Fight Club

by Chuck Palahniuk

  “You’re a brave man,” the bus driver says, “to make yourself a homework assignment.”

  The mechanic tells the bus driver, “Shut up,” and “The lookout doesn’t say shit.”

  You know one of the space monkeys has a rubber band to wrap around your nuts. They fill up the front of the bus.

  The mechanic says, “You know the drill, Mr. Durden. You said it yourself. You said, if anyone ever tries to shut down the club, even you, then we have to get him by the nuts.”

  Gonads.

  Jewels.

  Testes.

  Huevos.

  Picture the best part of yourself frozen in a sandwich bag at the Paper Street Soap Company.

  “You know it’s useless to fight us,” the mechanic says.

  The bus driver chews his sandwich and watches us in the overhead mirror.

  A police siren wails, coming closer. A tractor rattles across a field in the distance. Birds. A window in the back of the bus is half open. Clouds. Weeds grow at the edge of the gravel turnaround. Bees or flies buzz around the weeds.

  “We’re just after a little collateral,” the fight club mechanic says. “This isn’t just a threat, this time, Mr. Durden. This time, we have to cut them.”

  The bus driver says, “It’s cops.”

  The siren arrives somewhere at the front of the bus.

  So what do I have to fight back with?

  A police car pulls up to the bus, lights flashing blue and red through the bus windshield, and someone outside the bus is shouting, “Hold up in there.”

  And I’m saved.

  Sort of.

  I can tell the cops about Tyler. I’ll tell them everything about fight club, and maybe I’ll go to jail, and then Project Mayhem will be their problem to solve, and I won’t be staring down a knife.

  The cops come up the bus steps, the first cop saying, “You cut him yet?”

  The second cop says, “Do it quick, there’s a warrant out for his arrest.”

  Then he takes off his hat, and to me he says, “Nothing personal, Mr. Durden. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

  I say, you all are making a big mistake.

  The mechanic says, “You told us you’d probably say that.”

  I’m not Tyler Durden.

  “You told us you’d say that, too.”

  I’m changing the rules. You can still have fight club, but we’re not going to castrate anyone, anymore.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the mechanic says. He’s halfway down the aisle holding the knife out in front of him. “You said you would definitely say that.”

  Okay so I’m Tyler Durden. I am. I’m Tyler Durden, and I dictate the rules, and I say, put the knife down.

  The mechanic calls back over his shoulder, “What’s our best time to date for a cut-and-run?”

  Somebody yells, “Four minutes.”

  The mechanic yells, “Is somebody timing this?”

  Both cops have climbed up into the front of the bus now, and one looks at his watch and says, “Just a sec. Wait for the second hand to get up to the twelve.”

  The cop says, “Nine.”

  “Eight.”

  “Seven.”

  I dive for the open window.

  My stomach hits the thin metal windowsill, and behind me, the fight club mechanic yells, “Mr. Durden! You’re going to fuck up the time.”

  Hanging half out the window, I claw at the black rubber sidewalk of the rear tire. I grab the wheelwell trim and pull. Someone grabs my feet and pulls. I’m yelling at the little tractor in the distance, “Hey.” And “Hey.” My face swelling hot and full of blood, I’m hanging upside down. I pull myself out a little. Hands around my ankles pull me back in. My tie flops in my face. My belt buckle catches on the windowsill. The bees and the flies and weeds are inches from in front of my face, and I’m yelling, “Hey!”

  Hands are hooked in the back of my pants, tugging me in, hugging my pants and belt down over my ass.

  Somebody inside the bus yells, “One minute!”

  My shoes slip off my feet.

  My belt buckle slips inside the windowsill.

  The hands bring my legs together. The windowsill cuts hot from the sun into my stomach. My white shirt billows and drops down around my head and shoulders, my hands still gripping the wheelwell trim, me still yelling, “Hey!”

  My legs are stretched out straight and together behind me. My pants slip down my legs and are gone. The sun shines warm on my ass.

