Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread

by Chuck Palahniuk

The only cube that was left was the cheese stabbed on the toothpick in Monkey’s hand. It was her sword and her grail, and Monkey thrust it at Gorilla’s eyes. She thrust the toothpick deep into the back of Gorilla’s mouth, and he choked and gagged and spat out the cheese, but Monkey caught the wet, white cube as it fell. She lifted the slimy cheese cradled in the palm of one hand and slapped it between Gorilla’s lips. With the stampede of animals lifting them both and carrying them toward the exit, Monkey kept her hand muzzled across Gorilla’s mouth, her eyes meeting his eyes until Gorilla chewed and swallowed. Until she felt the huge muscles of his struggling arms relax and go slack with understanding.

In Miss Chen’s English class, we learned, “To be or not to be…” but there’s a big gray area in between. Maybe in Shakespeare times people only had two options. Griffin Wilson, he knew that the SATs were just the gateway to a big lifetime of bullshit. To getting married and college. To paying taxes and trying to raise a kid who’s not a school shooter. And Griffin Wilson knew drugs are only a patch. After drugs, you’re always going to need more drugs. The problem with being Talented And Gifted is sometimes you get too smart. My uncle Henry says the importance of eating a good breakfast is because your brain is still growing. But nobody talks about how, sometimes, your brain can get just too big.

To be or not to be. God’s greatest gift to animals is they don’t get a choice. Every time I open the newspaper I want to throw up. In another ten seconds I won’t know how to read. Better yet, I won’t have to. I won’t know about global climate change. I won’t know about cancer or genocide or SARS or environmental degradation or religious conflict. The public address system is paging my name. I won’t even know my name.

She brought the bouquet to the fake grave and knelt. The evening breeze carried snatches of her prayer. She was talking about how much she loved her old horse, and how much she loved the new Arabian. Listening, it occurred to Randall that the love people feel for animals is the purest form of love. Loving an animal, a horse, cat, or dog, was always a romantic tragedy. It meant loving something that would die before you. Like that movie with Ali MacGraw. There was no future, just the affection of the present moment. You didn’t expect a big payoff, someday.

Lisa speculated lightly, “It’s like watching Mother Nature get revenge for all the global warming the white patriarchy has inflicted on the environment.” She sighed. “Don’t take it so personally, Daddy. You just chose the wrong time in history to be a straight, white, Christian male.” It was the smugness in her voice. The supreme confidence. It made Randall feel sorry for her. Miles went by before he gathered the courage to ask, “Did you kill Sour Kraut?” Scrolling through her text messages, his daughter replied, “The bidding is now at two-point-five million.” Those were the last words the two spoke to one another.

You should congratulate me. My wife and I just had twins, and they seem okay. Ten fingers. Ten toes. Two little girls. But you know the feeling…I keep waiting for something to go wrong because that’s how it is when things get too happy. I keep expecting to wake up from this beautiful dream.

The motivation for self destruction lies in knowing nothing lasts, good or bad.

I mean, back before I was married I had this one girlfriend who was fat. We were, both of us, fat together so we got along. That girlfriend, she was always testing us on new diets to lose weight, like eating nothing except pineapple and vinegar, or nothing but green algae from an envelope, and she was suggesting we take long walks together until she started to shed the pounds, her hips just melted away, and you never saw anybody so happy. Even then I knew something would wreck it. You know the feeling: When you love somebody, you’re happy to see her happy, but I knew my girlfriend was going to dump me because now guys with careers and health insurance were getting her on their radar. I remember she was pretty and funny before, but now that she was getting so skinny it was obvious she possessed vast untapped reserves of self-control and self-discipline way out of my league, and my friends weren’t any help because they were all circling, waiting for us to call it quits so they could date her, and then it turned out it wasn’t the pineapple or the self-discipline because she found out she really had cancer, but she slimmed down to wearing a bitch’n-hot Size Two before she died. That’s how I know happiness is like a ticking bomb.

And when they’re old enough I’m going to tell my little girls that everybody looks a little crazy if you’re looking close enough, and if you can’t look that close then you don’t really love them. All the while life goes around, and it goes around. And if you keep waiting for somebody perfect you’ll never find love, because it’s how much you love them is what makes them perfect. And maybe I’m the retarded one because I keep waking up expecting my happiness to run out when I should just enjoy it.

every animal wears a badge. This might be a bracelet braided by their kid or a neck tattoo, but it’s a hint about something secret they treasure. If you identify the badge and praise it—open sesame—you pick the lock on someone’s heart. You only needed to read the clues.

Recently her daughter has begun to call out, “Look at me, Mom! Look at me! Are you watching?” April obviously had no idea what she was saying. That was simply the universal chorus of children, sighted or blind. The essence of being a parent was the shift from being the person who is watched to being the person who does the watching.

Among this company mingled Rainbow Bright, accepting their greetings and accolades. To young people he was proof that age wouldn’t end their fun. To older campers, he was a living link to their youth.

Here was the incubator, the test tube, the petri dish. And he was proud to play a part. The fringe was the future, and what happened next in the world, it happened here first. Fashion. Politics. Music and culture. The next world religion would take form, here. Of these experiments, almost all would fizzle, but some would take root and grow.

On his phone, a text bulletin came through from the National Weather Service. High winds were predicted for midnight, and that meant another blinding dust storm. He hoped it would hold off. The gigantic papier-mâché penis was scheduled to burn at nine. A big crowd was expected. The evening consisted of the usual verbal altercations concerning love or drugs. A couple of cases of heat prostration. Tribes paid their respects as he ambled past their camps. Girls tossed candy necklaces over his head. People offered beer and chai. These were his people. Failed artists. Rejected musicians and writers. Part-time idealists and closet visionaries. As a young man, he’d been an idealist in a corrupt world. It was no surprise that he’d turned out equally as corrupt, just a new and different form of corrupt. That might be the best any generation could achieve: to pioneer its own brand of corruption.

He’d attended art school, it was bunk. A stinking, lousy racket. They’d cashed his checks and told him he had Rembrandt potential. His advisors and professors, they’d painted a picture of his future prettier than any masterpiece they’d ever painted in real life. What a put-on. They’d told him he had talent. That word was heroin to the young. Talent. Four years, five years, six, and he’d kept buying the fix. His dream had been to do computer animation in movies, maybe video games. He’d spend his career bringing CG heroes and angels to life. Making the impossible possible. Student debt and a string of service jobs—interrupted each year for this, where he’d met his wife, a woman who could stick to a boring pigeonhole—and finally he’d found his calling.

If numbers could explain the physical world, words would explain the invisible one. Felix had staked his life on it. And if history remembered him as an idiot, well, he was only one among billions of people. History could spare one man. All men are doomed to spend most of their existence among the dead.

These low byways of the city were well known to Felix from his months of traipsing. He’d grown to be an authority on the tunnels and warrens which formed a city beneath the city.

Advancing upon each gas lamp, their shadows fell behind them, and while taking leave of each their shadows fell before them. In this way, each measure of the journey marked a false day with the rising and setting of each flickering sun.