Chuck Palahniuk - Doomed

In the event the soul has taken permanent leave—as Harvey’s clearly has—any spirit making contact may take up residence. Thus, when I open my eyes my perspective is that of someone sprawled on the not-clean carpet of LAX, corralled by the bovine gaze of curious passersby, hemmed in by the steady drone of tiny wheels as roller bags eddy in a stream past my sweat-chilled face. I reside within the damaged body of a stranger, the taste of curry still in my strange new mouth, but I am alive.

Ye gods, Gentle Tweeter, I had forgotten how awful it feels to be alive. Even when a living-alive person is in good health, there’s the torment of dry skin, ill-fitting shoes, scratchy throats. As a child on the cusp of puberty, I have not been much troubled by what an adult body entails. However, from this instant I’m abraded by coarse underarm hairs. I’m suffocated by my own pungent endocrine musk, so like the masculine reek of an upstate public potty. As a girl, I’d always imagined the joy of having a pee-pee: like having a best friend and confidant, only attached. The reality is that I’m no more aware of my newfound wiener than I am of my appendix. I twist my impossibly thick neck and cast my glance in every direction. A female voice asks, “Mr. Peavey, can you hear me?” It’s a paramedic leaning over me, the one who administered the shock, shining a penlight into my eyes. She says, “Mr. Peavey, may I call you Harvey? Don’t try to move.”

The beam of the penlight is a searing agony. My bowels roil and ache. My newly acquired chest throbs where the torn skin begins to leak fresh blood, and my ribs burn where the sticky electrodes are still plastered. My intention is merely to brush the attending paramedic aside, but the gesture, a robust sweep of my arm, knocks her over backward. Imagine being Venetian water sucked down a drain and taking the shape of some strange, new plumbing. I don’t know my own strength. Nor do I fully realize my size. I’m inside a colossal fleshy robot, trying to make the arms and legs function. These arms and legs are huge. To stand upright takes a skillful feat of engineering; I overcompensate and stagger a step. Pinwheeling my arms for balance, I scatter paramedics and security guards like tenpins. I’m upright and stumbling, staggering stiff-legged. This is my nightmare: I’m a demure schoolgirl who finds herself stripped half-naked in one of the world’s busiest air travel crossroads. Realizing that my breasts are exposed—also, they’re hirsute and padded with muscle—I squeal and tuck my beefy elbows tight to my ribs to hide my mortified, large brown nipples. My massive hands flapping frantically around my stubbly face, I squeal and take off running. “Golly, I’m sorry,” I chirp, lumbering through the horrified airport masses. “Excuse me,” I shrill as my considerable spurting of man-blood dapples the recoiling gawkers.

Despite my linebacker size I gallop along like a gamine, clutching my bosoms, my shoulders shrugged up to my hairy ears. My steps splayed. Every stride crashes against wheelchairs, baby strollers, luggage carts. In my attempt to pussyfoot I barge and bulldoze my way through the stunned airport malingerers while a team of peace officers sprints after me, their walkie-talkies crackling with static and officious chatter.

I stagger after Satan and his latest hostage, crashing into innocent travelers and trilling, “Golly, gosh, darn…” I try to speak in cheerful peeps, but blast out the words in a strange, blaring voice: “Sorry… my fault… sorry… oops…”

In my pants now I can feel something bobbing and jiggling. My pee-pee feels less like a faithful compadre and more like something gross falling out of my pelvic floor. Like a dangling, pendulous rupture. Like a strangulated hernia several inches long. Ye gods! It’s like taking a poop from the front! How can men tolerate this vile sensation? My vision begins to frost inward from around the edges, and I can guess this is because I’ve lost so much blood. My heart is speeding up. My heart feels the size of a revving Porsche 950. In the near distance I can see Satan dragging his captive through an emergency exit.

My years of sexual assault prevention training come to mind, and I shout, “Rape!” My size-twenty feet clumping along, I bellow, “Help me! Rape!”

My pursuers are a dozen powerful police hands reaching to grab me from behind.

My feet stumble, my blood pressure failing, and I begin to sink to the floor.

Satan observes my humiliation, laughing as soundlessly as any character from Ayn Rand. The blue ghost tethered to him looks back in confusion.

And I shout, “Someone stop him!” I shout, “He’s the Devil!” Hands grab my arms and yank them away from my chest, cruelly baring my hairy, muscular prepubescent breasts, and I shout, “Madison Spencer didn’t tell you the truth! She’s lying!” Woozy now, with hardly sufficient blood to blush modestly over my bared titties, my naked nipples peaking in the frigid LAX air-conditioning, I squeal, “Everyone, please, stop saying the F-word!”

The agony, Gentle Tweeter, is excruciating. Even Satan’s laugh smells like methane. Especially Satan’s laugh. At last, mercifully, my massive giant’s heart fails once more, and all is plunged into darkness.

Gentle Tweeter,

The next time some sensitive, inquiring person asks you whether you believe in life after death, take my advice. That pompous question—which smarty-pants, intellectual Democrat types use to winnow the idiots from their own ilk: Do you believe in an afterlife? Do your personal beliefs include a life after death?—no matter how they phrase their snotty test, do the following. Simply look them in the eye, snort derisively, and retort, “Frankly, only a provincial ignoramus would even believe in death.”

Please allow me to share an anecdote from my former life. This one time, en route to a shooting location in Nuremburg or Nagasaki or Newark, the production company sent exactly the wrong kind of car. In place of an elegant black Lincoln Town Car they sent a customized superstretch Cadillac limousine with all the interior upholstery trimmed in purple chase lights. The carpet’s stench of Ozium was in direct ratio to the number of bachelorettes who’d retched up Long Island iced teas and semen in the backseats, and to make matters worse this particular car had a faulty battery or bladder or alternator or whatnot that wouldn’t hold a charge. And to skip ahead, my mom and dad and I found ourselves standing on the shoulder of some Third World turnpike while a team of automotive paramedics arrived in some towing company ambulance and attempted to give the limo’s heart a shock using two scary-looking nipple clamps. No amount of car defibrillation could restart that odious bus; nor did my parents and I desire to reenter its lumpy interior pungent with expelled bodily fluids.

This is exactly how I feel looking down on the ungainly corpse of poor Harvey Peavey. Once more betrayed by his failed heart, he lies on the not-sanitary carpet of LAX, the bumbling chauffeur whose soul departed in tow with Satan. The paramedics shout, “Clear,” and jolt him with another shock, but no way am I reentering that mess.

“Lucky him,” says a voice. The blue spirit of Mr. Crescent City steps up beside me, both of us looking down on Peavey’s corpse.

I ask, “Where’s your body?” I glance around, but there’s no overdosed rag doll slumped in any of the plastic airport chairs. A short line of three or four people is forming outside the locked door of a handicapped bathroom. Even now that I’m postalive, the thought of using a public toilet fills me with terror. To Crescent City, I say, “Those private toilets are reserved for crippled persons.”