Fight Club

and everything wooden swells and shrinks, and the nails in everything wooden, the floors and baseboards and window casings, the nails inch out and rust.
    Everywhere there are rusted nails to step on or snag your elbow on, and there’s only one bathroom for the seven bedrooms, and now there’s a used condom.
    The house is waiting for something, a zoning change or a will to come out of probate, and then it will be torn down. I asked Tyler how long he’s been here, and he said about six weeks. Before the dawn of time, there was an owner who collected lifetime stacks of the National Geographic and Reader’s Digest. Big teetering stacks of magazines that get taller every time it rains. Tyler says the last tenant used to fold the glossy magazine pages for cocaine envelopes. There’s no lock on the front door from when police or whoever kicked in the door. There’s nine layers of wallpaper swelling on the dining-room walls, flowers under stripes under flowers under birds under grasscloth.
    Our only neighbors are a closed machine shop and across the street, a block-long warehouse. Inside the house, there’s a closet with seven-foot rollers for rolling up damask tablecloths so they never have to be creased. There’s a cedar-lined, refrigerated fur closet. The tile in the bathroom is painted with little flowers nicer than most everybody’s wedding china, and there’s a used condom in the toilet.
    I’ve been living with Tyler about a month.

    Tyler comes to breakfast with hickies sucked all over his neck and chest, and I’m reading through an old Reader’s Digest magazine. This is the perfect house for dealing drugs. There are no neighbors. There’s nothing else on Paper Street except for warehouses and the pulp mill. The fart smell of steam from the paper mill, and the hamster cage smell of wood chips in orange pyramids around the mill. This is the perfect house for dealing drugs because a bah-zillion trucks drive down Paper Street everyday, but at night, Tyler and I are alone for a half mile in every direction.
    I found stacks and stacks of Reader’s Digest in the basement and now there’s a pile of Reader’s Digest in every room.
    Life in These United States.
    Laughter Is the Best Medicine.
    Stacks of magazines are about the only furniture.
    In the oldest magazines, there’s a series of articles where organs in the human body talk about themselves in the first person: I am Jane’s Uterus.
    I am Joe’s Prostate.
    No kidding, and Tyler comes to the kitchen table with his hickies and no shirt and says, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, he met Marla Singer last night and they had sex.
    Hearing this, I am totally Joe’s Gallbladder. All of this is my fault. Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it’s the things you don’t do, and you get screwed.
    Last night, I called Marla. We’ve worked out a system so if I want to go to a support group, I can call Marla and see if she’s planning to go. Melanoma was last night, and I felt a little down.
    Marla lives at the Regent Hotel, which is nothing but brown bricks held together with sleaze, where all the mattresses are sealed inside slippery plastic covers, so many people go there to die. You sit on any bed the wrong way, and you and the sheets and blanket slide right to the floor.
    I called Marla at the Regent Hotel to see if she was going to Melanoma.
    Marla answered in slow motion. This wasn’t a for-real suicide, Marla said, this was probably just one of those cry-for-help things, but she had taken too many Xanax.
    Picture going over to the Regent Hotel to watch Marla throw herself around her crummy room saying: I’m dying. Dying. I’m dying. Dying. Die-ing. Dying.
    This would go on for hours.
    So she was staying home tonight, right?
    She was doing the big death thing, Marla told me. I should get a move on if I wanted to watch.
    Thanks anyway, I said, but I had other plans.
    That’s okay, Marla said, she could die just as well watching television. Marla just hoped there was something worth watching.
    And I ran off to Melanoma. I came home early. I slept.
    And now, at breakfast the next morning, Tyler’s sitting here covered in hickies and says Marla is some twisted bitch, but he likes that a lot.
    After Melanoma last night, I came home and went to bed and slept. And dreamed I was humping, humping, humping Marla Singer.
    And this morning, listening to Tyler, I pretend to read the Reader’s Digest. A twisted bitch, I could’ve told you