Chuck Palahniuk - Doomed

Striking a hail of blows upon the struggling caca, I likewise found myself howling great screams of rage. Mine was the vengeful whoop of every child ever tormented by cruel bullies, a combination of fury and weeping and sheer hysterical laughter. The concrete room felt flooded, swamped with the outcries of two combatants, the fetid air vibrating with the multiplied echoes. So fiercely did I scream that frothy spittle ribboned from my lips.

Even in the throes of my fury, my naturalist instincts held sway. Even with my soft-focus vision, sans eyeglasses, I saw how the beaten dooky had begun to shrink in size. The noxious boo-boo was recoiling, becoming smaller, shorter, until it seemed about to retract itself back through the ragged hole. To prevent its impending escape I opened the Beagle book to roughly its midpoint and placed the opened volume so that the gutter would cradle the wilting poo. As my colleagues, the Pencil and the Blue Pen, had pressed samples of leaves and flowers, preserving those ferns and grasses for posterity, so would I press my own shocking discovery. At the moment before the poopie-doo-doo might flee, I slammed shut the huge tome. All of upstate trembled with the resulting scream. Kuala Lumpur, Calcutta, or Karachi, wherever my parents were sunbathing, watching their navels fill with sweat, they must’ve heard the outburst. All the world shook with the force of that howl.

Thus I held captive the shrinking tortured number two: sandwiched in the paper middle of Mr. Darwin’s voyage, by my estimate clamped somewhere within his account of Tierra del Fuego. I retained possession of the evil poopie by squeezing the book shut, and continued my efforts to pull it free, yanking from side to side, pulling with all my strength. Getting jerked this way and that meant the poochie-poo-poo was snagged and chewed by the hole’s jagged, snaggletoothed edge. By this point the flimsy sheet-metal toilet cubicle swayed, its bolts rattling loose, and readied itself to collapse.

It happens on rare occasion, Gentle Tweeter, that natural phenomena occur for which we’ve no ready explanation. The role of the naturalist is to take note and to record a description of said occurrence, trusting that eventually that rogue event will make sense. I mention this because the oddest thing happened: As I held fast, gripping my book with the boo-boo-caca shut snugly inside it—me yanking the book on its short tether—the book appeared to vomit. A thin stream of vile sputum jetted from between the pages. This viscous off-white vomitus erupted from the depths of Mr. Darwin’s journal. My memory slows the moment, stretching the seconds so as to depict the finer details: A pulse followed by a second and third pulse of colorless sputum burst from the book clasped in my hands. Not a large quantity, nonetheless it presented itself at such a velocity that I’d no time to react. Before I could move aside, the jelly’s trajectory landed it upon the chest of my blue chambray shirt. Here, my professional demeanor failed me. The spoutings of mysterious phlegm still clinging to my meager child’s bosom, I abandoned the fight. I deserted the Beagle book and the dog boo-boo it still held prisoner. I burst from my toilet stall, and I ran squealing at the top of my lungs.

Gentle Tweeter,

When I burst from the brown-painted door of that hellish public toilet in tedious upstate, the lackluster sun had dropped to late afternoon. Where I’d sated my thirst with too much tea, the empty glass jar still lay in the scorched grass. Soon my deranged attacker would emerge from the men’s restroom behind me, perhaps not deterred by our struggle, perhaps only enraged and bent on the single purpose of seizing me and rending me limb from limb and completing a frenzied sexual act upon my lifeless, beheaded torso within full view of a million speeding upstate motorists.

That endless stream of tailgating tanker trucks and logging trucks and minivans continued to roar around the edges of this shunned traffic island. To my naked face, with my eyeglasses still abandoned back on the bathroom floor, the vehicles layered and overlapped each other until they became the solid wall of their growling tire tread sound. No space existed between them. I stooped to retrieve the gallon-size tea jar, distracted by my impending doom.

Perhaps I had brashly overreacted to the proffered dirty-poo finger? After all, I was a stranger in upstate. Perhaps thrusting doo-doo sticks through holes in toilet stalls constituted a local backwoods custom akin to a mild flirtation. My Nana Minnie once told me, “Boys only tease the girls they like.” In response, I’d quoted Oscar Wilde, saying, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.”

Nonetheless, upstate being upstate, it’s not impossible that I’d just now thwarted an amorous country swain. If, indeed, waving caca logs at young girls was some rural prelude to romance, then I’d lost myself a potential suitor.

Whether I’d foiled a rustic courtship or escaped a murderer, my heart still struggled high in my throat, and the cold sweat of shock washed down from my forehead. The mysterious ejaculate that had sprung from the Beagle book hung heavily, in coagulated lumps, on the bosom of my shirt. Sans my eyeglasses, everything in the world was either too close or too far away for me to see it clearly. I was in no good condition to fling myself into the clockwork tangle of dense traffic, but if a poo-wielding madman were to emerge from the cinder-block building, I felt I’d have precious little choice. Here my bleary gaze fell upon the glass tea jar I’d grasped and lifted, the walls of which now showed themselves to be studded—nay, fairly paved—with black houseflies trapped by the thick residue of sugar. Recoiling from these vermin, I dropped the jar and watched it bounce in the grass. As it had before, the cunning naturalist within me formulated a plan. Carefully, I once more stooped and lifted the empty jar, gingerly avoiding its carpet of gluey bug life. With a few steps I carried it to the margin where the parched lawn met the asphalt parking lot; there, a curb awaited, the white concrete fairly shimmering in the day’s heat. Granted, my nana needed this jar to brew her windowsill tea, but my self-protection seemed a higher priority. In the future, if my Nana Minnie missed her homemade swill, I’d simply telephone Spago and have them FedEx a single serving of their delicious blend. For now, using both hands, I lifted the sticky, insect-laden vessel over my head. With a cathartic yelp, I hurled it against the curb, where the glass burst into countless shards. The largest, cruelest, most daggerlike of these jagged glass pieces I selected as my weapon.

Lest my course of action seem overly dramatic, please understand that I’d written my name within the end pages of the Beagle book. Even if I quickly fled the scene, that book—and my eyeglasses—remained with my foe. The psychotic fiend would see my name. A poop-brandishing nutcase would discover my name and begin stalking me to exact his revenge. To protect my hand I wrapped the hilt of my glass dagger in euro notes. Thus armed to retrieve my book, I crept soundlessly back toward the dingy cinder-block toilets.

Scattered around me on the grass were doodie dog logs so like the one that had recently been thrust at me, and I could tell that for the rest of my life the sight of a dog boo-boo would make my heart stumble with terror. My eyes would see inflating doodie-cacas lurking in every shadow. Every future nightmare would be an echo of today.

At the building’s entrance I turned my head sideways and placed a listening ear to the brown-painted door. No sounds emerged from within. From that stance my flawed peripheral vision included the rest-area parking lot, the sun-toasted lawn, the endless riptides of motor vehicle traffic. Only a single automobile waited, unoccupied, in the lot. It was a dented, rusted truck of the type known as a “pickup.” A crack bisected the windshield lengthwise. My poor eyesight might’ve been mistaken, but a taillight appeared to be repaired with layers of red-colored adhesive tape. My deranged nemesis, I deemed, had arrived here in that sad, mud-dappled, well-scratched truck.