Fight Club

Field.
    You wake up at LAX.
    We have an almost empty flight, tonight, so feel free to fold the armrests up into the seatbacks and stretch out. You stretch out, zigzag, knees bent, waist bent, elbows bent across three or four seats. I set my watch two hours earlier or three hours later, Pacific, Mountain, Central, or Eastern time; lose an hour, gain an hour.
    This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.
    You wake up at Cleveland Hopkins.
    You wake up at SeaTac, again.
    You’re a projectionist and you’re tired and angry, but mostly you’re bored so you start by taking a single frame of pornography collected by some other projectionist that you find stashed away in the booth, and you splice this frame of a lunging red penis or a yawning wet vagina close-up into another feature movie.
    This is one of those pet adventures, when the dog and cat are left behind by a traveling family and must find their way home. In reel three, just after the dog and cat, who have human voices and talk to each other, have eaten out of a garbage can, there’s the flash of an erection.
    Tyler does this.
    A single frame in a movie is on the screen for one-sixtieth of a second. Divide a second into sixty equal parts. That’s how long the erection is. Towering four stories tall over the popcorn auditorium, slippery red and terrible, and no one sees it.
    You wake up at Logan, again.
    This is a terrible way to travel. I go to meetings my boss doesn’t want to attend. I take notes. I’ll get back to you.
    Wherever I’m going, I’ll be there to apply the formula. I’ll keep the secret intact.
    It’s simple arithmetic.
    It’s a story problem.
    If a new car built by my company leaves Chicago traveling west at 60 miles per hour, and the rear differential locks up, and the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall?
    You take the population of vehicles in the field ( A ) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure ( B ), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement ( C ).
    A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don’t initiate a recall.
    If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.
    If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don’t recall.
    Everywhere I go, there’s the burned-up wadded-up shell of a car waiting for me. I know where all the skeletons are. Consider this my job security.
    Hotel time, restaurant food. Everywhere I go, I make tiny friendships with the people sitting beside me from Logan to Krissy to Willow Run.
    What I am is a recall campaign coordinator, I tell the single-serving friend sitting next to me, but I’m working toward a career as a dishwasher.
    You wake up at O’Hare, again.
    Tyler spliced a penis into everything after that. Usually, close-ups, or a Grand Canyon vagina with an echo, four stories tall and twitching with blood pressure as Cinderella danced with her Prince Charming and people watched. Nobody complained. People ate and drank, but the evening wasn’t the same. People feel sick or start to cry and don’t know why. Only a hummingbird could have caught Tyler at work.
    You wake up at JFK.
    I melt and swell at the moment of landing when one wheel thuds on the runway but the plane leans to one side and hangs in the decision to right itself or roll. For this moment, nothing matters. Look up into the stars and you’re gone. Not your luggage. Nothing matters. Not your bad breath. The windows are dark outside and the turbine engines roar backward. The cabin hangs at the wrong angle under the roar of the turbines, and you will never have to file another expense account claim. Receipt required for items over twenty-five dollars. You will never have to get another haircut.
    A thud, and the second wheel hits the tarmac. The staccato of a hundred seat-belt buckles snapping open, and the single-use friend you almost died sitting next to says:
    I hope you make your connection.
    Yeah, me too.
    And this is how long your moment lasted. And life goes on.
    And somehow, by accident, Tyler and I met.
    It was time for a vacation.
    You wake up at LAX.
    Again.
    How I met Tyler was I went to a nude beach. This was the very end of summer, and I was asleep. Tyler was naked and sweating, gritty with sand, his hair wet and stringy, hanging in his face.
    Tyler had been around a long time before we met.
    Tyler was pulling driftwood logs out of the surf and dragging them up the