Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
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.
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.
Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.
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.
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.
Every evening, I died, and every evening, I was born.
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.
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 probably 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.
[LOL TOYOTA]
For this moment, nothing matters. Look up into the stars and you're gone.
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.
Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
a house full of condiments and no real food.
"If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't."
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.
Maybe self improvement isn't the answer.
Tyler never knew his father.
Maybe self-destruction is the answer.
What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women.
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 soufflé looks pumped.
I'm a thirty-year-old boy, and I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer I need.
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.
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 of ourselves.
Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing mattered.
Maybe we didn't need a father to complete ourselves.
These are the quiet young men who listen until it's time to decide.
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?
Hearing this, I am totally Joe's Gallbladder. All of this is my fault. Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.
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.
"Sticking feathers up your butt," Tyler says, "does not make you a chicken."
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.
"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."
What's the white moon face
The stars never feel anger
Blah, blah, blah, the end
Tyler's words coming out of my mouth. I used to be such a nice person.
There will be mistakes, and maybe the point is not to forget the rest of yourself if one little part might go bad.
There are a lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love.
What you have to know is that Marla is still alive. Marla's philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn't.
Marla started going to the support groups since it was easier to be around other human butt wipe. Everyone has something wrong. And for a while, her heart just sort of flatlined.
Tyler had nothing to lose.
Tyler was the pawn of the world, everybody's trash.
"Go ahead, you can't kill me," Tyler was laughing. "You stupid fuck. Beat the crap out of me, but you can't kill me."
You have too much to lose.
I have nothing.
You have everything.
Maybe it was loaded, maybe not. Maybe we should always assume the worst.
The third rule of Project Mayhem is no excuses.
When I come home, one space monkey is reading to the assembled space monkeys who sit covering the whole first floor. "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile."
The space monkey continues, "Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing."
I am Joe's Broken Heart because Tyler's dumped me. Because my father dumped me. Oh, I could go on and on.
The mechanic says, "If you're male and you're Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?"
This is all Tyler Durden dogma. Scrawled on bits of paper while I was asleep and given to me to type and photocopy at work. I've read it all. Even my boss has probably read it all.
"What you end up doing," the mechanic says, "is you spend your life searching for a father and God."
"What you have to consider," he says, "is the possibility that God doesn't like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that can happen."
How Tyler saw it was that getting God's attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all. Maybe because God's hate is better than his indifference.
If you could be either God's worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?
We are God's middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention.
Unless we get God's attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption.
Which is worse, hell or nothing?
Only if we're caught and punished can we be saved.
"Burn the Louvre," the mechanic says, "and wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know our names."
The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back.
"If the prodigal son had never left home," the mechanic says, "the fatted calf would still be alive."
It's not enough to be numbered with the grains of sand on the beach and the stars in the sky.
According to the mechanic, another new fight club rule is that fight club will always be free. It will never cost to get in. The mechanic yells out the driver's window into the oncoming traffic and the night wind pouring down the side of the car: "We want you, not your money."
The mechanic yells out the window, "As long as you're at fight club, you're not how much money you've got in the bank. You're not your job. You're not your family, and you're not who you tell yourself."
The mechanic yells into the wind, "You're not your name."
A space monkey in the back seat picks it up: "You're not your problems."
The mechanic yells, "You're not your problems."
A space monkey shouts, "You're not your age."
The mechanic yells, "You're not your age."
Here, the mechanic swerves us into the oncoming lane, filling the car with headlights through the windshield, cool as ducking jabs. One car and then another comes at us head-on screaming its horn and the mechanic swerves just enough to miss each one.
Headlights come at us, bigger and bigger, horns screaming, and the mechanic cranes forward into the glare and noise and screams, "You are not your hopes."
No one takes up the yell.
This time, the car coming head-on swerves in time to save us.
Another car comes on, headlights, blinking high, low, high, low, horn blaring, and the mechanic screams, "You will not be saved."
The mechanic doesn't swerve, but the head-on car swerves.
Another car, and the mechanic screams, "We are all going to die, someday."