  Blood pounding in my head, my eyes bugging from the pressure, all I can see is the white shirt hanging around my face. The tractor rattles somewhere. The bees buzz. Somewhere. Everything is a million miles away. Somewhere a million miles behind me someone is yelling, “Two minutes!”

  And a hand slips between my legs and gropes for me.

  “Don’t hurt him,” someone says.

  The hands around my ankles are a million miles away. Picture them at the end of a long, long road. Guided meditation.

  Don’t picture the windowsill as a dull hot knife slitting open your belly.

  Don’t picture a team of men tug-of-warring your legs apart.

  A million miles away, a bah-zillion miles away, a rough warm hand wraps around the base of you and pulls you back, and something is holding you tight, tighter, tighter.

  A rubber band.

  You’re in Ireland.

  You’re in fight club.

  You’re at work.

  You’re anywhere but here.

  “Three minutes!”

  Somebody far far away yells, “You know the speech Mr. Durden. Don’t fuck with fight club.”

  ♦

  The warm hand is cupped under you. The cold tip of the knife. An arm wraps around your chest. Therapeutic physical contact. Hug time. And the ether presses your nose and mouth, hard. Then nothing, less than nothing. Oblivion.

  ∨ Fight Club ∧

  Twenty-Three

  The exploded shell of my burned-out condo is outer space black and devastated in the night above the little lights of the city. With the windows gone, a yellow ribbon of police crime scene tape twists and swings at the edge of the fifteen-story drop.

  I wake up on the concrete subfloor. There was maple flooring once. There was art on the walls before the explosion. There was Swedish furniture. Before Tyler.

  I’m dressed. I put my hand in my pocket and feel.

  I’m whole.

  Scared but intact.

  Go to the edge of the floor, fifteen stories above the parking lot, and look at the city lights and the stars, and you’re gone.

  It’s all so beyond us.

  ♦

  Up here, in the miles of night between the stars and the Earth, I feel just like one of those space animals.

  Dogs.

  Monkeys.

  Men.

  You just do your little job. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don’t really understand any of it.

  The world is going crazy. My boss is dead. My home is gone. My job is gone. And I’m responsible for it all.

  There’s nothing left.

  I’m overdrawn at the bank.

  Step over the edge.

  The police tape flutters between me and oblivion.

  Step over the edge.

  What else is there?

  Step over the edge.

  There’s Marla.

  Jump over the edge.

  There’s Marla, and she’s in the middle of everything and doesn’t know it.

  And she loves you.

  She loves Tyler.

  She doesn’t know the difference.

  Somebody has to tell her. Get out. Get out. Get out.

  Save yourself. You ride the elevator down to the lobby, and the doorman who never liked you, now he smiles at you with three teeth knocked out of his mouth and says, “Good evening, Mr. Durden. Can I get you a cab? Are you feeling alright? Do you want to use the phone?”

  You call Marla at the Regent Hotel.

  The clerk at the
Regent says, “Right away, Mr. Durden.”

  Then Marla comes on the line.

  The doorman is listening over your shoulder. The clerk at the Regent is probably listening. You say, Marla, we have to talk.

  Marla says, “You can suck shit.”

  She might be in danger, you say. She deserves to know what’s going on. She has to meet you. You have to talk.

  “Where?”

  She should go to the first place we ever met. Remember. Think back.

  The white healing ball of light. The palace of seven doors.

  “Got it,” she says. “I can be there in twenty minutes.”

  Be there.

  You hang up, and the doorman says, “I can get you a cab, Mr. Burden. Free of charge to anywhere you want.”

  The fight club boys are tracking you. No, you say, it’s such a nice night, I think I’ll walk.

  It’s Saturday night, bowel cancer night in the basement of First Methodist, and Marla is there when you arrive.

  Marla Singer smoking her cigarette. Marla Singer rolling her eyes. Marla Singer with a black eye.

