Chapter 20

   Fast forward, fly back home to Marla and the Paper Street Soap Company.
   Everything is still falling apart.
   At home, I’m too scared to look in the fridge. Picture dozens of little plastic sandwich bags labeled with cities like Las Vegas and Chicago and Milwaukee where Tyler had to make good his threats to protect chapters of fight club. Inside each bag would be a pair of messy tidbits, frozen solid.
   In one corner of the kitchen, a space monkey squats on the cracked linoleum and studies himself in a hand mirror. “I am the all-singing, all-dancing crap of this world,” the space monkey tells the mirror. “I am the toxic waste byproduct of God’s creation.”
   Other space monkeys move around in the garden, picking things, killing things.
   With one hand on the freezer door, I take a big breath and try to center my enlightened spiritual entity.
   Raindrops on roses
   Happy Disney animals
   This makes my parts hurt
   The freezer’s open an inch when Marla peers over my shoulder and says, “What’s for dinner?”
   The space monkey looks at himself squatting in his hand mirror. “I am the shit and infectious human waste of creation.”
   Full circle.
   About a month ago, I was afraid to let Marla look in the fridge. Now I’m afraid to look in the fridge myself.
   Oh, God. Tyler.
   Marla loves me. Marla doesn’t know the difference.
   “I’m glad you’re back,” Marla says. “We have to talk.”
   Oh, yeah, I say. We have to talk.
   I can’t bring myself to open the freezer.
   I am Joe’s Shrinking Groin.
   I tell Marla, don’t touch anything in this freezer. Don’t even open it. If you ever find anything inside it, don’t eat them or feed them to a cat or anything. The space monkey with the hand mirror is eyeing us so I tell Marla we have to leave. We need to be someplace else to have this talk.
   Down the basement stairs, one space monkey is reading to the other space monkeys. “The three ways to make napalm:
   “One, you can mix equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate,” the space monkey in the basement reads. “Two, you can mix equal parts of gasoline and diet cola. Three, you can dissolve crumbled cat litter in gasoline until the mixture is thick.”
   Marla and I, we mass-transit from the Paper Street Soap Company to a window booth at the planet Denny’s, the orange planet.
   This was something Tyler talked about, how since England did all the exploration and built colonies and made maps, most of the places in geography have those secondhand sort of English names. The English got to name everything. Or almost everything.
   Like, Ireland.
   New London, Australia.
   New London, India.
   New London, Idaho.
   New York, New York.
   Fast-forward to the future.
   This way, when deep-space exploitation ramps up, it will probably be the megatonic corporations that discover all the new planets and map them.
   The IBM Stellar Sphere.
   The Philip Morris Galaxy.
   Planet Denny’s.
   Every planet will take on the corporate identity of whoever rapes it first.
   Budweiser World.
   Our waiter has a big goose egg on his forehead and stands ramrod straight, heels together. “Sir!” our waiter says. “Would you like to order now? Sir!” he says. “Anything you order is free of charge. Sir!”
   You can imagine you smell urine in everybody’s soup.
   Two coffees, please.
   Marla asks, “Why is he giving us free food?”
   The waiter thinks I’m Tyler Durden, I say.
   In that case, Marla orders fried clams and clam chowder and a fish basket and fried chicken and a baked potato with everything and a chocolate chiffon pie.
   Through the pass-through window into the kitchen, three line cooks, one with stitches along his upper lip, are watching Marla and me and whispering with their three bruised heads together. I tell the waiter, give us clean food, please. Please, don’t be doing any trash to the stuff we order.
   “In that case, sir,” our waiter says, “may I advise against the lady, here, eating the clam chowder.”
   Thank you. No clam chowder. Marla looks at me, and I tell her, trust me.
   The waiter turns on his heel and marches our order back to the kitchen.
   Through the kitchen pass-through window, the three line cooks give me the thumbs-up.
   Marla says, “You get some nice perks, being Tyler Durden.”
   From now on, I tell Marla, she has to follow me everywhere at night, and write down everywhere I go. Who do I see. Do I castrate anyone important. That sort of detail.
   I take out my wallet and show Marla my driver’s license with my real name.
   Not Tyler Durden.
   “But everyone knows you’re Tyler Durden,” Marla says.
   Everyone but me.
   Nobody at work calls me Tyler Durden. My boss calls me by my real name.
   My parents know who I really am.
   “So why,” Marla asks, “are you Tyler Durden to some people but not to everybody?”
   The first time I met Tyler, I was asleep.
   I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn’t see any way to change things.
   Only end them.
   I felt trapped.
   I was too complete.
   I was too perfect.
   I wanted a way out of my tiny life. Single-serving butter and cramped airline seat role in the world.
   Swedish furniture.
   Clever art.
   I took a vacation. I fell asleep on the beach, and when I woke up there was Tyler Durden, naked and sweating, gritty with sand, his hair wet and stringy, hanging in his face.
   Tyler was pulling driftwood logs out of the surf and dragging them up the beach.
   What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand, and Tyler was sitting in the palm of a perfection he’d made himself.
   And a moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
   Maybe I never really woke up on that beach.
   Maybe all this started when I peed on the Blarney stone.
   When I fall asleep, I don’t really sleep.
   At other tables in the Planet Denny’s, I count one, two, three, four, five guys with black cheekbones or folded-down noses smiling at me.
   “No,” Marla says, “you don’t sleep.”
   Tyler Durden is a separate personality I’ve created, and now he’s threatening to take over my real life.
   “Just like Tony Perkins’ mother in Psycho,” Marla says. “This is so cool. Everybody has their little quirks. One time, I dated a guy who couldn’t get enough body piercings.”
   My point being, I say, I fall asleep and Tyler is running off with my body and punched-out face to commit some crime. The next morning, I wake up bone tired and beat up, and I’m sure I haven’t slept at all.
   The next night, I’d go to bed earlier.
   That next night, Tyler would be in charge a little longer.
   Every night that I go to bed earlier and earlier, Tyler will be in charge longer and longer.
   “But you are Tyler,” Marla says.
   No.
   No, I’m not.
   I love everything about Tyler Durden, his courage and his smarts. His nerve. Tyler is funny and charming and forceful and independent, and men look up to him and expect him to change their world. Tyler is capable and free, and I am not.
   I’m not Tyler Durden.
   “But you are, Tyler,” Marla says.
   Tyler and I share the same body, and until now, I didn’t know it. Whenever Tyler was having sex with Marla, I was asleep. Tyler was walking and talking while I thought I was asleep.
   Everyone in fight club and Project Mayhem knew me as Tyler Durden.
   And if I went to bed earlier every night and I slept later every morning, eventually I’d be gone altogether.
   I’d just go to sleep and never wake up.
   Marla says, “Just like the animals at the Animal Control place.”
   Valley of the Dogs. Where even if they don’t kill you, if someone loves you enough to take you home, they still castrate you.
   I would never wake up, and Tyler would take over.
   The waiter brings the coffee and clicks his heels and leaves.
   I smell my coffee. It smells like coffee.
   “So,” Marla says, “even if I did believe all this, what do you want from me?”
   So Tyler can’t take complete control, I need Marla to keep me awake. All the time.
   Full circle.
   The night Tyler saved her life, Marla asked him to keep her awake all night.
   The second I fall asleep, Tyler takes over and something terrible will happen.
   And if I do fall asleep, Marla has to keep track of Tyler. Where he goes. What he does. So maybe during the day, I can rush around and undo the damage.

