Survivor

by Chuck Palahniuk

To stand here and try to fix her life is just a big waste of time. People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

The shortest distance between two points is a time line, a schedule, a map of your time, the itinerary for the rest of your life.

The craving inside of me is to be clutched at by some dead girl. To put my ear to her chest and be hearing nothing. Even getting munched on by zombies beats the idea that I’m only flesh and blood, skin and bone. Demon or angel or evil spirit, I just need something to show itself. Ghoulie or ghosty or long-legged beastie, I just want my hand held.

Whatever my real problems might be, I didn’t want them cured. None of the little secrets inside me wanted to be found and explained away. By myths. By my childhood. By chemistry. My fear was, what would be left?

How this feels is I’m just another task in God’s daily planner: the Italian Renaissance penciled in for right after the Dark Ages.

You realize that people take drugs because it’s the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it’s the only way they can get anything really finished.

Amphetamines are the most American drug. You get so much done. You look terrific, and your middle name is Accomplishment.

Because the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.

We feel so superior to the dead. For example, if Michelangelo was so damn smart, why’d he die?

“Even the garden of Eden was just a big fancy cage,” Adam says. “You’ll be a slave the rest of your life unless you bite the apple.”

“And if you never have sex,” Adam’s saying, “you never gain a sense of power. You never gain a voice or an identity of your own. Sex is the act that separates us from our parents. Children from adults. It’s by having sex that adolescents first rebel.” And if you never have sex, Adam tells me, you never grow beyond everything else your parents taught you. If you never break the rule against sex, you won’t break any other rule.