Fight Club

Chuck Palahniuk

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26

Fight Club
by Chuck Palahniuk

Chapter 1

   Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.
   The barrel of the gun pressed against the back of my throat, Tyler says “We really won’t die.”
   With my tongue I can feel the silencer holes we drilled into the barrel of the gun. Most of the noise a gunshot makes is expanding gases, and there’s the tiny sonic boom a bullet makes because it travels so fast. To make a silencer, you just drill holes in the barrel of the gun, a lot of holes. This lets the gas escape and slows the bullet to below the speed of sound.
   You drill the holes wrong and the gun will blow off your hand.
   “This isn’t really death,” Tyler says. “We’ll be legend. We won’t grow old.”
   I tongue the barrel into my cheek and say, Tyler, you’re thinking of vampires.
   The building we’re standing on won’t be here in ten minutes. You take a 98 percent concentration of fuming nitric acid and add the acid to three times that amount of sulfuric acid. Do this in an ice bath. Then add glycerin drop-by-drop with an eye dropper. You have nitroglycerin.
   I know this because Tyler knows this.
   Mix the nitro with sawdust, and you have a nice plastic explosive. A lot of folks mix their nitro with cotton and add Epsom salts as a sulfate. This works too. Some folks, they use paraffin mixed with nitro. Paraffin has never, ever worked for me.
   So Tyler and I are on top of the Parker-Morris Building with the gun stuck in my mouth, and we hear glass breaking. Look over the edge. It’s a cloudy day, even this high up. This is the world’s tallest building, and this high up the wind is always cold. It’s so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you’re one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you’re trained to do.
   Pull a lever.
   Push a button.
   You don’t understand any of it, and then you just die.
   One hundred and ninety-one floors up, you look over the edge of the roof and the street below is mottled with a shag carpet of people, standing, looking up. The breaking glass is a window right below us. A window blows out the side of the building, and then comes a file cabinet big as a black refrigerator, right below us a six-drawer filing cabinet drops right out of the cliff face of the building, and drops turning slowly, and drops getting smaller, and drops disappearing into the packed crowd.
   Somewhere in the one hundred and ninety-one floors under us, the space monkeys in the Mischief Committee of Project Mayhem are running wild, destroying every scrap of history.
   That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways.
   With a gun stuck in your mouth and the barrel of the gun between your teeth, you can only talk in vowels.
   We’re down to our last ten minutes.
   Another window blows out of the building, and glass sprays out, sparkling flock-of-pigeons style, and then a dark wooden desk pushed by the Mischief Committee emerges inch by inch from the side of the building until the desk tilts and slides and turns end-over-end into a magic flying thing lost in the crowd.
   The Parker-Morris Building won’t be here in nine minutes. You take enough blasting gelatin and wrap the foundation columns of anything, you can topple any building in the world. You have to tamp it good and tight with sandbags so the blast goes against the column and not out into the parking garage around the column.
   This how-to stuff isn’t in any history book.
   The three ways to make napalm: One, you can mix equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate. 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.
   Ask me how to make nerve gas. Oh, all those crazy car bombs.
   Nine minutes.
   The Parker-Morris Building will go over, all one hundred and ninety-one floors, slow as a tree falling in the forest. Timber. You can topple anything. It’s weird to think the place where we’re standing will only be a point in the sky.
   Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I’m wondering how clean this gun is.
   We just totally forget about Tyler’s whole murder-suicide thing while we watch another file cabinet slip out the side of the building and the drawers roll open midair, reams of white paper caught in the updraft and carried off on the wind.
   Eight minutes.
   Then the smoke, smoke starts out of the broken windows. The demolition team will hit the primary charge in maybe eight minutes. The primary charge will blow the base charge, the foundation columns will crumble, and the photo series of the Parker-Morris Building will go into all the history books.
   The five-picture time-lapse series. Here, the building’s standing. Second picture, the building will be at an eighty-degree angle. Then a seventy-degree angle. The building’s at a forty-five-degree angle in the fourth picture when the skeleton starts to give and the tower gets a slight arch to it. The last shot, the tower, all one hundred and ninety-one floors, will slam down on the national museum which is Tyler’s real target.
   “This is our world, now, our world,” Tyler says, “and those ancient people are dead.”
   If I knew how this would all turn out, I’d be more than happy to be dead and in Heaven right now.
   Seven minutes.
   Up on top of the Parker-Morris Building with Tyler’s gun in my mouth. While desks and filing cabinets and computers meteor down on the crowd around the building and smoke funnels up from the broken windows and three blocks down the street the demolition team watches the clock, I know all of this: the gun, the anarchy, the explosion is really about Marla Singer.
   Six minutes.
   We have sort of a triangle thing going here. I want Tyler. Tyler wants Marla. Marla wants me.
   I don’t want Marla, and Tyler doesn’t want me around, not anymore. This isn’t about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership.
   Without Marla, Tyler would have nothing.
   Five minutes.
   Maybe we would become a legend, maybe not. No, I say, but wait.
   Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?
   Four minutes.
   I tongue the gun barrel into my cheek and say, you want to be a legend, Tyler, man, I’ll make you a legend. I’ve been here from the beginning.
   I remember everything.
   Three minutes.

Chapter 2

   Bob’s big arms were closed around to hold me inside, and I was squeezed in the dark between Bob’s new sweating tits that hang enormous, the way we think of God’s as big. Going around the church basement full of men, each night we met: this is Art, this is Paul, this is Bob; Bob’s big shoulders made me think of the horizon. Bob’s thick blond hair was what you get when hair cream calls itself sculpting mousse, so thick and blond and the part is so straight.
   His arms wrapped around me, Bob’s hand palms my head against the new tits sprouted on his barrel chest.
   “It will be alright,” Bob says. “You cry now.”
   From my knees to my forehead, I feel chemical reactions within Bob burning food and oxygen.
   “Maybe they got it all early enough,” Bob says. “Maybe it’s just seminoma. With seminoma, you have almost a hundred percent survival rate.”
   Bob’s shoulders inhale themselves up in a long draw, then drop, drop, drop in jerking sobs. Draw themselves up. Drop, drop, drop.
   I’ve been coming here every week for two years, and every week Bob wraps his arms around me, and I cry.
   “You cry,” Bob says and inhales and sob, sob, sobs. “Go on now and cry.”
   The big wet face settles down on top of my head, and I am lost inside. This is when I’d cry. Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.
   Anything you’re ever proud of will be thrown away.
   And I’m lost inside.
   This is as close as I’ve been to sleeping in almost a week.
   This is how I met Marla Singer.
   Bob cries because six months ago, his testicles were removed. Then hormone support therapy. Bob has tits because his testosterone ration is too high. Raise the testosterone level too much, your body ups the estrogen to seek a balance.
   This is when I’d cry because right now, your life comes down to nothing, and not even nothing, oblivion.
   Too much estrogen, and you get bitch tits.
   It’s easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.
   Bob loves me because he thinks my testicles were removed, too.
   Around us in the Trinity Episcopal basement with the thrift store plaid sofas are maybe twenty men and only one woman, all of them clung together in pairs, most of them crying. Some pairs lean forward, heads pressed ear-to-ear, the way wrestlers stand, locked. The man with the only woman plants his elbows on her shoulders; one elbow on either side of her head, her head between his hands, and his face crying against her neck. The woman’s face twists off to one side and her hand brings up a cigarette.
   I peek out from under the armpit of Big Bob.
   “All my life,” Bob cries. “Why I do anything, I don’t know.”
   The only woman here at Remaining Men Together, the testicular cancer support group, this woman smokes her cigarette under the burden of a stranger, and her eyes come together with mine.
   Faker.
   Faker.
   Faker.
   Short matte black hair, big eyes the way they are in Japanese animation, skim milk thin, buttermilk sallow in her dress with a wallpaper pattern of dark roses, this woman was also in my tuberculosis support group Friday night. She was in my melanoma round table Wednesday night. Monday night she was in my Firm Believers leukemia rap group. The part down the center of her hair is a crooked lightning bolt of white scalp.
   When you look for these support groups, they all have vague upbeat names. My Thursday evening group for blood parasites, it’s called Free and Clear.
   The group I go to for brain parasites is called Above and Beyond.
   And Sunday afternoon at Remaining Men Together in the basement of Trinity Episcopal, this woman is here, again.
   Worse than that, I can’t cry with her watching.
   This should be my favorite part, being held and crying with Big Bob without hope. We all work so hard all the time. This is the only place I ever really relax and give up.
   This is my vacation.
   I went to my first support group two years ago, after I’d gone to my doctor about my insomnia, again.
   Three weeks and I hadn’t slept. Three weeks without sleep, and everything becomes an out-of-body experience. My doctor said, “Insomnia is just the symptom of something larger. Find out what’s actually wrong. Listen to your body.”
   I just wanted to sleep. I wanted little blue Amytal Sodium capsules, 200 milligram-sized. I wanted red-and-blue Tuinal bullet capsules, lipstick-red Seconals.
   My doctor told me to chew valerian root and get more exercise. Eventually I’d fall asleep.
   The bruised, old fruit way my face had collapsed, you would’ve thought I was dead.
   My doctor said, if I wanted to see real pain, I should swing by First Eucharist on a Tuesday night. See the brain parasites. See the degenerative bone diseases. The organic brain dysfunctions. See the cancer patients getting by.
   So I went.
   The first group I went to, there were introductions: this is Alice, this is Brenda, this is Dover. Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.
   I never give my real name at support groups.
   The little skeleton of a woman named Chloe with the seat of her pants hanging down sad and empty, Chloe tells me the worst thing about her brain parasites was no one would have sex with her. Here she was, so close to death that her life insurance policy had paid off with seventy-five thousand bucks, and all Chloe wanted was to get laid for the last time. Not intimacy, sex.
   What does a guy say? What can you say, I mean.
   All this dying had started with Chloe being a little tired, and now Chloe was too bored to go in for treatment. Pornographic movies, she had pornographic movies at home in her apartment.
   During the French Revolution, Chloe told me, the women in prison, the duchesses, baronesses, marquises, whatever, they would screw any man who’d climb on top. Chloe breathed against my neck. Climb on top. Pony up, did I know. Screwing passed the time.
   La petite mort, the French called it.
   Chloe had pornographic movies, if I was interested. Amyl nitrate. Lubricants.
   Normal times, I’d be sporting an erection. Our Chloe, however, is a skeleton dipped in yellow wax.
   Chloe looking the way she is, I am nothing. Not even nothing. Still, Chloe’s shoulder pokes mine when we sit around a circle on the shag carpet. We close our eyes. This was Chloe’s turn to lead us in guided meditation, and she talked us into the garden of serenity. Chloe talked us up the hill to the palace of seven doors. Inside the palace were the seven doors, the green door, the yellow door, the orange door, and Chloe talked us through opening each door, the blue door, the red door, the white door, and finding what was there.
   Eyes closed, we imagined our pain as a ball of white healing light floating around our feet and rising to our knees, our waist, our chest. Our chakras opening. The heart chakra. The head chakra. Chloe talked us into caves where we met our power animal. Mine was a penguin.
   Ice covered the floor of the cave, and the penguin said, slide. Without any effort, we slid through tunnels and galleries.
   Then it was time to hug.
   Open your eyes.
   This was therapeutic physical contact, Chloe said. We should all choose a partner. Chloe threw herself around my head and cried. She had strapless underwear at home, and cried. Chloe had oils and handcuffs, and cried as I watched the second hand on my watch go around eleven times.
   So I didn’t cry at my first support group, two years ago. I didn’t cry at my second or my third support group, either. I didn’t cry at blood parasites or bowel cancers or organic brain dementia.
   This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can’t touch anything and nothing can touch you.
   Then there was Bob. The first time I went to testicular cancer, Bob the big moosie, the big cheesebread moved in on top of me in Remaining Men Together and started crying. The big moosie treed right across the room when it was hug time, his arms at his sides, his shoulders rounded. His big moosie chin on his chest, his eyes already shrink-wrapped in tears. Shuffling his feet, knees together invisible steps, Bob slid across the basement floor to heave himself on me.
   Bob pancaked down on me.
   Bob’s big arms wrapped around me.
   Big Bob was a juicer, he said. All those salad days on Dianabol and then the racehorse steroid, Wistrol. His own gym, Big Bob owned a gym. He’d been married three times. He’d done product endorsements, and had I seen him on television, ever? The whole how-to program about expanding your chest was practically his invention.
   Strangers with this kind of honesty make me go a big rubbery one, if you know what I mean.
   Bob didn’t know. Maybe only one of his huevos had ever descended, and he knew this was a risk factor. Bob told me about postoperative hormone therapy.
   A lot of bodybuilders shooting too much testosterone would get what they called bitch tits.
   I had to ask what Bob meant by huevos.
   Huevos, Bob said. Gonads. Nuts. Jewels. Testes. Balls. In Mexico, where you buy your steroids, they call them “eggs.”
   Divorce, divorce, divorce, Bob said and showed me 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, but when you’re pumped and shaved on stage, totally shredded with body fat down to around two percent and the diuretics leave you cold and hard as concrete to touch, You’re blind from the lights, and deaf from the feedback rush of the sound system until the judge orders: “Extend your right quad, flex and hold.”
   “Extend your left arm, flex the bicep and hold.”
   This is better than real life.
   Fast-forward, Bob said, to the cancer. Then he was bankrupt. He had two grown kids who wouldn’t return his calls.
   The cure for bitch tits was for the doctor to cut up under the pectorals and drain any fluid.
   This was all I remember because then Bob was closing in around me with his arms, and his head was folding down to cover me. Then I was lost inside oblivion, dark and silent and complete, and when I finally stepped away from his soft chest, the front of Bob’s shirt was a wet mask of how I looked crying.
   That was two years ago, at my first night with Remaining Men Together.
   At almost every meeting since then, Big Bob has made me cry.
   I never went back to the doctor. I never chewed the valerian root.
   This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom. If I didn’t say anything, people in a group assumed the worst. They cried harder. I cried harder. Look up into the stars and you’re gone.
   Walking home after a support group, I felt more alive than I’d ever felt. I wasn’t host to cancer or blood parasites; I was the little warm center that the life of the world crowded around.
   And I slept. Babies don’t sleep this well.
   Every evening, I died, and every evening, I was born.
   Resurrected.
   Until tonight, two years of success until tonight, because I can’t cry with this woman watching me. Because I can’t hit bottom, I can’t be saved. My tongue thinks it has flocked wallpaper, I’m biting the inside of my mouth so much. I haven’t slept in four days.
   With her watching, I’m a liar. She’s a fake. She’s the liar. At the introductions tonight, we introduced ourselves: I’m Bob, I’m Paul, I’m Terry, I’m David.
   I never give my real name.
   “This is cancer, right?” she said.
   Then she said, “Well, hi, I’m Marla Singer.”
   Nobody ever told Marla what kind of cancer. Then we were all busy cradling our inner child.
   The man still crying against her neck, Marla takes another drag on her cigarette.
   I watch her from between Bob’s shuddering tits.
   To Marla I’m a fake. Since the second night I saw her, I can’t sleep. Still, I was the first fake, unless, maybe all these people are faking with their lesions and their coughs and tumors, even Big Bob, the big moosie. The big cheesebread.
   Would you just look at his sculpted hair.
   Marla smokes and rolls her eyes now.
   In this one moment, Marla’s lie reflects my lie, and all I can see are lies. In the middle of all their truth. Everyone clinging and risking to share their worst fear, that their death is coming head-on and the barrel of a gun is pressed against the back of their throats. Well, Marla is smoking and rolling her eyes, and me, I’m buried under a sobbing carpet, and all of a sudden even death and dying rank right down there with plastic flowers on video as a non-event.
   “Bob,” I say, “you’re crushing me.” I try to whisper, then I don’t. “Bob.” I try to keep my voice down, then I’m yelling. “Bob, I have to go to the can.”
   A mirror hangs over the sink in the bathroom. If the pattern holds, I’ll see Marla Singer at Above and Beyond, the parasitic brain dysfunction group. Marla will be there. Of course, Marla will be there, and what I’ll do is sit next to her. And after the introductions and the guided meditation, the seven doors of the palace, the white healing ball of light, after we open our chakras, when it comes time to hug, I’ll grab the little bitch.
   Her arms squeezed tight against her sides, and my lips pressed against her ear, I’ll say, Marla, you big fake, you get out.
   This is the one real thing in my life, and you’re wrecking it.
   You big tourist.
   The next time we meet, I’ll say, Marla, I can’t sleep with you here. I need this. Get out.

Chapter 3

   You wake up at Air Harbor International.
   Every takeoff and landing, when the plane banked too much to one side, I prayed for a crash. That moment cures my insomnia with narcolepsy when we might die helpless and packed human tobacco in the fuselage.
   This is how I met Tyler Durden.
   You wake up at O’Hare.
   You wake up at LaGuardia.
   You wake up at Logan.
   Tyler worked part-time as a movie projectionist. Because of his nature, Tyler could only work night jobs. If a projectionist called in sick, the union called Tyler.
   Some people are night people. Some people are day people. I could only work a day job.
   You wake up at Dulles.
   Life insurance pays off triple if you die on a business trip. I prayed for wind shear effect. I prayed for pelicans sucked into the turbines and loose bolts and ice on the wings. On takeoff, as the plane pushed down the runway and the flaps tilted up, with our seats in their full upright position and our tray tables stowed and all personal carry-on baggage in the overhead compartment, as the end of the runway ran up to meet us with our smoking materials extinguished, I prayed for a crash.
   You wake up at Love Field.
   In a projection booth, Tyler did changeovers if the theater was old enough. With changeovers, you have two projectors in the booth, and one projector is running.
   I know this because Tyler knows this.
   The second projector is set up with the next reel of film. Most movies are six or seven small reels of film played in a certain order. Newer theaters, they splice all the reels together into one five-foot reel. This way, you don’t have to run two projectors and do changeovers, switch back and forth, reel one, switch, reel two on the other projector, switch, reel three on the first projector.
   Switch.
   You wake up at SeaTac.
   I study the people on the laminated airline seat card. A woman floats in the ocean, her brown hair spread out behind her, her seat cushion clutched to her chest. The eyes are wide open, but the woman doesn’t smile or frown. In another picture, people calm as Hindu cows reach up from their seats toward oxygen masks sprung out of the ceiling.
   This must be an emergency.
   Oh.
   We’ve lost cabin pressure.
   You wake up, and you’re at Willow Run.
   Old theater, new theater, to ship a movie to the next theater, Tyler has to break the movie back down to the original six or seven reels. The small reels pack into a pair of hexagonal steel suitcases. Each suitcase has a handle on top. Pick one up, and you’ll dislocate a shoulder.
   They weigh that much.
   Tyler’s a banquet waiter, waiting tables at a hotel, downtown, and Tyler’s a projectionist with the projector operator’s union. I don’t know how long Tyler had been working on all those nights I couldn’t sleep.
   The old theaters that run a movie with two projectors, a projectionist has to stand right there to change projectors at the exact second so the audience never sees the break when one reel starts and one reel ran out. You have to look for the white dots in the top, right-hand corner of the screen. This is the warning. Watch the movie, and you’ll see two dots at the end of a reel.
   “Cigarette burns,” they’re called in the business.
   The first white dot, this is the two-minute warning. You get the second projector started so it will be running up to speed.
   The second white dot is the five-second warning. Excitement. You’re standing between the two projectors and the booth is sweating hot from the xenon bulbs that if you looked right at them you’re blind. The first dot flashes on the screen. The sound in a movie comes from a big speaker behind the screen. The projectionist booth is soundproof because inside the booth is the racket of sprockets snapping film past the lens at six feet a second, ten frames a foot, sixty frames a second snapping through, clattering Gatling-gun fire. The two projectors running, you stand between and hold the shutter lever on each. On really old projectors, you have an alarm on the hub of the feed reel.
   Even after the movie’s on television, the warning dots will still be there. Even on airplane movies.
   As most of the movie rolls onto the take-up reel, the take-up reel turns slower and the feed reel has to turn faster. At the end of a reel, the feed reel turns so fast the alarm will start ringing to warn you that a changeover is coming up.
   The dark is hot from the bulbs inside the projectors, and the alarm is ringing. Stand there between the two projectors with a lever in each hand, and watch the corner of the screen. The second dot flashes. Count to five. Switch one shutter closed. At the same time, open the other shutter.
   Changeover.
   The movie goes on.
   Nobody in the audience has any idea.
   The alarm is on the feed reel so the movie projectionist can nap. A movie projectionist does a lot he’s not supposed to. Not every projector has the alarm. At home, you’ll sometimes wake up in your dark bed with the terror you’ve fallen asleep in the booth and missed a changeover. The audience will be cursing you. The audience, their movie dream is ruined, and the manager will be calling the union.
   You wake up at Krissy Field.
   The charm of traveling is everywhere I go, tiny life. I go to the hotel, tiny soap, tiny shampoos, single-serving butter, tiny mouthwash and a single-use toothbrush. Fold into the standard airplane seat. You’re a giant. The problem is your shoulders are too big. Your Alice in Wonderland legs are all of a sudden miles so long they touch the feet of the person in front. Dinner arrives, a miniature do-it-yourself Chicken Cordon Bleu hobby kit, sort of a put-it together project to keep you busy.
   The pilot has turned on the seat-belt sign, and we would ask you to refrain from moving about the cabin.
   You wake up at Meigs Field.
   Sometimes, Tyler wakes up in the dark, buzzing with the terror that he’s missed a reel change or the movie has broken or the movie has slipped just enough in the projector that the sprockets are punching a line of holes through the sound track.
   After a movie has been sprocket run, the light of the bulb shines through the sound track and instead of talk, you’re blasted with the helicopter blade sound of whop whop whop as each burst of light comes through a sprocket hole.
   What else a projectionist shouldn’t do: Tyler makes slides out of the best single frames from a movie. The first full frontal movie anyone can remember had the naked actress Angie Dickinson.
   By the time a print of this movie had shipped from the West Coast theaters to the East Coast theaters, the nude scene was gone. One projectionist took a frame. Another projectionist took a frame. Everybody wanted to make a naked slide of Angle Dickinson. Porno got into theaters and these projectionists, some guys they built collections that got epic.
   You wake up at Boeing Field.
   You wake up at LAX.
   We have an almost empty flight, tonight, so feel free to fold the armrests up into the seatbacks and stretch out. You stretch out, zigzag, knees bent, waist bent, elbows bent across three or four seats. I set my watch two hours earlier or three hours later, Pacific, Mountain, Central, or Eastern time; lose an hour, gain an hour.
   This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.
   You wake up at Cleveland Hopkins.
   You wake up at SeaTac, again.
   You’re a projectionist and you’re tired and angry, but mostly you’re bored so you start by taking a single frame of pornography collected by some other projectionist that you find stashed away in the booth, and you splice this frame of a lunging red penis or a yawning wet vagina closeup into another feature movie.
   This is one of those pet adventures, when the dog and cat are left behind by a traveling family and must find their way home. In reel three, just after the dog and cat, who have human voices and talk to each other, have eaten out of a garbage can, there’s the flash of an erection.
   Tyler does this.
   A single frame in a movie is on the screen for one-sixtieth of a second. Divide a second into sixty equal parts. That’s how long the erection is. Towering four stories tall over the popcorn auditorium, slippery red and terrible, and no one sees it.
   You wake up at Logan, again.
   This is a terrible way to travel. I go to meetings my boss doesn’t want to attend. I take notes. I’ll get back to you.
   Wherever I’m going, I’ll be there to apply the formula. I’ll keep the secret intact.
   It’s simple arithmetic.
   It’s a story problem.
   If a new car built by my company leaves Chicago traveling west at 60 miles per hour, and the rear differential locks up, and the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall?
   You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C).
   A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don’t initiate a recall.
   If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.
   If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don’t recall.
   Everywhere I go, there’s the burned-up wadded-up shell of a car waiting for me. I know where all the skeletons are. Consider this my job security.
   Hotel time, restaurant food. Everywhere I go, I make tiny friendships with the people sitting beside me from Logan to Krissy to Willow Run.
   What I am is a recall campaign coordinator, I tell the single-serving friend sitting next to me, but I’m working toward a career as a dishwasher.
   You wake up at O’Hare, again.
   Tyler spliced a penis into everything after that. Usually, close-ups, or a Grand Canyon vagina with an echo, four stories tall and twitching with blood pressure as Cinderella danced with her Prince Charming and people watched. Nobody complained. People ate and drank, but the evening wasn’t the same. People feel sick or start to cry and don’t know why. Only a hummingbird could have caught Tyler at work.
   You wake up at JFK.
   I melt and swell at the moment of landing when one wheel thuds on the runway but the plane leans to one side and hangs in the decision to right itself or roll. For this moment, nothing matters. Look up into the stars and you’re gone. Not your luggage. Nothing matters. Not your bad breath. The windows are dark outside and the turbine engines roar backward. The cabin hangs at the wrong angle under the roar of the turbines, and you will never have to file another expense account claim. Receipt required for items over twenty-five dollars. You will never have to get another haircut.
   A thud, and the second wheel hits the tarmac. The staccato of a hundred seatbelt buckles snapping open, and the single-use friend you almost died sitting next to says:
   I hope you make your connection.
   Yeah, me too.
   And this is how long your moment lasted. And life goes on.
   And somehow, by accident, Tyler and I met.
   It was time for a vacation.
   You wake up at LAX.
   Again.
   How I met Tyler was I went to a nude beach. This was the very end of summer, and I was asleep. Tyler was naked and sweating, gritty with sand, his hair wet and stringy, hanging in his face.
   Tyler had been around a long time before we met.
   Tyler was pulling driftwood logs out of the surf and dragging them up the beach. In the wet sand, he’d already planted a half circle of logs so they stood a few inches apart and as tall as his eyes. There were four logs, and when I woke up, I watched Tyler pull a fifth log up the beach. Tyler dug a hole under one end of the log, then lifted the other end until the log slid into the hole and stood there at a slight angle.
   You wake up at the beach.
   We were the only people on the beach.
   With a stick, Tyler drew a straight line in the sand several feet away. Tyler went back to straighten the log by stamping sand around its base.
   I was the only person watching this.
   Tyler called over, “Do you know what time it is?”
   I always wear a watch.
   “Do you know what time it is?”
   I asked, where?
   “Right here,” Tyler said. “Right now.”
   It was 4:06 p.m.
   After a while, Tyler sat cross-legged in the shadow of the standing logs. Tyler sat for a few minutes, got up and took a swim, pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and started to leave. I had to ask.
   I had to know what Tyler was doing while I was asleep.
   If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?
   I asked if Tyler was an artist.
   Tyler shrugged and showed me how the five standing logs were wider at the base. Tyler showed me the line he’d drawn in the sand, and how he’d use the line to gauge the shadow cast by each log.
   Sometimes, you wake up and have to ask where you are.
   What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand. Only now the fingers were Nosferatu-long and the thumb was too short, but he said how at exactly four-thirty the hand was perfect. The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute Tyler had sat in the palm of a perfection he’d created himself.
   You wake up, and you’re nowhere.
   One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
   You wake up, and that’s enough.
   His name was Tyler Durden, and he was a movie projectionist with the union, and he was a banquet waiter at a hotel, downtown, and he gave me his phone number.
   And this is how we met.
   All the usual brain parasites are here, tonight. Above and Beyond always gets a big turnout. This is Peter. This is Aldo. This is Marcy.
   Hi.
   The introductions, everybody, this is Marla Singer, and this is her first time with us.
   Hi, Marla.
   At Above and Beyond, we start with the Catch-Up Rap. The group isn’t called Parasitic Brain Parasites. You’ll never hear anyone say “parasite.” Everybody is always getting better. Oh, this new medication. Everyone’s always just turned the corner. Still, everywhere, there’s the squint of a five-day headache. A woman wipes at involuntary tears. Everyone gets a name tag, and people you’ve met every Tuesday night for a year, they come at you, handshake hand ready and their eyes on your name tag.
   I don’t believe we’ve met.
   No one will ever say parasite. They’ll say, agent.
   They don’t say cure. They’ll say, treatment.
   In Catch-Up Rap, someone will say how the agent has spread into his spinal column and now all of a sudden he’ll have no control of his left hand. The agent, someone will say, has dried the lining of his brain so now the brain pulls away from the inside of his skull, causing seizures.
   The last time I was here, the woman named Chloe announced the only good news she had. Chloe pushed herself to her feet against the wooden arms of her chair and said she no longer had any fear of death.
   Tonight, after the introductions and Catch-Up Rap, a girl I don’t know, with a name tag that says Glenda, says she’s Chloe’s sister and that at two in the morning last Tuesday, Chloe finally died.
   Oh, this should be so sweet. For two years, Chloe’s been crying in my arms during hug time, and now she’s dead, dead in the ground, dead in an urn, mausoleum, columbarium. Oh, the proof that one day you’re thinking and hauling yourself around, and the next, you’re cold fertilizer, worm buffet. This is the amazing miracle of death, and it should be so sweet if it weren’t for, oh, that one.
   Marla.
   Oh, and Marla’s looking at me again, singled out among all the brain parasites.
   Liar.
   Faker.
   Marla’s the faker. You’re the faker. Everyone around when they wince or twitch and fall down barking and the crotch of their jeans turns dark blue, well, it’s all just a big act.
   Guided meditation all of a sudden won’t take me anywhere, tonight. Behind each of the seven palace doors, the green door, the orange door, Marla. The blue door, Marla stands there. Liar. In the guided meditation through the cave of my power animal, my power animal is Marla. Smoking her cigarette, Marla, rolling her eyes. Liar. Black hair and pillowy French lips. Faker. Italian dark leather sofa lips. You can’t escape.
   Chloe was the genuine article.
   Chloe was the way Joni Mitchell’s skeleton would look if you made it smile and walk around a party being extra special nice to everyone. Picture Chloe’s popular skeleton the size of an insect, running through the vaults and galleries of her innards at two in the morning. Her pulse a siren overhead, announcing: Prepare for death in ten, in nine, in eight seconds. Death will commence in seven, six …
   At night, Chloe ran around the maze of her own collapsing veins and burst tubes spraying hot lymph. Nerves surface as trip wires in the tissue. Abscesses swell in the tissue around her as hot white pearls.
   The overhead announcement, prepare to evacuate bowels in ten, in nine, eight, seven.
   Prepare to evacuate soul in ten, in nine, eight.
   Chloe’s splashing through the ankle-deep backup of renal fluid from her failed kidneys.
   Death will commence in five.
   Five, four.
   Four.
   Around her, parasitic life spray paints her heart.
   Four, three.
   Three, two.
   Chloe climbs hand-over-hand up the curdled lining of her own throat.
   Death to commence in three, in two.
   Moonlight shines in through the open mouth.
   Prepare for the last breath, now.
   Evacuate.
   Now.
   Soul clear of body.
   Now.
   Death commences.
   Now.
   Oh, this should be so sweet, the remembered warm jumble of Chloe still in my arms and Chloe dead somewhere.
   But no, I’m watched by Marla.
   In guided meditation, I open my arms to receive my inner child, and the child is Marla smoking her cigarette. No white healing ball of light. Liar. No chakras. Picture your chakras opening as flowers and at the center of each is a slow motion explosion of sweet light.
   Liar.
   My chakras stay closed.
   When meditation ends, everyone is stretching and twisting their heads and pulling each other to their feet in preparation. Therapeutic physical contact. For the hug, I cross in three steps to stand against Marla who looks up into my face as I watch everyone else for the cue.
   Let’s all, the cue comes, embrace someone near us.
   My arms clamp around Marla.
   Pick someone special to you, tonight.
   Marla’s cigarette hands are pinned to her waist.
   Tell this someone how you feel.
   Marla doesn’t have testicular cancer. Marla doesn’t have tuberculosis. She isn’t dying. Okay in that brainy brain-food philosophy way, we’re all dying, but Marla isn’t dying the way Chloe was dying.
   The cue comes, share yourself.
   So, Marla, how do you like them apples?
   Share yourself completely.
   So, Marla, get out. Get out. Get out.
   Go ahead and cry if you have to.
   Marla stares up at me. Her eyes are brown. Her earlobes pucker around earring holes, no earrings. Her chapped lips are frosted with dead skin.
   Go ahead and cry.
   “You’re not dying either,” Marla says.
   Around us, couples stand sobbing, propped against each other.
   “You tell on me,” Marla says, “and I’ll tell on you.”
   Then we can split the week, I say. Marla can have bone disease, brain parasites, and tuberculosis. I’ll keep testicular cancer, blood parasites, and organic brain dementia.
   Marla says, “What about ascending bowel cancers?”
   The girl has done her homework.
   We’ll split bowel cancer. She gets it the first and third Sunday of every month.
   “No,” Marla says. No, she wants it all. The cancers, the parasites. Marla’s eyes narrow. She never dreamed she could feel so marvelous. She actually felt alive. Her skin was clearing up. All her life, she never saw a dead person. There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with. Oh, but now there was dying and death and loss and grief. Weeping and shuddering, terror and remorse. Now that she knows where we’re all going, Marla feels every moment of her life.
   No, she wasn’t leaving any group.
   “Not and go back to the way life felt before,” Marla says. “I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact I was breathing. So what if I couldn’t get a job in my field.”
   Then go back to your funeral home, I say.
   “Funerals are nothing compared to this,” Marla says. “Funerals are all abstract ceremony. Here, you have a real experience of death.”
   Couples around the two of us are drying their tears, sniffing, patting each other on the back and letting go.
   We can’t both come, I tell her.
   “Then don’t come.” I need this. “Then go to funerals.” Everyone else has broken apart and they’re joining hands for the closing prayer. I let Marla go. “How long have you been coming here?” The closing prayer. Two years. A man in the prayer circle takes my hand. A man takes Marla’s hand. These prayers start and usually, my breathing is blown. Oh, bless us. Oh, bless us in our anger and our fear. “Two years?” Marla tilts her head to whisper. Oh, bless us and hold us. Anyone who might’ve noticed me in two years has either died or recovered and never came back. Help us and help us. “Okay,” Marla says, “okay, okay, you can have testicular cancer.” Big Bob the big cheesebread crying all over me. Thanks. Bring us to our destiny. Bring us peace. “Don’t mention it.” This is how I met Marla.

