Invisible Monsters

  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 Mom 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 Marché.

  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 hypoallergenic 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 h
is 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.

  Flash.

  Seth hauls his water-retaining self up to sit on the railing. His kiltie tassel loafers swing above the nets. His tie blows straight out above the nothing and darkness. “I’m not afraid,” he says. He straightens one leg and lets a kiltie tassel loafer dangle from his toes.

  I clutch the veils tight around my neck so people who don’t know me will think like my parents that I’m still happy.

  Seth says, “The last time I’ll ever be scared was the night you caught me trying to kill you,” and Seth looks out over the lights of Seattle and smiles.

  I’d smile, too, you know, if I had any lips.

  In the future, in the wind, in the dark on the observation deck at the top of the Space Needle, Brandy Alexander, that brand-name queen supreme that she is, Brandy comes out to Seth and I with souvenirs of the future. These are postcards. Brandy Alexander gives us each a stack of postcards so faded and dog-eared and picked over and ignored that they’ve survived in the back of a revolving wire rack for years. Here are pictures of the future with clean, sun-bleached skies behind an opening-day Space Needle. Here’s the Monorail full of smiling babes in Jackie O pink mohair suits with three huge cloth-covered buttons down the front. Children in striped T-shirts and blonde astronaut crewcuts run through a Science Center where all the fountains still work.

  “Tell the world what scares you most,” says Brandy. 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:

  I love 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.

  Brandy is waiting to take the card and read it out loud. Brandy’s waiting to read my worst fears to the world, but I don’t give her the card. I kiss it myself with the lips I don’t have and let the wind take it out of my hand. The card flies up, up, up to the stars and then falls down to land in the suicide net.

  While I watch my future trapped in the suicide net, Brandy reads another card from Seth.

  We are all self-composting.

  I write on another card from the future, and Brandy reads it.

  When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves.

  An updraft lifts my worst fears from the suicide net and sails them away.

  Seth writes and Brandy reads.

  You have to keep recycling yourself.

  I write and Brandy reads.

  Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known.

  I write and Brandy reads.

  The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.

  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 over-compensate, 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.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jump back to the day Brandy chucks a handful of shimmering nothing into the air above my head, and the speech therapist office around me turns gold.

  Brandy says, “This is cotton voile.”

  She throws another handful of fog, and the world blurs behind gold and green.

  “Silk georgette,” Brandy says.

  She throws a handful of sparkle, and the world, Brandy sitting in front of me with her wicker sewing basket open in her lap. The two of us alone, locked in the speech therapist office. The poster of a kitten on the cinderblock wall. All this goes star-filter soft and bright, every sharp edge erased or smeared behind the green and gold, and 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.

  Hard at work, planning stylist that she is, Brandy Alexander is already pulling tulle out of her purse, pink tulle and lace and crochet doily netting and settling it over my head.

  She says, “You don’t have to wear make-up. You don’t even have to wash. A good veil is the equivalent of mirrored sunglasses, but for your whole head.”

  A good veil is the same as staying indoors, Brandy tells me. Cloistered. Private. She throws sheer yellow chiffon. She drapes red patterned nylon over me. In the way our world is, everybody shoulder to shoulder, people knowing everything about you at first glance, a good veil is your tinted limousine window. The unlisted number for your face. Behind a good veil, you could be anyone. A movie star. A saint. A good veil says:

  We Have Not Been Properly Introduced.

  You’re the prize be
hind door number three.

  You’re the lady or the tiger.

  In our world where nobody can keep a secret anymore, a good veil says:

  Thank You For NOT Sharing.

  “Don’t worry,” Brandy says. “Other people will fill in the blanks.”

  The same as how they do with God, she says.

  What I never told Brandy is I grew up near a farm. This was a farm that grew pigs. Daisy St. Patience used to come home from school every sunny afternoon and had to feed the pigs with her brother.

  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 cup-cakes 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.