Fight Club

by Chuck Palahniuk

I am stupid, and all I do is want and need things.

  My tiny life. My little shit job. My Swedish furniture. I never, no, never told anyone this, but before I met Tyler, I was planning to buy a dog and name it ‘Entourage’.

  This is how bad your life can get.

  Kill me.

  I grab the steering wheel and crank us back into traffic.

  Now.

  Prepare to evacuate soul.

  Now.

  The mechanic wrestles the wheel toward the ditch, and I wrestle to fucking die.

  Now. The amazing miracle of death, when one second you’re walking and talking, and the next second, you’re an object.

  I am nothing, and not even that.

  Cold.

  Invisible.

  I smell leather. My seat belt feels twisted like a straitjacket around me, and when I try to sit up, I hit my head against the steering wheel. This hurts more than it should. My head is resting in the mechanic’s lap, and as I look up, my eyes adjust to see the mechanic’s face high over me, smiling, driving, and I can see stars outside the driver’s window.

  My hands and face are sticky with something.

  Blood?

  Buttercream frosting.

  The mechanic looks down. “Happy Birthday.”

  I smell smoke and remember the birthday cake.

  “I almost broke the steering wheel with your head,” he says.

  Just nothing else, just the night air and the smell of smoke, and the stars and the mechanic smiling and driving, my head in his lap, all of a sudden I don’t feel like I have to sit up.

  Where’s the cake?

  The mechanic says, “On the floor.”

  Just the night air and the smell of smoke is heavier.

  Did I get my wish?

  Up above me, outlined against the stars in the window, the face smiles. “Those birthday candles,” he says, “they’re the kind that never go out.”

  In the starlight, my eyes adjust enough to see smoke braiding up from little fires all around us in the carpet.

  ∨ Fight Club ∧

  Sixteen

  The fight club mechanic is standing on the gas, raging behind the wheel in his quiet way, and we still have something important to do, tonight.

  One thing I’ll have to learn before the end of civilization is how to look at the stars and tell where I’m going. Things are quiet as driving a Cadillac through outer space. We must be off the freeway. The three guys in the back seat are passed out or asleep.

  “You had a near-life experience,” the mechanic says.

  He takes one hand off the steering wheel and touches the long welt where my forehead bounced off the steering wheel. My forehead is swelling enough to shut both my eyes, and he runs a cold fingertip down the length of the swelling. The Corniche hits a bump and the pain seems to bump out over my eyes like the shadow from the brim of a cap. Our twisted rear springs and bumper bark and creak in the quiet around our rush down the night road.

  The mechanic says how the back bumper of the Corniche is hanging by its ligaments, how it was torn almost free when it caught an end of the truck’s front bumper.

  I ask, is tonight part of his homework for Project Mayhem?

  “Part of it,” he says. “I had to make four human sacrifices, and I have to pick up a load of fat.”

  Fat?

  “For the soap.”

  What is Tyler planning?

  The mechanic starts talking, and it’s pure Tyler Durden.

  “I see the strongest and the smartest men who have ever lived,” he says, his face outlined against the stars in the driver’s window, “and these men are pumping gas and waiting tables.”

  The drop of his forehead, his brow, the slope of his nose, his eyelashes and the curve of his eyes, the plastic profile of his mouth, talking, these are all outlined in black against the stars.

  “If we could put these men in training camps and finish raising them.”

  “All a gun does is focus an explosion in one direction.”

  “You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need.”

  “We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.”

  “We have to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them, and show them courage by frightening them.”

  “Napoleon bragged that he could train men to sacrifice their lives for a scrap of ribbon.”

  “Imagine, when we call a strike and everyone refuses to work until we redistribute the wealth of the world.”

  “Imagine hunting elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center.”

  “What you said about your job,” the mechanic says, “did you really mean it?”

  “Yeah, I meant it.”

  “That’s why we’re on the road, tonight,” he says.

  We’re a hunting party, and we’re hunting for fat.

