Fight Club

dangle, rappelling against the tower’s brick facade, dropping, trusting each other to hold ropes, swinging, risking quick death in offices where every day they felt their lives end one hour at a time.
    The next morning, these same clerks and assistant account reps would be in the crowd with their neatly combed heads thrown back, rummy without sleep but sober and wearing ties and listening to the crowd around them wonder, who would do this, and the police shout for everyone to please get back, now, as water ran down from the broken smoky center of each huge eye.
    Tyler told me in secret that there’s never more than four good proposals at a meeting so your chances of drawing a real proposal and not just a blank are about four in ten. There are twenty-five guys on the Assault Committee including Tyler. Everybody gets their homework: lose a fight in public; and each member draws for a proposal.
    This week, Tyler told them, "Go out and buy a gun.”
    Tyler gave one guy the telephone-book yellow pages and told him to tear out an advertisement. Then pass the book to the next guy. No two guys should go to the same place to buy or shoot.
    "This,” Tyler said, and he took a gun out of his coat pocket, "this is a gun, and in two weeks, you should each of you have a gun about this size to bring to meeting.
    "Better you should pay for it with cash,” Tyler said. "Next meeting, you’ll all trade guns and report the gun you bought as stolen.”
    Nobody asked anything. You don’t ask questions is the first rule in Project Mayhem.
    Tyler handed the gun around. It was so heavy for something so small, as if a giant thing like a mountain or a sun were collapsed and melted down to make this. The committee guys held it by two fingers. Everyone wanted to ask if it was loaded, but the second rule of Project Mayhem is you don’t ask questions.
    Maybe it was loaded, maybe not. Maybe we should always assume the worst.
    "A gun,” Tyler said, "is simple and perfect. You just draw the trigger back.”
    The third rule in Project Mayhem is no excuses.
    "The trigger,” Tyler said, "frees the hammer, and the hammer strikes the powder.”
    The fourth rule is no lies.
    "The explosion blasts a metal slug off the open end of the shell, and the barrel of the gun focuses the exploding powder and the rocketing slug,” Tyler said, "like a man out of a cannon, like a missile out of a silo, like your jism, in one direction.”
    When Tyler invented Project Mayhem, Tyler said the goal of Project Mayhem had nothing to do with other people. Tyler didn’t care if other people got hurt or not. 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.
    It was at fight club that Tyler invented Project Mayhem.
    I tagged a first-timer one night at fight club. That Saturday night, a young guy with an angel’s face came to his first fight club, and I tagged him for a fight. That’s the rule. If it’s your first night in fight club, you have to fight. I knew that so I tagged him because the insomnia was on again, and I was in a mood to destroy something beautiful.
    Since most of my face never gets a chance to heal, I’ve got nothing to lose in the looks department. My boss, at work, he asked me what I was doing about the hole through my cheek that never heals. When I drink coffee, I told him, I put two fingers over the hole so it won’t leak.
    There’s a sleeper hold that gives somebody just enough air to stay awake, and that night at fight club I hit our first-timer and hammered that beautiful mister angel face, first with the bony knuckles of my fist like a pounding molar, and then the knotted tight butt of my fist after my knuckles were raw from his teeth stuck through his lips. Then the kid fell through my arms in a heap.
    Tyler told me later that he’d never seen me destroy something so completely. That night, Tyler knew he had to take fight club up a notch or shut it down.
    Tyler said, sitting at breakfast the next morning, "You looked like a maniac, Psycho-Boy. Where did you go?”
    I said I felt like crap and not relaxed at all. I didn’t get any kind of a buzz. Maybe I’d developed a jones. You can build up a tolerance to fighting, and maybe I needed to move on to something bigger.
    It was that morning, Tyler invented Project Mayhem.
    Tyler asked what I was really fighting.
    What Tyler says about being the crap and the slaves of history, that’s how I felt. I wanted