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I met Tyler Durden again on the plane, and then he followed me home and drank me dry like a Capri-Sun. He was real messy about it, biting through my flesh in a way he probably didn’t have to, opening up my vital arteries like he was strip mining.
All in all, the only fast part was how quickly my blood stained my Stoense rug.
Tyler always had a flair for the dramatic, so he laid me down on my Njurunda coffee tables1 like he had sat himself in his driftwood hand. Tyler asked me, “Anything you want to say or do before you die? Have you felt your freedom or are you clinging to your chains?”
I cowered and didn’t respond, dreaming of my power animal being eaten by a leopard seal.
Tyler said, “This is your life. Good till the last drop. This is the greatest moment in your life, and you’re missing it.”
And that was where everything went wrong, or right, because instead of begging for mercy or bleeding out with pride, I lurched up and tore him a matching hole in the crook of his throat.
His blood filled my mouth and I swallowed the sinew and I felt like I could finally sleep. The last thing I saw was Tyler’s begrudging respect.
So, he blew up my condo.
I woke up at Paper Street with a killer headache and the blood of five men on me.2 Tyler lurked by my bed. He told me, “You’re a real desperate thing, aren’t you?” and informed me I could hang around with him and avoid having one of the clans find me, or I could become vampiric foie gras. My choice. The area without the chunk of meat I had taken from him was already swelling itself back together, a pus filled cavity. I wondered if that was how my own looked. I wondered whose blood was pooling in my body.
That is how I came to live at Paper Street with Tyler Durden, and why I now follow Tyler Durden around, trying to learn to eat men.
The immediate benefit of becoming a vampire is that I no longer need to sleep. Unfortunately, I was turned in a state of immense sleep deprivation, so I look and function the same. The downside of biting out a sizeable portion of Tyler’s throat is that I did not die, and now when I go to work my boss smells like fast food french fries and honey glazed meats. Tyler assures me that if I properly gorge myself, I can avoid eating the small animals and large humans around me despite my very young age. He says it's partially because I'm naturally verklempt, something he intends to fix as he helps me hit bottom.
That’s the whole point, for Tyler. He says that’s why he likes to eat men whole. He says I ruined his plans for me. He had seen me on the beach, on the plane, and I rejected his gift to me. Now I’m making him put in all this extra work. But it’s worth it, because it’s the most interesting thing that’s happened to him these past two centuries.
I’m sorry, Tyler. You’re welcome, Tyler.
These conversations happen over random businessmen in whatever town I’ve been forced to fly into that week. Tyler says it’s cute that I want to keep my job for the travel benefits so I don’t get accused of being a serial killer. He still travels along with me, waving his hand at anyone important and making it obvious that he could get us tickets to anywhere.3
The car wrecks have a new level of awful about them. The smell of cauterized human fat is still appalling, but now it makes me crave blood clots. Maybe it’s that small amount of Tyler in me that gives me a hankering for a more than liquid diet.
I wonder if there is a support group for this. I think Marla could be a vampire. I tell Tyler this.
Tyler says, “She’s not, and you shouldn’t go to the groups anymore.4 If you try to eat one of those chemo patients it’ll drive you insane for a year or two.” He pauses. “Actually, you should give it a try. They like to do hard shit if they know they’re on the way out.”
No thank you, Tyler. I just wanted to know if there’s others that went through this. Maybe I could talk with them. It seems like a while since you did.
“What did I tell you about the clans, man?5” Tyler says. “You do not want to meet other vampires. Besides, there’s sooner going to be a support group for all your victims. Shit. Tell me if there is, we can go to that one.”
I try to avoid learning about support groups after that.
It’s crazy, how much I took for granted when I was a human shitstain. Maybe that’s what Tyler means. Instead of failing to sleep, I now fail to enter a state of torpor, and remain painfully aware of every second of my now immortal life. This is my life, and it is extending one minute at a time. The freedom of my death is quite distant. I think, I am glad Tyler is here. At least I am not alone, and I have a man invested in me enough that he’s hoping to convince me to eat someone’s yorkie.
And so, of course, Tyler starts to turn other men.
He piles them in our basement. Tyler tells me, “You showed me what I could do. I can turn these freaks and we can have a clan of our own.” I try not to think how the concrete walls below us could be the cage one traps geese in. The boys6 worship the ground Tyler walks on, being far more evocative about how dangling them in front of death then ripping them from it inspired them. He sends them out on little trips, and the murder count in the surrounding suburbs skyrockets. Tyler starts to disappear, and I know what he’s doing. Franchising.