  You sit on the shag carpet at opposite sides of the meditation circle and try to summon up your power animal while Marla glares at you with her black eye. You close your eyes and meditate to the palace of the seven doors, and you can still feel Marla’s glare. You cradle your inner child.

  Marla glares.

  Then it’s time to hug.

  Open your eyes.

  We should all choose a partner.

  Marla crosses the room in three quick steps and slaps me hard across the face.

  Share yourself completely.

  “You fucking suck-ass piece of shit,” Marla says.

  Around us, everyone stands staring.

  Then both of Marla’s fists are beating me from every direction. “You killed someone,” she’s screaming. “I called the police and they should be here any minute.”

  I grab her wrists and say, maybe the police will come, but probably they won’t.

  Marla twists and says the police are speeding over here to hook me up to the electric chair and bake my eyes out or at least give me a lethal injection.

  This will feel just like a bee sting.

  An overdose shot of sodium phenobarbital, and then the big sleep. Valley of the Dogs style.

  Marla says she saw me kill somebody today.

  If she means my boss, I say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, the police know, everyone’s looking for me to lethally inject me, already, but it was Tyler who killed my boss.

  Tyler and I just happen to have the same fingerprints, but no one understands.

  “You can suck shit,” Marla says and pushes her punched-out black eye at me. “Just because you and your little disciples like getting beat up, you touch me ever again, and you’re dead.”

  “I saw you shoot a man tonight,” Marla says.

  No, it was a bomb, I say, and it happened this morning. Tyler drilled a computer monitor and filled it with gasoline or black powder.

  All the people with real bowel cancers are standing around watching this.

  “No,” Marla says. “I followed you to the Pressman Hotel, and you were a waiter at one of those murder mystery parties.”

  The murder mystery parties, rich people would come to the hotel for a big dinner party, and act out a sort of Agatha Christie story. Sometime between the Boudin of Gravlax and the Saddle of Venison, the lights would go out for a minute and someone would fake getting killed. It’s supposed to be a fun let’s-pretend sort of death.

  The rest of the meal, the guests would get drunk and eat their Madeira Consomme and try to find clues to who among them was a psychotic killer.

  Marla yells, “You shot the mayor’s special envoy on recycling!”

  Tyler shot the mayor’s special envoy on whatever.

  Marla says, “And you don’t even have cancer!”

  It happens that fast.

  Snap your fingers.

  Everyone’s looking.

  I yell, you don’t have cancer either!

  “He’s been coming here for two years,” Marla shouts, “and he doesn’t have anything!”

  I’m trying to save your life!

  “What? Why does my life need saving?”

  Because you’ve been following me. Because you followed me tonight, because you saw Tyler Durden kill someone, and Tyler will kill anybody who threatens Project Mayhem.

  Everybody in the room looks snapped out of their little tragedies. Their little cancer thing. Even the people on pain meds look wide-eyed and alert.

  I say to the crowd, I’m sorry. I never meant any harm. We should go. We should talk about this outside.

  Everybody goes, “No! Stay! What else?”

  I didn’t kill anybody, I say. I’m not Tyler Durden. He’s the other side of my split personality. I say, has anybody here seen the movie Sybil?

  Marla says, “So who’s going to kill me?”

  ♦

  Tyler.

  “You?”

  Tyler, I say, but I can take care of Tyler. You just have to watch out for the members of Project Mayhem. Tyler might’ve given them orders to follow you or kidnap you or something.

  “Why should I believe any of this?”

  It happens that fast.

  I say, because I think I like you.

  Marla says, “Not love?”

  This is a cheesy enough moment, I say. Don’t push it.

  Everybody watching smiles.

  I have to go. I have to get out of here. I say, watch out for guys with shaved heads or guys who look beat up. Black eyes. Missing teeth. That sort of thing.

  And Marla says, “So where are you going?”

  I have to take care of Tyler Durden.

