Fight Club

Compliance people at the Department of Transportation. There’s a front seat mounting bracket that never passed collision testing before it went into production.
    If you know where to look, there are bodies buried everywhere.
    Morning, I say.
    He says, "Morning.”
    Set at my elbow is another for-my-eyes-only important secret document Tyler wanted me to type up and copy. A week ago, Tyler was pacing out the dimensions of the basement of the rented house on Paper Street. It’s sixty-five shoe lengths front to back and forty shoe lengths side to side. Tyler was thinking out loud. Tyler asked me, "What is six times seven?”
    Forty-two.
    "And forty-two times three?”
    One hundred and twenty-six.
    Tyler gave me a handwritten list of notes and said to type it and make seventy-two copies.
    Why that many?
    "Because,” Tyler said, "that’s how many guys can sleep in the basement, if we put them in triple-decker army surplus bunk beds.”
    I asked, what about their stuff?
    Tyler said, "They won’t bring anything more than what’s on the list, and it should all fit under a mattress.”
    The list my boss finds in the copy machine, the copy machine counter still set for seventy-two copies, the list says:
    "Bringing the required items does not guarantee admission to training, but no applicant will be considered unless he arrives equipped with the following items and exactly five hundred dollars cash for personal burial money.”
    It costs at least three hundred dollars to cremate an indigent corpse, Tyler told me, and the price was going up. Anyone who dies without at least this much money, their body goes to an autopsy class.
    This money must always be carried in the student’s shoe so if the student is ever killed, his death will not be a burden on Project Mayhem.
    In addition, the applicant has to arrive with the following:
    Two black shirts.
    Two black pair of trousers.
    One pair of heavy black shoes.
    Two pair of black socks and two pair of plain underwear.
    One heavy black coat.
    This includes the clothes the applicant has on his back.
    One white towel.
    One army surplus cot mattress.
    One white plastic mixing bowl.
    At my desk, with my boss still standing there, I pick up the original list and tell him, thanks. My boss goes into his office, and I set to work playing solitaire on my computer.
    After work, I give Tyler the copies, and days go by. I go to work.
    I come home.
    I go to work.
    I come home, and there’s a guy standing on our front porch. The guy’s at the front door with his second black shirt and pants in a brown paper sack and he’s got the last three items, a white towel, an army surplus mattress, and a plastic bowl, set on the porch railing. From an upstairs window, Tyler and I peek out at the guy, and Tyler tells me to send the guy away.
    "He’s too young,” Tyler says.
    The guy on the porch is mister angel face whom I tried to destroy the night Tyler invented Project Mayhem. Even with his two black eyes and blond crew cut, you see his tough pretty scowl without wrinkles or scars. Put him in a dress and make him smile, and he’d be a woman. Mister angel just stands his toes against the front door, just looks straight ahead into the splintering wood with his hands at his sides, wearing black shoes, black shirt, black pair of trousers.
    "Get rid of him,” Tyler tells me. "He’s too young.”
    I ask how young is too young?
    "It doesn’t matter,” Tyler says. "If the applicant is young, we tell him he’s too young. If he’s fat, he’s too fat. If he’s old, he’s too old. Thin, he’s too thin. White, he’s too white. Black, he’s too black.”
    This is how Buddhist temples have tested applicants going back for bah-zillion years, Tyler says. You tell the applicant to go away, and if his resolve is so strong that he waits at the entrance without food or shelter or encouragement for three days, then and only then can he enter and begin the training.
    So I tell mister angel he’s too young, but at lunchtime he’s still there. After lunch, I go out and beat mister angel with a broom and kick the guy’s sack out into the street. From upstairs, Tyler watches me stickball the broom upside the kid’s ear, the kid just standing there, then I kick his stuff into the gutter and scream.
    Go away, I’m screaming. Haven’t you heard? You’re too young. You’ll never make it, I scream. Come back in a couple years and apply again. Just go. Just get off my porch.
    The next day, the guy is still