Part 14 (1/2)

And the guy stays.

On the third day, another applicant is at the front door. Mister angel is still there, and Tyler goes down and just tells mister angel, ”Come in. Get your stuff out of the street and come in.”

To the new guy, Tyler says, he's sorry but there's been a mistake. The new guy is too old to train here, and would he please leave.

I go to work every day. I come home, and every day there's one or two guys waiting on the front porch. These new guys don't make eye contact. I shut the door and leave them on the porch. This happens every day for a while, and sometimes the applicants will leave, but most times, the applicants stick it out until the third day, until most of the seventy-two bunk beds Tyler and I bought and set up in the bas.e.m.e.nt are full.

One day, Tyler gives me five hundred dollars in cash and tells me to keep it in my shoe all the time. My personal burial money. This is another old Buddhist monastery thing.

I come home from work now, and the house is filled with strangers that Tyler has accepted. All of them working. The whole first floor turns into a kitchen and a soap factory. The bathroom is never empty. Teams of men disappear for a few days and come home with red rubber bags of thin, watery fat.

One night, Tyler comes upstairs to find me hiding in my room and says, ”Don't bother them. They all know what to do. It's part of Project Mayhem. No one guy understands the whole plan, but each guy is trained to do one simple task perfectly.”

The rule in Project Mayhem is you have to trust Tyler.

Then Tyler's gone.

Teams of Project Mayhem guys render fat all day. I'm not sleeping. All night I hear other teams mix the lye and cut the bars and bake the bars of soap on cookie sheets, then wrap each bar in tissue and seal it with the Paper Street Soap Company label. Everyone except me seems to know what to do, and Tyler is never home.

I hug the walls, being a mouse trapped in this clockwork of silent men with the energy of trained monkeys, cooking and working and sleeping in teams. Pull a lever. Push a b.u.t.ton. A team of s.p.a.ce monkeys cooks meals all day, and all day, teams of s.p.a.ce monkeys are eating out of the plastic bowls they brought with them.

One morning I'm leaving for work and Big Bob's on the front porch wearing black shoes and a black s.h.i.+rt and pants. I ask, has he seen Tyler lately? Did Tyler send him here?

”The first rule about Project Mayhem,” Big Bob says with his heels together and his back ramrod straight, ”is you don't ask questions about Project Mayhem.”

So what brainless little honor has Tyler a.s.signed him, I ask. There are guys whose job is to just boil rice all day or wash out eating bowls or clean the c.r.a.pper. All day. Has Tyler promised Big Bob enlightenment if he spends sixteen hours a day wrapping bars of soap?

Big Bob doesn't say anything.

I go to work. I come home, and Big Bob's still on the porch. I don't sleep all night, and the next morning, Big Bob's out tending the garden.

Before I leave for work, I ask Big Bob, who let him in? Who a.s.signed him this task? Did he see Tyler? Was Tyler here last night?

Big Bob says, ”The first rule in Project Mayhem is you don't talk-”

I cut him off. I say, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And while I'm at work, teams of s.p.a.ce monkeys dig up the muddy lawn around the house and cut the dirt with Epsom salts to lower the acidity, and spade in loads of free steer manure from the stockyards and bags of hair clippings from barber shops to ward off moles and mice and boost the protein in the soil.

At any time of the night, s.p.a.ce monkeys from some slaughterhouse come home with bags of blood meal to boost the iron in the soil and bone meal to boost the phosphorus.

Teams of s.p.a.ce monkeys plant basil and thyme and lettuce and starts of witch hazel and eucalyptus and mock orange and mint in a kaleidoscope knot pattern. A rose window in every shade of green. And other teams go out at night and kill the slugs and snails by candlelight. Another team of s.p.a.ce monkeys picks only the most perfect leaves and juniper berries to boil for a natural dye. Comfrey because it's a natural disinfectant. Violet leaves because they cure headaches and sweet woodruff because it gives soap a cut-gra.s.s smell.

In the kitchen are bottles of 80-proof vodka to make the translucent rose geranium and brown sugar soap and the patchouli soap, and I steal a bottle of vodka and spend my personal burial money on cigarettes. Marla shows up. We talk about the plants. Marla and I walk on raked gravel paths through the kaleidoscope green patterns of the garden, drinking and smoking. We talk about her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. We talk about everything except Tyler Durden.

And one day it's in the newspaper how a team of men wearing black had stormed through a better neighborhood and a luxury car dealers.h.i.+p slamming baseball bats against the front b.u.mpers of cars so the air bags inside would explode in a powdery mess with their car alarms screaming.

At the Paper Street Soap Company, other teams pick the petals from roses or anemones and lavender and pack the flowers into boxes with a cake of pure tallow that will absorb their scent for making soap with a flower smell.

Marla tells me about the plants.

The rose, Marla tells me, is a natural astringent.

Some of the plants have obituary names: Iris, Basil, Rue, Rosemary, and Verbena. Some, like meadowsweet and cowslips, sweet flag and spikenard, are like the names of Shakespeare fairies. Deer tongue with its sweet vanilla smell. Witch hazel, another natural astringent.

Orrisroot, the wild Spanish iris.

Every night, Marla and I walk in the garden until I'm sure that Tyler's not coming home that night. Right behind us is always a s.p.a.ce monkey trailing us to pick up the twist of balm or rue or mint Marla crushes under my nose. A dropped cigarette b.u.t.t. The s.p.a.ce monkey rakes the path behind him to erase our ever being there.

And one night in an uptown square park, another group of men poured gasoline around every tree and from tree to tree and set a perfect little forest fire. It was in the newspaper, how townhouse windows across the street from the fire melted, and parked cars farted and settled on melted flat tires.

Tyler's rented house on Paper Street is a living thing wet on the inside from so many people sweating and breathing. So many people are moving inside, the house moves.

Another night that Tyler didn't come home, someone was drilling bank machines and pay telephones and then s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g lube fittings into the drilled holes and using a grease gun to pump the bank machines and pay telephones full of axle grease or vanilla pudding.

And Tyler was never at home, but after a month a few of the s.p.a.ce monkeys had Tyler's kiss burned into the back of their hand. Then those s.p.a.ce monkeys were gone, too, and new ones were on the front porch to replace them.

And every day, the teams of men came and went in different cars. You never saw the same car twice. One evening, I hear Marla on the front porch, telling a s.p.a.ce monkey, ”I'm here to see Tyler. Tyler Durden. He lives here. I'm his friend.”

The s.p.a.ce monkey says, ”I'm sorry, but you're too...,” and he pauses, ”you're too young to train here.”

Marla says, ”Get screwed.”

”Besides,” the s.p.a.ce monkey says, ”you haven't brought the required items: two black s.h.i.+rts, two pair of black pants-”

Marla screams, ”Tyler!”

”One pair of heavy black shoes.”

”Tyler!”

”Two pair of black socks and two pair of plain underwear.”

”Tyler!”

And I hear the front door slam shut. Marla doesn't wait the three days.

Most days, after work, I come home and make a peanut b.u.t.ter sandwich.

When I come home, one s.p.a.ce monkey is reading to the a.s.sembled s.p.a.ce monkeys who sit covering the whole first floor. ”You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.”

The s.p.a.ce monkey continues, ”Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.”

The reader stops when I walk in to make my sandwich, and all the s.p.a.ce monkeys sit silent as if I were alone. I say, don't bother. I've already read it. I typed it.

Even my boss has probably read it.