  We’re going to the medical waste dump.

  We’re going to the medical waste incinerator, and there among the discarded surgical drapes and wound dressings, and ten-year-old tumors and intravenous tubes and discarded needles, scary stuff, really scary stuff, among the blood samples and amputated tidbits, we’ll find more money than we can haul away in one night, even if we were driving a dump truck.

  We’ll find enough money to load this Corniche down to the axle stops.

  “Fat,” the mechanic says, “liposuctioned fat sucked out of the richest thighs in America. The richest, fattest thighs in the world.”

  Our goal is the big red bags of liposuctioned fat we’ll haul back to Paper Street and render and mix with lye and rosemary and sell back to the very people who paid to have it sucked out. At twenty bucks a bar, these are the only folks who can afford it.

  “The richest, creamiest fat in the world, the fat of the land,” he says. “That makes tonight a kind of Robin Hood thing.”

  The little wax fires sputter in the carpet.

  “While we’re there,” he says, “we’re supposed to look for some of those hepatitis bugs, too.”

  ∨ Fight Club ∧

  Seventeen

  The tears were really coming now, and one fat stripe rolled along the barrel of the gun and down the loop around the trigger to burst flat against my index finger. Raymond Hessel closed both eyes so I pressed the gun hard against his temple so he would always feel it pressing right there and I was beside him and this was his life and he could be dead at any moment.

  This wasn’t a cheap gun, and I wondered if salt might fuck it up.

  Everything had gone so easy, I wondered. I’d done everything the mechanic said to do. This was why we needed to buy a gun. This was doing my homework.

  We each had to bring Tyler twelve driver’s licenses. This would prove we each made twelve human sacrifices.

  I parked tonight, and I waited around the block for Raymond Hessel to finish his shift at the all-night Korner Mart, and around midnight he was waiting for a night owl bus when I finally walked up and said, hello.

  Raymond Hessel, Raymond didn’t say anything. Probably he figured I was after his money, his minimum wage, the fourteen dollars in his wallet. Oh, Raymond Hessel, all twenty-three years of you, when you started crying, tears rolling down the barrel of my gun pressed to your temple, no, this wasn’t about money. Not everything is about money.

  You didn’t even say, hello.

  You’re not your sad little wallet.

  I said, nice night, cold but clear.

  You didn’t even say, hello.

  I said, don’t run, or I’ll have to shoot you in the back. I had the gun out, and I was wearing a latex glove so if the gun ever became a people’s exhibit A, there’d
be nothing on it except the dried tears of Raymond Hessel, Caucasian, aged twenty-three with no distinguishing marks.

  Then I had your attention. Your eyes were big enough that even in the streetlight I could see they were antifreeze green.

  You were jerking backward and backward a little more every time the gun touched your face, as if the barrel was too hot or too cold. Until I said, don’t step back, and then you let the gun touch you, but even then you rolled your head up and away from the barrel.

  You gave me your wallet like I asked.

  Your name was Raymond K. Hessel on your driver’s license. You live at 1320 SE Benning, apartment A. That had to be a basement apartment. They usually give basement apartments letters instead of numbers.

  Raymond K.K. K.K. K.K. Hessel, I was talking to you.

  Your head rolled up and away from the gun, and you said, yeah. You said, yes, you lived in a basement.

  “You had some pictures in the wallet, too. There was your mother.”

  This was a tough one for you, you’d have to open your eyes and see the picture of Mom and Dad smiling and see the gun at the same time, but you did, and then your eyes closed and you started to cry.

  You were going to cool, the amazing miracle of death. One minute, you’re a person, the next minute, you’re an object, and Mom and Dad would have to call old doctor whoever and get your dental records because there wouldn’t be much left of your face, and Mom and Dad, they’d always expected so much more from you and, no, life wasn’t fair, and now it was come to this.

  Fourteen dollars.

  This, I said, is this your mom?

