SURVIVOR by Chuck Palahniuk

Author:Chuck Palahniuk [Palahniuk, Chuck]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: archivio inglese, cover, english
ISBN: 9780393047028
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-02-07T10:54:19+00:00

Up on the pulpit is a list of people I've never met and their life-threatening conditions.

Mrs. Steven Brandon, I just have to call out. Come down and have your failing kidneys touched by God.

Mr. William Doxy, come down and put your crippled heart in God's hands.

Part of my training was how to press my fingers into somebody's eyes hard and fast so the pressure registered on their optic nerve as a flash of white light.

"Divine light," the agent says.

Part of my training was how to press my hands over somebody's ears so hard they heard a buzzing noise I could tell them was the eternal Om.

"Go," the agent says.

I've missed my cue.

Down onstage, the opening preacher is shouting Tender Branson into a microphone. The one, the only, the last survivor, the great Tender Branson.

The agent tells me, "Wait." He plucks the cigarette out of my mouth and pushes me down the aisle. "Now, go," he says.

All the hands reach out into the aisle to touch me. The spotlight's so bright onstage in front of me. In the dark around me are the smiles of a thousand delirious people who think they love me. All I have to do is walk into the spotlight.

This is dying without the control issues.

The gun is heavy and banging my hip in my pants pocket.

This is having a family without being familiar. Having relations without being related.

Onstage, the spotlights are warm.

This is being loved without the risk of loving anyone in return.

I remember this was the perfect moment to die.

It wasn't Heaven, but it was as close as I was ever going to get.

I raised my arms and people cheered. I lowered my arms and people were silent. The script was there on the podium for me to read. The typewritten list told me who out in the dark was suffering from what.

Everybody's blood was alkaline. Everybody's heart was there for the taking. This is how it felt to shoplift. This is how it felt to hear confessions over my crisis hotline. This is how I imagined sex.

With Fertility on my mind, I started to read the script:

We are all the divine products of creation.

We are each of us the fragments that make up something whole and beautiful.

Each time I paused, people would hold their breath.

The gift of life, I read from the script, is precious.

I put my hand on the gun loaded with bullets in my pocket.

The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only God's most selfish children would steal God's greatest gift, His only gift greater than life. The gift of death.

This lesson is to the murderer, I said. This is to the suicide. This is to the abortionist. This is to the suffering and sick.

Only God has the right to surprise His children with death.

I had no idea what I was saying until it was too late.

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