The Aubergine Dreams eyes close. Brandy, pulling long, even breaths, says, "The doctors, they took out the bottom rib on each side of my chest." Her hands rub where, and she says, "I couldn't sit up in bed for two months, but I had a sixteen-inch waist. I still have a six-teen-inch waist."

One of Brandy's hands opens to full flower and slides over the flat land where her blouse tucks into the belt of her skirt. "They cut out two of my ribs, and I never saw them again," Brandy says. "There's something in the Bible about taking out your ribs."

The creation of Eve.

Brandy says, "I don't know why I let them do that to me."

And Brandy, she's asleep.

Jump back to the night Brandy and I started this road trip, the night we left the Congress Hotel with Brandy driving the way you can only drive at two-thirty AM in an open sports car with a loaded rifle and an overdosed hostage. Brandy hides her eyes behind Ray- Bans so she can drive in a little privacy. Instant glamour from another planet in the 1950s, Brandy pulls an Hermes scarf over her auburn hair and ties it under her chin.

All I can see is myself reflected in Brandy's Ray-Bans, tiny and horrible. Still strung out and pulled apart by the cold night air around the windshield. Bathrobe still dragging shut in the car door. My face, you touch my blasted, scar-tissue face and you'd swear you were touching chunks of orange peel and leather.

Driving east, I'm not sure what we're running from. Evie or the police or Mr. Baxter or the Rhea sisters. Or nobody. Or the future. Fate. Growing up, getting old. Picking up the pieces. As if by running we won't have to get on with our lives. I'm with Brandy right now because I can't imagine getting away with this without Brandy's help. Because, right now, I need her.

Not that I really love her. Him. Shane.

Already the word love is sounding pretty thin.

Hermes scarf on her head, Ray-Bans on her head, makeup on her face, I look at the queen supreme in the pulse- pulse, then pulse-pulse, then pulse-pulse of oncoming headlights. What I see when I look at Brandy, this is what Manus saw when he took me sailing.

Right now, looking at flashes of Brandy beside me in Manus's car, I know what it is I loved about her. What I love is myself. Brandy Alexander just looks exactly the way I looked before the accident. Why wouldn't she? She's my brother, Shane. Shane and I were almost the same height, born one year apart. The same coloring. The same features. The same hair, only Brandy's hair is in better shape.

Add to this her lipo, her silicone, her trachea shave, her brow shave, her scalp advance, her forehead realignment, her rhino contouring to smooth her nose, her maxomil-liary operations to shape her jaw. Add to all that years of electrolysis and a handful of hormones and antiandrogens every day, and it's no wonder I didn't recognize her.

Plus the idea my brother's been dead for years. You just don't expect to meet dead people.

What I love is myself. I was so beautiful.

My love cargo, Manus LockedInTheTrunk, Manus TryingToKillMe, how can I keep thinking I love Manus? Manus is just the last man who thought I was beautiful. Who kissed me on the lips. Who touched me. Manus is just the last man who ever told me he loved me.

You count down the facts and it's so depressing.

I can only eat baby food.

My best friend screwed my fiance.

My fiance almost stabbed me to death.

I've set fire to a house and been pointing a rifle at innocent people all night.

My brother I hate has come back from the dead to upstage me.

I'm an invisible monster, and I'm incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which is worse. Jump to me wetting a washcloth in the vanity sink. In the undersea bathroom grotto even the towels and washcloths are aqua and blue, with a scalloped shell motif along the hems. I put the cold, wet washcloth on Brandy's forehead and wake her up, so's she can take more pills. Die in the car instead of this bathroom.

I haul Brandy to her feet and stuff the princess back into her suit jacket.

We have to walk her around before anybody sees her this way.

I strap her high heels back on her feet. Brandy, she leans on me. She leans on the edge of the countertop. She picks up a handful of Bilax capsules and squints down at them.

"My back is killing me," Brandy says. " Why'd I ever let them give me such big tits?"

The queen supreme looks ready to swallow a handful of anything.

I shake my head, No.

Brandy squints at me, "But I need these."

In the Physicians' Desk Reference, I show her Bilax, bowel evacuant.

"Oh," Brandy turns her hand over to spill the Bilax into her purse, and some capsules fall but some stick to the sweat on her palm. "After they give you the tits, your nipples are cockeyed and way too high," she says, "they use a razor to shave the nipples off, and they relocate them.”

That's her word.

Relocate.

The Brandy Alexander Nipple Relocation Program.

My dead brother, the late Shane, shakes the last bowel evacuant off her damp palm. Rrandy says, "I have no sensation in my nipples."

Off the counter, I get my veils and put layer after layer over my head.

Thank you for not sharing.

We walk up and down the second floor hallways until Rrandy says she's ready for the stairs. Step at a time, quiet, we go down to the foyer. Across the foyer, through the double doors closed on the drawing room, you can hear Mr. Parker's deep voice saying something soft, over and over.

Brandy leaning on me, we tiptoe a slow three-legged race across the foyer, from the foot of the stairs to the drawing room doors. We crack the doors open some inches and poke our faces through the crack.

Ellis is laid out on the drawing room carpet.

Mr. Parker is sitting on Ellis's chest with a size seventeen wingtip planted on each side of Ellis's head.

Ellis's hands slap Parker's big ass, claw at the back of the double-breasted jacket. The single vent in Mr. Parker's jacket is torn open along the seam up the middle of his back to his collar.

Mr. Parker's hands, the heel of one hand crams a soggy, gnawed eel-skin wallet between Ellis's capped teeth.

Ellis's face is dark red and shining the way you'd look if you got the cherry pie in the pie eating contest. A runny finger painting mess of nosebleed and tears, snot and drool.

Mr. Parker, his hair is fallen over his eyes. His other hand is a fist around five inches of Ellis's pulled out-tongue.

Ellis's slapping and gagging between Mr. Parker's thick legs.

Broken Ming vases and other collectibles are all around them on the floor.

Mr. Parker says, "That's right. Just do that. That's nice. Just relax."

Brandy and me, watching.

Me wanting Ellis destroyed, this is all just too perfect to spoil.

I tug on Brandy. Brandy, honey. We better walk you back upstairs. Rest you some more. Give you a nice fresh handful of Benzedrine spansules.

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.