Fight Club

courage by frightening them.
    "Napoleon bragged that he could train men to sacrifice their lives for a scrap of ribbon.
    "Imagine, when we call a strike and everyone refuses to work until we redistribute the wealth of the world.
    "Imagine hunting elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center.
    "What you said about your job,” the mechanic says, "did you really mean it?”
    Yeah, I meant it.
    "That’s why we’re on the road, tonight,” he says.
    We’re a hunting party, and we’re hunting for fat.
    We’re going to the medical waste dump.
    We’re going to the medical waste incinerator, and there among the discarded surgical drapes and wound dressings, and ten-year-old tumors and intraveneous tubes and discarded needles, scary stuff, really scary stuff, among the blood samples and amputated tidbits, we’ll find more money than we can haul away in one night, even if we were driving a dump truck.
    We’ll find enough money to load this Corniche down to the axle stops.
    "Fat,” the mechanic says, "liposuctioned fat sucked out of the richest thighs in America. The richest, fattest thighs in the world.”
    Our goal is the big red bags of liposuctioned fat we’ll haul back to Paper Street and render and mix with lye and rosemary and sell back to the very people who paid to have it sucked out. At twenty bucks a bar, these are the only folks who can afford it.
    "The richest, creamiest fat in the world, the fat of the land,” he says. "That makes tonight a kind of Robin Hood thing.”
    The little wax fires sputter in the carpet.
    "While we’re there,” he says, "we’re supposed to look for some of those hepatitis bugs, too.”

20
    THE TEARS WERE really coming now, and one fat stripe rolled along the barrel of the gun and down the loop around the trigger to burst flat against my index finger. Raymond Hessel closed both eyes so I pressed the gun hard against his temple so he would always feel it pressing right there and I was beside him and this was his life and he could be dead at any moment.
    This wasn’t a cheap gun, and I wondered if salt might fuck it up.
    Everything had gone so easy, I wondered. I’d done everything the mechanic said to do. This was why we needed to buy a gun. This was doing my homework.
    We each had to bring Tyler twelve driver’s licenses. This would prove we each made twelve human sacrifices.
    I parked tonight, and I waited around the block for Raymond Hessel to finish his shift at the all-night Korner Mart, and around midnight he was waiting for a night owl bus when I finally walked up and said, hello.
    Raymond Hessel, Raymond didn’t say anything. Probably he figured I was after his money, his minimum wage, the fourteen dollars in his wallet. Oh, Raymond Hessel, all twenty-three years of you, when you started crying, tears rolling down the barrel of my gun pressed to your temple, no, this wasn’t about money. Not everything is about money.
    You didn’t even say, hello.
    You’re not your sad little wallet.
    I said, nice night, cold but clear.
    You didn’t even say, hello.
    I said, don’t run, or I’ll have to shoot you in the back. I had the gun out, and I was wearing a latex glove so if the gun ever became a people’s exhibit A, there’d be nothing on it except the dried tears of Raymond Hessel, Caucasian, aged twenty-three with no distinguishing marks.
    Then I had your attention. Your eyes were big enough that even in the streetlight I could see they were antifreeze green.
    You were jerking backward and backward a little more every time the gun touched your face, as if the barrel was too hot or too cold. Until I said, don’t step back, and then you let the gun touch you, but even then you rolled your head up and away from the barrel.
    You gave me your wallet like I asked.
    Your name was Raymond K. Hessel on your driver’s license. You live at 1320 SE Benning, apartment A. That had to be a basement apartment. They usually give basement apartments letters instead of numbers.
    Raymond K. K. K. K. K. K. Hessel, I was talking to you.
    Your head rolled up and away from the gun, and you said, yeah. You said, yes, you lived in a basement.
    You had some pictures in the wallet, too. There was your mother.
    This was a tough one for you, you’d have to open your eyes and see the picture of Mom and Dad smiling and see the gun at the same time, but you did, and then your eyes closed and you started to cry.
    You were going to cool, the amazing miracle of