested

they take a walk back into the trees, into the bushes.

Even the most horny young men with their eyes scamming

everybody else would say, "Uh, no thanks."

Or, "I just want to be alone right now."

Or worse, "Back off, you old troll, or I'll call a cop.”

After San Francisco and San Jose and Sacramento, we

went to Reno and Brandy turned Denver Omelet into Chase

Manhattan. We zigzagged everywhere I thought we'd find

enough drugs. Evie's money could wait.

Jump to Las Vegas and Brandy turns Chase Manhattan into

Eberhard Faber. We drive the Seville down the gut of Las

Vegas. All that spasming neon, the red chase lights going one

direction, white chase lights going the other direction. Las

Vegas looks the way you'd imagine heaven must look at night.

We never put the top up on the Seville, had it two weeks,

never put the top up.

Cruising the gut of Las Vegas, Brandy sat on the boot with

her ass up on the trunk lid and her feet on the back seat,

wearing this strapless metallic brocade sheath as pink as the

burning center of a road flare with a bejeweled bodice and a

detachable long silk taffeta cape with balloon sleeves.

With her looking that good, Las Vegas with all its flash and

dazzle was just another Brandy Alexander brand fashion

accessory.

Brandy puts her arms up, wearing these long, pink opera

gloves, and just howls. She just looks and feels so good at that

moment. And the detachable long silk taffeta cape with

balloon sleeves, it detaches.

And sails off into Las Vegas traffic.

"Go around the block," Brandy screams. "That cape has to go

back to Bullock's in the morning."

After Manus's detective career started downhill, we'd have to

work out in the gym every day, twice on some days. Aerobics,

tanning, nutrition, every station of the cross. He was a

bodybuilder, if what that means is you drink your meal

replacement shakes right out of the blender six times a day over

the kitchen sink. Then Manus would get swimwear through the

mail you couldn't buy in this country, little pouches on strings and

microfilament technology he'd put on the moment we got home

from the gym, then follow me around asking, did I think his butt

looked too flat?

If I was a gay guy, did I think he needed to trim back his pubic

hair? Me being a gay guy, would I think he looked too desperate?

Too aloof? Was his chest big enough? Too big, maybe?

"I'd hate for guys to think I'm just a big dumb cow is all,"

Manus would say.

Did he look, you know, too gay? Gay guys only wanted guys who

acted straight.

"I don't want guys to see me as a big passive bottom," Manus

would say. "It's not like I'd just flop there and let just any guy bone

me."

Manus would leave a ring of shaved hairs and bronzer scum

around the bathtub and expect me to scrub.

Always in the background was the idea of going back to

an assignment where people shot at you, criminals with

nothing to lose if you got killed.

And maybe Manus could bust some old tourist who found

the cruisy part of Washington Park by accident, but most days

the precinct commander was on him to start training a

younger replacement.

Most days, Manus would untangle a silver metallic tiger

stripe string bikini out of the knotted mess in his underwear

drawer. He'd strain his ass into this little A-cup nothing and

look at himself in the mirror sideways, frontways, backwards,

then tear it off and leave the stretched, dead little animal

print on the bed for me to find. This would go on through

zebra stripes, tiger stripes, leopard spots, then cheetah,

panther, puma, ocelot, until he ran out of time.

"These are my lucky lifeguard 'kinis," he'd tell me. "Be

honest."

And this is what I kept telling myself was love.

Be honest? I wouldn't know where to start. I was so out of

practice.

After Las Vegas, we rented one of those family vans.

Eberhard Faber became Hewlett Packard. Brandy wore a long,

white cotton pique dress with open strappy sides and a high

slit up the skirt that was totally inappropriate for the entire

state of Utah. We stopped and tasted the Great Salt Lake.

This just seemed like the thing to do.

I was always writing in the sand, writing in the dust on the

car:

maybe your sister is in the next town.

Writing: here, take a few more Vicodins.

It was after Manus couldn't get guys to approach him for

sex that he started into buying man-on-man sex magazines

and going out to gay clubs.

"Research," he'd say.

"You can come with," he'd tell me, "but don't stand too

close, I don't want to send out the wrong signal."

After Utah, Brandy turned Hewlett Packard into Harper

Collins in Butte. There in Montana, we rented a Ford Probe

and Harper drove with me squashed in the back seat, and

every once in a while Harper would say, "We're going one

hundred and ten miles an hour."

Brandy and me, we'd shrug.

Speeding didn't seem like anything in a place as big as

Montana.

maybe your sister's not even in the united states, I

wrote in lipstick on a bathroom mirror in a motel in Great Palls,

So to keep Manus's job, we went out to gay bars, and I sat

alone and told myself that it was different for men, the

good looks thing was. Manus flirted and danced and sent

drinks down the bar to whoever looked like a challenge.

Manus would slip onto the bar stool next to mine and

whisper out the side of his mouth.

"I can't believe he's with that guy," he'd say.

Manus would nod just enough for me to figure out

which guy.

"Last week, he wouldn't give me the time of day,"

Manus would rant under his breath. "I wasn't good

enough, and that trashy, bottle-blonde piece of garbage is

supposed to be better?"

Manus would hunch over his drink and say, "Guys are so

fucked up."

And I'd be, like, no duh.

And I told myself it was okay. Any relationship I could be in

would have these rough times.

Jump to Calgary, Alberta, where Brandy ate Nebalino

suppositories wrapped in gold foil because she thought they

were Almond Roca. She got so ripped, she turned Harper

Collins into Addison Wesley. Most of Calgary, Brandy wore a

white, quilted ski jacket with a faux fur collar and a white

bikini bottom by Donna Karan. The look was fun and

spirited and we felt light and popular.

Evenings called for a black and white striped floor-length

coat dress that Brandy could never keep buttoned up, with

black wool hot pants on underneath. Addison Wesley turned

into Nash Rambler, and we rented another Cadillac.

Jump to Edmonton, Alberta, Nash Rambler turned into Alfa

Romeo. Brandy wore these crinoline shorty-short square

dance petticoats over black tights tucked into cowboy boots.

Brandy wore this push-up bustier made of leather with local

cattle brands burned all over it.

In a nice hotel bar in Edmonton, Brandy says, "I hate it

when you can see the seam in your martini glass. I mean, I

can feel the mold line. It's so cheap."

Guys all over her. Like spotlights, I remember that kind

of attention. That whole country, Brandy never had to buy

her own drinks, not once.

Jump to Manus losing his assignment as an independent

special contract vice operative to the detective division of the

Metropolitan police department. My point is, he never really

got over it.

He was running out of money. It's not like there was a lot

in the bank to begin with. Then the birds ate my face.

What I didn't know is, there was Evie Cottrell living alone

in her big lonesome house with all her Texas land and oil

money, saying, hey, she had some work that needed doing.

And Manus with his driving need to prove he can still pee on

every tree. That mirror-mirror kind of power. The rest you

already know.

