Paper cameras and wristwatches and copies of The Celestine Prophecy, how could things of such vital importance just evaporate the way they did? That entire world of dot-matrix printers and pulling the tracking strips off the edges of continuous-feed printer paper—gone.

  Before the elephant went out of sight people were already telling the story: he was nothing short of Lazarus, this man who fell and came back to life.

  Probably they’re still telling it.

  In the last days of road maps and telephone books, before global positioning systems and ride-sharing apps, my French editor hosted a dinner at her apartment on the Left Bank. As the guest of honor I sat at the head of the table. The other guests were her friends, smoking and drinking and arguing without rancor about who among them had gotten the others addicted to heroin. My impression was that everyone present had been or was currently a dope fiend. An assumption supported by the way they excused themselves from the table in pairs to use the bathroom and returned grinning and stumbling.

  Me, I’d arrived from Portland that afternoon, exhausted with jet lag, and had spent the afternoon posing for a photographer who asked me to crouch on the floor in the empty closet of my hotel room because he needed an all-white background. The halo flash he used—a ring-shaped strobe that encircles the camera, meant to light the subject from every angle—he said it would hide the sagging bags and erase the red veins of my tired bloodshot eyes. The next day would be interviews and more photographers, with a book signing in the evening and a long dinner with a table of journalists. And tonight I only wanted to get to my hotel and pass out, but this party was in my honor so here I sat, squinting against the cigarette smoke, not understanding a lick of French and feeling, more and more, like the puppy in chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby surrounded by loud drunks, sleepy and ignored.

  Did I mention I was angry, too? More than anything I was fuming mad. Tomorrow I’d be expected to work hard, and the least these French people could do was feed me and put me to bed. What’s more, my grandmother had died the day before. She’d been taking a medication to blunt the pain of her arthritis so she could keep working, and it had masked the symptoms of acute diverticulitis. My grandmother had died suddenly and painfully, and her funeral would be the next day, and I would miss it because I had a book tour.

  To make matters worse, the host set a platter of Brie on the table. As the guest of honor I was expected to take the first slice from the thick wedge of cheese, something they explained to me in English. They were also trying to teach me the French cautionary rhyme, “Red before white and you’ll be all right. White before red and you’re better off dead.” Meaning, if you drink white wine before red wine you’ll suffer a hangover. At their urging I repeated the French back to them. Taking the knife, I cut the smallest bit I could manage off the pointed tip of the Brie wedge.

  The table, the table went nuts. Junkies or not, they all squawked, “How American!” And, “Just like an American!” It seems I’d helped myself to the center of the cheese, the softest, creamiest bit. The correct thing to do would’ve been to slice along the entire side of the wedge, taking both a smidgen of the center as well as a share of the hoary rind.

  After my apologies they went back to their argument, throwing impossible French words at each other. A man and woman staggered out of the bathroom and began to excuse themselves. They had to work in the morning and needed to leave early to get some rest.

  Early? It was the middle of the night. I saw my chance and begged them for a ride. They shrugged. I climbed into the backseat of their tiny car, and we sped away.

  This is how high they were: They’d stop at red lights. The light would turn green, and they’d stay stopped. The light would turn red, and they’d stay stopped. Other cars eddied around us, honking. We’d hurry off, only to stay stopped as they nodded off at another green light.

  My anger was held in check by my fear. I couldn’t remember the name of my hotel, much less the address. We kept driving past the same statues and fountains. We were driving in circles. Where we were, who knew? I could bail out, but was this a safe neighborhood or a sketchy one?

  At last the lights of the Eiffel Tower loomed ahead of us. The strung-out driver hit the gas, and we sped through one, two, three red lights, racing, weaving through the sparse traffic until the front wheel struck the curb and we bumped to a stop, parked on the sidewalk at the base of the tower…beside a police car.

  The man and woman leapt from the front seat and began to run across the plaza, leaving their car doors open, the headlights on, the engine running. The police couldn’t miss this. As they ran toward the area beneath the tower, the couple shouted, “Run, Chuck! Run!”

  They had drugs. I knew they had drugs. They were evading arrest, leaving me in a car filled with drugs. The police were looking at me, and I was going to a French prison unless I acted fast.

  Of course I ran. All the French I could speak was, “Rouge puis blanc…” I dashed after the escaping heroin dealers. The police ran after me. We were all running across the plaza, between the legs of the Eiffel Tower.

