drop of used motor oil.
And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.
I held the face of mister angel like a baby or a football in the crook of my arm and bashed him with my knuckles, bashed him until his teeth broke through his lips. Bashed him with my elbow after that until he fell through my arms into a heap at my feet. Until the skin was pounded thin across his cheekbones and turned black.
I wanted to breathe smoke.
Birds and deer are a silly luxury, and all the fish should be floating.
I wanted to burn the Louvre. I’d do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa. This is my world, now.
This is my world, my world, and those ancient people are dead.
It was at breakfast that morning that Tyler invented Project Mayhem.
We wanted to blast the world free of history.
We were eating breakfast in the house on Paper Street, and Tyler said, picture yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course.
You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five-degree angle. We’ll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what’s left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night.
“Recycling and speed limits are bullshit,” Tyler said. “They’re like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed.”
It’s Project Mayhem that’s going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover.
“You justify anarchy,” Tyler says. “You figure it out.”
Like fight club does with clerks and box boys, Project Mayhem will break up civilization so we can, make something better out of the world.
“Imagine,” Tyler said, “stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you’ll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles.”
This was the goal of Project Mayhem, Tyler said, the complete and rightaway destruction of civilization.
What comes next in Project Mayhem, nobody except Tyler knows. The second rule is you don’t ask questions.
“Don’t get any bullets,” Tyler told the Assault Committee. “And just so you don’t worry about it, yes, you’re going to have to kill someone.
Arson. Assault. Mischief and Misinformation.
No questions. No questions. No excuses and no lies.
The fifth rule about Project Mayhem is you have to trust Tyler.
Tyler wanted me to type up and copy. A week ago, Tyler was pacing out the dimensions of the basement of the rented house on Paper Street. It’s sixty-five shoe lengths front to back and forty shoe lengths side to side. Tyler was thinking out loud. Tyler asked me, “What is six times seven?”
Forty-two.
“And forty-two times three?”
One hundred and twenty-six.
Tyler gave me a handwritten list of notes and said to type it and make seventy-two copies.
Why that many?
“Because,” Tyler said, “that’s how many guys can sleep in the basement, if we put them in triple-decker army surplus bunk beds.”
I asked, what about their stuff?
Tyler said, “They won’t bring anything more than what’s on the list, and it should all fit under a mattress.”
The list my boss finds in the copy machine, the copy machine counter still set for seventy-two copies, the list says:
“Bringing the required items does not guarantee admission to training, but no applicant will be considered unless he arrives equipped with the following items and exactly five hundred dollars cash for personal burial money.”
“It costs at least three hundred dollars to cremate an indigent corpse, Tyler told me, and the price was going up. Anyone who dies without at least this much money, their body goes to an autopsy class.
This money must always be carried in the student’s shoe so if the student is ever killed, his death will not be a burden on Project Mayhem.
In addition, the applicant has to arrive with the following:
Two black shirts.
Two black pair of trousers.
Chapter 14
My boss brings another sheet of paper to my desk and sets it at my elbow. I don’t even wear a tie anymore. My boss is wearing his blue tie, so it must be a Thursday. The door to my boss’s office is always closed now, and we haven’t traded more than two words any day since he found the fight club rules in the copy machine and I maybe implied I might gut him with a shotgun blast. Just me clowning around, again.
Or, I might call the Compliance people at the Department of Transportation. There’s a front seat mounting bracket that never passed collision testing before it went into production.
If you know where to look, there are bodies buried everywhere.
Morning, I say.
He says, “Morning.”
Set at my elbow is another for-my-eyes-only important secret document
One pair of heavy black shoes.
Two pair of black socks and two pair of plain underwear.
One heavy black coat.
This includes the clothes the applicant has on his back.
One white towel.
One army surplus cot mattress.
One white plastic mixing bowl.
At my desk, with my boss still standing there, I pick up the original list and tell him, thanks. My boss goes into his office, and I set to work playing solitaire on my computer.
After work, I give Tyler the copies, and days go by. I go to work.
I come home.
I go to work.
I come home, and there’s a guy standing on our front porch. The guy’s at the front door with his second black shirt and pants in a brown paper sack and he’s got the last three items, a white towel, an army surplus mattress, and a plastic bowl, set on the porch railing. From an upstairs window, Tyler and I peek out at the guy, and Tyler tells me to send the guy away.
“He’s too young,” Tyler says.
