The same way a compact disk isn’t responsible for what’s recorded on it, that’s how we are. You’re about as free to act as a programmed computer. You’re about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill.
“There isn’t any real you in you,” she says. “Even your physical body, all your cells will be replaced within eight years.”
Skin, bones, blood, and organs transplant from person to person. Even what’s inside you already, the colonies of microbes and bugs that eat your food for you, without them you’d die. Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited.
“Relax,” Brandy says, “Whatever you’re thinking, a million other folks are thinking. Whatever you do, they’re doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort.”
Up under my veil, I finger the wet poking stub of a tongue from some vandalized product. The doctors suggested using part of my small intestine to make my throat longer. They suggested carving the shinbones, the fibulas of this human product I am, shaping the bones and grafting them to build me, build the product, a new jawbone.
On my pad, I wrote:
the leg-bone connected to the head-bone?
The doctors didn’t get it.
Now hear the word of the Lord.
“You’re a product of our language,” Brandy says, “and how our laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you has already been thought out by some million people before you,” she says. “Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You’re safe because you’re so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it. You can’t imagine any way to escape. There’s no way you can get out,” Brandy says.
“The world,” Brandy says, “is your cradle and your trap.”
This is after I backslid. I wrote to my booker at the agency and asked about my chances of getting hand or foot work. Modeling watches and shoes. My booker had sent me some flowers in the hospital early on. Maybe I could pick up assignments as a leg model. How much Evie had blabbed to them, I didn’t know.
To be a hand model, he wrote back, you have to wear a size seven glove and a size five ring. A foot model must have perfect toenails and wear a size six shoe. A leg model can’t play any sports. She can’t have any visible veins. Unless your fingers and toes still look good printed in a magazine at three times their normal size, or billboarded at two hundred times their size, he wrote, don’t count on body part work.
My hand’s an eight. My foot, a seven.
Brandy says, “And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that’s a trap, too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.”
The books on plastic surgery, the pamphlets and brochures, all promised to help me live a more normal, happy life; but less and less this looked like what I’d want. What I wanted looked more and more like what I’d always been trained to want. What everybody wants.
Give me attention.
Flash.
Give me beauty.
Flash.
Give me peace and happiness, a loving relationship, and a perfect home.
Flash.
Brandy says, “The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don’t be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.”
She says, “Don’t do what you want.” She says, “Do what you don’t want. Do what you’re trained not to want.”
It’s the opposite of following your bliss.
Brandy tells me, “Do the things that scare you the most.”
Chapter 30
ou won’t catch Manus bowing down, making himself a slave to the golden calf of total accuracy. You, who are always trying to get everything “right,” he could teach you a thing or ten. For example: don’t be in such an all-fired hurry to get everything wrapped up.
Witness how Manus recounts the story of his all-time favorite movie: Billy Zane is riding a boat with Dolores Claiborne. Also aboard are Kate Winslet and that demented kid from Gilbert Grape. The lavish interiors are spectacular, but the exteriors make the boat look a little computer-generated—genuinely video-gamey—not that you could do much better. The boat, itself, wow, this boat is gigantic, plowing through the North Atlantic, escorted by leaping porpoises, but most of what you’ll notice is how much air pollution it generates. It’s as if the entire reason for this trip is to draw a fat line of coal smoke between Southampton and Ellis Island. Inside the grand salon, Billy Zane gives Kate Winslet a big blue diamond and slugs her in the chops. The kid from Gilbert Grape draws a naked picture of her boobs. This, this is just not Kate Winslet’s day! Finally, an iceberg takes a bite out of the boat’s hull, well below the waterline. It’s exactly like Jaws but in slow motion and with ice. This grand metaphor—it’s sinking fast. As the boat stands straight up in the water, panic ensues. This gesture mimics, strangely, the moment Kate Winslet stood on her tiptoes, ballerina-style, and fell down drunk. To save two thousand Irish people from drowning, Kate shoots Billy Zane and stuffs his corpse in the leak. Nobody sees that coming. At this point there’s still three days to kill before anyone will see the Statue of Liberty; most of the actors are playing a card game called “bridge.” Hereabouts, usually Manus gets up to use the bathroom or microwave a snack. When he comes back to watch, the boat is swarming with vampires. Sometimes Manus channel-surfs, splicing in the better parts of other films. Martians blast the boat with death rays. Charleton Heston tries to rescue Ava Gardner but is washed away to a martyr’s offscreen death. The kid from Gilbert Grape dies every time—BUT NEVER SOON ENOUGH.
As far as Manus is concerned, Bill Paxton should’ve made Aliens II and quit while he was ahead. Instead, Paxton finds the naked drawing of Kate Winslet locked in an underwater safe. This is not what he wanted. He wanted the big blue diamond that a littering old woman doesn’t think to recycle. She simply heaves it into the ocean, where human beings throw all their Styrofoam cups and used diapers. Bankrupt, Bill Paxton smiles at a skinny blond girl.
That …that’s the wonderful freedom you had when you were six years old, before you caved in to logic. You had authority but you forgot it. There is no truth. Not really. There’s only the best truth.
The happy ending is that, time and time again, Manus falls asleep.
Chapter 31
hen you go out with a drunk, you’ll notice how a drunk fills your glass so he can empty his own. As long as you’re drinking, drinking is okay. Two’s company. Drinking is fun. If there’s a bottle, even if your glass isn’t empty, a drunk, he’ll pour a little in your glass before he fills his own.
This only looks like generosity.
That Brandy Alexander, she’s always on me about plastic surgery. Why don’t I, you know, just look at what’s out there? With her chest siliconed, her hips liposucked, the 46-16-26 Katty Kathy hourglass thing she is, the fairy godmother makeover, my fair lady, Pygmalion thing she is, my brother back from the dead, Brandy Alexander is very invested in plastic surgery.
And vice versa.