When God himself informs you your contract has been passed on to a third party, you might wonder where you're headed.
My regiment of angels waved me off. A man with a split lip and holy glow, he said, this was out of our hands, sir. We'll try to follow you. Sir.
The first few weeks I was at the asylum, I got taken off all my pills. Mount Massive was not Heaven. Divine figures shrunk back into shrinks. They paid special care to the rough chop of scar tissue spread across my face. I was a corpse laid fresh on an anthill.
The thing is, when you come off a cocktail of benzos and antipsychotics and mood stabilizers and SSRIs meant to keep you from blowing up the World Trade Center, you have withdrawals. The thing is, it was very apparent that is what the doctors ordered.
The Engine.
I was out of my gourd, when they primed me for it. The therapy, you'd think they'd never seen a car crash before. I could hear all the other men screaming. The sensation, it was insomnia before support groups all over again.
I know what you want. On the way back to my cell, I talked.
"Do you?"
You want him back.
"Do we, or do you?" My false father figure in all his hazmat glory liked to lead his questions.
Of course I want him back. I'd watch their Z-list snuff films twenty four seven if it meant he'd come back.
Why does Murkoff want Tyler?
My shrink, he said, "Have you considered, what is amazing about Tyler is not him, but the fact that you could make him?"
So I learned, this was a Jesus sort of thing. Or maybe God. I told my shrink, you can't teach God anything.
The Engine.
That was a bit more like lye. My keepers, they wanted Tyler. They wanted me pissing on the Blarney Stone. They wanted my palace of many doors. My inner cave. They wanted what my mind could do, they wanted me to craft them their very own God.
The Engine showed me blond hair. Red leather. Chipped teeth.
Oh, my compliance was a scientist's wet dream.
It's only natural that when Tyler returned, everything collapsed like the soggy wood of the mansion under monkey feet.
Like a schoolgirl sold on love at first sight, I want to believe I felt it when he crawled back inside my head and out the door of my subconscious. In truth, I spent the first night of the riot hidden away, under my bed. Awake. The howls I heard. I knew it'd been too long since I'd been to fight club. I'd die like a fool.
Tyler, though.
When I wake up, I'm in an office. In a closet, really. The desk arranged just like the one I woke up at with gasoline on my hands.
Rejoice.
Tyler, I know he keeps coming around, because the hulking, mutated, beaten men I pass by start nodding at me. I know because I wake up with badly done stitches. I know because I'm not seeing him, and he's all the more real since I'm not.
I wonder what the other patients think. Skinny guys fight til they're burger. I wonder if Tyler's siren call works as well in a land already past bottom.
I wake up in different rooms. My cell. That office. A kitchen, with a dead man laid out, head inside a microwave. Tyler left a sticky note on him.
You are what you eat!
The bodies around tell the story. The flesh that speaks.
When the carcass is gone, we stop moving. The burners are clear and the fridge is full of glycerin.
Tyler Durden, creature of habit.
I make no habit of roaming. These men, their eyes are open. They know I'm Tyler. They know I'm his. These things are different. Property, ownership. Things that can be stolen.
I like to fall asleep to the caterwauls of all these lost apes.
The prodigal son returns, finally, when the church burns. You know what they say, Hell is empty, all the devils are here.
Tyler, I say.
He looks at me. It's so easy to be pinned like a worm under a dissecting microscope. I try to imagine him with his brains blown out. With the massacre of a face I have.
Tyler.
"And so Adam was sent from the garden," Tyler says. "And so, the devil ran amuk."
He looks like he's thriving.
The next man I see calls me sir.
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