  And there they stopped. The couple stopped, and I stopped. Panting and breathless, they shouted, “Look up, Chuck! Look up!”

  A few bystanders stood around. The police officers were catching up.

  The couple already had their heads tilted back, gazing skyward. I looked up.

  From where we stood, under the center of the tower, it rises upward like a vast, square tube. Floodlights turn the tapering structure into a bright tunnel of light that seems to stretch into infinity. My heart pounding, sweating, a little drunk, I looked up into this glorious, blazing tunnel.

  And the entire world disappeared into darkness.

  Nothing existed. With no visual points of reference I lost my balance and collapsed to the sticky concrete. Everyone gasping in unison, that and my heartbeat were all I could hear. I was blind. The world was gone. And my fingers clutched at the rough ground for fear I’d lose that, too.

  Someone began to clap. Everyone joined the applause.

  My eyes adjusted. The druggy couple and the police were still there. The Eiffel Tower rose over us, no longer a tunnel of light, but a looming, dark oil derrick.

  Will you think I’m crazy? Worse, will you think I’m a liar if I tell you that during that long moment when the world had disappeared, while I seemed afloat in nothingness, I heard my dead grandmother speak? People invent this stuff, but where does our imagination come from? All I can tell you is what her voice said. It told me, “This is why we’re alive. We come to earth to have these adventures.”

  The moment after which everything is different.

  The heroin addicts were only pretending. During the course of the dinner, the entire table had argued over the one experience I had to have, that they had to provide for me, while I was in Paris. Everyone knew I was exhausted, and that my schedule wouldn’t allow for any sightseeing. So they’d plotted to bring me to this exact spot at exactly midnight when the lights of the Eiffel Tower would be extinguished. They’d baited me over the cheese, goaded me to frustration. Then they’d kept me awake. Once I was in a car they’d dawdled at traffic lights, always stalling so they could arrive at the Champ de Mars moments before midnight.

  The panicked dash had been staged to deliver me breathlessly to this spot. Even the police understood, more or less, what was taking place. I’d been wrong about everything.

  These strangers I’d hated so much, in this city I’d begun to fear and despise, they’d all conspired to antagonize me, to enrage me. A team of people had ultimately plotted to bring me to a joy I never could’ve imagined.

  We keep tabs on Tom. Some of us, his former students. Someone will drop by his house and later spread the word as to whether or not he could recall her name. Whether he was losing weight. If he might even be writing again. Eventually every writer becomes another writer’s story.

  Don’t get the idea that Tom’s workshop was always bliss. Certain students wanted overnight success and attacked him when that didn’t happen. In recent years a female student accused Tom of favoring his male students, and she campaigned for all of his female students to abandon the workshop.

  More recently it came to light that someone at my agent’s office—the same agency that represented Tom—had been embezzling for years. Tom’s money, Edward Gorey’s money, Mario Puzo’s money, my money, millions of dollars. So much for my lax checkbook balancing!

  The agency folded. The thief went to prison, and the courts could find no money to recover.

  This isn’t a happy ending, not exactly. But there’s always an ending after the ending. That one, I said.

  If you were my student I’d ask you to consider just one more possibility.

  What if all of our anger and fear is unwarranted? What if world events are unfolding in perfect order to deliver us to a distant joy we can’t conceive of at this time?

  Please consider that the next ending will be the happy one.

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  About the Author

  Chuck Palahniuk has been a nationally bestselling author since his first novel, 1996’s Fight Club, was made into the acclaimed David Fincher film of the same name. Palahniuk’s work has sold millions of copies worldwide. He lives outside Portland, Oregon.

  Also by Chuck Palahniuk

  Fight Club

  Survivor

  Invisible Monsters

  Choke

  Lullaby

  Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon

  Diary

  Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories

  Haunted

  Rant

  Snuff

  Pygmy

  Tell-All

  Damned

  Invisible Monsters Remix

  Phoenix (ebook original)

  Doomed

  Beautiful You

  Make Something Up:

  Stories You Can’t Unread

  Fight Club 2

  Bait: Off-Color Stories for You to Color

  Legacy: An Off-Color Novella for You to Color

  Fight Club 3

  Adjustment Day

 

 

  Chuck Palahniuk, Consider This

 

 

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