Fight Club

deep note, the same low moan of the truck’s air horn, and we have no control, no choice, no direction, and no escape and we’re dead.
    My wish right now is for me to die. I am nothing in the world compared to Tyler.
    I am helpless.
    I am stupid, and all I do is want and need things.
    My tiny life. My little shit job. My Swedish furniture. I never, no, never told anyone this, but before I met Tyler, I was planning to buy a dog and name it "Entourage.”
    This is how bad your life can get.
    Kill me.
    I grab the steering wheel and crank us back into traffic.
    Now.
    Prepare to evacuate soul.
    Now.
    The mechanic wrestles the wheel toward the ditch, and I wrestle to fucking die.
    Now. The amazing miracle of death, when one second you’re walking and talking, and the next second, you’re an object.
    I am nothing, and not even that.
    Cold.
    Invisible.
    I smell leather. My seat belt feels twisted like a straitjacket around me, and when I try to sit up, I hit my head against the steering wheel. This hurts more than it should. My head is resting in the mechanic’s lap, and as I look up, my eyes adjust to see the mechanic’s face high over me, smiling, driving, and I can see stars outside the driver’s window.
    My hands and face are sticky with something.
    Blood?
    Buttercream frosting.
    The mechanic looks down. "Happy Birthday.”
    I smell smoke and remember the birthday cake.
    "I almost broke the steering wheel with your head,” he says.
    Just nothing else, just the night air and the smell of smoke, and the stars and the mechanic smiling and driving, my head in his lap, all of a sudden I don’t feel like I have to sit up.
    Where’s the cake?
    The mechanic says, "On the floor.”
    Just the night air and the smell of smoke is heavier.
    Did I get my wish?
    Up above me, outlined against the stars in the window, the face smiles. "Those birthday candles,” he says, "they’re the kind that never go out.”
    In the starlight, my eyes adjust enough to see smoke braiding up from little fires all around us in the carpet.

19
    THE FIGHT CLUB mechanic is standing on the gas, raging behind the wheel in his quiet way, and we still have something important to do, tonight.
    One thing I’ll have to learn before the end of civilization is how to look at the stars and tell where I’m going. Things are quiet as driving a Cadillac through outer space. We must be off the freeway. The three guys in the back seat are passed out or asleep.
    "You had a near-life experience,” the mechanic says.
    He takes one hand off the steering wheel and touches the long welt where my forehead bounced off the steering wheel. My forehead is swelling enough to shut both my eyes, and he runs a cold fingertip down the length of the swelling. The Corniche hits a bump and the pain seems to bump out over my eyes like the shadow from the brim of a cap. Our twisted rear springs and bumper bark and creak in the quiet around our rush down the night road.
    The mechanic says how the back bumper of the Corniche is hanging by its ligaments, how it was torn almost free when it caught an end of the truck’s front bumper.
    I ask, is tonight part of his homework for Project Mayhem?
    "Part of it,” he says. "I had to make four human sacrifices, and I have to pick up a load of fat.”
    Fat?
    "For the soap.”
    What is Tyler planning?
    The mechanic starts talking, and it’s pure Tyler Durden.
    "I see the strongest and the smartest men who have ever lived,” he says, his face outlined against the stars in the driver’s window, "and these men are pumping gas and waiting tables.”
    The drop of his forehead, his brow, the slope of his nose, his eyelashes and the curve of his eyes, the plastic profile of his mouth, talking, these are all outlined in black against the stars.
    "If we could put these men in training camps and finish raising them.
    "All a gun does is focus an explosion in one direction.
    "You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need.
    "We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.
    "We have to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them, and show them