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Heaven isn’t anything like you expect.
Heaven is like the aftermath of a nuclear war, everything bomb-stricken and silent. Heaven is the world in the grip of another black plague, the few surviving members of the human race hopeless and powerless and waiting for it all to end.
In heaven, there are no more haughty men in business suits, no more trophy wives riddled with plastic surgery scars. There are no liposuction clinics, no overpriced jewelry or chunky gold watches.
Heaven’s celebrity perfume is Tyler Durden’s sweat. Its daytime television is Project Mayhem, emptying the pig troughs. Project Mayhem, husking the corn and planting the barley seeds, Project Mayhem heaping buckets of lake water into their purification machine made of old stage curtains and period evening gowns from some abandoned theater. Project Mayhem with their steps in synch like the militia of a country with no enemies.
In heaven, the flowers that get crushed under your bare heels are one shade lighter than cornflower blue. The sky, free of all its smog and airplane trails, it’s nowhere near the color called sky blue.
Heaven’s music is the wafting sound of Frank Sinatra from Tyler’s record player, the crinkling of a fire fed by the autobiographies of Joe’s spleen and Jill’s fallopian tubes. The scratching of scrawny, feral, once-prodigy greyhounds, purebred dalmations and bloody, mangled persians, humbled and begging for your trash. The hooting of monkeys escaped from the zoo.
Heaven is Tyler lounging naked on a beat-up Porsche like a Sports Illustrated model, eating roasted pigeon off someone’s antique china, a cigarette from some obsolete drugstore in his hand as he tells you, “you’re dreaming.”
“I’m dead,” you tell him. You smell nicotine, gasoline and the unassuming scent of earth. “I’m dead and I’m in heaven.”
“You’re not dead. This is just a dream,” Tyler corrects you. “My dream, to be exact, and just like my life, it’s ending.”
He’s watching you like he’s expecting an answer. You shrug, and watch him chew off the last bit of flesh from the miniscule pigeon bones, then he pitches the plate off into the distance like a frisbee. The crash seems quieter than it should.
He swings his legs down over the side of the car and pats the space next to him. You climb up, broken glass jamming into the rough soles of your feet, and you watch the sun setting behind the jagged, crumbling skyline.
Tyler says, “this is what happens in every failed revolution. Someone shoots the guy who dreamed it up, and you’ve got a never-ending power struggle. The maps are right in front of you, but no matter how far you run, you’ll just get further and further behind.”
He leans back and takes a long drag on his cigarette.
“The chaos you get,” Tyler says, “isn’t the chaos you want. Without leadership, nobody remembers what they wanted in the first place.”
Tyler says, “too bad, because this is all I ever wanted.”
You turn to look at him, and find him gone. You’re alone, and the sun’s gone down beneath the horizon of toppling buildings with broken windows. Project Mayhem is shuffling back into Tyler’s house, bags slung over their shoulders as they chant, “you are not the seeds you plant. You are not the deer you kill. You are the same decaying, organic matter as everyone else.”
You wake up at Wilmington Hospital, fluorescent lights flickering above you and traffic blaring outside your window, and Marla tells you, “it’s going to be all right.”