She leans in close, "It was more difficult than you'd ever imagine, trying to settle her down. You know, she burned down the last house we bought her."

Beside the social secretary, there's a stack of gold-engraved wedding invitations. These are the regrets. Sorry, but we can't make it.

There seem to be a lot of regrets. Nice invitations, though, gold engraved, hand-torn edges, a three-fold card with a dried violet inside. I steal one of the regrets, and I catch up with the realty Cottrell woman and Brandy and Ellis.

"No," Brandy's saying, "there are too many people around. We couldn't view the house under these conditions."

"Between you and me," says the realty Cottrell, "The biggest wedding in the world is worth the cost if we can shove Evie off onto some poor man."

Brandy says, "We don't want to keep you."

"But, then," the Cottrell woman says, "there's this subgroup of 'men' who like their 'women' the way Evie is now."

Brandy says, "We really must be going."

And Ellis says, "Men who like insane women?"

"Why, it plum broke our hearts the day Evan came to us. Sixteen years old, and he says 'Mommy, Daddy, I want to be a girl'," says Mrs. Cottrell.

"But we paid for it," she says. "A tax deduction is a tax deduction. Evan wanted to be a world-famous fashion model, he told us. He started calling himself Evie, and I canceled my subscription to Vogue the next day. I felt it had done enough damage to my family."

Brandy says, "Well, congratulations," and starts tugging me toward the front door.

And Ellis says, "Evie was a man? "

Evie was a man. And I just have to sit down. Evie was a man. And I saw her implant scars. Evie was a man. And I saw her naked in fitting rooms.

Give me a complete late-stage revision of my adult life.

Flash.

Give me anything in this whole fucking world that is exactly what it looks like!

Flash!

Evie's mother looks hard at Brandy, "Have you ever done any modeling?" she says. "You look so much like a friend of my son's."

"Your daughter," Brandy growls.

And I finger the invitation I stole. The wedding, the union of Miss Evelyn Cottrell and Mr. Allen Skinner, is tomorrow. At eleven ante meridiem, according to the gold engraving. To be followed by a reception at the bride's home.

To be followed by a house fire.

To be followed by a murder.

Dress formal.

My dress I carry my ass around Evie's wedding in is tighter than skin tight. It's what you'd call bone tight. It's that knockoff print of the Shroud of Turin, most of it brown and white, draped and cut so the shiny red buttons all button through the stigmata. Then I'm wearing yards and yards of black silk gloves bunched up on my arms. My heels are nosebleed high. I wrap Brandy's half mile of black tulle studded with sparkle up around my scar tissue, over the shining cherry pie where my face used to be, wrapped tight, until only my eyes are out. It's a look that's bleak and morbid. The feeling is we've got a little out of control.

It takes more effort to hate Evie than it used to. My whole life is moving farther away from any reason to hate her. It's moving far away from reason itself. It takes a cup of coffee and a Dexedrine capsule to feel even vaguely pissed about anything.

Brandy, she wears the knock-off Bob Mackie suit with the little peplum skirt and the big, I don't know, and the thin, narrow I couldn't care less. She wears a hat, since it's a wedding, after all. Got some shoes on her feet made from the skin of some animal. Accessorized including jewelry, you know, stones dug out of the earth, polished and cut to reflect light, set in alloys of gold and copper, atomic weight, melted and beat with hammers, all of it so labor intensive. Meaning, all of Brandy Alexander.

Ellis, he wears a double-breasted, whatever, a suit, a single vent in the back, black. He looks the way you'd imagine yourself dead in a casket if you're a guy, not a problem for me, since Ellis has outlived his role in my life.

Ellis's strutting around now that he's proved he can seduce something in every category. Not that knobbing Mr. Parker makes him King of Fag Town, but now he's got Evie under his belt, and maybe enough time's gone by Ellis can go back on duty, get his old beat back in Washington Park.

So we take the gold-engraved wedding invitation that I stole, Brandy and Ellis each take a Percodan, and we go to Evie's wedding reception moment.

Jump to eleven o'clock ante meridiem at the baronial West Hills manor house of crazy Evie Cottrell, gun-happy Evie, newly united Mrs. Evelyn Cottrell Skinner, as if I could care at this point. And. This is oh so dazzling. Evie, she could be the wedding cake, in tier on tier of sashes and flowers rising around her big hoop skirt, up and up to her cinched waist, then her big Texas breasts popped out the top of a strapless bodice. There's so much of her to decorate, the same as Christmas at a shopping mall. Silk flowers are bunched at one side of her waist. Silk flowers over both ears anchor a veil thrown back over her blonde on blonde sprayed-up hair. In that hoop skirt and those pushed-up Texas grapefruit, the girl walks around riding her own parade float.

Full of Champagne and Percodan interactions, Brandy is looking at me.

And I'm amazed I never saw it before, how Evie was a man. A big blonde, the same as she is here, but with one of those ugly wrinkled, you know, scrotums.

Ellis is hiding from Evie, trying to scope out if her new husband as yet another notch in his special contract vice operative resume. Ellis, how this story looks from his point of view is he's still major sport bait winning proof he can bust any man after the long fight. Everybody here thinks the whole story is about them. Definitely that goes for everybody in the world.

Oh, and this is gone way beyond sorry, Mom. Sorry,

God. At this point, I'm not sorry for anything. Or anybody.

No, really, everybody here's just itching to be cremated.

Jump to upstairs. In the master bedroom, Evie's trousseau is laid out ready to be packed. I brought my own matches this time, and I light the hand-torn edge of the gold-engraved invitation, and I carry the invitation from the bedspread to the trousseau to the curtains. It's the sweetest of moments when the fire takes control, and you're no longer responsible for anything.

I take a big bottle of Chanel Number Five from Evie's bathroom and a big bottle of Joy and a big bottle of White Shoulders, and I slosh the smell of a million parade float flowers all over the bedroom.

The fire, Evie's wedding inferno finds the trail of flowers in alcohol and chases me out into the hallway. That's what I love about fire, how it would kill me as quick as anybody else. How it can't know I'm its mother. It's so beautiful and powerful and beyond feeling anything for anybody, that's what I love about fire.

You can't stop any of this. You can't control. The fire in Evie's clothes is just more and more every second, and now the plot moves along without you pushing.

And I descend. Step-pause-step. The invisible showgirl. For once, what's happening is what I want. Even better than I expected. Nobody's noticed.

Our world is speeding straight ahead into the future. Flowers and stuffed mushrooms, wedding guests and string quartet, we're all going there together on the Planet Brandy Alexander. In the front hall, there's the Princess Princess thinking she's still in control.

The feeling is of supreme and ultimate control over all. Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.