"I need you to do me another favor," Tyler says.
This is about Marla isn't it?
"Don't ever talk to her about me. Don't talk about me behind my back. Do you promise?" Tyler says.
I promise.
Tyler says, "If you ever mention me to her, you'll never see me again."
I promise.
"Promise?"
I promise.
Tyler says, "Now remember, that was three times that you promised."
A layer of something thick and clear is collecting on top of the tallow in the fridge.
The tallow, I say, it's separating.
"Don't worry," Tyler says. "The clear layer is glycerin. You can mix the glycerin back in when you make soap. Or, you can skim the glycerin off."
Tyler licks his lips, and turns my hands palm-down on his thigh, on the gummy flannel lap of his bathrobe...
"You can mix the glycerin with nitric acid to make nitroglycerin," Tyler says.
I breathe with my mouth open and say, nitroglycerin.
Tyler licks his lips wet and shining and kisses the back of my hand.
"You can mix the nitroglycerin with sodium nitrate and sawdust to make dynamite," Tyler says.
The kiss shines wet on the back of my white hand.
Dynamite, I say, and sit back on my heels.
Tyler pries the lid off the can of lye. "You can blow up bridges," Tyler says.
"You can mix the nitroglycerin with more nitric acid and paraffin and make gelatin explosives," Tyler says.
"You could blow up a building, easy," Tyler says.
Tyler tilts the can of lye an inch above the shining wet kiss on the back of my hand.
"This is a chemical burn," Tyler says, "and it will hurt worse than you've ever been burned. Worse than a hundred cigarettes."
The kiss shines on the back of my hand.
"You'll have a scar," Tyler says.
"With enough soap," Tyler says, "you could blow up the whole world. Now remember your promise."
And Tyler pours the lye.
9
TYLER'S SALIVA DID two jobs. The wet kiss on the back of my hand held the flakes of lye while they burned. That was the first job. The second was lye only burns when you combine it with water. Or saliva.
"This is a chemical burn," Tyler said, "and it will hurt more than you've ever been burned."
You can use lye to open clogged drains.
Close your eyes.
A paste of lye and water can burn through an aluminum pan.
A solution of lye and water will dissolve a wooden spoon.
Combined with water, lye heats to over two hundred degrees, and as it heats it burns into the back of my hand, and Tyler places his fingers of one hand over my fingers, our hands spread on the lap of my bloodstained pants, and Tyler says to pay attention because this is the greatest moment of my life.
"Because everything up to now is a story," Tyler says, "and everything after now is a story."
This is the greatest moment of our life.
The lye clinging in the exact shape of Tyler's kiss is a bonfire or a branding iron or an atomic pile meltdown on my hand at the end of a long, long road I picture miles away from me. Tyler tells me to come back and be with him. My hand is leaving, tiny and on the horizon at the end of the road.
Picture the fire still burning, except now it's beyond the horizon. A sunset.
"Come back to the pain," Tyler says.
This is the kind of guided meditation they use at support groups.
Don't even think of the word pain.
Guided meditation works for cancer, it can work for this.
"Look at your hand," Tyler says.
Don't look at your hand.
Don't think of the word searing or flesh or tissue or charred.
Don't hear yourself cry.
Guided meditation.
You're in Ireland. Close your eyes.
You're in Ireland the summer after you left college, and you're drinking at a pub near the castle where every day busloads of English and American tourists come to kiss the Blarney stone.
"Don't shut this out," Tyler says. "Soap and human sacrifice go hand in hand."
You leave the pub in a stream of men, walking through the beaded wet car silence of streets where it's just rained. It's night. Until you get to the Blarneystone castle.
The floors in the castle are rotted away, and you climb the rock stairs with blackness getting deeper and deeper on every side with every step up. Everybody is quiet with the climb and the tradition of this little act of rebellion.
"Listen to me," Tyler says. "Open your eyes.
"In ancient history," Tyler says, "human sacrifices were made on a hill above a river. Thousands of people. Listen to me. The sacrifices were made and the bodies were burned on a pyre.
"You can cry," Tyler says. "You can go to the sink and run water over your hand, but first you have to know that you're stupid and you will die. Look at me.
"Someday," Tyler says, "you will die, and until you know that, you're useless to me."
You're in Ireland.
"You can cry," Tyler says, "but every tear that lands in the lye flakes on your skin will burn a cigarette burn scar."
Guided meditation. You're in Ireland the summer after you left college, and maybe this is where you first wanted anarchy. Years before you met Tyler Durden, before you peed in your first creme anglaise, you learned about little acts of rebellion.
