Fight Club

to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn’t afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I’d never see.
    I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.
    Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground.
    Don’t think of this as extinction. Think of this as downsizing.
    For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil.
    And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.
    I held the face of mister angel like a baby or a football in the crook of my arm and bashed him with my knuckles, bashed him until his teeth broke through his lips. Bashed him with my elbow after that until he fell through my arms into a heap at my feet. Until the skin was pounded thin across his cheekbones and turned black.
    I wanted to breathe smoke.
    Birds and deer are a silly luxury, and all the fish should be floating.
    I wanted to burn the Louvre. I’d do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa. This is my world, now.
    This is my world, my world, and those ancient people are dead.
    It was at breakfast that morning that Tyler invented Project Mayhem.
    We wanted to blast the world free of history.
    We were eating breakfast in the house on Paper Street, and Tyler said, picture yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course.
    You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five-degree angle. We’ll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what’s left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night.
    "Recycling and speed limits are bullshit,” Tyler said. "They’re like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed.”
    It’s Project Mayhem that’s going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover.
    "You justify anarchy,” Tyler says. "You figure it out.”
    Like fight club does with clerks and box boys, Project Mayhem will break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world.
    "Imagine,” Tyler said, "stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you’ll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles.”
    This was the goal of Project Mayhem, Tyler said, the complete and right-away destruction of civilization.
    What comes next in Project Mayhem, nobody except Tyler knows. The second rule is you don’t ask questions.

    "Don’t get any bullets,” Tyler told the Assault Committee. "And just so you don’t worry about it, yes, you’re going to have to kill someone.”
    Arson. Assault. Mischief and Misinformation.
    No questions. No questions. No excuses and no lies.
    The fifth rule about Project Mayhem is you have to trust Tyler.

17
    MY BOSS BRINGS another sheet of paper to my desk and sets it at my elbow. I don’t even wear a tie anymore. My boss is wearing his blue tie, so it must be a Thursday. The door to my boss’s office is always closed now, and we haven’t traded more than two words any day since he found the fight club rules in the copy machine and I maybe implied I might gut him with a shotgun blast. Just me clowning around, again.
    Or, I might call the