  ∨ Fight Club ∧

  Twenty-Four

  His name was Patrick Madden, and he was the mayor’s special envoy on recycling. His name was Patrick Madden, and he was an enemy of Project Mayhem.

  I walk out into the night around First Methodist, and it’s all coming back to me.

  All the things that Tyler knows are all coming back to me.

  Patrick Madden was compiling a list of bars where fight clubs met.

  All of the sudden, I know how to run a movie projector. I know how to break locks and how Tyler had rented the house on Paper Street just before he revealed himself to me at the beach.

  I know why Tyler had occurred. Tyler loved Marla. From the first night I met her, Tyler or some part of me had needed a way to be with Marla.

  Not that any of this matters. Not now. But all the details are coming back to me as I walk through the night to the closest fight club.

  There’s a fight club in the basement of the Armory Bar on Saturday nights. You can probably find it on the list Patrick Madden was compiling, poor dead Patrick Madden.

  Tonight, I go to the Armory Bar and the crowds part zipper style when I walk in. To everybody there, I am Tyler Durden the Great and Powerful. God and father.

  All around me I hear, “Good evening, sir.”

  “Welcome to fight club, sir.”

  “Thank you for joining us, sir.”

  Me, my monster face just starting to heal. The hole in my face smiling through my cheek. A frown on my real mouth.

  Because I’m Tyler Durden, and you can kiss my ass, I register to fight every guy in the club that night. Fifty fights. One fight at a time. No shoes. No shirts.

  The fights go on as long as they have to.

  And if Tyler loves Marla.

  I love Marla.

  And what happens doesn’t happen in words. I want to smother all the French beaches I’ll never see. Imagine stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around Rockefeller Center.

  The first fight I get, the guy gets me in a full nelson and rams my face, rams my cheek, rams the hole in my cheek into the concrete floor until my teeth inside snap off and plant their jagged roots into my tongue.

  Now I can remember Patrick Madden, dead on the floor
, his little figurine of a wife, just a little girl with a chignon. His wife giggled and tried to pour champagne between her dead husband’s lips.

  The wife said the fake blood was too, too red. Mrs. Patrick Madden put two fingers in the blood pooled next to her husband and then put the fingers in her mouth.

  The teeth planted in my tongue, I taste the blood.

  Mrs. Patrick Madden tasted the blood.

  I remember being there on the outskirts of the murder mystery party with the space monkey waiters standing bodyguard around me. Marla in her dress with a wallpaper pattern of dark roses watched from the other side of the ballroom.

  My second fight, the guy puts a knee between my shoulder blades. The guy pulls both my arms together behind my back, and slams my chest into the concrete floor. My collarbone on one side, I hear it snap.

  I would do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa.

  Mrs. Patrick Madden held her two bloody fingers up, the blood climbing the cracks between her teeth, and the blood ran down her fingers, down her wrist, across a diamond bracelet, and to her elbow where it dripped.

  Fight number three, I wake up and it’s time for fight number three. There are no more names in fight club.

  You aren’t your name.

  You aren’t your family.

  Number three seems to know what I need and holds my head in the dark and the smother. There’s a sleeper hold that gives you just enough air to stay awake. Number three holds my head in the crook of his arm, the way he’d hold a baby or a football, in the crook of his arm, and hammers my face with the pounding molar of his clenched fist.

  Until my teeth bite through the inside of my cheek.

  Until the hole in my cheek meets the corner of my mouth, the two run together into a ragged leer that opens from under my nose to under my ear.

  Number three pounds until his fist is raw.

  Until I’m crying.

  How everything you ever love will reject you or die.

  Everything you ever create will be thrown away.

  Everything you’re proud of will end up as trash.

  I am Ozymandias, king of kings.

  One more punch and my teeth click shut on my tongue. Half of my tongue drops to the floor and gets kicked away.

  The little figurine of Mrs. Patrick Madden knelt on the floor next to the body of her husband, the rich people, the people they called friends, towering drunk around her and laughing.