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.
Chapter 10
When I get to the Regent Hotel, Marla’s in the lobby wearing a bathrobe. Marla called me at work and asked, would I skip the gym and the library or the laundry or whatever I had planned after work and come see her, instead.
This is why Marla called, because she hates me.
She doesn’t say a thing about her collagen trust fund.
What Marla says is, would I do her a favor? Marla was lying in bed this afternoon. Marla lives on the meals that Meals on Wheels delivers for her neighbors who are dead; Marla accepts the meals and says they’re asleep. Long story short, this afternoon Marla was just lying in bed, waiting for the Meals on Wheels delivery between noon and two. Marla hasn’t had health insurance for a couple years so she’s stopped looking, but this morning she looks and there seemed to be a lump and the nodes under her arm near the lump were hard and tender at the same time and she couldn’t tell anyone she loves because she doesn’t want to scare them and she can’t afford to see a doctor if this is nothing, but she needed to talk to someone and someone else needed to look.
The color of Marla’s brown eyes is like an animal that’s been heated in a furnace and dropped into cold water. They call that vulcanized or galvanized or tempered.
Marla says she’ll forgive the collagen thing if I’ll help her look.
I figure she doesn’t call Tyler because she doesn’t want to scare him. I’m neutral in her book, I owe her.
We go upstairs to her room, and Marla tells me how in the wild you don’t see old animals because as soon as they age, animals die. If they get sick or slow down, something stronger kills them. Animals aren’t meant to get old.
Marla lies down on her bed and undoes the tie on her bathrobe, and says our culture has made death something wrong. Old animals should be an unnatural exception.
Freaks.
Marla’s cold and sweating while I tell her how in college I had a wart once. On my penis, only I say, dick. I went to the medical school to have it removed. The wart. Afterwards, I told my father. This was years after, and my dad laughed and told me I was a fool because warts like that are nature’s French tickler. Women love them and God was doing me a favor.
Kneeling next to Marla’s bed with my hands still cold from outside, feeling Marla’s cold skin a little at a time, rubbing a little of Marla between my fingers every inch, Marla says those warts that are God’s French ticklers give women cervical cancer.
So I was sitting on the paper belt in an examining room at the medical school while a medical student sprays a canister of liquid nitrogen on my dick and eight medical students watched. This is where you end up if you don’t have medical insurance. Only they don’t call it a dick, they called it a penis, and whatever you call it, spray it with liquid nitrogen and you might as well burn it with lye, it hurts so bad.
Marla laughs at this until she sees my fingers have stopped. Like maybe I’ve found something.
Marla stops breathing and her stomach goes like a drum, and her heart is like a fist pounding from inside the tight skin of a drum. But no, I stopped because I’m talking, and I stopped because, for a minute, neither of us was in Marla’s bedroom. We were in the medical school years ago, sitting on the sticky paper with my dick on fire
