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 pavé 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 Hermès 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 silicone.
Florists come in with sprays of irises and roses and stock.
Your silicone broke, Shane. The bullet popped your silicone 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.
Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
(Series: # )
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