Survivor: a novel by Chuck Palahniuk

Author:Chuck Palahniuk [Palahniuk, Chuck]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Fiction, Cults, Psychological fiction, Psychological, Romance, Biographical, Autobiography, Satire, Autobiography - Authorship, Authorship, Suicide victims
ISBN: 9780393047028
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1999-01-25T08:00:00+00:00

Survivor

His two perfect rows of teeth look set in his mouth by a jeweler.

The pills for AIDS look just like the pills for cancer look just like the pills for diabetes. I ask, So these things really aren’t invented?

“Let’s not use that word, ‘invented,’” the agent says. “It makes everything sound so contrived.”

But they aren’t real?

“Of course they’re real,” he says and plucks the first two bottles out of my hands. “They’re copyrighted. We have an inventory of almost fifteen thousand copyrighted names for products that are still in development,” he says. “And that includes you.”

He says, “That’s just my point.”

He’s developing a cure for cancer?

“We’re a total concept marketing slash public relations organization,” he says. “Our job is to create the concept. You patent a drug. You copyright the name. As soon as someone else develops the product they come to us, sometimes by choice, sometimes not.”

I ask him, Why sometimes not?

“The way this works is we copyright every conceivable combination of words, Greek words, Latin, English, what-have-you. We get the legal rights to every conceivable word a pharmaceutical company might use to name a new product. For diabetes alone, we have an inventory of one hundred forty names,” he says. He hands me stapled-together pages from out of his briefcase in his lap.

GlucoCure, I read.

InsulinEase.

PancreAid. Hemazine. Glucodan. Growdenase. I turn to the next page, and bottles slip out of my lap and roll along the car floor with the pills inside rattling.

“If the drug company that ever cures diabetes wants to use any combination of words even vaguely related to the condition, they’ll have to lease that right from us.”

So the pills I have here, I say, these are sugar pills. I twist one bottle open and shake a tablet, dark red and shining, into my palm. I lick it, and it’s candy-coated chocolate. Others are gelatin capsules with powdered sugar inside.

“Mock-ups,” he says. “Prototypes.”

He says, “My point is that every bit of your career with us is already in place, and we’ve been prophesying your arrival for more than fifteen years.”

He says, “I’m telling you this so you can relax.”

But the Creedish church district disaster was only ten years ago.

And I put a pill, an orange Geriamazone, in my mouth.

“We’ve been tracking you,” he says. “As soon as the Creedish survival numbers dipped below one hundred, we started the campaign rolling. The whole media countdown over the last six months, that was our doing. It needed some fine-tuning. It wasn’t anything specific at first, all the copy is pretty much search-and-replace, fill-in-the-blank, universal-change stuff, but it’s all in the can. All we needed was a warm body and the survivor’s name. That’s where you enter the picture.”

From another bottle, I shake out two dozen Inazans and hold them under my tongue until their black candy shells dissolve. Chocolate melts out.

The agent takes out more sheets of printed paper and hands them to me.

Ford Merit, I read.

Mercury Rapture.

Dodge Vignette.

He says, “We have names copyrighted for cars that haven’t

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