The End of Law: Part in the First
(Homage to Fight Club, by Chuck Palanhniuk)




If you face death and survive, for the moment of direct confrontation; you are immortal.




Beff gets me a job in a diner, after that he is pushing a gun between my lips and saying the first step to eternal life is you have to die. I thought we were best friends. Everyone was always asking me, did I know Beff Pike?

And now I am going to die.

But that’s not the beginning, not where it started.

I was dead before he found me, gave me life. And then he was saying, “You have to give up everything. Even your life.”

He said, “You have to destroy everything before you can ever really create anything.” Too late it occurred to me to ask; where it would end? And it all started with such innocence. Then, one day in a theatre watching a movie with my at-the-time girlfriend, he was suddenly behind me, sitting in the seat beside and to the left of me and my girlfriend. Lascivious Pike, braggadocio Beff, he said…

“This is a movie about the subjugation of the penis,” he remarked when of the on-screen romance playing out before us. Declarations like this would become commonplace. “The women’s lib movement has gone so far left. They’re trying to kill the erection.”

The movie was tripe, pure and unadulterated crap spewed out of some high volume production ring and pumped through the masses with such vigorous media hype you’d get a migraine from not going to see the fucking thing. It billed itself as ‘The Romance of the Year’ and had overtly female overtones. They called the things ‘chick flicks’.

“You tell yourself; I’m seeing this movie because my girlfriend will like it and maybe I’ll get laid out of the deal.” He balled up a fistful of popcorn, shoved it between his lips and while masticating added, “but let me ask you… Where’s the sex in this? The hero is a feminist dyke. What kind of protagonist wears a thong and tub-top in mixed company and sells herself as a heroine to girls ten and up? And the strongest male character is the villain; a dickless wonder whose only ambition seems to be to win and rig the electoral process.”

“If she doesn’t want to chop it off by the time you get home maybe, just maybe, you’ll land a pity fuck.”

I was transfixed. My girlfriend at the time, disgusted, had stormed out. She paused and leered at me. I realized she expected me to follow. Snails and turtles have moved faster. The last thing she said was something about not doing this here and then she was gone. To this day I haven’t spoken to her again.

“Smooth,” the man smirked, stealing at my popped corn. “Did you know that cellophane is extremely flammable?”

He was about as tall as me, sitting down, but possessed the kind of body generally reserved for movie stars and runway models. I don’t recall that I had ever been attracted to a man before; there was a sort of nonchalant ruggedness about him. It was as though he did not exist within the same dimension of reality as the rest of us, as if he occupied some rift in space and time reserved especially for him.

A fire alarm beckoned our attention.

Moments later we were evacuating the theater. There had been a fire in the old-style projection booth. Tomorrows headlines would read ‘Bizarre Fire Sparked in Old Town Theatre, Arson Suspected’. I knew. But as the crowds dispersed and the chaos died away to a dull roar, Beff Pike had gone.

That night, at home, I listened to my phone messages (two of which had been left by her) deleted the bunch and went to sleep.





I wake up in the morning; it’s another planet, another star system. In transit everything becomes subjective. You realize that time, beyond the confines of society, has little practical application; at least not on any human scale. Shuttles rush to make their deadlines departing one port of call at three thirty on a Wednesday and arriving at another two days earlier and with time to spare. The inter-galactic jet set subscribe to their own timeline, apparent and relevant to themselves alone. On a long enough time line the life expectancy of anyone drops to zero.

That’s what I do for a living, how I make my money. I am an insurance adjuster for an sizable corporation. I call it ‘the Syndicate’. Traveling, I always use an alias and it’s always supplied by the company. An inveterate name, my employers prefer that I do not advertise my position abroad simply because of the general animosity it tends to provoke in others.

I have had food thrown at me by complete strangers. Once, on a long work sojourn typed up as a ‘temporary sabbatical’ (my position also involves instructing junior employees in the policies and procedures of the Syndicate) to review the potential establishment of a branch office in new territory, I mentioned to the woman in the seat aside my own just what it was I did, what I called an occupation. I could have been more solicitous in my approach.

