Chapter 17 Section 17

My boss came to my desk with another piece of paper and put it next to my elbow.I don't even wear a tie these days.My boss is wearing his blue tie, so it must be Thursday.The door to my boss's office is always shut these days, since the last time he found the Fight Club charter in the copy machine, and I might have hinted that I'm going to shoot him out with a shotgun. No conversation will exceed two words.I'm the only one messing around again. Or, I can call the DOT inspectors.There is a mount for the front seat of a car that never passed a crash test before it went into production.

There are buried bodies everywhere if you know where to look. morning, i said. He said, "Morning." Resting at my elbow was yet another important secret document that must never be revealed, which Taylor had asked me to print and photocopy.A week earlier, Taylor had started walking the dimensions of the basement of the rental house on Paper Street.The result is a length of sixty-five shoe lengths and a width of forty shoe lengths.Tyler was talking to himself while testing.Tyler asked me, "How much is six times seven?" Forty-two. "What about forty-two times three?"

One hundred and twenty six. Tyler gave me a handwritten dos and don'ts list and asked me to type it out and make seventy-two copies. Tyler told me later that he had never seen me destroy something so completely.That night, Taylor knew he had to call Fight Club out of business, or close it altogether. Over breakfast the next morning, Tyler said, "You look like a lunatic, pervert. What the hell is wrong with you?" I said I felt like a piece of shit and couldn't be at ease.I don't have any excitement now.Maybe I should try some drugs.You can develop a tolerance for fighting, maybe I'll have to try something tougher.

Taylor had invented sabotage that morning. Taylor asked me what I was really playing at the time. Tyler once said that we are all shit and slaves to history, and that's exactly how I feel.I want to destroy everything beautiful that was never mine.Burn down the Amazon rainforest.Hit chlorofluorocarbons directly into the sky to devour the ozone layer.Open the safety valves of supertankers and lift the covers off offshore oil wells.I want to kill all the fish I can't afford, and bury all the French beaches I never get to see. I want to make the whole world beyond redemption. As I was beating that kid up, I wanted to shoot every endangered panda between the eyebrows, let them go extinct as a species, and every whale or dolphin that voluntarily stranded after despair.

Don't think of this as extinction.Think of it as simplification. For thousands of years, human beings have been making waves on this planet, creating garbage, and littering everywhere, and now history expects me to clean up all this.I had to wash and crush my soup cans.I had to account for every drop of motor lube I used. I had to pay bills for nuclear waste, had to bury gasoline canisters and toxic filth thrown away by generations before me. I wrapped my arms around that angelic kid's face like he was a baby or a football and punched him so hard that his teeth stuck out between his lips.Then I elbowed him until he fell out of my arms like a puddle of mud at my feet.The skin on his cheekbones was so thin that it turned black.

I want to breathe the smoke. Birds and deer are stupid luxuries, and all fish are damned squishy too. I want to burn down the Louvre with a single fire.I'm gonna smash the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer, I'm gonna rip the Mona Lisa to wipe my ass.Now, this is my world. This is my world, my world is gone, those ancients are dead long ago. It was during breakfast that morning that Taylor invented sabotage. We want to blow up the world so that it is no longer bound by history. We were having breakfast at the house on Paper Street, Taylor said, and imagine yourself growing turnips and potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course.

You'll hunt elk in the dank valley forests surrounding Rockefeller Center and dig for clams next to the Space Needle, which leans at a forty-five-degree angle.We'll paint giant totem faces and tiki portraits all over our skyscrapers, and every night the rest of humanity will retreat to empty zoos, locking themselves in cages to prevent walking outside at night, peeping through cage bars Watch our bears, leopards and wolves. So I went and told Angel Face that he was too young, but by lunch time he was still there.After lunch I went out and beat him up with a broom and kicked his paper bag into the street.Tyler watched from upstairs as I hit the kid's car with a broom instead of a bat, and the kid just stood there, and then I kicked his stuff in the gutter and yelled:

Go, I yell.Are you deaf?you are too young.You can't do it, I cried.Come back in a year or two, let's go now.Get the hell out of my door. The next day, the man was still there, and Taylor went out to send him off in person, "I'm sorry." Taylor said he was sorry for letting him know about the training camp, but he was too young, could he do me a favor and stay away? Grind here. Sing a bad face.A red face. I yelled at the poor kid again.Then, six hours later, Taylor went out again and said he was sorry, but it still didn't work.He has to leave.Taylor said he would call the police if he persisted.

The child remained where he was. His clothes are still in the gutter.The wind blew the torn paper bag away. The child remained where he was. On the third day, another applicant blocked the door.The angel face still stayed where it was, Taylor went downstairs and said something to the angel face: "Come in. Pick up things from the street." To the newcomer, Tyler said he was sorry, but he must have misunderstood.He is too old to be trained here.Could you ask him to leave. I go to work as usual every day.Every day when I come home from get off work, there are one or two people waiting at the door.The newcomers did not exchange glances with each other.I closed the door and told them to wait.It was like this every day for a while, sometimes the applicant would leave, but mostly the applicant would hang on until the third day, and by the end, Taylor and I had seventy-two bunks packed from a military surplus store Almost full.

One day Tyler gave me five hundred dollars in cash to keep hidden in my shoes.My personal funeral expenses.This is another practice of ancient Buddhist temples. Now when I come home from get off work, the house is full of strangers Taylor has taken in.Everyone is working.The entire ground floor became a kitchen and a soap factory.The bathroom is never empty.Teams of people first disappeared for a few days, and then returned with thin fat in red rubber bags. Tyler came upstairs one night and found me hiding in my room, and he said to me, "Don't bother them. They all know what to do. It's part of the sabotage project. No one understands the whole plan, but everyone does." Trained to perform simple tasks flawlessly."

The charter of Sabotage is that you must trust Taylor. Then Taylor disappeared. Several groups of team members who sabotaged the project melted fat all day long.I can't sleep.All night listening to the other teams adding lye, cutting into strips, baking the soap into shape on a baking sheet, wrapping each strip in tissue paper and affixing the Paper Street Soap Company logo.Everyone seemed to know what to do except me, and Tyler was no longer home. I cling to the walls, trapped like a rat in the clockwork of this silent crowd with the energy of a trained monkey.Pull a rod.Push a button.Teams of space monkeys cook all day long, and teams of space monkeys eat from their own plastic bowls all day long. One morning, as I was leaving for work, Big Bob came to the door in black pants and black shoes.I asked him, had he seen Taylor lately?Did Tyler send him here? "The first rule of sabotage," said Big Bob, standing at attention, his back tensed, "is that you can't ask questions about sabotage." So what kind of silly little favor did Tyler send him, I asked.Some people's job is to cook rice or wash rice bowls or clean toilets all day long.all day.Had Tyler promised Big Bob that he would get enlightened if he spent sixteen hours a day wrapping soap paper? Big Bob said nothing. I go to work.I came home from get off work and Big Bob was still standing on the porch.I stayed up all night, and the next morning, Big Bob was out tending the garden. I asked Big Bob before work, who let him in?Who assigned him the job?Did he meet Tyler?Tyler was back last night? Big Bob said, "The first rule of sabotage is that you can't talk about—" I interrupt him.I said, yes, yes.Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. While I was at work, teams of space monkeys dug up the muddy lawn around the house, mixed it with Epsom salts to reduce the acidity, and shoveled in copious amounts of free manure from the cowshed and scraps from the barbershop. hair to keep out moles and voles and to increase the protein content of the soil. In the middle of the night, Space Monkey brought back bags of dried blood meal from the slaughterhouse to increase the iron in the soil, and bone meal to increase the phosphorus content. Teams of space monkeys began planting basil, thyme, lettuce, and seedlings of witch hazel, eucalyptus, mandarin orange, and mint in kaleidoscopic symmetrical patterns.Like a rose window made of different shades of green.There are also teams out there at night killing slugs and snails by candlelight.Another team of space monkeys picked the best leaves and juniper berries and boiled them for natural lye.Comfrey is picked because it is a natural disinfectant.Violet leaves are used for their ability to treat headaches.Woodruff because it adds a fresh scent of cut grass to the soap. In the kitchen are bottles of 80 percent vodka used to grow translucent rose geraniums and brown sugar soap, patchouli soap, I stole a bottle and spent my personal funeral expenses on cigarettes .Mara shows up again.We talk about these plants.Marla and I drank and smoked along raked gravel paths through the garden's kaleidoscopic symmetry of green figures.We talk about her breasts.We talk about everything except Tyler Durden. One day, the papers covered how a gang of men in black stormed an upscale neighborhood and a luxury car dealership, slammed the front bumper of the car with a baseball bat so that the airbags in the car went off as the car alarm wailed. It will be fried to pieces. At the Paper Street Soap Company, other teams were busy picking petals of roses, anemones, and lavender, and stuffing them into boxes containing a piece of pure oil, which was used to absorb the fragrance for making soap. A soap with a floral scent. Mara told me about plants. Marla told me that roses are a natural hemostatic agent. Some plants have special names for funerals: iris, basil, rue, rosemary, and cherry cherry.There are, like spiraea and primrose, calamus and pines, like the names of elves in Shakespeare's plays.Buckwheat has a sweet vanilla scent.Witch hazel is another natural hemostatic agent. Orris root is actually wild Spanish iris. Every night, Marla and I wandered the garden until I was sure Taylor hadn't come home that night.There was always a space monkey trailing behind us, tidying up and Marla crushing any scraps of balsam or rue or mint under my nose for me to smell.And the cigarette butts we throw away.The space monkey also raked the trail behind him, erasing all traces of our walk. One night in a residential square park, another team doused gasoline around and between every tree and started a wonderful little forest fire.The newspapers reported how the windows of the houses along the street were burned in the fire, and how the parked cars farted and were fixed on the