Jump to us on the road, after the hospital, after the Rhea

sisters, and I keep slipping the hormones, the Provera and

Climara and Premarin, into what he ate and drank. Whiskey

and estradiol. Vodka and ethinyl estradiol. It was so easy it was

scary. He was all the time making big cow eyes at Brandy.

We were all running from something. Vaginoplasty.

Aging. The future.

Jump to Los Angeles.

Jump to Spokane.

Jump to Boise and San Diego and Phoenix.

Jump to Vancouver, British Columbia, where we were

Italian expatriates speaking English as a second language until

there wasn't a native tongue among us.

"You have two of the breasts of a young woman," Alfa

Romeo told a realtor I can't remember in which house.

From Vancouver, we reentered the United States as

Brandy, Seth, and Bubba-Joan via the Princess Princess's very

professional mouth. All the way to Seattle, Brandy read to us how a

little Jewish girl with a mysterious muscle disease turned herself

into Rona Barrett.

All of us looking at big rich houses, picking up drugs, renting

cars, buying clothes, and taking clothes back.

"Tell us a gross personal story," Brandy says en route to Seattle.

Brandy all the time being the boss of me. Being this close to death

herself.

Rip yourself open.

Tell me my life story before I die.

Sew yourself shut.

CHAPTER TWENTY -FOUR

Jump way back to a fashion shoot at this slaughterhouse where

whole pigs without their insides hang as thick as fringe from a

moving chain. Evie and me wear Bibo Kelley stainless steel party

dresses while the chain zips by behind us at about a hundred pigs an

hour, and Evie says, "After your brother was mutilated, then

what?"

The photographer looks at his light meter and says, "Nope. No

way."

The art director says, "Girls, we're getting too much glare off

the carcasses."

Each pig goes by big as a hollow tree, all red and shining inside

and covered in this really nice pigskin on the outside just after

someone's singed the hair off with a blowtorch. This makes me

feel all stubbly by comparison, and I have to count back to my

last waxing.

And Evie goes, "Your brother?"

And I'm, like, counting Friday, Thursday, Wednesday,

Tuesday ...

"How did he go from being mutilated to being dead?" Evie

says.

These pigs keep going by too fast for the art director to

powder down their shine. You have to wonder how pigs keep

their skin so nice. If now farmers use sunblock or what.

Probably, I figure it's been a month since I was as smooth as

they are. The way some salons use their new lasers, even with

the cooling gel, they might as well use a blowtorch.

"Space girl," Evie says to me. "Phone home."

The whole pig place is refrigerated too much to wear a

stainless steel dress around. Guys in white A-line coats and

boots with low heels get to spray super-heated steam in

where the pigs insides were, and I'm ready to trade them

jobs. I'm ready to trade jobs with the pigs, even. To Evie, I say,

"The police wouldn't buy the hairspray story. They were sure

my father had raged on Shane's face. Or my mom had put the

hairspray can in the trash. They called it 'neglect.'"

The photographer says, "What if we regroup and backlight

the carcasses?"

"Too much strobe effect as they go past," the art director

says.

Evie says, "Why'd the police think that?"

"Beats me," I say. "Somebody just kept making anonymous

calls to them."

The photographer says, "Can we stop the chain?"

The art director says, "Not unless we can stop people from

eating meat."

We're still hours away from taking a real break, and Evie

says, "Somebody lied to the police?"

The pig guys are checking us out, and some are pretty

cute. They laugh and slide their hands up and down fast on

their shiny black steamhoses. Curling their tongues at us.

Flirting.

"Then Shane ran away," I tell Evie. "Simple as that. A

couple years ago, my folks got a call he was dead."

We step back as close as we can to the pigs going by, still

warm. The floor seems to be really greasy, and Evie starts

telling me about an idea she has for a remake of Cinderella,

only instead of the little birds and animals making her a

dress, they do cosmetic surgery. Bluebirds give her a facelift.

Squirrels give her implants. Snakes, liposuction. Plus,

Cinderella starts out as a lonely little boy.

"As much attention as he got," I tell Evie, "I'd bet my

brother put that hairspray can in the fire himself.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Jump to one time, nowhere special, just Brandy and me

shopping along a main street of stores in some Idaho town

with a Sears outlet, a diner, a day-old bakery store, and a

realtor's office with our own Mr. White Westing-house gone

inside to hustle some realtor. We go into a secondhand dress

shop. This is next door to the day-old bargain bakery, and

Brandy says how her father used to pull this stunt with pigs

just before he took them to market. She says how he used to

feed them expired desserts he bought by the truckload from

this kind of bakery outlet. Sunlight comes down on us

through clean air. Bears and mountains are within walking

distance.

Brandy looks at me over a rack of secondhand dresses.

"You know about that kind of scam? The one with the pigs,

sweetness?" she says.

He used to stovepipe potatoes, her father. You hold the burlap

bag open and stand a length of stovepipe inside. All around the

pipe, you put big potatoes from this year's crop. Inside the pipe you

put last year's soft, bruised, cut, and rotting potatoes so folks can't

see them from through the burlap. You pull the stovepipe out, and

you stitch the bag shut tight so nothing inside can shift. You sell

them roadside with your kids helping, and even at a cheap price,

you're making money.

We had a Ford that day in Idaho. It was brown inside and out.

Brandy pushes the hangers apart, checking out every dress on

the rack and says, "You ever hear of anything in your whole life so

underhanded?"

Jump to Brandy and me in a secondhand store on that same

main street, behind a curtain, crowded together in a fitting room

the size of a phone booth. Most of the crowding is a ball gown

Brandy needs me to help get her into, a real Grace Kelly of a dress

with Charles James written all over it. Baffles and plenums and all

that high-stressed skeletoning engineered inside a skin of shot pink

organza or ice blue velveteen.

These most incredible dresses, Brandy tells me, the

constructed ball gowns, the engineered evening dresses with

their hoops and strapless bodices, their stand-up horseshoe

collars and flaring shoulders, nipped waists, their stand-away

peplums and bones, they never last very long. The tension, the

push and pull of satin and crepe de Chine trying to control

the wire and boning inside, the battle of fabric against

metal, this tension will shred them. As the outsides age, the

fabric, the part you can see, as it gets weak, the insides start to

poke and tear their way out.

Princess Princess, she says, "It will take at least three

Darvons to get me into this dress."

She opens her hand, and I shake out the prescription.

Her father, Brandy says, he used to grind his beef with

crushed ice to force it full of water before he sold it. He'd

grind beef with what's called bull meal to force it full of

cereal.

"He wasn't a bad person," she says. "Not outside of following

the rules a little too much."

Not the rules about being fair and honest, she says, so

much as the rules about protecting your family from poverty.

And disease.

Some nights, Brandy says, her father used to creep into her

room while she was asleep.

