Invisible Monsters Remix, Chapter 17 (Bathroom Talk)

There had to be some way better to kill Brandy. To set me free. Some quick permanent closure. Some kind of cross fire 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 suite jacket with its sanitary little waist and mode three quarter sleeves is still folded on the aquamarine countertop beside the big clam shell sink. I pick up the jacket, and my souvenir from the future falls out. It's a postcard of clean, sun-bleached 2962 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 was 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 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 blond 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,a nd the post office will be closing soon. There's still Evie's insurance money to pick up. At least a half a 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 emergence 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 you 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 look 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 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, drops the big Plumbago 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 door frame. She's grabbed at the 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 nobody 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 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, 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 though, 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 hell, 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. Someplace 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. I will give you bigger discoveries. I will make you stronger than I could be."

I start down the stairs. Brandy in her new flats, me in my total confusion, we go to the foyer, and through the drawing room doors you can hear Mr. Parker's long, deep voice belching over, "That's right. Just do that."

Brandy and me, we stand outside the doors for a moment. We pick the lint and toilet paper off each other, and I fluff up the 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 inside 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 as stuck up in the air. The rest of his bareness was stuck in Ellis's face. Ellis Island, formerly Independent Special Contract Vice Operative Manus Kelly.

"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 big square-jawed Nazi-poster-by face. Ellis grunted and gagging, making his comeback from forced retirement.

(Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Twenty-Four)