I ask her, "Jsfssjf ciacb sxi?"

"You come from escaped French aristocrat blood," Brandy says.

"Gwdcn aixa gklgfnv?"

"You grew up in Paris, and went to a school run by nuns," Brandy says.

Give me homesickness.

Flash.

Give me nostalgic childhood yearnings.

Flash.

What's the word for the opposite of glamour?

Brandy never asked about my folks, were they living or dead, and why weren't they here to gnash their teeth.

"Your father and mother, Rainier and Honoraria St. Patience, were assassinated by fashion terrorists," she says.

B.B., before Brandy, my father took his pigs to market every fall. His secret is to spend all summer driving his flatbed truck around Idaho and the other upper, left-hand corner states, stopping at all the day-old bakery outlets selling expired snack foods, individual fruit pies and cupcakes with creamy fillings, little loaves of sponge cake injected with artificial whipped cream and lumps of devil's food cake covered with marshmallow and shredded coconut dyed pink. Old birthday cakes that didn't sell. Stale cakes wishing Congratulations. Happy Mother's Day. Be My Valentine. My father still brings it all home, heaped in a dense sticky pile or heat-sealed inside cellophane. That's the hardest part, opening these thousands of old snacks and dropping them to the pigs.

My father who Brandy didn't want to hear about, his secret is to feed the pigs these pies and cakes and snacks the last two weeks before they go to market. The snacks have no nutrition, and the pigs gobble them until there isn't an expired snack left within five hundred miles.

These snacks don't have any real fiber to them so every fall, every three-hundred-pound pig goes to market with an extra ninety pounds in its colon. My father makes a fortune at auction, and who knows how long after that, but the pigs all take a big sugary crap when they see inside whatever slaughterhouse where they end up.

I say, "Kwvne wivnuw fw sojaoa."

"No," Brandy says and puts up her foot-long index finger, six cocktail rings stacked on just this one finger, and she presses her jeweled hotdog up and down across my mouth the moment I try and say anything.

"Not a word," Brandy says. "You're still too connected to your past. Your saying anything is pointless."

From out of her sewing basket, Brandy draws a streamer of white and gold, a magic act, a layer of sheer white silk patterned with a Greek key design in gold she casts over my head.

Behind another veil, the real world is that much farther away.

"Guess how they do the gold design," Brandy says.

The fabric is so light my breath blows it out in front; the silk lays across my eyelashes without bending them. Even my face, where every nerve in your body comes to an end, even my face can't feel it.

It takes a team of kids in India, Brandy says, four- and five-year-old kids sitting all day on wooden benches, being vegetarians, they have to tweeze out most of about a zillion gold threads to leave the pattern of just the gold left behind.

"You don't see kids any older than ten doing this job," Brandy says, "because by then most kids go blind."

Just the veil Brandy takes out of her basket must be six feet square. The precious eyesight of all those darling children, lost. The precious days of their fragile childhood spent tweezing silk threads out.

Give me pity.

Flash.

Give me empathy.

Flash.

Oh, I wish I could make my poor heart just bust.

I say, "Vswf siws cm eiuvn sines."

No, it's okay, Brandy says. She doesn't want to reward anybody for exploiting children. She got it on sale.

Caged behind my silk, settled inside my cloud of organza and georgette, the idea that I can't share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems.

"Oh, and don't worry," Brandy says. "You'll still get attention. You have a dynamite tits and ass combo. You just can't talk to anybody."

People just can't stand not knowing something, she tells me. Especially men can't bear not climbing every mountain, mapping everywhere. Labeling everything. Peeing on every tree and then never calling you back.

"Behind a veil, you're the great unknown," she says. "Most guys will fight to know you. Some guys will deny you're a real person, and some will just ignore you.”

The zealot. The atheist. The agnostic.

Even if somebody is only wearing an eye patch, you always want to look. To see if he's faking. The man in the Hathaway Shirt. Or to see the horror underneath.

The photographer in my head says:

Give me a voice.

Flash.

Give me a face.

Brandy's answer was little hats with veils. And big hats with veils. Pancake hats and pillbox hats edged all around with clouds of tulle and gauze. Parachute silk or heavy crepe or dense net dotted with chenille pompoms.

"The most boring thing in the entire world," Brandy says, "is nudity."

The second most boring thing, she says, is honesty.

"Think of this as a tease. It's lingerie for your face," she says. "A peekaboo nightgown you wear over your whole identity."

The third most boring thing in the entire world is your sorry-assed past. So Brandy never asked me anything. Bulldozer alpha bitch she can be, we meet again and again in the speech therapist office and Brandy tells me everything I need to know about myself.

Jump to Brandy Alexander tucking me into a Seattle bed. This is the night of the Space Needle, the night the future doesn't happen. Brandy, she's wearing yards and yards of black tulle wrapped around her legs, twisted up and around her hourglass waist. Black veil crosses her torpedo breasts and loops up and over the top of her auburn hair. All this sparkle that bends over beside my bed could be the trial-sized mock-up for the original summer night sky.

Little rhinestones, not the plastic ones pooped out by a factory in Calcutta but the Austrian crystal ones cut by elves in the Black Forest, these little star-shaped rhinestones are set all over the black tulle. The queen supreme's face is the moon in the night sky that bends over and kisses me good night. My hotel room is dark, and the television at the foot of my bed is turned on so the handmade stars twinkle in all the colors the television is trying to show us.

Seth's right, the television does make me God. I can look in on anybody and every hour the lives change. Here in the real world, that's not always the case.

"I will always love you," the queen of the night sky says, and I know which postcard she's found.

The hotel sheets feel the same as the hospital sheets. This is thousands of miles since we met, and the big fingers of Brandy are still smoothing the blankets under where my chin used to be. My face is the last thing the go-go boys and girls want to meet when they go into a dark alley looking to buy drugs.

Brandy says, "We'll be back as soon as we sell out."

Seth is silhouetted in the open doorway to the hall. How he looks from my bed is the terrific outline of a superhero against the neon green and gray and pink tropical leaves of the hallway wallpaper. His coat, the long black leather coat Seth wears, is fitted tight until the waist and then flares from there down so in outline you think it's a cape.

And maybe when he kisses Brandy Alexander's royal butt he's not just pretending. Maybe it's the two of them in love when I'm not around. This wouldn't be the first time I've lost him.

The face surrounded in black veil that leans over me is a surprise of color. The skin is a lot of pink around a Plumbago mouth, and the eyes are too aubergine. Even these colors are too garish right now, too saturated, too intense. Lurid. You think of cartoon characters. Fashion dolls have pink skin like this, like plastic bandages. Flesh tone. Too aubergine eyes, cheekbones too defined by Rusty Rose blusher. Nothing is left to your imagination.