Work Text:
Once they start, the dreams don't stop.
Anyone else in my position would be happy to be sleeping at all. Not me. I come home from my dead-end job to my decrepit dead-end life hanging from the twisted metal of a street sign, with Marla Singer's screaming and Tyler Durden's 'fuck yeah's bouncing off the walls of my warm little center that the human wastes of this world took for their own. This isn't sleeping. This is lying with glazed eyes on a lumpy, caved-in mattress spilling its guts at the seams putting image to sound. Changeover's got nothing on this.
Play. Rewind. Play. Rewind. Click. Rinse and repeat until you've successfully blue-balled your way through the night. I am chasing away the sun, because no one gives a fuck what I think when the whole world goes on stand-by. Static is the only thing you get in the twilight hour. That, and cheap pay-by-the-dollar porn. I get the latter for free. Blindfolded, with the volume turned all the way up. I've contemplated killing for a mute button.
I am no longer the Zen Master. I am no longer the gravitational pull of the soon-to-be-dead. I am Jack's raging hard-on, and I despise Marla Singer more than I can say. Fucking tourist. She stole my support groups and sent me on this carnival ride to hell, then she came crawling back like the cancerous tumor she was and suckered onto my journey of absolution. The parasite laid her eggs under my skin, and now they begin to hatch.
I can't even thank her for delivering me to Tyler. Marla. The cancer eating at me every waking hour. There has to be a support group for this. I don't have real cancer, testicular or bowel, and I don't have a brain parasite, but I had Tyler and now she is stealing him away from me, demanding what I was too afraid to ask for. I am forged out of iron now and I still can't cut the foreplay.
I'm hard. I've been hard for days - months - years, sat on the can racing to the finish line with a crumpled ball of toilet paper pressed to the tip of my cock, caring too little about bodily function and too much about the monthly IKEA catalog delivered right to my doorstep. I bite my lip when I think about it, in its wrinkled plastic just ready to be devoured.
I am a consumerist, it's in my blood. I can live without my strine green stripe patterns, Tyler, but I have to take something and make it mine. I start to stroke myself slowly. I don't have to take care to match it to the swing of Tyler's hips as he forces his way into Marla's halfway-corpse; I've heard him driving the bedposts into the wall above my head long enough for it to be ingrained into my subconscious.
I'm always, always around to hear. Sometimes, when the pitch of Marla's voice rises so high the glassless window frames rattle and the damp-infested plaster threatens to come down over my head, I wonder. Wonder what Tyler's doing to turn her into orgasmic waste, bottling her like lye. Marla is a human chemical burn just waiting to throw itself all over me, with Tyler's lips and Tyler's hands and Tyler's cock ready to brand itself into my skin.
He is breaking her down from the compound every-fuck she was, regressing her all the way back to bottom. Tyler is an animal. He fucks like I want him to fuck – like he fights. Primal and merciless. He wants to bring ruin to all that stands in his way, and right now that something is Marla Singer's gaping cunt. Tyler Durden doesn't like beautiful. That's an artificial concept in itself.
I remember letting the side of my face cave in during one of my first fights, not tapping out, the guy driving my face into concrete once, twice, three times until my blood ran black. Tyler Durden doesn't like beautiful. He doesn't want pretty. I was too much of both, so I went and ruined myself for him. Watching him acknowledge the blood spatter left in the grit and dirt we'd made our own kept me hard for weeks.
It was only after he'd taken Marla in that I realised Tyler never settled for broken, either. He wants a body to destroy all on his own. He fucks her like I want to be fuck. He has ruined her like I wanted to be ruined. I am Jack's endless wet dream, and I'll never go away.
My dick twitches in my grip as Tyler's loud moan lifts an octave higher and I imagine that Marla's slipped a finger in his ass. Everyone thinks that anything worth mentioning during sex happens below the belt. It's not. It's all about completing a neuro-chemical circuit in your brain. That's all sex is, all an orgasm is. Your reward circuitry kicking in, sending you wild with the craving to fuck, to pass on your genes.
Dopamine. All addiction stems from dopamine – porn, money, power, fame... it's all to do with getting yourself high on brain chemicals. Brain-smack.
Doctors will drug you up to the eyeballs on bullshit 'natural remedy' lectures before they'll feed you meds for insomnia. Masturbation was always in the top five, because some genius figured coming twelve times a day would leave you running so high you couldn't possibly give a shit about anything beyond the tightening of your ballsac. Chronic insomniacs probably get hooked on dopamine every day of the week. Bam. Police bursting through the door to find some suicidal fuck trying to find a release from the world, drowning in their own come.
Some people are too good for empty pill bottles and torn foil packets blaring the in-season prescription brand. Marla Singer is too good for that.
I feel myself getting closer, so I close my eyes and let the crumbling ceiling above my bed fall away. Tyler and Marla aren't in the same room, but they're so loud that they could be and two years of meditative conditioning kicks in, guided by their screams:
'Fuck, fuck, step forward into your cave, Jesus Christ, fuck me, you pathetic piece of shit...!'
