Chuck Palahniuk - Fight Club

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Fight Club

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

98percent 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 meat 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.

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,

200milligram-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.

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摘要：

FightClubbyChuckPalahniukChapter1TYLERGETSMEajobasawaiter,afterthatTyler'spushingaguninmymouthandsaying,thefirststeptoeternallifeisyouhavetodie.Foralongtimethough,TylerandIwerebestfriends.Peoplearealwaysasking,didIknowaboutTylerDurden.Thebarrelofthegunpressedagainstthebackofmythroat,Tylersays"Wereal...

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Chuck Palahniuk - Fight Club

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