Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters.pdf - Chuck Palahniuk - ostres

I NVI SI BLE

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

Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters.pdf

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