Fight Club

by Chuck Palahniuk

The head chakra. Chloe talked us into caves where we met our power animal. Mine was a penguin.

rounded. His big moosie chin on his chest, his eyes already shrink-wrapped in tears.

This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.

The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute Tyler had sat in the palm of a perfection he’d created himself.

One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

I just don’t want to die without a few scars, I say.

It’s nothing anymore to have a beautiful stock body. You see those cars that are completely stock cherry, right out of a dealer’s showroom in 1955, I always think, what a waste.

Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer. Tyler never knew his father. Maybe self-destruction is the answer.

Fight club gets to be your reason for going to the gym and keeping your hair cut short and cutting your nails. The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.

even a soufflé looks pumped.

At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.

What Marla loves, she says, is all the things that people love intensely and then dump an hour or a day after. The way a Christmas tree is the center of attention, then, after Christmas you see those dead Christmas trees with the tinsel still on them, dumped alongside the highway.

"The Animal Control place is the best place to go,” Marla says. "Where all the animals, the little doggies and kitties that people loved and then dumped, even the old animals, dance and jump around for your attention because after three days, they get an overdose shot of sodium phenobarbital and then into the big pet oven.

Tyler only says this to make me feel better. The truth is I like my boss.

I should run from self-improvement, and I should be running toward disaster. I can’t just play it safe anymore.

"It’s only after you’ve lost everything,” Tyler says, "that you’re free to do anything.”

Think about the animals used in product testing. Think about the monkeys shot into space. "Without their death, their pain, without their sacrifice,” Tyler says, "we would have nothing.”

for once A times B times C equaled more than the cost of a recall.

My boss is wearing his gray tie so today must be a Tuesday.

"The good news,” Big Bob says, "is there’s a new group, but the first rule about this new group is you aren’t supposed to talk about it.”

Marla hasn’t had health insurance for a couple years so she’s stopped looking, but this morning she looks and there seemed to be a lump and the nodes under her arm near the lump were hard and tender at the same time and she couldn’t tell anyone she loves because she doesn’t want to scare them

Marla tells me how in the wild you don’t see old animals because as soon as they age, animals die.

Old animals should be an unnatural exception.

Coming out of Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital after a partial mastectomy, she says: "You feel lopsided?”

Me, when I go to the beach, I always sit with my right foot tucked under me. Australia and New Zealand, or I keep it buried in the sand. My fear is that people will see my foot and I’ll start to die in their minds.

"I’m breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions,” Tyler whispered, "because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.”

"The liberator who destroys my property,” Tyler said, "is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free.”

am trash and shit and crazy to you and this whole fucking world,” Tyler said to the union president. "You don’t care where I live or how I feel, or what I eat or how I feed my kids or how I pay the doctor if I get sick, and yes I am stupid and bored and weak, but I am still your responsibility.”

Tyler would know, but the first rule about Project Mayhem is you don’t ask questions about Project Mayhem.

The goal was to teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history. We, each of us, can take control of the world.

organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.”

Does Tyler Durden only sleep one hour a night? Rumor has it that Tyler’s on the road starting fight clubs all over the country. What’s next, everybody wants to know.

And I push the one, two, three molars into the dirt and hair and shit and bone and blood where Marla won’t see.

"If you’re male and you’re Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?”

"What you have to consider,” he says, "is the possibility that God doesn’t like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that can happen.”

The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back.

"If the prodigal son had never left home,” the mechanic says, "the fatted calf would still be alive.”

My wish right now is for me to die. I am nothing in the world compared to Tyler.

My tiny life. My little shit job. My Swedish furniture. I never, no, never told anyone this, but before I met Tyler, I was planning to buy a dog and name it "Entourage.”

"You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need.

"We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.

"Fat,” the mechanic says, "liposuctioned fat sucked out of the richest thighs in America. The richest, fattest thighs in the world.”

This wasn’t a cheap gun, and I wondered if salt might fuck it up.

This is what Tyler wants me to do. These are Tyler’s words coming out of my mouth. I am Tyler’s mouth. I am Tyler’s hands.

You’ve got to find Tyler. You’ve got to get some sleep.

"Every time you fall asleep,” Tyler says, "I run off and do something wild, something crazy, something completely out of my mind.”

We both use the same body, but at different times.

And Tyler said, "We have nothing to lose except fight club.” The commissioner, he had everything. All we were left was the shit and the trash of the world.

"The people you’re trying to step on, we’re everyone you depend on. We’re the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you’re asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi