Fight Club

this,” Marla says. "Funerals are all abstract ceremony. Here, you have a real experience of death.”
    Couples around the two of us are drying their tears, sniffing, patting each other on the back and letting go.
    We can’t both come, I tell her.
    "Then don’t come.”
    I need this.
    "Then go to funerals.”
    Everyone else has broken apart and they’re joining hands for the closing prayer. I let Marla go.
    "How long have you been coming here?”
    The closing prayer.
    Two years.
    A man in the prayer circle takes my hand. A man takes Marla’s hand.
    These prayers start and usually, my breathing is blown. Oh, bless us. Oh, bless us in our anger and our fear.
    "Two years?” Marla tilts her head to whisper.
    Oh, bless us and hold us.
    Anyone who might’ve noticed me in two years has either died or recovered and never came back.
    Help us and help us.
    "Okay,” Marla says, "okay, okay, you can have testicular cancer.”
    Big Bob the big cheesebread crying all over me. Thanks.
    Bring us to our destiny. Bring us peace.
    "Don’t mention it.”
    This is how I met Marla.

5
    THE SECURITY TASK force guy explained everything to me.
    Baggage handlers can ignore a ticking suitcase. The security task force guy, he called baggage handlers Throwers. Modern bombs don’t tick. But a suitcase that vibrates, the baggage handlers, the Throwers, have to call the police.
    How I came to live with Tyler is because most airlines have this policy about vibrating baggage.
    My flight back from Dulles, I had everything in that one bag. When you travel a lot, you learn to pack the same for every trip. Six white shirts. Two black trousers. The bare minimum you need to survive.
    Traveling alarm clock.
    Cordless electric razor.
    Toothbrush.
    Six pair underwear.
    Six pair black socks.
    It turns out, my suitcase was vibrating on departure from Dulles, according to the security task force guy, so the police took it off the flight. Everything was in that bag. My contact lens stuff. One red tie with blue stripes. One blue tie with red stripes. These are regimental stripes, not club tie stripes. And one solid red tie.
    A list of all these things used to hang on the inside of my bedroom door at home.
    Home was a condominium on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise, a sort of filing cabinet for widows and young professionals. The marketing brochure promised a foot of concrete floor, ceiling, and wall between me and any adjacent stereo or turned-up television. A foot of concrete and air conditioning, you couldn’t open the windows so even with maple flooring and dimmer switches, all seventeen hundred airtight feet would smell like the last meal you cooked or your last trip to the bathroom.
    Yeah, and there were butcher block countertops and low-voltage track lighting.
    Still, a foot of concrete is important when your next-door neighbor lets the battery on her hearing aid go and has to watch her game shows at full blast. Or when a volcanic blast of burning gas and debris that used to be your living-room set and personal effects blows out your floor-to-ceiling windows and sails down flaming to leave just your condo, only yours, a gutted charred concrete hole in the cliffside of the building.
    These things happen.
    Everything, including your set of hand-blown green glass dishes with the tiny bubbles and imperfections, little bits of sand, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous aboriginal peoples of wherever, well, these dishes all get blown out by the blast. Picture the floor-to-ceiling drapes blown out and flaming to shreds in the hot wind.
    Fifteen floors over the city, this stuff comes flaming and bashing and shattering down on everyone’s car.
    Me, while I’m heading west, asleep at Mach 0.83 or 455 miles an hour, true airspeed, the FBI is bomb-squading my suitcase on a vacated runway back at Dulles. Nine times out of ten, the security task force guy says, the vibration is an electric razor. This was my cordless electric razor. The other time, it’s a vibrating dildo.
    The security task force guy told me this. This was at my destination, without my suitcase, where I was about to cab it home and find my flannel sheets shredded on the ground.
    Imagine, the task force guy says, telling a passenger on arrival that a dildo kept her baggage on the East Coast. Sometimes it’s even a man. It’s airline policy not to imply ownership in the event of a dildo. Use the indefinite article.
    A dildo.
    Never your dildo.
    Never,