Haunted

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Webber standing there, cut off in the middle of singing “Buttons and Bows,” the spiffy Doris Day version, not the cheesy Dinah Shore version, he's wearing a strapless blue satin sheath with all his chest hair, his shoulder and arm hair billowing from wrist to wrist like a lush boa of black feathers, and he asks this girl, “So you wanna buy a punch or not?”

  Flint's one step away, at the head of the line, taking people's money, and he says, “Take your best shot.” He says, “Half price for chicks.”

  And the girl, she just looks at them, tapping one of her feet in its tennis shoe, her mouth clamped shut and pulled way over to one side of her face.

  Finally, she says, “Can you fake-sing that Titanic song?”

  And Flint takes her ten bucks and gives her a hug. “For you,” he says, “we can play that song all night long . . .”

  That was the night they finally topped out the fifty grand for the mission.

  Now, outside the jet, you can see the torn brown-and-gold coastline of Saudi Arabia. The windows of a Gulfstream are two, three times the size of the little porthole you get on a commercial jetliner. Just looking out, at the sun and ocean, everything else mixed together from this high up, you'd almost want to live. To scrub the whole mission and head home, no matter how bleak the future.

  A Gulfstream carries enough fuel to fly 6,750 nautical miles, even with an 85-percent headwind. Their target was only going to take 6,701, leaving just enough jet fuel to trigger their luggage, their suitcases plus the bags and bags that Jenson loaded in Florida, where they landed because the pilot started to feel sick. This is after they got him a cup of coffee. Three Vicodins ground and mixed in black coffee would make most people dizzy, groggy, sick. So they landed. Offloaded the regular pilot. Onloaded the bags. Mr. Jenson humping the ammonium nitrate. And here was Flint's girl, Sheila, fresh out of flight school and ready to take off.

  In the open doorway to the cockpit, you can see Sheila slip her earphones down to rest around her neck. Looking back over one shoulder, she says, “Just heard on the radio. Somebody dove a jet full of fertilizer into the Vatican . . .”

  Go figure, Webber says.

  Looking out his window, kicked back in his white leather recliner, Flint says, “We got company.” Off that side of the plane, you can see two jet fighters. Flint gives them a little wave. The profiles of the little fighter pilots, they don't wave back.

  And Webber looks at the ice melting in his empty glass and says, “Where are we going?”

  From the cockpit, Sheila says, “We've had them since we made the turn inland at Jedda.” She puts her headphones back over her ears.

  And Flint leans across the aisle to pour the empty glass full of Scotch, again, and Flint says, “Does Mecca ring a bell, old buddy? The Al-Haram?” He says, “How about the Ka'ba?”

  Sheila, one hand touching the earphone over one ear, she says, “They got the Mormon Tabernacle . . . the National Baptist Convention Headquarters . . . the Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock . . . the Beverly Hills Hotel . . .”

  Nope, Flint says. Disarmament didn't work. The United Nation didn't, either. Still, maybe this will.

  With their friend, Jenson, our Reverend Godless, to be the sole survivor.

  Webber says, “What's in the Beverly Hills Hotel?”

  And Flint drains his glass and says, “The Dalai Lama . . .”

  That girl in Missoula, Montana, Webber got her name and phone number that night. When it came time for them all to write out their last will and testaments, Webber left that girl everything he had in the world, including the Mustang parked in his folks' breezeway, his set of Craftsman tools, and fourteen Coach purses with the shoes and outfits to match.

  That night, after she paid fifty bucks to kick Webber's ass, the girl looks at him with his blind white eye swollen almost shut, his lips split. He's three years older than her, but he looks like her grandma, and she says, “So why is it you're doing this?”

  And Webber peels off the wig, all the strands and curls of blond hair stuck to the blood dried around his nose and mouth. Webber says, “Everybody wants to make the world a better place.”

  Drinking his lite beer, Flint looks at Webber. Shaking his head, he says, “You fucker . . .” Flint says, “Is that my wig?”

  11

  Not every day was filled with terror.

  The Matchmaker called this one job “picking white peaches.”