“Take the total number of persons in a single cultural unit,” I said striking a few lines on the tray of my in-flight meal. “Assume for the example that our societal element has a total population of one million individuals.”

“Select a ratio of people’s representative of each major demographic. Utilize this group of individuals as your test base to calibrate a per-capita cost and worth analysis of each individual based on a number of significant factors such as current net income, previous financial histories, and incurred debt as well as current and previous expenses. Incorporate all available information such as medical history, family trees and so on… every bit of data gathered on any given subject will enhance the final result… Subjective data is less useful. You want hard, solid facts.”

“Assign each demographic a value based on the results of your previous examination. These values reflect the current contribution or drain each element effects on the society as a whole.”

“Multiply the value of each demographic by the number of persons incorporated in those demographics. Tally the results and add them together. The resulting series of digits is then entered into a computer which compares the number to additional variables too rapidly fluctuating for standardized formulae.”

“The computer will then produce a series of financial values for the society as a whole, reducing its complexity to a purely monetary state.”

“If the value of the society does not indicate a profit, we don’t… invest.”

Throughout my diatribe I had not intended to sound insincere or aloof in my regard for the people I was turning into dollar signs, though I think that certain nonchalance had crept into my tone. So I was not entirely surprised when she up-ended her pasta in my lap and stormed off to the bathroom. Aliens, in my experience, tended to have the least appreciation for the complexity of my profession.





Pain is funny.

You can watch a man get hit in the groin a dozen times over and laugh out loud with each blow. That’s humor.

If you forget how to deal with pain, and I mean the physical sort, and go for too long without knowing it when it does come upon you, all too often, it hits with an intensity we are not prepared for.

Heroine addicts say the same thing about their first hit.

Pain is like a drug. Once you have it you can never let it go. Makes you sharp, like a weapon pain does. It turns down the volume of the world, lets you put people on mute and gives you endless patience to concentrate on the pain and nothing else. Pain blocks everything out.

I felt like a teen slipping my hand under a girl’s shirt for the first time. Felt like I was high and falling. My guts wanted to explode and I felt like I could puke up my lungs. And then, in a flash, I was on the ground broken and bleeding and confused. The sky was on fire. Bits of paper floated about on the breeze burning as they tumbled, spiraling to the ground around me. Each one hit with the impact of a meteor, shook the ground and made my ears pound. A torch blazed, sat upon a blackened pillar of smoke and ash.

I had been seriously concussed by the blast.

The blast that had previously been my fifty first floor apartment, which had opened my home to the dark night and sent my possessions, flaming, out into the moonlit sky. The blast, the explosion that had lifted me from my bed and flung me, amongst the debris of my life, out.

In the hospital, a day later; I was floating. I had faced death and survived. I’d never been so happy for my own life.

And then, wearing an orderly’s smock and the shit-eating grin of the dog that just chewed up your best shoes, Beff Pike strolled into my room in the hospital and asked, “Did you see God?”

That was how I came to live with Beff Pike.

It didn't strike me as unusual; his general approach.

He'd come to see me when the nurses and doctors weren't about. In that ridiculous lab coat with a stethoscope slung around his neck, he would make a big show of examining my charts and making light of my uncomfortable position. I had burns up and down my legs and had to be suspended on foam supports the result of which was that, throughout the long hours, I'd sit with legs lifted and spread eagle.

“You're progressing well,” he would joke. “I think it's time for your enema.”

For almost a year, Beff Pike was the only friend I had.

So, when it finally came time for me to be discharged from the hospital, I was not all that surprised when he asked if I would come stay with him.

You see, the police had not gotten around to closing the book on my case and so, ever the bitter enemy, my insurance agency refused to pay out. I left the hospital that day deeper in debt then I had ever been, thank you very much Medical Institution Six, and without a home to call my own.

Beff said, “It's not like you have much choice. What else do you have?”