And there's Marla, all dressed up as my 'power animal', cigarette smoke shroud wrapped around her. And it's not just her this time, no, now I'm caught in the middle. Tyler and Marla, Marla and Tyler. I can feel heat on my shirtless back even as my nipples harden under Marla's frosty gaze, so I turn to Tyler, all fire and leather and rose-tinted glasses, melting away my cave.
And he's so bright he transcends normal flame, a burning white light. A healing light. Tyler smirks that dirty smirk at me and I’m startled out of my own head with a jerk. Sleep. I'd been falling asleep and I hadn't even realised it, no longer jacking off but simply holding meat in my hand. I glance down a bruised body no longer my own to watch it strain towards the ceiling, towards Marla begging Tyler for 'deeper'.
I can't help it. I squeeze in frustration, watch my own dick flush an ugly red with blood. Everything about this sex organ is ugly, with the skin drawn tight at the tip then wrinkled at the scrotum. One of Tyler's little space monkeys, leaking brain fluid. Ready to be shot into space.
I don't have a death-wish. I just want to sleep, for Christ's sake.
I think of Tyler's wet, naked body on the beach we first met on, sand clinging to his thighs and the curve of his ass. I think of him fucking me under driftwood logs, held in the palm of perfection-turned-Nosferatu he'd created, the last half-inch slipping inside of me. Tyler is an artist. He molded Marla into his sport fuck as I lay back and let him sculpt me into his through the rain-swollen walls. We are his reels of film, and he's splicing himself into us, getting us ready for the changeover.
We go outside, with our bruises and our bite-marks and the rest of the world has no idea. When my boss walks in and catches me swallowing down blood that's been congealing in my throat for hours, when Marla goes to support groups with hickeys circling her neck like a collar, no one knows that it's just the price you pay to hit bottom with Tyler.
Play. Rewind. Play. Rewind. Play – I think of Marla again, hiding behind my green door cloaked with ice, lumpy tits to match the ten-minute lie plastered to my right foot. Her lie reflected my lie through her raccoon eyes and suddenly we're one and the same person, the eggs hatch and suddenly I'm there, under Tyler, over him, my legs wrapped around his waist, throat wrapped around his cock, letting him push one, two, three, four fingers into me and then...
The high. Dopamine rushes through my veins like the first drag of a cigarette after a long day of stealing jeans out of dryers and selling them to a thrift store at fifteen bucks a pair. Some guy once claimed orgasm was the biggest heroin rush legally available in the US. I'm a smack addict and I don't even know it.
At orgasm, dopamine drops like a lead balloon, and I'm coming into my hand, already waiting for the prolactin to hit and the addiction to spiral.
Click. The room moves in time to my shuddering gasps. One moment. One moment of perfection. I've never asked what happened when the moment is over. 'Without pain, without sacrifice, we'd have nothing.' Tyler would tell me that at least I'd had something. I haven't slept. How long have I slept? It doesn't matter.
All that matters is what goes up, must come down. And I'm going down, down, down, sinking through the mattress and into my own personal hell. They've stopped. I can't hear them anymore. Orgasm can't make you deaf, nor can self-flagellation. I wonder if they've finally gone too far, if Tyler has killed her with something that requires more than a rubber glove. Marla would beg him to do it, find it fitting – she's always been one for the spiritual bullshit.
I wonder if I'd never given her my phone number, would she have taken that Xanax anyway and fucked herself with the dildo on her dresser, just so her death rattle could be heard over the too-loud TVs by the druggies shooting up?
No. Marla is a cry-for-help case. If she wants to die so badly, she would've fucking done it already. She clings to life even as she claims to escape it, like the parasite she is. Faker. Tourist. The tumor of this world that exists among the dead. Tyler thinks she's trying to hit bottom? He doesn't know a thing about her. 'Marla doesn't need a lover she needs a fucking case worker.'
What is it that I need, Tyler?
I turn my head to the door and catch Tyler standing there, indifferent. My first thought isn't fear and an excuse, as it would've been before coming to this house, before listening night after night as Tyler and Marla fucked the walls away. The door is wide open, and I don't remember whether I left it there by accident or not. Tyler wouldn't break house rules. 'The first rule of 1537 Paper Street is...'
I wanted Tyler to see this, didn't I? I wanted him to watch me jerk off, prostrate myself willingly at his altar. I don't want to be a space monkey. I don't want to be Marla, with her yawning holes that Tyler's tongue and Tyler's cock and Tyler's fist claimed as their own. But Tyler is still watching, wearing an expressionless mask, so all I can do is wipe my come-stained palm on the mattress. I let the filthy remnants that slip through my fingers melt into the scar of Tyler's kiss.
I ask if I've hit bottom yet. "Soon," he says. "Soon." Tyler says a lot of things. I am Jack's -
No. Fuck this delusion. I've always been Tyler's.