Chapter 4

   The security taskforce guy explained everything to me.
   Baggage handlers can ignore a ticking suitcase. The security task force guy, he called baggage handlers Throwers. Modern bombs don’t tick. But a suitcase that vibrates, the baggage handlers, the Throwers, have to call the police.
   How I came to live with Tyler is because most airlines have this policy about vibrating baggage.
   My flight back from Dulles, I had everything in that one bag. When you travel a lot, you learn to pack the same for every trip. Six white shirts. Two black trousers. The bare minimum you need to survive.
   Traveling alarm clock.
   Cordless electric razor.
   Toothbrush.
   Six pair underwear.
   Six pair black socks.
   It turns out, my suitcase was vibrating on departure from Dulles, according to the security task force guy, so the police took it off the flight. Everything was in that bag. My contact lens stuff. One red tie with blue stripes. One blue tie with red stripes. These are regimental stripes, not club tie stripes. And one solid red tie.
   A list of all these things used to hang on the inside of my bedroom door at home.
   Home was a condominium on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise, a sort of filing cabinet for widows and young professionals. The marketing brochure promised a foot of concrete floor, ceiling, and wall between me and any adjacent stereo or turned-up television. A foot of concrete and air conditioning, you couldn’t open the windows so even with maple flooring and dimmer switches, all seventeen hundred airtight feet would smell like the last meal you cooked or your last trip to the bathroom.
   Yeah, and there were butcher block countertops and low-voltage track lighting.
   Still, a foot of concrete is important when your next-door neighbor lets the battery on her hearing aid go and has to watch her game shows at full blast. Or when a volcanic blast of burning gas and debris that used to be your living-room set and personal effects blows out your floor-to-ceiling windows and sails down flaming to leave just your condo, only yours, a gutted charred concrete hole in the cliffside of the building.
   These things happen.
   Everything, including your set of hand-blown green glass dishes with the tiny bubbles and imperfections, little bits of sand, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous aboriginal peoples of wherever, well, these dishes all get blown out by the blast. Picture the floor-to-ceiling drapes blown out and flaming to shreds in the hot wind.
   Fifteen floors over the city, this stuff comes flaming and bashing and shattering down on everyone’s car.
   Me, while I’m heading west, asleep at Mach 0.83 or 455 miles an hour, true airspeed, the FBI is bomb-squading my suitcase on a vacated runway back at Dulles. Nine times out of ten, the security task force guy says, the vibration is an electric razor. This was my cordless electric razor. The other time, it’s a vibrating dildo.
   The security task force guy told me this. This was at my destination, without my suitcase, where I was about to cab it home and find my flannel sheets shredded on the ground.
   Imagine, the task force guy says, telling a passenger on arrival that a dildo kept her baggage on the East Coast. Sometimes it’s even a man. It’s airline policy not to imply ownership in the event of a dildo. Use the indefinite article.
   A dildo.
   Never your dildo.
   Never, ever say the dildo accidentally turned itself on.
   A dildo activated itself and created an emergency situation that required evacuating your baggage.
   Rain was falling when I woke up for my connection in Stapleton.
   Rain was falling when I woke up on our final approach to home.
   An announcement told us to please take this opportunity to check around our seats for any personal belongings we might have left behind. Then the announcement said my name. Would I please meet with an airline representative waiting at the gate.
   I set my watch back three hours, and it was still after midnight.
   There was the airline representative at the gate, and there was the security task force guy to say, ha, your electric razor kept your checked baggage at Dulles. The task force guy called the baggage handlers Throwers. Then he called them Rampers. To prove things could be worse, the guy told me at least it wasn’t a dildo. Then, maybe because I’m a guy and he’s a guy and it’s one o’clock in the morning, maybe to make me laugh, the guy said industry slang for flight attendant was Space Waitress. Or Air Mattress. It looked like the guy was wearing a pilot’s uniform, white shirt with little epaulets and a blue tie. My luggage had been cleared, he said, and would arrive the next day.
   The security guy asked my name and address and phone number, and then he asked me what was the difference between a condom and a cockpit.
   “You can only get one prick into a condom,” he said.
   I cabbed home on my last ten bucks.
   The local police had been asking a lot of questions, too.
   My electric razor, which wasn’t a bomb, was still three time zones behind me.
   Something which was a bomb, a big bomb, had blasted my clever Njurunda coffee tables in the shape of a lime green yin and an orange yang that fit together to make a circle. Well they were splinters, now.
   My Haparanda sofa group with the orange slip covers, design by Erika Pekkari, it was trash, now.
   And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.
   We all have the same Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern. Mine fell fifteen stories, burning, into a fountain.
   We all have the same Rislampa/Har paper lamps made from wire and environmentally friendly unbleached paper. Mine are confetti.
   All that sitting in the bathroom.
   The Alle cutlery service. Stainless steel. Dishwasher safe.
   The Vild hall clock made of galvanized steel, oh, I had to have that.
   The Klipsk shelving unit, oh, yeah.
   Hemlig hat boxes. Yes.
   The street outside my high-rise was sparkling and scattered with all this.
   The Mommala quilt-cover set. Design by Tomas Harila and available in the following:
   Orchid.
   Fuschia.
   Cobalt.
   Ebony.
   Jet.
   Eggshell or heather.
   It took my whole life to buy this stuff.
   The easy-care textured lacquer of my Kalix occasional tables.
   My Steg nesting tables.
   You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.
   Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
   Until I got home from the airport.
   The doorman steps out of the shadows to say, there’s been an accident. The police, they were here and asked a lot of questions.
   The police think maybe it was the gas. Maybe the pilot light on the stove went out or a burner was left on, leaking gas, and the gas rose to the ceiling, and the gas filled the condo from ceiling to floor in every room. The condo was seventeen hundred square feet with high ceilings and for days and days, the gas must’ve leaked until every room was full. When the rooms were filled to the floor, the compressor at the base of the refrigerator clicked on.
   Detonation.
   The floor-to-ceiling windows in their aluminum frames went out and the sofas and the lamps and dishes and sheet sets in flames, and the high school annuals and the diplomas and telephone. Everything blasting out from the fifteenth floor in a sort of solar flare.
   Oh, not my refrigerator. I’d collected shelves full of different mustards, some stone-ground, some English pub style. There were fourteen different flavors of fat-free salad dressing, and seven kinds of capers.
   I know, I know, a house full of condiments and no real food.
   The doorman blew his nose and something went into his handkerchief with the good slap of a pitch into a catcher’s mitt.
   You could go up to the fifteen floor, the doorman said, but nobody could go into the unit. Police orders. The police had been asking, did I have an old girlfriend who’d want to do this or did I make an enemy of somebody who had access to dynamite.
   “It wasn’t worth going up,” the doorman said. “All that’s left is the concrete shell.”
   The police hadn’t ruled out arson. No one had smelled gas. The doorman raises an eyebrow. This guy spent his time flirting with the day maids and nurses who worked in the big units on the top floor and waited in the lobby chairs for their rides after work. Three years I lived here, and the doorman still sat reading his Ellery Queen magazine every night while I shifted packages and bags to unlock the front door and let myself in.
   The doorman raises an eyebrow and says how some people will go on a long trip and leave a candle, a long, long candle burning in a big puddle of gasoline. People with financial difficulties do this stuff. People who want out from under.
   I asked to use the lobby phone.
   “A lot of young people try to impress the world and buy too many things,” the doorman said.
   I called Tyler.
   The phone rang in Tyler’s rented house on Paper Street.
   Oh, Tyler, please deliver me.
   And the phone rang.
   The doorman leaned into my shoulder and said, “A lot of young people don’t know what they really want.”
   Oh, Tyler, please rescue me.
   And the phone rang.
   “Young people, they think they want the whole world.”
   Deliver me from Swedish furniture.
   Deliver me from clever art.
   And the phone rang and Tyler answered.
   “If you don’t know what you want,” the doorman said, “you end up with a lot you don’t.”
   May I never be complete.
   May I never be content.
   May I never be perfect.
   Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.
   Tyler and I agreed to meet at a bar.
   The doorman asked for a number where the police could reach me. It was still raining. My Audi was still parked in the lot, but a Dakapo halogen torchiere was speared through the windshield.
   Tyler and I, we met and drank a lot of beer, and Tyler said, yes, I could move in with him, but I would have to do him a favor.
   The next day, my suitcase would arrive with the bare minimum, six shirts, six pair of underwear.
   There, drunk in a bar where no one was watching and no one would care, I asked Tyler what he wanted me to do.
   Tyler said, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”

Chapter 5

   Two screens into my demo to Microsoft, I taste blood and have to start swallowing. My boss doesn’t know the material, but he won’t let me run the demo with a black eye and half my face swollen from the stitches inside my cheek. The stitches have come loose, and I can feel them with my tongue against the inside of my cheek. Picture snarled fishing line on the beach. I can picture them as the black stitches on a dog after it’s been fixed, and I keep swallowing blood. My boss is making the presentation from my script, and I’m running the laptop projector so I’m off to one side of the room, in the dark.
   More of my lips are sticky with blood as I try to lick the blood off, and when the lights come up, I will turn to consultants Ellen and Walter and Norbert and Linda from Microsoft and say, thank you for coming, my mouth shining with blood and blood climbing the cracks between my teeth.
   You can swallow about a pint of blood before you’re sick.
   Fight club is tomorrow, and I’m not going to miss fight club.
   Before the presentation, Walter from Microsoft smiles his steam shovel jaw like a marketing tool tanned the color of a barbecued potato chip. Walter with his signet ring shakes my hand, wrapped in his smooth soft hand and says, “I’d hate to see what happened to the other guy.”
   The first rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.
   I tell Walter I fell.
   I did this to myself.
   Before the presentation, when I sat across from my boss, telling him where in the script each slide cues and when I wanted to run the video segment, my boss says, “What do you get yourself into every weekend?”
   I just don’t want to die without a few scars, I say. It’s nothing anymore to have a beautiful stock body. You see those cars that are completely stock cherry, right out of a dealer’s showroom in 1955, I always think, what a waste.
   The second rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.
   Maybe at lunch, the waiter comes to your table and the waiter has the two black eyes of a giant panda from fight club last weekend when you saw him get his head pinched between the concrete floor and the knee of a two-hundred pound stock boy who kept slamming a fist into the bridge of the waiter’s nose again and again in flat hard packing sounds you could hear over all the yelling until the waiter caught enough breath and sprayed blood to say, stop.
   You don’t say anything because fight club exists only in the hours between when fight club starts and when fight club ends.
   You saw the kid who works in the copy center, a month ago you saw this kid who can’t remember to three-hole-punch an order or put colored slip sheets between the copy packets, but this kid was a god for ten minutes when you saw him kick the air out of an account representative twice his size then land on the man and pound him limp until the kid had to stop. That’s the third rule in fight club, when someone says stop, or goes limp, even if he’s just faking it, the fight is over. Every time you see this kid, you can’t tell him what a great fight he had.
   Only two guys to a fight. One fight at a time. They fight without shirts or shoes. The fights go on as long as they have to. Those are the other rules of fight club.
   Who guys are in fight club is not who they are in the real world. Even if you told the kid in the copy center that he had a good fight, you wouldn’t be talking to the same man.
   Who I am in fight club is not someone my boss knows.
   After a night in fight club, everything in the real world gets the volume turned down. Nothing can piss you off. Your word is law, and if other people break that law or question you, even that doesn’t piss you off.
   In the real world, I’m a recall campaign coordinator in a shirt and tie, sitting in the dark with a mouthful of blood and changing the overheads and slides as my boss tells Microsoft how he chose a particular shade of pale cornflower blue for an icon.
   The first fight club was just Tyler and I pounding on each other.
   It used to be enough that when I came home angry and knowing that my life wasn’t toeing my five-year plan, I could clean my condominium or detail my car. Someday I’d be dead without a scar and there would be a really nice condo and car. Really, really nice, until the dust settled or the next owner. Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart. Since fight club, I can wiggle half the teeth in my jaw.
   Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer.
   Tyler never knew his father.
   Maybe self-destruction is the answer.
   Tyler and I still go to fight club, together. Fight club is in the basement of a bar, now, after the bar closes on Saturday night, and every week you go and there’s more guys there.
   Tyler gets under the one light in the middle of the black concrete basement and he can see that light flickering back out of the dark in a hundred pairs of eyes. First thing Tyler yells is, “The first rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.
   “The second rule about fight club,” Tyler yells, “is you don’t talk about fight club.”
   Me, I knew my dad for about six years, but I don’t remember anything. My dad, he starts a new family in a new town about every six years. This isn’t so much like a family as it’s like he sets up a franchise.
   What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women.
   Tyler standing under the one light in the after-midnight blackness of a basement full of men, Tyler runs through the other rules: two men per fight, one fight at a time, no shoes no shirts, fights go on as long as they have to.
   “And the seventh rule,” Tyler yells, “is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.”
   Fight club is not football on television. You aren’t watching a bunch of men you don’t know halfway around the world beating on each other live by satellite with a two-minute delay, commercials pitching beer every ten minutes, and a pause now for station identification. After you’ve been to fight club, watching football on television is watching pornography when you could be having great sex.
   Fight club gets to be your reason for going to the gym and keeping your hair cut short and cutting your nails. The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.
   Like Tyler says, even a snuffle looks pumped.
   My father never went to college so it was really important I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what?
   My dad didn’t know.
   When I got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn’t know, so he said, get married.
   I’m a thirty-year-old boy, and I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer I need.
   What happens at fight club doesn’t happen in words. Some guys need a fight every week. This week, Tyler says it’s the first fifty guys through the door and that’s it. No more.
   Last week, I tapped a guy and he and I got on the list for a fight. This guy must’ve had a bad week, got both my arms behind my head in a full nelson and rammed my face into the concrete floor until my teeth bit open the inside of my cheek and my eye was swollen shut and was bleeding, and after I said, stop, I could look down and there was a print of half my face in blood on the floor.
   Tyler stood next to me, both of us looking down at the big O of my mouth with blood all around it and the little slit of my eye staring up at us from the floor, and Tyler says, “Cool.”
   I shake the guy’s hand and say, good fight.
   This guy, he says, “How about next week?”
   I try to smile against all the swelling, and I say, look at me. How about next month?
   You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive at fight club. When it’s you and one other guy under that one light in the middle of all those watching. Fight club isn’t about winning or losing fights. Fight club isn’t about words. You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, and his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood. This guy trusts himself to handle anything. There’s grunting and noise at fight club like at the gym, but fight club isn’t about looking good. There’s hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved.
   After my last fight, the guy who fought me mopped the floor while I called my insurance to pre-approve a visit to the emergency room. At the hospital, Tyler tells them I fell down.
   Sometimes, Tyler speaks for me.
   I did this to myself.
   Outside, the sun was coming up.
   You don’t talk about fight club because except for five hours from two until seven on Sunday morning, fight club doesn’t exist.
   When we invented fight club, Tyler and I, neither of us had ever been in a fight before. If you’ve never been in a fight, you wonder. About getting hurt, about what you’re capable of doing against another man. I was the first guy Tyler ever felt safe enough to ask, and we were both drunk in a bar where no one would care so Tyler said, “I want you to do me a favor. I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”
   I didn’t want to, but Tyler explained it all, about not wanting to die without any scars, about being tired of watching only professionals fight, and wanting to know more about himself.
   About self-destruction.
   At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.
   I looked around and said, okay. Okay, I say, but outside in the parking lot.
   So we went outside, and I asked if Tyler wanted it in the face or in the stomach.
   Tyler said, “Surprise me.”
   I said I had never hit anybody.
   Tyler said, “So go crazy, man.”
   I said, close your eyes.
   Tyler said, “No.”
   Like every guy on his first night in fight club, I breathed in and swung my fist in a roundhouse at Tyler’s jaw like in every cowboy movie we’d ever seen, and me, my fist connected with the side of Tyler’s neck.
   Shit, I said, that didn’t count. I want to try it again.
   Tyler said, “Yeah it counted,” and hit me, straight on, pox, just like a cartoon boxing glove on a spring on Saturday morning cartoons, right in the middle of my chest and I fell back against a car. We both stood there, Tyler rubbing the side of his neck and me holding a hand on my chest, both of us knowing we’d gotten somewhere we’d never been and like the cat and mouse in cartoons, we were still alive and wanted to see how far we could take this thing and still be alive.
   Tyler said, “Cool.”
   I said, hit me again.
   Tyler said, “No, you hit me.”
   So I hit him, a girl’s wide roundhouse to right under his ear, and Tyler shoved me back and stomped the heel of his shoe in my stomach. What happened next and after that didn’t happen in words, but the bar closed and people came out and shouted around us in the parking lot.
   Instead of Tyler, I felt finally I could get my hands on everything in the world that didn’t work, my cleaning that came back with the collar buttons broken, the bank that says I’m hundreds of dollars overdrawn. My job where my boss got on my computer and fiddled with my DOS execute commands. And Marla Singer, who stole the support groups from me.
   Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing mattered.
   The first night we fought was a Sunday night, and Tyler hadn’t shaved all weekend so my knuckles burned raw from his weekend beard. Lying on our backs in the parking lot, staring up at the one star that came through the streetlights, I asked Tyler what he’d been fighting.
   Tyler said, his father.
   Maybe we didn’t need a father to complete ourselves. There’s nothing personal about who you fight in fight club. You fight to fight. You’re not supposed to talk about fight club, but we talked and for the next couple of weeks, guys met in that parking lot after the bar had closed, and by the time it got cold, another bar offered the basement where we meet now.
   When fight club meets, Tyler gives the rules he and I decided. “Most of you,” Tyler yells in the cone of light in the center of the basement full of men, “you’re here because someone broke the rules. Somebody told you about fight club.”
   Tyler says, “Well, you better stop talking or you’d better start another fight club because next week you put your name on a list when you get here, and only the first fifty names on the list get in. If you get in, you set up your fight right away if you want a fight. If you don’t want a fight, there are guys who do, so maybe you should just stay home.
   “If this is your first night at fight club,” Tyler yells, “you have to fight.”
   Most guys are at fight club because of something they’re too scared to fight. After a few fights, you’re afraid a lot less.
   A lot of best friends meet for the first time at fight club. Now I go to meetings or conferences and see faces at conference tables, accountants and junior executives or attorneys with broken noses spreading out like an eggplant under the edges of bandages or they have a couple stitches under an eye or a jaw wired shut. These are the quiet young men who listen until it’s time to decide.
   We nod to each other.
   Later, my boss will ask me how I know so many of these guys.
   According to my boss, there are fewer and fewer gentlemen in business and more thugs.
   The demo goes on.
   Walter from Microsoft catches my eye. Here’s a young guy with perfect teeth and clear skin and the kind of job you bother to write the alumni magazine about getting. You know he was too young to fight in any wars, and if his parents weren’t divorced, his father was never home, and here he’s looking at me with half my face clean shaved and half a leering bruise hidden in the dark. Blood shining on my lips. And maybe Walter’s thinking about a meatless, painfree potluck he went to last weekend or the ozone or the Earth’s desperate need to stop cruel product testing on animals, but probably he’s not.

