Haunted - Chuck Palahniuk

“You know, I used to think the only thing worse than losing at love was winning. . .” She says, “I used to be so in love with Scout, ever since school, but you know how events. . . disappoint us.”

If you don’t work, you don’t sleep. Day and night, you’re half awake, bored.

That’s the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.

“Every breath you take is because something has died.”
Something or someone lived and died so you could have this life.
This mountain of dead, they lift you into daylight.
The Missing Link, he says, “Will the effort and energy and momentum of their lives. . .” How will it find you? How will you enjoy their gift? Leather shoes and fried chicken and dead soldiers are only a tragedy if you waste their gift sitting in front of the television. Or stuck in traffic. Or stranded at some airport.
“How will you show all the creatures of history?” says the Missing Link.
How will you show their birth and work and death were worthwhile?

Animals, she says, a dog, it makes us human. Proof of our humanity. Other people, they just make us redundant. A dog or cat, a bird or a lizard, it makes us God.

And Mr. Whittier said, “This is why Moses led the tribes of Israel into the desert. . .” Because those people had lived for generations as slaves. They’d learned to be helpless. To create a race of masters from a race of slaves, Mr. Whittier said, to teach a controlled group of people how to create their own lives, Moses had to be an asshole.

After you give up television and newspapers, the mornings are the worst part: that first cup of coffee. It’s true, that first hour awake, you want to catch up with the rest of the world. But her new rule is: No radio. No television. No newspaper. Cold turkey.

Of course, she still misses her friends. Her husband. But it’s like Inky would say: Being absent is the new being present.

The camera behind the camera behind the camera, Mr. Whittier would say.

Everybody wants to make the world a better place.

“All those women,” the director says, “all chanting and protesting againstHustlermagazine, saying porno turns a woman into an object. . . Well,” she says, “what do you think a dildo is? Or donor sperm from some clinic?” Some men may only want pictures of naked women. But some women only want a man’s dick. Or his sperm. Or his money. Both sexes have the same problem with intimacy.

The trouble with eternal youth is, you do tend to procrastinate.

Because the killer has to come back. The killer has to talk, to tell this story until it’s used up. Other stories, they use you up. To the only audience a killer can risk having, his victim. Cassandra on her bed of moss. The microphone hanging above her, connected to a tape recorder and a transmitter broadcasting to a sheriff’s deputy perched on rocks across the canyon. Far enough away he can swat mosquitoes without giving himself away. The headphones over his ears. Sitting on the ground, crawling with ants. All the time, listening. In his earphones, birds sing. The wind blows. You’d be amazed how many of the killers come back to say good-bye. They’ve shared something, the killer and the victim, and the killer will come to sit at the grave and talk about old times. Everyone needs an audience.

“Nobody calls Michelangelo the Vatican’s bitch,” says the Duke of Vandals, just because he begged Pope Julius for work.

Mr. Whittier says: “Maybe we’re living the exact way we’re meant to live.” Maybe our factory planet is processing our souls. . . just fine.

“The same mistakes we made as cavemen,” says Mr. Whittier, “we still make.” So maybe we’re supposed to fight and hate and torture each other...