In Ireland.
You're standing on a platform at the top of the stairs in a castle.
"We can use vinegar," Tyler says, "to neutralize the burning, but first you have to give up."
After hundreds of people were sacrificed and burned, Tyler says, a thick white discharge crept from the altar, downhill to the river.
First you have to hit bottom.
You're on a platform in a castle in Ireland with bottomless darkness all around the edge of the platform, and ahead of you, across an arm's length of darkness, is a rock wall.
"Rain," Tyler says, "fell on the burnt pyre year after year, and year after year, people were burned, and the rain seeped through the wood ashes to become a solution of lye, and the lye combined with the melted fat of the sacrifices, and a thick white discharge of soap crept out from the base of the altar and crept downhill toward the river."
And the Irish men around you with their little act of rebellion in the darkness, they walk to the edge of the platform, and stand at the edge of the bottomless darkness and piss.
And the men say, go ahead, piss your fancy American piss rich and yellow with too many vitamins. Rich and expensive and thrown away.
"This is the greatest moment of your life," Tyler says, "and you're off somewhere missing it."
You're in Ireland.
Oh, and you're doing it. Oh, yeah. Yes. And you can smell the ammonia and the daily allowance of B vitamins.
Where the soap fell into the river, Tyler says, after a thousand years of killing people and rain, the ancient people found their clothes got cleaner if they washed at that spot.
I'm pissing on the Blarney stone.
"Geez," Tyler says.
I'm pissing in my black trousers with the dried bloodstains my boss can't stomach.
You're in a rented house on Paper Street.
"This means something," Tyler says.
"This is a sign," Tyler says. Tyler is full of useful information. Cultures without soap, Tyler says, they used their urine and the urine of their dogs to wash their clothes and hair because of the uric acid and ammonia.
There's the smell of vinegar, and the fire on your hand at the end of the long road goes out.
There's the smell of lye scalding the branched shape of your sinuses, and the hospital vomit smell of piss and vinegar.
"It was right to kill all those people," Tyler says.
The back of your hand is swollen red and glossy as a pair of lips in the exact shape of Tyler's kiss. Scattered around the kiss are the cigarette burn spots of somebody crying.
"Open your eyes," Tyler says, and his face is shining with tears. "Congratulations," Tyler says. "You're a step closer to hitting bottom.
"You have to see," Tyler says, "how the first soap was made of heroes."
Think about the animals used in product testing.
Think about the monkeys shot into space.
"Without their death, their pain, without their sacrifice," Tyler says, "we would have nothing."
10
I STOP THE elevator between floors while Tyler undoes his belt. When the elevator stops, the soup bowls stacked an the buffet cart stop rattling, and steam mushrooms up to the elevator ceiling as Tyler takes the lid off the soup tureen.
Tyler starts to take himself out and says, "Don't look at me, or I can't go."
The soup's a sweet tomato bisque with cilantro and clams. Between the two, nobody will smell anything else we put in.
I say, hurry up, and I look back over my shoulder at Tyler with his last half inch hanging in the soup. This looks in a really funny way like a tall elephant in a waiter's white shirt and bow tie drinking soup through its little trunk.
Tyler says, "I said, `Don't look."'
The elevator door in front of me has a little face-sized window that lets me look out into the banquet service corridor. With the elevator stopped between floors, my view is about a cockroach above the green linoleum, and from here at cockroach level the green corridor stretches toward the vanishing point, past half-open doors where titans and their gigantic wives drink barrels of champagne and bellow at each other wearing diamonds bigger than I feel.
Last week, I tell Tyler, when the Empire State Lawyers were here for their Christmas party, I got mine hard and stuck it in all their orange mousses.
Last week, Tyler says, he stopped the elevator and farted on a whole cart of Boccone Dolce for the Junior League tea.
That Tyler knows how a meringue will absorb odor.
At cockroach level, we can hear the captive harpist make music as the titans lift forks of butterflied lamb chop, each bite the size of a whole pig, each mouth a tearing Stonehenge of ivory.
I say, go already.
Tyler says, "I can't."
If the soup gets cold, they'll send it back.
The giants, they'll send something back to the kitchen for no reason at all. They just want to see you run around for their money. A dinner like this, these banquet parties, they know the tip is already included in the bill so they treat you like dirt. We don't really take anything back to the kitchen. Move the Pommes Parisienne and the Asperges Hollandaise around the plate a little, serve it to someone else, and all of a sudden it's fine.