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.
Then there was Bob. The first time I went to testicular cancer, Bob the big moosie, the big cheesebread moved in on top of me in Remaining Men Together and started crying. The big moosie treed right across the room when it was hug time, his arms at his sides, his shoulders rounded. His big moosie chin on his chest, his eyes already shrink-wrapped in tears. Shuffling his feet, knees together invisible steps, Bob slid across the basement floor to heave himself on me.
Bob pancaked down on me.
Bob’s big arms wrapped around me.
Big Bob was a juicer, he said. All those salad days on Dianabol and then the racehorse steroid, Wistrol. His own gym, Big Bob owned a gym. He’d been married three times. He’d done product endorsements, and had I seen him on television, ever? The whole how-to program about expanding your chest was practically his invention.
Strangers with this kind of honesty make me go a big rubbery one, if you know what I mean.
Bob didn’t know. Maybe only one of his huevos had ever descended, and he knew this was a risk factor. Bob told me about postoperative hormone therapy.
A lot of bodybuilders shooting too much testosterone would get what they called bitch tits.
I had to ask what Bob meant by huevos.
Huevos, Bob said. Gonads. Nuts. Jewels. Testes. Balls. In Mexico, where you buy your steroids, they call them “eggs.”
Divorce, divorce, divorce, Bob said and showed me a wallet photo of himself huge and naked at first glance, in a posing strap at some contest. It’s a stupid way to live, Bob said, but when you’re pumped and shaved on stage, totally shredded with body fat down to around two percent and the diuretics leave you cold and hard as concrete to touch, You’re blind from the lights, and deaf from the feedback rush of the sound system until the judge orders: “Extend your right quad, flex and hold.”
“Extend your left arm, flex the bicep and hold.”
This is better than real life.
Fast-forward, Bob said, to the cancer. Then he was bankrupt. He had two grown kids who wouldn’t return his calls.
The cure for bitch tits was for the doctor to cut up under the pectorals and drain any fluid.
This was all I remember because then Bob was closing in around me with his arms, and his head was folding down to cover me. Then I was lost inside oblivion, dark and silent and complete, and when I finally stepped away from his soft chest, the front of Bob’s shirt was a wet mask of how I looked crying.
That was two years ago, at my first night with Remaining Men Together.
At almost every meeting since then, Big Bob has made me cry.
I never went back to the doctor. I never chewed the valerian root.
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.
Walking home after a support group, I felt more alive than I’d ever felt. I wasn’t host to cancer or blood parasites; I was the little warm center that the life of the world crowded around.
And I slept. Babies don’t sleep this well.
Every evening, I died, and every evening, I was born.
Resurrected.
Until tonight, two years of success until tonight, because I can’t cry with this woman watching me. Because I can’t hit bottom, I can’t be saved. My tongue thinks it has flocked wallpaper, I’m biting the inside of my mouth so much. I haven’t slept in four days.
With her watching, I’m a liar. She’s a fake. She’s the liar. At the introductions tonight, we introduced ourselves: I’m Bob, I’m Paul, I’m Terry, I’m David.
I never give my real name.
“This is cancer, right?” she said.
Then she said, “Well, hi, I’m Marla Singer.”
Nobody ever told Marla what kind of cancer. Then we were all busy cradling our inner child.
The man still crying against her neck, Marla takes another drag on her cigarette.
I watch her from between Bob’s shuddering tits.
To Marla I’m a fake. Since the second night I saw her, I can’t sleep. Still, I was the first fake, unless, maybe all these people are faking with their lesions and their coughs and tumors, even Big Bob, the big moosie. The big cheesebread.
Would you just look at his sculpted hair.
Marla smokes and rolls her eyes now.
In this one moment, Marla’s lie reflects my lie, and all I can see are lies. In the middle of all their truth. Everyone clinging and risking to share their worst fear, that their death is coming head-on and the barrel of a gun is pressed against the back of their throats. Well, Marla is smoking and rolling her eyes, and me, I’m buried under a sobbing carpet, and all of a sudden even death and dying rank right down there with plastic flowers on video as a non-event.
“Bob,” I say, “you’re crushing me.” I try to whisper, then I don’t. “Bob.” I try to keep my voice down, then I’m yelling. “Bob, I have to go to the can.”
A mirror hangs over the sink in the bathroom. If the pattern holds, I’ll see Marla Singer at Above and Beyond, the parasitic brain dysfunction group. Marla will be there. Of course, Marla will be there, and what I’ll do is sit next to her. And after the introductions and the guided meditation, the seven doors of the palace, the white healing ball of light, after we open our chakras, when it comes time to hug, I’ll grab the little bitch.
Her arms squeezed tight against her sides, and my lips pressed against her ear, I’ll say, Marla, you big fake, you get out.
This is the one real thing in my life, and you’re wrecking it.
You big tourist.
The next time we meet, I’ll say, Marla, I can’t sleep with you here. I need this. Get out.
Chapter 3
You wake up at Air Harbor International.
Every takeoff and landing, when the plane banked too much to one side, I prayed for a crash. That moment cures my insomnia with narcolepsy when we might die helpless and packed human tobacco in the fuselage.
This is how I met Tyler Durden.
You wake up at O’Hare.
You wake up at LaGuardia.
You wake up at Logan.
Tyler worked part-time as a movie projectionist. Because of his nature, Tyler could only work night jobs. If a projectionist called in sick, the union called Tyler.
Some people are night people. Some people are day people. I could only work a day job.
You wake up at Dulles.
Life insurance pays off triple if you die on a business trip. I prayed for wind shear effect. I prayed for pelicans sucked into the turbines and loose bolts and ice on the wings. On takeoff, as the plane pushed down the runway and the flaps tilted up, with our seats in their full upright position and our tray tables stowed and all personal carry-on baggage in the overhead compartment, as the end of the runway ran up to meet us with our smoking materials extinguished, I prayed for a crash.
You wake up at Love Field.
In a projection booth, Tyler did changeovers if the theater was old enough. With changeovers, you have two projectors in the booth, and one projector is running.
I know this because Tyler knows this.
