Invisible Monsters Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Oh, layered amber cashmere trimmed in faceted topaz marabou.

  Oh, slithering underwired free-range mink bolero.

  We had to go.

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

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

  The paperback cover showed a pretty 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 felching 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 hairspray 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 infomercial. 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 Cancún, Mexico, for Espre.