Tonight, after the introductions and Catch-Up Rap, a girl I don’t know, with a name tag that says Glenda, says she’s Chloe’s sister and that at two in the morning last Tuesday, Chloe finally died.
Oh, this should be so sweet. For two years, Chloe’s been crying in my arms during hug time, and now she’s dead, dead in the ground, dead in an urn, mausoleum, columbarium. Oh, the proof that one day you’re thinking and hauling yourself around, and the next, you’re cold fertilizer, worm buffet. This is the amazing miracle of death, and it should be so sweet if it weren’t for, oh, that one.
Marla.
Oh, and Marla’s looking at me again, singled out among all the brain parasites.
Liar.
Faker.
Marla’s the faker. You’re the faker. Everyone around when they wince or twitch and fall down barking and the crotch of their jeans turns dark blue, well, it’s all just a big act.
Guided meditation all of a sudden won’t take me anywhere, tonight. Behind each of the seven palace doors, the green door, the orange door, Marla. The blue door, Marla stands there. Liar. In the guided meditation through the cave of my power animal, my power animal is Marla. Smoking her cigarette, Marla, rolling her eyes. Liar. Black hair and pillowy French lips. Faker. Italian dark leather sofa lips. You can’t escape.
Chloe was the genuine article.
Chloe was the way Joni Mitchell’s skeleton would look if you made it smile and walk around a party being extra special nice to everyone. Picture Chloe’s popular skeleton the size of an insect, running through the vaults and galleries of her innards at two in the morning. Her pulse a siren overhead, announcing: Prepare for death in ten, in nine, in eight seconds. Death will commence in seven, six…
At night, Chloe ran around the maze of her own collapsing veins and burst tubes spraying hot lymph. Nerves surface as trip wires in the tissue. Abscesses swell in the tissue around her as hot white pearls.
The overhead announcement, prepare to evacuate bowels in ten, in nine, eight, seven.
Prepare to evacuate soul in ten, in nine, eight.
Chloe’s splashing through the ankle-deep backup of renal fluid from her failed kidneys.
Death will commence in five.
Five, four.
Four.
Around her, parasitic life spray paints her heart.
Four, three.
Three, two.
Chloe climbs hand-over-hand up the curdled lining of her own throat.
Death to commence in three, in two.
Moonlight shines in through the open mouth.
Prepare for the last breath, now.
Evacuate.
Now.
Soul clear of body.
Now.
Death commences.
Now.
Oh, this should be so sweet, the remembered warm jumble of Chloe still in my arms and Chloe dead somewhere.
But no, I’m watched by Marla.
In guided meditation, I open my arms to receive my inner child, and the child is Marla smoking her cigarette. No white healing ball of light. Liar. No chakras. Picture your chakras opening as flowers and at the center of each is a slow motion explosion of sweet light.
Liar.
My chakras stay closed.
When meditation ends, everyone is stretching and twisting their heads and pulling each other to their feet in preparation. Therapeutic physical contact. For the hug, I cross in three steps to stand against Marla who looks up into my face as I watch everyone else for the cue.
Let’s all, the cue comes, embrace someone near us.
My arms clamp around Marla.
Pick someone special to you, tonight.
Marla’s cigarette hands are pinned to her waist.
Tell this someone how you feel.
Marla doesn’t have testicular cancer. Marla doesn’t have tuberculosis. She isn’t dying. Okay in that brainy brain-food philosophy way, we’re all dying, but Marla isn’t dying the way Chloe was dying.
The cue comes, share yourself.
So, Marla, how do you like them apples?
Share yourself completely.
So, Marla, get out. Get out. Get out.
Go ahead and cry if you have to.
Marla stares up at me. Her eyes are brown. Her earlobes pucker around earring holes, no earrings. Her chapped lips are frosted with dead skin.
Go ahead and cry.
“You’re not dying either,” Marla says.
Around us, couples stand sobbing, propped against each other.
“You tell on me,” Marla says, “and I’ll tell on you.”
Then we can split the week, I say. Marla can have bone disease, brain parasites, and tuberculosis. I’ll keep testicular cancer, blood parasites, and organic brain dementia.
Marla says, “What about ascending bowel cancers?”
The girl has done her homework.
We’ll split bowel cancer. She gets it the first and third Sunday of every month.
“No,” Marla says. No, she wants it all. The cancers, the parasites. Marla’s eyes narrow. She never dreamed she could feel so ‘smarvelous. She actually felt alive. Her skin was clearing up. All her life, she never saw a dead person. There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with. Oh, but now there was dying and death and loss and grief. Weeping and shuddering, terror and remorse. Now that she knows where we’re all going, Marla feels every moment of her life.
No, she wasn’t leaving any group.
“Not and go back to the way life felt before,” Marla says. “I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact I was breathing. So what if I couldn’t get a job in my field.”
Then go back to your funeral home, I say.
“Funerals are nothing compared to this,” Marla says. “Funerals are all abstract ceremony. Here, you have a real experience of death.”