I don't want to hear this. Brandy's diet of Provera and

Darvon has side-effected her with this kind of emotional

bulimia where she can't keep down any nasty secret. I

smooth my veils over my ears. Thank you for not sharing.

"My father used to sit on my bed some nights," she says,

"and wake me up."

Our father.

The ball gown is resurrected glorious on Brandy's shoulders,

brought back to life, larger than life and fairy tale

impossible to wear any place in the past fifty years. A zipper

thick as my spine goes up the side to just under Brandy's

arm. The panels of the bodice pinch Brandy off at her waist

and explode her out the top, her breasts, her bare arms and

long neck. The skirt is layered pale yellow silk faille and tulle.

It's so much gold embroidery and seed pearls would make any

bit of jewelry too much.

"It's a palace of a dress," Brandy says, "but even with the

drugs, it hurts."

The broke ends of the wire stays poke out around the

neck, poke in at the waist. Panels of plastic whalebone, their

corners and sharp edges jab and cut. The silk is hot, the tulle,

rough. Just her breathing in and out makes the clashing steel

and celluloid tucked inside, hidden, just Brandy being alive

makes it bite and chew at the fabric and her skin.

Jump to at night, Brandy's father, he used to say, hurry.

Get dressed. Wake your sister.

Me.

Get your coats on and get in the back of the truck, he'd say.

And we would, late after the TV stations had done the national

anthem and gone off the air. Concluded their broadcast day. Nothing

was on the road except us, our folks in the cab of the pickup and us

two in the back, Brandy and his sister, curled on our sides against the

corrugated floor of the truck bed, the squeak of the leaf springs, the

hum of the driveline coming right into us. The potholes bounce our

pumpkin heads hard on the floor of the bed. Our hands clamp tight

over our faces to keep from breathing the sawdust and dried manure

blowing around leftover. Our eyes shut tight to keep out the same. We

were going we didn't know where, but tried to figure out. A right

turn, then a left turn, then a long straight stretch going we didn't

know how fast, then another right turn would roll us over on our left

sides. We didn't know how long. You couldn't sleep.

Wearing the dress to shreds and holding very still, Brandy says, "You

know, I've been on my own pretty much since I was sixteen."

With every breath, even her taking shallow Darvon overdosed

little gulps of air, Brandy winces. She says, "There was an accident

when I was fifteen, and at the hospital, the police accused my

father of abusing me. It just went on and on. I couldn't tell them

anything because there was nothing to tell."

She inhales and winces, "The interviews, the counseling, the

intervention therapy, it just went on and on."

The pickup truck slowed and bounced off the edge of the

blacktop, onto gravel or washboard dirt, and the whole truck

bounced and rattled a while farther, then stopped.

This is how poor we were.

Still in the truck bed, you took your hands off your face, and

we'd be stopped. The dust and manure would settle. Brandy's

father would drop the tailgate of the truck, and you'd be on a

dirt road alongside a looming broken wall of boxcars laying this

way and that off their tracks. Boxcars would be broken open.

Flatcars would be rolled over with their loads of logs or two-by-fours

scattered. Tanker cars buckled and leaking. Hoppers full of coal or

wood chips would be heaved over and dumped out in black or gold

piles. The fierce smell of ammonia. The good smell of cedar. The

sun would be just under the horizon with light coming around to

us from underneath the world.

There'd be lumber to load on the truck. Cases of instant

butterscotch pudding. Cases of typing paper, toilet paper, double-A

batteries, toothpaste, canned peaches, books. Crushed diamonds

of safety glass'd be everywhere around car carriers tipped sideways

with the brand-new cars inside wrecked, with their clean, black tires

in the air.

Brandy lifts the gown's neckline and peeks inside at her

Estraderm patch on one breast. She peels the backing off another

patch and pastes it on her other breast, then takes another stabbing

breath and winces.

"The whole mess died down after about three months, the

whole child abuse investigation," Brandy says. "Then one basketball

practice, I'm getting out of the gym and a man comes up. He's with

the police, he says, and this is a confidential follow-up interview."

Brandy inhales, winces. She lifts the neckline again and takes

out a Methadone disket from between her breasts, bites off half

of it and drops the rest back inside.

The fitting room is hot and small with the two of us and that

huge civil engineering project of a dress packed together.

Brandy says, "Darvon." She says, "Quick, please." And she snaps

her fingers.

I fish out another red and pink capsule, and she gulps it dry.

"This guy," Brandy says, "he asks me to get in his car, to talk, just

to talk, and he asks if I have anything I'd like to say that maybe I

was too afraid to tell any of the child service people.”

The dress is coming apart, the silk opening at every seam,

the tulle busting out, and Brandy says, "This guy, this

detective, I tell him, 'No,' and he says, 'Good.' He says he likes a

kid who can keep a secret."

At a train wreck you could pick up pencils two thousand at a

time. Light bulbs still perfect and not rattling inside. Key blanks

by the hundreds. The pickup truck could only hold so much,

and by then other trucks would be arrived with people

shoveling grain into car backseats and people watching us

with our piles of too much as we decided what we needed

more, the ten thousand shoelaces or one thousand jars of

celery salt. The five hundred fan belts all one size we didn't

need but could re-sell, or the double-A batteries. The case of

shortening we couldn't use up before it went rancid or the

three hundred cans of hairspray

"The police guy," Brandy says, and every wire is rising out

of her tight yellow silk, "he puts his hand on me, right up

the leg of my shorts, and he says we don't have to re-open

the case. We don't have to cause my family any more

problems." Brandy says, "This detective says the police want

to arrest my father for suspicion. He can stop them, he says. He

says, it's all up to me."

Brandy inhales and the dress shreds, she breathes and

every breath makes her naked in more places.

"What did I know," she says. "I was fifteen. I didn't

know anything."

In a hundred torn holes, bare skin shows through.

At the train wreck, my father said security would be

here any minute.

How I heard this was: we'd be rich. We'd be secure. But

what he really meant was we'd have to hurry or we'd get

caught and lose it all.

Of course I remember.

"The police guy," Brandy says, "he was young, twenty-

one or twenty-two. He wasn't some dirty old man. It wasn't

horrible," she says, "but it wasn't love."

With more of the dress torn, the skeleton springs apart

in different places.

"Mostly," Brandy says, "it made me confused for a long

time."

That's my growing up, those kind of train wrecks. Our

only dessert from the time I was six to the time I was nine

was butterscotch pudding. It turns out I loathe butterscotch.

Even the color. Especially the color. And the taste.

And smell.

How I met Manus was when I was eighteen a great-

looking guy came to the door of my parents' house and

asked, did we ever hear back from my brother after he ran

away?

The guy was a little older, but not out of the ballpark.

Twenty-five, tops. He gave me a card that said Manus Kelley.

Independent Special Contract Vice Operative. The only thing

else I noticed was he didn't wear a wedding ring. He said,

"You know, you look a lot like your brother." He had a

glorious smile and said, "What's your name?"

"Before we go back to the car," Brandy says, "I have to tell

you something about your friend. Mr. White Westing-

house."

Formerly Mr. Chase Manhattan, formerly Nash Rambler,

formerly Denver Omelet, formerly independent special

contract vice operative Manus Kelley. I do the homework:

Manus is thirty years old. Brandy's twenty-four. When

Brandy was sixteen I was fifteen. When Brandy was sixteen,

maybe Manus was already part of our lives.

I don't want to hear this.

The most beautiful ancient perfect dress is gone. The silk

and tulle have slipped, dropped, slumped to the fitting room

floor, and the wire and boning is broken and sprung away,

leaving just some red marks already fading on Brandy's skin

with Brandy left standing way too close to me in just her

underwear.

"It's funny," Brandy says, "but this isn't the first time I've

destroyed somebody's beautiful dress," and a big Aubergine

Dreams eye winks at me. Her breath and skin feel warm, she's

that close.

"The night I ran away from home," Brandy says, "I

burned almost every stitch of clothing my family had hanging

on the clothesline."

Brandy knows about me, or she doesn't know. She's confessing

her heart, or she's teasing me. If she knows, she could

be lying to me about Manus. If she doesn't know, then the

man I love is a freaky creepy sexual predator.

Either Manus or Brandy is being a sleazy liar to me, me,

the paragon of virtue and truth here. Manus or Brandy, I

don't know who to hate.

Me and Manus or Me and Brandy. It wasn't horrible, but it

wasn't love.

CHAPTER TWENTY -SIX

I here had to be some better way to kill Brandy. To set me

free. Some quick permanent closure. Some kind of crossfire I

could walk away from. Evie hates me by now. Brandy looks

just like I used to. Manus is still so in love with Brandy he'd

follow her anywhere, even if he's not sure why. All I'd have to

do is get Brandy cross-haired in front of Evie's rifle.

Bathroom talk.

Brandy's suit jacket with its sanitary little waist and mod

three-quarter sleeves is still folded on the aquamarine

countertop beside the big clamshell sink. I pick up the jacket,

and my souvenir from the future falls out. It's a postcard of

clean, sun-bleached 1962 skies and an opening day Space Needle.

You could look out the bathroom's porthole windows and see

what's become of the future. Overrun with Goths wearing sandals

and soaking lentils at home, the future I wanted is gone. The

future I was promised. Everything I expected. The way everything

was supposed to turn out. Happiness and peace and love and

comfort.

When did the future, Ellis once wrote on the back of a

postcard, switch from being a promise to a threat?

I tuck the postcard between the vaginoplasty brochures and the

labiaplasty handouts stuck between the pages of the Miss Rona

book. On the cover is a satellite photo of Hurricane Blonde just off

the West Coast of her face. The blonde is crowded with pearls and

what could be diamonds sparkle here and there.

She looks very happy. I put the book back in the inside pocket of

Brandy's jacket. I pick up the cosmetics and drugs scattered across

the countertops and I put them away. Sun comes through the

porthole windows at a low, low angle, and the post office will be

closing soon. There's still Evie's insurance money to pick up. At least

a half million dollars, I figure. What you can do with all that

money, I don't know, but I'm sure I'll find out.

Brandy's lapsed into major hair emergency status so I shake her.

Brandy's Aubergine Dreams eyes flicker, blink, flicker, squint.

Her hair, it's gotten all flat in the back.

Brandy comes up on one elbow. "You know," she says, "I'm

on drugs so it's all right if I tell you this." Brandy looks at me

bent over her, offering a hand up. "I have to tell you,"

Brandy says, "but I do love you." She says, "I can't tell how

this is for you, but I want us to be a family."

My brother wants to marry me.

I give Brandy a hand up. Brandy leans on me, Brandy, she

leans on the edge of the countertop. She says, "This wouldn't

be a sister thing." Brandy says, "I still have some days left in my

Real Life Training."

Stealing drugs, selling drugs, buying clothes, renting

luxury cars, taking clothes back, ordering blender drinks, this

isn't what I'd call Real Life, not by a long shot.

Brandy's ring-beaded hands open to full flower and

spread the fabric of her skirt across her front. "I still have all

my original equipment," she says.

The big hands are still patting and smoothing Brandy's

crotch as she turns sideways to the mirror and looks at her

profile. "It was supposed to come off after a year, but then I

met you," she says. "I had my bags packed in the Congress

Hotel for weeks just hoping you'd come to rescue me."

Brandy turns her other side to the mirror and searches. "I

just loved you so much, I thought maybe it's not too late?"

Brandy spreads pot gloss across her top lip and then her

bottom lip, blots her lips on a tissue, and drops the big

lumbago kiss into the snail shell toilet. Brandy says with her

new lips. "Any idea how to flush this thing?"

Hours I sat on that toilet, and no, I never saw how to

flush it. I step out into the hallway so if Brandy wants to blab

at me she'll have to follow.

Brandy stumbles in the bathroom doorway where the tile

meets the hallway carpet. Her one shoe, the heel is broken.

Her stocking is run where it rubbed the doorframe. She's

grabbed at a towel rack for balance and chipped her nail

polish.

Shining anal queen of perfection, she says, "Fuck."

Princess Princess, she yells after me, "It's not that I really

want to be a woman." She yells, "Wait up!" Brandy yells, "I'm

only doing this because it's just the biggest mistake I can

think to make. It's stupid and destructive, and anybody you

ask will tell you I'm wrong. That's why I have to go through

with it."

Brandy says, "Don't you see? Because we're so trained to do

life the right way. To not make mistakes" Brandy says, "I

figure, the bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll

have to break out and live a real life."

Like Christopher Columbus sailing toward disaster at the

edge of the world.

Like Fleming and his bread mold.

"Our real discoveries come from chaos," Brandy yells, "from

going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish."

Her imperial voice everywhere in the house, she yells, "You

do not walk away from me when I take a minute to explain

myself!"

Her example is a woman who climbs a mountain, there's

no rational reason for climbing that hard, and to some

people it's a stupid folly, a misadventure, a mistake. A

mountain climber, maybe she starves and freezes, exhausted

and in pain for days, and climbs all the way to the top. And

maybe she's changed by that, but all she has to show for it is

her story.

"But me," Brandy says, still in the bathroom doorway, still

looking at her chipped nail polish, "I'm making the same

mistake only so much worse, the pain, the money, the time,

and being dumped by my old friends, and in the end my

whole body is my story."

A sexual reassignment surgery is a miracle for some

people, but if you don't want one, it's the ultimate form of

self-mutilation.

She says, "Not that it's bad being a woman. This might be

wonderful, if I wanted to be a woman. The point is," Brandy

says, "being a woman is the last thing I want. It's just the

biggest mistake I could think to make."

So it's the path to the greatest discovery.