Nothing, I'd told myself. And it was the truth. My parents were both dead, had been dead since I was a child. Their parents had passed on long before I was even conceived and none had any siblings or even cousins to speak of. Sure, I had friends... but they were not the sort of people you went to when you needed help. I called them “my fair weather friends”. I thought about calling my Ex, and then thought better of it.

I conceded.

Beff Pike lived in a run down old estate on the wrong side of the tracks ten kilometers from the nearest neighborhood and in the midst of what had become a semi-industrial storage area. The rumbling roar of cargo and freight liners shook the walls during the night and the rats and mice would get scared out of their holes. Without any real inclination as to how he had come to possess such a home, I didn't ask.

My room was on the third floor and you'd have to walk around the soft spots in the floor to avoid busting through. The pipes were rusted or broken and what little liquid they did produce could hardly be called water. If it rained all the wood and plaster would swell and dimple while the roof was little more then a sieve for the torrents that would collect and pool in the cracks.

Power, by which I mean electricity, reached the house via a network of jury rigged cables that trailed off into the distance before vanishing under the fences of one of the freight and storage depots.

The house had everything a person needed to live, to be part of society, and nothing more... nothing else.

Previously the place had belonged to some sort of gangster, or so Beff told me. It had been handed down the ranks, part of an expanding syndicate, until finally being relegated to a gang-spot, a club for hoodlums to loaf about in doing their narcotics. Needles and broken pipes were strewn all about and you had to be careful not to split your foot on some years-old drug paraphernalia left to rot like so much debris. He would tease me that there were bodies buried in the back yard.





We had gone out for drinks which meant beers at the 'local' biker hangout. Almost five klicks from Pikes place, we had to walk there and back as neither of us owned a vehicle nor cared to update our drivers licenses. Drinking didn't often appeal to me but the police had called, I'm not sure how they had found me at Pikes number, and wanted to ask me a few questions about the explosion.

This is a year later and they are finally getting back to me. A Detective has been assigned to my case.

“Do you have any enemies that would want to blow you up?” The voice on the telephone asked. “Any old grudges that you neglected to tell us about?”

I am totally stunned, frozen in place. I gargle something about who would want to kill me?

“It seems that someone picked the electronic lock to your apartment prior to the explosion. Do you know anyone who might know how to do that?”

And then Pike is standing at my shoulder and he says, “Tell him that you are an enemy of the state and that one of your pipe-bombs went off by accident. You almost killed yourself but you were trying to kill the President. That's what he wants to hear.”

Suddenly I am outraged and it is as though I am looking at myself from the outside. I can hear myself telling the detective that those things were my life, that I had worked hard to get where I was in life and I did not go around making enemies. Before the explosion I had never been so passionate about my possessions. I was emblazoned.

“We will need you to not leave town for a while,” the cop said. “Someone from the department will contact you shortly. We would like to bring you down to the station to review some evidence.”

After that the long walk to the bar seemed well worth it.





The bar was quiet and so we managed to get our own table. A half empty pitcher of beer sat between us and the droning sounds of a Country and Western artist provided the ambiance. It smelled of grease and sweat. My feet stuck to the floor crushing peanut shells with each step. Before, I'd never have patronized a place like this.

Before I knew it I was asking Beff questions I had already told myself I wouldn't bother with.

The mystery of Pike had eluded me, enchanted me and tempted me to consider possibilities I could not previously, morally, consider. Thus I had decided that I would not investigate too deeply the persona of Pike until he chose to reveal himself to me, as he chose to reveal himself to me. My lips loosened by alcohol, however; I was soon querying of him those very things.

“If you wanted to know, you should have just asked,” he told me point-blank over the rim of his beer. “Doesn't mean I'll tell you, but you can ask.”

And so I did. I wanted to know how he had gotten a hold of the house.

“I told you the bodies are buried in the back. I wasn't joking. Crime begets punishment; that is the cycle. The house is mine because I took it and it is mine because I keep it.”

What about morals? What about law?

He leaned close to me, so close I could feel the heat of his breath against my face. “The only things that matter in this life are those things you chose to care about. No one else can make that choice for you.”

And then, he hit me...