Fight Club

and snails by candlelight. Another team of space monkeys picks only the most perfect leaves and juniper berries to boil for a natural dye. Comfrey because it’s a natural disinfectant. Violet leaves because they cure headaches and sweet woodruff because it gives soap a cut-grass smell.
    In the kitchen are bottles of 80-proof vodka to make the translucent rose geranium and brown sugar soap and the patchouli soap, and I steal a bottle of vodka and spend my personal burial money on cigarettes. Marla shows up. We talk about the plants. Marla and I walk on raked gravel paths through the kaleidoscope green patterns of the garden, drinking and smoking. We talk about her breasts. We talk about everything except Tyler Durden.
    And one day it’s in the newspaper how a team of men wearing black had stormed through a better neighborhood and a luxury car dealership slamming baseball bats against the front bumpers of cars so the air bags inside would explode in a powdery mess with their car alarms screaming.
    At the Paper Street Soap Company, other teams pick the petals from roses or anemones and lavender and pack the flowers into boxes with a cake of pure tallow that will absorb their scent for making soap with a flower smell.
    Marla tells me about the plants.
    The rose, Marla tells me, is a natural astringent.
    Some of the plants have obituary names: Iris, Basil, Rue, Rosemary, and Verbena. Some, like meadowsweet and cowslips, sweet flag and spikenard, are like the names of Shakespeare fairies. Deer tongue with its sweet vanilla smell. Witch hazel, another natural astringent.
    Orrisroot, the wild Spanish iris.
    Every night, Marla and I walk in the garden until I’m sure that Tyler’s not coming home that night. Right behind us is always a space monkey trailing us to pick up the twist of balm or rue or mint Marla crushes under my nose. A dropped cigarette butt. The space monkey rakes the path behind him to erase our ever being there.
    And one night in an uptown square park, another group of men poured gasoline around every tree and from tree to tree and set a perfect little forest fire. It was in the newspaper, how townhouse windows across the street from the fire melted, and parked cars farted and settled on melted flat tires.
    Tyler’s rented house on Paper Street is a living thing wet on the inside from so many people sweating and breathing. So many people are moving inside, the house moves.
    Another night that Tyler didn’t come home, someone was drilling bank machines and pay telephones and then screwing lube fittings into the drilled holes and using a grease gun to pump the bank machines and pay telephones full of axle grease or vanilla pudding.
    And Tyler was never at home, but after a month a few of the space monkeys had Tyler’s kiss burned into the back of their hand. Then those space monkeys were gone, too, and new ones were on the front porch to replace them.
    And every day, the teams of men came and went in different cars. You never saw the same car twice. One evening, I hear Marla on the front porch, telling a space monkey, "I’m here to see Tyler. Tyler Durden. He lives here. I’m his friend.”
    The space monkey says, "I’m sorry, but you’re too…,” and he pauses, "you’re too young to train here.”
    Marla says, "Get screwed.”
    "Besides,” the space monkey says, "you haven’t brought the required items: two black shirts, two pair of black pants—”
    Marla screams, "Tyler!”
    "One pair of heavy black shoes.”
    "Tyler!”
    "Two pair of black socks and two pair of plain underwear.”
    "Tyler!”
    And I hear the front door slam shut. Marla doesn’t wait the three days.
    Most days, after work, I come home and make a peanut butter sandwich.
    When I come home, one space monkey is reading to the assembled space monkeys who sit covering the whole first floor. "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.”
    The space monkey continues, "Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.”
    The reader stops when I walk in to make my sandwich, and all the space monkeys sit silent as if I were alone. I say, don’t bother. I’ve already read it. I typed it.
    Even my boss has probably read it.
    We’re all just a big bunch of crap, I say. Go ahead. Play your little game. Don’t mind me.
    The space monkeys