The wife said the fake blood was too, too red. Mrs. Patrick Madden put two fingers in the blood pooled next to her husband and then put the fingers in her mouth.

The teeth planted in my tongue, I taste the blood.

Mrs. Patrick Madden tasted the blood.

I remember being there on the outskirts of the murder mystery party with the s.p.a.ce monkey waiters standing bodyguard around me. Marla in her dress with a wallpaper pattern of dark roses watched from the other side of the ballroom.

My second fight, the guy puts a knee between my shoulder blades. The guy pulls both my arms together behind my back, and slams my chest into the concrete floor. My collarbone on one side, I hear it snap.

I would do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my a.s.s with the Mona Lisa. Mona Lisa.

Mrs. Patrick Madden held her two b.l.o.o.d.y fingers up, the blood climbing the cracks between her teeth, and the blood ran down her fingers, down her wrist, across a diamond bracelet, and to her elbow where it dripped.

Fight number three, I wake up and it's time for fight number three. There are no more names in fight club.

You aren't your name.

You aren't your family.

Number three seems to know what I need and holds my head in the dark and the smother. There's a sleeper hold that gives you just enough air to stay awake. Number three holds my head in the crook of his arm, the way he'd hold a baby or a football, in the crook of his arm, and hammers my face with the pounding molar of his clenched fist.

Until my teeth bite through the inside of my cheek.

Until the hole in my cheek meets the corner of my mouth, the two run together into a ragged leer that opens from under my nose to under my ear.

Number three pounds until his fist is raw.

Until I'm crying.

How everything you ever love will reject you or die.

Everything you ever create will be thrown away.

Everything you're proud of will end up as trash.

I am Ozymandias, king of kings.

One more punch and my teeth click shut on my tongue. Half of my tongue drops to the floor and gets kicked away.

The little figurine of Mrs. Patrick Madden knelt on the floor next to the body of her husband, the rich people, the people they called friends, towering drunk around her and laughing.

The wife, she said, "Patrick?"

The pool of blood spreading wider and wider until it touches her skirt.

She says, "Patrick, that's enough, stop being dead."

The blood climbs the hem of her skirt, capillary action, thread to thread, climbing her skirt.

Around me the men of Project Mayhem are screaming.

Then Mrs. Patrick Madden is screaming.

And in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Armory Bar, Tyler Durden slips to the floor in a warm jumble. Tyler Durden the great, who was perfect for one moment, and who said that a moment is the most you could ever expect from perfection.

And the fight goes on and on because I want to be dead. Because only in death do we have names. Only in death are we no longer part of Project Mayhem.

29.

TYLER'S STANDING THERE, perfectly handsome and an angel in his everything-blond way. My will to live amazes me. perfectly handsome and an angel in his everything-blond way. My will to live amazes me.

Me, I'm a b.l.o.o.d.y tissue sample dried on a bare mattress in my room at the Paper Street Soap Company.

Everything in my room is gone.

My mirror with a picture of my foot from when I had cancer for ten minutes. Worse than cancer. The mirror is gone. The closet door is open and my six white shirts, black pants, underwear, socks, and shoes are gone.

Tyler says, "Get up."

Under and behind and inside everything I took for granted, something horrible has been growing.

Everything has fallen apart.

The s.p.a.ce monkeys are cleared out. Everything is relocated, the liposuction fat, the bunk beds, the money, especially the money. Only the garden is left behind, and the rented house.

Tyler says, "The last thing we have to do is your martyrdom thing. Your big death thing."

Not like death as a sad, downer thing, this was going to be death as a cheery, empowering thing.

Oh, Tyler, I hurt. Just kill me here.

"Get up."

Kill me, already. Kill me. Kill me. Kill me. Kill me.

"It has to be big," Tyler says. "Picture this: you on top of the world's tallest building, the whole building taken over by Project Mayhem. Smoke rolling out the windows. Desks falling into the crowds on the street. A real opera of a death, that's what you're going to get."

I say, no. You've used me enough.

"If you don't cooperate, we'll go after Marla."

I say, lead the way.

"Now get the f.u.c.k out of bed," Tyler said, "and get your a.s.s into the f.u.c.king car."

So Tyler and I are up on top of the Parker-Morris Building with the gun stuck in my mouth.

We're down to our last ten minutes.

The Parker-Morris Building won't be here in ten minutes. I know this because Tyler knows this.

The barrel of the gun pressed against the back of my throat, Tyler says, "We won't really die."

I tongue the gun barrel into my surviving cheek and say, Tyler, you're thinking of vampires.

We're down to our last eight minutes.

The gun is just in case the police helicopters get here sooner.

To G.o.d, this looks like one man alone, holding a gun in his own mouth, but it's Tyler holding the gun, and it's my life.

You take a 98-percent concentration of fuming nitric acid and add the acid to three times that amount of sulfuric acid.

You have nitroglycerin.

Seven minutes.

Mix the nitro with sawdust, and you have a nice plastic explosive. A lot of the s.p.a.ce monkeys mix their nitro with cotton and add Epsom salts as a sulfate. This works, too. Some monkeys, they use paraffin mixed with nitro. Paraffin has never, ever worked for me.

Four minutes.

Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I'm wondering how clean this gun is.

Three minutes.

Then somebody yells.

"Wait," and it's Marla coming toward us across the roof.

Marla's coming toward me, just me because Tyler's gone. Poof. Tyler's my hallucination, not hers. Fast as a magic trick, Tyler's disappeared. And now I'm just one man holding a gun in my mouth.

"We followed you," Marla yells. "All the people from the support group. You don't have to do this. Put the gun down."

Behind Marla, all the bowel cancers, the brain parasites, the melanoma people, the tuberculosis people are walking, limping, wheel-chairing toward me.

They're saying, "Wait."

Their voices come to me on the cold wind, saying, "Stop."

And, "We can help you."

"Let us help you."

Across the sky comes the whop, whop, whop whop, whop, whop of police helicopters. of police helicopters.

I yell, go. Get out of here. This building is going to explode.

Marla yells, "We know."

This is like a total epiphany moment for me.

I'm not killing myself, I yell. I'm killing Tyler.

I am Joe's Hard Drive.

I remember everything.

"It's not love or anything," Marla shouts, "but I think I like you, too."

One minute.

Marla likes Tyler.

"No, I like you," Marla shouts. "I know the difference."

And nothing.

Nothing explodes.

The barrel of the gun tucked in my surviving cheek, I say, Tyler, you mixed the nitro with paraffin, didn't you.

Paraffin never works.

I have to do this.

The police helicopters.

And I pull the trigger.

30.

IN MY FATHER'S house are many mansions. house are many mansions.