Fight Club

freezer part of the fridge, and inside there’s no collagen trust fund.
    There’s two old flashlight batteries, but that’s all.
    "Where is she?”
    I’m already crawling backwards, my hands slipping, my shoes slipping on the linoleum, and my ass wiping a clean path across the dirty floor away from Marla and the fridge. I hold up the skirt so I don’t have to see Marla’s face when I tell her.
    The truth.
    We made soap out of it. Her. Marla’s mother.
    "Soap?”
    Soap. You boil fat. You mix it with lye. You get soap.
    When Marla screams, I throw the skirt in her face and run. I slip. I run.
    Around and around the first floor, Marla runs after me, skidding on the corners, pushing off against the window casings for momentum. Slipping.
    Leaving filthy handprints of grease and floor dirt among the wallpaper flowers. Falling and sliding into the wainscoting, getting back up, running.
    Marla screaming, "You boiled my mother!”
    Tyler boiled her mother.
    Marla screaming, always one swipe of her fingernails behind me.
    Tyler boiled her mother.
    "You boiled my mother!”
    The front door was still open.
    And then I was out the front door with Marla screaming in the doorway behind me. My feet didn’t slip against the concrete sidewalk, and I just kept running. Until I found Tyler or until Tyler found me, and I told him what happened.

    With one beer each, Tyler and I spread out on the front and back seats with me in the front seat. Even now, Marla’s probably still in the house, throwing magazines against the walls and screaming how I’m a prick and a monster two-faced capitalist suck-ass bastard. The miles of night between Marla and me offer insects and melanomas and flesh-eating viruses. Where I’m at isn’t so bad.
    "When a man is hit by lightning,” Tyler says, "his head burns down to a smoldering baseball and his zipper welds itself shut.”
    I say, did we hit bottom, tonight?
    Tyler lies back and asks, "If Marilyn Monroe was alive right now, what would she be doing?”
    I say, goodnight.
    The headliner hangs down in shreds from the ceiling, and Tyler says, "Clawing at the lid of her coffin.”

12
    MY BOSS STANDS too close to my desk with his little smile, his lips together and stretched thin, his crotch at my elbow. I look up from writing the cover letter for a recall campaign. These letters always begin the same way:
    "This notice is sent to you in accordance with the requirements of the National Motor Vehicle Safety Act. We have determined that a defect exists…”
    This week I ran the liability formula, and for once A times B times C equaled more than the cost of a recall.
    This week, it’s the little plastic clip that holds the rubber blade on your windshield wipers. A throwaway item. Only two hundred vehicles affected. Next to nothing for the labor cost.
    Last week was more typical. Last week the issue was some leather cured with a known teratogenic substance, synthetic Nirret or something just as illegal that’s still used in third world tanning. Something so strong that it could cause birth defects in the fetus of any pregnant woman who comes across it. Last week, nobody called the Department of Transportation. Nobody initiated a recall.
    New leather multiplied by labor cost multiplied by administration cost would equal more than our first-quarter profits. If anyone ever discovers our mistake, we can still pay off a lot of grieving families before we come close to the cost of retrofitting sixty-five hundred leather interiors.
    But this week, we’re doing a recall campaign. And this week the insomnia is back. Insomnia, and now the whole world figures to stop by and take a dump on my grave.
    My boss is wearing his gray tie so today must be a Tuesday.
    My boss brings a sheet of paper to my desk and asks if I’m looking for something. This paper was left in the copy machine, he says, and begins to read:
    "The first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.”
    His eyes go side to side across the paper, and he giggles.
    "The second rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.”
    I hear Tyler’s words come out of my boss, Mister Boss with his midlife spread and family photo on his desk and his dreams about early retirement and winters spent at a trailer-park hookup in some Arizona desert. My boss, with his extra-starched shirts and standing appointment for a haircut every Tuesday after lunch, he looks at me, and he says:
    "I hope this isn’t yours.”
    I am Joe’s