After my last fight, the guy who fought me mopped the floor while I called my insurance to pre-approve a visit to the emergency room. At the hospital, Tyler tells them I fell down.

Sometimes, Tyler speaks for me.

I did this to myself.

Outside, the sun was coming up.

You don't talk about fight club because except for five hours from two until seven on Sunday morning, fight club doesn't exist.

When we invented fight club, Tyler and I, neither of us had ever been in a fight before. If you've never been in a fight, you wonder. About getting hurt, about what you're capable of doing against another man. I was the first guy Tyler ever felt safe enough to ask, and we were both drunk in a bar where no one would care so Tyler said, "I want you to do me a favor. I want you to hit me as hard as you can."

I didn't want to, but Tyler explained it all, about not wanting to die without any scars, about being tired of watching only professionals fight, and wanting to know more about himself.

About self-destruction.

At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.

I looked around and said, okay. Okay, I say, but outside in the parking lot.

So we went outside, and I asked if Tyler wanted it in the face or in the stomach.

Tyler said, "Surprise me."

I said I had never hit anybody.

Tyler said, "So go crazy, man."

I said, close your eyes.

Tyler said, "No."

Like every guy on his first night in fight club, I breathed in and swung my fist in a roundhouse at Tyler's jaw like in every cowboy movie we'd ever seen, and me, my fist connected with the side of Tyler's neck.

s.h.i.t, I said, that didn't count. I want to try it again.

Tyler said, "Yeah it counted," and hit me, straight on, pow pow, just like a cartoon boxing glove on a spring on Sat.u.r.day morning cartoons, right in the middle of my chest and I fell back against a car. We both stood there, Tyler rubbing the side of his neck and me holding a hand on my chest, both of us knowing we'd gotten somewhere we'd never been and like the cat and mouse in cartoons, we were still alive and wanted to see how far we could take this thing and still be alive.

Tyler said, "Cool."

I said, hit me again.

Tyler said, "No, you hit me."

So I hit him, a girl's wide roundhouse to right under his ear, and Tyler shoved me back and stomped the heel of his shoe in my stomach. What happened next and after that didn't happen in words, but the bar closed and people came out and shouted around us in the parking lot.

Instead of Tyler, I felt finally I could get my hands on everything in the world that didn't work, my cleaning that came back with the collar b.u.t.tons broken, the bank that says I'm hundreds of dollars overdrawn. My job where my boss got on my computer and fiddled with my DOS execute commands. And Marla Singer, who stole the support groups from me.

Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing mattered.

The first night we fought was a Sunday night, and Tyler hadn't shaved all weekend so my knuckles burned raw from his weekend beard. Lying on our backs in the parking lot, staring up at the one star that came through the streetlights, I asked Tyler what he'd been fighting.

Tyler said, his father.

Maybe we didn't need a father to complete ourselves. There's nothing personal about who you fight in fight club. You fight to fight. You're not supposed to talk about fight club, but we talked and for the next couple of weeks, guys met in that parking lot after the bar had closed, and by the time it got cold, another bar offered the bas.e.m.e.nt where we meet now.

When fight club meets, Tyler gives the rules he and I decided. "Most of you," Tyler yells in the cone of light in the center of the bas.e.m.e.nt full of men, "you're here because someone broke the rules. Somebody told you about fight club."

Tyler says, "Well, you better stop talking or you'd better start another fight club because next week you put your name on a list when you get here, and only the first fifty names on the list get in. If you get in, you set up your fight right away if you want a fight. If you don't want a fight, there are guys who do, so maybe you should just stay home.

"If this is your first night at fight club," Tyler yells, "you have to fight."

Most guys are at fight club because of something they're too scared to fight. After a few fights, you're afraid a lot less.

A lot of best friends meet for the first time at fight club. Now I go to meetings or conferences and see faces at conference tables, accountants and junior executives or attorneys with broken noses spreading out like an eggplant under the edges of bandages or they have a couple st.i.tches under an eye or a jaw wired shut. These are the quiet young men who listen until it's time to decide.

We nod to each other.

Later, my boss will ask me how I know so many of these guys.

According to my boss, there are fewer and fewer gentlemen in business and more thugs.

The demo goes on.

Walter from Microsoft catches my eye. Here's a young guy with perfect teeth and clear skin and the kind of job you bother to write the alumni magazine about getting. You know he was too young to fight in any wars, and if his parents weren't divorced, his father was never home, and here he's looking at me with half my face clean shaved and half a leering bruise hidden in the dark. Blood shining on my lips. And maybe Walter's thinking about a meatless, pain-free potluck he went to last weekend or the ozone or the Earth's desperate need to stop cruel product testing on animals, but probably he's not.

7.

ONE MORNING, THERE'S the dead jellyfish of a used condom floating in the toilet. the dead jellyfish of a used condom floating in the toilet.

This is how Tyler meets Marla.

I get up to take a leak, and there against the sort of cave paintings of dirt in the toilet bowl is this. You have to wonder, what do sperm think.

This?

This is the v.a.g.i.n.al vault?

What's happening here?

All night long, I dreamed I was humping Marla Singer. Marla Singer smoking her cigarette. Marla Singer rolling her eyes. I wake up alone in my own bed, and the door to Tyler's room is closed. The door to Tyler's room is never closed. All night, it was raining. The shingles on the roof blister, buckle, curl, and the rain comes through and collects on top of the ceiling plaster and drips down through the light fixtures.

When it's raining, we have to pull the fuses. You don't dare turn on the lights. The house that Tyler rents, it has three stories and a bas.e.m.e.nt. We carry around candles. It has pantries and screened sleeping porches and stained-gla.s.s windows on the stairway landing. There are bay windows with window seats in the parlor. The baseboard moldings are carved and varnished and eighteen inches high.

The rain trickles down through the house, and everything wooden swells and shrinks, and the nails in everything wooden, the floors and baseboards and window casings, the nails inch out and rust.

Everywhere there are rusted nails to step on or snag your elbow on, and there's only one bathroom for the seven bedrooms, and now there's a used condom.

The house is waiting for something, a zoning change or a will to come out of probate, and then it will be torn down. I asked Tyler how long he's been here, and he said about six weeks. Before the dawn of time, there was an owner who collected lifetime stacks of the National Geographic National Geographic and and Reader's Digest. Reader's Digest. Big teetering stacks of magazines that get taller every time it rains. Tyler says the last tenant used to fold the glossy magazine pages for cocaine envelopes. There's no lock on the front door from when police or whoever kicked in the door. There's nine layers of wallpaper swelling on the dining-room walls, flowers under stripes under flowers under birds under gra.s.scloth. Big teetering stacks of magazines that get taller every time it rains. Tyler says the last tenant used to fold the glossy magazine pages for cocaine envelopes. There's no lock on the front door from when police or whoever kicked in the door. There's nine layers of wallpaper swelling on the dining-room walls, flowers under stripes under flowers under birds under gra.s.scloth.

Our only neighbors are a closed machine shop and across the street, a block-long warehouse. Inside the house, there's a closet with seven-foot rollers for rolling up damask tablecloths so they never have to be creased. There's a cedar-lined, refrigerated fur closet. The tile in the bathroom is painted with little flowers nicer than most everybody's wedding china, and there's a used condom in the toilet.

I've been living with Tyler about a month.

Tyler comes to breakfast with hickies sucked all over his neck and chest, and I'm reading through an old Reader's Digest Reader's Digest magazine. This is the perfect house for dealing drugs. There are no neighbors. There's nothing else on Paper Street except for warehouses and the pulp mill. The fart smell of steam from the paper mill, and the hamster cage smell of wood chips in orange pyramids around the mill. This is the perfect house for dealing drugs because a bah-zillion trucks drive down Paper Street everyday, but at night, Tyler and I are alone for a half mile in every direction. magazine. This is the perfect house for dealing drugs. There are no neighbors. There's nothing else on Paper Street except for warehouses and the pulp mill. The fart smell of steam from the paper mill, and the hamster cage smell of wood chips in orange pyramids around the mill. This is the perfect house for dealing drugs because a bah-zillion trucks drive down Paper Street everyday, but at night, Tyler and I are alone for a half mile in every direction.

I found stacks and stacks of Reader's Digest Reader's Digest in the bas.e.m.e.nt and now there's a pile of in the bas.e.m.e.nt and now there's a pile of Reader's Digest Reader's Digest in every room. in every room.

Life in These United States.

Laughter Is the Best Medicine.

Stacks of magazines are about the only furniture.

In the oldest magazines, there's a series of articles where organs in the human body talk about themselves in the first person: I am Jane's Uterus.

I am Joe's Prostate.

No kidding, and Tyler comes to the kitchen table with his hickies and no shirt and says, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, he met Marla Singer last night and they had s.e.x.

Hearing this, I am totally Joe's Gallbladder. All of this is my fault. Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.

Last night, I called Marla. We've worked out a system so if I want to go to a support group, I can call Marla and see if she's planning to go. Melanoma was last night, and I felt a little down.

Marla lives at the Regent Hotel, which is nothing but brown bricks held together with sleaze, where all the mattresses are sealed inside slippery plastic covers, so many people go there to die. You sit on any bed the wrong way, and you and the sheets and blanket slide right to the floor.

I called Marla at the Regent Hotel to see if she was going to Melanoma.

Marla answered in slow motion. This wasn't a for-real suicide, Marla said, this was probably just one of those cry-for-help things, but she had taken too many Xanax.

Picture going over to the Regent Hotel to watch Marla throw herself around her crummy room saying: I'm dying. Dying. I'm dying. Dying. Die-ing. Dying.

This would go on for hours.

So she was staying home tonight, right?

She was doing the big death thing, Marla told me. I should get a move on if I wanted to watch.

Thanks anyway, I said, but I had other plans.

That's okay, Marla said, she could die just as well watching television. Marla just hoped there was something worth watching.

And I ran off to Melanoma. I came home early. I slept.

And now, at breakfast the next morning, Tyler's sitting here covered in hickies and says Marla is some twisted b.i.t.c.h, but he likes that a lot.

After Melanoma last night, I came home and went to bed and slept. And dreamed I was humping, humping, humping Marla Singer.

And this morning, listening to Tyler, I pretend to read the Reader's Digest. Reader's Digest. A twisted b.i.t.c.h, I could've told you that. A twisted b.i.t.c.h, I could've told you that. Reader's Digest. Reader's Digest. Humor in Uniform. Humor in Uniform.

I am Joe's Raging Bile Duct.

The things Marla said to him last night, Tyler says. No girl's ever talked to him that way.

I am Joe's Grinding Teeth.

I am Joe's Inflamed Flaring Nostrils.

After Tyler and Marla had s.e.x about ten times, Tyler says, Marla said she wanted to get pregnant. Marla said she wanted to have Tyler's abortion.

I am Joe's White Knuckles.

How could Tyler not fall for that. The night before last, Tyler sat up alone, splicing s.e.x organs into Snow White. Snow White.

How could I compete for Tyler's attention.

I am Joe's Enraged, Inflamed Sense of Rejection.

What's worse is this is all my fault. After I went to sleep last night, Tyler tells me he came home from his shift as a banquet waiter, and Marla called again from the Regent Hotel. This was it, Marla said. The tunnel, the light leading her down the tunnel. The death experience was so cool, Marla wanted me to hear her describe it as she lifted out of her body and floated up.

Marla didn't know if her spirit could use the telephone, but she wanted someone to at least hear her last breath.

No, but no, Tyler answers the phone and misunderstands the whole situation.

They've never met so Tyler thinks it's a bad thing that Marla is about to die.

It's nothing of the kind.

This is none of Tyler's business, but Tyler calls the police and Tyler races over to the Regent Hotel.

Now, according to the ancient Chinese custom we all learned from television, Tyler is responsible for Marla, forever, because Tyler saved Marla's life.

If I had only wasted a couple of minutes and gone over to watch Marla die, then none of this would have happened.

Tyler tells me how Marla lives in room 8G, on the top floor of the Regent Hotel, up eight flights of stairs and down a noisy hallway with canned television laughter coming through the doors. Every couple seconds an actress screams or actors die screaming in a rattle of bullets. Tyler gets to the end of the hallway and even before he knocks a thin, thin, b.u.t.termilk sallow arm slingshots out the door of room 8G, grabs his wrist, and yanks Tyler inside.

I bury myself in a Reader's Digest. Reader's Digest.

Even as Marla yanks Tyler into her room, Tyler can hear brake squeals and sirens collecting out in front of the Regent Hotel. On the dresser, there's a d.i.l.d.o made of the same soft pink plastic as a million Barbie dolls, and for a moment, Tyler can picture millions of baby dolls and Barbie dolls and d.i.l.d.os injection-molded and coming off the same a.s.sembly line in Taiwan.

Marla looks at Tyler looking at her d.i.l.d.o, and she rolls her eyes and says, "Don't be afraid. It's not a threat to you."