Fight Club

Fight Club

by Chuck Palahniuk

(Adapted book. Upper-Intermediate level)

CHAPTER ONE

Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, and after that Tyler is pushing a gun into my mouth, saying, the first step to eternal life is to die.

But for a long time Tyler and I were best friends.

People are always asking me if I knew Tyler Durden.

The gun is in my mouth now, and Tyler says, "We won't really die."

With my tongue, I can feel the barrel of the gun.

"This isn't really death," Tyler says. "We'll be a legend. We won't grow old."

With my tongue, I move the gun barrel into my cheek and say, Tyler, we're not vampires.

The building we're standing on won't be here in ten minutes.

If you take nitric acid, add it to sulfuric acid, and then add glycerin - you get nitroglycerin. Mix the nitro with sawdust, and you have a nice plastic explosive.

I know this because Tyler knows this.

So Tyler and I are on top of the Parker-Morris Building with the gun in my mouth, and we hear glass breaking. This is the world's tallest building, and the wind is always cold here. It's a cloudy day. It's so quiet that you feel like one of those space monkeys, doing the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand anything, and then you just die.

You look down from the roof, and one hundred and ninety-one floors below on the street you can see a crowd of people, standing, looking up. The breaking glass is a window that blows out of the side of the building, and then out comes a big cabinet. It falls down, turning slowly and getting smaller, disappearing into the crowd below.

Somewhere in the one hundred and ninety-one floors under us, the space monkeys in the Mischief Committee of Project Mayhem are destroying every piece of history.

I remember that old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, it works both ways. With a gun in your mouth, you can only talk in vowels.

We've got our last ten minutes.

Another window blows out of the building, and then a dark wooden desk pushed by the Mischief Committee comes from the gap and flies down until it is lost in the crowd, too.

The Parker-Morris Building won't be here in nine minutes. If you have enough explosives, you can blast any building in the world. This practical stuff isn't in any of the history books.