burnt flat tires. Taylor's rented house on Paper Row was a living thing, damp from the sweat and breath of so many people inside.So many people are still moving in, the house itself is moving. Another Taylor's Night of No Return, someone drilled holes in ATMs and payphones, then screwed oil nipples into the drilled holes, used a grease gun to press crankshaft oil and vanilla pudding in until the ATMs And payphones top up. Taylor never went home, but a month later, several space monkeys had burnt hickeys on the backs of their hands.Then the space monkeys disappeared, and there were new monkeys waiting in front of the porch to replace them. Moreover, groups of people come and go in different vehicles every day.Never see the same car twice.One evening, I heard Marla talking to a space monkey on the front porch: "I'm here for Tyler. Tyler Durden. He lives here. I'm his friend." The sky monkey said, "I'm sorry, but you're too..." He paused, "You're too young to come here for training." Marla said, "Fuck your mother." "Also," said the space monkey, "you didn't buy the required items either: two black shirts, two black pants—" Marla yelled, "Taylor!" "A pair of heavy black shoes." "Taylor!" "Two pairs of black socks and two sets of plain underwear." "Taylor!" I heard the door slam shut.Mara didn't wait three days at the door. After get off work, I basically just go home and make myself a peanut butter sandwich. When I came home, a space monkey was reading to a room full of space monkeys filling the ground floor. "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are a rotting pile of organic matter like everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile." The space monkey continued, "Our culture has made us all the same. No one is ever really white, or black, or rich. We all want the same things. Individually, we are penniless." value." When I went in to get my sandwich, the monkey who was reading stopped, and all the space monkeys sat there in silence, as if I was the only one.I said, don't bother.I have seen it.I printed it. Probably even my boss has seen it. We're just a big piece of shit.I say.keep going.Keep playing your little game.Just pretend I'm not there. The space monkey waited in silence the whole time I made my sandwich and got my bottle of vodka and walked upstairs.When I went upstairs, I heard the voice behind me say, "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake." I am heartbroken Joe because Taylor dumped me.Because my dad dumped me.Oh, I could go on and on, on and on. Some nights after get off work, I'd go to different fight clubs, in some bar or in the basement of a garage, and I'd ask if anyone had seen Tyler Durden. At every new fight club there was someone I'd never seen standing under the single light in the dark center, surrounded by crowds, reading Taylor's words. The first rule of Fight Club is you can't talk about Fight Club. After the fight started, I pulled the head of the club aside and asked him if he had seen Taylor.I live with Tyler, and I say, he hasn't been home for a while. The guy's eyes would go wide and he'd ask, do I really know Tyler Durden? This old cliché is repeated in most new fight clubs.Yes, I said, I'm Tyler's best buddy.Then, all of a sudden, everyone wanted to shake my hand. These newcomers stared at the poop hole on my cheek, the black skin on my face, and the yellow-yellow-green color around them, and they opened their mouths and called me "sir".No, sir.Hardly ever, sir.No one they knew had ever seen Tyler Durden.Friends of friends met Tyler Durden, they started this chapter of the fight club, sir. When it was over, he winked at me. No one they knew had ever seen Tyler Durden. sir. Everyone asks, is it true.Is Tyler Durden really building an army?This is the original words.Did Tyler Durden really only sleep an hour a night?Rumor has it that Taylor is planning to have fight clubs pop up all over the country.Where to go next, everyone wants to know. The sabotage huddle had been moved to the larger basement, because each committee—the fire, assault, hoax, and disinformation committees—had grown in size as more people graduated from Fight Club.Every committee has a head, and even the heads don't know where Taylor is.Taylor called them every week with instructions. Every member of the Sabotage Project wants to know where to go next. Where are we heading? What to expect there? On Paper Street, Mara and I strolled barefoot through the gardens at night, reliving the scents of sage, bell cherry and rose geranium with every step.Men in black shirts and trousers trail us with candles in their hands, and lift leaves from plants to kill a snail or slug.Marla asked, what the hell is going on here? Tufts of hair surround the clod.hair and feces.Bone meal and dried blood.Plants grow faster than space monkeys can pruning. Mara asked, "What are you going to do?" What is this nonsense? There was a shiny little nugget of gold in the dirt, and I knelt down to examine it.What's going to happen next, I don't know, I tell Marla. It looked like we were both dumped. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw space monkeys walking around in the dark, each holding a candle.That little piece of gold in the soil is a filling for a molar tooth.Next to it are two molars, filled with amalgam.This is someone's jawbone. I said, I can't see, I can't see what's going to happen next.I buried the one, two, three molars in the dirt, mixed with feces and bones and blood, and kept Marla from seeing them.