Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.
The barrel of the gun pressed against the back of my throat, Tyler says "We really won't die."
With my tongue I can feel the silencer holes we drilled into the barrel of the gun. Most of the noise a gunshot makes is expanding gases, and there's the tiny sonic boom a bullet makes because it travels so fast. To make a silencer, you just drill holes in the barrel of the gun, a lot of holes. This lets the gas escape and slows the bullet to below the speed of sound.
You drill the holes wrong and the gun will blow off your hand.
"This isn't really death," Tyler says. "We'll be legend. We won't grow old."
I tongue the barrel into my cheek and say, Tyler, you're thinking of vampires.
The building we're standing on won't be here in ten minutes. You take a 98percent concentration of fuming nitric acid and add the acid to three times that amount of sulfuric acid. Do this in an ice bath. Then add glycerin drop-by-drop with an eye dropper. You have nitroglycerin.
I know this because Tyler knows this.
Mix the nitro with sawdust, and you have a nice plastic explosive. A lot of folks mix their nitro with cotton and add Epsom salts as a sulfate. This works too. Some folks, they use paraffin mixed with nitro. Paraffin has never, ever worked for me.
So Tyler and I are on top of the Parker-Morris Building with the gun stuck in my mouth, and we hear glass breaking. Look over the edge. It's a cloudy day, even this high up. This is the world's tallest building, and this high up the wind is always cold. It's so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you're trained to do.
Pull a lever.
Push a button.
You don't understand any of it, and then you just die.
One hundred and ninety-one floors up, you look over the edge of the roof and the street below is mottled with a shag carpet of people, standing, looking up. The breaking glass is a window right below us. A window blows out the side of the building, and then comes a file cabinet big as a black refrigerator, right below us a six-drawer filing cabinet drops right out of the cliff face of the building, and drops turning slowly, and drops getting smaller, and drops disappearing into the packed crowd.
Somewhere in the one hundred and ninety-one floors under us, the space monkeys in the Mischief Committee of Project Mayhem are running wild, destroying every scrap of history.
That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways.
With a gun stuck in your mouth and the barrel of the gun between your teeth, you can only talk in vowels.
We're down to our last ten minutes.
Another window blows out of the building, and glass sprays out, sparkling flock-of-pigeons style, and then a dark wooden desk pushed by the Mischief Committee emerges inch by inch from the side of the building until the desk tilts and slides and turns end-over-end into a magic flying thing lost in the crowd.
The Parker-Morris Building won't be here in nine minutes. You take enough blasting gelatin and wrap the foundation columns of anything, you can topple any building in the world. You have to tamp it good and tight with sandbags so the blast goes against the column and not out into the parking garage around the column.
This how-to stuff isn't in any history book.
The three ways to make napalm: One, you can mix equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate. 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.
Ask me how to make nerve gas. Oh, all those crazy car bombs.
Nine minutes.
The Parker-Morris Building will go over, all one hundred and ninety-one floors, slow as a tree falling in the forest. Timber. You can topple anything. It's weird to think the place where we're standing will only be a point in the sky.
Tyler and meat the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I'm wondering how clean this gun is.
We just totally forget about Tyler's whole murder-suicide thing while we watch another file cabinet slip out the side of the building and the drawers roll open midair, reams of white paper caught in the updraft and carried off on the wind.
Eight minutes.
Then the smoke, smoke starts out of the broken windows. The demolition team will hit the primary charge in maybe eight minutes. The primary charge will blow the base charge, the foundation columns will crumble, and the photo series of the Parker-Morris Building will go into all the history books.
The five-picture time-lapse series. Here, the building's standing. Second picture, the building will be at an eighty-degree angle. Then a seventy-degree angle. The building's at a forty-five-degree angle in the fourth picture when the skeleton starts to give and the tower gets a slight arch to it. The last shot, the tower, all one hundred and ninety-one floors, will slam down on the national museum which is Tyler's real target.
"This is our world, now, our world," Tyler says, "and those ancient people are dead."
If I knew how this would all turn out, I'd be more than happy to be dead and in Heaven right now.
Seven minutes.
Up on top of the Parker-Morris Building with Tyler's gun in my mouth. While desks and filing cabinets and computers meteor down on the crowd around the building and smoke funnels up from the broken windows and three blocks down the street the demolition team watches the clock, I know all of this: the gun, the anarchy, the explosion is really about Marla Singer.
Six minutes.
We have sort of a triangle thing going here. I want Tyler. Tyler wants Marla. Marla wants me.
I don't want Marla, and Tyler doesn't want me around, not anymore. This isn't about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership.
Without Marla, Tyler would have nothing.
Five minutes.
Maybe we would become a legend, maybe not. No, I say, but wait.
Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?
Four minutes.
I tongue the gun barrel into my cheek and say, you want to be a legend, Tyler, man, I'll make you a legend. I've been here from the beginning.
I remember everything.
