It was at fight club that Tyler invented Project Mayhem.
I tagged a first-timer one night at fight club. That Saturday night, a young guy with an angel's face came to his first fight club, and I tagged him for a fight. That's the rule. If it's your first night in fight club, you have to fight. I knew that so I tagged him because the insomnia was on again, and I was in a mood to destroy something beautiful.
Since most of my face never gets a chance to heal, I've got nothing to lose in the looks department. My boss, at work, he asked me what I was doing about the hole through my cheek that never heals. When I drink coffee, I told him, I put two fingers over the hole so it won't leak.
There's a sleeper hold that gives somebody just enough air to stay awake, and that night at fight club I hit our first-timer and hammered that beautiful mister angel face, first with the bony knuckles of my fist like a pounding molar, and then the knotted tight butt of my fist after my knuckles were raw from his teeth stuck through his lips. Then the I, id fell through my arms in a heap.
Tyler told me later that he'd never seen me destroy something so completely. That night, Tyler knew he had to take fight club up a notch or shut it down.
Tyler said, sitting at breakfast the next morning, "You looked like a maniac, Psycho-Boy. Where did you go?"
I said I felt like crap and not relaxed at all. I didn't get any kind of n buzz. Maybe I'd developed a Jones. You can build up a tolerance to fighting, and maybe I needed to move on to something bigger.
It was that morning, Tyler invented Project Mayhem.
Tyler asked what I was really fighting.
What Tyler says about being the crap and the slaves of history, that's I n >w I felt. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up o > gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see.
I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.
Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes every endangered panda that wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground.
Don't think of this as extinction. Think of this as downsizing.
For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil.
And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.
I held the face of mister angel like a baby or a football in the crook of my arm and bashed him with my knuckles, bashed him until his teeth broke through his lips. Bashed him with my elbow after that until he fell through my arms into a heap at my feet. Until the skin was pounded thin across his cheekbones and turned black.
I wanted to breathe smoke.
Birds and deer are a silly luxury, and all the fish should be floating.
I wanted to burn the Louvre. I'd do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lira. This is my world, now.
This is my world, my world, and those ancient people are dead.
It was at breakfast that morning that Tyler invented Project Mayhem.
We wanted to blast the world free of history.
We were eating breakfast in the house on Paper Street, and Tyler said, picture yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course.
You'll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five-degree angle. We'll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what's left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night.
"Recycling and speed limits are bullshit," Tyler said. "They're like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed."
It's Project Mayhem that's going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover.
"You justify anarchy," Tyler says. "You figure it out."
Like fight club does with clerks and box boys, Project Mayhem will break up civilization so we can, make something better out of the world.
"Imagine," Tyler said, "stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you'll climb the wristthick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you'll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you'll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles."
This was the goal of Project Mayhem, Tyler said, the complete and rightaway destruction of civilization.
What comes next in Project Mayhem, nobody except Tyler knows. The second rule is you don't ask questions.
"Don't get any bullets," Tyler told the Assault Committee. "And just so you don't worry about it, yes, you're going to have to kill someone.
Arson. Assault. Mischief and Misinformation.
No questions. No questions. No excuses and no lies.
The fifth rule about Project Mayhem is you have to trust Tyler.
Tyler wanted me to type up and copy. A week ago, Tyler was pacing out the dimensions of the basement of the rented house on Paper Street. It's sixty-five shoe lengths front to back and forty shoe lengths side to side. Tyler was thinking out loud. Tyler asked me, "What is six times seven?"
Forty-two.
"And forty-two times three?"
One hundred and twenty-six.
Tyler gave me a handwritten list of notes and said to type it and make seventy-two copies.
Why that many?
"Because," Tyler said, "that's how many guys can sleep in the basement, if we put them in triple-decker army surplus bunk beds."
I asked, what about their stuff?
Tyler said, "They won't bring anything more than what's on the list, and it should all fit under a mattress."
The list my boss finds in the copy machine, the copy machine counter still set for seventy-two copies, the list says:
"Bringing the required items does not guarantee admission to training, but no applicant will be considered unless he arrives equipped with the following items and exactly five hundred dollars cash for personal burial money."
" It costs at least three hundred dollars to cremate an indigent corpse, Tyler told me, and the price was going up. Anyone who dies without at least this much money, their body goes to an autopsy class.
This money must always be carried in the student's shoe so if the student is ever killed, his death will not be a burden on Project Mayhem.
In addition, the applicant has to arrive with the following:
Two black shirts.
Two black pair of trousers.
17
MY BOSS BRINGS another sheet of paper to my desk and sets it at my elbow. I don't even wear a tie anymore. My boss is wearing his blue tie, so it must be a Thursday. The door to my boss's office is always closed now, and we haven't traded more than two words any day since he found the fight club rules in the copy machine and I maybe implied I might gut him with a shotgun blast. Just me clowning around, again.
Or, I might call the Compliance people at the Department of Transportation. There's a front seat mounting bracket that never passed collision testing before it went into production.
If you know where to look, there are bodies buried everywhere.
Morning, I say.
He says, "Morning."
Set at my elbow is another for-my-eyes-only important secret document
One pair of heavy black shoes.
Two pair of black socks and two pair of plain underwear.
One heavy black coat.
This includes the clothes the applicant has on his back.
One white towel.
One army surplus cot mattress.
One white plastic mixing bowl.
At my desk, with my boss still standing there, I pick up the original list and tell him, thanks. My boss goes into his office, and I set to work playing solitaire on my computer.
After work, I give Tyler the copies, and days go by. I go to work.
I come home.
I go to work.
I come home, and there's a guy standing on our front porch. The guy's at the front door with his second black shirt and pants in a brown paper sack and he's got the last three items, a white towel, an army surplus mattress, and a plastic bowl, set on the porch railing. From an upstairs window, Tyler and I peek out at the guy, and Tyler tells me to send the guy away.
"He's too young," Tyler says.
The guy on the porch is mister angel face whom I tried to destroy the night Tyler invented Project Mayhem. Even with his two black eyes and blond crew cut, you see his tough pretty scowl without wrinkles or scars. Put him in a dress and make him smile, and he'd be a woman. Mister angel just stands his toes against the front door, just looks straight ahead into the splintering wood with his hands at his sides, wearing black shoes, black shirt, black pair of trousers.
"Get rid of him," Tyler tells me. "He's too young."
I ask how young is too young?
"It doesn't matter," Tyler says. "If the applicant is young, we tell him he's too young. If he's fat, he's too fat. If he's old, he's too old.
Thin, he's too thin. White, he's too white. Black, he's too black."
This is how Buddhist temples have tested applicants going back for bahzillion years, Tyler says. You tell the applicant to go away, and if his resolve is so strong that he waits at the entrance without food or shelter or encouragement for three days, then and only then can he enter and begin the training.
So I tell mister angel he's too young, but at lunchtime he's still there. After lunch, I go out and beat mister angel with a broom and kick the guy's sack out into the street. From upstairs, Tyler watches me stickball the broom upside the kid's ear, the kid just standing there, then I kick his stuff into the gutter and scream.