Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk

Author:Chuck Palahniuk
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Jamal wandered, awestruck, through the rooms of his new home. His pit bull, Bouncer, loped a few steps ahead, sniffing behind a chair, pawing at a cabinet door, as if to flush out whatever animals might be hiding there. Each room opened into a larger room, the walls lined with pictures of white people, lined with fireplaces and shelves packed tight with books. Bright sunlight lit up big, clean windows and white paint. He’d requisitioned the house from a long list of surrendered properties. Photographs posted on the Internet. Today marked the first time in his life he wasn’t living under his mama’s roof.

The paintings looking down, they’d been a lineage of the old world. The stuck-up faces of high and mighty dead folks. The paintings could go. The books he’d keep. With Adjustment Day past, what Jamal truly wanted to do was write, to be an author who put a world of symbols and images into people’s minds with his careful, steady stream of words. The way Talbott had done. As Talbott had phrased it:

No man is an adult while his parents are alive. Until they die he is merely a performance to either please or punish them.

For too long the whites have acted as the finger-wagging parents of blacks.

For even longer heterosexuals have acted as the shaming parents of homosexuals.

To Jamal it seemed he’d always been expected to back down, to forever defer, step aside. He’d always played the submissive good guy because the only other role was to be a thug. Everything he’d done was meant to keep people happy. Killing people wasn’t ideal but it was the first time he wasn’t trying to make them all love him. It mostly felt strange—strange not bad—because he wasn’t trying to please these people. It felt nice to just shoot them and not worry about whether or not it made them happy. That relief made Jamal happy.

Opposition seemed unlikely. The downtrodden had always turned to church, and their numbers had swelled until a leader appeared to organize their power. This time, history’s displaced, the disenfranchised had long ago laughed off the idea of God. Their churches had been colleges and government offices, and these days their preachers were buried in mass graves. The new peasantry might have advanced degrees and awards galore, but they had no churches to harbor and comfort them.

Smarter men might exist. Stronger men. But Jamal was the one who pulled the trigger so they would work for him.

Whoever the owners of this house had been, they’d long since relocated to the appropriate homeland. Traveled light, from the look of it. They’d left behind their furniture, even the clothes and shoes in the closets. Not that it mattered. From today on this would be his house, his land, his farm. Jamal’s mother was installed in a house in town, nicer than anywhere she’d ever lived but not near as nice as his place. Three floors, from the look of it, with Greek temple columns out front, the only word that seemed fitting was grand.

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