Three minutes.
Chapter 2
Bob's big arms were closed around to hold me inside, and I was squeezed in the dark between Bob's new sweating tits that hang enormous, the way we think of God's as big. Going around the church basement full of men, each night we met: this is Art, this is Paul, this is Bob; Bob's big shoulders made me think of the horizon. Bob's thick blond hair was what you get when hair cream calls itself sculpting mousse, so thick and blond and the part is so straight.
His arms wrapped around me, Bob's hand palms my head against the new tits sprouted on his barrel chest.
"It will be alright," Bob says. "You cry now."
From my knees to my forehead, I feel chemical reactions within Bob burning food and oxygen.
"Maybe they got it all early enough," Bob says. "Maybe it's just seminoma. With seminoma, you have almost a hundred percent survival rate."
Bob's shoulders inhale themselves up in a long draw, then drop, drop, drop in jerking sobs. Draw themselves up. Drop, drop, drop.
I've been coming here every week for two years, and every week Bob wraps his arms around me, and I cry.
"You cry," Bob says and inhales and sob, sob, sobs. "Go on now and cry."
The big wet face settles down on top of my head, and I am lost inside. This is when I'd cry. Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.
Anything you're ever proud of will be thrown away.
And I'm lost inside.
This is as close as I've been to sleeping in almost a week.
This is how I met Marla Singer.
Bob cries because six months ago, his testicles were removed. Then hormone support therapy. Bob has tits because his testosterone ration is too high. Raise the testosterone level too much, your body ups the estrogen to seek a balance.
This is when I'd cry because right now, your life comes down to nothing, and not even nothing, oblivion.
Too much estrogen, and you get bitch tits.
It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.
Bob loves me because he thinks my testicles were removed, too.
Around us in the Trinity Episcopal basement with the thrift store plaid sofas are maybe twenty men and only one woman, all of them clung together in pairs, most of them crying. Some pairs lean forward, heads pressed ear-to-ear, the way wrestlers stand, locked. The man with the only woman plants his elbows on her shoulders; one elbow on either side of her head, her head between his hands, and his face crying against her neck. The woman's face twists off to one side and her hand brings up a cigarette.
I peek out from under the armpit of Big Bob.
"All my life," Bob cries. "Why I do anything, I don't know."
The only woman here at Remaining Men Together, the testicular cancer support group, this woman smokes her cigarette under the burden of a stranger, and her eyes come together with mine.
Faker.
Faker.
Faker.
Short matte black hair, big eyes the way they are in Japanese animation, skim milk thin, buttermilk sallow in her dress with a wallpaper pattern of dark roses, this woman was also in my tuberculosis support group Friday night. She was in my melanoma round table Wednesday night. Monday night she was in my Firm Believers leukemia rap group. The part down the center of her hair is a crooked lightning bolt of white scalp.
When you look for these support groups, they all have vague upbeat names. My Thursday evening group for blood parasites, it's called Free and Clear.
The group I go to for brain parasites is called Above and Beyond.
And Sunday afternoon at Remaining Men Together in the basement of Trinity Episcopal, this woman is here, again.
Worse than that, I can't cry with her watching.
This should be my favorite part, being held and crying with Big Bob without hope. We all work so hard all the time. This is the only place I ever really relax and give up.
This is my vacation.
I went to my first support group two years ago, after I'd gone to my doctor about my insomnia, again.
Three weeks and I hadn't slept. Three weeks without sleep, and everything becomes an out-of-body experience. My doctor said, "Insomnia is just the symptom of something larger. Find out what's actually wrong. Listen to your body."
I just wanted to sleep. I wanted little blue Amytal Sodium capsules, 200milligram-sized. I wanted red-and-blue Tuinal bullet capsules, lipstick-red Seconals.
My doctor told me to chew valerian root and get more exercise. Eventually I'd fall asleep.
The bruised, old fruit way my face had collapsed, you would've thought I was dead.
My doctor said, if I wanted to see real pain, I should swing by First Eucharist on a Tuesday night. See the brain parasites. See the degenerative bone diseases. The organic brain dysfunctions. See the cancer patients getting by.
So I went.
The first group I went to, there were introductions: this is Alice, this is Brenda, this is Dover. Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.
I never give my real name at support groups.
The little skeleton of a woman named Chloe with the seat of her pants hanging down sad and empty, Chloe tells me the worst thing about her brain parasites was no one would have sex with her. Here she was, so close to death that her life insurances under the one light in the middle of the black concrete basement and he can see that light flickering back out of the dark in a hundred pairs of eyes. First thing Tyler yells is, "The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.
"The second rule about fight club," Tyler yells, "is you don't talk about fight club."
Me, I knew my dad for about six years, but I don't remember anything. My dad, he starts a new family in a new town about every six years. This isn't so much like a family as it's like he sets up a franchise.
What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women.
