Survivor

by Chuck Palahniuk

There’s always the chance you could die right in the middle of your life story.” And I yelled, So what else is new? And, Tell me something I don’t know.

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.

My parents bought me the first one to teach me about loving and caring for another living breathing creature of God. Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet that someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.

In the outside world, he said, people were visited in their houses by spirits they called television. Spirits spoke to people through what they called the radio. People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.

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. Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.

Ignore how it feels when the only real talent you have is for hiding the truth. You have a God-given knack for committing a terrible sin. It’s your calling. You have a natural gift for denial. A blessing.

Call me the voice of experience.

After seventeen years of working in private houses every day, the things I know the most about are slapped faces, creamed corn, black eyes, wrenched shoulders, beaten eggs, kicked shins, scratched corneas, chopped onions, bites of all sorts, nicotine stains, sexual lubricants, knocked-out teeth, split lips, whipped cream, twisted arms, vaginal tears, deviled ham, cigarette burns, crushed pineapple, hernias, terminated pregnancies, pet stains, shredded coconut, gouged eyes, sprains, and stretch marks.

You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you’re changing a patio lightbulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you’ll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you’ll be dead.

After working in these rich houses, I know the best way to get blood out of the trunk of a car is not to ask any questions.

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.

I want to be hugged in her cold, dead arms and told that life has no absolute end.

My life is not some Funeral Grade bit of compost that will rot tomorrow and be outlived by my name in an obituary.

“God, I forgot how good it feels to get something accomplished.”

It’s that night I start answering the phone again. This is after I’m so horny I have to go downtown and hunt for something to steal. This isn’t so much for the cash as to get off. It’s okay. The caseworker says it’s okay. It’s a sexual release, she tells me. It’s perfectly natural. You find what you want. You stalk it. You grab it and make it your own. After you’ve had it, you throw it away.

The caseworker found out everything about me except for the truth. I just didn’t want to be fixed. 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? So none of my real grudges and dreads ever came out into the light of day. I didn’t want to resolve any angst. I’d never talk about my dead family. Express my grief, she called it. Resolve it. Leave it behind.

The key is not to panic.

The trick is to keep busy.

The secret is to not let your imagination get carried away.

We were kept busy learning. We had a million facts to remember. We memorized half the Old Testament. We thought all this teaching was to make us smart. What it did was make us stupid. With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think. None of us ever considered what life would be like cleaning up after a stranger every day. Washing dishes all day. Feeding a stranger’s children. Mowing a lawn. All day. Painting houses. Year after year. Ironing bedsheets. Forever and ever. Work without end.

God forbid you should ever get bored and want more.

So I laugh. Because I have to do something, make some noise, shout, scream, cry, swear, howl, I laugh. It’s all just different ways to vent.

In the back of the pet store, the hundreds of canaries flutter from side to side of their stinking crowded cage. Next week, they’ll all be free. Then what? I want to tell them, stay in the cage. There are better things than freedom. There are worse things than living a long bored life in some stranger’s house and then dying and going to canary heaven.

You can tell people the truth, but they’ll never believe you until the event. Until it’s too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble.

The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can’t feel a thing.

You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.

These days, people aren’t going to fill stadiums to get preached at by somebody who isn’t beautiful.

What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.

if Jesus Christ had died in prison, with no one watching and with no one there to mourn or torture him, would we be saved?

the biggest factor that makes you a saint is the amount of press coverage you get.

The same as if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, you realize, if no one had been there to witness the agony of Christ, would we be saved?

The key to salvation is how much attention you get. How high a profile you get. Your audience share. Your exposure. Your name recognition. Your press following. The buzz.

you can’t believe you’re the slave to this body, this big baby. You have to keep it fed and put it to bed and take it to the bathroom. You can’t believe we haven’t invented something better. Something not so needy. Not so time-consuming.

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.

You realize that there’s no point in doing anything if ...

You realize that if no one’s watching, you might as well stay home. Play with yourself. Watch broadcast television.

You’re that tree falling in the forest that nobody gives a rat’s ass about. It doesn’t matter if you do anything. If nobody notices, your life will add up to a big zero. Nada. Cipher.

You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past. We can’t give up our concept of who we were.

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

the secret to getting famous is you just keep saying yes.

“Reality means you live until you die,” the agent says. “The real truth is nobody wants reality.”

You know the old saying: It’s not what you know. It’s who you know.

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

Everything we did to fix me had side effects we had to fix. Then the fixes had side effects to fix and so on and so on.

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

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn’t it just lie there and rot? And if Christ had died from a barbiturate overdose, alone on the bathroom floor, would He be in Heaven?

The moment was all wrong. I procrastinated, and timing was everything. Besides. Eternity was going to seem like forever.

“All you have to do is pay attention to the patterns,” Fertility says. “After you see all the patterns, you can extrapolate the future.”

According to Fertility Hollis, there is no chaos. There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.

If you watch close, history does nothing but...