Chapter 21

   His name is Robert Paulson and he is forty-eight years old. His name is Robert Paulson, and Robert Paulson will be forty-eight years old, forever.
   On a long enough time line, everyone’s survival rate drops to zero.
   Big Bob.
   The big cheesebread. The big moosie was on a regulation chill-and-drill homework assignment. This was how Tyler got into my condominium to blow it up with homemade dynamite. You take a spray canister of refrigerant, R-12 if you can still get it, what with the ozone hole and everything, or R-134a, and you spray it into the lock cylinder until the works are frozen.
   On a chill-and-drill assignment, you spray the lock on a pay telephone or a parking meter or a newspaper box. Then you use a hammer and a cold chisel to shatter the frozen lock cylinder.
   On a regulation drill-and-fill homework assignment, you drill the phone or the automatic bank teller machine, then you screw a lube fitting into the hole and use a grease gun to pump your target full of axle grease or vanilla pudding or plastic cement.
   It’s not that Project Mayhem needed to steal a handful of change. The Paper Street Soap Company was backlogged on filling orders. God help us when the holidays came around. Homework is to build your nerve. You need some cunning. Build your investment in Project Mayhem.
   Instead of a cold chisel, you can use an electric drill on the frozen lock cylinder. This works just as well and it’s more quiet.
   It was a cordless electric drill that the police thought was a gun when they blew Big Bob away.
   There was nothing to tie Big Bob to Project Mayhem or fight club or the soap.
   In his pocket was a wallet photo of himself huge and naked at first glance in a posing strap at some contest. It’s a stupid way to live, Bob said. You’re blind from the stage lights, and deaf from the feedback rush of the sound system until the judge will order, extend your right quad, flex and hold.
   Put your hands where we can see them.
   Extend your left arm, flex the bicep and hold.
   Freeze.
   Drop the weapon.
   This was better than real life.
   On his hand was a scar from my kiss. From Tyler’s kiss. Big Bob’s sculpted hair had been shaved off and his fingerprints had been burned off with lye. And it was better to get hurt than get arrested, because if you were arrested, you were off Project Mayhem, no more homework assignments.
   One minute, Robert Paulson was the warm center that the life of the world crowded around, and the next moment, Robert Paulson was an object. After the police shot, the amazing miracle of death.
   In every fight club, tonight, the chapter leader walks around in the darkness outside the crowd of men who stare at each other across the empty center of every fight club basement, and this voice yells:
   “His name is Robert Paulson.”
   And the crowd yells, “His name is Robert Paulson.”
   The leaders yell, “He is forty-eight years old.”
   And the crowd yells, “He is forty-eight years old.”
   He is forty-eight years old, and he was part of fight club.
   He is forty-eight years old, and he was part of Project Mayhem.
   Only in death will we have our own names since only in death are we no longer part of the effort. In death we become heroes.
   And the crowds yell, “Robert Paulson.”
   And the crowds yell, “Robert Paulson.”
   And the crowds yell, “Robert Paulson.”
   I go to fight club tonight to shut it down. I stand in the one light at the center of the room, and the club cheers. To everyone here, I’m Tyler Durden. Smart. Forceful. Gutsy. I hold up my hands for silence, and I suggest, why don’t we all just call it a night. Go home, tonight, and forget about fight club.
   I think fight club has served its purpose, don’t you?
   Project Mayhem is canceled.
   I hear there’s a good football game on television …
   One hundred men just stare at me.
   A man is dead, I say. This game is over. It’s not for fun anymore. Then, from the darkness outside the crowd comes the anonymous voice of the chapter leader: “The first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.”
   I yell, go home!
   “The second rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.”
   Fight club is canceled! Project Mayhem is canceled.
   “The third rule is only two guys to a fight.”
   I am Tyler Durden, I yell. And I’m ordering you to get out!
   And no one’s looking at me. The men just stare at each other across the center of the room.
   The voice of the chapter leader goes slowly around the room. Two men to a fight. No shirts. No shoes.
   The fight goes on and on and on as long as it has to.
   Picture this happening in a hundred cities, in a half-dozen languages.
   The rules end, and I’m still standing in the center of the light.
   “Registered fight number one, take the floor,” yells the voice out of the darkness. “Clear the center of the club.”
   I don’t move.
   “Clear the center of the club!”
   I don’t move.
   The one light reflects out of the darkness in one hundred pairs of eyes, all of them focused on me, waiting. I try to see each man the way Tyler would see him. Choose the best fighters for training in Project Mayhem. Which ones would Tyler invite to work at the Paper Street Soap Company?
   “Clear the center of the club!” This is established fight club procedure. After three requests from the chapter leader, I will be ejected from the club.
   But I’m Tyler Durden. I invented fight club. Fight club is mine. I wrote those rules. None of you would be here if it wasn’t for me. And I say it stops here!
   “Prepare to evict the member in three, two, one.”
   The circle of men collapses in on top of me, and two hundred hands clamp around every inch of my arms and legs and I’m lifted spreadeagle toward the light.
   Prepare to evacuate soul in five, in four, three, two, one.
   And I’m passed overhead, hand to hand, crowd surfing toward the door. I’m floating. I’m flying.
   I’m yelling, fight club is mine. Project Mayhem was my idea. You can’t throw me out. I’m in control here. Go home.
   The voice of the chapter leader yells, “Registered fight number one, please take the center of the floor. Now!”
   I’m not leaving. I’m not giving up. I can beat this. I’m in control here.
   “Evict fight club member, now!”
   Evacuate soul, now.
   And I fly slowly out the door and into the night with the stars overhead and the cold air, and I settle to the parking lot concrete. All the hands retreat, and a door shuts behind me, and a bolt snaps it locked. In a hundred cities, fight club goes on without me.
   For years now I’ve wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.
   I’m with Marla in room 8G at the Reagent Hotel. With all the old people and junkies shut up in their little rooms, here, somehow, my pacing desperation seems sort of norms and expected.
   “Here,” Marla says while she’s sitting cross-legged on her bed and punching a half-dozen wake-up pills out of their plastic blister cart “I used to date a guy who had terrible nightmares. He hated to sleep too.”
   What happened to the guy she was dating?
   “Oh, he died. Heart attack. Overdose. Way too many amphetamines,” Marls says. “He was only nineteen.”
   Thanks for sharing.
   When we walked into the hotel, the guy at the lobby desk had half his hair torn out at the roots. His scalp raw and scabbed, he saluted me. The seniors watching television in the lobby all turned to see who I was when the guy at the desk called me sir.
   “Good evening, sir.”
   Right now, I can imagine him calling some Project Mayhem headquarters and reporting my whereabouts. They’ll have a wall map of the city and trace my movements with little pushpins. I feel tagged like a migrating goose on Wild Kingdom.
   They’re all spying on me, keeping tabs.
   “You can take all six of these and not get sick to your stomach,” Marla says, “but you have to take them by putting them up your butt.”
   Oh, this is pleasant.
   Marla says, “I’m not making this up. We can get something stronger, later. Some real drugs like cross tops or black beauties or alligators.”
   I’m not putting these pills up my ass.
   “Then only take two.”
   Where are we going to go?
   “Bowling. It’s open all night, and they won’t let you sleep there.”
   Everywhere we go, I say, guys on the street think I’m Tyler Durden.
   “Is that why the bus driver let us ride for free?”
   Yeah. And that’s why the two guys on the bus gave us their seats.
   “So what’s your point?”
   I don’t think it’s enough to just hide out. We have to do something to get rid of Tyler.
   “I dated a guy once who liked to wear my clothes,” Marla says. “You know, dresses. Hats with veils. We could dress you up and sneak you around.”
   I’m not cross-dressing, and I’m not putting pills up my ass.
   “It gets worse,” Marla says. “I dated a guy, once, who wanted me to fake a lesbian scene with his blow-up doll.”
   I could imagine myself becoming one of Marla’s stories.
   I dated a guy once who was a split personality
   “I dated this other guy who used one of those penis enlargement systems.”
   I ask what time is it?
   “Four A.M.”
   In another three hours, I have to be at work.
   “Take your pills,” Marla says. “You being Tyler Durden and all, they’ll probably let us bowl for free. Hey, before we get rid of Tyler, can we go shopping? We could get a nice car. Some clothes. Some CDs. There is an upside to all this free stuff”
   Marla.
   “Okay, forget it.”

