Chuck Palahniuk - Survivor

I listened at the hole the way I listened to people confess over the telephone, the way I listened at crypts for signs of life. I asked, so why does she need me?

"Because you grew up in a different world," the mouth says.

"Because if anybody is going to surprise me, it's going to be you. You're not part of the mass culture, not yet. You're my only hope of seeing anything new. You're the magic prince that can break this spell of boredom. This trance of day-after-day sameness. Eventhere. Done that. You're a control group of one."

But no, I whisper, I'm not all that different.

"Yes, you are," the mouth says. "And your staying different is my only hope."

So give me some predictions.

"No."

Why not?

"Because I'll never see you again. The world of people will eat you up, and I'll lose you. From now on, I'll give you one prediction each week."

How?

"This way," the mouth says. "Just like right now. And don't worry. I'll find you."

According to my itinerary, I'm in a dark television studio on a brown sofa, a 60/40 poly-wool blend by the feel of it, a broadloom weave, treated to resist stains and fading at the center of a dozen stage lights. My hair styled by. My clothes designed by. My jewelry provided by.

My autobiography says I've never been more joyful and fulfilled in my joy of living life every day to its fullest. The press releases say I'm taping a new television program, a half hour every late night when I'll take calls from people needing advice. I'll offer new perspectives. According to the press releases, every so often the show will include a new prediction. A disaster, an earthquake, tidal wave, rain of locusts could be headed your way, so you'd better tune in, just in case.

It's sort of the evening news before the fact. The press release calls the new show Peace of Mind.If you could call it that.

It's Fertility who said I'd be famous someday. She said I'd be telling the whole world about her so I'd better get my facts straight.

Fertility said, after I was famous to describe her eyes as catlike.

Her hair, she said, was storm-tossed. Those were her exact words.

Yeah, and her lips were bee-stung.

She said her arms are as smooth as a skinless chicken breast. According to Fertility, the way she walked was fun-loving. "After you're famous," she told me, "don't make me look like a monster or a victim or anything." Fertility said, "You're going to sell out your entire religion and everything you believe in, just don't lie about me. Okay? Please."

So part of my being famous is I do this weekly sit-down program with a famous television journalist to introduce me. She segues to commercial break. She feeds me the people calling in with questions. The Teleprompter feeds me the answers. People call in on the toll-free line. Help me. Heal me. Feed me. Hear me. It's what I used to do in my dodgy apartment at night only broadcast nationwide. Messiah. Savior. Deliver us. Save us.

The confessions to me in my apartment, the confessions to me on national television, they're all just the same as my story right now into the cockpit flight recorder. My confessional.

With the kinds of drugs I was taking at that point in my career, if you want to sleep at night, you don't want to read the package insert. The side effects include nothing you'd do on national television. Vomiting, flatulence, diarrhea.

The side effects include: headache, fever, dizziness, rashes, sweating.

I could tick them all off:

Dyspepsia.

Constipation.

Malaise.

Somnolence.

Taste perversions.

According to my personal trainer, it's the Primabolin that's making my head buzz. My hands shake. Sweat stands on the back of my neck. It could be a drug interaction.

According to my personal trainer, this is a good thing. Just sitting here, I'm losing weight.

According to my personal trainer, the best way to get illegal steroids is you find a cat sick with leukemia and take it around to veterinarians who will prescribe preloaded syringes of animal steroids equivalent to the best steroids for human use. He said if the I lives long enough, you can stockpile a year's worth.

When I asked him what happens to the cat, he asked, why should he care?

The journalist sits across from me. How her legs look with the rest of her body is not too long. She shows just enough ear for earrings. All her problems are hidden inside. All her flaws are underneath. The only smell she gives off, even her breath, is hair spray. How she's folded into her chair, her legs crossed at the knee, her hands folded in her lap, is less good posture than it is some flesh-and-blood origami.

According to the storyboards, I'm on a sofa in the island of hot light surrounded by television cameras and cables and silent technicians doing their jobs around me in the dark. The agent is there in the shadows with his arms crossed and looking at his watch. The agent turns to where some writers are marking last-minute revisions to the copy before it appears on the Teleprompter.

On a little table next to the sofa is a glass of ice water, and if I pick it up my hand shakes so much the ice cubes ring until the agent shakes his head at me, his mouth making a silent no.

We're taping.

According to the journalist, she feels my pain. She's read my autobiography. She knows all about my humiliation. She's read all about the humiliating ordeal it must've been to be naked and sold as a slave, naked. Me being just seventeen or eighteen years old and all those people, everyone in the cult, being there to see me, naked. A naked slave, she says, in slavery. Naked.

The agent is in my line of sight just over the journalist's shoulder, with the writers crowded around him in the dark, clothed.

Next to the agent, the Teleprompter screen tells me: I FELT VIOLATED BY BEING AUCTIONED NAKED AS A SLAVE.

According to the Teleprompter: I FELT DEEPLY HUMILIATED. According to the Teleprompter: I FELT USED AND DEFILED ... MOLESTED.

The staff writers bunch up around the Teleprompter and mouth the words as I read them aloud.

While I read all this out loud with the cameras watching me, the journalist looks off into the darkness at the director and touches her wrist. The director holds up two fingers, then eight fingers. A technician steps into the light and pats a curl back over the journalist's ear.

The Teleprompter tells me: I WAS SEXUALLY ABUSED. SEXUAL ABUSE WAS COMMONPLACE AMONG THE CREEDISH CULT MEMBERS. INCEST WAS AN EVERYDAY PART OF FAMILY LIFE. SO WAS SEX WITH ALL SORTS OF ANIMALS. SATAN WORSHIP WAS POPULAR. THE CREEDISH SACRIFICED CHILDREN TO SATAN ALL THE TIME, BUT NOT BEFORE ABUSING THEM LIKE CRAZY. THEN THE CREEDISH CHURCH ELDERS KILLED THEM. DRANK THEIR BLOOD. THESE WERE KIDS I SAT NEXT TO IN SCHOOL EVERY DAY. THE CHURCH ELDERS ATE THEM. WHEN THERE WAS A FULL MOON, CHURCH ELDERS DANCED NAKED, WEARING JUST THE SKINS OF DEAD CREEDISH CHILDREN. Yeah, I say, it was all really, really stressful. The Teleprompter says: YOU CAN FIND ALL THE VIVID ACCOUNTS OF THE CREEDISH SEX CRIMES IN MY BOOK. IT'S CALLED SAVED FROM SALVATION AND IT'S IN BOOKSTORES EVERYWHERE.

In the shadows, the agent and the writers give each other silent high fives. The agent gives me a big thumbs-up.

My hands are numb. I can't feel my face. My tongue belongs to somebody else. My lips are dead with circumoral paresthesia.

Side effects.

Peripheral paresthesia kills any feeling in my feet. My whole body feels as far away and detached as the picture of me wearing a black suit and sitting on a brown sofa on the studio monitor, the way it's supposed to feel as your soul goes up to Heaven and watches the rest of you, the flesh and blood of you, die.

The director is waving his fingers at me, two fingers on his one hand and four on his other. What he's trying to tell me I don't know.