Couples around the two of us are drying their tears, sniffing, patting each other on the back and letting go.
We can’t both come, I tell her.
♦
“Then don’t come.” I need this. “Then go to funerals.” Everyone else has broken apart and they’re joining hands for the closing prayer. I let Marla go. “How long have you been coming here?” The closing prayer. Two years. A man in the prayer circle takes my hand. A man takes Marla’s hand. These prayers start and usually, my breathing is blown. Oh, bless us. Oh, bless us in our anger and our fear. “Two years?” Marla tilts her head to whisper. Oh, bless us and hold us. Anyone who might’ve noticed me in two years has either died or recovered and never came back. Help us and help us. “Okay,” Marla says, “okay, okay, you can have testicular cancer.” Big Bob the big cheesebread crying all over me. Thanks. Bring us to our destiny. Bring us peace. “Don’t mention it.” This is how I met Marla.
∨ Fight Club ∧
Four
The security task force guy explained everything to me.
Baggage handlers can ignore a ticking suitcase. The security task force guy, he called baggage handlers Throwers. Modern bombs don’t tick. But a suitcase that vibrates, the baggage handlers, the Throwers, have to call the police.
How I came to live with Tyler is because most airlines have this policy about vibrating baggage.
My flight back from Dulles, I had everything in that one bag. When you travel a lot, you learn to pack the same for every trip. Six white shirts. Two black trousers. The bare minimum you need to survive.
Traveling alarm clock.
Cordless electric razor.
Toothbrush.
Six pair underwear.
Six pair black socks.
It turns out, my suitcase was vibrating on departure from Dulles, according to the security task force guy, so the police took it off the flight. Everything was in that bag. My contact lens stuff. One red tie with blue stripes. One blue tie with red stripes. These are regimental stripes, not club tie stripes. And one solid red tie.
A list of all these things used to hang on the inside of
my bedroom door at home.
Home was a condominium on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise, a sort of filing cabinet for widows and young professionals. The marketing brochure promised a foot of concrete floor, ceiling, and wall between me and any adjacent stereo or turned-up television. A foot of concrete and air conditioning, you couldn’t open the windows so even with maple flooring and dimmer switches, all seventeen hundred airtight feet would smell like the last meal you cooked or your last trip to the bathroom.
Yeah, and there were butcher block countertops and low-voltage track lighting.
Still, a foot of concrete is important when your next-door neighbor lets the battery on her hearing aid go and has to watch her game shows at full blast. Or when a volcanic blast of burning gas and debris that used to be your living-room set and personal effects blows out your floor-to-ceiling windows and sails down flaming to leave just your condo, only yours, a gutted charred concrete hole in the cliffside of the building.
These things happen.
Everything, including your set of hand-blown green glass dishes with the tiny bubbles and imperfections, little bits of sand, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous aboriginal peoples of wherever, well, these dishes all get blown out by the blast. Picture the floor-to-ceiling drapes blown out and flaming to shreds in the hot wind.
Fifteen floors over the city, this stuff comes flaming and bashing and shattering down on everyone’s car.
Me, while I’m heading west, asleep at Mach 0.83 or 455 miles an hour, true airspeed, the FBI is bomb-squading my suitcase on a vacated runway back at Dulles. Nine times out of ten, the security task force guy says, the vibration is an electric razor. This was my cordless electric razor. The other time, it’s a vibrating dildo.
The security task force guy told me this. This was at my destination, without my suitcase, where I was about to cab it home and find my flannel sheets shredded on the ground.
Imagine, the task force guy says, telling a passenger on arrival that a dildo kept her baggage on the East Coast. Sometimes it’s even a man. It’s airline policy not to imply ownership in the event of a dildo. Use the indefinite article.
A dildo.
Never your dildo.
Never, ever say the dildo accidentally turned itself on.
A dildo activated itself and created an emergency situation that required evacuating your baggage.
Rain was falling when I woke up for my connection in Stapleton.
Rain was falling when I woke up on our final approach to home.
An announcement told us to please take this opportunity to check around our seats for any personal belongings we might have left behind. Then the announcement said my name. Would I please meet with an airline representative waiting at the gate.
I set my watch back three hours, and it was still after midnight.
There was the airline representative at the gate, and there was the security task force guy to say, ha, your electric razor kept your checked baggage at Dulles. The task force guy called the baggage handlers Throwers. Then he called them Rampers. To prove things could be worse, the guy told me at least it wasn’t a dildo. Then, maybe because I’m a guy and he’s a guy and it’s one o’clock in the morning, maybe to make me laugh, the guy said industry slang for flight attendant was Space Waitress. Or Air Mattress. It looked like the guy was wearing a pilot’s uniform, white shirt with little epaulets and a blue tie. My luggage had been cleared, he said, and would arrive the next day.
The security guy asked my name and address and phone number, and then he asked me what was the difference between a condom and a cockpit.
“You can only get one prick into a condom,” he said.
