Fight Club

updraft and carried off on the wind.
    Eight minutes.
    Then the smoke, smoke starts out of the broken windows. The demolition team will hit the primary charge in maybe eight minutes. The primary charge will blow the base charge, the foundation columns will crumble, and the photo series of the Parker-Morris Building will go into all the history books.
    The five-picture time-lapse series. Here, the building’s standing. Second picture, the building will be at an eighty-degree angle. Then a seventy-degree angle. The building’s at a forty-five-degree angle in the fourth picture when the skeleton starts to give and the tower gets a slight arch to it. The last shot, the tower, all one hundred and ninety-one floors, will slam down on the national museum which is Tyler’s real target.
    "This is our world, now, our world,” Tyler says, "and those ancient people are dead.”
    If I knew how this would all turn out, I’d be more than happy to be dead and in Heaven right now.
    Seven minutes.
    Up on top of the Parker-Morris Building with Tyler’s gun in my mouth. While desks and filing cabinets and computers meteor down on the crowd around the building and smoke funnels up from the broken windows and three blocks down the street the demolition team watches the clock, I know all of this: the gun, the anarchy, the explosion is really about Marla Singer.
    Six minutes.
    We have sort of a triangle thing going here. I want Tyler. Tyler wants Marla. Marla wants me.
    I don’t want Marla, and Tyler doesn’t want me around, not anymore. This isn’t about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership.
    Without Marla, Tyler would have nothing.
    Five minutes.
    Maybe we would become a legend, maybe not. No, I say, but wait.
    Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?
    Four minutes.
    I tongue the gun barrel into my cheek and say, you want to be a legend, Tyler, man, I’ll make you a legend. I’ve been here from the beginning.
    I remember everything.
    Three minutes.

2
    BOB’S BIG ARMS were closed around to hold me inside, and I was squeezed in the dark between Bob’s new sweating tits that hang enormous, the way we think of God’s as big. Going around the church basement full of men, each night we met: this is Art, this is Paul, this is Bob; Bob’s big shoulders made me think of the horizon. Bob’s thick blond hair was what you get when hair cream calls itself sculpting mousse, so thick and blond and the part is so straight.
    His arms wrapped around me, Bob’s hand palms my head against the new tits sprouted on his barrel chest.
    "It will be alright,” Bob says. "You cry now.”
    From my knees to my forehead, I feel chemical reactions within Bob burning food and oxygen.
    "Maybe they got it all early enough,” Bob says. "Maybe it’s just seminoma. With seminoma, you have almost a hundred percent survival rate.”
    Bob’s shoulders inhale themselves up in a long draw, then drop, drop, drop in jerking sobs. Draw themselves up. Drop, drop, drop.
    I’ve been coming here every week for two years, and every week Bob wraps his arms around me, and I cry.
    "You cry,” Bob says and inhales and sob, sob, sobs. "Go on now and cry.”
    The big wet face settles down on top of my head, and I am lost inside. This is when I’d cry. Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.
    Anything you’re ever proud of will be thrown away.
    And I’m lost inside.
    This is as close as I’ve been to sleeping in almost a week.
    This is how I met Marla Singer.
    Bob cries because six months ago, his testicles were removed. Then hormone support therapy. Bob has tits because his testosterone ration is too high. Raise the testosterone level too much, your body ups the estrogen to seek a balance.
    This is when I’d cry because right now, your life comes down to nothing, and not even nothing, oblivion.
    Too much estrogen, and you get bitch tits.
    It’s easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.
    Bob loves me because he thinks my testicles were removed, too.
    Around us in the Trinity Episcopal basement with the thrift store plaid sofas are maybe twenty men and only one woman, all of them clung together in pairs, most of them crying. Some pairs lean forward, heads pressed ear-to-ear, the way wrestlers stand, locked. The