Diary by Chuck Palahniuk Page A

Bible under the floor or seal it inside the walls. They'll always leave one wall unpainted until the owners arrive. That way the devil won't know the house is done until it's already being lived in.
    Out of a pocket in the side of his camera bag, Angel takes something flat and silver, the size of a paperback book. It's square and shining, a flask, curved so your reflection in the concave side is tall and thin. Your reflection in the convex side is squat and fat. He hands it to Misty, and the metal's smooth and heavy with a round cap on one end. The weight shifts as something sloshes inside. His camera bag is scratchy gray fabric, covered with zippers.
    On the tall thin side of the flask, it's engraved:
To Angel—Te Amo
.
    Misty says, “So? Why are
you
here?”
    As she takes the flask, their fingers touch. Physical contact. Flirting.
    Just for the record, the weather today is partly suspicious with chances of betrayal.
    And Angel says, “It's gin.”
    The cap unscrews and swings away on a little arm that keeps it attached to the flask. What's inside smells like a good time, and Angel says, “Drink,” and his fingerprints are all over her tall, thin reflection in the polish. Through the hole in the wall, you can see the homeowner's feet wearing suede loafers. Angel sets his camera bag so it covers the hole.
    Somewhere beyond all this, you can hear each ocean wave hiss and burst. Hiss and burst.
    Graphology says the three aspects of any personality show in our handwriting. Anything that falls below the bottom of a word, the tail of a lowercase
g
or
y
for example, that hints at your subconscious. What Freud would call your id. This is your most animal side. If it swings to the right, it means you lean to the future and the world outside yourself. If the tail swings to the left, it means you're stuck in the past and looking at yourself.
    You writing, you walking down the street, your whole life shows in every physical action. How you hold your shoulders, Angel says. It's all art. What you do with your hands, you're always blabbing your life story.
    It's gin inside the flask, the good kind that you can feel cold and thin down the whole length of your throat.
    Angel says the way your tall letters look, anything that rises above the regular lowercase
e
or
x,
those tall letters hint at your greater spiritual self. Your superego. How you write your
l
or
h
or dot your
i,
that shows what you aspire to become.
    Anything in between, most of your lowercase letters, these show your ego. Whether they're crowded and spiky or spread out and loopy, these show the regular, everyday you.
    Misty hands the flask to Angel and he takes a drink.
    And he says, “Are you feeling anything?”
    Peter's words say, “. . . it's with your blood that we preserve our world for the next generations . . .”
    Your words. Your art.
    Angel's fingers open around hers. They go off into the dark, and you can hear the zippers pull open on his camera bag. The brown leather smell of him steps away from her and there's the click and flash, click and flash of him taking pictures. He tilts the flask against his lips, and her reflection slides up and down the metal in his fingers.
    Misty's fingers tracing the walls, the writing says: “. . . I've done my part. I found her . . .”
    It says: “. . . it's not my job to kill anybody. She's the executioner . . .”
    To get the look of pain just right, Misty says how the sculptor Bernini sketched his own face while he burned his leg with a candle. When Géricault painted
The Raft of the Medusa,
he went to a hospital to sketch the faces of the dying. He brought their severed heads and arms back to his studio to study how the skin changed color as it rotted.
    The wall booms. It booms again, the drywall and paint shivering under her touch. The homeowner on the other side kicks the wall again with her canvas boat shoes and the framed flowers and birds rattle against the yellow wallpaper. Against the scrawls of black spray