The Klipsk shelving unit, oh, yeah.

Hemlig hat boxes. Yes.

The street outside my high-rise was sparkling and scattered with all this.

The Mommala quilt-cover set. Design by Tomas Harila and available in the following: Orchid.

Fuschia.

Cobalt.

Ebony.

Jet.

Eggsh.e.l.l or heather.

It took my whole life to buy this stuff.

The easy-care textured lacquer of my Kalix occasional tables.

My Steg nesting tables.

You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.

Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

Until I got home from the airport.

The doorman steps out of the shadows to say, there's been an accident. The police, they were here and asked a lot of questions.

The police think maybe it was the gas. Maybe the pilot light on the stove went out or a burner was left on, leaking gas, and the gas rose to the ceiling, and the gas filled the condo from ceiling to floor in every room. The condo was seventeen hundred square feet with high ceilings and for days and days, the gas must've leaked until every room was full. When the rooms were filled to the floor, the compressor at the base of the refrigerator clicked on.

Detonation.

The floor-to-ceiling windows in their aluminum frames went out and the sofas and the lamps and dishes and sheet sets in flames, and the high school annuals and the diplomas and telephone. Everything blasting out from the fifteenth floor in a sort of solar flare.

Oh, not my refrigerator. I'd collected shelves full of different mustards, some stone-ground, some English pub style. There were fourteen different flavors of fat-free salad dressing, and seven kinds of capers.

I know, I know, a house full of condiments and no real food.

The doorman blew his nose and something went into his handkerchief with the good slap of a pitch into a catcher's mitt.

You could go up to the fifteen floor, the doorman said, but n.o.body could go into the unit. Police orders. The police had been asking, did I have an old girlfriend who'd want to do this or did I make an enemy of somebody who had access to dynamite.

"It wasn't worth going up," the doorman said. "All that's left is the concrete sh.e.l.l."

The police hadn't ruled out arson. No one had smelled gas. The doorman raises an eyebrow. This guy spent his time flirting with the day maids and nurses who worked in the big units on the top floor and waited in the lobby chairs for their rides after work. Three years I lived here, and the doorman still sat reading his Ellery Queen Ellery Queen magazine every night while I shifted packages and bags to unlock the front door and let myself in. magazine every night while I shifted packages and bags to unlock the front door and let myself in.

The doorman raises an eyebrow and says how some people will go on a long trip and leave a candle, a long, long candle burning in a big puddle of gasoline. People with financial difficulties do this stuff. People who want out from under.

I asked to use the lobby phone.

"A lot of young people try to impress the world and buy too many things," the doorman said.

I called Tyler.

The phone rang in Tyler's rented house on Paper Street.

Oh, Tyler, please deliver me.

And the phone rang.

The doorman leaned into my shoulder and said, "A lot of young people don't know what they really want."

Oh, Tyler, please rescue me.

And the phone rang.

"Young people, they think they want the whole world."

Deliver me from Swedish furniture.

Deliver me from clever art.

And the phone rang and Tyler answered.

"If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't."

May I never be complete.

May I never be content.

May I never be perfect.

Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.

Tyler and I agreed to meet at a bar.

The doorman asked for a number where the police could reach me. It was still raining. My Audi was still parked in the lot, but a Dakapo halogen torchiere was speared through the windshield.

Tyler and I, we met and drank a lot of beer, and Tyler said, yes, I could move in with him, but I would have to do him a favor.

The next day, my suitcase would arrive with the bare minimum, six shirts, six pair of underwear.

There, drunk in a bar where no one was watching and no one would care, I asked Tyler what he wanted me to do.

Tyler said, "I want you to hit me as hard as you can."

6.

TWO SCREENS INTO my demo to Microsoft, I taste blood and have to start swallowing. My boss doesn't know the material, but he won't let me run the demo with a black eye and half my face swollen from the st.i.tches inside my cheek. The st.i.tches have come loose, and I can feel them with my tongue against the inside of my cheek. Picture snarled fishing line on the beach. I can picture them as the black st.i.tches on a dog after it's been fixed, and I keep swallowing blood. My boss is making the presentation from my script, and I'm running the laptop projector so I'm off to one side of the room, in the dark. my demo to Microsoft, I taste blood and have to start swallowing. My boss doesn't know the material, but he won't let me run the demo with a black eye and half my face swollen from the st.i.tches inside my cheek. The st.i.tches have come loose, and I can feel them with my tongue against the inside of my cheek. Picture snarled fishing line on the beach. I can picture them as the black st.i.tches on a dog after it's been fixed, and I keep swallowing blood. My boss is making the presentation from my script, and I'm running the laptop projector so I'm off to one side of the room, in the dark.

More of my lips are sticky with blood as I try to lick the blood off, and when the lights come up, I will turn to consultants Ellen and Walter and Norbert and Linda from Microsoft and say, thank you for coming, my mouth shining with blood and blood climbing the cracks between my teeth.

You can swallow about a pint of blood before you're sick.

Fight club is tomorrow, and I'm not going to miss fight club.

Before the presentation, Walter from Microsoft smiles his steam shovel jaw like a marketing tool tanned the color of a barbecued potato chip. Walter with his signet ring shakes my hand, wrapped in his smooth soft hand and says, "I'd hate to see what happened to the other guy."