Chapter 6

   One morning, there’s the dead jellyfish of a used condom floating in the toilet.
   This is how Tyler meets Marla.
   I get up to take a leak, and there against the sort of cave paintings of dirt in the toilet bowl is this. You have to wonder, what do sperm think.
   This?
   This is the vaginal vault?
   What’s happening here?
   All night long, I dreamed I was humping Marla Singer. Marla Singer smoking her cigarette. Marla Singer rolling her eyes. I wake up alone in my own bed, and the door to Tyler’s room is closed. The door to Tyler’s room is never closed. All night, it was raining. The shingles on the roof blister, buckle, curl, and the rain comes through and collects on top of the ceiling plaster and drips down through the light fixtures.
   When it’s raining, we have to pull the fuses. You don’t dare turn on the lights. The house that Tyler rents, it has three stories and a basement. We carry around candles. It has pantries and screened sleeping porches and stained-glass windows on the stairway landing. There are bay windows with window seats in the parlor. The baseboard moldings are carved and varnished and eighteen inches high.
   The rain trickles down through the house, and everything wooden swells and shrinks, and the nails in everything wooden, the floors and baseboards and window casings, the nails inch out and rust.
   Everywhere there are rusted nails to step on or snag your elbow on, and there’s only one bathroom for the seven bedrooms, and now there’s a used condom.
   The house is waiting for something, a zoning change or a will to come out of probate, and then it will be torn down. I asked Tyler how long he’s been here, and he said about six weeks. Before the dawn of time, there was an owner who collected lifetime stacks of the National Geographic and Reader’s Digest. Big teetering stacks of magazines that get taller every time it rains. Tyler says the last tenant used to fold the glossy magazine pages for cocaine envelopes. There’s no lock on the front door from when police or whoever kicked in the door. There’s nine layers of wallpaper swelling on the dining-room walls, flowers under stripes under flowers under birds under grasscloth.
   Our only neighbors are a closed machine shop and across the street, a blocklong warehouse. Inside the house, there’s a closet with seven-foot rollers for rolling up damask tablecloths so they never have to be creased. There’s a cedarlined, refrigerated fur closet. The tile in the bathroom is painted with little flowers nicer than most everybody’s wedding china, and there’s a used condom in the toilet.
   I’ve been living with Tyler about a month.
   I am Joe’s White Knuckles.
   How could Tyler not fall for that. The night before last, Tyler sat up alone, splicing sex organs into Snow White.
   How could I compete for Tyler’s attention.
   I am Joe’s Enraged, Inflamed Sense of Rejection.
   What’s worse is this is all my fault. After I went to sleep last night, Tyler tells me he came home from his shift as a banquet waiter, and Marla called again from the Regent Hotel. This was it, Marla said. The tunnel, the light leading her down the tunnel. The death experience was so cool, Marla wanted me to hear her describe it as she lifted out of her body and floated up.
   Marla didn’t know if her spirit could use the telephone, but she wanted someone to at least hear her last breath.
   No, but no, Tyler answers the phone and misunderstands the whole situation.
   They’ve never met so Tyler thinks it’s a bad thing that Marla is about to die.
   It’s nothing of the kind.
   This is none of Tyler’s business, but Tyler calls the police and Tyler races over to the Regent Hotel.
   Now, according to the ancient Chinese custom we all learned from television, Tyler is responsible for Marla, forever, because Tyler saved Marla’s life.
   If I had only wasted a couple of minutes and gone over to watch Marla die, then none of this would have happened.
   Tyler tells me how Marla lives in room 8G, on the top floor of the Regent Hotel, up eight flights of stairs and down a noisy hallway with canned television laughter coming through the doors. Every couple seconds an actress screams or actors die screaming in a rattle of bullets. Tyler gets to the end of the hallway and even before he knocks a thin, thin, buttermilk sallow arm slingshots out the door of room 8G, grabs his wrist, and yanks Tyler inside.
   I bury myself in a Reader’s Digest.
   Even as Marla yanks Tyler into her room, Tyler can hear brake squeals and sirens collecting out in front of the Regent Hotel. On the dresser, there’s a dildo made of the same soft pink plastic as a million Barbie dolls, and for a moment, Tyler can picture millions of baby dolls and Barbie dolls and dildos injectionmolded and coming off the same assembly line in Taiwan.
   Marla looks at Tyler looking at her dildo, and she rolls her eyes and says, “Don’t be afraid. It’s not a threat to you.”
   Marla shoves Tyler back out into the hallway, and she says she’s sorry, but he shouldn’t have called the police and that’s probably the police downstairs right now.
   In the hallway, Marla locks the door to 8G and shoves Tyler toward the stairs. On the stairs, Tyler and Marla flatten against the wall as police and paramedics charge by with oxygen, asking which door will be 8G.
   Marla tells them the door at the end of the hall.
   Marla shouts to the police that the girl who lives in 8G used to be a lovely charming girl, but the girl is a monster bitch monster. The girl is infectious human waste, and she’s confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing so she won’t commit to anything.
   “The girl in 8G has no faith in herself,” Marla shouts, “and she’s worried that as she grows older, she’ll have fewer and fewer options.”
   Marla shouts, “Good luck.”
   The police pile up at the locked door to 8G, and Marla and Tyler hurry down to the lobby. Behind them, a policeman is yelling at the door:
   “Let us help you! Miss Singer, you have every reason to live! Just let us in, Marla, and we can help you with your problems!”
   Marla and Tyler rushed out into the street. Tyler got Marla into a cab, and high up on the eighth floor of the hotel, Tyler could see shadows moving back and forth across the windows of Marla’s room.
   Out on the freeway with all the lights and the other cars, six lanes of traffic racing toward the vanishing point, Marla tells Tyler he has to keep her up all night. If Marla ever falls asleep, she’ll die.
   A lot of people wanted Marla dead, she told Tyler. These people were already dead and on the other side, and at night they called on the telephone. Marla would go to bars and hear the bartender calling her name, and when she took the call, the line was dead.
   Tyler and Marla, they were up almost all night in the room next to mine. When Tyler woke up, Marla had disappeared back to the Regent Hotel.
   I tell Tyler, Marla Singer doesn’t need a lover, she needs a case worker.
   Tyler says, “Don’t call this love.”
   Long story short, now Marla’s out to ruin another part of my life. Ever since college, I make friends. They get married. I lose friends.
   Fine.
   Neat, I say.
   Tyler asks, is this a problem for me?
   I am Joe’s Clenching Bowels.
   No, I say, it’s fine.
   Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains.
   Just great, I say. Really.
   My boss sends me home because of all the dried blood on my pants, and I am overjoyed.
   The hole punched through my cheek doesn’t ever heal. I’m going to work, and my punched-out eye sockets are two swollen-up black bagels around the little piss holes I have left to see through. Until today, it really pissed me off that I’d become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed. Still, I’m doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When I pass people in the hall at work, I get totally ZEN right in everyone’s hostile little FACE.
   Worker bees can leave
   Even drones can fly away
   The queen is their slave
   You give up all your worldly possessions and your car and go live in a rented house in the toxic waste part of town where late at night, you can hear Marla and Tyler in his room, calling each other hum; butt wipe.
   Take it, human butt wipe.
   Do it, butt wipe.
   Choke it down. Keep it down, baby.
   Just by contrast, this makes me the calm little center of the world.
   Me, with my punched-out eyes and dried blood in big black crusty stains on my pants, I’m saying HELLO to everybody at work. HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it’s so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.
   Sigh.
   Look. Outside the window. A bird.
   My boss asked if the blood was my blood.
   The bird flies downwind. I’m writing a little haiku in my head.
   Without just one nest
   A bird can call the world home
   Life is your career
   I’m counting on my fingers: five, seven, five. The blood, is it mine? Yeah, I say. Some of it. This is a wrong answer.
   Like this is a big deal. I have two pair of black trousers. Six white shirts. Six pair of underwear. The bare minimum. I go to fight club. These things happen. “Go home,” my boss says. “Get changed.”
   I’m starting to wonder if Tyler and Marla are the same person. Except for their humping, every night in Marla’s room.
   Doing it.
   Doing it.
   Doing it.
   Tyler and Marla are never in the same room. I never see them together.
   Still, you never see me and Zsa Zsa Gabor together, and this doesn’t mean we’re the same person. Tyler just doesn’t come out when Marla’s around.
   So I can wash the pants, Tyler has to show me how to make soap. Tyler’s upstairs, and the kitchen is filled with the smell of cloves and burnt hair. Marla’s at the kitchen table, burning the inside of her arm with a clove cigarette and calling herself human butt wipe.
   “I embrace my own festering diseased corruption,” Marla tells the cherry on the end of her cigarette. Marla twists the cigarette into the soft white belly of her arm. “Burn, witch, burn.”
   Tyler’s upstairs in my bedroom, looking at his teeth in my mirror, and says he got me a job as a banquet waiter, part time.
   “At the Pressman Hotel, if you can work in the evening,” Tyler says. “The job will stoke your class hatred.”
   Yeah, I say, whatever.
   “They make you wear a black bow tie,” Tyler says. “All you need to work there is a white shirt and black trousers.”
   Soap, Tyler. I say, we need soap. We need to make some soap. I need to wash my pants.
   I hold Tyler’s feet while he does two hundred sit-ups.
   “To make soap, first we have to render fat.” Tyler is full of useful information.
   Except for their humping, Marla and Tyler are never in the same room. If Tyler’s around, Marla ignores him. This is familiar ground.
   “The big sleep, ‘Valley of the Dogs’ style.
   “Where even if someone loves you enough to save your life, they still castrate you.” Marla looks at me as if I’m the one humping her and says, “I can’t win with you, can I?”
   Marla goes out the back door singing that creepy “Valley of the Dolls” song.
   I just stare at her going.
   There’s one, two, three moments of silence until all of Marla is gone from the room.
   I turn around, and Tyler’s appeared.
   Tyler says, “Did you get rid of her?”
   Not a sound, not a smell, Tyler’s just appeared.
   “First,” Tyler says and jumps from the kitchen doorway to digging in the freezer. “First, we need to render some fat.”
   About my boss, Tyler tells me, if I’m really angry I should go to the post office and fill out a change-of-address card and have all his mail forwarded to Rugby, North Dakota.
   Tyler starts pulling out sandwich bags of frozen white stuff and dropping them in the sink. Me, I’m supposed to put a big pan on the stove and fill it most of the way with water. Too little water, and the fat will darken as it separates into tallow.
   “This fat,” Tyler says, “it has a lot of salt so the more water, the better.”
   Put the fat in the water, and get the water boiling.
   Tyler squeezes the white mess from each sandwich bag into the water, and then Tyler buries the empty bags all the way at the bottom of the trash.
   Tyler says, “Use a little imagination. Remember all that pioneer shit they taught you in Boy Scouts. Remember your high school chemistry.”
   It’s hard to imagine Tyler in Boy Scouts.
   Another thing I could do, Tyler tells me, is I could drive to my boss’s house some night and hook a hose up to an outdoor spigot. Hook the hose to a hand pump, and I could inject the house plumbing with a charge of industrial dye. Red or blue or green, and wait to see how my boss looks the next day. Or, I could just sit in the bushes and pump the hand pump until the plumbing was superpressurized to 110 psi. This way, when someone goes to flush a toilet, the toilet tank will explode. At 150 psi, if someone turns on the shower, the water pressure will blow off the shower head, strip the threads, blam, the shower head turns into a mortar shell.
   Tyler only says this to make me feel better. The truth is I like my boss. Besides, I’m enlightened now. You know, only Buddha-style behavior. Spider chrysanthemums. The Diamond Sutra and the Blue Cliff Record. Hari Rama, you know, Krishna, Krishna. You know, Enlightened.
   “Sticking feathers up your butt,” Tyler says, “does not make you a chicken.”
   As the fat renders, the tallow will float to the surface of the boiling water.
   Oh, I say, so I’m sticking feathers up my butt.
   As if Tyler here with cigarette burns marching up his arms is such an evolved soul. Mister and Missus Human Butt Wipe. I calm my face down and turn into one of those Hindu cow people going to slaughter on the airline emergency procedure card.
   Turn down the heat under the pan.
   I stir the boiling water.
   More and more tallow will rise until the water is skinned over with a rainbow mother-of-pearl layer. Use a big spoon to skim the layer off, and set this layer aside.
   So, I say, how is Marla?
   Tyler says, “At least Marla’s trying to hit bottom.”
   I stir the boiling water.
   Keep skimming until no more tallow rises. This is tallow we’re skimming off the water. Good clean tallow.
   Tyler says I’m nowhere near hitting the bottom, yet. And if I don’t fall all the way, I can’t be saved. Jesus did it with his crucifixion thing. I shouldn’t just abandon money and property and knowledge. This isn’t just a weekend retreat. I should run from self-improvement, and I should be running toward disaster. I can’t just play it safe anymore.
   This isn’t a seminar.
   “If you lose your nerve before you hit the bottom,” Tyler says, “you’ll never really succeed.”
   Only after disaster can we be resurrected.
   “It’s only after you’ve lost everything,” Tyler says, “that you’re free to do anything.”
   What I’m feeling is premature enlightenment.
   “And keep stirring,” Tyler says.
   When the fat’s boiled enough that no more tallow rises, throw out the boiling water. Wash the pot and fill it with clean water.
   I ask, am I anywhere near hitting bottom?
   “Where you’re at, now,” Tyler says, “you can’t even imagine what the bottom will be like.”
   Repeat the process with the skimmed tallow. Boil the tallow in the water. Skim and keep skimming. “The fat we’re using has a lot of salt in it,” Tyler says. “Too much salt and your soap won’t get solid.” Boil and skim.
   Boil and skim.
   Marla is back.
   The second Marla opens the screen door, Tyler is gone, vanished, run out of the room, disappeared.
   Tyler’s gone upstairs, or Tyler’s gone down to the basement.
   Poof.
   Marla comes in the back door with a canister of lye flakes.
   “At the store, they have one-hundred-percent-recycled toilet paper,” Marla says. “The worst job in the whole world must be recycling toilet paper.”
   I take the canister of lye and put it on the table. I don’t say anything.
   “Can I stay over, tonight?” Marla says.
   I don’t answer. I count in my head: five syllables, seven, five.
   A tiger can smile
   A snake will say it loves you
   Lies make us evil
   Marla says, “What are you cooking?”
   I am Joe’s Boiling Point.
   I say, go, just go, just get out. Okay? Don’t you have a big enough chunk of my life, yet?
   Marla grabs my sleeve and holds me in one place for the second it takes to kiss my cheek. “Please call me,” she says. “Please. We need to talk.”
   I say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
   The moment Marla is out the door, Tyler appears back in the room.
   Fast as a magic trick. My parents did this magic act for five years.
   I boil and skim while Tyler makes room in the fridge. Steam layers the air and water drips from the kitchen ceiling. The forty-watt bulb hidden in the back of the fridge, something bright I can’t see behind the empty ketchup bottles and jars of pickle brine or mayonnaise, some tiny light from inside the fridge edges Tyler’s profile bright.
   Boil and skim. Boil and skim. Put the skimmed tallow into milk cartons with the tops opened all the way.
   With a chair pulled up to the open fridge, Tyler watches the tallow cool. In the heat of the kitchen, clouds of cold fog waterfall out from the bottom of the fridge and pool around Tyler’s feet.
   As I fill the milk cartons with tallow, Tyler puts them in the fridge.
   I go to kneel beside Tyler in front of the fridge, and Tyler takes my hands and shows them to me. The life line. The love line. The mounds of Venus and Mars. The cold fog pooling around us, the dim bright light on our faces.
   “I need you to do me another favor,” Tyler says.
   This is about Marla isn’t it?
   “Don’t ever talk to her about me. Don’t talk about me behind my back. Do you promise?” Tyler says.
   I promise.
   Tyler says, “If you ever mention me to her, you’ll never see me again.”
   I promise.
   “Promise?”
   I promise.
   Tyler says, “Now remember, that was three times that you promised.”
   A layer of something thick and clear is collecting on top of the tallow in the fridge.
   The tallow, I say, it’s separating.
   “Don’t worry,” Tyler says. “The clear layer is glycerin. You can mix the glycerin back in when you make soap. Or, you can skim the glycerin off.”
   Tyler licks his lips, and turns my hands palm-down on his thigh, on the gummy flannel lap of his bathrobe.
   “You can mix the glycerin with nitric acid to make nitroglycerin,” Tyler says.
   I breathe with my mouth open and say, nitroglycerin.
   Tyler licks his lips wet and shining and kisses the back of my hand.
   “You can mix the nitroglycerin with sodium nitrate and sawdust to make dynamite,” Tyler says.
   The kiss shines wet on the back of my white hand.
   Dynamite, I say, and sit back on my heels.
   Tyler pries the lid off the can of lye. “You can blow up bridges,” Tyler says.
   “You can mix the nitroglycerin with more nitric acid and paraffin and make gelatin explosives,” Tyler says.
   “You could blow up a building, easy,” Tyler says.
   Tyler tilts the can of lye an inch above the shining wet kiss on the back of my hand.
   “This is a chemical burn,” Tyler says, “and it will hurt worse than you’ve ever been burned. Worse than a hundred cigarettes.”
   The kiss shines on the back of my hand.
   “You’ll have a scar,” Tyler says.
   “With enough soap,” Tyler says, “you could blow up the whole world. Now remember your promise.”
   And Tyler pours the lye.

