Fight Club

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Don’t think of this as extinction. Think of this as downsizing.

  For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every 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 Lira. 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 wristthick 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.

  ∨ Fight Club ∧

  Fourteen

  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.

  The guy on the porch is mister angel face whom I tried to destroy the night Tyler invented Project Mayhem. Even with his two black eyes and blond crew cut, you see his tough pretty scowl without wrinkles or scars. Put him in a dress and make him smile, and he’d be a woman. Mister angel just stands his toes against the front door, just looks straight ahead into the splintering wood with his hands at his sides, wearing black shoes, black shirt, black pair of trousers.

  “Get rid of him,” Tyler tells me. “He’s too young.”

  I ask how young is too young?

  “It doesn’t matter,” Tyler says. “If the applicant is young, we tell him he’s too young. If he’s fat, he’s too fat. If he’s old, he’s too old. Thin, he’s too thin. White, he’s too white. Black, he’s too black.”

  This is how Buddhist temples have tested applicants going back for bahzillion years, Tyler says. You tell the applicant to go away, and if his resolve is so strong that he waits
at the entrance without food or shelter or encouragement for three days, then and only then can he enter and begin the training.

  So I tell mister angel he’s too young, but at lunchtime he’s still there. After lunch, I go out and beat mister angel with a broom and kick the guy’s sack out into the street. From upstairs, Tyler watches me stickball the broom upside the kid’s ear, the kid just standing there, then I kick his stuff into the gutter and scream.

  Go away, I’m screaming. Haven’t you heard? You’re too young. You’ll never make it, I scream. Come back in a couple years and apply again. Just go. Just get off my porch.

  The next day, the guy is still there, and Tyler goes out to go, “I’m sorry.” Tyler says he’s sorry he told the guy about training, but the guy is really too young, and would he please just go.

  Good cop. Bad cop.

  I scream at the poor guy, again. Then, six hours later, Tyler goes out and says he’s sorry, but no. The guy has to leave. Tyler says he’s going to call the police if the guy won’t leave.

  And the guy stays.

  And his clothes are still in the gutter. The wind takes the torn paper sack away.

  And the guy stays.

  On the third day, another applicant is at the front door. Mister angel is still there, and Tyler goes down and just tells mister angel, “Come in. Get your stuff out of the street and come in.”

  To the new guy, Tyler says, he’s sorry but there’s been a mistake. The new guy is too old to train here, and would he please leave.

  I go to work every day. I come home, and every day there’s one or two guys waiting on the front porch. These new guys don’t make eye contact. I shut the door and leave them on the porch. This happens every day for a while, and sometimes the applicants will leave, but most times, the applicants stick it out until the third day, until most of the seventy-two bunk beds Tyler and I bought and set up in the basement are full.

  One day, Tyler gives me five hundred dollars in cash and tells me to keep it in my shoe all the time. My personal burial money. This is another old Buddhist monastery thing.

  I come home from work now, and the house is filled with strangers that Tyler has accepted. All of them working. The whole first floor turns into a kitchen and a soap factory. The bathroom is never empty. Teams of men disappear for a few days and come home with red rubber bags of thin, watery fat.

  One night, Tyler comes upstairs to find me hiding in my room and says, “Don’t bother them. They all know what to do. It’s part of Project Mayhem. No one guy understands the whole plan, but each guy is trained to do one simple task perfectly.”

  The rule in Project Mayhem is you have to trust Tyler.

  Then Tyler’s gone.

  Teams of Project Mayhem guys render fat all day. I’m not sleeping. All night I hear other teams mix the lye and cut the bars and bake the bars of soap on cookie sheets, then wrap each bar in tissue and seal it with the Paper Street Soap Company label. Everyone except me seems to know what to do, and Tyler is never home.

  I hug the walls, being a mouse trapped in this clockwork of silent men with the energy of trained monkeys, cooking and working and sleeping in teams. Pull a lever. Push a button. A team of space monkeys cooks meals all day, and all day, teams of space monkeys are eating out of the plastic bowls they brought with them.

  One morning I’m leaving for work and Big Bob’s on the front porch wearing black shoes and a black shirt and pants. I ask, has he seen Tyler lately? Did Tyler send him here?

  “The first rule about Project Mayhem,” Big Bob says with his heels together and his back ramrod straight, “is you don’t ask questions about Project Mayhem.”

  So what brainless little honor has Tyler assigned him, I ask. There are guys whose job is to just boil rice all day or washout eating bowls or clean the crapper. All day. Has Tyler promised Big Bob enlightenment if he spends sixteen hours a day wrapping bars of soap?

  Big Bob doesn’t say anything.

  I go to work. I come home, and Big Bob’s still on the porch. I don’t sleep all night, and the next morning, Big Bob’s out tending the garden.

  Before I leave for work, I ask Big Bob, who let him in? Who assigned him this task? Did he see Tyler? Was Tyler here last night?

