Survivor

by Chuck Palahniuk

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. What we can’t understand we call nonsense. What we can’t read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables. “There is only the inevitable,” Fertility says. “There’s only one future. You don’t have a choice....

Here are the shadows left behind by a thousand moments, a thousand moods, of needs traced here on the wall by men who are gone. Here is the record of their being here. Their visit. Their passing. Here’s what the caseworker would call a primary source document. A history of the unacceptable.

“No,” the mouth says. “You’re turning out just like every guy I’ve ever trusted,” she says. “You’re greedy.”

More and more everything in my life was a fix for an earlier fix for an earlier fix until I forget what the original problem was.

People can’t conceive of a virtue in someone else that they can’t conceive in themselves. Instead of believing you’re stronger, it’s so much easier to imagine you’re weaker. You’re addicted to self-abuse. You’re a liar. People are always ready to believe the opposite of what you tell them. You’re not just self-controlled.

This is in the limo going to the plane going to the next stadium, God knows where. According to the agent, Seattle is just the general geographic area around the Kingdome. Detroit is the people who live around the Silverdome. We’re never going to Houston, we’re going to the Astrodome. The Superdome. The Mile High Stadium. RFK Stadium. Jack Murphy Stadium. Jacobs Field. Shea Stadium. Wrigley Field. All of these places have towns, but that doesn’t matter.

According to the agent, the secret to staying on top is to be non-threatening. Be nothing. Be a blank space people can fill in. Be a mirror. I’m the religious version of a lottery winner. America is full of rich and famous people, but I’m supposed to be that rare combination: celebrated and stupid, famous and humble, innocent and rich. You just live your humble life, people think, your Joan of Arc everyday life, your Virgin Mary life washing dishes, and one day your number will come up.

It’s weird how the name outlives the person, the signifier outlasts the signified, the symbol the symbolized.

All of it looks beautiful and real if you’re far enough away.

Feel no evil. See no evil. Hear no evil. Fear no evil.

No matter how many luxuries you get, something will be missing. No matter how carefully you choose, you’ll never be totally happy.

Fertility says, “Can you just relax and let things happen?” I ask, does she mean, like disasters, like pain, like misery? Can I just let all that happen? “And Joy,” she says, “and Serenity, and Happiness, and Contentment.” She says all the wings of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum. “You don’t have to control everything,” she says. “You can’t control everything.”

But you can be ready for disaster.

“If you worry about disaster all the time, that’s what yo...

The whole world is a disaster waiting to happen.

“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.”

On the radio, I’m saying, The complete way our minds were controlled we never had a chance. None of us in the outside world would ever want sex. We’d never betray the church. We’d spend our entire lives at work. “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. On the radio, I say, It’s hard for someone in the outside world to imagine how completely trained we were.