It's because we're so trapped in our culture, in the being of

being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the

same two arms and two legs everybody has. We're so trapped

that any way we could imagine to escape would be just

another part of the trap. Anything we want, we're trained to

want.

"My first idea was to have one arm and one leg amputated,

the left ones, or the right ones," she looks at me and

shrugs, "but no surgeon would agree to help me."

She says, "I considered AIDS, for the experience, but

then everybody had AIDS and it looked so mainstream and

trendy." She says, "That's what the Rhea sisters told my

birth family, I'm pretty sure. Those bitches can be so

possessive."

Brandy pulls a pair of white gloves out of her handbag,

the kind of gloves with a white pearl button on the inside

of each wrist. She works each hand into a glove and does

the button. White is not a good color choice. In white, her

hands look transplanted from a giant cartoon mouse.

"Then I thought, a sex change," she says, "a sexual

reassignment surgery. The Rheas," she says, "they think

they're using me, but really I'm using them for their

money, for their thinking they were in control of me and

this was all their idea."

Brandy lifts her foot to look at the broken heel, and she

sighs. Then she reaches down to take off the other shoe.

"None of this was the Rhea sisters' pushing. It wasn't. It

was just the biggest mistake I could make. The biggest

challenge I could give myself."

Brandy snaps the heel off her one good shoe, leaving

her feet in two ugly flats.

She says, "You have to jump into disaster with both

feet."

She throws the broken heels into the bathroom trash.

"I'm not straight, and I'm not gay," she says. "I'm not

bisexual. I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life

crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find

something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on

the map. A real adventure."

A sphinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined.

Unknowable. Indefinable. Those were all the words Brandy

used to describe me in my veils. Not just a story that goes and

then, and then, and then, and then until you die.

"When I met you," she says, "I envied you. I coveted your

face. I thought that face of yours will take more guts than any

sex change operation. It will give you bigger discoveries. It will

make you stronger than I could ever be."

I start down the stairs. Brandy in her new flats, me in my

total confusion, we get to the foyer, and through the

drawing room doors you can hear Mr. Parker's long, deep voice

belching over and over, "That's right. Just do that."

Brandy and me, we stand outside the doors a moment. We

pick the lint and toilet paper off each other, and I fluff up the

flat back of Brandy's hair. Brandy pulls her pantyhose up her

legs a little and tugs down the front of her jacket.

The postcard and the book tucked inside her jacket, the

dick tucked in her pantyhose, you can't tell either one's there.

We throw open the drawing room double doors and

there's Mr. Parker and Ellis. Mr. Parker's pants are around his

knees, his bare hairy ass is stuck up in the air. The rest of his

bareness is stuck in Ellis's face. Ellis Island, formerly

Independent Special Contract Vice Operative Manus Kelley.

"Oh, yes. Just do that. That's so good."

Ellis's getting an A in job performance, his hands are

cupped around Parker's football scholarship power-clean bare

buns, pulling everything he can swallow into his square-

jawed Nazi poster boy face. Ellis grunting and gagging, making

his comeback from forced retirement.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The man at General Delivery who asked to see my ID pretty

much had to take my word for it. The picture on my driver's license

might as well be Brandy's. This means a lot of writing on scraps of

paper for me to explain how I look now. This whole time I'm in

the post office, I'm looking sideways to see if I'm a cover girl up on

the FBI's most wanted poster board.

Almost half a million dollars is about twenty-five pounds of

ten- and twenty-dollar bills in a box. Plus, inside with the money is

a pink stationery note from Evie saying blah, blah, blah, I will kill

you if I ever see you again. And I couldn't be happier.

Before Brandy can see who it's addressed to, I claw off the label.

One part of being a model is my phone number was unlisted so

I wasn't in any city for Brandy to find. I was nowhere. And now

we're driving back to Evie. To Brandy's fate. The whole way back,

me and Ellis, we're writing postcards from the future and slipping

them out the car windows as we go south on Interstate 5 at a mile

and a half every minute. Three miles closer to Evie and her rifle

every two minutes. Ninety miles closer to fate every hour.

Ellis writes: Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life

trying to correct.

The electric window of the Lincoln Town Car hums down a half

inch, and Ellis drops the card out into the I-5 slipstream.

I write: You spend your entire life becoming God and then you

die.

Ellis writes: When you don't share your problems, you resent

hearing the problems of other people.

I write: All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring.

We must never, ever be boring.

Jump to us reading the real estate section of the newspaper,

looking for big open houses. We always do this in a new town. We

sit at a nice sidewalk cafe and drink cappuccino with chocolate

sprinkles and read the paper, then

Brandy calls all the realtors to find which open houses

have people still living in them. Ellis makes a list of houses to

hit tomorrow.

We check into a nice hotel, and we take a cat nap. After

midnight Brandy wakes me up with a kiss. She and Ellis are

going out to sell the stock we picked up in Seattle. Probably

they're screwing. I don't care.

"And no," Brandy says. "Miss Alexander will not be calling

the Rhea sisters while she's in town. Anymore, she's

determined the only vagina worth having is the kind you buy

yourself."

Ellis is standing in the open doorway to the hotel hallway,

looking like a superhero that I want to crawl in to bed and

save me. Still, since Seattle, he's been my brother. And you

can't be in love with your brother.

Brandy says, "You want the TV remote control?" Brandy

turns on the television, and there's Evie scared and

desperate with her big pumped-up rainbow hair in every

shade of blonde. Evelyn Cottrell, Inc., everybody's favorite

writeoff, is stumbling through the studio audience in her

sequined dress begging folks to eat her meat by-products.

Brandy changes channels.

Brandy changes channels.

Brandy changes channels.

Evie is everywhere after midnight, offering what she's got

on a silver tray. The studio audience ignores her,

watching themselves on the monitor, trapped in the reality loop of

watching themselves watch themselves, trying the way we do every

time we look in a mirror to figure out exactly who that person is.

That loop that never ends. Evie and me, we did this infomercial.

How could I be so dumb? We're so totally trapped in ourselves.

The camera stays on Evie, and what I can almost hear Evie saying

is, Love me.

Love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me,

I'll be anybody you want me to be. Use me. Change me. I can be

thin with big breasts and big hair. Take me apart. Make me into

anything, but just love me.

Jump way back to one time, Evie and me did this fashion shoot

in a junk yard, in a slaughterhouse, in a mortuary. We'd go

anywhere to look good by comparison, and what I realize is mostly

what I hate about Evie is the fact that she's so vain and stupid and

needy. But what I hate most is how she's just like me. What I really

hate is me so I hate pretty much everybody.

Jump to the next day we hit a few houses, a mansion, a couple

palaces, and a chateau full of drugs. Around three o'clock we meet

a realtor in the baronial dining room of a West Hills manor house. All

around us are caterers and florists. The dining room table is spread

and heaping with silver and crystal, tea sets, samovars,

candelabras, stemware. A woman in dowdy scarecrow social

secretary tweeds is unwrapping these gifts of silver and crystal

and making notes in a tiny red book.

A constant stream of arriving flowers eddies around us,

buckets of irises and roses and stock. The manor house is sweet

with the smell of flowers and rich with the smell of little puff

pastries and stuffed mushrooms.

Not our style. Brandy looks at me. Way too many folks

around.

But the realtor's already there, smiling, fn a drawl as flat

and drawn-out as the Texas horizon, the realtor introduces

herself as Mrs. Leonard Cottrell. And she is so happy to meet

us.

This Cottrell woman takes Brandy by the elbow and steers

her around the baronial first floor while I decide to fight or

flight.

Give me terror.

Flash.

Give me panic.

Flash.

This has to be Evie's mother, oh, you know it is. And this

must be Evie's new house. And I'm wondering how it is we

came here. Why today? What are the chances?

The realty Cottrell steers us past the tweedy social secretary

and all the wedding gifts. "This is my daughter's house. But

she spends almost all her days in the furniture department at

Brumbach's, downtown. So far we've gone along with her little

obsessions, but enough's enough, so now we're gonna marry her

off to some jackass."

She leans in close, "It was more difficult than you'd ever

imagine, trying to settle her down. You know, she burned down the

last house we bought her."

Beside the social secretary, there's a stack of gold-engraved

wedding invitations. These are the regrets. Sorry, but we can't

make it.

There seem to be a lot of regrets. Nice invitations, though, gold

engraved, hand-torn edges, a three-fold card with a dried violet

inside. I steal one of the regrets, and I catch up with the realty

Cottrell woman and Brandy and Ellis.

"No," Brandy's saying, "there are too many people around. We

couldn't view the house under these conditions."

"Between you and me," says the realty Cottrell, "The biggest

wedding in the world is worth the cost if we can shove Evie off

onto some poor man."

Brandy says, "We don't want to keep you."

"But, then," the Cottrell woman says, "there's this subgroup of

'men' who like their 'women' the way Evie is now."

Brandy says, "We really must be going."

And Ellis says, "Men who like insane women?"

"Why, it plum broke our hearts the day Evan came to us. Sixteen

years old, and he says 'Mommy, Daddy, I want to be a girl'," says Mrs.

Cottrell.

"But we paid for it," she says. "A tax deduction is a tax

deduction. Evan wanted to be a world-famous fashion model,

he told us. He started calling himself Evie, and I canceled my

subscription to Vogue the next day. I felt it had done enough

damage to my family."

Brandy says, "Well, congratulations," and starts tugging

me toward the front door.

And Ellis says, "Evie was a man? "

Evie was a man. And I just have to sit down. Evie was a

man. And I saw her implant scars. Evie was a man. And I saw

her naked in fitting rooms.

Give me a complete late-stage revision of my adult life.

Flash.

Give me anything in this whole fucking world that is

exactly what it looks like!

Flash!

Evie's mother looks hard at Brandy, "Have you ever done

any modeling?" she says. "You look so much like a friend of

my son's."

"Your daughter," Brandy growls.

And I finger the invitation I stole. The wedding, the

union of Miss Evelyn Cottrell and Mr. Allen Skinner, is

tomorrow. At eleven ante meridiem, according to the gold

engraving. To be followed by a reception at the bride's home.

To be followed by a house fire.

To be followed by a murder.

Dress formal.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

My dress I carry my ass around Evie's wedding in is tighter

than skin tight. It's what you'd call bone tight. It's that knockoff

print of the Shroud of Turin, most of it brown and white,

draped and cut so the shiny red buttons all button through

the stigmata. Then I'm wearing yards and yards of black silk

gloves bunched up on my arms. My heels are nosebleed high. I

wrap Brandy's half mile of black tulle studded with sparkle up

around my scar tissue, over the shining cherry pie where my

face used to be, wrapped tight, until only my eyes are out. It's

a look that's bleak and morbid. The feeling is we've got a

little out of control.

It takes more effort to hate Evie than it used to. My

whole life is moving farther away from any reason to hate her.

It's moving far away from reason itself. It takes a cup of coffee

and a Dexedrine capsule to feel even vaguely pissed about

anything.

Brandy, she wears the knock-off Bob Mackie suit with the

little peplum skirt and the big, I don't know, and the thin,

narrow I couldn't care less. She wears a hat, since it's a

wedding, after all. Got some shoes on her feet made from

the skin of some animal. Accessorized including jewelry, you

know, stones dug out of the earth, polished and cut to reflect

light, set in alloys of gold and copper, atomic weight, melted

and beat with hammers, all of it so labor intensive. Meaning,

all of Brandy Alexander.

Ellis, he wears a double-breasted, whatever, a suit, a single

vent in the back, black. He looks the way you'd imagine

yourself dead in a casket if you're a guy, not a problem for

me, since Ellis has outlived his role in my life.

Ellis's strutting around now that he's proved he can

seduce something in every category. Not that knobbing Mr.

Parker makes him King of Fag Town, but now he's got Evie

under his belt, and maybe enough time's gone by Ellis can go

back on duty, get his old beat back in Washington Park.

So we take the gold-engraved wedding invitation that I

stole, Brandy and Ellis each take a Percodan, and we go to Evie's

wedding reception moment.

Jump to eleven o'clock ante meridiem at the baronial West Hills

manor house of crazy Evie Cottrell, gun-happy Evie, newly united

Mrs. Evelyn Cottrell Skinner, as if I could care at this point. And. This

is oh so dazzling. Evie, she could be the wedding cake, in tier on

tier of sashes and flowers rising around her big hoop skirt, up and

up to her cinched waist, then her big Texas breasts popped out the

top of a strapless bodice. There's so much of her to decorate, the

same as Christmas at a shopping mall. Silk flowers are bunched at

one side of her waist. Silk flowers over both ears anchor a veil

thrown back over her blonde on blonde sprayed-up hair. In that

hoop skirt and those pushed-up Texas grapefruit, the girl walks

around riding her own parade float.

Full of Champagne and Percodan interactions, Brandy is looking

at me.

And I'm amazed I never saw it before, how Evie was a man. A

big blonde, the same as she is here, but with one of those ugly

wrinkled, you know, scrotums.

Ellis is hiding from Evie, trying to scope out if her new husband

as yet another notch in his special contract vice operative resume.

Ellis, how this story looks from his point of view is he's still major

sport bait winning proof he can bust any man after the long fight.

Everybody here thinks the whole story is about them. Definitely that

goes for everybody in the world.

Oh, and this is gone way beyond sorry, Mom. Sorry,

God. At this point, I'm not sorry for anything. Or anybody.

No, really, everybody here's just itching to be cremated.

Jump to upstairs. In the master bedroom, Evie's

trousseau is laid out ready to be packed. I brought my own

matches this time, and I light the hand-torn edge of the

gold-engraved invitation, and I carry the invitation from the

bedspread to the trousseau to the curtains. It's the sweetest

of moments when the fire takes control, and you're no

longer responsible for anything.

I take a big bottle of Chanel Number Five from Evie's

bathroom and a big bottle of Joy and a big bottle of White

Shoulders, and I slosh the smell of a million parade float

flowers all over the bedroom.

The fire, Evie's wedding inferno finds the trail of flowers in

alcohol and chases me out into the hallway. That's what I

love about fire, how it would kill me as quick as anybody

else. How it can't know I'm its mother. It's so beautiful and

powerful and beyond feeling anything for anybody, that's

what I love about fire.

You can't stop any of this. You can't control. The fire in

Evie's clothes is just more and more every second, and now

the plot moves along without you pushing.

And I descend. Step-pause-step. The invisible showgirl. For

once, what's happening is what I want. Even better than I

expected. Nobody's noticed.

Our world is speeding straight ahead into the future.

Flowers and stuffed mushrooms, wedding guests and

string quartet, we're all going there together on the

Planet Brandy Alexander. In the front hall, there's the

Princess Princess thinking she's still in control.

The feeling is of supreme and ultimate control over all.

Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will

matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the

people living there won't know we ever happened.

"Where did you go?" Brandy says.

The immediate future, I would tell her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Jump to Brandy and me, we can't find Ellis anywhere. Evie

and all the Texas Cottrells can't find their groom, either,

everybody laughing that nervous laughter. What bridesmaid

has run off with him, everybody wants to know. Ha, ha.

I tug Brandy toward the door, but she shushes me. Ellis and

the groom both missing ... a hundred Texans drinking hard . .

. that ridiculous bride in her big drag wedding dress ... this is

just too much fun for Brandy to walk out now.

Jump to Evie riding her big parade float out of the butler's

pantry, her hands all fisted up, her veil and hair flying

straight out behind her. Evie's shouting about how she done

found her butt-sucking fag-assed new husband face-downed

enjoying butt sex with everybody's old boyfriend in the

butler's pantry.

Oh, Ellis.

I remember all his porno magazines, and all the details of

anal, oral, rimming, fisting, felching. You could put yourself

in the hospital trying to self-suck.

Oh, this is dazzling.

Of course, Evie's answer to everything is to heft her hoop

skirt and run upstairs after a rifle except by now most of her

bedroom is a Chanel Number Five perfumed wall of flames Evie

has to ride her parade float right into. Everybody cell phones 91-

1 for help. Nobody's bothered enough to go into the butler's

pantry and check out the action. Folks don't want to know

what might be going on in there.

Go figure, but Texans seem to be a lot more comfortable

around disastrous house fires than they are around anal sex.

I remember my folks. Scat and water sports. Sado and

masochism.

Waiting for Evie to burn to death, everybody gets a fresh

drink and goes to stand in the foyer at the foot of the stairs.

You hear loud spanking from the butler's pantry. The painful

kind where you spit on your hand first.

Brandy, the socially inappropriate thing she is, Brandy

starts laughing. "This is going to be messy good fun," Brandy

tells me out the side of her Plumbago mouth. "I put a

handful of Bilax bowel evacuant in Ellis's last drink."

Oh, Ellis.

With all that's going on, Brandy could've gotten away if

she hadn't started laughing.

You see, since right then, Evie steps out of that wall of

flame at the top of the stairs. A rifle in her hands, her

wedding dress burned down to the steel hoops, the silk

flowers in her hair burned down to their wire skeletons, all

her blonde hair burned off, Evie does her slow step-pausestep

down the stairs with a rifle pointed right at Brandy

Alexander.

With everybody looking up the stairs at Evie wearing

nothing but wire and ashes, sweat and soot smeared all over

her lucious hourglass transgender bod, we all watch Evelyn

Cottrell in her big incorporated moment, and Evie screams,

"You!"

She screams at Brandy Alexander down the barrel of the

rifle, "You did it to me again. Another fire!"

Step-pause-step.

"I thought we were best friends," she says. "Sure, yes, I slept

with your boyfriend, but who hasn't?" Evie says, with the gun

and everything.

Step-pause-step.

"It's just not enough for you to be the best and most

beautiful," Evie says. "Most people, if they looked as good as

you, they'd tread water for the rest of their lives."

Step-pause-step.

"But no," Evie says, "Here you have to destroy everyone else."

The second floor fire inches down the foyer wallpaper, and

wedding guests are scrambling for their wraps and bags, all of them

headed outdoors with the wedding gifts, the silver and the crystal.

You hear that butt slapping sound from the butler's pantry.

"Shut up in there!" Evie yells. Back to Brandy, Evie says, "So

maybe I'll spend some years in prison, but you'll have a big head

start on me in hell!"

You hear the rifle cock.

The fire inches down the walls.

"Oh, God, yes, Jesus Christ," Ellis yells. "Oh, God, I'm coming!"

Brandy stops laughing. Bigger and prettier than ever, looking

regal and annoyed and put-upon as if this is all a big joke, Brandy

Alexander lifts a giant hand and looks at her watch.

And I'm about to become an only child.

And I could stop everything at this moment. I could throw off

my veil, tell the truth, save lives. I'm me. Brandy's innocent. Here's

my second chance. I could've opened my bedroom window years

ago and let Shane inside. I could've not called the police all those

times to suggest Shane's accident wasn't. What stands in my way is

the story how Shane burned my clothes. How being mutilated made

Shane the center of attention. And if I throw off my veil now, I'll

just be a monster, a less than perfect, mutilated victim. I'll be

only how I look. Just the truth, the whole truth, and

nothing but the truth. Honesty being the most boring

thing in the planet Brandy Alexander.

And. Evie aims.

"Yes!" Ellis yells from the pantry. "Yes, do it, big guy! Give

it to me! Shoot it!"

Evie squints down the barrel.

"Now!" Ellis is yelling. "Shoot it right in my mouth!"

Brandy smiles.

And I do nothing.

And Evie shoots Brandy Alexander right in the heart.

CHAPTER THIRTY

My life," Brandy says. "I'm dying, and I'm supposed to see my

whole life."

Nobody's dying here. Give me denial.

Evie's shot her wad, dropped the rifle, and gone outside.

The police and paramedics are on their way, and the rest of the

wedding guests are outside fighting over the wedding gifts, who

gave what and who now has the right to take it back. All of it good

messy fun.

Blood is pretty much all over Brandy Alexander, and she says, "I

want to see my life."

From some back room, Ellis says, "You have the right to remain

silent.”

Jump to me, I let go from holding Brandy's hand, my

hand warm red with blood-born pathogens, I write on the

burning wallpaper.

Your Name Is Shane McFarland.

You Were Born Twenty-Four Years Ago.

You Have A Sister, One Year Younger.

The fire's already eating my top line.

You Got Gonorrhea From A Special Contract Vice

Operative And Your Family Threw You Out.

You Met Three Drag Queens Who Paid You To Start A

Sex Change Because You Couldn't Think Of Anything You

Wanted Less.

The fire's already eating my second line.

You Met Me.

I Am Your Sister, Shannon McFarland.

Me writing the truth in blood just minutes ahead of the

fire eating it.

You Loved Me Because Even If You Didn't Recognize

Me, You Knew I Was Your Sister. On Some Level, You Knew

Right Away So You Loved Me.

We traveled all over the West and grew up together

again.

I've hated you for as long as I can remember.

And You Are Not Going To Die.

I could've saved you.

And you are not going to die.

The fire and my writing are now neck and neck.

Jump to Brandy half-bled on the floor, most of her blood

wiped up by me to write with, Brandy squints to read as the fire

eats our whole family history, line by line. The line And You Are Not

Going To Die is almost at the floor, right in Brandy's face.

"Honey," Brandy says, "Shannon, sweetness, I knew all that. It

was Miss Evie's doing. She told me about you being in the

hospital. About your accident."

Such a hand model I am already. And such a rube.

"Now," Brandy says. "Tell me everything."

I write: I've Been Feeding Ellis Island Female Hormones For

The Past Eight Months.

And Brandy laughs blood. "Me too!" she says.

How can I not laugh?

"Now," Brandy says, "quick, before I die, what else?"

I write: Everybody Just Loved You More After The Hairspray

Accident.

And:

And I Did Not Make That Hairspray Can Explode.

Brandy says, "I know. I did it. I was so miserable being a normal

average child. I wanted something to save me. I wanted the

opposite of a miracle."

From some other room, Ellis says, "Anything you say can and

may be used against you in a court of law." And on the baseboard, I

write:

The Truth Is I Shot Myself In The Face.

There's no more room to write, no more blood to write

with, and nothing left to say, and Brandy says, "You shot your

own face off?"

I nod.

"That," says Brandy, "that, I didn't know.”

CHAPTER THIRTY -ONE

Jump to this one time, nowhere special, just Brandy almost

dead on the floor and me kneeling over her -with my hands covered

in her Princess Alexander partytime blood.

Brandy yells, "Evie!"

And Evie's burned-up head sticks back in through the front

doorway. "Brandy, sugar," Evie says, "This all's been the best disaster

you've ever pulled off!"

To me, Evie runs up and kisses me with her nasty melted lipstick

and says, "Shannon, I just can't thank you enough for spicing up

my boring old home life."

"Miss Evie," Brandy says, "you can act like anything, but, girl,

you just totally missed shooting the bulletproof part of my

vest."

Jump to the truth. I'm the stupid one.

Jump to the truth. I shot myself. I let Evie think it was

Manus and Manus think it was Evie. Probably it was their

suspicion of each other that drove them apart. It drove Evie

to keep a loaded rifle around in case Manus came after her.

The same fear made Manus carry a butcher knife the night

he came over to confront her.

The truth is nobody here is as stupid or evil as I let on.

Except me. The truth is I drove out away from the city on the

day of the accident. With my driver's side window rolled

halfway up, I got out and I shot through the glass. On the

way back into town, on the freeway, I got in the exit lane for

Growden Avenue, the exit for La Paloma Memorial Hospital.

The truth is I was addicted to being beautiful, and that's

not something you just walk away from. Being addicted to

all that attention, I had to quit cold turkey. I could shave my

head, but hair grows back. Even bald, I might still look too

good. Bald, I might get even more attention. There was the

option of getting fat or drinking out of control to ruin my

looks, but I wanted to be ugly, and I wanted my health.

Wrinkles and aging looked too far off. There had to be some

way to get ugly in a flash. I had to deal with my looks in a fast,

permanent way or I'd always be tempted to go back.

You know how you look at ugly hunchback girls, and they

are so lucky. Nobody drags them out at night so they can't

finish their doctorate thesis papers. They don't get yelled at

by fashion photographers if they get infected ingrown bikini

hairs. You look at burn victims and think how much time they

save not looking in mirrors to check their skin for sun damage.

I wanted the everyday reassurance of being mutilated. The

way a crippled deformed birth-defected disfigured girl can

drive her car with the windows open and not care how the

wind makes her hair look, that's the kind of freedom I was

after.

I was tired of staying a lower life form just because of my

looks. Trading on them. Cheating. Never getting anything real

accomplished, but getting the attention and recognition

anyway. Trapped in a beauty ghetto is how I felt. Stereotyped.

Robbed of my motivation.

In this way, Shane, we are very much brother and sister.

This is the biggest mistake I could think would save me. I

wanted to give up the idea I had any control. Shake things up.

To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force

myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone.

I slowed down for the exit and pulled over onto the

shoulder, what they call the breakdown lane. I remember

thinking, how apropos. I remember thinking, this is going to

be so exciting. My makeover. Here was my life about to start all

over again. I could be a great brain surgeon this time around.

Or I could be an artist. Nobody would care how I'd look.

People would just see my art, what I made instead of just how

I looked, and people would love me.

What I thought last was, at last I'll be growing again,

mutating, adapting, evolving. I'll be physically challenged.

I couldn't wait. I got the gun from the glove compartment.

I wore a glove against powder burns, and held the gun

at arm's length out my broken window. It wasn't even like

aiming with the gun only about two feet away. I might've

killed myself that way, but by now that idea didn't seem very

tragic.

This makeover would make piercings and tattoos and

brandings look so lame, all those little fashion revolts so safe

that they themselves only become fashionable. Those little

paper tiger attempts to reject looking good that only end up

reinforcing it.

The shot, it was like getting hit hard is what I remember.

The bullet. It took a minute before I could focus my eyes, but

there was my blood and snot, my drool and teeth all over the

passenger seat. I had to open the car door and get the gun

from where I'd dropped it outside the window. Being in shock

helped. The gun and the glove's in a storm drain in the

hospital parking lot where I dropped them, in case you want

proof.

Then the intravenous morphine, the tiny operating

room manicure scissors cut my dress off, the little patch

panties, the police photos. Birds ate my face. Nobody ever

suspected the truth.

The truth is I panicked a little after that. I let everybody

think the wrong things. The future is not a good place to

start lying and cheating all over again. None of this is

anybody's fault except mine. I ran because just getting my jaw

rebuilt was too much temptation to revert, to play that game,

the looking good game. Now my whole new future is still out

there waiting for me.

The truth is, being ugly isn't the thrill you'd think, but it

can be an opportunity for something better than I ever

imagined.

The truth is I'm sorry.

CHAPTER THIRTY -TWO

Jump 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 some day 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 pave 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 Hermes 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 stick pin 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 sili-cone.

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

Your silicone broke, Shane. The bullet popped your sil-icone 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 make-up 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.