  Big Bob says, “The first rule in Project Mayhem is you don’t talk – ”

  I cut him off. I say, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

  And while I’m at work, teams of space monkeys dig up the muddy lawn around the house and cut the dirt with Epsom salts to lower the acidity, and spade in loads of free steer manure from the stockyards and bags of hair clippings from barber shops to ward off moles and mice and boost the protein in the soil.

  At any time of the night, space monkeys from some slaughterhouse come home with bags of blood meal to boost the iron in the soil and bone meal to boost the phosphorus.

  Teams of space monkeys plant basil and thyme and lettuce and starts of witch hazel and eucalyptus and mock orange and mint in a kaleidoscope knot pattern. A rose window in every shade of green. And other teams go out at night and kill the slugs and snails by candlelight. Another team of space monkeys picks only the most perfect leaves and juniper berries to boil for a natural dye. Comfrey because it’s a natural disinfectant. Violet leaves because they cure headaches and sweet woodruff because it gives soap a cut-grass smell.

  In the kitchen are bottles of 80-proof vodka to make the translucent rose geranium and brown sugar soap and the patchouli soap, and I steal a bottle of vodka and spend my personal burial money on cigarettes. Marla shows up. We talk about the plants. Marla and I walk on raked gravel paths through the kaleidoscope green patterns of the garden, drinking and smoking. We talk about her breasts. We talk about everything except Tyler Durden.

  And one day it’s in the newspaper how a team of men wearing black had stormed through a better neighborhood and a luxury car dealership slamming baseball bats against the front bumpers of cars so the air bags inside would explode in a powdery mess with their car alarms screaming.

  At the Paper Street Soap Company, other teams pick the petals from roses or anemones and lavender and pack the flowers into boxes with a cake of pure tallow that will absorb their scent for making soap with a flower smell.

  Marla tells me about the plants.

  The rose, Marla tells me, is a natural astringent.

  Some of the plants have obituary names: Iris, Basil, Rue, Rosemary, and Verbena. Some, like meadowsweet and cowslips, sweet flag and spikenard, are like the names of Shakespeare fairies. Deer tongue with its sweet vanilla smell. Witch hazel, another natural astringent. Orrisroot, the wild Spanish iris.

  Every night, Marla and I walk in the garden until I’m sure that Tyler’s not coming home that night. Right behind us is always a space monkey trailing us to pick up the twist of balm or rue or mint Marla crushes under my nose. A dropped cigarette butt. The space monkey rakes the path behind him to erase our ever being there.

  And one night in an uptown square park, another group of men floured gasoline around every tree and from tree to tree and set a perfect little forest fire. It was in the newspaper, how townhouse winlows across the street from the fire melted, and parked cars farted and settled on melted flat tires.

  Tyler’s rented house on Paper Street is a living thing wet on the inside from so many people sweating and breathing. So many people are moving inside, the house moves.

  Another night that Tyler didn’t come home, someone was drilling bank machines and pay telephones and then screwing lube fittings into the drilled holes and using a grease gun to pump the bank machines and pay telephones full of axle grease or vanilla pudding.

  And Tyler was never at home, but after a month a few of the space monkeys had Tyler’s kiss burned into the back of their hand. Then those space monkeys were gone, too, and new ones were on the front porch to replace them.

  And every day, the teams of men came and went in different cars. You never saw the same car twice. One evening, I hear Marla on the front porch, tellin
g a space monkey, “I’m here to see Tyler. Tyler Durden He lives here. I’m his friend.”

  The space monkey says, “I’m sorry, but you’re too…,” and he pauses, “you’re too young to train here.”

  Marla says, “Get screwed.”

  “Besides,” the space monkey says, “you haven’t brought the required items: two black shirts, two pair of black pants – ”

  Marla screams, “Tyler!”

  “One pair of heavy black shoes.”

  “Tyler!”

  “Two pair of black socks and two pair of plain underwear.”

  “Tyler!”

  And I hear the front door slam shut. Marla doesn’t wait the three days.

  Most days, after work, I come home and make a peanut butter sandwich.

  When I come home, one space monkey is reading to the assembled space monkeys who sit covering the whole first floor. “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.”

  The space monkey continues, “Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.”

  The reader stops when I walk in to make my sandwich, and all the space monkeys sit silent as if I were alone. I say, don’t bother. I’ve already read it. I typed it.

  Even my boss has probably read it.

  We’re all just a big bunch of crap, I say. Go ahead. Play your little game. Don’t mind me.

  The space monkeys wait in quiet while I make my sandwich and take another bottle of vodka and go up the stairs. Behind me I hear, “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.”

  I am Joe’s Broken Heart because Tyler’s dumped me. Because my father dumped me. Oh, I could go on and on.

  Some nights, after work, I go to a different fight club in the basement of a bar or garage, and I ask if anybody’s seen Tyler Durden.

  In every new fight club, someone I’ve never met is standing under the one light in the center of the darkness, surrounded by men, and reading Tyler’s words.