"The world," Brandy says, "is your cradle and your trap."

This is after I backslid. I wrote to my hooker at the agency and asked about my chances of getting hand or foot work. Modeling watches and shoes. My hooker 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.”

In Seattle, I've been watching Brandy nap in our undersea grotto for more than one hundred and sixty years. Me, I'm sitting here with a glossy pile of brochures from surgeons showing sexual reassignment surgeries. Transitional transgender operations. Sex changes.

The color pictures show pretty much the same shot of different-quality vaginas. Camera shots focused straight into the dark vaginal introitus. Fingers with red nail polish cupped against each thigh to spread the labia. The urethral meatus soft and pink. The pubic hair clipped down to stubble on some. The vaginal depth given as six inches, eight inches, two inches. Unresected corpus spon-giosum mounding around the urethral opening on some.

The clitoris hooded, the frenulum of the clitoris, the tiny folds of skin under the hood that join the clitoris to the labia.

Bad, cheap vaginas with hair-growing scrotal skin used inside, still growing hair, choked with hair.

Picture perfect, state-of-the-art vaginas lengthened using sections of colon, self-cleaning and lubricated with its own mucosa. Sensate clitorises made by cropping and rerouting bits of the glans penis. The Cadillac of vagino-plasty. Some of these Cadillacs turn out so successful the flood of colon mucosa means wearing a maxi-pad every day.

Some are old-style vaginas where you had to stretch and dilate them every day with a plastic mold. All these brochures are souvenirs of Brandy's near future.

After we saw Mr. Parker sitting on Ellis, I helped the drug- induced dead body Brandy might as well be back upstairs and took her out of her clothes again. She coughed them back up when I tried to slip any more Darvons down her throat, so I settled her back on the bathroom floor, and when I folded her suit jacket over my arm there was something cardboard tucked in the inside pocket. The Miss Rona book. Tucked in the book is a souvenir of my own future.

Kicked back on the big ceramic snail shell, I read: Hove Seth Thomas so much I have to destroy him. I over-compensate by worshiping the queen supreme. Seth will never love me. No one will ever love me ever again.

How embarrassing.

Give me needy emotional whining bullshit.

Flash.

Give me self-absorbed egocentric twaddle.

Christ.

Fuck me. I'm so tired of being me. Me beautiful. Me ugly. Blonde. Brunette. A million fucking fashion makeovers that only leave me trapped being me.

Who I was before the accident is just a story now. Everything before now, before now, before now, is just a story I carry around. I guess that would apply to anybody in the world. What I need is a new story about who I am.

What I need to do is fuck up so bad I can't save myself.

So this is life in the Brandy Alexander Witness Reincarnation Project.

In Santa Barbara, Manus who was Denver taught us how to get drugs. The three of us were squeezed into that Fiat Spider from Portland to Santa Barbara, and Brandy just wanted to die. All the time, holding both hands pressed on her lower back, Brandy kept saying, "Stop the car. I got to stretch. I am spaz-am-ing. We have to stop."

It took us two days to drive from Oregon to California, and the two states are right next door to each other. Manus being all the time looking at Brandy, listening to her, in love with her so obvious I only wanted to kill them in worse and more painful ways.

In Santa Barbara, we're just into town when Brandy wants to get out arid walk a little. Trouble is, this is a really good neighborhood in California. Right up in the hills over Santa Barbara. You walk around up here, the police or some private security patrol cruises you and wants to know who you are and see some I.D., please.

Still, Brandy, she's spasming again, and the hysterical princess has one leg over the door, half climbed out of the Spider before Denver Omelet will even stop. What Brandy wants are the Tylox capsules she left in Suite 15-G at the Congress Hotel.

"You can't be beautiful," Brandy says about a thousand times, "until you feel beautiful."

Up here in the hills, we pull up curbside to an OPEN HOUSE sign. The house looking down on us is a big hacienda, Spanish enough to make you want to dance the flamenco on a table, swing on a wrought-iron chandelier, wear a sombrero and a bandoleer.

"Here," Denver says to her. "Get yourselves pretty, and I'll show you how we can scam some prescription painkillers."

Jump back to the three days we hid out in Denver's apartment until we could get some cash together. Brandy, she's cooked up some new plan. Before she goes under the knife she's decided to find her sister.

The me who wants to dance on her grave.

"A vaginoplasty is pretty much forever," she says. "It can wait while I figure some things out."

She's decided to find her sister and tell her everything, about the gonorrhea, about why Shane's not dead, what happened, everything. Make a clean break of it. Probably she'd be surprised how much her sister already knows.

I just want to be out of town in case a felony arson arrest warrant is in the pipeline, so I threaten Denver, if he won't come with us, I'll run to the police and accuse him. Of arson, of kidnapping, of attempted murder. To Evie, I mail a letter.

To Brandy, I write:

let's drive around some, see what happens, chill.

This seems a little labor intensive, but we've all got something to run from. And when I say we, I mean everybody in the world. So Brandy thinks we're on tour to find her sister, and Denver's come along by blackmail. My letter to Evie's sitting in her mailbox at the end of her driveway leading up to her burned-up ruins of a house. Evie's in Cancun, maybe.

The letter to Evie says:

To Miss Evelyn Cottrell,