Fight Club Read Free

shaved on stage, totally shredded with body fat down to around two percent and the diuretics leave you cold and hard as concrete to touch, you’re blind from the lights, and deaf from the feedback rush of the sound system until the judge orders: "Extend your right quad, flex and hold.”
    "Extend your left arm, flex the bicep and hold.”
    This is better than real life.
    Fast-forward, Bob said, to the cancer. Then he was bankrupt. He had two grown kids who wouldn’t return his calls.
    The cure for bitch tits was for the doctor to cut up under the pectorals and drain any fluid.
    This was all I remember because then Bob was closing in around me with his arms, and his head was folding down to cover me. Then I was lost inside oblivion, dark and silent and complete, and when I finally stepped away from his soft chest, the front of Bob’s shirt was a wet mask of how I looked crying.

    That was two years ago, at my first night with Remaining Men Together.
    At almost every meeting since then, Big Bob has made me cry.
    I never went back to the doctor. I never chewed the valerian root.
    This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom. If I didn’t say anything, people in a group assumed the worst. They cried harder. I cried harder. Look up into the stars and you’re gone.
    Walking home after a support group, I felt more alive than I’d ever felt. I wasn’t host to cancer or blood parasites; I was the little warm center that the life of the world crowded around.
    And I slept. Babies don’t sleep this well.
    Every evening, I died, and every evening, I was born.
    Resurrected.
    Until tonight, two years of success until tonight, because I can’t cry with this woman watching me. Because I can’t hit bottom, I can’t be saved. My tongue thinks it has flocked wallpaper, I’m biting the inside of my mouth so much. I haven’t slept in four days.
    With her watching, I’m a liar. She’s a fake. She’s the liar. At the introductions, tonight, we introduced ourselves: I’m Bob, I’m Paul, I’m Terry, I’m David.
    I never give my real name.
    "This is cancer, right?” she said.
    Then she said, "Well, hi, I’m Marla Singer.”
    Nobody ever told Marla what kind of cancer. Then we were all busy cradling our inner child.
    The man still crying against her neck, Marla takes another drag on her cigarette.
    I watch her from between Bob’s shuddering tits.
    To Marla I’m a fake. Since the second night I saw her, I can’t sleep. Still, I was the first fake, unless, maybe all these people are faking with their lesions and their coughs and tumors, even Big Bob, the big moosie. The big cheesebread.
    Would you just look at his sculpted hair.
    Marla smokes and rolls her eyes now.
    In this one moment, Marla’s lie reflects my lie, and all I can see are lies. In the middle of all their truth. Everyone clinging and risking to share their worst fear, that their death is coming head-on and the barrel of a gun is pressed against the back of their throats. Well, Marla is smoking and rolling her eyes, and me, I’m buried under a sobbing carpet, and all of a sudden even death and dying rank right down there with plastic flowers on video as a non-event.
    "Bob,” I say, "you’re crushing me.” I try to whisper, then I don’t. "Bob.” I try to keep my voice down, then I’m yelling. "Bob, I have to go to the can.”

    A mirror hangs over the sink in the bathroom. If the pattern holds, I’ll see Marla Singer at Above and Beyond, the parasitic brain dysfunction group. Marla will be there. Of course, Marla will be there, and what I’ll do is sit next to her. And after the introductions and the guided meditation, the seven doors of the palace, the white healing ball of light, after we open our chakras, when it comes time to hug, I’ll grab the little bitch.
    Her arms squeezed tight against her sides, and my lips pressed against her ear, I’ll say, Marla, you big fake, you get out.
    This is the one real thing in my life, and you’re wrecking