Chapter 7

   Tyler’s saliva did two jobs. The wet kiss on the back of my hand held the flakes of lye while they burned. That was the first job. The second was lye only burns when you combine it with water. Or saliva.
   “This is a chemical burn,” Tyler said, “and it will hurt more than you’ve ever been burned.”
   You can use lye to open clogged drains.
   Close your eyes.
   A paste of lye and water can burn through an aluminum pan.
   A solution of lye and water will dissolve a wooden spoon.
   Combined with water, lye heats to over two hundred degrees, and as it heats it burns into the back of my hand, and Tyler places his fingers of one hand over my fingers, our hands spread on the lap of my bloodstained pants, and Tyler says to pay attention because this is the greatest moment of my life.
   “Because everything up to now is a story,” Tyler says, “and everything after now is a story.”
   This is the greatest moment of our life.
   The lye clinging in the exact shape of Tyler’s kiss is a bonfire or a branding iron or an atomic pile meltdown on my hand at the end of a long, long road I picture miles away from me. Tyler tells me to come back and be with him. My hand is leaving, tiny and on the horizon at the end of the road.
   Picture the fire still burning, except now it’s beyond the horizon. A sunset.
   “Come back to the pain,” Tyler says.
   This is the kind of guided meditation they use at support groups.
   Don’t even think of the word pain.
   Guided meditation works for cancer, it can work for this.
   “Look at your hand,” Tyler says.
   Don’t look at your hand.
   Don’t think of the word searing or flesh or tissue or charred.
   Don’t hear yourself cry.
   Guided meditation.
   You’re in Ireland. Close your eyes.
   You’re in Ireland the summer after you left college, and you’re drinking at a pub near the castle where every day busloads of English and American tourists come to kiss the Blarney stone.
   “Don’t shut this out,” Tyler says. “Soap and human sacrifice go hand in hand.”
   You leave the pub in a stream of men, walking through the beaded wet car silence of streets where it’s just rained. It’s night. Until you get to the Blarneystone castle.
   The floors in the castle are rotted away, and you climb the rock stairs with blackness getting deeper and deeper on every side with every step up. Everybody is quiet with the climb and the tradition of this little act of rebellion.
   “Listen to me,” Tyler says. “Open your eyes.
   “In ancient history,” Tyler says, “human sacrifices were made on a hill above a river. Thousands of people. Listen to me. The sacrifices were made and the bodies were burned on a pyre.
   “You can cry,” Tyler says. “You can go to the sink and run water over your hand, but first you have to know that you’re stupid and you will die. Look at me.
   “Someday,” Tyler says, “you will die, and until you know that, you’re useless to me.”
   You’re in Ireland.
   “You can cry,” Tyler says, “but every tear that lands in the lye flakes on your skin will burn a cigarette burn scar.”
   Guided meditation. You’re in Ireland the summer after you left college, and maybe this is where you first wanted anarchy. Years before you met Tyler Durden, before you peed in your first creme anglaise, you learned about little acts of rebellion.
   In Ireland.
   You’re standing on a platform at the top of the stairs in a castle.
   “We can use vinegar,” Tyler says, “to neutralize the burning, but first you have to give up.”
   After hundreds of people were sacrificed and burned, Tyler says, a thick white discharge crept from the altar, downhill to the river.
   First you have to hit bottom.
   You’re on a platform in a castle in Ireland with bottomless darkness all around the edge of the platform, and ahead of you, across an arm’s length of darkness, is a rock wall.
   “Rain,” Tyler says, “fell on the burnt pyre year after year, and year after year, people were burned, and the rain seeped through the wood ashes to become a solution of lye, and the lye combined with the melted fat of the sacrifices, and a thick white discharge of soap crept out from the base of the altar and crept downhill toward the river.”
   And the Irish men around you with their little act of rebellion in the darkness, they walk to the edge of the platform, and stand at the edge of the bottomless darkness and piss.
   And the men say, go ahead, piss your fancy American piss rich and yellow with too many vitamins. Rich and expensive and thrown away.
   “This is the greatest moment of your life,” Tyler says, “and you’re off somewhere missing it.”
   You’re in Ireland.
   Oh, and you’re doing it. Oh, yeah. Yes. And you can smell the ammonia and the daily allowance of B vitamins.
   Where the soap fell into the river, Tyler says, after a thousand years of killing people and rain, the ancient people found their clothes got cleaner if they washed at that spot.
   I’m pissing on the Blarney stone.
   “Geez,” Tyler says.
   I’m pissing in my black trousers with the dried bloodstains my boss can’t stomach.
   You’re in a rented house on Paper Street.
   “This means something,” Tyler says.
   “This is a sign,” Tyler says. Tyler is full of useful information. Cultures without soap, Tyler says, they used their urine and the urine of their dogs to wash their clothes and hair because of the uric acid and ammonia.
   There’s the smell of vinegar, and the fire on your hand at the end of the long road goes out.
   There’s the smell of lye scalding the branched shape of your sinuses, and the hospital vomit smell of piss and vinegar.
   “It was right to kill all those people,” Tyler says.
   The back of your hand is swollen red and glossy as a pair of lips in the exact shape of Tyler’s kiss. Scattered around the kiss are the cigarette burn spots of somebody crying.
   “Open your eyes,” Tyler says, and his face is shining with tears. “Congratulations,” Tyler says. “You’re a step closer to hitting bottom.
   “You have to see,” Tyler says, “how the first soap was made of heroes.”
   Think about the animals used in product testing.
   Think about the monkeys shot into space.
   “Without their death, their pain, without their sacrifice,” Tyler says, “we would have nothing.”
   I stop the elevator between floors while Tyler undoes his belt. When the elevator stops, the soup bowls stacked an the buffet cart stop rattling, and steam mushrooms up to the elevator ceiling as Tyler takes the lid off the soup tureen.
   Tyler starts to take himself out and says, “Don’t look at me, or I can’t go.”
   The soup’s a sweet tomato bisque with cilantro and clams. Between the two, nobody will smell anything else we put in.
   I say, hurry up, and I look back over my shoulder at Tyler with his last half inch hanging in the soup. This looks in a really funny way like a tall elephant in a waiter’s white shirt and bow tie drinking soup through its little trunk.
   Tyler says, “I said, ‘Don’t look.’”
   The elevator door in front of me has a little face-sized window that lets me look out into the banquet service corridor. With the elevator stopped between floors, my view is about a cockroach above the green linoleum, and from here at cockroach level the green corridor stretches toward the vanishing point, past half-open doors where titans and their gigantic wives drink barrels of champagne and bellow at each other wearing diamonds bigger than I feel.
   Last week, I tell Tyler, when the Empire State Lawyers were here for their Christmas party, I got mine hard and stuck it in all their orange mousses.
   Last week, Tyler says, he stopped the elevator and farted on a whole cart of Boccone Dolce for the Junior League tea.
   That Tyler knows how a meringue will absorb odor.
   At cockroach level, we can hear the captive harpist make music as the titans lift forks of butterflied lamb chop, each bite the size of a whole pig, each mouth a tearing Stonehenge of ivory.
   I say, go already.
   Tyler says, “I can’t.”
   If the soup gets cold, they’ll send it back.
   The giants, they’ll send something back to the kitchen for no reason at all. They just want to see you run around for their money. A dinner like this, these banquet parties, they know the tip is already included in the bill so they treat you like dirt. We don’t really take anything back to the kitchen. Move the Pommes Parisienne and the Asperges Hollandaise around the plate a little, serve it to someone else, and all of a sudden it’s fine.
   I say, Niagara Falls. The Nile River. In school, we all thought if you put somebody’s hand in a bowl of warm water while they slept, they’d wet the bed.
   Tyler says, “Oh.” Behind me, Tyler says, “Oh, yeah. Oh, I’m doing it. Oh, yeah. Yes.”
   Past half-open doors in the ballrooms off the service corridor swish gold and black and red skirts as tall as the gold velvet curtain at the
   Old Broadway Theatre. Now and again there are pairs of Cadillac sedans in black leather with shoelaces where the windshields should be. Above the cars move a city of office towers in red cummerbunds.
   Not too much, I say.
   Tyler and me, we’ve turned into the guerrilla terrorists of the service industry. Dinner party saboteurs. The hotel caters dinner parties, and when somebody wants the food they get the food and the wine and the china and glassware and the waiters. They get the works, all in one bill. And because they know they can’t threaten you with the pp, to them you’re just a cockroach.
   Tyler, he did a dinner party one time. This was when Tyler turned into a renegade waiter. That first dinner party, Tyler was serving the fish course in this white and glass cloud of a house that seemed to float over the city on steel legs attached to a hillside. Part of the way through the fish course, while Tyler’s rinsing plates from the pasta course, the hostess comes in the kitchen holding a scrap of paper that flaps like a flag, her hand is shaking so much. Through her clenched teeth, Madam wants to know did the waiters see any of the guests go down the hallway that leads to the bedroom part of the house? Especially any of the women guests? Or the host?
   In the kitchen, it’s Tyler and Albert and Len and Jerry rinsing and stacking the plates and a prep cook, Leslie, basting garlic butter on the artichoke hearts stuffed with shrimp and escargot.
   “We’re not supposed to go in that part of the house,” Tyler says.
   We come in through the garage. All we’re supposed to see is the garage, the kitchen, and the dining room.
   The host comes in behind his wife in the kitchen doorway and takes the scrap of paper out of her shaking hand. “This will be alright,” he says.
   “How can I face those people,” Madam says, “unless I know who did this?”
   The host puts a flat open hand against the back of her silky white party dress that matches her house and Madam straightens up, her shoulders squared, and is all of a sudden quiet. “They are your guests,” he says. “And this party is very important.”
   This looks in a really funny way like a ventriloquist bringing his dummy to life. Madam looks at her husband, and with a little shove the host takes his wife back into the dining room. The note drops to the floor and the two-way swish-swish of the kitchen door sweeps the note against Tyler’s feet.
   Albert says, “What’s it say?”
   Len goes out to start clearing the fish course.
   Leslie slides the tray of artichoke hearts back into the oven and says, “What’s it say, already?”
   Tyler looks right at Leslie and says, without even picking up the note, “‘I have passed an amount of urine into at least one of your many elegant fragrances.’”
   Albert smiles. “You pissed in her perfume?”
   No, Tyler says. He just left the note stuck between the bottles. She’s got about a hundred bottles sitting on a mirror counter in her bathroom.
   Leslie smiles. “So you didn’t, really?”
   “No,” Tyler says, “but she doesn’t know that.”
   The whole rest of the night in that white and glass dinner party in the sky, Tyler kept clearing plates of cold artichokes, then cold veal with cold Pommes Duchesse, then cold Choufleur a la Polonaise from in front of the hostess, and Tyler kept filling her wine glass about a dozen times. Madam sat watching each of her women guests eat the food, until between clearing the sorbet dishes and serving the apricot gateau, Madam’s place at the head of the table was all of a sudden empty.
   They were washing up after the guests had left, loading the coolers and the china back into the hotel van, when the host came in the kitchen and asked, would Albert please come help him with something heavy?
   Leslie says, maybe Tyler went too far.
   Loud and fast, Tyler says how they kill whales, Tyler says, to make that perfume that costs more than gold per ounce. Most people have never seen a whale. Leslie has two kids in an apartment next to the freeway and Madam hostess has more bucks than we’ll make in a year in bottles on her bathroom counter.
   Albert comes back from helping the host and dials 9-1-1 on the phone. Albert puts a hand over the mouth part and says, man, Tyler shouldn’t have left that note.
   Tyler says, “So, tell the banquet manager. Get me fired. I’m not married to this chickenshit job.”
   Everybody looks at their feet.
   “Getting fired,” Tyler says, “is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we’d quit treading water and do something with our lives.”
   Albert says into the phone that we need an ambulance and the address. Waiting on the line, Albert says the hostess is a real mess right now. Albert had to pick her up from next to the toilet. The host couldn’t pick her up because Madam says he’s the one who peed in her perfume bottles, and she says he’s trying to drive her crazy by having an affair with one of the women guests, tonight, and she’s tired, tired of all the people they call their friends.
   The host can’t pick her up because Madam’s fallen down behind the toilet in her white dress and she’s waving around half a broken perfume bottle. Madam says she’ll cut his throat, he even tries to touch her.
   Tyler says, “Cool.”
   And Albert stinks. Leslie says, “Albert, honey, you stink.”
   There’s no way you could come out of that bathroom not stinking,
   Albert says. Every bottle of perfume is broken on the floor and the toilet is piled full of the other bottles. They look like ice, Albert says, like at the fanciest hotel parties where we have to fill the urinals with crushed ice. The bathroom stinks and the floor is gritty with slivers of ice that won’t melt, and when Albert helps Madam to her feet, her white dress wet with yellow stains, Madam swings the broken bottle at the host, slips in the perfume and broken glass, and lands on her palms.
   She’s crying and bleeding, curled against the toilet. Oh, and it stings, she says. “Oh, Walter, it stings. It’s stinging,” Madam says.
   The perfume, all those dead whales in the cuts in her hands, it stings.
   The host pulls Madam to her feet against him, Madam holding her hands up as if she were praying but with her hands an inch apart and blood running down the palms, down the wrists, across a diamond bracelet, and to her elbows where it drips.
   And the host, he says, “It will be alright, Nina.”
   “My hands, Walter,” Madam says.
   “It will be alright.”
   Madam says, “Who would do this to me? Who could hate me this much?”
   The host says, to Albert, “Would you call an ambulance?”
   That was Tyler’s first mission as a service industry terrorist. Guerrilla waiter. Minimum-wage despoiler. Tyler’s been doing this for years, but he says everything is more fun as a shared activity.
   At the end of Albert’s story, Tyler smiles and says, “Cool.”
   Back in the hotel, right now, in the elevator stopped between the kitchen and the banquet floors, I tell Tyler how I sneezed on the trout in aspic for the dermatologist convention and three people told me it was too salty and one person said it was delicious.
   Tyler shakes himself off over the soup tureen and says he’s run dry.
   This is easier with cold soup, vichyssoise, or when the chefs make a really fresh gazpacho. This is impossible with that onion soup that has a crust of melted cheese on it in ramekins. If I ever ate here, that’s what I’d order.
   We were running out of ideas, Tyler and me. Doing stuff to the food got to be boring, almost part of the job description. Then I hear one of the doctors, lawyers, whatever, say how a hepatitis bug can live on stainless steel for six months. You have to wonder how long this bug can live on Rum Custard Charlotte Russe.
   Or Salmon Timbale.
   I asked the doctor where could we get our hands on some of these hepatitis bugs, and he’s drunk enough to laugh.
   Everything goes to the medical waste dump, he says.
   And he laughs.
   Everything.
   The medical waste dump sounds like hitting bottom.
   One hand on the elevator control, I ask Tyler if he’s ready. The scar on the back of my hand is swollen red and glossy as a pair of lips in the exact shape of Tyler’s kiss.
   “One second,” Tyler says.
   The tomato soup must still be hot because the crooked thing Tyler tucks back in his pants is boiled pink as a jumbo prawn.

Chapter 8

   In South America, Land of Enchantment, we could be wading in a river where tiny fish will swim up Tyler’s urethra. The fish have barbed spines that flare out and back so once they’re up Tyler, the fish set up housekeeping and get ready to lay their eggs. In so many ways, how we spent Saturday night could be worse.
   “It could’ve been worse,” Tyler says, “what we did with Marla’s mother.”
   I say, shut up.
   Tyler says, the French government could’ve taken us to an underground complex outside of Paris where not even surgeons but semiskilled technicians would razor our eyelids off as part of toxicity testing an aerosol tanning spray.
   “This stuff happens,” Tyler says. “Read the newspaper.”
   What’s worse is I knew what Tyler had been up to with Marla’s mother, but for the first time since I’ve known him, Tyler had some oval play money. Tyler was making real bucks. Nordstrom’s called and left an order for two hundred bars of Tyler’s brown sugar facial soap before Christmas. At twenty bucks a bar, suggested retail price, we had money to go out on Saturday night. Money to fix the leak in the gas line. Go dancing. Without money to worry about, maybe I could quit my job.
   Tyler calls himself the Paper Street Soap Company. People are saying it’s the best soap ever.
   “What would’ve been worse,” Tyler says, “is if you had accidentally eaten Marla’s mother.”
   Through a mouthful of Kung Pao Chicken, I say to just shut the hell up.
   Where we are this Saturday night is the front seat of a 1968 Impala sitting on two flats in the front row of a used-car lot. Tyler and me, we’re talking, drinking beer out of cans, and the front seat of this Impala is bigger than most people’s sofas. The car lots up and down this part of the boulevard, in the industry they call these lots the Pot Lots where the cars all cost around two hundred dollars and during the day, the gypsy guys who run these lots stand around in their plywood offices smoking long, thin cigars.
   The cars are the beater first cars kids drive in high school: Gremlins and Pacers, Mavericks and Hornets, Pintos, International Harvester pickup trucks, lowered Camaros and Dusters and Impalas. Cars that people loved and then dumped. Animals at the pound. Bridesmaid dresses at the Goodwill. With dents and gray or red or black primer quarter panels and rocker panels and lumps of body putty that nobody ever got around to sanding. Plastic wood and plastic leather and plastic chrome interiors. At night, the gypsy guys don’t even lock the car doors.
   The headlights on the boulevard go by behind the price painted on the Impala-big wraparound Cinemascope windshield. See the U.S.A. The price is ninety-eight dollars. From the inside, this looks like eightynine cents. Zero, zero, decimal point, eight, nine. America is asking you to call.
   Most of the cars here are about a hundred dollars, and all the cars have an “AS IS” sales agreement hanging in the driver’s window.
   We chose the Impala because if we have to sleep in a car on Saturday night, this car has the biggest seats.
   We’re eating Chinese because we can’t go home. It was either sleep here, or stay up all night at an after-hours dance club. We don’t go to dance clubs. Tyler says the music is so loud, especially the base tracks, that it screws with his biorhythm. The last time we went out, Tyler said the loud music made him constipated. This, and the club is too loud to talk, so after a couple of drinks, everyone feels like the center of attention but completely cutoff from participating with anyone else.
   You’re the corpse in an English murder mystery.
   We’re sleeping in a car tonight because Marla came to the house and threatened to call the police and have me arrested for cooking her mother, and then Marla slammed around the house, screaming that I was a ghoul and a cannibal and she went kicking through the piles of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic, and then I left her there. In a nutshell.
   After her accidental on-purpose suicide with Xanax at the Regent Hotel, I can’t imagine Marla calling the police, but Tyler thought it would be good to sleep out, tonight. Just in case.
   Just in case Marla burns the house down.
   Just in case Marla goes out and finds a gun.
   Just in case Marla is still in the house.
   Just in case.
   I try to get centered:
   Watching white moon face The stars never feel anger Blah, blah, blah, the end
   Here, with the cars going by on the boulevard and a beer in my hand in the Impala with its cold, hard Bakelite steering wheel maybe three feet in diameter and the cracked vinyl seat pinching my ass through my jeans, Tyler says, “One more time. Tell me exactly what happened.”
   For weeks, I ignored what Tyler had been up to. One time, I went with Tyler to the Western Union office and watched as he sent Marla’s mother a telegram.
   HIDEOUSLY WRINKLED (stop) PLEASE HELP ME! (end)
   Tyler had showed the clerk Marla’s library card and signed Marla’s name to the telegram order, and yelled, yes, Marla can be a guy’s name sometimes, and the clerk could just mind his own business.
   When we were leaving the Western Union, Tyler said if I loved him, I’d trust him. This wasn’t something I needed to know about, Tyler told me and he took me to Garbonzo’s for hummus.
   What really scared me wasn’t the telegram as much as it was eating out with Tyler. Never, no, never had Tyler ever paid cash for anything, or clothes, Tyler goes to gyms and hotels and claims clothing out of the lost and found. This is better than Marla, who goes to Laundromats to steal jeans out of the dryers and sell them at twelve dollars a pair to those places that buy used jeans. Tyler never ate in restaurants, and Marla wasn’t wrinkled.
   For no apparent reason, Tyler sent Marla’s mother a fifteen-pound box of chocolates.
   Another way this Saturday night could be worse, Tyler tells me in the Impala, is the brown recluse spider. When it bites you, it injects not just a venom but a digestive enzyme or acid that dissolves the tissue around the bite, literally melting your arm or your leg or your face. Tyler was hiding out tonight when this all started. Marla showed up at the house. Without even knocking, Marla leans inside the front door and shouts, “Knock, knock.”
   I’m reading Reader’s Digest in the kitchen. I am totally nonplussed.
   Marla yells, “Tyler. Can I come in? Are you home?”
   I yell, Tyler’s not home.
   Marla yells, “Don’t be mean.”
   By now, I’m at the front door. Marla’s standing in the foyer with a Federal Express overnight package, and says, “I needed to put something in your freezer.”
   I dog her heels on the way to the kitchen, saying, no.
   No.
   No.
   No.
   She is not going to start keeping her junk in this house.
   “But Pumpkin,” Marla says, “I don’t have a freezer at the hotel, and you said I could.”
   No, I did not. The last thing I want is Marla moving in, one piece of crap at a time.
   Marla has her Federal Express package ripped open on the kitchen table, and she lifts something white out of the Styrofoam packing peanuts and shakes this white thing in my face. “This is not crap,” she says. “This is my mother you’re talking about so just fuck off.”
   What Marla lifts out of the package, it’s one of those sandwich bags of white stuff that Tyler rendered for tallow to make soap.
   “Things would’ve been worse,” Tyler says, “if you’d accidentally eaten what was in one of those sandwich bags. If you’d got up in the middle of the night sometime, and squeezed out the white goo and added California onion soup mix and eaten it as a dip with potato chips. Or broccoli.”
   More than anything in the world right then, while Marla and I were standing in the kitchen, I didn’t want Marla to open the freezer.
   I asked, what was she going to do with the white stuff?
   “Paris lips,” Marla said. “As you get older, your lips pull inside your mouth. I’m saving for a collagen lip injection. I have almost thirty pounds of collagen in your freezer.”
   I asked, how big of lips did she want?
   Marla said it was the operation itself that scared her.
   The stuff in the Federal Express package, I tell Tyler in the Impala, that was the same stuff we made soap out of. Ever since silicone turned out to be dangerous, collagen has become the hot item to I have injected to smooth out wrinkles or to puff up thin lips or weak chins. The way Marla had explained it, most collagen you get cheap from cow fat that’s been sterilized and processed, but that kind of cheap collagen doesn’t last very long in your body. Wherever you get injected, say in your lips, your body rejects it and starts to poop it out. Six months later, you have thin lips, again.
   The best kind of collagen, Marla said, is your own fat, sucked out of your thighs, processed and cleaned and injected back into your lips, or wherever. This kind of collagen will last.
   This stuff in the fridge at home, it was Marla’s collagen trust fund. Whenever her mom grew any extra fat, she had it sucked out and packaged. Marla says the process is called gleaning. If Marla’s mom doesn’t need the collagen herself, she sends the packets to Marla. Marla never has any fat of her own, and her mom figures that familial collagen would be better than Marla ever having to use the cheap cow kind.
   Streetlight along the boulevard comes through the sales agreement in the window and prints “AS IS” on Tyler’s cheek.
   “Spiders,” Tyler says, “could lay their eggs and larva could tunnel, under your skin. That’s how bad your life can get.”
   Right now, my Almond Chicken in its warm, creamy sauce tastes like something sucked out of Marla’s mother’s thighs.
   It was right then, standing in the kitchen with Marla, that I knew what Tyler had done.
   HIDEOUSLY WRINKLED.
   And I knew why he sent candy to Marla’s mother.
   PLEASE HELP.
   I say, Marla, you don’t want to look in the freezer.
   Marla says, “Do what?”
   “We never eat red meat,” Tyler tells me in the Impala, and he can’t use chicken fat or the soap won’t harden into a bar. “The stuff,” Tyler says, “is making us a fortune. We paid the rent with that collagen.”
   I say, you should’ve told Marla. Now she thinks I did it.
   “Saponification,” Tyler says, “is the chemical reaction you need to make good soap. Chicken fat won’t work or any fat with too much salt.
   “Listen,” Tyler says. “We have a big order to fill. What we’ll do is send Marla’s mom some chocolates and probably some fruitcakes.”
   I don’t think that will work, anymore.
   Long story short, Marla looked in the freezer. Okay, there was a little scuffle, first. I try to stop her, and the bag she’s holding gets dropped and breaks open on the linoleum and we both slip in the greasy white mess and come up gagging. I have Marla around the waist from behind, her black hair whipping my face, her arms pinned to her sides, and I’m saying over and over, it wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.
   I didn’t do it.
   “My mother! You’re spilling her all over!”
   We needed to make soap, I say with my face pressed up behind her car. We needed to wash my pants, to pay the rent, to fix the leak in the gas line. It wasn’t me.
   It was Tyler.
   Marla screams, “What are you talking about?” and twists out of her skirt. I’m scrambling to get up off the greased floor with an armful of Marla’s India cotton print skirt, and Marla in her panties and wedgie Feels and peasant blouse throws open the freezer part of the fridge, and inside there’s no collagen trust fund.
   There’s two old flashlight batteries, but that’s all.
   “Where is she?”
   I’m already crawling backwards, my hands slipping, my shoes slipping on the linoleum, and my ass wiping a clean path across the dirty Moor away from Marla and the fridge. I hold up the skirt so I don’t Dave to see Marla’s face when I tell her.
   The truth.
   We made soap out of it. Her. Marla’s mother.
   “Soap?”
   Soap. You boil fat. You mix it with lye. You get soap.
   When Marla screams, I throw the skirt in her face and run. I slip. I run.
   Around and around the first floor, Marla runs after me, skidding in the corners, pushing off against the window casings for momentum. Slipping.
   Leaving filthy handprints of grease and floor dirt among the wallpaper flowers. Falling and sliding into the wainscoting, getting back up, running.
   Marla screaming, “You boiled my mother!”
   Tyler boiled her mother.
   Marla screaming, always one swipe of her fingernails behind me.
   Tyler boiled her mother.
   “You boiled my mother!”
   The front door was still open.
   And then I was out the front door with Marla screaming in the doorway behind me. My feet didn’t slip against the concrete sidewalk, and I just kept running. Until I found Tyler or until Tyler found me, and I told him what happened.
   With one beer each, Tyler and I spread out on the front and back seats with me in the front seat. Even now, Marla’s probably still in the house, throwing magazines against the walls and screaming how I’m a prick and a monster two-faced capitalist suck-ass bastard. The miles of night between Marla and me offer insects and melanomas and flesh-eating viruses. Where I’m at isn’t so bad.
   “When a man is hit by lightning,” Tyler says, “his head burns down to a smoldering baseball and his zipper welds itself shut.”
   I say, did we hit bottom, tonight?
   Tyler lies back and asks, “If Marilyn Monroe was alive right now, what would she be doing?”
   I say, goodnight.
   The headliner hangs down in shreds from the ceiling, and Tyler says, “Clawing at the lid of her coffin.”

Chapter 9

   My boss stands too close to my desk with his little smile, his lips together and stretched thin, his crotch at my elbow. I look up from writing the cover letter for a recall campaign. These letters always begin the same way:
   “This notice is sent to you in accordance with the requirements of the National Motor Vehicle Safety Act. We have determined that a defect exists … “
   This week I ran the liability formula, and for once A times B times C equaled more than the cost of a recall.
   This week, it’s the little plastic clip that holds the rubber blade on your windshield wipers. A throwaway item. Only two hundred vehicles affected. Next to nothing for the labor cost.
   Last week was more typical. Last week the issue was some leather cured with a known teratogenic substance, synthetic Nirret or something just as illegal that’s still used in third world tanning. Something so strong that it could cause birth defects in the fetus of any pregnant woman who comes across it. Last week, nobody called the Department of Transportation. Nobody initiated a recall.
   New leather multiplied by labor cost multiplied by administration cost would equal more than our first-quarter profits. If anyone ever discovers our mistake, we can still pay off a lot of grieving families before we come close to the cost of retrofitting sixty-five hundred leather interiors.
   But this week, we’re doing a recall campaign. And this week the insomnia is back. Insomnia, and now the whole world figures to stop by and take a dump on my grave.
   My boss is wearing his gray tie so today must be a Tuesday.
   My boss brings a sheet of paper to my desk and asks if I’m looking for something. This paper was left in the copy machine, he says, and begins to read:
   “The first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.”
   His eyes go side to side across the paper, and he giggles.
   “The second rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.”
   I hear Tyler’s words come out of my boss, Mister Boss with his midlife spread and family photo on his desk and his dreams about early retirement and winters spent at a trailer-park hookup in some Arizona desert. My boss, with his extra-starched shirts and standing appointment for a haircut every Tuesday after lunch, he looks at me, and he says:
   “I hope this isn’t yours.”
   I am Joe’s Blood-Boiling Rage.
   Tyler asked me to type up the fight club rules and make him ten copies. Not nine, not eleven. Tyler says, ten. Still, I have the insomnia, and can’t remember sleeping since three nights ago. This must be the original I typed. I made ten copies, and forgot the original. The paparazzi flash of the copy machine in my face. The insomnia distance of everything, a copy of a copy of a copy. You can’t touch anything, and nothing can touch you.
   My boss reads:
   “The third rule of fight club is two men per fight.”
   Neither of us blinks.
   My boss reads:
   “One fight at a time.”
   I haven’t slept in three days unless I’m sleeping now. My boss shakes the paper under my nose. What about it, he says. Is this some little game I’m playing on company time? I’m paid for my full attention, not to waste time with little war games. And I’m not paid to abuse the copy machines.
   What about it? He shakes the paper under my nose. What do I think, he asks, what should he do with an employee who spends company time in some little fantasy world. If I was in his shoes, what would I do?
   What would I do?
   The hole in my cheek, the blue-black swelling around my eyes, and the swollen red scar of Tyler’s kiss on the back of my hand, a copy of a copy of a copy.
   Speculation.
   Why does Tyler want ten copies of the fight club rules?
   Hindu cow.
   What I would do, I say, is I’d be very careful who I talked to about this paper.
   I say, it sounds like some dangerous psychotic killer wrote this, and this buttoned-down schizophrenic could probably go over the edge at any moment in the working day and stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-180 carbine gas-operated semiautomatic.
   My boss just looks at me.
   The guy, I say, is probably at home every night with a little rattail file, filing a cross into the tip of every one of his rounds. This way, when he shows up to work one morning and pumps a round into his nagging, ineffectual, petty, whining, butt-sucking, candy-ass boss, that one round will split along the filed grooves and spread open the way a dumdum bullet flowers inside you to blow a bushel load of your stinking guts out through your spine. Picture your gut chakra opening in a slow-motion explosion of sausage-casing small intestine.
   My boss takes the paper out from under my nose.
   Go ahead, I say, read some more.
   No really, I say, it sounds fascinating. The work of a totally diseased mind.
   And I smile. The little butthole-looking edges of the hole in my cheek are the same blue-black as a dog’s gums. The skin stretched tight across the swelling around my eyes feels varnished.
   My boss just looks at me.
   Let me help you, I say.
   I say, the fourth rule of fight club is one fight at a time.
   My boss looks at the rules and then looks at me.
   I say, the fifth rule is no shoes, no shirts in the fight.
   My boss looks at the rules and looks at me.
   Maybe, I say, this totally diseased fuck would use an Eagle Apache carbine because an Apache takes a thirty-shot mag and only weighs nine pounds. The Armalite only takes a five-round magazine. With thirty shots, our totally fucked hero could go the length of mahogany row and take out every vice president with a cartridge left over for each director.
   Tyler’s words coming out of my mouth. I used to be such a nice person.
   I just look at my boss. My boss has blue; blue, pale cornflower blue eyes.
   The J and R 68 semiautomatic carbine also takes a thirty-shot mag, and it only weighs seven pounds.
   My boss just looks at me.
   It’s scary, I say. This is probably somebody he’s known for years. Probably this guy knows all about him, where he lives, and where his wife works and his kids go to school.
   This is exhausting, and all of a sudden very, very boring.
   And why does Tyler need ten copies of the fight club rules?
   What I don’t have to say is I know about the leather interiors that cause birth defects. I know about the counterfeit brake linings that looked good enough to pass the purchasing agent, but fail after two thousand miles.
   I know about the air-conditioning rheostat that gets so hot it sets fire to the maps in your glove compartment. I know how many people burn alive because of fuel-injector flashback. I’ve seen people’s legs cut off at the knee when turbochargers start exploding and send their vanes through the firewall and into the passenger compartment. I’ve been out in the field and seen the burned-up cars and seen the reports where CAUSE OF FAILURE is recorded as “unknown.”
   No, I say, the paper’s not mine. I take the paper between two fingers and jerk it out of his hand. The edge must slice his thumb because his hand flies to his mouth, and he’s sucking hard, eyes wide open. I crumble the paper into a ball and toss it into the trash can next to my desk.
   Maybe, I say, you shouldn’t be bringing me every little piece of trash you pick up.
   Sunday night, I go to Remaining Men Together and the basement of Trinity Episcopal is almost empty. Just Big Bob, and I come dragging in with every muscle bruised inside and out, but my heart’s still racing and my thoughts are a tornado in my head. This is insomnia. All night, your thoughts are on the air.
   All night long, you’re thinking: Am I asleep? Have I slept?
   Insult to injury, Big Bob’s arms come out of his T-shirt sleeves quilted with muscle and so hard they shine. Big Bob smiles, he’s so happy to see me.
   He thought I was dead.
   Yeah, I say, me too.
   “Well,” Big Bob says, “I’ve got good news.”
   Where is everybody?
   “That’s the good news,” Big Bob says. “The group’s disbanded. I only come down here to tell any guys who might show up.”
   I collapse with my eyes closed on one of the plaid thrift store couches.
   “The good news,” Big Bob says, “is there’s a new group, but the first rule about this new group is you aren’t supposed to talk about it.
   Oh.
   Big Bob says, “And the second rule is you’re not supposed to talk about it.”
   Oh, shit. I open my eyes.
   Fuck.
   “The group’s called fight club,” Big Bob says, “and it meets every Friday night in a closed garage across town. On Thursday nights, there’s another fight club that meets at a garage closer by.”
   I don’t know either of these places.
   “The first rule about fight club,” Big Bob says, “is you don’t talk about fight club.”
   Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday night, Tyler is a movie projectionist. I saw his pay stub last week.
   “The second rule about fight club,” Big Bob says, “is you don’t talk about fight club.”
   Saturday night, Tyler goes to fight club with me.
   “Only two men per fight.”
   Sunday morning, we come home beat up and sleep all afternoon. “Only one fight at a time,” Big Bob says. Sunday and Monday night, Tyler’s waiting tables. “You fight without shirts or shoes.” Tuesday night, Tyler’s at home making soap, wrapping it in tissue paper, shipping it out. The Paper Street Soap Company. “The fights,” Big Bob says, “go on as long as they have to. Those are the rules invented by the guy who invented fight club.” Big Bob asks, “Do you know him? “I’ve never seen him, myself,” Big Bob says, “but the guy’s name is Tyler Durden.” The Paper Street Soap Company. Do I know him. I dunno, I say. Maybe.