Chuck Palahniuk - Doomed

World’s Best Dad…

My brain belched up something I refused to taste. I choked back the possibility, the as-yet-unrealized horror that lodged itself within my throat. This new idea was like seeing an Asian person speaking Spanish. It was too impossible a concept.

Without question, I was in a state of shock. As an animated zombie, clutching my glass knife, I shouldered open the door and reentered the reeking public toilet. The movement from blazing day to dim interior blinded me, but I could hear the plink-plunk of dripping water. In that catacomb echo I heard a man’s raspy breathing. My eyes beheld, in the next blink, a figure sprawled on the filthy concrete. It was a man, his head resting on the floor. His wrinkled skin and gray hair had matted together until you couldn’t, in surety, vouchsafe where his face ended and his scalp began. At first I wouldn’t swear whether he lay faceup or -down, but then I saw his knees were together, pulled to his chest in a fetal pose. His slacks were still wadded around his ankles, and his belt with its WORLD’S BEST DAD buckle was splayed open. Of his naked legs, the exposed flanks were so white they glowed, pearlescent, hazed with small, black hairs. Between his knobby pink knees stretched the empty hammock of his dingy underbriefs, and one of his hands disappeared into his crotch, where it appeared to be cupping his shame. His other hand had reached the full length of his extended arm and clutched the air near my dropped book. As bright as a spot of sunlight in this stony traffic island tomb, a gold band circled the base of his ring finger. It was, to my handicapped vision, nothing better than nine-carat.

Even my bad eyes could see a stream of crimson running from the man’s withered loins. This rivulet of red rolled down the slight slope of the floor, collecting his discarded flecks of tobacco spit and edging toward the rusted central drain. There, all of his various fluids were disappearing in sizable amounts. Following his gaze, his reaching hand, my worst fears were confirmed, for he certainly intended to examine the book.

With my next step my Bass Weejun foot found my lost glasses. Under my baby-fat weight they weren’t anyone’s glasses; they weren’t even eyeglasses anymore. A loud pop and the crunch of glass and plastic turned the old man’s head in my direction.

The Beagle book had fallen, facedown and open, so its precious pages were pressed flat to that awful floor. A pathetic assortment of dried flowers and leaves had fallen from their hiding places deep inside Mr. Darwin’s narrative. After being safely preserved for decades, these tiny blossoms were scattered and sprinkled over the body of the fallen pervert. In a panicked impulse I lunged forward, closing the short distance, and leaned down to seize my paper property.

As my fingers closed around an edge of the book, likewise did the hand of the psycho grasp the volume. For a terrible eternity he held fast. We endured a dark tug-of-war, me and this anonymous Other. I still could not see his face, masked as it was by the disarray of his hair. As his arm strength failed, his grip did not, and my efforts dragged the man closer. He was old, an old man with gaunt sunken cheeks and glazed, rheumy eyes. His cheekbones and chin were as craggy as the totem sculptures people carved with chain saws and sold in vacant lots next to upstate gas stations. The dried flowers, ancient violets and pansies, age-old foxgloves, sprigs of lavender, desiccated marigolds, and fragile four-leafed clovers, all of these still retained their colors from long-vanished summers. From summers before I’d been born. These preserved daisies and asters formed a bier under his body, and a final, fading breath of their long-ago perfume sweetened the fetid air of that profane setting.

My arms tugged the book free, and I backed away a step but could not bring myself to take flight. Strewn among the flowers and broken eyeglass lenses was a scarlet butterfly, dead and pressed flat. It was the blaze-colored butterfly of my greatest naturalist dreams. My own species: Papilio madisonspencerii . But on closer examination it was neither scarlet nor a butterfly. It was merely a white moth newly saturated in this stranger’s rapidly issuing blood.

The man, shrouded with flowers, resting upon flowers, he lifted a quivering hand toward me. His old lips twitched with a single word, but no voice emerged. His pale lips moved again, this time saying, “Madison?”

Involuntarily the hand holding my makeshift knife relaxed—that longish shard of glass with a handle of tightly wrapped currency notes—and the dagger fell. The room’s hardened walls, scarred with their layers of graffiti, resounded with the fragile ringing sound of something brittle breaking into infinite fragments. Shattered glass sparkled, and the paper money fluttered to land in the escaping blood. My nose could smell air I didn’t want inside my mouth.

The familiar dented pickup truck parked outside. The World’s Best Dad.

Leonard wants me to pick some flowers for my dad .

The old lips hissed the words, “Little Maddy?”

My heart overcame my brains, and I inched closer, close enough that I could see the red was soaking his pants and the front of his shirt. He reached a trembling hand, and my hand, now empty of its weapon, met his halfway. Our fingers laced together, his skin feeling icy cold despite the summer heat. The stranger was my mother’s father. He was Nana Minnie’s husband. He was Papadaddy Ben, my grandpa, and his failing lips worked softly, saying, “You have murdered me, you evil child…. Don’t think you won’t burn in hell for this!” He hissed, “Forever are you condemned to the unquenchable lake of fire!”

His bony grip crushed my fingers. And like the repeating song of a finch… like waves lapping at a Galápagos beach, he kept saying, “You are a wicked, despicable girl….” He rasped, “Your mama and grandma will hate you for breaking their hearts!”

On and on, with his every dying breath my papadaddy cursed me.

Gentle Tweeter,

As an actor my mother hates sitting for still photographers. Fashion models, she says, are able to communicate themselves in a fixed expression, but an actor needs to use the pitch and volume of her voice, the motion of her gestures. Limiting an actor to a still, silent image is a reduction, as flavorless and aroma-free as a perfect snapshot of the most delicious mesquite-roasted, Cajun-rubbed tofu. That’s how absurd this feels: reducing Papadaddy Ben’s death to a blog entry. Mere words. To make you experience the scene fully I’d need to smear his warm dying blood on your hands. Instead of just reading this, you’d have to sit next to him on that concrete paved with dirt until his fingers felt nothing but cold. You’d need to take the biggest chunk surviving from my busted eyeglasses and hold it over his gaped-open lips while you prayed to see the glass fog even a little bit. Not that my parents ever taught me how to pray. Spurred by your gigantic panic, your feet would launch you out through the brown-painted bathroom door, sprinting down pathways across soft steps of dead grass, your soles slapping parking lot until you were waving for somebody’s attention from the edge of freeway traffic. Crying all the way. Hearing nothing except the loud sound of your lungs yelling air in and out. Without thinking twice you’d do jumping jacks between lanes of air-horning, headlight-flashing trucks and cars, and you’d perform all these verbs without seeing anything clearly. You’d be fluttering your blood-painted hands like red flags for some grown-up to please stop.