Another window blows out of the building, and the glass sprays out, sparkling flock-of-pigeons style, and then the dark wooden desk pushed by the Mischief Committee emerges inch by inch from the side of the building until the desk tilts and slides and turns end-over-end into a magic flying thing lost in the crowd. With a gun stuck in your mouth, and the barrel oft he gun between your teeth, you can only talk in vowels. That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways. Somewhere in a hundred and ninety-one floors under us, the space monkeys of the Mischief Committee of Project Mayhem are running wild, destroying every scrap of history. A window blows out the side of the building, and then comes a file cabinet big as a black refrigerator, right below us is a six drawer filing cabinet drops right out of the cliff face of the building, and drops turning slowly, and drops getting smaller, and drops disappearing into the packed crowd. The breaking glass is a window right below us. One hundred and ninety-one floors up, you look over the edge of the roof and the street below is mottled with a shag carpet of people, standing, looking up. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die. You do the little job you're trained to do. It's so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys. This is the world's tallest building, and this high up the wind is always cold. So Tyler and I are on top of the Parker-Morris Building with the gun stuck in my mouth, and we hear glass breaking. Some folks, they use paraffin mixed with nitro. A lot of folks mix their nitro with cotton and add Epsom salts as a sulfate. Mix the nitro with sawdust, and you have a nice plastic explosive. Then add glycerin drop-by-drop with an eye dropper. You take a 98-percent concentration of fuming nitric acid and add the acid to three times that amount of sulfuric acid. The Building we're standing on won't be here in ten minutes. We won't grow old.' I tongue the barrel into my cheek and say, Tyler, you're thinking of vampires.

You drill the holes wrong and the gun will blow off your hand. This lets the gas escape and slows the bullet to below the speed of sound.

To make a silence, you just drill holes in the barrel of the gun, a lot of holes. Most of the noise a gunshot makes is expanding gases, and there's a tiny sonic boom a bullet makes because it travels so fast. The barrel of the gun pressed to the back of my throat, Tyler says, 'We really won't die.' With my tongue I can feel the silencer holes were drilled into the barrel of the gun.

People were always asking, did I know Tyler Durden. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk