Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters

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2024-12-06 0 0 662.43KB 112 页 5.9玖币
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INVISIBLE
MONSTERS
Chuck Palahniuk
W. W. Norton & Company New York • London
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 ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
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 condi-
tioned 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 suspen
sion 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 pho-
tographer 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 pret-
a-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 real
ty 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
摘要：

INVISIBLEMONSTERSChuckPalahniukW.W.Norton&CompanyNewYork•LondonForGeoff,whosaid,"Thisishowtostealdrugs."AndIna,whosaid,"Thisislipliner."AndJanet,whosaid,"Thisissilkgeorgette."Andmyeditor,Patricia,whokeptsaying,"Thisisnotgood,enough."CHAPTERONECHAPTERTWOCHAPTERTHREECHAPTERFOURCHAPTERFIVECHAPTERSIXCHA...

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