I came to realise, in a whirling of chaos and cities and instinct like a homing missile that we chose to call déjà vu, no one had ever seen Tyler Durden's face.

The strutting, shagging, lye-searing simulacra; the true tyrant of fight club: Tyler Durden.

Not the skinny Ikea-boy in his cheap Primarni duds, black hair unstyled because he hadn't the nerve to pimp himself up. [They say dying the hair signals the opposite sex to the fact you're on the pull. Nice one, researchers, not many people get paid to state the obvious – who'm I kidding, way too many do.] Not him, because that useless bastard was called Jack.

Even in his own mind, the place that was meant to be his, the definition of 'me' was Jack, Jack Shit.

No wonder I'd given the imaginary arsehole the real name. No wonder Project Mayhem cremated all identity and turned people into anonymous, identical members. Pain burns, as does exhaustion, as does adrenaline. Doesn't take a punch drunk much to forget which is which and just soar on the up draught without the brains to realise his wings are on fire.

But those ruthless brainwashed nobodies had been following Jack's face all along. I didn't have the style and flair and bloody-minded ego to get away with the things Tyler did. And on those days where my insanity wavered and the denial came close to falling apart, days when Jack could be even more savage than Tyler in destroying the beautiful things; I still couldn't pulverise his disciples with the same panache as their real leader did.

But the real Tyler only lived in Jack's head. They'd never seen the leather jacket and the red shades (or did I own those?), never seen the hideous straggled fur coat (I hope I don't own that, unless it's called päls kavaj and has customizable storage solutions so long as you don't break it setting it up), or the spiky blond pincushion hair.

The all-singing-all-dancing-crap-of-the-world had blown up half a district for a man they couldn't see, except in the flashes of genius that spun from his lips and soapy hands at midnight, the murky electric light that bounced blond off the sweat in his hair after a beating, a level of terrifying, thrilling charisma that elevated paranoid old Jack in his dressing gown to someone that was called Boss all over the world.

His own followers could barely believe it [they say no one's ever seen his face] so he made them independent sheep, so that they could bite the wolves in Tyler's forgotten name when Jack the lamb forgot how.

My face has a bullet hole through the cheek now, and more stitches than the Bayeux tapestry. It's not Jack's face anymore, and thank god it ain't Tyler's. It's just me, and I'm happy to remain nameless.

As for Marla, who the hell knows? Maybe she was attracted to someone with a face as grey as the ash clogging her lungs up, perhaps she liked how I dealt with the numbing corporeal dissonance and head-silent-screaming insomnia in the same way she did – by playing empathy games with the truly tragic of the support groups. I never admitted to Bob that I was a pariah there, even when he lived in my house. He probably hit me in the balls enough times during Club to realize I still had'em.

It's hard to say 'I' when the last year's been all about him, him him him. It's so ironic that when I was teaching losers the carnal elements of the body; everything they couldn't buy in a magazine but could vent for nothing in a blood-stained basement, I didn't realise I was even in that body.

[car·nal -kɑrnl/ –adjective
1. pertaining to or characterized by the flesh or the body, its passions and appetites; sensual: carnal pleasures. (to Marla, apparently, if only I'd known it – how much does that burn?)

2. not spiritual; merely human; temporal; worldly: a man of secular, rather carnal, leanings. (to everyone else. Hell if option 1 went to anyone but Marla no matter how big their bitch-tits, Bob)]

I am Jack's rising bile.

Let's hope I never have kids, 'cause me x Marla probably = the Antichrist. Though that would make my imaginary foe proud. And what would I teach them? "The condo is safer, but you'll never reach one because your parents live in slums now, brat. Sorry about that."

Or would I hold on to the philosophies and power that had been mine all along, the things I had achieved in my sleep, and leave as my legacy the fact that we are more than the objects we own, we can never become the crap we buy, and the definition of Tyler is not a bubbled-glass dessert bowl. Though the yin-yang table came close.

I could say something amazing.

I could say that existence is qualia, and we are our memories and our memories are our interpretations and records of qualia and that the unique way we see things is what we are. Some of us put additional people into the picture that can't be publicly confirmed, some of us subtract the colour that really is there and see everything sepia-toned, through a smokescreen generated by a little white death-stick.

[By the way, qualia is 'a term used in philosophy to describe the subjective quality of conscious experience.' Examples of qualia are the pain of a fight club, the taste of Marla, or the redness of an exploding skyline. Thank you internet, you let me leech intelligence from the hive mind of the modern world.]

I will say that who we are will never be seen by others or even ourselves, but if we throw away our fear of dying and of the cursed gift of life; we will be able to feel who we are more than anything else in the world.

Because what I am, no matter who I may seem to be; is a pulse.

And I'll do anything to make that heart beat a little harder.