Fight Club

and the club cheers. To everyone here, I’m Tyler Durden. Smart. Forceful. Gutsy. I hold up my hands for silence, and I suggest, why don’t we all just call it a night. Go home, tonight, and forget about fight club.
    I think fight club has served its purpose, don’t you?
    Project Mayhem is canceled.
    I hear there’s a good football game on television…
    One hundred men just stare at me.
    A man is dead, I say. This game is over. It’s not for fun anymore.
    Then, from the darkness outside the crowd comes the anonymous voice of the chapter leader: "The first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.”
    I yell, go home!
    "The second rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.”
    Fight club is canceled! Project Mayhem is canceled.
    "The third rule is only two guys to a fight.”
    I am Tyler Durden, I yell. And I’m ordering you to get out!
    And no one’s looking at me. The men just stare at each other across the center of the room.
    The voice of the chapter leader goes slowly around the room. Two men to a fight. No shirts. No shoes.
    The fight goes on and on and on as long as it has to.
    Picture this happening in a hundred cities, in a half-dozen languages.
    The rules end, and I’m still standing in the center of the light.
    "Registered fight number one, take the floor,” yells the voice out of the darkness. "Clear the center of the club.”
    I don’t move.
    "Clear the center of the club!”
    I don’t move.
    The one light reflects out of the darkness in one hundred pairs of eyes, all of them focused on me, waiting. I try to see each man the way Tyler would see him. Choose the best fighters for training in Project Mayhem. Which ones would Tyler invite to work at the Paper Street Soap Company?
    "Clear the center of the club!” This is established fight club procedure. After three requests from the chapter leader, I will be ejected from the club.
    But I’m Tyler Durden. I invented fight club. Fight club is mine. I wrote those rules. None of you would be here if it wasn’t for me. And I say it stops here!
    "Prepare to evict the member in three, two, one.”
    The circle of men collapses in on top of me, and two hundred hands clamp around every inch of my arms and legs and I’m lifted spread-eagle toward the light.
    Prepare to evacuate soul in five, in four, three, two, one.
    And I’m passed overhead, hand to hand, crowd surfing toward the door. I’m floating. I’m flying.
    I’m yelling, fight club is mine. Project Mayhem was my idea. You can’t throw me out. I’m in control here. Go home.
    The voice of the chapter leader yells, "Registered fight number one, please take the center of the floor. Now!”
    I’m not leaving. I’m not giving up. I can beat this. I’m in control here.
    "Evict fight club member, now!”
    Evacuate soul, now.
    And I fly slowly out the door and into the night with the stars overhead and the cold air, and I settle to the parking lot concrete. All the hands retreat, and a door shuts behind me, and a bolt snaps it locked. In a hundred cities, fight club goes on without me.

25
    FOR YEARS NOW , I’ve wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do. I’m with Marla in room 8G at the Regent Hotel. With all the old people and junkies shut up in their little rooms, here, somehow, my pacing desperation seems sort of normal and expected.
    "Here,” Marla says while she’s sitting cross-legged on her bed and punching a half-dozen wake-up pills out of their plastic blister card. "I used to date a guy who had terrible nightmares. He hated to sleep, too.”
    What happened to the guy she was dating?
    "Oh, he died. Heart attack. Overdose. Way too many amphetamines,” Marla says. "He was only nineteen.”
    Thanks for sharing.
    When we walked into the hotel, the guy at the lobby desk had half his hair torn out at the roots. His scalp raw and scabbed, he saluted me. The seniors watching television in the lobby all turned to see who I was when the guy at the desk called me sir.
    "Good evening, sir.”
    Right now, I can imagine him calling some Project Mayhem headquarters and reporting my whereabouts. They’ll have a wall map of the city and trace my movements with little pushpins. I feel tagged like a migrating goose on Wild Kingdom.
    They’re all spying on me, keeping tabs.
    "You can take all six of these and not get sick to your stomach,” Marla says, "but you have to take