  You drag two scrolly white sofas together, face to face, straight under the “tree.” On this island of sofa, you build a “ladder” by piling together gold-carved little tables. Each table with its heavy, gray marble top veined pink. On top of those, you stack brittle, eggshell-delicate palace chairs, so you can climb higher and higher. Until you're looking down into the gray nest of everyone's dusty wig, everyone's face tilted back so far their mouths hang open against their neck. So high you can look down into the pit behind their collarbones and see the stair steps of their rib cage disappear into their dress or collar.

  Everyone, our hands are wrapped in bloody rags. Gloves hang flapping-loose with fingers empty. Shoes are stuffed with balled-up socks to replace missing toes.

  We call ourselves the People's Committee to Conserve the Daylight.

  The Matchmaker, he takes down a “peach,” wrapped in velvet to protect his hand, and he lowers it to skinny Saint Gut-Free. Who hands it to Chef Assassin, the chef with his big stomach hammocked in the waistband of his pants.

  Agent Tattletale, with the video camera pressed to his face, he records the peach passed hand to hand.

  The oldest peaches, the ones gone dark, you can see yourself reflected in them. The Matchmaker says it's the tungsten filament. As electricity passes through it, the thin wire would burst into flame. That's why each peach is filled with some inert gas. Most of them, argon. Some gas you can't breathe, it keeps the tungsten filament from burning. The very oldest filled with nothing. A vacuum.

  The Matchmaker, with pink freckles across his cheeks, more pink freckles on his forearms where his sleeves are rolled back to each elbow, he tells us, “The melting point of tungsten is six thousand degrees Fahrenheit.” The normal heat of a “peach” is enough to melt a frying pan. Hot enough to bring copper pennies to a boil. Four thousand degrees Fahrenheit.

  Instead of bursting into flame, the tungsten filament evaporates, atom by atom. Some atoms bounce back, off the atoms of argon, and attach to the filament, again, in crystals small as perfect jewels. Other atoms of tungsten, they attach to the cooler inside of the glass “peach.”

  The atoms “condense,” the Matchmaker says. Coating the inside of the glass with metal, turning the outside into a mirror.

  Frosted black on the inside, this turns the lightbulbs into little round mirrors that make us look fat. Even skinny Saint Gut-Free with his pant legs and shirtsleeves always twisting and flapping around the bony stalk of each arm and leg.

  No, not all our days were filled with murder and torture. Some were just this:

  Comrade Snarky holds a peach, turning her face to see it from different angles in the curved glass. The fingers of her free hand, the fingertips pulling the slack skin back at the top of one ear. While she pulls, the dark hollow under that cheekbone is gone. “This is going to sound terrible,” Comrade Snarky says. Her fingers release the skin, and that half her face turns back into shadowy sags and wrinkles. “I used to see photographs of those people behind barbed wire in death camps,” she says. “Those living skeletons. And I always thought: ‘Those people could wear anything.'”

  The Earl of Slander reaches toward her, stretching his arm to collect her words in his hand-sized silver tape recorder.

  Comrade Snarky hands the peach to the Baroness Frostbite . . .

  Who says, “You're right.” The Baroness Frostbite says, “That does sound awful.”

  And Comrade Snarky leans into the microphone and says, “If you're recording this, you are an asshole.”

  The Baroness Frostbite, with her teeth loose and r
attling in her gums, each big white tooth tapering to show its thin brown root, she hands the peach to the Duke of Vandals.

  The Duke, with his ponytail undone and hair hanging in his face. The Duke of Vandals, his jaw works in slow circles on the same wad of nicotine gum he's chewed since forever. His hair the smell of clove cigarettes.

  The Duke hands the peach to Miss America, the black roots of her bleach-blond grown out to show how long we've been trapped here. Our poor pregnant Miss America.

  Above us, the tree blinks dark for a moment. That moment, we don't exist. Nothing exists. The next moment, the power flashes back. We're back.

  “The ghost,” Agent Tattletale says, muffled through his video camera.

  “The ghost,” the Earl of Slander repeats into the tape recorder inside his fist.

  Around here, every power surge, every cold draft or strange noise or food smell, we blame it on our ghost.

  To Agent Tattletale, the ghost is a murdered private detective.

