Chuck Palahniuk: Invisible Monsters Remix

In the Swiss Alps I had no cell phone coverage, and the voice mails from my mother have accumulated: updates about her chemotherapy, her blood work, her garden. Each one ends with I love you instead of Good-bye . Instead of pressing seven to erase them, I press nine to save them for another ninety days. I can’t listen to them all before I just start pressing nine.

The next morning, room service delivers a lavish breakfast to my sumptuous penthouse suite at the Hilton, and there folded on the table next to my egg white omelet and my whole-wheat toast, no butter, and my coffee, black, no sugar, is the Sunday Los Angeles Times , and on the front page is an obituary for David Foster Wallace. Next to that are a knife …a fork …and a bud vase holding a yellow rose. Two days earlier, a few miles east of here, while I was pretending to journalists that Choke is a romantic comedy—because who ever heard of selling a romantic tragedy ?—David Foster Wallace hung himself. It’s not until he’s dead, and I’m reading his obituary, that I see we have the same birthday. We were both born on February 21, 1962. Please don’t ask me if this means something. Please don’t ask me if anything makes sense.

Anjelica Huston’s husband dies.

Flash.

My mother dies. I erase the message from the trapped makeup artist and wonder if anyone ever helped her escape. Otherwise, I keep pressing nine, trying to buy the sound of my mother’s voice, her words, another three months, then another three months. Then, yet another three months.

Flash.

Every story is an experiment in collecting, organizing, and presenting details. An inventory of facts. Yes, all of this effort is being expended to preserve the memories of one person …I mean, I keep quilting together these moments I’ve loved, but as per usual I’ve failed. The heaped-up truths, they’re already starting to teeter sideways. Coincidence fatigue sets in. Pathos overload occurs, and after five pages the details shudder and topple into dust. A better architect could keep his lines plumb and distribute the stresses, but me, I can only start over:

Where you’re supposed to be is at home folding the clean laundry …

Where you’re supposed to be is feeding the dog …

The caterers are passing Thai salad rolls with peanut dipping sauce. The caterers are passing blackened tilapia topped with a sweet corn salsa. If you ask me why I keep trying, all I can say is: So far, so good.

I’m still pressing nine. I’m always pressing nine.

Where I’m at is a big Episcopal church in downtown Newark, New Jersey, sitting in the dark while I try to write down everything. But isn’t that always the impossible impulse? Don’t we always try to rescue the doomed bits and pieces of life, in the hope that a mere story can become Noah’s Ark and deliver all the living things of the past to a bright and glorious immortality?