Chapter 22

   That old saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.
   And it does work both ways.
   This morning I went to work and there were police barricades between the building and the parking lot with the police at the front doors, taking statements from the people I work with. Everybody milling around.
   I didn’t even get off the bus.
   I am Joe’s Cold Sweat.
   From the bus, I can see the floor-to-ceiling windows on the third floor of my office building are blown out, and inside a fireman in a dirty yellow slicker is whacking at a burnt panel in the suspended ceiling. A smoldering desk inches out the broken window, pushed by two firemen, then the desk tilts and slides and falls the quick three stories to the sidewalk and lands with more of a feeling than a sound.
   Breaks open and it’s still smoking.’
   I am the Pit of Joe’s Stomach.
   It’s my desk.
   I know my boss is dead.
   The three ways to make napalm. I knew Tyler was going to kill my boss. The second I smelled gasoline on my hands, when I said I wanted out of my job, I was giving him permission. Be my guest.
   Kill my boss.
   Oh, Tyler.
   I know a computer blew up.
   I know this because Tyler knows this.
   I don’t want to know this, but you use a jeweler’s drill to drill a hole through the top of a computer monitor. All the space monkeys know this. I typed up Tyler’s notes. This is a new version of the lightbulb bomb, where you drill a hole in a lightbulb and fill the bulb with gasoline. Plug the hole with wax or silicone, then screw the bulb into a socket and let someone walk into the room and throw the switch.
   A computer tube can hold a lot more gasoline than a lightbulb.
   A cathode ray tube, CRT, you either remove the plastic housing around the tube, this is easy enough, or you work through the vent panels in the top of the housing.
   First you have to unplug the monitor from the power source and from the computer.
   This would also work with a television.
   Just understand, if there’s a spark, even static electricity from the carpet, you’re dead. Screaming, burned-alive dead.
   A cathode ray tube can hold 300 volts of passive electrical storage, so use a hefty screwdriver across the main power supply capacitor, first. If you’re dead at this point, you didn’t use an insulated screwdriver.
   There’s a vacuum inside the cathode ray tube so the moment you drill through, the tube will suck air, sort of inhale a little whistle of it.
   Ream the little hole with a larger bit, then a larger bit, until you can put the tip of a funnel into the hole. Then, fill the tube with your choice of explosive. Homemade napalm is good. Gasoline or gasoline mixed with frozen orange juice concentrate or cat litter.
   A sort of fun explosive is potassium permanganate mixed with powdered sugar. The idea is to mix one ingredient that will burn very fast with a second ingredient that will supply enough oxygen for that burning. This burns so fast, it’s an explosion.
   Barium peroxide and zinc dust.
   Ammonium nitrate and powdered aluminum.
   The nouvelle cuisine of anarchy.
   Barium nitrate in a sauce of sulfur and garnished with charcoal. That’s your basic gunpowder.
   Bon appetit.
   Pack the computer monitor full of this, and when someone turns on the power, this is five or six pounds of gunpowder exploding in their face.
   The problem is, I sort of liked my boss.
   If you’re male, and you’re Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And sometimes you find your father in your career.
   Except Tyler didn’t like my boss.
   The police would be looking for me. I was the last person out of the building last Friday night. I woke up at my desk with my breath condensed on the desktop and Tyler on the telephone, telling me, “Go outside. We have a car.”
   We have a Cadillac.
   The gasoline was still on my hands.
   The fight club mechanic asked, what will you wish you’d done before you died?
   I wanted out of my job. I was giving Tyler permission. Be my guest. Kill my boss.
   From my exploded office, I ride the bus to the gravel turnaround point at the end of the line. This is where the subdivisions peter out to vacant lots and plowed fields. The driver takes out a sack lunch and a thermos and watches me in his overhead mirror.
   I’m trying to figure where I can go that the cops won’t be looking for me. From the back of the bus, I can see maybe twenty people sitting between me and the driver. I count the backs of twenty heads.
   Twenty shaved heads.
   The driver twists around in his seat and calls to me in the back seat, “Mr. Durden, sir, I really admire what you’re doing.”
   I’ve never seen him before.
   “You have to forgive me for this,” the driver says. “The committee says this is your own idea sir.”
   The shaved heads turn around one after another. Then one by one they stand. One’s got a rag in his hand, and you can smell the ether. The closest one has a hunting knife. The one with the knife is the fight club mechanic.
   “You’re a brave man,” the bus driver says, “to make yourself a homework assignment.”
   The mechanic tells the bus driver, “Shut up,” and “The lookout doesn’t say shit.”
