Free Make Something Up by Chuck Palahniuk Page A

girl’s already called me and told me to field offers, but you’re the fellah what holds the papers.”
    Up to then the worst Randall had ever seen was a classroom movie called
Signal 30.
Mr. O’Connor had made his class watch it in sixth grade, to make them more careful around railroad crossings and wearing seat belts. The memory was like bronzed baby shoes or the wad of cotton folks used to find in a bottle of aspirin: almost forgotten. The school movie showed black-and-white photos of wrecked cars and people speared through the chest by gory steering columns. Windshields were punched with cannonball holes made by blasting-out babies. The blood and motor oil had the same quality of inky black. That made it difficult to tell if a puddle on the pavement beside a crumbled sedan was from a cracked block or someone bleeding to death. A kid in class fainted, Logan Carlisle, maybe Eva Newsome fainted. An ominous storyteller’s voice had stitched the nightmares together, asking, “The next time you think you can outrun a freight train, think again!” A train horn had blared, followed by sound effects of breaking glass and crashing metal, and the movie would flash the photo of dead teenagers strewn around a jalopy mashed to scrap by a Southern Pacific locomotive.
    The booming voice asked, “Think it’s safe to pass a stopped school bus? Well, think again!” Filling the movie screen would be some two-lane rural highway scattered with the mangled bodies of children.
    The other worst thing Randall had seen was at a barbershop, where they used to keep a stack of true crime magazines under the
Playboy
s. Page after page of sex crime photos. Atrocities. Like a naked woman, pretty except for having her arms and legs hacked off with a meat cleaver, packed into an open suitcase with a black bar superimposed across her eyes to protect her dignity. One was a woman on the flowered rug in an olden-times hotel room, strangled by the cord of a rotary-dial telephone. On the coarse, yellowing pages was woman after woman, naked and dead in different ways, but all with black rectangles to keep their eyes secret.
    Compared to
Signal 30
and the barbershop magazines, what Randall found on the Internet was worse. A person might as well eat poison as download this clip. He didn’t have to watch more than a couple minutes to recognize his horse. What Red Sultan’s Big Boy was doing to a naked, bent-over man was the ultimate abomination. An image Randall would be burdened to carry to his grave.
    If nothing else, it felt comforting to know he was the last among his friends and neighbors to be stained by watching this strange, sad outrage. It was equally galling to imagine what others were imagining, him hosting the purebred under his roof. But where they saw sin, he recognized loneliness. A brand of loneliness that heretofore Randall hadn’t known existed.
    He hit Enter and watched the video clip play a second time.
    It could be what occurred in the video wasn’t about pleasure as much as it was about surviving the real version of what life did to you every day. Randall reasoned, it was about subjecting oneself to a greater power. Whether it was a pleasure or a physical test, it wasn’t cluttered up with ideas of romantic love. More a religious love. Taking place was a penance or an act of contrition.
    Randall conceded a longing to not be the master, to stop being in control. A want to please some brand of huge, weighty god. To feel its crushing approval.
    He hit Enter to replay the experience.
    It scared him to think the opposite. To consider that it might be a pleasure, a pleasure beyond anything most people would ever know, a pleasure worth dying for. A physical rapture.
    From the recorded grunts and groans, the man under the horse thought he was having a grand old time. He must’ve known he was on videotape. None of that mattered, judging from how the man arched his back, and the eyes-closed smile on his face. It was strange to see someone