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How I met Tyler was I went to a nude beach. This was the very end of summer, and I was asleep. Tyler was naked and sweating, gritty with sand, his hair wet and stringy, hanging in his face.
Tyler had been around a long time before we met.
Tyler was pulling driftwood logs out of the surf and dragging them up the beach. In the wet sand, he’d already planted a half circle of logs so they stood a few inches apart and as tall as his eyes. There were four logs, and when I woke up, I watched Tyler pull a fifth log up the beach. Tyler dug a hole under one end of the log, then lifted the other end until the log slid into the hole and stood there at a slight angle.
You wake up at the beach.
We were the only people on the beach.
With a stick, Tyler drew a straight line in the sand several feet away. Tyler went back to straighten the log by stamping sand around its base.
I was the only person watching this.
Tyler called over, “Do you know what time it is?”
I always wear a watch.
“Do you know what time it is?”
I asked, where?
“Right here,” Tyler said. “Right now.”
It was 4:06 P.m.
After a while, Tyler sat cross-legged in the shadow of the standing logs. Tyler sat for a few minutes, got up and took a swim, pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and started to leave. I had to ask.
I had to know what Tyler was doing while I was asleep.
If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?
I asked if Tyler was an artist.
Tyler shrugged and showed me how the five standing logs were wider at the base. Tyler showed me the line he’d drawn in the sand, and how he’d use the line to gauge the shadow cast by each log.
Sometimes, you wake up and have to ask where you are.
What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand. Only now the fingers were Nosferatu-long and the thumb was too short, but he said how at exactly four-thirty the hand was perfect. The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute Tyler had sat in the palm of a perfection he’d created himself.
You wake up, and you’re nowhere.
One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
You wake up, and that’s enough.
His name was Tyler Durden, and he was a movie projectionist with the union, and he was a banquet waiter at a hotel, downtown, and he gave me his phone number.
And this is how we met.
Excerpted from Fight Club, copyright © 1996 by Chuck Palahniuk
Henry: Do you really think there is only one perfect mate?
Leonardo da Vinci: As a matter of fact, I do.
Henry: Well then how can you be certain to find them? And if you do find them, are they really the one for you or do you only think they are? And what happens if the person you’re supposed to be with never appears, or, or she does, but you’re too distracted to notice?
Leonardo da Vinci: You learn to pay attention.
Henry: Then let’s say God puts two people on Earth and they are lucky enough to find one another. But one of them gets hit by lightning. Well then what? Is that it? Or, perchance, you meet someone new and marry all over again. Is that the lady you’re supposed to be with or was it the first? And if so, when the two of them were walking side by side were they both the one for you and you just happened to meet the first one first or, was the second one supposed to be first? And is everything just chance or are some things meant to be?
Leonardo da Vinci: You cannot leave everything to fate, boy. She’s got a lot to do. Sometimes you must give her a hand.
I just found out that Abhishek Bachchan has a sister named Shweta.
Irony isn’t the right word, but it’s the first one that comes to mind.
Henry Rollins: What’s your latest obsession?
Hank: Just the fact that people seem to be getting dumber and dumber. You know, I mean we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically four finger wank machines. The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn. People…they don’t write anymore; they blog. Instead of talking, they text, no punctuation, no grammar: LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me it’s just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people in a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King’s English.
Henry Rollins: Yet you’re part of the problem, I mean you’re out there blogging with the best of them.
Hank: Hence my self-loathing.
Back to filming.