  To the Earl of Slander, the ghost is a has-been child actor.

  The brass branches of the tree. Each branch, loopy, bent, twisted as grapevines dipped in dull gold. Dripping with the glass and crystal “leaves” of the tree. The tinkling rustle as you reach inside. The burning smell of dust on each “ripe” peach, still glowing bright white. Too hot to touch without a handful of fabric, a scrap of velvet skirt or brocade waistcoat, to protect your hand. The other peaches, “rotten,” gone dark and cold, frosted with dust, and draped with white strands of cobweb. The glass-and-crystal leaves, all white and silver and gray at the same time. As they turn, their edges still sparkle, a moment, a flash of rainbow, before they're no color again.

  The branches, twisted and tarnished to dark brown. They each balance a black rice path of dried mouse shit.

  Rocking his body, front to back, and holding his breath, the Matchmaker reaches around inside the tree and picks the peaches. He tosses each peach, still hot, down to where the Missing Link catches it in between two silk pillows. Our sports hero, the Missing Link. Mr. College Scholarship, with his single eyebrow thick as pubic hair. Mr. Champion Halfback, with his cleft chin big as two nuts in a sack.

  From just this short toss, the peach is cool enough to touch. Mother Nature takes the peach from between the pillows and packs it into a hatbox of old wigs that Miss Sneezy carries, wrapped in both arms, in front of her waist.

  Mother Nature, red henna designs smudge the back of her hands and outline the length of each finger. Her every head turn or nod, it rings the chain of brass bells around her neck. Her hair, the smell of sandalwood and patchouli and mint.

  Miss Sneezy coughs. Poor Miss Sneezy is always coughing, her nose red and mashed toward one cheek from being wiped with her shirtsleeve. Her eyes bulging-big, swimming in tears, and shattered with red veins. Miss Sneezy coughs and coughs, tongue out, a hand on each knee, bent double.

  Sometimes, the Matchmaker clutches the legs of chairs, the veined-marble edges of gold tables, to keep the ladder steady.

  Sometimes, the Countess Foresight stands on her toes and holds the handle of a stiff, dusty broom in both hands, high over her head, and she pokes the tree, turning it enough to help you reach more of the “ripe” peaches. The ones still hot enough to boil copper. On her toes, her arms stretched out, you can see the security bracelet still sealed around her wrist. The tracking device dictated by the terms of her parole.

  To the Countess Foresight, the ghost is an old-man antiques dealer, his throat slashed with a straight razor.

  And with every peach the Matchmaker “picks,” the tree goes a little darker.

  To Saint Gut-Free, the ghost is an aborted two-headed baby, both heads with his skinny face.

  To the Baroness Frostbite, the ghost wears a white apron around his waist and curses God.

  Sometimes, Sister Vigilante taps the face of her black wristwatch, saying, “Three hours, seventeen minutes, and thirty seconds until lights-out . . .”

  To Sister Vigilante, the ghost is a hero with the side of his face caved in.

  To Miss Sneezy, the ghost is her grandmother.

  Standing this high up, the Matchmaker says, you can see the ceiling as an empty frontier where no one has ever set foot. That same way—when you were little and you'd sit upside down on the sofa, with your legs against the back cushions and your back against the seat cushions, so your head would hang down the front—that way the old family living room became some strange new place. Upside down, you could walk out across that flat painted floor and look up at the new ceiling, padded with carpet and cluttered with the stalactites of furniture hanging down.

  The way, the Duke of Vandals says, an artist will turn his painting upside down, for the same reason, or look at it reversed in a mirror, to see it the way a stranger might. As something he doesn't know. Something new and novel. The reality of someone else.

  It's the same way, Saint Gut-Free says, a pervert will turn his pornography upside down to make it new and exciting for a little bit longer.

  In this way, each tree of glass leaves and peaches is rooted to the ground by the braided trunk of a thick chain, that trunk covered with a sleeve of dusty red velvet for bark.

  When the tree is almost dark, we move our ladder, chair by chair, sofa by sofa, to the next tree. When the “orchard” is bare, we go through the door to the next room.

  The harvested peaches we pack away in a hatbox.

