Tyler kneeling next to my bed says, “Close your eyes and give me your hand.”
I close my eyes, and Tyler takes my hand. I feel Tyler’s lips against the scar of his kiss.
“I said that if you talked about me behind my back, you’d never see me again,” Tyler said. “We’re not two separate men. Long story short, when you’re awake, you have the control, and you can call yourself anything you want, but the second you fall asleep, I take over, and you become Tyler Durden.”
But we fought, I say. The night we invented fight club.
“You weren’t really fighting me,” Tyler says. “You said so yourself. You were fighting everything you hate in your life.”
But I can see you.
“You’re asleep.”
But you’re renting a house. You held a job. Two jobs.
Tyler says, “Order your canceled checks from the bank. I rented the house in your name. I think you’ll find the handwriting on the rent checks matches the notes you’ve been typing for me.”
Tyler’s been spending my money. It’s no wonder I’m always overdrawn.
“And the jobs, well, why do you think you’re so tired. Geez, it’s not insomnia. As soon as you fall asleep, I take over and go to work or fight club or whatever. You’re lucky I didn’t get a job as a snake handler.”
I say, but what about Marla?
“Marla loves you.”
Marla loves you.
“Marla doesn’t know the difference between you and me. You gave her a fake name the night you met. You never gave your real name at a support group, you inauthentic shit. Since I saved her life, Marla thinks your name is Tyler Durden.”
So, now that I know about Tyler, will he just disappear?
“No,” Tyler says, still holding my hand, “I wouldn’t be here in the first place if you didn’t want me. I’ll still live my life while you’re asleep, but if you fuck with me, if you chain yourself to the bed at night or take big doses of sleeping pills, then we’ll be enemies. And I’ll get you for it.”
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.”
This isn’t real. This is a dream, and I’ll wake up.
“Then wake up.”
And then the telephone’s ringing, and Tyler’s gone.
Sun is coming through the curtains.
It’s my 7 A.M. wake-up call, and when I pick up the receiver, the line is dead.
Chapter 20
Fast forward, fly back home to Marla and the Paper Street Soap Company.
Everything is still falling apart.
At home, I’m too scared to look in the fridge. Picture dozens of little plastic sandwich bags labeled with cities like Las Vegas and Chicago and Milwaukee where Tyler had to make good his threats to protect chapters of fight club. Inside each bag would be a pair of messy tidbits, frozen solid.
In one corner of the kitchen, a space monkey squats on the cracked linoleum and studies himself in a hand mirror. “I am the all-singing, all-dancing crap of this world,” the space monkey tells the mirror. “I am the toxic waste byproduct of God’s creation.”
Other space monkeys move around in the garden, picking things, killing things.
With one hand on the freezer door, I take a big breath and try to center my enlightened spiritual entity.
Raindrops on roses
Happy Disney animals
This makes my parts hurt
The freezer’s open an inch when Marla peers over my shoulder and says, “What’s for dinner?”
The space monkey looks at himself squatting in his hand mirror. “I am the shit and infectious human waste of creation.”
Full circle.
About a month ago, I was afraid to let Marla look in the fridge. Now I’m afraid to look in the fridge myself.
Oh, God. Tyler.
Marla loves me. Marla doesn’t know the difference.
“I’m glad you’re back,” Marla says. “We have to talk.”
Oh, yeah, I say. We have to talk.
I can’t bring myself to open the freezer.
I am Joe’s Shrinking Groin.
I tell Marla, don’t touch anything in this freezer. Don’t even open it. If you ever find anything inside it, don’t eat them or feed them to a cat or anything. The space monkey with the hand mirror is eyeing us so I tell Marla we have to leave. We need to be someplace else to have this talk.
Down the basement stairs, one space monkey is reading to the other space monkeys. “The three ways to make napalm:
“One, you can mix equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate,” the space monkey in the basement reads. “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.”
Marla and I, we mass-transit from the Paper Street Soap Company to a window booth at the planet Denny’s, the orange planet.
This was something Tyler talked about, how since England did all the exploration and built colonies and made maps, most of the places in geography have those secondhand sort of English names. The English got to name everything. Or almost everything.
Like, Ireland.
New London, Australia.
New London, India.
New London, Idaho.
New York, New York.
Fast-forward to the future.
This way, when deep-space exploitation ramps up, it will probably be the megatonic corporations that discover all the new planets and map them.
The IBM Stellar Sphere.
The Philip Morris Galaxy.
Planet Denny’s.
Every planet will take on the corporate identity of whoever rapes it first.
Budweiser World.
Our waiter has a big goose egg on his forehead and stands ramrod straight, heels together. “Sir!” our waiter says. “Would you like to order now? Sir!” he says. “Anything you order is free of charge. Sir!”
You can imagine you smell urine in everybody’s soup.
Two coffees, please.
Marla asks, “Why is he giving us free food?”
The waiter thinks I’m Tyler Durden, I say.