   You know one of the space monkeys has a rubber band to wrap around your nuts. They fill up the front of the bus.
   The mechanic says, “You know the drill, Mr. Durden. You said it yourself. You said, if anyone ever tries to shut down the club, even you, then we have to get him by the nuts.”
   Gonads.
   Jewels.
   Testes.
   Huevos.
   Picture the best part of yourself frozen in a sandwich bag at the Paper Street Soap Company.
   “You know it’s useless to fight us,” the mechanic says.
   The bus driver chews his sandwich and watches us in the overhead mirror.
   A police siren wails, coming closer. A tractor rattles across a field in the distance. Birds. A window in the back of the bus is half open. Clouds. Weeds grow at the edge of the gravel turnaround. Bees or flies buzz around the weeds.
   “We’re just after a little collateral,” the fight club mechanic says. “This isn’t just a threat, this time, Mr. Durden. This time, we have to cut them.”
   The bus driver says, “It’s cops.”
   The siren arrives somewhere at the front of the bus.
   So what do I have to fight back with?
   A police car pulls up to the bus, lights flashing blue and red through the bus windshield, and someone outside the bus is shouting, “Hold up in there.”
   And I’m saved.
   Sort of.
   I can tell the cops about Tyler. I’ll tell them everything about fight club, and maybe I’ll go to jail, and then Project Mayhem will be their problem to solve, and I won’t be staring down a knife.
   The cops come up the bus steps, the first cop saying, “You cut him yet?”
   The second cop says, “Do it quick, there’s a warrant out for his arrest.”
   Then he takes off his hat, and to me he says, “Nothing personal, Mr. Durden. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”
   I say, you all are making a big mistake.
   The mechanic says, “You told us you’d probably say that.”
   I’m not Tyler Durden.
   “You told us you’d say that, too.”
   I’m changing the rules. You can still have fight club, but we’re not going to castrate anyone, anymore.
   “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the mechanic says. He’s halfway down the aisle holding the knife out in front of him. “You said you would definitely say that.”
   Okay so I’m Tyler Durden. I am. I’m Tyler Durden, and I dictate the rules, and I say, put the knife down.
   The mechanic calls back over his shoulder, “What’s our best time to date for a cut-and-run?”
   Somebody yells, “Four minutes.”
   The mechanic yells, “Is somebody timing this?”
   Both cops have climbed up into the front of the bus now, and one looks at his watch and says, “Just a sec. Wait for the second hand to get up to the twelve.”
   The cop says, “Nine.”
   “Eight.”
   “Seven.”
   I dive for the open window.
   My stomach hits the thin metal windowsill, and behind me, the fight club mechanic yells, “Mr. Durden! You’re going to fuck up the time.”
   Hanging half out the window, I claw at the black rubber sidewall of the rear tire. I grab the wheelwell trim and pull. Someone grabs my feet and pulls. I’m yelling at the little tractor in the distance, “Hey.” And “Hey.” My face swelling hot and full of blood, I’m hanging upside down. I pull myself out a little. Hands around my ankles pull me back in. My tie flops in my face. My belt buckle catches on the windowsill. The bees and the flies and weeds are inches from in front of my face, and I’m yelling, “Hey!”
   Hands are hooked in the back of my pants, tugging me in, hugging my pants and belt down over my ass.
   Somebody inside the bus yells, “One minute!”
   My shoes slip off my feet.
   My belt buckle slips inside the windowsill.
   The hands bring my legs together. The windowsill cuts hot from the sun into my stomach. My white shirt billows and drops down around my head and shoulders, my hands still gripping the wheelwell trim, me still yelling, “Hey!”
   My legs are stretched out straight and together behind me. My pants slip down my legs and are gone. The sun shines warm on my ass.
   Blood pounding in my head, my eyes bugging from the pressure, all I can see is the white shirt hanging around my face. The tractor rattles somewhere. The bees buzz. Somewhere. Everything is a million miles away. Somewhere a million miles behind me someone is yelling, “Two minutes!”
   And a hand slips between my legs and gropes for me.
   “Don’t hurt him,” someone says.
   The hands around my ankles are a million miles away. Picture them at the end of a long, long road. Guided meditation.
   Don’t picture the windowsill as a dull hot knife slitting open your belly.
   Don’t picture a team of men tug-of-warring your legs apart.
   A million miles away, a bah-zillion miles away, a rough warm hand wraps around the base of you and pulls you back, and something is holding you tight, tighter, tighter.
   A rubber band.
   You’re in Ireland.
   You’re in fight club.
   You’re at work.
   You’re anywhere but here.
   “Three minutes!”
   Somebody far far away yells, “You know the speech Mr. Durden. Don’t fuck with fight club.”
   The warm hand is cupped under you. The cold tip of the knife. An arm wraps around your chest. Therapeutic physical contact. Hug time. And the ether presses your nose and mouth, hard. Then nothing, less than nothing. Oblivion.

Chapter 23

   The exploded shell of my burned-out condo is outer space black and devastated in the night above the little lights of the city. With the windows gone, a yellow ribbon of police crime scene tape twists and swings at the edge of the fifteen-story drop.
   I wake up on the concrete subfloor. There was maple flooring once. There was art on the walls before the explosion. There was Swedish furniture. Before Tyler.
   I’m dressed. I put my hand in my pocket and feel.
   I’m whole.
   Scared but intact.
   Go to the edge of the floor, fifteen stories above the parking lot, and look at the city lights and the stars, and you’re gone.
   It’s all so beyond us.
   Up here, in the miles of night between the stars and the Earth, I feel just like one of those space animals.
   Dogs.
   Monkeys.
   Men.
   You just do your little job. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don’t really understand any of it.
   The world is going crazy. My boss is dead. My home is gone. My job is gone. And I’m responsible for it all.
   There’s nothing left.
   I’m overdrawn at the bank.
   Step over the edge.
   The police tape flutters between me and oblivion.
   Step over the edge.
   What else is there?
   Step over the edge.
   There’s Marla.
   Jump over the edge.
   There’s Marla, and she’s in the middle of everything and doesn’t know it.
   And she loves you.
   She loves Tyler.
   She doesn’t know the difference.
   Somebody has to tell her. Get out. Get out. Get out.
   Save yourself. You ride the elevator down to the lobby, and the doorman who never liked you, now he smiles at you with three teeth knocked out of his mouth and says, “Good evening, Mr. Durden. Can I get you a cab? Are you feeling alright? Do you want to use the phone?”
   You call Marla at the Regent Hotel.
   The clerk at the Regent says, “Right away, Mr. Durden.”
   Then Marla comes on the line.
   The doorman is listening over your shoulder. The clerk at the Regent is probably listening. You say, Marla, we have to talk.
   Marla says, “You can suck shit.”
   She might be in danger, you say. She deserves to know what’s going on. She has to meet you. You have to talk.
   “Where?”
   She should go to the first place we ever met. Remember. Think back.
   The white healing ball of light. The palace of seven doors.
   “Got it,” she says. “I can be there in twenty minutes.”
   Be there.
   You hang up, and the doorman says, “I can get you a cab, Mr. Durden. Free of charge to anywhere you want.”
   The fight club boys are tracking you. No, you say, it’s such a nice night, I think I’ll walk.
   It’s Saturday night, bowel cancer night in the basement of First Methodist, and Marla is there when you arrive.
   Marla Singer smoking her cigarette. Marla Singer rolling her eyes. Marla Singer with a black eye.
   You sit on the shag carpet at opposite sides of the meditation circle and try to summon up your power animal while Marla glares at you with her black eye. You close your eyes and meditate to the palace of the seven doors, and you can still feel Marla’s glare. You cradle your inner child.
   Marla glares.
   Then it’s time to hug.
   Open your eyes.
   We should all choose a partner.
   Marla crosses the room in three quick steps and slaps me hard across the face.
   Share yourself completely.
   “You fucking suck-ass piece of shit,” Marla says.
   Around us, everyone stands staring.
   Then both of Marla’s fists are beating me from every direction. “You killed someone,” she’s screaming. “I called the police and they should be here any minute.”
   I grab her wrists and say, maybe the police will come, but probably they won’t.
   Marla twists and says the police are speeding over here to hook me up to the electric chair and bake my eyes out or at least give me a lethal injection.
   This will feel just like a bee sting.
   An overdose shot of sodium phenobarbital, and then the big sleep. Valley of the Dogs style.
   Marla says she saw me kill somebody today.
   If she means my boss, I say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, the police know, everyone’s looking for me to lethally inject me, already, but it was Tyler who killed my boss.
   Tyler and I just happen to have the same fingerprints, but no one understands.
   “You can suck shit,” Marla says and pushes her punched-out black eye at me. “Just because you and your little disciples like getting beat up, you touch me ever again, and you’re dead.”
   “I saw you shoot a man tonight,” Marla says.
   No, it was a bomb, I say, and it happened this morning. Tyler drilled a computer monitor and filled it with gasoline or black powder.
   All the people with real bowel cancers are standing around watching this.
   “No,” Marla says. “I followed you to the Pressman Hotel, and you were a waiter at one of those murder mystery parties.”
   The murder mystery parties, rich people would come to the hotel for a big dinner party, and act out a sort of Agatha Christie story. Sometime between the Boudin of Gravlax and the Saddle of Venison, the lights would go out for a minute and someone would fake getting killed. It’s supposed to be a fun let’s-pretend sort of death.
   The rest of the meal, the guests would get drunk and eat their Madeira Consomme and try to find clues to who among them was a psychotic killer.
   Marla yells, “You shot the mayor’s special envoy on recycling!”
   Tyler shot the mayor’s special envoy on whatever.
   Marla says, “And you don’t even have cancer!”
   It happens that fast.
   Snap your fingers.
   Everyone’s looking.
   I yell, you don’t have cancer either!
   “He’s been coming here for two years,” Marla shouts, “and he doesn’t have anything!”
   I’m trying to save your life!
   “What? Why does my life need saving?”
   Because you’ve been following me. Because you followed me tonight, because you saw Tyler Durden kill someone, and Tyler will kill anybody who threatens Project Mayhem.
   Everybody in the room looks snapped out of their little tragedies. Their little cancer thing. Even the people on pain meds look wide-eyed and alert.
   I say to the crowd, I’m sorry. I never meant any harm. We should go. We should talk about this outside.
   Everybody goes, “No! Stay! What else?”
   I didn’t kill anybody, I say. I’m not Tyler Durden. He’s the other side of my split personality. I say, has anybody here seen the movie Sybil?
   Marla says, “So who’s going to kill me?”
   Tyler.
   “You?”
   Tyler, I say, but I can take care of Tyler. You just have to watch out for the members of Project Mayhem. Tyler might’ve given them orders to follow you or kidnap you or something.
   “Why should I believe any of this?”
   It happens that fast.
   I say, because I think I like you.
   Marla says, “Not love?”
   This is a cheesy enough moment, I say. Don’t push it.
   Everybody watching smiles.
   I have to go. I have to get out of here. I say, watch out for guys with shaved heads or guys who look beat up. Black eyes. Missing teeth. That sort of thing.
   And Marla says, “So where are you going?”
   I have to take care of Tyler Durden.

Chapter 24

   His name was Patrick Madden, and he was the mayor’s special envoy on recycling. His name was Patrick Madden, and he was an enemy of Project Mayhem.
   I walk out into the night around First Methodist, and it’s all coming back to me.
   All the things that Tyler knows are all coming back to me.
   Patrick Madden was compiling a list of bars where fight clubs met.
   All of the sudden, I know how to run a movie projector. I know how to break locks and how Tyler had rented the house on Paper Street just before he revealed himself to me at the beach.
   I know why Tyler had occurred. Tyler loved Marla. From the first night I met her, Tyler or some part of me had needed a way to be with Marla.
   Not that any of this matters. Not now. But all the details are coming back to me as I walk through the night to the closest fight club.
   There’s a fight club in the basement of the Armory Bar on Saturday nights. You can probably find it on the list Patrick Madden was compiling, poor dead Patrick Madden.
   Tonight, I go to the Armory Bar and the crowds part zipper style when I walk in. To everybody there, I am Tyler Durden the Great and Powerful. God and father.
   All around me I hear, “Good evening, sir.”
   “Welcome to fight club, sir.”
   “Thank you for joining us, sir.”
   Me, my monster face just starting to heal. The hole in my face smiling through my cheek. A frown on my real mouth.
   Because I’m Tyler Durden, and you can kiss my ass, I register to fight every guy in the club that night. Fifty fights. One fight at a time. No shoes. No shirts.
   The fights go on as long as they have to.
   And if Tyler loves Marla.
   I love Marla.
   And what happens doesn’t happen in words. I want to smother all the French beaches I’ll never see. Imagine stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around Rockefeller Center.
   The first fight I get, the guy gets me in a full nelson and rams my face, rams my cheek, rams the hole in my cheek into the concrete floor until my teeth inside snap off and plant their jagged roots into my tongue.
   Now I can remember Patrick Madden, dead on the floor, his little figurine of a wife, just a little girl with a chignon. His wife giggled and tried to pour champagne between her dead husband’s lips.
   The wife said the fake blood was too, too red. Mrs. Patrick Madden put two fingers in the blood pooled next to her husband and then put the fingers in her mouth.
   The teeth planted in my tongue, I taste the blood.
   Mrs. Patrick Madden tasted the blood.
   I remember being there on the outskirts of the murder mystery party with the space monkey waiters standing bodyguard around me. Marla in her dress with a wallpaper pattern of dark roses watched from the other side of the ballroom.
   My second fight, the guy puts a knee between my shoulder blades. The guy pulls both my arms together behind my back, and slams my chest into the concrete floor. My collarbone on one side, I hear it snap.
   I would do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa.
   Mrs. Patrick Madden held her two bloody fingers up, the blood climbing the cracks between her teeth, and the blood ran down her fingers, down her wrist, across a diamond bracelet, and to her elbow where it dripped.
   Fight number three, I wake up and it’s time for fight number three. There are no more names in fight club.
   You aren’t your name.
   You aren’t your family.
   Number three seems to know what I need and holds my head in the dark and the smother. There’s a sleeper hold that gives you just enough air to stay awake. Number three holds my head in the crook of his arm, the way he’d hold a baby or a football, in the crook of his arm, and hammers my face with the pounding molar of his clenched fist.
   Until my teeth bite through the inside of my cheek.
   Until the hole in my cheek meets the corner of my mouth, the two run together into a ragged leer that opens from under my nose to under my ear.
   Number three pounds until his fist is raw.
   Until I’m crying.
   How everything you ever love will reject you or die.
   Everything you ever create will be thrown away.
   Everything you’re proud of will end up as trash.
   I am Ozymandias, king of kings.
   One more punch and my teeth click shut on my tongue. Half of my tongue drops to the floor and gets kicked away.
   The little figurine of Mrs. Patrick Madden knelt on the floor next to the body of her husband, the rich people, the people they called friends, towering drunk around her and laughing.
   The wife, she said, “Patrick?”
   The pool of blood spreading wider and wider until it touches her skirt.
   She says, “Patrick, that’s enough, stop being dead.”
   The blood climbs the hem of her skirt, capillary action, thread to thread, climbing her skirt.
   Around me the men of Project Mayhem are screaming.
   Then Mrs. Patrick Madden is screaming.
   And in the basement of the Armory Bar, Tyler Durden slips to the floor in a warm jumble. Tyler Durden the great, who was perfect for one moment, and who said that a moment is the most you could ever expect from perfection.
   And the fight goes on and on because I want to be dead. Because only in death do we have names. Only in death are we no longer part of Project Mayhem.