I cabbed home on my last ten bucks.
The local police had been asking a lot of questions, too.
My electric razor, which wasn’t a bomb, was still three time zones behind me.
Something which was a bomb, a big bomb, had blasted my clever Njurunda coffee tables in the shape of a lime green yin and an orange yang that fit together to make a circle. Well they were splinters, now.
My Haparanda sofa group with the orange slip covers, design by Erika Pekkari, it was trash, now.
And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.
We all have the same Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern. Mine fell fifteen stories, burning, into a fountain.
We all have the same Rislampa⁄Har paper lamps made from wire and environmentally friendly unbleached paper. Mine are confetti.
All that sitting in the bathroom.
The Alle cutlery service. Stainless steel. Dishwasher safe.
The Vild hall clock made of galvanized steel, oh, I had to have that.
The Klipsk shelving unit, oh, yeah.
Hemlig hat boxes. Yes.
The street outside my high-rise was sparkling and scattered with all this.
The Mommala quilt-cover set. Design by Tomas Harila and available in the following:
Orchid.
Fuschia.
Cobalt.
Ebony.
Jet.
Eggshell or heather.
It took my whole life to buy this stuff.
The easy-care textured lacquer of my Kalix occasional tables.
My Steg nesting tables.
You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.
Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
Until I got home from the airport.
The doorman steps out of the shadows to say, there’s been an accident. The police, they were here and asked a lot of questions.
The police think maybe it was the gas. Maybe the pilot light on the stove went out or a burner was left on, leaking gas, and the gas rose to the ceiling, and the gas filled the condo from ceiling to floor in every room. The condo was seventeen hundred square feet with high ceilings and for days and days, the gas must’ve leaked until every room was full. When the rooms were filled to the floor, the compressor at the base of the refrigerator clicked on.
Detonation.
The floor-to-ceiling windows in their aluminum frames went out and the sofas and the lamps and dishes and sheet sets in flames, and the high school annuals and the diplomas and telephone. Everything blasting out from the fifteenth floor in a sort of solar flare.
Oh, not my refrigerator. I’d collected shelves full of different mustards, some stone-ground, some English pub style. There were fourteen different flavors of fat-free salad dressing, and seven kinds of capers.
I know, I know, a house full of condiments and no real food.
The doorman blew his nose and something went into his handkerchief with the good slap of a pitch into a catcher’s mitt.
You could go up to the fifteen floor, the doorman said, but nobody could go into the unit. Police orders. The police had been asking, did I have an old girlfriend who’d want to do this or did I make an enemy of somebody who had access to dynamite.
“It wasn’t worth going up,” the doorman said. “All that’s left is the concrete shell.”
The police hadn’t ruled out arson. No one had smelled gas. The doorman raises an eyebrow. This guy spent his time flirting with the day maids and nurses who worked in the big units on the top floor and waited in the lobby chairs for their rides after work. Three years I lived here, and the doorman still sat reading his Ellery Queen magazine every night while I shifted packages and bags to unlock the front door and let myself in.
The doorman raises an eyebrow and says how some people will go on a long trip and leave a candle, a long, long candle burning in a big puddle of gasoline
. People with financial difficulties do this stuff. People who want out from under.
I asked to use the lobby phone.
“A lot of young people try to impress the world and buy too many things,” the doorman said.
I called Tyler.
The phone rang in Tyler’s rented house on Paper Street.
Oh, Tyler, please deliver me.
And the phone rang.
The doorman leaned into my shoulder and said, “A lot of young people don’t know what they really want.”
Oh, Tyler, please rescue me.
And the phone rang.
“Young people, they think they want the whole world.”
Deliver me from Swedish furniture.
Deliver me from clever art.
And the phone rang and Tyler answered.
“If you don’t know what you want,” the doorman said, “you end up with a lot you don’t.”
May I never be complete.
May I never be content.
May I never be perfect.
Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.
Tyler and I agreed to meet at a bar.
The doorman asked for a number where the police could reach me. It was still raining. My Audi was still parked in the lot, but a Dakapo halogen torchiere was speared through the windshield.
Tyler and I, we met and drank a lot of beer, and Tyler said, yes, I could move in with him, but I would have to do him a favor.
The next day, my suitcase would arrive with the bare minimum, six shirts, six pair of underwear.
There, drunk in a bar where no one was watching and no one would care, I asked Tyler what he wanted me to do.
Tyler said, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”
∨ Fight Club ∧
Five
Two screens into my demo to Microsoft, I taste blood and have to start swallowing. My boss doesn’t know the material, but he won’t let me run the demo with a black eye and half my face swollen from the stitches inside my cheek. The stitches have come loose, and I can feel them with my tongue against the inside of my cheek. Picture snarled fishing line on the beach. I can picture them as the black stitches on a dog after it’s been fixed, and I keep swallowing blood. My boss is making the presentation from my script, and I’m running the laptop projector so I’m off to one side of the room, in the dark.