  No, not every day we're trapped here is filled with kidnapping and humiliation.

  The Earl of Slander slips a notepad out of his shirt pocket. He scribbles on the blue-lined paper, saying, “Sixty-two bulbs still viable. With twenty-two held in reserve.”

  Our last line of defense. Our last resort against the idea of dying alone, here, left in the dark with all the lights burned out. A world without a sun, the survivors left cold and clutching the pitch-dark. The damp wallpaper, growing slippery with mold.

  Nobody wants that.

  The ripe peaches you leave behind, as they go dark and rotten, and you build your furniture ladder again. You climb back up. Putting your head back into that canopy of glass and crystal leaves, that forest of tarnished brass branches. Dust and mouse turds and cobwebs. And you replace the dark peaches with a few peaches still ripe and burning bright-hot.

  The dead peach in the Matchmaker's hand, it shows us not the way we are. More the way we were. The dark glass reflecting all of us, only fat in the curved side. The layer of tungsten atoms precipitated on the inside, the opposite of a pearl, the silver backing on a mirror. Blown glass, thin as a soap bubble.

  Here's Mrs. Clark with her new wrinkles disguised behind a veil thick as chicken wire. Even starved-skinny, her lips still look silicone-fat, frozen mid–blow job. Her breasts swell, but full of nothing you'd want to suck. Her wig, powdery-white, it leans to one side. Her neck stringy and webbed with tendons.

  Here's the Missing Link with the dark forest on his cheeks, the brush sunk into the deep canyons that run down from each eye.

  Something needs to happen.

  Something terrible needs to happen.

  And—pop.

  A peach has slipped and broke on the floor. A nest of glass needles. A mess of white slivers. The image of us as fat, now gone.

  The Earl of Slander jots a line in his notepad and says, “Twenty-one viable lightbulbs held in reserve . . .”

  Sister Vigilante taps her wristwatch and says, “Three hours and ten minutes until lights out . . .”

  It's then Mrs. Clark says, “Tell me a story.” Through her veil, looking up at the Matchmaker in his sparkling, crystal tree, her silicone lips say, “Tell me something to forget I'm so hungry. Tell me a story you could never tell anyone.”

  His hand twisting a peach, wrapped in a sticky scrap of dried-bloody velvet, the Matchmaker says, “There's a joke.” High on his piled-up ladder of chairs, he says, “There's a joke my uncles only tell when they're drinking . . .”

  The Earl of Slander holds up his tape recor
der.

  Agent Tattletale, his video camera.

  The Consultant

  A Poem About the Matchmaker

  “If you love something,” says the Matchmaker, “set it free.”

  Just don't be surprised if it comes back with herpes . . .

  The Matchmaker onstage, he slouches with his hands stuffed deep

  in the pockets of his bib overalls.

  His boots crusted with dried horse shit.

  His shirt, plaid. Flannel. With pearl snaps instead of buttons.

  Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:

  of wedding videos where brides and grooms trade rings

  and kiss to run outside to blizzards of white rice.

  All this trickles across his face, the Matchmaker's bottom lip stretched to pocket a chaw

  of chewing tobacco.

  The Matchmaker says, “The girl I loved, she thought she could do better.”

  This girl, she wanted a taller man, with a deep tan, long hair, and a bigger dick.

  Who could play the guitar.

  So she said “no” when he'd first kneeled down to propose.

  So, the Matchmaker hired a whore named Steed, a male prostitute who advertised:

  Long hair and a dick as thick as a can of chili. And who could learn

  to play a few chords.

  And Steed pretended to meet her by accident, at church. Then, again, at the library.

  The Matchmaker paying two hundred dollars per date,

  and taking notes as the whore told him how much the girl liked her nipples

  played with from behind. And how best to make her come two or three times.

  Steed sent her roses. He sang songs. Steed fucked her in back seats and hot tubs,

  where he swore eternal love and devotion.

  Then didn't call her for a week. Two weeks. A month.

  Until he pretended to meet her by accident, at church again.

  There, Steed said they were finished—because she was too slutty. Almost a whore.

  “I swear,” the Matchmaker says, “he called her a whore. The nerve of that guy . . .”