Man Cave

CATHERINE CHUNG

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS ‘26

ACRYLIC, GESSOED COLLAGE, RECYCLED MAGAZINES

with lines from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club

And I ask Tyler, Can I come to fight club?

Tyler says, fight club is for men. He orders a bloody mary and four eggs over easy.

You don’t understand, I tell Tyler. I’m like you. My father fucked me up and if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God and I know no one is coming to save me so I’d like to hit someone about it, please. And I’m not hungry. The waiter leaves. You can’t get what you want by asking for it, Tyler says.

You did. I want you to hit me as hard as you can.

Tyler has a black-bruised cheek and excess blood pooled in his eye socket in the shape of a scythe. How did your father fuck you up, Tyler asks.

He hit me.

Hit him back.

I have. I was seventeen. In the laundry room, my father poured bleach in while I was loading my delicates, lacy underwear I bought at the mall with my paycheck so I could pretend to be a girl instead of the manifestation of rage he made me to be. I socked him in the stomach. He didn’t flinch. He smacked the back of my head and black snow fell behind my eyes until my lingerie disintegrated.

I don’t tell Tyler this. I say, He’s too big. I need practice on fight club’s smaller guys.

You went to class this morning, Tyler says. He kicks my backpack under the laminate table. He says, I ran fight club. I oversaw fifty fights. I fought two guys. I took a canine tooth to the stomach. What makes you think you can handle that?

After the most important man hurts you, a copy of a copy of a copy, it’s impossible not to see how every man has the same five fingers that curl into a fist and the same wide palm.

Tyler says, You can’t be more than five foot three.

His eggs arrive with his drink. He pokes their yolks like busting an optic nerve, and the runny insides pool before Tyler picks up his plate, angles it over his glass, and the yolk drips into his bloody mary. The substances separate, layers of ochre and red like somebody’s insides. Look, he says, you want to be your father, because your father was invincible to you. But nobody’s the center of fight club except the two men fighting. Not your daddy, not your existential crises. Women don’t need fight club. If you want bruises, marry someone who’ll give them to you.

Years ago on my parents’ front porch, in the rocking chairs that needed to be painted, I told my mother about my father’s violence. She looked out at the knee-high grass and said, Do you know what my father did to me? He came back from Vietnam, and you can’t imagine what he brought with him. This is what men are. You find the best one you can, and it gets a little better with each generation. Why can’t we be like them? I asked her. Because without women, she said, there would be no one to show a little tenderness.

But I’m failing my mother. I say, I don’t want to be my father. I want to beat him. I daydream of cracking men’s skulls on the concrete. I say, Tyler, you’re just another man. Finally, Tyler says, a threat. Something worth my time. I say, I learned to fight by watching the fist come toward me. But you can only learn by observation for so long.

I push my seat back to stand. Tyler shoves the table away from himself so it nails me in the stomach. I keel over, hair in my face, and dry heave. He kicks me under the table in the hollow beneath my knees. The checkered floor tile tastes of salt and grease, like french fries, or writhing bodies.

Tyler looks down at me, chewing his egg whites. He doesn’t help me up, but he doesn’t keep me down.

For a second I see my father’s wide face, and I understand: indifference. He could be fighting anyone. This isn’t about me. Before I left home, I hit my little brother. When he came into my bedroom without knocking, changed the TV channel, put his fingers in my bag of chips. Like kids holding hands beside a playground slide to share an electric shock, the pain ran through me and into him.

Tyler opens his fist over his head. Same wide palm. He says, Should I get the check?

Fights go on as long as they have to.

Tyler leans in. No, that’s your problem. Here’s why you can’t come to fight club. You don’t want to fight. I knocked you down, and you fell like you’d been waiting for it. You want all the guys in their forties, fifties, men with kids, you want them to see a little girl at fight club and drop their fists. You want them to prove they’re not all bad. You want a hug.

How tight could they squeeze, I say from the ground, voice cracking. Could they break me open? Could I gag on blood until it drowns the child screaming inside me? Could I resurrect as an innocent body?

If my father went to fight club, I say, blinking rapidly, would he not have hit me?

KELSIE BENNETT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY ‘24