Tyler standing under the one light in the after-midnight blackness of a basement full of men, Tyler runs through the other rules: two men per fight, one fight at a time, no shoes no shirts, fights go on as long as they have to.
"And the seventh rule," Tyler yells, "is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight."
Fight club is not football on television. You aren't watching a bunch of men you don't know halfway around the world beating on each other live by satellite with a two-minute delay, commercials pitching beer every ten minutes, and a pause now for station identification. After you've been to fight club, watching football on television is watching pornography when you could be having great sex.
Fight club gets to be your reason for going to the gym and keeping your hair cut short and cutting your nails. The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.
Like Tyler says, even a snuffle looks pumped.
My father never went to college so it was really important I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what?
My dad didn't know.
When I got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn't know, so he said, get married.
I'm a thirty-year-old boy, and I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer I need.
What happens at fight club doesn't happen in words. Some guys need a fight every week. This week, Tyler says it's the first fifty guys through the door and that's it. No more.
Last week, I tapped a guy and he and I got on the list for a fight. This guy must've had a bad week, got both my arms behind my head in a full nelson and rammed my face into the concrete floor until my teeth bit open the inside of my cheek and my eye was swollen shut and was bleeding, and after I said, stop, I could look down and there was a print of half my face in blood on the floor.
Tyler stood next to me, both of us looking down at the big O of my mouth with blood all around it and the little slit of my eye staring up at us from the floor, and Tyler says, "Cool."
I shake the guy's hand and say, good fight.
This guy, he says, "How about next week?"
I try to smile against all the swelling, and I say, look at me. How about next month?
You aren't alive anywhere like you're alive at fight club. When it's you and one other guy under that one light in the middle of all those watching. Fight club isn't about winning or losing fights. Fight club isn't about words. You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, and his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood. This guy trusts himself to handle anything. There's grunting and noise at fight club like at the gym, but fight club isn't about looking good. There's hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved.
After my last fight, the guy who fought me mopped the floor while I called my insurance to pre-approve a visit to the emergency room. At the hospital, Tyler tells them I fell down.
Some policy had paid off with seventy-five thousand bucks, and all Chloe wanted was to get laid for the last time. Not intimacy, sex.
What does a guy say? What can you say, I mean.
All this dying had started with Chloe being a little tired, and now Chloe was too bored to go in for treatment. Pornographic movies, she had pornographic movies at home in her apartment.
During the French Revolution, Chloe told me, the women in prison, the duchesses, baronesses, marquises, whatever, they would screw any man who'd climb on top. Chloe breathed against my neck. Climb on top. Pony up, did I know. Screwing passed the time.
La petite mort, the French called it.
Chloe had pornographic movies, if I was interested. Amyl nitrate. Lubricants.
Normal times, I'd be sporting an erection. Our Chloe, however, is a skeleton dipped in yellow wax.
Chloe looking the way she is, I am nothing. Not even nothing. Still, Chloe's shoulder pokes mine when we sit around a circle on the shag carpet. We close our eyes. This was Chloe's turn to lead us in guided meditation, and she talked us into the garden of serenity. Chloe talked us up the hill to the palace of seven doors. Inside the palace were the seven doors, the green door, the yellow door, the orange door, and Chloe talked us through opening each door, the blue door, the red door, the white door, and finding what was there.
Eyes closed, we imagined our pain as a ball of white healing light floating around our feet and rising to our knees, our waist, our chest. Our chakras opening. The heart chakra. The head chakra. Chloe talked us into caves where we met our power animal. Mine was a penguin.
Ice covered the floor of the cave, and the penguin said, slide. Without any effort, we slid through tunnels and galleries.
Then it was time to hug.
Open your eyes.
This was therapeutic physical contact, Chloe said. We should all choose a partner. Chloe threw herself around my head and cried. She had strapless underwear at home, and cried. Chloe had oils and handcuffs, and cried as I watched the second hand on my watch go around eleven times.
So I didn't cry at my first support group, two years ago. I didn't cry at my second or my third support group, either. I didn't cry at blood parasites or bowel cancers or organic brain dementia.
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 donetimes, Tyler speaks for me.
I did this to myself.
Outside, the sun was coming up.
You don't talk about fight club because except for five hours from two until seven on Sunday morning, fight club doesn't exist.
When we invented fight club, Tyler and I, neither of us had ever been in a fight before. If you've never been in a fight, you wonder. About getting hurt, about what you're capable of doing against another man. I was the first guy Tyler ever felt safe enough to ask, and we were both drunk in a bar where no one would care so Tyler said, "I want you to do me a favor. I want you to hit me as hard as you can."
I didn't want to, but Tyler explained it all, about not wanting to die without any scars, about being tired of watching only professionals fight, and wanting to know more about himself.
About self-destruction.
At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.
I looked around and said, okay. Okay, I say, but outside in the parking lot.
So we went outside, and I asked if Tyler wanted it in the face or in the stomach.
Tyler said, "Surprise me."
I said I had never hit anybody.
Tyler said, "So go crazy, man."
I said, close your eyes.
Tyler said, "No."
Like every guy on his first night in fight club, I breathed in and swung my fist in a roundhouse at Tyler's jaw like in every cowboy movie we'd ever seen, and me, my fist connected with the side of Tyler's neck.
Shit, I said, that didn't count. I want to try it again.
Tyler said, "Yeah it counted," and hit me, straight on, pox, just like a cartoon boxing glove on a spring on Saturday morning cartoons, right in the middle of my chest and I fell back against a car. We both stood there, Tyler rubbing the side of his neck and me holding a hand on my chest, both of us knowing we'd gotten somewhere we'd never been and like the cat and mouse in cartoons, we were still alive and wanted to see how far we could take this thing and still be alive.
Tyler said, "Cool."
I said, hit me again.
Tyler said, "No, you hit me."
So I hit him, a girl's wide roundhouse to right under his ear, and Tyler shoved me back and stomped the heel of his shoe in my stomach. What happened next and after that didn't happen in words, but the bar closed and people came out and shouted around us in the parking lot.
Instead of Tyler, I felt finally I could get my hands on everything in the world that didn't work, my cleaning that came back with the collar buttons broken, the bank that says I'm hundreds of dollars overdrawn. My job where my boss got on my computer and fiddled with my DOS execute commands. And Marla Singer, who stole the support groups from me.
Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing mattered.
The first night we fought was a Sunday night, and Tyler hadn't shaved all weekend so my knuckles burned raw from his weekend beard. Lying on our backs in the parking lot, staring up at the one star that came through the streetlights, I asked Tyler what he'd been fighting.
Tyler said, his father.
Maybe we didn't need a father to complete ourselves. There's nothing personal about who you fight in fight club. You fight to fight. You're not supposed to talk about fight club, but we talked and for the next couple of weeks, guys met in that parking lot after the bar had closed, and by the time it got cold, another bar offered the basement where we meet now.
When fight club meets, Tyler gives the rules he and I decided. "Most of you," Tyler yells inund.
So I can wash the pants, Tyler has to show me how to make soap. Tyler's upstairs, and the kitchen is filled with the smell of cloves and burnt hair. Marla's at the kitchen table, burning the inside of her arm with a clove cigarette and calling herself human butt wipe.
"I embrace my own festering diseased corruption," Marla tells the cherry on the end of her cigarette. Marla twists the cigarette into the soft white belly of her arm. "Burn, witch, burn."
Tyler's upstairs in my bedroom, looking at his teeth in my mirror, and says he got me a job as a banquet waiter, part time.
"At the Pressman Hotel, if you can work in the evening," Tyler says. "The job will stoke your class hatred."
Yeah, I say, whatever.
"They make you wear a black bow tie," Tyler says. "All you need to work there is a white shirt and black trousers."
Soap, Tyler. I say, we need soap. We need to make some soap. I need to wash my pants.
I hold Tyler's feet while he does two hundred sit-ups.
"To make soap, first we have to render fat." Tyler is full of useful information.
Except for their humping, Marla and Tyler are never in the same room. If Tyler's around, Marla ignores him. This is familiar ground.
"The big sleep, `Valley of the Dogs' style.
"Where even if someone loves you enough to save your life, they still castrate you." Marla looks at me as if I'm the one humping her and says, "I can't win with you, can I?"
Marla goes out the back door singing that creepy "Valley of the Dolls" song.
I just stare at her going.
There's one, two, three moments of silence until all of Marla is gone from the room.
I turn around, and Tyler's appeared.
Tyler says, "Did you get rid of her?"
Not a sound, not a smell, Tyler's just appeared.
"First," Tyler says and jumps from the kitchen doorway to digging in the freezer. "First, we need to render some fat."
About my boss, Tyler tells me, if I'm really angry I should go to the post office and fill out a change-of-address card and have all his mail forwarded to Rugby, North Dakota.
Tyler starts pulling out sandwich bags of frozen white stuff and dropping them in the sink. Me, I'm supposed to put a big pan on the stove and fill it most of the way with water. Too little water, and the fat will darken as it separates into tallow.
"This fat," Tyler says, "it has a lot of salt so the more water, the better."
Put the fat in the water, and get the water boiling.
Tyler squeezes the white mess from each sandwich bag into the water, and then Tyler buries the emptyfrom inside the fridge edges Tyler's profile bright.
Boil and skim. Boil and skim. Put the skimmed tallow into milk cartons with the tops opened all the way.
With a chair pulled up to the open fridge, Tyler watches the tallow
cool. In the heat of the kitchen, clouds of cold fog waterfall out from the bottom of the fridge and pool around Tyler's feet.
As I fill the milk cartons with tallow, Tyler puts them in the fridge.
I go to kneel beside Tyler in front of the fridge, and Tyler takes my hands and shows them to me. The life line. The love line. The mounds of Venus and Mars. The cold fog pooling around us, the dim bright light on our faces.
"I need you to do me another favor," Tyler says.
This is about Marla isn't it?
"Don't ever talk to her about me. Don't talk about me behind my back. Do you promise?" Tyler says.
I promise.
Tyler says, "If you ever mention me to her, you'll never see me again."
I promise.
"Promise?"
I promise.
Tyler says, "Now remember, that was three times that you promised."
A layer of something thick and clear is collecting on top of the tallow in the fridge.
The tallow, I say, it's separating.
"Don't worry," Tyler says. "The clear layer is glycerin. You can mix the glycerin back in when you make soap. Or, you can skim the glycerin off."
Tyler licks his lips, and turns my hands palm-down on his thigh, on the gummy flannel lap of his bathrobe. , ,
"You can mix the glycerin with nitric acid to make nitroglycerin," Tyler says.
I breathe with my mouth open and say, nitroglycerin.
Tyler licks his lips wet and shining and kisses the back of my hand.
"You can mix the nitroglycerin with sodium nitrate and sawdust to make dynamite," Tyler says.
The kiss shines wet on the back of my white hand.
Dynamite, I say, and sit back on my heels.
Tyler pries the lid off the can of lye. "You can blow up bridges," Tyler says.
"You can mix the nitroglycerin with more nitric acid and paraffin and make gelatin explosives," Tyler says.
"You could blow up a building, easy," Tyler says.
Tyler tilts the can of lye an inch above the shining wet kiss on the back of my hand.
"This is a chemical burn," Tyler says, "and it will hurt worse than you've ever been burned. Worse than a hundred cigarettes."
The kiss shines on the back of my hand.
"You'll have a scar," Tyler says.
"With enough soap," Tyler says, "you could blow up the whole world. Now remember your promise."
And Tyler pourssmile, his lips together and stretched thin, his crotch at my elbow. I look up from writing the cover letter for a recall campaign. These letters always begin the same way:
"This notice is sent to you in accordance with the requirements of the National Motor Vehicle Safety Act. We have determined that a defect exists . . ."
This week I ran the liability formula, and for once A times B times C equaled more than the cost of a recall.
This week, it's the little plastic clip that holds the rubber blade on your windshield wipers. A throwaway item. Only two hundred vehicles affected. Next to nothing for the labor cost.
Last week was more typical. Last week the issue was some leather cured with a known teratogenic substance, synthetic Nirret or something just as illegal that's still used in third world tanning. Something so strong that it could cause birth defects in the fetus of any pregnant woman who comes across it. Last week, nobody called the Department of Transportation. Nobody initiated a recall.
New leather multiplied by labor cost multiplied by administration cost would equal more than our first-quarter profits. If anyone ever discovers our mistake, we can still pay off a lot of grieving families before we come close to the cost of retrofitting sixty-five hundred leather interiors.
But this week, we're doing a recall campaign. And this week the insomnia is back. Insomnia, and now the whole world figures to stop by and take a dump on my grave.
My boss is wearing his gray tie so today must be a Tuesday.
My boss brings a sheet of paper to my desk and asks if I'm looking for something. This paper was left in the copy machine, he says, and begins to read:
"The first rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club."
His eyes go side to side across the paper, and he giggles.
"The second rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club."
I hear Tyler's words come out of my boss, Mister Boss with his midlife spread and family photo on his desk and his dreams about early retirement and winters spent at a trailer-park hookup in some Arizona desert. My boss, with his extra-starched shirts and standing appointment for a haircut every Tuesday after lunch, he looks at me, and he says:
"I hope this isn't yours."
I am Joe's Blood-Boiling Rage.
Tyler asked me to type up the fight club rules and make him ten copies. Not nine, not eleven. Tyler says, ten. Still, I have the insomnia, and can't remember sleeping since three nights ago. This must be the original I typed. I made ten copies, and forgot the original. The paparazzi flash of the copy machine in my face. The insomnia distance
of everything, a copy of a copy of a copy. You can't touch anything, and nothing can touch you.
My boss reads:
"The third rule of fight club is two men per fight."
Neither of us blinks.
My boss reads:
"One fight at a time."
I haven't slept in three days unless I'm sleeping now. My boss shakes the paper under my nose. What about it, he says. Is this some little game I'm playing on company time? I'm paid for my full attention, not to waste time with little war games. And I'm not paid to abuse the copy machines.
What about it? He shakes the paper under my nose. What do I think, he asks, what should he do with an employee who spends company time in some little fantasy world. If I was in his shoes, what would I do?
What would I do?
The hole in my cheek, the blue-black swelling around my eyes, and the swollen red scar of Tyler's kiss on the back of my hand, a copy of a copy of a copy.
Speculation.
Why does Tyler want ten copies of the fight club rules?
Hindu cow.
What I would do, I say, is I'd be very careful who I talked to about this paper.
I say, it sounds like some dangerous psychotic 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 tkiller wrote this, and this buttoned-down schizophrenic could probably go over the edge at any moment in the working day and stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-180 carbine gas-operated semiautomatic.
My boss just looks at me.
The guy, I say, is probably at home every night with a little rattail file, filing a cross into the tip of every one of his rounds. This way, when he shows up to work one morning and pumps a round into his nagging, ineffectual, petty, whining, butt-sucking, candy-ass boss, that one round will split along the filed grooves and spread open the way a dumdum bullet flowers inside you to blow a bushel load of your stinking guts out through your spine. Picture your gut chakra opening in a slow-motion explosion of sausage-casing small intestine.
My boss takes the paper out from under my nose.
Go ahead, I say, read some more.
No really, I say, it sounds fascinating. The work of a totally diseased mind.
And I smile. The little butthole-looking edges of the hole in my cheek are the same blue-black as .a dog's gums. The skin stretched tight across the swelling around my eyes feels varnished.
My boss just looks at me.
Let me help you, I say.
I say, the fourth rule of fight club is one fight at a time.
My boss looks at the rules and then looks at me.
I say, the fifth rule is no shoes, no shirts in the fight.
My boss looks at the rules and looks at me.
Maybe, I say, this totally diseased fuck would use an Eagle Apache carbine because an Apache takes a thirty-shot mag and only weighs nine pounds. The Armalite only takes a five-round magazine. With thirty shots, our totally fucked hero could go the length of mahogany row and take out every vice president with a cartridge left over for each director.
Tyler's words coming out of my mouth. I used to be such a nice person.
I just look at my boss. My boss has blue; blue, pale cornflower blue eyes.
The J and R 68 semiautomatic carbine also takes a thirty-shot mag, and it only weighs seven pounds.
My boss just looks at me.
It's scary, I say. This is probably somebody he's known for years. Probably this guy knows all about him, where he lives, and where his wife works and his kids go to school.
This is exhausting, and all of a sudden very, very boring.
And why does Tyler need ten copies of the fight club rules?
What I don't have to say is I know about the leather interiors that cause birth defects. I know about the counterfeit brake linings that looked good enough to pass the purchasing agent, but fail after two thousand miles.
I know about the air-conditioning rheostat that gets so hot it sets fire to the maps in your glove compartment. I know how many people burn alive because of fuel-injector flashback. I've seen people's legs cut off at the knee when turbochargers start exploding and send their vanes through the firewall and into the passenger compartment. I've been out in the field and seen the burned-up cars and seen the reports where CAUSE OF FAILURE is recorded as "unknown."
No, I say, the paper's not mine. I take the paper between two fingers and jerk it out of his hand. The edge must slice his thumb because his hand flies to his mouth, and he's sucking hard, eyes wide open. I crumble the paper into a ball and toss it into the trash can next to my desk.
Maybe, I say, you shouldn't be bringing me every little piece of trash you pick up.
Sunday night, I go to Remaining Men Together and the basement of Trinity Episcopal is almost empty. Just Big Bob, and I come dragging in with every muscle bruised inside and out, but my heart's still racing and my thoughts are a tornado in my head. This is insomnia. All night, your thoughts are on the air.
All night long, you're thinking: Am I asleep? Have I slept?
Insult to injury, Big Bob's arms come out of his T-shirt sleeves quilted with muscle and so hard they shine. Big Bob smiles, he's so happy to see me.
He thought I was dead.
Yeah, I say, me too.
"Well," Big Bob says, "I've got good news."
Where is everybody?
"That's the good news," Big Bob says. "The group's disbanded. I only come down here to tell any guys who might show up."
I collapse with my eyes closed on one of the plaid thrift store couches.
"The good news," Big Bob says, "is there's a new group, but the first rule about this new group is you aren't supposed to talk about it.
Oh.
Big Bob says, "And the second rule is you're not supposed to talk aboupray canisters of Freon to shatter lock cylinders w > they could dangle, rappelling against the tower's brick facade, dropping, trusting each other to hold ropes, swinging, risking quick death in offices where every day they felt their lives end one hour at a time.
The next morning, these same, clerks and assistant account reps would be in the crowd with their neatly combed heads thrown back, rummy without sleep but sober and wearing ties and listening to the crowd around them wonder, who would do this, and the police shout I ()r everyone to please get back, now, as water ran down from the broken smoky center of each huge eye.
Tyler told me in secret that there's never more than four good proposals at a meeting so your chances of drawing a real proposal and [lot just a blank are about four in ten. There are twenty-five guys on t Ire Assault Committee including Tyler. Everybody gets their homework: lose a fight in public; and each member draws for a proposal.
This week, Tyler told them, "Go out and buy a gun."
Tyler gave one guy the telephone-book yellow pages and told him t () tear out an advertisement. Then pass the book to the next guy. No two guys should go to the same place to buy or shoot.
"This," Tyler said, and he took a gun out of his coat pocket, "this is a gun, and in two weeks, you should each of you have a gun about t Isis size to bring to meeting.
"Better you should pay for it with cash," Tyler said. "Next meeting, you'll all trade guns and report the gun you bought as stolen."
Nobody asked anything. You don't ask questions is the first rule in Project Mayhem.
Tyler handed the gun around. It was so heavy for something se small, as if a giant thing like a mountain or a sun were collapsed and melted down to make this. The committee guys held it by two fingers. Everyone wanted to ask if it was loaded, but the second rule of Project Mayhem is you don't ask questions.
Maybe it was loaded, maybe not. Maybe we should always assume the worst.
"A gun," Tyler said, "is simple and perfect. You just draw the trigger back."
The third rule in Project Mayhem is no excuses.
"The trigger," Tyler said, "frees the hammer, and the hammer strikes the powder."
The fourth rule is no lies.
"The explosion blasts a metal slug off the open end of the shell, and the barrel of the gun focuses the exploding powder and the rocketing slug," Tyler said, "like a man out of a cannon, like a missile out of a silo, like your jism, in one direction."
When Tyler invented Project Mayhem, Tyler said the goal of Project Mayhem had nothing to do with other people. Tyler didn't care if other people got hurt or not. The goal wasbr>
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, telling 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 th>
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. She 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.
The second projector is set up with the next reel of film. Most movies are six or seven small reels of film played in a certain order. Newer theaters, they splice all the reels together into one five-foot reel. This way, you don't have to run two projectors and do changeovers, switch back and forth, reel one, switch, reel two on the other projector, switch, reel three on the first projector.
Switch.
You wake up at SeaTac.
I study the people on the laminated airline seat card. A woman floats in the ocean, her brown hair spread out behind her, her seat cushion clutched to her chest. The eyes are wide open, but the woman doesn't smile or frown. In another picture, people calm as Hindu cows reach up from their seats toward oxygen masks sprung out of the ceiling.
This must be an emergency.
Oh.
We've lost cabin pressure.
You wake up, and you're at Willow Run.
Old theater, new theater, to ship a movie to the next theater, Tyler has to break the movie back down to the original six or seven reels. The small reels pack into a pair of hexagonal steel suitcases. Each suitcase has a handle on top. Pick one up, and you'll dislocate a shoulder.
They weigh that much.
Tyler's a banquet waiter, waiting tables at a hotel, downtown, and Tyler's a projectionist with the projector operator's union. I don't know how long Tyler had been working on all those nights I couldn't sleep.
The old theaters that run a movie with two projectors, a projectionist has to stand right there to change projectors at the exact second so the audience never sees the break when one reel starts and one reel ran out. You have to look for the white dots in the top, right-hand corner of the screen. This is the warning. Watch the movie, and you'll see two dots at the end of a reel.
"Cigarette burns," they're called in the business.
The first white dot, this is the two-minute warning. You get the second projector started so it will be running up to speed.
The second white dot is the five-second warning. Excitement. You're standing between the two projectors and the booth is sweating hot from the xenon bulbs that if you looked right at them you're blind. The first dot flashes on the screen. The sound in a movie comes from a big speaker behind the screen. The projectionist booth is soundproof because inside the booth is the racket of sprockets snapping film past the lens at six feet a second, ten frames a foot, sixty frames a second snapping through, clattering Gatling-gun fire. The two projectors running, you stand between and hold the shutter lever on each. On really old projectors, you have an alarm on the hub of the feed reel.
Even after the movie's on television, the warning dots will still be there. Even on airplane movies.
As most of the movie rolls onto the take-up reel, the take-up reel turns slower and the feed reel has to turn faster. At the end of a reel, the feed reel turns so fast the alarm will start ringing to warn you that a changeover is coming up.
The dark is hot from the bulbs inside the projectors, and the alarm is ringing. Stand there between the two projectors with a lever in each hand, and watch the corner of the screen. The second dot flashes. Count to five. Switch one shutter closed. At the same time, open the other shutter.
Changeover.
The movie goes on.
Nobody in the audience has any idea.
The alarm is on the feed reel so the movie projectionist can nap. A movie projectionist does a lot he's not supposed to. Not every projector has the alarm. At home, you'll sometimes wake up in your dark bed with the terror you've fallen asleep in the booth and missed a changeover. The audience will be cursing you. The audience, their movie dream is ruined, and the manager will be calling the union.
You wake up at Krissy Field.
The charm of traveling is everywhere I go, tiny life. I go to the hotel, tiny soap, tiny shampoos, single-serving butter, tiny mouthwash and a single-use toothbrush. Fold into the standard airplane seat. You're a giant. The problem is your shoulders are too big. Your Alice in Wonderland legs are all of a sudden miles so long they touch the feet of the person in front. Dinner arrives, a miniature do-it-yourself Chicken Cordon Bleu hobby kit, sort of a put-it together project to keep you busy.
