Fight Club

swerves us into the oncoming lane, filling the car with headlights through the windshield, cool as ducking jabs. One car and then another comes at us head-on screaming its horn and the mechanic swerves just enough to miss each one.
    Headlights come at us, bigger and bigger, horns screaming, and the mechanic cranes forward into the glare and noise and screams, "You are not your hopes.”
    No one takes up the yell.
    This time, the car coming head-on swerves in time to save us.
    Another car comes on, headlights blinking high, low, high, low, horn blaring, and the mechanic screams, "You will not be saved.”
    The mechanic doesn’t swerve, but the head-on car swerves.
    Another car, and the mechanic screams, "We are all going to die, someday.”
    This time, the oncoming car swerves, but the mechanic swerves back into its path. The car swerves, and the mechanic matches it, head-on, again.
    You melt and swell at that moment. For that moment, nothing matters. Look up at the stars and you’re gone. Not your luggage. Nothing matters. Not your bad breath. The windows are dark outside and the horns are blaring around you. The headlights are flashing high and low and high in your face, and you will never have to go to work again.
    You will never have to get another haircut.
    "Quick,” the mechanic says.
    The car swerves again, and the mechanic swerves back into its path.
    "What,” he says, "what will you wish you’d done before you died?”
    With the oncoming car screaming its horn and the mechanic so cool he even looks away to look at me beside him in the front seat, and he says, "Ten seconds to impact.
    "Nine.
    "In eight.
    "Seven.
    "In six.”
    My job, I say. I wish I’d quit my job.
    The scream goes by as the car swerves and the mechanic doesn’t swerve to hit it.
    More lights are coming at us just ahead, and the mechanic turns to the three monkeys in the back seat. "Hey, space monkeys,” he says, "you see how the game’s played. Fess up now or we’re all dead.”
    A car passes us on the right with a bumper sticker saying, "I Drive Better When I’m Drunk.” The newspaper says thousands of these bumper stickers just appeared on cars one morning. Other bumper stickers said things like "Make Mine Veal.”
    "Drunk Drivers Against Mothers.”
    "Recycle All the Animals.”
    Reading the newspaper, I knew the Misinformation Committee had pulled this. Or the Mischief Committee.
    Sitting beside me, our clean and sober fight club mechanic tells me, yeah, the Drunk bumper stickers are part of Project Mayhem.
    The three space monkeys are quiet in the back seat.
    The Mischief Committee is printing airline pocket cards that show passengers fighting each other for oxygen masks while their jetliner flames down toward the rocks at a thousand miles an hour.
    Mischief and Misinformation Committees are racing each other to develop a computer virus that will make automated bank tellers sick enough to vomit storms of ten- and twenty-dollar bills.
    The cigarette lighter in the dash pops out hot, and the mechanic tells me to light the candles on the birthday cake.
    I light the candles, and the cake shimmers under a little halo of fire.
    "What will you wish you’d done before you died?” the mechanic says and swerves us into the path of a truck coming head-on. The truck hits the air horn, bellowing one long blast after another as the truck’s headlights, like a sunrise, come brighter and brighter to sparkle off the mechanic’s smile.
    "Make your wish, quick,” he says to the rearview mirror where the three space monkeys are sitting in the back seat. "We’ve got five seconds to oblivion.
    "One,” he says.
    "Two.”
    The truck is everything in front of us, blinding bright and roaring.
    "Three.”
    "Ride a horse,” comes from the back seat.
    "Build a house,” comes another voice.
    "Get a tattoo.”
    The mechanic says, "Believe in me and you shall die, forever.”
    Too late, the truck swerves and the mechanic swerves but the rear of our Corniche fishtails against one end of the truck’s front bumper.
    Not that I know this at the time, what I know is the lights, the truck headlights blink out into darkness and I’m thrown first against the passenger door and then against the birthday cake and the mechanic behind the steering wheel.
    The mechanic’s lying crabbed on the wheel to keep it straight and the birthday candles snuff out. In one perfect second there’s no light inside the warm black leather car and our shouts all hit the same