The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.

I tell Walter I fell.

I did this to myself.

Before the presentation, when I sat across from my boss, telling him where in the script each slide cues and when I wanted to run the video segment, my boss says, "What do you get yourself into every weekend?"

I just don't want to die without a few scars, I say. It's nothing anymore to have a beautiful stock body. You see those cars that are completely stock cherry, right out of a dealer's showroom in 1955, I always think, what a waste.

The second rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.

Maybe at lunch, the waiter comes to your table and the waiter has the two black eyes of a giant panda from fight club last weekend when you saw him get his head pinched between the concrete floor and the knee of a two-hundred-pound stock boy who kept slamming a fist into the bridge of the waiter's nose again and again in flat hard packing sounds you could hear over all the yelling until the waiter caught enough breath and sprayed blood to say, stop.

You don't say anything because fight club exists only in the hours between when fight club starts and when fight club ends.

You saw the kid who works in the copy center, a month ago you saw this kid who can't remember to three-hole-punch an order or put colored slip sheets between the copy packets, but this kid was a G.o.d for ten minutes when you saw him kick the air out of an account representative twice his size then land on the man and pound him limp until the kid had to stop. That's the third rule in fight club, when someone says stop, or goes limp, even if he's just faking it, the fight is over. Every time you see this kid, you can't tell him what a great fight he had.

Only two guys to a fight. One fight at a time. They fight without shirts or shoes. The fights go on as long as they have to. Those are the other rules of fight club.

Who guys are in fight club is not who they are in the real world. Even if you told the kid in the copy center that he had a good fight, you wouldn't be talking to the same man.

Who I am in fight club is not someone my boss knows.

After a night in fight club, everything in the real world gets the volume turned down. Nothing can p.i.s.s you off. Your word is law, and if other people break that law or question you, even that doesn't p.i.s.s you off.

In the real world, I'm a recall campaign coordinator in a shirt and tie, sitting in the dark with a mouthful of blood and changing the overheads and slides as my boss tells Microsoft how he chose a particular shade of pale cornflower blue for an icon.

The first fight club was just Tyler and I pounding on each other.

It used to be enough that when I came home angry and knowing that my life wasn't toeing my five-year plan, I could clean my condominium or detail my car. Someday I'd be dead without a scar and there would be a really nice condo and car. Really, really nice, until the dust settled or the next owner. Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa Mona Lisa is falling apart. Since fight club, I can wiggle half the teeth in my jaw. is falling apart. Since fight club, I can wiggle half the teeth in my jaw.

Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer.

Tyler never knew his father.

Maybe self-destruction is the answer.

Tyler and I still go to fight club, together. Fight club is in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a bar, now, after the bar closes on Sat.u.r.day night, and every week you go and there's more guys there.

Tyler gets under the one light in the middle of the black concrete bas.e.m.e.nt and he can see that light flickering back out of the dark in a hundred pairs of eyes. First thing Tyler yells is, "The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.

"The second rule about fight club," Tyler yells, "is you don't talk about fight club."

Me, I knew my dad for about six years, but I don't remember anything. My dad, he starts a new family in a new town about every six years. This isn't so much like a family as it's like he sets up a franchise.

What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women.

Tyler standing under the one light in the after-midnight blackness of a bas.e.m.e.nt full of men, Tyler runs through the other rules: two men per fight, one fight at a time, no shoes no shirts, fights go on as long as they have to.

"And the seventh rule," Tyler yells, "is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight."

Fight club is not football on television. You aren't watching a bunch of men you don't know halfway around the world beating on each other live by satellite with a two-minute delay, commercials pitching beer every ten minutes, and a pause now for station identification. After you've been to fight club, watching football on television is watching p.o.r.nography when you could be having great s.e.x.

Fight club gets to be your reason for going to the gym and keeping your hair cut short and cutting your nails. The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.

Like Tyler says, even a souffle looks pumped.

My father never went to college so it was really important I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what?

My dad didn't know.

When I got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn't know, so he said, get married.

I'm a thirty-year-old boy, and I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer I need.

What happens at fight club doesn't happen in words. Some guys need a fight every week. This week, Tyler says it's the first fifty guys through the door and that's it. No more.

Last week, I tapped a guy and he and I got on the list for a fight. This guy must've had a bad week, got both my arms behind my head in a full nelson and rammed my face into the concrete floor until my teeth bit open the inside of my cheek and my eye was swollen shut and was bleeding, and after I said, stop, I could look down and there was a print of half my face in blood on the floor.

Tyler stood next to me, both of us looking down at the big O O of my mouth with blood all around it and the little slit of my eye staring up at us from the floor, and Tyler says, "Cool." of my mouth with blood all around it and the little slit of my eye staring up at us from the floor, and Tyler says, "Cool."

I shake the guy's hand and say, good fight.

This guy, he says, "How about next week?"

I try to smile against all the swelling, and I say, look at me. How about next month?

You aren't alive anywhere like you're alive at fight club. When it's you and one other guy under that one light in the middle of all those watching. Fight club isn't about winning or losing fights. Fight club isn't about words. You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, and his a.s.s is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood. This guy trusts himself to handle anything. There's grunting and noise at fight club like at the gym, but fight club isn't about looking good. There's hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved.