Fight Club Read Online Free PDF Page B

furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.
    Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
    Until I got home from the airport.
    The doorman steps out of the shadows to say, there’s been an accident. The police, they were here and asked a lot of questions.
    The police think maybe it was the gas. Maybe the pilot light on the stove went out or a burner was left on, leaking gas, and the gas rose to the ceiling, and the gas filled the condo from ceiling to floor in every room. The condo was seventeen hundred square feet with high ceilings and for days and days, the gas must’ve leaked until every room was full. When the rooms were filled to the floor, the compressor at the base of the refrigerator clicked on.
    Detonation.
    The floor-to-ceiling windows in their aluminum frames went out and the sofas and the lamps and dishes and sheet sets in flames, and the high school annuals and the diplomas and telephone. Everything blasting out from the fifteenth floor in a sort of solar flare.
    Oh, not my refrigerator. I’d collected shelves full of different mustards, some stone-ground, some English pub style. There were fourteen different flavors of fat-free salad dressing, and seven kinds of capers.
    I know, I know, a house full of condiments and no real food.
    The doorman blew his nose and something went into his handkerchief with the good slap of a pitch into a catcher’s mitt.
    You could go up to the fifteen floor, the doorman said, but nobody could go into the unit. Police orders. The police had been asking, did I have an old girlfriend who’d want to do this or did I make an enemy of somebody who had access to dynamite.
    "It wasn’t worth going up,” the doorman said. "All that’s left is the concrete shell.”
    The police hadn’t ruled out arson. No one had smelled gas. The doorman raises an eyebrow. This guy spent his time flirting with the day maids and nurses who worked in the big units on the top floor and waited in the lobby chairs for their rides after work. Three years I lived here, and the doorman still sat reading his Ellery Queen magazine every night while I shifted packages and bags to unlock the front door and let myself in.
    The doorman raises an eyebrow and says how some people will go on a long trip and leave a candle, a long, long candle burning in a big puddle of gasoline. People with financial difficulties do this stuff. People who want out from under.
    I asked to use the lobby phone.
    "A lot of young people try to impress the world and buy too many things,” the doorman said.
    I called Tyler.
    The phone rang in Tyler’s rented house on Paper Street.
    Oh, Tyler, please deliver me.
    And the phone rang.
    The doorman leaned into my shoulder and said, "A lot of young people don’t know what they really want.”
    Oh, Tyler, please rescue me.
    And the phone rang.
    "Young people, they think they want the whole world.”
    Deliver me from Swedish furniture.
    Deliver me from clever art.
    And the phone rang and Tyler answered.
    "If you don’t know what you want,” the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don’t.”
    May I never be complete.
    May I never be content.
    May I never be perfect.
    Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.
    Tyler and I agreed to meet at a bar.
    The doorman asked for a number where the police could reach me. It was still raining. My Audi was still parked in the lot, but a Dakapo halogen torchiere was speared through the windshield.
    Tyler and I, we met and drank a lot of beer, and Tyler said, yes, I could move in with him, but I would have to do him a favor.
    The next day, my suitcase would arrive with the bare minimum, six shirts, six pair of underwear.
    There, drunk in a bar where no