Diary by Chuck Palahniuk (classic fiction .txt) 📗

A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

Just for the record, today your poor wife, she drops a butter knife in the hotel dining room. When she bends to pick it up, something's reflected in the silver blade. It's some words written on the underside of table six. On her hands and knees, she lifts the edge of the tablecloth. On the wood, there with the dried chewing gum and crumbs of snot, it says, “Don't let them trick you again.”

Written in pencil, it says, “Choose any book at the library.”

Somebody's homemade immortality. Their lasting effect. This is their life after death.

Just for the record, the weather today is partly soused with occasional bursts of despair and irritation.

The message under table six, the faint penciled handwriting, it's signed Maura Kincaid.

June 29—

The New Moon

IN OCEAN PARK, the man answers his front door, a wineglass in one hand, some kind of bright orange wine filling it up to his index finger on the side of the glass. He's wearing a white terry cloth bathrobe with “Angel” stitched on the lapel. He wears a gold chain tangled in his gray chest hair and smells like plaster dust. His other hand holds the flashlight. The man drinks the wine down to his middle finger, and his face looks puffy with dark chin stubble. His eyebrows are bleached or plucked until they're almost not there.

Just for the record, this is how they met, Mr. Angel Delaporte and Misty Marie.

In art school, you learn that Leonardo da Vinci's painting, the Mona Lisa, it has no eyebrows because they were the last detail the artist added. He was putting wet paint onto dry. In the seventeenth century, a restorer used the wrong solvent and wiped them off forever.

A pile of suitcases sits just inside the front door, the real leather kind, and the man points past them, back into the house with his flashlight in hand, and says, “You can tell Peter Wilmot that his grammar is atrocious.”

These summer people, Misty Marie tells them carpenters are always writing inside walls. It's the same idea every man gets, to write his name and the date before he seals the wall with Sheetrock. Sometimes they leave the day's newspaper. It's tradition to leave a bottle of beer or wine. Roofers will write on the decking before they cover it with tar paper and shingles. Framers will write on the sheathing before they cover it with clapboard or stucco. Their name and the date. Some little part of themselves for someone in the future to discover. Maybe a thought. We were here. We built this. A reminder.

Call it custom or superstition or feng shui.

It's a kind of sweet homespun immortality.

In art history, they teach how Pope Pius V asked El Greco to paint over some nude figures Michelangelo had painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. El Greco agreed, but only if he could paint over the entire ceiling. They teach that El Greco is only famous because of his astigmatism. That's why he distorted his human bodies, because he couldn't see right, he stretched everybody's arms and legs and got famous for the dramatic effect.

From famous artists to building contractors, we all want to leave our signature. Our lasting effect. Your life after death.

We all want to explain ourselves. Nobody wants to be forgotten.

That day in Ocean Park, Angel Delaporte shows Misty the dining room, the wainscoting and blue-striped wallpaper. Halfway up one wall is a busted hole of curling, torn paper and plaster dust.

Masons, she tells him, they'll mortar a charm, a religious medal on a chain, to hang inside a chimney and keep evil spirits from coming down the flue. Masons in the Middle Ages would seal a live cat inside the walls of a new building to bring good luck. Or a live woman. To give the building a soul.

Misty, she's watching his glass of wine. She's talking to it instead of his face, following it around with her eyes, hoping he'll notice and offer her a drink.

Angel Delaporte puts his puffy face, his plucked eyebrow, on the hole and says, “. . . the people of Waytansea Island will kill you the way they've killed everyone before . . .” He holds the little flashlight tight to the side of his head so it shines into the darkness. The bristling brass and silver keys hang down to his shoulder, bright as costume jewelry. He says, “You should see what's written in here.”

Slow, the way a child learns to read, Angel Delaporte stares into the dark and says, “. . . now I see my wife working at the Waytansea Hotel, cleaning rooms and turning into a fat fucking slob in a pink plastic uniform . . .”

Mr. Delaporte says, “. . . She comes home and her hands smell like the latex gloves she has to wear to pick up your used rubbers . . . her blond hair's gone gray and smells like the shit she uses to scrub out your toilets when she crawls into bed next to me . . .”

“Hmm,” he says, and drinks his wine down to his ring finger. “That's a misplaced modifier.”

He reads, “. . . her tits hang down the front of her like a couple of dead carp. We haven't had sex in three years . . .”

It gets so quiet Misty tries to make a little laugh.

Angel Delaporte holds out the flashlight. He drinks his bright orange wine down to where his pinkie finger is on the side of the glass, and he nods at the hole in the wall and says, “Read it for yourself.”

His ring of keys is so heavy Misty has to make a muscle to lift the little flashlight, and when she puts her eye to the small, dark hole, the words painted on the far wall say:

“. . . you'll die wishing you'd never set foot . . .”

The missing linen closet in Seaview,