Chapter 25

   Tyler’s standing there, perfectly handsome and an angel in his everything-blond way. My will to live amazes me.
   Me, I’m a bloody tissue sample dried on a bare mattress in my room at the Paper Street Soap Company.
   Everything in my room is gone.
   My mirror with a picture of my foot from when I had cancer for ten minutes. Worse than cancer. The mirror is gone. The closet door is open and my six white shirts, black pants, underwear, socks, and shoes are gone. Tyler says, “Get up.”
   Under and behind and inside everything I took for granted, something horrible has been growing.
   Everything has fallen apart.
   The space monkeys are cleared out. Everything is relocated, the liposuction fat, the bunk beds, the money, especially the money. Only the garden is left behind, and the rented house.
   Tyler says, “The last thing we have to do is your martyrdom thing. Your big death thing.”
   Not like death as a sad, downer thing, this was going to be death as a cheery, empowering thing.
   Oh, Tyler, I hurt. Just kill me here.
   “Get up.”
   Kill me, already. Kill me. Kill me. Kill me. Kill me.
   “It has to be big,” Tyler says. “Picture this: you on top of the world’s tallest building, the whole building taken over by Project Mayhem. Smoke rolling out the windows. Desks falling into the crowds on the street. A real opera of a death, that’s what you’re going to get.”
   I say, no. You’ve used me enough.
   “If you don’t cooperate, we’ll go after Marla.”
   I say, lead the way.
   “Now get the fuck out of bed,” Tyler said, “and get your ass into the fucking car.”
   So Tyler and I are up on top of the Parker-Morris Building with the gun stuck in my mouth.
   We’re down to our last ten minutes.
   The Parker-Morris Building won’t be here in ten minutes. I know this because Tyler knows this.
   The barrel of the gun pressed against the back of my throat, Tyler says, “We won’t really die.”
   I tongue the gun barrel into my surviving cheek and say, Tyler, you’re thinking of vampires.
   We’re down to our last eight minutes.
   The gun is just in case the police helicopters get here sooner.
   To God, this looks like one man alone, holding a gun in his own mouth, but it’s Tyler holding the gun, and it’s my life.
   You take a 98-percent concentration of fuming nitric acid and add the acid to three times that amount of sulfuric acid.
   You have nitroglycerin.
   Seven minutes.
   Mix the nitro with sawdust, and you have a nice plastic explosive. A lot of the space monkeys mix their nitro with cotton and add Epsom salts as a sulfate. This works, too. Some monkeys, they use paraffin mixed with nitro. Paraffin has never, ever worked for me.
   Four minutes.
   Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I’m wondering how clean this gun is.
   Three minutes.
   Then somebody yells.
   “Wait,” and it’s Marla coming toward us across the roof.
   Marla’s coming toward me, just me because Tyler’s gone. Poor. Tyler’s my hallucination, not hers. Fast as a magic trick, Tyler’s disappeared. And now I’m just one man holding a gun in my mouth.
   “We followed you,” Marla yells. “All the people from the support group. You don’t have to do this. Put the gun down.”
   Behind Marla, all the bowel cancers, the brain parasites, the melanoma people, the tuberculosis people are walking, limping, wheelchairing toward me.
   They’re saying, “Wait.”
   Their voices come to me on the cold wind, saying, “Stop.”
   And, “We can help you.”
   “Let us help you.”
   Across the sky comes the whop, whop, whop of police helicopters.
   I yell, go. Get out of here. This building is going to explode.
   Marla yells, “We know.”
   This is like a total epiphany moment for me.
   I’m not killing myself, I yell. I’m killing Tyler.
   I am Joe’s Hard Drive.
   I remember everything.
   “It’s not love or anything,” Marla shouts, “but I think I like you, too.”
   One minute.
   Marla likes Tyler.
   “No, I like you,” Marla shouts. “I know the difference.”
   And nothing.
   Nothing explodes.
   The barrel of the gun tucked in my surviving cheek, I say, Tyler, you mixed the nitro with paraffin, didn’t you.
   Paraffin never works.
   I have to do this.
   The police helicopters.
   And I pull the trigger.

Chapter 26

   In my father’s house are many mansions. Of course, when I pulled the trigger, I died.
   Liar.
   And Tyler died.
   With the police helicopters thundering toward us, and Marla and all the support group people who couldn’t save themselves, with all of them trying to save me, I had to pull the trigger.
   This was better than real life.
   And your one perfect moment won’t last forever.
   Everything in heaven is white on white.
   Faker.
   Everything in heaven is quiet, rubber-soled shoes.
   I can sleep in heaven.
   People write to me in heaven and tell me I’m remembered. That I’m their hero. I’ll get better.
   The angels here are the Old Testament kind, legions and lieutenants, a heavenly host who works in shifts, days, swing. Graveyard. They bring you your meals on a tray with a paper cup of meds. The Valley of the Dolls playset.
   I’ve met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, “Why?”
   Why did I cause so much pain?
   Didn’t I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness?
   Can’t I see how we’re all manifestations of love?
   I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong.
   We are not special.
   We are not crap or trash, either.
   We just are.
   We just are, and what happens just happens.
   And God says, “No, that’s not right.”
   Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can’t teach God anything.
   God asks me what I remember.
   I remember everything.
   The bullet out of Tyler’s gun, it tore out my other cheek to give me a jagged smile from ear to ear. Yeah, just like an angry Halloween pumpkin. Japanese demon. Dragon of Avarice.
   Marla’s still on Earth, and she writes to me. Someday, she says, they’ll bring me back.
   And if there were a telephone in Heaven, I would call Marla from Heaven and the moment she says, “Hello,” I wouldn’t hang up. I’d say, “Hi. What’s happening? Tell me every little thing.”
   But I don’t want to go back. Not yet.
   Just because.
   Because every once in a while, somebody brings me my lunch tray and my meds and he has a black eye or his forehead is swollen with stitches, and he says:
   “We miss you Mr. Durden.”
   Or somebody with a broken nose pushes a mop past me and whispers:
   “Everything’s going according to the plan.
   Whispers
   “We’re going to break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world.”
   Whispers
   “We look forward to getting you back.”

Chuck Palahniuk

Diary : A Novel

   For my grandfather,
   Joseph Tallent,
   who told me to be
   whatever I wanted.
 
   1910–2003

June 21—The Three-Quarter Moon
   TODAY, A MAN CALLED from Long Beach. He left a long message on the answering machine, mumbling and shouting, talking fast and slow, swearing and threatening to call the police, to have you arrested.
   Today is the longest day of the year—but anymore, every day is.
   The weather today is increasing concern followed by full-blown dread.
   The man calling from Long Beach, he says his bathroom is missing.

June 22
   BY THE TIME you read this, you’ll be older than you remember.
   The official name for your liver spots is hyperpigmented lentigines . The official anatomy word for a wrinkle is rhytide . Those creases in the top half of your face, the rhytides plowed across your forehead and around your eyes, this is dynamic wrinkling , also called hyperfunctional facial lines , caused by the movement of underlying muscles. Most wrinkles in the lower half of the face are static rhytides, caused by sun and gravity.
   Let’s look in the mirror. Really look at your face. Look at your eyes, your mouth.
   This is what you think you know best.
   Your skin comes in three basic layers. What you can touch is the stratum corneum, a layer of flat, dead skin cells pushed up by the new cells under them. What you feel, that greasy feeling, is your acid mantle, the coating of oil and sweat that protects you from germs and fungus. Under that is your dermis. Below the dermis is a layer of fat. Below the fat are the muscles of your face.
   Maybe you remember all this from art school, from Figure Anatomy 201. But then, maybe not.
   When you pull up your upper lip—when you show that one top tooth, the one the museum guard broke—this is your levator labii superioris muscle at work. Your sneer muscle. Let’s pretend you smell some old stale urine. Imagine your husband’s just killed himself in your family car. Imagine you have to go out and sponge his piss out of the driver’s seat. Pretend you still have to drive this stinking rusted junk pile to work, with everyone watching, everyone knowing, because it’s the only car you have.
   Does any of this ring a bell?
   When a normal person, some normal innocent person who sure as hell deserved a lot better, when she comes home from waiting tables all day and finds her husband suffocated in the family car, his bladder leaking, and she screams, this is simply her orbicularis oris stretched to the very limit.
   That deep crease from each corner of your mouth to your nose is your nasolabial fold . Sometimes called your “sneer pocket.” As you age, the little round cushion of fat inside your cheek, the official anatomy word is malar fat pad, it slides lower and lower until it comes to rest against your nasolabial fold—making your face a permanent sneer.
   This is just a little refresher course. A little step-by-step.
   Just a little brushing up. In case you don’t recognize yourself.
   Now frown. This is your triangularis muscle pulling down the corners of your orbicularis oris muscle.
   Pretend you’re a twelve-year-old girl who loved her father like crazy. You’re a little preteen girl who needs her dad more than ever before. Who counted on her father always to be there. Imagine you go to bed crying every night, your eyes clamped shut so hard they swell.
   The “orange peel” texture of your chin, these “popply” bumps are caused by your mentalis muscle. Your “pouting” muscle. Those frown lines you see every morning, getting deeper, running from each corner of your mouth down to the edge of your chin, those are called marionette lines . The wrinkles between your eyebrows, they’re glabellar furrows . The way your swollen eyelids sag down is called ptosis . Your lateral canthal rhytides, your “crow’s-feet,” are worse every day and you’re only twelve fucking years old for God’s sake.
   Don’t pretend you don’t know what this is about.
   This is your face.
   Now, smile—if you still can.
   This is your zygomatic major muscle. Each contraction pulls your flesh apart the way tiebacks hold open the drapes in your living room window. The way cables pull aside a theater curtain, your every smile is an opening night. A premiere. You unveiling yourself.
   Now, smile the way an elderly mother would when her only son kills himself. Smile and pat the hand of his wife and his preteen daughter and tell them not to worry—everything really will work out for the best. Just keep smiling and pin up your long gray hair. Go play bridge with your old lady friends. Powder your nose.
   That huge horrible wad of fat you see hanging under your chin, your jowls, getting bigger and jigglier every day, that’s submental fat. That crinkly ring of wrinkles around your neck is a platysmal band . The whole slow slide of your face, your chin and neck is caused by gravity dragging down on your superficial musculo-aponeurotic system .
   Sound familiar?
   If you’re a little confused right now, relax. Don’t worry. All you need to know is this is your face. This is what you think you know best.
   These are the three layers of your skin.
   These are the three women in your life.
   The epidermis, the dermis, and the fat.
   Your wife, your daughter, and your mother.
   If you’re reading this, welcome back to reality. This is where all that glorious, unlimited potential of your youth has led. All that unfulfilled promise. Here’s what you’ve done with your life.
   Your name is Peter Wilmot.
   All you need to understand is you turned out to be one sorry sack of shit.