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Tyler Durden is dead. Tyler Durden has been dead for six months and I've been dreaming about him for eight nights.
The good news is that I can sleep again.
The bad news is that Marla's gone. She's crossing the street without looking and a car that isn't looking either hits her. Her body gets knocked all over the road by about five other cars before someone stops. I see the whole thing.
That doesn't happen.
What happens is that I tell her about the Tyler dreams and she walks out without looking back. It is the one good decision of her entire life.
The first time I see Tyler in the flesh again, it's three in the morning and I'm just stumbling home to my shitty little apartment with no designer anything and a maze of rats' nests under the floor. I'm not in a very good mood, because I got mugged on my way home. I'm the kind of person that happens to, these days, but I don't feel anything when they hit me. No pain, no joy, nothing.
Then I open the door and he's standing there in what passes for my living room, looking alive and fucked-up as he ever did. He's wearing so much pink it makes me want to vomit just from looking at him. Of all the things I've hated and wanted about Tyler, that's at the top of the list.
"You look good," he says.
"Fuck you," I say. I'm just tired at this point, and I want to crawl into a six-pack of cheap beers and stay there till morning.
"So fight me." His voice arcs at the end like question, but I know it's not.
"I don't want to," I tell him. My palms are sweating and my heart won't slow down. It's like dying but not quite getting all the way there. Like unfinished fucking. That's what it's always like, with Tyler.
Tyler looks at my black eye and laughs at me, laughs like he knows I'm not going to join in. He does know. "Jesus Christ," he says lightly, "You come in, looking like that, and you say you don't want it?"
"I—I don't want it." My voice falters and I hate it. My hands are itching and I want to put them on him.
Tyler just smirks. "You little slut. You're such a whore for violence. C'mon, say you want me to choke you. Say you want to get hit."
I do something worse. I punch him.
He must have been keeping in shape (that's insane) while I was just lying around in bed sleeping, or not. He gets me on the floor in less than a minute. He hits me in the face again and again, and I'd be lying to say I'm not hard by the time he stops. I don't know why he stops. Maybe his arms are tired.
I ask him where he's been and he laughs and throws me against a wall and then onto the pull-out couch.
There are million horrible people in this city doing a million horrible things to each other. I let Tyler do several of them to me.
Somewhere at about the point his tongue's in my ass and I'm sobbing like a bitch, I kind of start to wonder what I'm really doing.
It's four hours later. I'm supposed to say something about narcissism now, but my mouth is full of Tyler's cock.
Next thing I know I'm sucking on the barrel of a gun, instead. The repetition isn't cute or funny, but I feel like laughing anyway. Then he takes the gun out of my mouth and keeps it pointed at my head while I suck him off.
*
Everyone at my new job thinks I'm being abused by my boyfriend or something.
The first time they ask, Tyler takes me home and rides me till he comes and/or I pass out. I don't know which happens first, but when I wake up, the sheets are sticky and Tyler is gone.
He's back the next morning.
He's still got the gun he shot me with. I can tell because it has my blood on it. On a Tuesday, he makes me lick the blood off. I feel narcissistic again.
On a Friday, Tyler makes me suck a bullet while he fucks me over the edge of the bed. The springs creak like a carnival ride about to fall apart as I straddle the corner of the bed, facedown with my cock stiff while he fucks me. He finishes and pulls out. I don't finish. Then he hits me till I come.
Tyler is spewing some bullshit about God or rich people again by the time I come back down. I don't listen, because it's boring now.
On a Sunday, he jams the gun against the base of my spine and says, "Do you want to take it up the ass?"
I think about what would happen if that gun went off, my guts being ripped out at close range. It's probably exactly what I deserve and exactly what Tyler won't do. "Yeah," I say, "I guess I do."
The metal of the gun is cold against my ass, but I love every second of it. Tyler fucks me rough with the gun and laughs the whole time, giggling like a stupid little kid. It's not a very appropriate metaphor. This isn't a very appropriate thing we're doing.
Marla left one of her dresses and Tyler makes me wear it. He chokes me that night till I see stars and we both come at the same time.
Eventually, He gets me a ring, because that's only fucking fair, by which I mean he burns a circle around my finger after the sixth month he's back.
I'd like to tell you that it stops, that I shoot him or myself or both of us with the gun once he finally gives me the bullets and let me keep it, but I don't. The good news is, Tyler isn't trying to blow things up anymore. He's just fucking with me. Or, well. You know.
So we keep it up. He keeps fucking me, with guns or whatever, and I keep letting him. I don't die. He doesn't die. That's it.