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**[|Chuck Palahniuk]'s [|Fight Club]**
//The security task force guy explained everything to me.//

//Baggage handlers can ignore a ticking suitcase. The security task force guy, he called the baggage handlers Throwers. Modern bombs dont tick. But I have a suitcase that vibrates, the baggage handlers, the Throwers have to call the police.//

//How I come to live with Tyler is because most airlines have this policy about vibrating luggage.//

//My flight back from Dulles, I had everything in that one bag. When you travel a lot, you learn to pack the same for every trip. Six white shirts, two black trousers. The bare minimum you need to survive.//

//Travelling alarm clock.//

//Cordless electric razor.//

//Toothbrush.//

//Six pair underwear.//

//Six pair black socks.//

//It turns out, my suitcase was vibrating on departure from Dulles, according to the security task force guy, so the police took it off the flight.// //Everything was in that bag. My contact lens stuff. One red tie with blue stripes. One blue tie with red stripes. These are regimental stripes, not club tie stripes. One blue tie with red stripes. And one solid red tie.//

//A list of all these things used to hand on the inside of my bedroom door at home.//

//Home was a condiminium on the fifteenth floor of a high rise, a sort of filing cabinet for widows and young professionals. The marketing brochure promised a foot of concrete floor, ceiling, and wall between me and any adjacent stereo or turned up television. A foot of concrete and air conditioning, you couldn't open the windows so even with maple flooring and dimmer switches, all seventeen hundred airtight feet would smell like the last meal you cooked or your last trip to the bathroom.//

//Yeah, and there were butcher block counter tops and low-voltage track lighting.//

==[|Haruki Murakami]'s [|Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World]==

The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure: it was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. It could have been going down for all I knew, or maybe it wasn't moving at all. But let's just assume it was going up. Merely a guess. Maybe I'd gone up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I'd circled the globe. How would I know?

Every last thing about this elevator was worlds apart from the cheap die-cut job in my apartment building, scarcely one notch up the evolutionary scale from a well-bucket. You'd never believe the two pieces of machinary had the same name and the same purpose. The two were pushing the outer limits conceivable as elevators.

First of all, consider the space. This elevator was so spacious it could have served as an office. Put in a desk, add a cabinet and a locker, throw in a kitchenette, and you'd still have room to spare. You might even squeeze in three camels and a mid-range palm tree while you were at it. Second, there was the cleanliness. Antiseptic as a brand-new coffin. The walls and ceiling were absolutely spotless polished stainless steel, the floor immaculately carpeted in a handsome moss-green. Third, it was dead silent. There wasn't a sound - literally not one sound - from the moment I stepped inside and the doors slid shut. Deep rivers run quiet.


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