My Imaginary Friend

Narrator: [on phone with Marla] Marla, did we ever have sex?
Marla Singer: What? Do you mean did I think we were just having sex or making love?
Narrator: Marla just answer the question. Did we ever have sex?
Marla Singer: Ok you fuck me, then snub me. You love me, you hate me. You show me a sensitive side, then you turn into a total asshole. Is this a pretty accurate description of our relationship, Tyler?
Narrator: Wait. What did you just call me?
Marla Singer: Tyler. Tyler Durden. Tyler Durden!

This is the point in which the narrator of the cult classic movie Fight Club discovers that he and his new best friend Tyler are the same person. He discovers that he is delusional. I never read the book ‘Fight Club but I have read a similar short story by Salman Rushdie called the Harmony of Spheres.

The Harmony of Spheres contains four main characters; Kahn, his wife Mala, Eliot Crane and his wife Lucy. Kahn and Eliot Crane meet in College and remain friends for several years. Eliot is an diagnosed schizophrenia and a self proclaimed academic with an interest in dark magic and satanic practices. This entertains Kahn and is an outlet for his curiousity. Kahn a single friend of the couple, is without a doubt a “predator posing as a house pet” (quote from Fight Club) as the relationship between Kahn and Lucy are too close especially since "we had kissed on the beach at Juhu when I was fourteen and she was twelve; and I was anxious to repeat the experience"(131)

Glimpses of Kahn own schizophrenia are revealed when Kahn admits his own personal instability “when I met Eliot I was a little unhinged myself-suffering from a disharmony of my own personal spheres”. (139) Mala admits while on their honeymoon that “he comes around too much.”(141) and Kahn’s own self admittance that perhaps Eliot could provide “a bridge between here – and – there, between my two othernesses, my double belonging.”(141)

Like many other famous writers Eliot’s suicide conceeded his loss of his battle with his own demons. Three tea chests of writings were discovered after his mind opening experience with a shotgun in which Kahn had the duty of going through. What was discovered was the pure confusion of Eliot's mind. The material contained "hundreds of pages of operatic, undirected obscenities and inchoate rants against the universe."(143) In particular the graphic detailed sexual experiences between Lucy and Kahn, of which Kahn thought were fantasied. The twist comes at the end when Mala admits that many of the claims in his writings “weren’t fantasies” (146), leading readers to believe that Kahn and Eliot Crane are the same person and the suicide of Eliot is just Kahn’s own riddance of his other half and self realization of his own schizophrenia.