Invisible Monsters

  This will get gruesome. Even here in black and white.

  For all I learned, I could be a doctor.

  Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.

  Manus once said that your folks are God. You love them and want to make them happy, but you still want to make up your own rules.

  The surgeons said, you can’t just cut off a lump of skin one place and bandage it on another. You’re not grafting a tree. The blood supply, the veins and capillaries just wouldn’t be hooked up to keep the graft alive. The lump would just die and fall off.

  It’s scary, but now when I see somebody blush, my reaction isn’t: oh, how cute. A blush only reminds me how blood is just under the surface of everything.

  Doing dermabrasion, this one plastic surgeon told me, is about the same as pressing a ripe tomato against a belt sander. What you’re paying for most is the mess.

  To relocate a piece of skin, to rebuild a jaw, you have to flay a long strip of skin from your neck. Cut up from the base of your neck, but don’t sever the skin at the top.

  Picture a sort of banner or strip of skin hanging down loose along your neck but still attached to the bottom of your face. The skin is still attached to you, so it still gets blood. This strip of skin is still alive. Take the strip of skin and roll it into a tube or column. Leave it rolled until it heals into a long, dangling lump of flesh, hanging from the bottom of your face. Living tissue. Full of fresh, healthy blood, flapping and dangling warm against your neck. This is a pedicle.

  Just the healing part, that can take months.

  Jump backwards to the red Fiat with Brandy behind her sunglasses and Manus locked in the trunk, and Brandy drives us to the top of Rocky Butte, the hilltop ruins of some lookout fort where if this weren’t a school night kids from Parkrose and Grant and Madison high schools would be breaking beer bottles and enjoying unsafe sex up here in the old ruins.

  Friday nights, this hilltop would be full of kids saying: Look, over there, you can see my house. That blue light in the window, that’s my folks watching TV.

  The ruins are just a few layers of stone blocks still on top of each other. Inside the ruins, the ground is flat and rocky, covered with broken glass and coarse orchard grass. Around us, in all directions except the road coming up, the sides of Rocky Butte are cliffs rising from the dot-to-dot streetlight grid.

  You could choke on the silence.

  What we need is a place to stay. Until I figure out what’s next. Until we can come up with some money. We have two, maybe three days until Evie gets home and we have to be gone. Then I figure, I’ll just call Evie and blackmail her.

  Evie owes me big.

  I can get away with this.

  Brandy races the Fiat into the darkest part of the ruins, then she kills the headlights and hits the brakes. Brandy and me, we stop so fast only our seatbelts keep us off the dashboard.

  Clatter and tintinnabulation of ringing metal against metal chimes and gongs in the car around us.

  “Sorry, I guess,” Brandy says. “There’s shit on the floor, got under the brake pedal when I tried to stop.”

  Music bright as silver rolls out from under our car seats. Napkin rings and silver teaspoons rush forward against our feet. Brandy’s got candlesticks between her feet. A silver platter bright with starlight is slid half out from under the front of Brandy’s seat, looking up between her long legs.

  Brandy looks at me. Her chin tucked down, Brandy lowers her Ray-Bans to the end of her nose and arches her penciled eyebrows.

  I shrug. I get out to liberate my love cargo.

  Even with the trunk open, Manus doesn’t move. His knees are against his elbows, his hands clasped in his face, his feet tucked back under his butt; Manus could be a fetus in army fatigues. All around him, I hadn’t noticed. I’ve been under a lot of stress tonight, so forgive me if I didn’t notice back at Evie’s house, but all around Manus flash pieces of silverware. Pirate treasure in the trunk of his Fiat, and other things.

  Relics.

  A long white candle, there’s a candle.

  Brandy slams out of her seat and comes to look, too.

  “Oh my shit,” Brandy says and rolls her eyes. “Oh my shit.”

  There’s an ashtray, no, it’s a plaster cast of a little hand, right next to Manus’s unconscious butt. It’s the kind of cast you make in grade school when you press your hand into a pie tin of wet plaster for a Mother’s Day gift.

  Brandy brushes a little hair off Manus’s forehead. “He’s really, really cute,” she says, “but I think this one’s going to be brain damaged.”

  It’s way too much trouble to explain tonight to Brandy in writing, but Manus getting brain damaged would be redundant.

  Too bad it’s just the Valiums.

  Brandy takes off her Ray-Bans for a better look. She takes off her Hermès scarf and shakes her hair out full, looking good, biting her lips, wetting her lips with her tongue just in case Manus wakes up. “With cute guys,” Brandy says, “it’s usually better to give them barbiturates.”

  Guess I’ll remember that.

  I haul Manus up until he’s sitting in the trunk with his legs hanging out over the bumper. Manus’s eyes, power blue, flicker, blink, flicker, squint.

  Brandy leans in to give him a good look. My brother out to steal my fiancé. At this point, I just want everybody dead.

  “Wake up, honey,” Brandy says with a hand cupped under Manus’s chin.

  And Manus squints, “Mommy?”

  “Wake up, honey,” Brandy says. “It’s okay.”

  “Now?” Manus says.

  “It’s okay.”

  There’s a little rushing sound, the sound of rain on the roof of a tent or a closed convertible.

  “Oh, God,” Brandy steps back. “Oh, sweet Christ!”

  Manus blinks and peers at Brandy, then at his lap. One leg of his army fatigues goes darker, darker, darker to the knee.

  “Cute,” Brandy says, “but he’s just peed his pants.”

  Jump back to plastic surgery. Jump to the happy day you’re healed. You’ve had this long strip of skin hanging off your neck for a couple months, only it’s not just one strip. There are probably more like a half-dozen pedicles because you might as well do a lot at once so the plastic surgeon has more tissue to work with.

  For reconstruction, you’ll have these long dangling strips of skin hanging off the bottom of your face for about two months.

  They say that what people notice first about you is your eyes. You’ll give up that hope. You look like some meat byproduct ground up and pooped out by the Num Num Snack Factory.

  A mummy coming apart in the rain.

  A broken piñata.

  These strips of warm skin flapping around your neck are good, blood-fed living tissue. The surgeon lifts each strip and attaches the healed end to your face. This way, the bulk of the tissue is transferred, grafted to your face without ever stopping its blood supply. They pull all this loose skin up and bunch it into the rough shape of a jaw. Your neck is the scars of where the skin used to lay. Your jaw is this mass of grafted tissue the surgeons hope will grow together and stay in place.

  For another month, you and the surgeons hope. Another month, you hide in the hospital and wait.

  Jump to Manus sitting in his piss and silver in the trunk of his red sports car. Potty training flashback. It happens.

  Me, I’m crouched in front of him, looking for the bulge of his wallet.

  Manus just stares at Brandy. Probably thinking Brandy’s me, the old me with a face.

  Brandy’s lost interest. “He doesn’t remember. He thinks I’m his mother,” Brandy says. “Sister, maybe, but mother?”

  So déjà vu. Try brother.

  We need a place to stay, and Manus must have a new place. Not the old place he and I shared. He lets us hide at his place, or I tell the cops he kidnapped me and burned down Evie’s house. Manus won’t know about Mr. Baxter and the Rhea sisters seeing me with a gun all over town.

  With my finger, I write
in the dirt:

  we need to find his wallet.

  “His pants,” Brandy says, “are wet.”

  Now Manus peers at me, sits up and scrapes his head on the open trunk lid. Man, oh, man, you know this hurts, still it isn’t anything tragic until Brandy Alexander chimes in with her overreaction. “Oh, you poor thing,” she says.

  Then Manus boo-hoos. Manus Kelley, the last person who has any right to, is crying.

  I hate this.

  Jump to the day the skin grafts take, and even then the tissue will need some support. Even if the grafts heal to where they look like a crude, lumpy jaw, you’ll still need a jawbone. Without a mandible, the soft mass of tissue, living and viable as it is, might just reabsorb.

  That’s the word the plastic surgeons used.

  Reabsorb.

  Into my face, as if I’m just a sponge made of skin.

  Jump to Manus crying and Brandy bent over him, cooing and petting his sexy hair.

  In the trunk, there’s a pair of bronze baby shoes, a silver chafing dish, a turkey picture made of macaroni glued to construction paper.

  “You know,” Manus sniffs and wipes the back of his hand under his nose. “I’m high right now so it’s okay if I tell you this.” Manus looks at Brandy bent over him and me crouched in the dirt. “First,” Manus says, “your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.”

  To make you a jawbone, the surgeons will break off parts of your shinbones, complete with the attached artery. First they expose the bone and sculpt it right there on your leg.

  Another way is the surgeons will break several other bones, probably long bones in your legs and arms. Inside these bones is the soft cancellous bone pulp.

  That was the surgeons’ word and the word from the books.

  Cancellous.

  “My mom,” Manus says, “and her new husband—my mom gets married a lot—they just bought this resort condo in Bowling River in Florida. People younger than sixty can’t buy property there. That’s a law they have.”

  I’m looking at Brandy, who’s still the overreactive mother, kneeling down, brushing the hair off Manus’s forehead. I’m looking over the cliff edge next to us. Those little blue lights in all the houses, that’s people watching television. Tiffany’s light blue. Valium blue. People in captivity.

  First my best friend and now my brother is trying to steal my fiancé.

  “I went to visit them at Christmas, last year,” Manus says. “My mom, their condo is right on the eighth green, and they love it. It’s like the whole age standard in Bowling River is fucked. My mom and stepdad are just turned sixty, so they’re just youngsters. Me, all these oldsters are scoping me out like an odds-on car burglary.”

  Brandy licks her lips.

  “According to the Bowling River age standard,” Manus says, “I haven’t been born yet.”

  You have to break out large enough slivers of this soft, bloody bone pulp. The cancellous stuff. Then you have to insert these shards and slivers of bone into the soft mass of tissue you’ve grafted onto your face.

  Really, you don’t do this, the surgeons do it all while you’re asleep.

  If the slivers are close enough together, they’ll form fibroblast cells to bond with each other. Again, a word from the books.

  Fibroblast.

  Again, this takes months.

  “My mom and her husband,” Manus says, sitting in the open trunk of his Fiat Spider on top of Rocky Butte, “for Christmas, their biggest present to me is this box all wrapped up. It’s the size of a high-end stereo system or a wide-screen television. This is what I’m hoping. I mean, it could’ve been anything else, and I would’ve liked it more.”

  Manus slides one foot down to the ground, then the other. On his feet, Manus turns back to the Fiat full of silver.

  “No,” Manus says. “they give me this shit.”

  Manus in his commando boots and army fatigues takes a big fat-belly silver teapot out of the trunk and looks at himself reflected fat in the convex side. “The whole box,” Manus says, “is full of all this shit and heirlooms that nobody else wants.”

  Just like me pitching Evie’s crystal cigarette box against the fireplace, Manus hauls off and fast pitches the teapot out into the darkness. Over the cliff, out over the darkness and the lights of suburbia, the teapot flies so far that you can’t hear it land.

  Not turning around, Manus reaches back and grabs another something. A silver candlestick. “This is my legacy,” Manus says. Pitched overhand into the darkness, the candlestick turns end over end, silent the way you imagine satellites fly.

  “You know,” Manus pitches a glittering handful of napkin rings. “how your parents are sort of like God. Sure, you love them and want to know they’re still around, but you never really see them unless they want something.”

  The silver chafing dish flies up, up, up, to the stars and then falls down to land somewhere among the blue TV lights.

  And after the shards of bone have grown together to give you a new jawbone inside the lump of grafted skin, then the surgeon can try to shape this into something you can talk with and eat with and keep slathered in make-up.

  This is years of pain later.

  Years of living in the hope that what you’ll get will be better than what you have. Years of looking and feeling worse in the hope that you might look better.

  Manus grabs the candle, the white candle from the trunk.

  “My mom,” Manus says, “her number two Christmas present to me was a box full of all the stuff from when I was a kid that she saved.” Manus says, “Check it out,” and holds up the candle, “my baptism candle.”

  Off into the darkness, Manus pitches the candle.

  The bronze baby shoes go next.

  Wrapped in a christening gown.

  Then a scattering handful of baby teeth.

  “Fuck,” Manus says, “the damn tooth fairy.”

  A lock of blond hair inside a locket on a chain, the chain swinging and let go bola-style from Manus’s hand, disappears into the dark.

  “She said she was giving me this stuff because she just didn’t have any room for it,” Manus says. “It’s not that she didn’t want it.”

  The plaster print of the second-grade hand goes end over end, off into the darkness.

  “Well, Mom, if it isn’t good enough for you,” Manus says, “I don’t want to carry this shit around, either.”

  Jump to all the times when Brandy Alexander gets on me about plastic surgery, then I think of pedicles. Reabsorbtion. Fibroblast cells. Cancellous bone. Years of pain and hope, and how can I not laugh.

  Laughter is the only sound left I can make that people will understand.

  Brandy, the well-meaning queen supreme with her tits siliconed to the point she can’t stand straight, she says: Just look to see what’s out there.

  How can I stop laughing.

  I mean it, Shane, I don’t need the attention that bad.

  I’ll just keep wearing my veils.

  If I can’t be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

  Jump to the silver punch ladle flying off to nowhere.

  Jump to each teaspoon, gone.

  Jump to all the grade school report cards and class pictures sailed off.

  Manus crumbles a thick piece of paper.

  His birth certificate. And chucks it out of existence. Then Manus stands rocking heel-toe, heel-toe, hugging himself.

  Brandy is looking at me to say something. In the dirt, with my finger I write:

  manus where do you live these days?

  Little cold touches land on my hair and peachy-pink shoulders. It’s raining.

  Brandy says, “Listen, I don’t want to know who you are, but if you could be anybody, who would you be?”

  “I’m not getting old, that’s for sure” Manus says, shaking his head. “No way.” Arms crossed, he rocks heel-toe, heel-toe. Manus tucks his chin to his chest and rocks, looking down at all the broken bottles.

&nbs
p; It’s raining harder. You can’t smell my smoky ostrich feathers or Brandy’s L’Air du Temps.

  “Then you’re Mr. Denver Omelet,” Brandy says. “Denver Omelet, meet Daisy St. Patience.” Brandy’s ring-beaded hand opens to full flower and lays itself across her forty-six inches of siliconed glory. “These,” she says, “this is Brandy Alexander.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Jump to this one time, nowhere special, just Brandy and me in the speech therapist office when Brandy catches me with my hands up under my veil, touching the seashells and ivory of my exposed molars, stroking the embossed leather of my scar tissue, dry and polished from my breath going back and forth across it. I’m touching the saliva where it dries sticky and raw down the sides of my neck, and Brandy says not to watch myself too close.

  “Honey,” she says, “times like this, it helps to think of yourself as a sofa or a newspaper, something made by a lot of other people but not made to last forever.”

  The open edge of my throat feels starched and plastic, ribbed-knitted and stiff with sizing and interfacing. It’s the same feel as the top edge of a strapless dress or mail-lot, held up with wire or plastic stays sewn inside. Hard but warm the way pink looks. Bony but covered in soft, touchable skin.

  This kind of acute traumatic mandibulectomy without reconstruction, before decannulation of the tracheostomy tube can lead to sleep apnea, the doctors said. This was them talking to each other during morning rounds.

  And people find me hard to understand.

  What the doctors told me was unless they rebuilt me some kind of jaw, at least some kind of flap, they said, I could die any time I fell asleep. I could just stop breathing and not wake up. A quick, painless death.

  On my pad with my pen, I wrote:

  don’t tease.

  Us in the speech therapist office, Brandy says, “It helps to know you’re not any more responsible for how you look than a car is,” Brandy says. “You’re a product just as much. A product of a product of a product. The people who design cars, they’re products. Your parents are products. Their parents were products. Your teachers, products. The minister in your church, another product,” Brandy says.