The pilot has turned on the seat-belt sign, and we would ask you to refrain from moving about the cabin.
You wake up at Meigs Field.
Sometimes, Tyler wakes up in the dark, buzzing with the terror that he's missed a reel change or the movie has broken or the movie has slipped just enough in the projector that the sprockets are punching a line of holes through the sound track.
After a movie has been sprocket run, the light of the bulb shines through the sound track and instead of talk, you're blasted with the helicopter blade sound of whop whop whop as each burst of light comes through a sprocket hole.
What else a projectionist shouldn't do: Tyler makes slides out of the best single frames from a movie. The first full frontal movie anyone can remember had the naked actress Angle Dickinson.
By the time a print of this movie had shipped from the West Coast theaters to the East Coast theaters, the nude scene was gone. One projectionist took a frame. Another projectionist took a frame. Everybody wanted to make a naked slide of Angle Dickinson. Porno got into theaters and these projectionists, some guys they built collections that got epic.
You wake up at Boeing Field.
You wake up at LAX.
We have an almost empty flight, tonight, so feel free to fold the armrests up into the seatbacks and stretch out. You stretch out, zigzag, knees bent, waist bent, elbows bent across three or four seats. I set my watch two hours earlier or three hours later, Pacific, Mountain, Central, or Eastern time; lose an hour, gain an hour.
This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.
You wake up at Cleveland Hopkins.
You wake up at SeaTac, again.
You're a projectionist and you're tired and angry, but mostly you're bored so you start by taking a single frame of pornography collected by some other projectionist that you find stashed away in the booth, and you splice this frame of a lunging red penis or a yawning wet vagina closeup into another feature movie.
This is one of those pet adventures, when the dog and cat are left behind by a traveling family and must find their way home. In reel three, just after the dog and cat, who have human voices and talk to each other, have eaten out of a garbage can, there's the flash of an erection.
Tyler does this.
A single frame in a movie is on the screen for one-sixtieth of a second. Divide a second into sixty equal parts. That's how long the erection is. Towering four stories tall over the popcorn auditorium, slippery red and terrible, and no one sees it.
You wake up at Logan, again.
This is a terrible way to travel. I go to meetings my boss doesn't want to attend. I take notes. I'll get back to you.
Wherever I'm going, I'll be there to apply the formula. I'll keep the secret intact.
It's simple arithmetic.
It's a story problem.
If a new car built by my company leaves Chicago traveling west at 60 miles per hour, and the rear differential locks up, and the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall?
You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (, then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement ©.
A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don't initiate a recall.
If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't recall.
Everywhere I go, there's the burned-up wadded-up shell of a car waiting for me. I know where all the skeletons are. Consider this my job security.
Hotel time, restaurant food. Everywhere I go, I make tiny friendships with the people sitting beside me from Logan to Krissy to Willow Run.
What I am is a recall campaign coordinator, I tell the single-serving friend sitting next to me, but I'm working toward a career as a dishwasher.
You wake up at O'Hare, again.
Tyler spliced a penis into everything after that. Usually, close-ups, or a Grand Canyon vagina with an echo, four stories tall and twitching with blood pressure as Cinderella danced with her Prince Charming and people watched. Nobody complained. People ate and drank, but the evening wasn't the same. People feel sick or start to cry and don't know why. Only a hummingbird could have caught Tyler at work.
You wake up at JFK.
I melt and swell at the moment of landing when one wheel thuds on the runway but the plane leans to one side and hangs in the decision to right itself or roll. For this moment, nothing matters. Look up into the stars and you're gone. Not your luggage. Nothing matters. Not your bad breath. The windows are dark outside and the turbine engines roar backward. The cabin hangs at the wrong angle under the roar of the turbines, and you will never have to file another expense account claim. Receipt required for items over twenty-five dollars. You will never have to get another haircut.
A thud, and the second wheel hits the tarmac. The staccato of a hundred seatbelt buckles snapping open, and the single-use friend you almost died sitting next to says:
I hope you make your connection.
Yeah, me too.
And this is how long your moment lasted. And life goes on.
And somehow, by accident, Tyler and I met.
It was time for a vacation.
You wake up at LAX.
Again.
How I met Tyler was I went to a nude beach. This was the very end of summer, and I was asleep. Tyler was naked and sweating, gritty with sand, his hair wet and stringy, hanging in his face.
Tyler had been around a long time before we met.
Tyler was pulling driftwood logs out of the surf and dragging them up the beach. In the wet sand, he'd already planted a half circle of logs so they stood a few inches apart and as tall as his eyes. There were four logs, and when I woke up, I watched Tyler pull a fifth log up the beach. Tyler dug a hole under one end of the log, then lifted the other end until the log slid into the hole and stood there at a slight angle.
You wake up at the beach.