  Yeah. You were crying, sniffing, crying. You swallowed. Yeah.

  You had a library card. You had a video movie rental card. A social security card. Fourteen dollars cash. I wanted to take the bus pass, but the mechanic said to only take the driver’s license. An expired community college student card.

  You used to study something.

  You’d worked up a pretty intense cry at this point so I pressed the gun a little harder against your cheek, and you started to step back until I said, don’t move or you’re dead right here. Now, what did you study?

  Where?

  In college, I said. You have a student card.

  Oh, you didn’t know, sob, swallow, sniff, stuff, biology.

  Listen, now, you’re going to die, Ray-mond K.K. K. Hessel, tonight. You might die in one second or in one hour, you decide. So lie to me. Tell me the first thing off the top of your head. Make something up. I don’t give a shit. I have the gun.

  Finally, you were listening and coming out of the little tragedy in your head.

  Fill in the blank. What does Raymond Hessel want to be when he grows up?

  Go home, you said you just wanted to go home, please.

  No shit, I said. But after that, how did you want to spend your life? If you could do anything in the world.

  Make something up.

  You didn’t know.

  Then you’re dead right now, I said. I said, now turn your head.

  Death to commence in ten, in nine, in eight.

  A vet, you said. You want to be a vet, a veterinarian.

  That means animals. You have to go to school for that.

  It means too much school, you said.

  You could be in school working your ass off, Raymond Hessel, or you could be dead. You choose. I stuffed your wallet into the back pocket of your jeans. So you really wanted to be an animal doctor. I took the saltwater muzzle of the gun off one cheek and pressed it against the other. Is that what you’ve always wanted to be, Dr. Raymond K.K. K.K. Hessel, a veterinarian?

  Yeah.

  No shit?

  No. No, you meant, yeah, no shit. Yeah.

  Okay, I said, and I pressed the wet end of the muzzle to the tip of your chin, and then the tip of your nose, and everywhere I pressed the muzzle, it left a shining wet ring of your tears.

  So, I said, go back to school. If you wake up tomorrow morning, you find a way to get back into school.

  I pressed the wet end of the gun on each cheek, and then on your chin, and then against your forehead and left the muzzle pressed there. You might as well be dead right now, I said.

  I have your license.

  I know who you are. I know where you live. I’m keeping your license, and I’m going to check on you, mister Raymond K. Hessel. In three months, and then in six months, and then in a year, and if you aren’t back in school on your way to being a veterinarian, you will be dead.

  ♦

  You didn’t say anything.

  Get out of here, and do your little life, but remember I’m watching you, Raymond Hessel, and I’d rather kill you than see you working a shit job for just enough money to buy cheese and watch television.

  Now, I’m going to walk away so don’t turn around.

  This is what Tyler wants me to do.

  These are Tyler’s words coming out of my mouth.

  I am Tyler’s mouth.

  I am Tyler’s hands.

  Everybody in Project Mayhem is part of Tyler Durden, and vice versa.

  Raymond K.K. Hessel, your dinner is going to taste better than any meal you’ve ever eaten, and tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of your entire life.

  In the bar, they throw an arm around me and want to buy me a beer. It’s like I already know which bars are the fight club bars. I ask, have they seen a guy named Tyler Durden. It’s stupid to ask if they know about fight club. The first rule is you don’t talk about fight club. But have they seen Tyler Durden? They say, never heard of him, sir. But you might find him in Chicago, sir. It must be the hole in my cheek, everyone calls me sir. And they wink. You wake up at O’Hare and take the shuttle into Chicago. Set your watch ahead an hour.

  ∨ Fight Club ∧

  Eighteen

  You wake up at Sky Harbor International.

  Set your watch back two hours.

  The shuttle takes me to downtown Phoenix and every bar I go into there are guys with stitches around the rim of an eye socket where a good slam packed their face meat against its sharp edge. There are guys with sideways noses, and these guys at the bar see me with the puckered hole in my cheek and we’re an instant family.

  Tyler hasn’t been home for a while. I do my little job. I go airport to airport to look at the cars that people died in. The magic of travel. Tiny life. Tiny soaps. The tiny airline seats.

  Everywhere I travel, I ask about Tyler.

  In case I find him, the driver’s licenses of my twelve human sacrifices are in my pocket.

  Every bar I walk into, every fucking bar, I see beat-up guys. Every…

  ♦

  If you can wake up in a different place. If you can wake up in a different time. Why can’t you wake up as a different person? Every bar you go into, punchedout guys want to buy you a beer. And no, sir, they’ve never met this Tyler Durden. And they wink. They’ve never heard the name before. Sir. I ask about fight club. Is there a fight club around here, tonight? No, sir. The second rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club. The punched-out guys at the bar shake their heads. Never heard of it. Sir. But you might find this fight club of yours in Seattle, sir. You wake up at Meigs Field and call Marla to see what’s happening on Paper Street. Marla says now all the space monkeys are shaving their heads. Their electric razor gets hot and now the whole house smells like singed hair. The space monkeys are using lye to burn off their fingerprints.

  ♦

  You wake up at SeaTac.

  Set your watch back two hours.

  The shuttle takes you to downtown Seattle, and the first bar you go into, the bartender is wearing a neck brace that tilts his head back so far he has to look down his purple smashed eggplant of a nose to grin at you.

  The bar is empty, and the bartender says, “Welcome back, sir.”

  I’ve never been to this bar, ever, ever before.

  I ask if he knows the name Tyler Durden.

  The bartender grins with his
chin stuck out above the top of the white neck brace and asks, “Is this a test?”

  Yeah, I say, it’s a test. Has he ever met Tyler Durden?

  “You stopped in last week, Mr. Durden,” he says. “Don’t you remember?”

  Tyler was here.

  “You were here, sir.”

  I’ve never been in here before tonight.

  “If you say so, sir,” the bartender says, “but Thursday night, you came in to ask how soon the police were planning to shut us down.”

  Last Thursday night, I was awake all night with the insomnia, wondering was I awake, was I sleeping. I woke up late Friday morning, bone tired and feeling I hadn’t ever had my eyes closed.

  “Yes, sir,” the bartender says, “Thursday night, you were standing right where you are now and you were asking me about the police crackdown, and you were asking me how many guys we had to turn away from the Wednesday night fight club.”

  The bartender twists his shoulders and braced neck to look around the empty bar and says, “There’s nobody that’s going to hear, Mr. Burden, sir. We had a twenty-seven-count turn-away, last night. The place is always empty the night after fight club.”

  Every bar I’ve walked into this week, everybody’s called me sir.

  Every bar I go into, the beat-up fight club guys all start to look alike. How can a stranger know who I am?

  “You have a birthmark, Mr. Durden,” the bartender says. “On your foot. It’s shaped like a dark red Australia with New Zealand next to it.”

  Only Marla knows this. Marla and my father. Not even Tyler knows this. When I go to the beach, I sit with that foot tucked under me.

  The cancer I don’t have is everywhere, now.

  “Everybody in Project Mayhem knows, Mr. Durden.” The bartender holds up his hand, the back of his hand toward me, a kiss burned into the back of his hand.

  My kiss?

  Tyler’s kiss.

  “Everybody knows about the birthmark,” the bartender says. “It’s part of the legend. You’re turning into a fucking legend, man.”

  ♦

  I call Marla from my Seattle motel room to ask if we’ve ever done it. You know. Long distance, Marla says, “What?” Slept together. “What!” Have I ever, you know, had sex with her? “Christ!” Well? “Well?” she says. Have we ever had sex? “You are such a piece of shit.” Have we had sex? “I could kill you!” Is that a yes or a no? “I knew this would happen,” Marla says. “You’re such a flake. You love me. You ignore me. You save my life, then you cook my mother into soap.”