I am Jack’s broken heart. Not just unbeating, now torn in half.
I take my rage out on one of the upstarts. I rip his face off. He sits there wailing, blood seeping from his muscles, nerves pulled loose along his jaw. I massacre him until he’s a pile of seething ooze that takes weeks to thank me for it. All the boys look up to me since I'm the first of Tyler’s creations. Tyler took my life apart and made me anew and he’s not even here to see it.
I start to hunt Tyler down. I don’t have a job, anymore. I ate my boss. I wave myself through airport security and sit in the copilot’s lap while I teethe on him.7 No awareness of cameras or consequences or CCTV. I am a bloodhound and I follow the traces of Tyler as he sweeps through LAX. O’Hare. MCO. SeaTac. I find his children abandoned and praying in dank basements. There’s vampires and humans alike. I grind their noses through concrete until they stop feasting long enough to tell me where Tyler Durden is.
It’s always somewhere else.
Tyler is glutting his clan with fresh blood. He is raising an army. I don’t see how the clans will ignore this. They could track him better than I could. My search twists itself into a great need to prevent Tyler from sentencing us to eternal torture.
I find him at Paper Street, with all the urchins chased out of the basement. I say, Tyler, what the fuck are you doing. I don’t want to spend all our undead lives on matching Judas cradles.
Tyler says, “If the clans caught us they wouldn’t skimp on variety, you should know that by now.”
What the fuck, Tyler, I repeat.
Tyler says, “This is your life, and it’s extending one minute at a time. If I killed you again, if I strung you apart and buried your pieces in the four corners of the compass, would you even care? Did you learn nothing?”
I say, I liked what we had. Living at Paper Street, surviving on businessmen.
“You just settled into your new routine,” Tyler says, and I’ve never seen him so fucking angry. “I’m done with that.”
Don’t pretend you just didn’t want to make your own clan, I say, your own new world order. He left me.
“It’s supposed to be ours,” Tyler says. “Our clan. Our new world order.”
I laugh. Tyler, I am just the first you made. I’m not special. I’m a fancy you’ll fly by in the next decade.8
Tyler takes a page out of my book, grabs me, and chews a chunk of my throat out. Now, I can only wheeze. I watch him eat me. Now, both of us have an immortal piece of the other in us.
“These idiots worship you because I tell them to. I made this all for you. They are nothing,” Tyler says. “If you want to be important to me then why don’t you do something about it?”
I hunted you across the country, I snap. I chased you down and found all your illicit offspring.
“And that made me hard as rocks,” Tyler says, “but what are you going to do now?”
I have nothing to say. Tyler hasn’t fucked any of his franchisees.9 It’s like tossing a starving dog a hunk of raw, bleeding prime rib. I jump on him and chew his lips open. I let him eat my tongue.
Tyler says, “Always needing some fucking direction, aren’t you,” but he says it in that satisfied way, like I’ve passed his little test by grinding my undead boner into his hip.
I’m Best in Show.
I think I am still disappointing Tyler, somehow. The fear of what his project will bring us still lurks in the back of my mind. However, it’s increasingly easy to ignore in the face of eternity at Tyler’s side. I find that I’ve gotten a taste. Emboldened.
Tyler had asked me, what did I want to do before I died?
I won’t die.
I won’t lie dead, either. I think, I’ve hit bottom, and the light shining down on me is my future with Tyler Durden. I would fill this hole with all the bodies of all the men Tyler has turned, every member of every clan. There is certainly insanity right at my fingertips, and Tyler kisses me full of it.
- Maybe being both alive and dead fit the image. Tyler probably loved it.[ ▲ ]
- I only knew two of them.[ ▲ ]
- He won’t do it for me. Tyler says I should learn the jedi mind tricks, trial by fire. If truly needed, he’d help break me out of prison.[ ▲ ]
- I already wasn’t. Didn’t feel right to talk to dying people with me already being dead and my body count rapidly rising.[ ▲ ]
- Mostly, he just said that if I saw a bald vampire, I should run.[ ▲ ]
- They already feel so much younger than me. I wonder if I am like a gnat to Tyler. A favored fly.[ ▲ ]
- I only do this once or twice. It might be a new type of mile high club. Mostly, I only take blood.[ ▲ ]
- Tyler himself told me this. He told me that I should take advantage of every second I have in his godly presence. And then he left me.[ ▲ ]
- As far as I know. But if I find out he is fucking them, I will rip them into subatomic matter. Torture would be too kind. I used to be such a nice person.[ ▲ ]