Adjustment Day

by Chuck Palahniuk

Going on, he’d claimed that the government had always known Pearl Harbor would be attacked by the Japanese. He’d insisted the government had known all along about the impending destruction of the World Trade Center. The battleships sunk had been practically obsolete. The Twin Towers were a necessary expenditure. In both cases, what the nation had really needed was a war to cull the impending generation of young men reaching adulthood. Such a war would cut down the labor

pool and ensure a sizable wage to the survivors. It would throw the surplus men of many countries into combat and stimulate economies the world over.

Adjustment Day had come a day closer with every drive-by shooting, every viral transmission, every letter carrier going postal. Once those groups had fully shed their humanity, it was only inevitable they decimate their shared oppressors.

“Those groups . . . recovery and support groups are the new churches.” He’d said that traditional places of worship had been reduced to crass theaters where people went to signal their status and virtues. A true church had to serve as the place where people went in safety to risk confessing their worst selves. Not to boast and display their pride. Those who attended recovery groups, they arrived defeated.

They told the story of their failure. Their sins and shortcomings. To admit their culpability, and in doing so they receive a communion with their flawed peers.

Miss Josephine listened in amazement. “Blacks killed Martin Luther King Jr.?” Arabella scowled. “Not Doctor King . . . ,” she exclaimed. “We hired a man to kill Stephen King. Unfortunately the assassin was inept, and the intended hit-and-run was a failure.” In the author’s masterpiece novels, she said, books such as The Shining and The Stand and The Green Mile, King had almost convinced white people of the majestic uncanny powers blacks kept under wraps.