29

Tyler's standing there, perfectly handsome and an angel in his everything-blond way. My will to live amazes me.

Me, I'm a bloody 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 space 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 fuck out of bed," Tyler said, "and get your ass into the fucking 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 [one of his cheeks was ripped open in a fight, earlier in the book] 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 God, 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 space 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, wheelchairing 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_ 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."

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.

Of course, when I pulled the trigger, I died.

Liar.

And Tyler died.

With the police helicopters thundering toward us, and Marla and all the support group people who couldn't save themselves, with all of them trying to save me, I had to pull the trigger.

This was better than real life.

And your one perfect moment won't last forever.

Everything in heaven is white on white.

Faker.

Everything in heaven is quiet, rubber-soled shoes.

I can sleep in heaven.

People write to me in heaven and tell me I'm remembered. That I'm their hero. I'll get better.

The angels here are the Old Testament kind, legions and lieutenants, a heavenly host who works in shifts, days, swing, Graveyard. They bring you your meals on a tray with a paper cup of meds. The Valley of the Dolls playset.

I've met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, "Why?"

Why did I cause so much pain?

Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness?

Can't I see how we're all manifestations of love?

I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God's got this all wrong.

We are not special.

We are not crap or trash, either.

We just are.

We just are, and what happens just happens.

And God says, "No, that's not right."

Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything.

God asks me what I remember.

I remember everything.

The bullet out of Tyler's gun, it tore out my other cheek to give me a jagged smile from ear to ear. Yeah, just like an angry Halloween pumpkin. Japanese demon. Dragon of Avarice.

Marla's still on Earth, and she writes to me. Someday, she says, they'll bring me back.

And if there were a telephone in Heaven, I would call Marla from Heaven and the moment she says, "Hello," I wouldn't hang up. I'd say, "Hi. What's happening? Tell me every little thing."

But I don't want to go back. Not yet.

Just because.

Because every once in a while, somebody brings me my lunch tray and my meds and he has a black eye or his forehead is swollen with stitches, and he says:

"We miss you Mr. Durden."

Or somebody with a broken nose pushes a mop past me and whispers:

"Everything's going according to the plan."

Whispers:

"We're going to break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world."

Whispers:

"We look forward to getting you back."