This time, the oncoming car serves, but the mechanic swerves back into its path. The car swerves, and the mechanic matches it, head-on, again.
You melt and swell at that moment. For that moment, nothing matters. Look up at the stars and you're gone. Not your luggage. Nothing matters. Not your bad breath. The windows are dark outside and the horns are blaring around you. The headlights are flashing high and low and high in your face, and you will never have to go to work again.
You will never have to get another haircut.
"Quick," the mechanic says.
The car swerves again, and the mechanic swerves back into its path.
"What," he says, "what will you wish you'd done before you died?"
With the oncoming car screaming its horn and the mechanic so cool he even looks away to look at me beside him in the front seat, and he says, "Ten seconds to impact.
"Nine.
"In eight.
"Seven.
"In six."
My job, I say. I wish I'd quit my job.
The scream goes by as the car swerves and the mechanic doesn't swerve to hit it.
"Believe in me and you shall die, forever."
The mechanic's lying crabbed on the wheel to keep it straight and the birthday candles snuff out. In one perfect second there's no light inside the warm black leather car and our shouts all hit the same deep note, the same low moan of the truck's air horn, and we have no control, no choice, no direction, and no escape and we're dead.
My wish right now is for me to die. I am nothing in the world compared to Tyler.
I am helpless.
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.
"You had a near-life experience," the mechanic says.
"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.
Finally, you were listening and coming out of the little tragedy in your head.
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.
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.
"Remember this," Tyler said. "The people you're trying to step on, we're everyone you depend on. We're the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you're asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life.
"We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact," Tyler said. "So don't fuck with us."
Oh, this is bullshit. This is a dream. Tyler is a projection. He's a disassociative personality disorder. A psychogenic fugue state. Tyler Durden is my hallucination.
"Fuck that shit," Tyler says. "Maybe you're my schizophrenic hallucination."
I was here first.
Tyler says, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, well let's just see who's here last."
Every planet will take on the corporate identity of whoever rapes it first.
I love everything about Tyler Durden, his courage and his smarts. His nerve. Tyler is funny and charming and forceful and independent and men look up to him and expect him to change their world. Tyler is capable and free, and I am not.
I'm not Tyler Durden.
The problem is, I sort of liked my boss.
If you're male, and you're Christian and living in American, your father is your model for God. And sometimes you find your father in your career.
It's Saturday night, bowel cancer night in the basement of First Methodist, and Marla is there when you arrive.
Marla Singer smoking her cigarette. Marla Singer rolling her eyes. Marla Singer with a black eye.
You sit on the shag carpet at opposite sides of the meditation circle and try to summon up your power animal while Marla glares at you with her black eyes. You close your eyes and meditate to the palace of the seven doors, and you can still feel Marla's glare. You cradle your inner child.
Marla glares.
Then it's time to hug.
Open your eyes.
We should all choose a partner.
Marla crosses the room in three quick steps and slaps me hard across the face.
Share yourself completely.
"You fucking suck-ass piece of shit," Marla says.
I say, because I think I like you.
Marla says, "Not love?"
This is a cheesy enough moment, I say. Don't push it.
Because I'm Tyler Durden, and you can kiss my ass, I register to fight every guy in the club that night. Fifty fights. One fight at a time. No shoes. No shirts.
Fight number three, I wake up and it's time for fight number three. There are no more names in fight club.
You aren't your name.
You aren't your family.
How everything you ever love will reject you or die.
Everything you ever create will be thrown away.
Everything you're proud of will end up as trash.
I am Ozymandias, king of kings.
And the fight goes on and on because I want to be dead. Because only in death do we have names. Only in death are we no longer part of Project Mayhem.
Oh Tyler, I hurt. Just kill me here.
"It's not love or anything," Marla shouts, "but I think I like you, too."
One minute.
Marla likes Tyler.
"No, I like you," Marla shouts. "I know the difference."
I've met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, "Why?"
Why did I cause so much pain?
Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness?
Can't I see how we're all manifestations of love?
I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God's got this all wrong.
We are not special.
We are not crap or trash, either.
We just are.
We just are, and what happens just happens.
And God says, "No, that's not right."
Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything.