Working Out
Free weights and Nautilus equipment relieve stress. My body responds to the workout accordingly. Shirtless, I scrutinize my image in the mirror above the sinks in the locker room at Xclusive. My arm muscles burn, my stomach is as taut as possible, my chest steel, pectorals granite hard, my eyes white as ice. In my locker in the locker room at Xclusive lie three vaginas I recently sliced out of various women I’ve attacked in the past week. Two are washed off, one isn’t. There’s a barrette clipped to one of them, a blue ribbon from Hermès tied around my favorite.
End of the 1980s
The smell of blood works its way into my dreams, which are, for the most part, terrible: on an ocean liner that catches fire, witnessing volcanic eruptions in Hawaii, the violent deaths of most of the inside traders at Salomon, James Robinson doing something bad to me, finding myself back at boarding school, then at Harvard, the dead walk among the living. The dreams are an endless reel of car wrecks and disaster footage, electric chairs and grisly suicides, syringes and mutilated pinup girls, flying saucers, marble Jacuzzis, pink peppercorns. When I wake up in a cold sweat I have to turn on the wide-screen television to block out the construction sounds that continue throughout the day, rising up from somewhere. A month ago was the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. Football games flash by, the sound turned off. I can hear the answering machine click once, its volume lowered, then twice. All summer long Madonna cries out to us, “life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone …”
When I’m moving down Broadway to meet Jean, my secretary, for brunch, in front of Tower Records a college student with a clipboard asks me to name the saddest song I know. I tell him, without pausing, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Beatles. Then he asks me to name the happiest song I know, and I say “Brilliant Disguise” by Bruce Springsteen. He nods, makes a note, and I move on, past Lincoln Center. An accident has happened. An ambulance is parked at the curb. A pile of intestines lies on the sidewalk in a pool of blood. I buy a very hard apple at a Korean deli which I eat on my way to meet Jean who, right now, stands at the Sixty-seventh Street entrance to Central Park on a cool, sunny day in September. When we look up at the clouds she sees an island, a puppy dog, Alaska, a tulip. I see, but don’t tell her, a Gucci money clip, an ax, a woman cut in two, a large puffy white puddle of blood that spreads across the sky, dripping over the city, onto Manhattan.
We stop at an outdoor café, Nowheres, on the Upper West Side, debating which movie to see, if there are any museum exhibits we should attend, maybe just a walk, she suggests the zoo, I’m nodding mindlessly. Jean is looking good, like she’s been working out, and she’s wearing a gilt lamé jacket and velvet shorts by Matsuda. I’m imagining myself on television, in a commercial for a new product—wine cooler? tanning lotion? sugarless gum?—and I’m moving in jump-cut, walking along a beach, the film is black-and-white, purposefully scratched, eerie vague pop music from the mid-1960s accompanies the footage, it echoes, sounds as if it’s coming from a calliope. Now I’m looking into the camera, now I’m holding up the product—a new mousse? tennis shoes?—now my hair is windblown then it’s day then night then day again and then it’s night.
“I’ll have an iced decaf au lait,” Jean tells the waiter.
“I’ll have a decapitated coffee also,” I say absently, before catching myself. “I mean … decaffeinated.” I glance over at Jean, worried, but she just smiles emptily at me. A Sunday Times sits on the table between us. We discuss plans for dinner tonight, maybe. Someone who looks like Taylor Preston walks by, waves at me. I lower my Ray-Bans, wave back. Someone on a bike pedals past. I ask a busboy for water. A waiter arrives instead and after that a dish containing two scoops of sorbet, cilantro-lemon and vodka-lime, are brought to the table that I didn’t hear Jean order.
“Want a bite?” she asks.
“I’m on a diet,” I say. “But thank you.”
“You don’t need to lose any weight,” she says, genuinely surprised. “You’re kidding, right? You look great. Very fit.”
“You can always be thinner,” I mumble, staring at the traffic in the street, distracted by something—what? I don’t know. “Look … better.”
“Well, maybe we shouldn’t go out to dinner,” she says, concerned. “I don’t want to ruin your … willpower.”
“No. It’s all right,” I say. “I’m not … very good at controlling it anyway.”
“Patrick, seriously. I’ll do whatever you want,” she says. “If you don’t want to go to dinner, we won’t. I mean—”
“It’s okay,” I stress. Something snaps. “You shouldn’t fawn over him.…” I pause before correcting myself. “I mean … me. Okay?”
“I just want to know what you want to do,” she says.
“To live happily ever after, right?” I say sarcastically. “That’s what I want.” I stare at her hard, for maybe half a minute, before turning away. This quiets her. After a while she orders a beer. It’s hot out on the street.
“Come on, smile,” she urges sometime later. “You have no reason to be so sad.”
“I know,” I sigh, relenting. “But it’s … tough to smile. These days. At least I find it hard to. I’m not used to it, I guess. I don’t know.”
“That’s … why people need each other,” she says gently, trying to make eye contact while spooning the not inexpensive sorbet into her mouth.
“Some don’t.” I clear my throat self-consciously. “Or, well, people compensate.… They adjust.…” After a long pause, “People can get accustomed to anything, right?” I ask. “Habit does things to people.”
Another long pause. Confused, she says, “I don’t know. I guess … but one still has to maintain … a ratio of more good things than … bad in this world,” she says, adding, “I mean, right?” She looks puzzled, as if she finds it strange that this sentence has come out of her mouth. A blast of music from a passing cab, Madonna again, “life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone …” Startled by the laughter at the table next to ours, I cock my head and hear someone admit, “Sometimes what you wear to the office makes all the difference,” and then Jean says something and I ask her to repeat it.
“Haven’t you ever wanted to make someone happy?” she asks.
“What?” I ask, trying to pay attention to her. “Jean?”
Shyly, she repeats herself. “Haven’t you ever wanted to make someone happy?”
I stare at her, a cold, distant wave of fright washes over me, dousing something. I clear my throat again and, trying to speak with great purposefulness, tell her, “I was at Sugar Reef the other night … that Caribbean place on the Lower East Side … you know it—”
“Who were you with?” she interrupts.
Jeanette. “Evan McGlinn.”
“Oh.” She nods, silently relieved, believing me.
“Anyway …” I sigh, continuing, “I saw some guy in the men’s room … a total … Wall Street guy … wearing a one-button viscose, wool and nylon suit by … Luciano Soprani … a cotton shirt by … Gitman Brothers … a silk tie by Ermenegildo Zegna and, I mean, I recognized the guy, a broker, named Eldridge … I’ve seen him at Harry’s and Au Bar and DuPlex and Alex Goes to Camp … all the places, but … when I went in after him, I saw … he was writing … something on the wall above the … urinal he was standing at.” I pause, take a swallow of her beer. “When he saw me come in … he stopped writing … put away the Mont Blanc pen … he zipped up his pants … said Hello, Henderson to me … checked his hair in the mirror, coughed … like he was nervous or … something and … left the room.” I pause again, another swallow. “Anyway … I went over to use the … urinal and … I leaned over … to read what he … wrote.” Shuddering, I slowly wipe my forehead with a napkin.
“Which was?” Jean asks cautiously.
I close my eyes, three words fall from my mouth, these lips: “‘Kill … All … Yuppies.’”
She doesn’t say anything.
To break the uncomfortable silence that follows, I mention all I can come up with, which is, “Did you know that Ted Bundy’s first dog, a collie, was named Lassie?” Pause. “Had you heard this?”
Jean looks at her dish as if it’s confusing her, then back up at me. “Who’s … Ted Bundy?”
“Forget it,” I sigh.
“Listen, Patrick. We need to talk about something,” she says. “Or at least I need to talk about something.”
… where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire—meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in … this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged …
“… and I don’t remember who it was you were talking to … it doesn’t matter. What does is that you were very forceful, yet … very sweet and, I guess, I knew then that …” She places her spoon down, but I’m not watching her. I’m looking out at the taxis moving up Broadway, yet they can’t stop things from unraveling, because Jean says the following: “A lot of people seem to have …” She stops, continues hesitantly, “lost touch with life and I don’t want to be among them.” After the waiter clears her dish, she adds, “I don’t want to get … bruised.”
I think I’m nodding.
“I’ve learned what it’s like to be alone and … I think I’m in love with you.” She says this last part quickly, forcing it out.
Almost superstitiously, I turn toward her, sipping an Evian water, then, without thinking, say, smiling, “I love someone else.”
As if this film had speeded up she laughs immediately, looks quickly away, down, embarrassed. “I’m, well, sorry … gosh.”
“But …” I add quietly, “you shouldn’t be … afraid.”
She looks back up at me, swollen with hope.
“Something can be done about it,” I say. Then, not knowing why I’d said that, I modify the statement, telling her straight on, “Maybe something can’t. I don’t know. I’ve thrown away a lot of time to be with you, so it’s not like I don’t care.”
She nods mutely.
“You should never mistake affection for … passion,” I warn her. “It can be … not good. It can … get you into, well, trouble.”
She’s not saying anything and I can suddenly sense her sadness, flat and calm, like a daydream. “What are you trying to say?” she asks lamely, blushing.
“Nothing. I’m just … letting you know that … appearances can be deceiving.”
She stares at the Times stacked in heavy folds on the table. A breeze barely causes it to flutter. “Why … are you telling me this?”
Tactfully, almost touching her hand but stopping myself, I tell her, “I just want to avoid any future misconnections.” A hardbody walks by. I notice her, then look back at Jean. “Oh come on, don’t look that way. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I’m not,” she says, trying to act casual. “I just want to know if you’re disappointed in me for admitting this.”
How could she ever understand that there isn’t any way I could be disappointed since I no longer find anything worth looking forward to?
“You don’t know much about me, do you?” I ask teasingly.
“I know enough,” she says, her initial response, but then she shakes her head. “Oh let’s just drop this. I made a mistake. I’m sorry.” In the next instant she changes her mind. “I want to know more,” she says, gravely.
I consider this before asking, “Are you sure?”
“Patrick,” she says breathlessly, “I know my life would be … much emptier without you … in it.”
I consider this too, nodding thoughtfully.
“And I just can’t …” She stops, frustrated. “I can’t pretend these feelings don’t exist, can I?”
“Shhh …”
… there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this—and I have, countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed—and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing.…
I’m asking Jean, “How many people in this world are like me?”
She pauses, carefully answers, “I don’t … think anyone?” She’s guessing.
“Let me rephrase the ques—Wait, how does my hair look?” I ask, interrupting myself.
“Uh, fine.”
“Okay. Let me rephrase the question.” I take a sip of her dry beer. “Okay. Why do you like me?” I ask.
She asks back, “Why?”
“Yes,” I say. “Why.”
“Well …” A drop of beer has fallen onto my Polo shirt. She hands me her napkin. A practical gesture that touches me. “You’re … concerned with others,” she says tentatively. “That’s a very rare thing in what”—she stops again—“is a … I guess, a hedonistic world. This is … Patrick, you’re embarrassing me.” She shakes her head, closing her eyes.
“Go on,” I urge. “Please. I want to know.”
“You’re sweet.” She rolls her eyes up. “Sweetness is … sexy … I don’t know. But so is … mystery.” Silence. “And I think … mystery … you’re mysterious.” Silence, followed by a sigh. “And you’re … considerate.” She realizes something, no longer scared, stares at me straight on. “And I think shy men are romantic.”
“How many people in this world are like me?” I ask again. “Do I really appear like that?”
“Patrick,” she says. “I wouldn’t lie.”
“No, of course you wouldn’t … but I think that …” My turn to sigh, contemplatively. “I think … you know how they say no two snowflakes are ever alike?”
She nods.
“Well, I don’t think that’s true. I think a lot of snowflakes are alike … and I think a lot of people are alike too.”
She nods again, though I can tell she’s very confused.
“Appearances can be deceiving,” I admit carefully.
“No,” she says, shaking her head, sure of herself for the first time. “I don’t think they are deceiving. They’re not.”
“Sometimes, Jean,” I explain, “the lines separating appearance—what you see—and reality—what you don’t—become, well, blurred.”
“That’s not true,” she insists. “That’s simply not true.”
“Really?” I ask, smiling.
“I didn’t use to think so,” she says. “Maybe ten years ago I didn’t. But I do now.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, interested. “You used to?”
… a flood of reality. I get an odd feeling that this is a crucial moment in my life and I’m startled by the suddenness of what I guess passes for an epiphany. There is nothing of value I can offer her. For the first time I see Jean as uninhibited; she seems stronger, less controllable, wanting to take me into a new and unfamiliar land—the dreaded uncertainty of a totally different world. I sense she wants to rearrange my life in a significant way—her eyes tell me this and though I see truth in them, I also know that one day, sometime very soon, she too will be locked in the rhythm of my insanity. All I have to do is keep silent about this and not bring it up—yet she weakens me, it’s almost as if she’s making the decision about who I am, and in my own stubborn, willful way I can admit to feeling a pang, something tightening inside, and before I can stop it I find myself almost dazzled and moved that I might have the capacity to accept, though not return, her love. I wonder if even now, right here in Nowheres, she can see the darkening clouds behind my eyes lifting. And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn’t and probably never will. This relationship will probably lead to nothing … this didn’t change anything. I imagine her smelling clean, like tea …
“Patrick … talk to me … don’t be so upset,” she is saying.
“I think it’s … time for me to … take a good look … at the world I’ve created,” I choke, tearfully, finding myself admitting to her, “I came upon … a half gram of cocaine … in my armoire last … night.” I’m squeezing my hands together, forming one large fist, all knuckles white.
“What did you do with it?” she asks.
I place one hand on the table. She takes it.
“I threw it away. I threw it all away. I wanted to do it,” I gasp, “but I threw it away.”
She squeezes my hand tightly. “Patrick?” she asks, moving her hand up until it’s gripping my elbow. When I find the strength to look back at her, it strikes me how useless, boring, physically beautiful she really is, and the question Why not end up with her? floats into my line of vision. An answer: she has a better body than most other girls I know. Another one: everyone is interchangeable anyway. One more: it doesn’t really matter. She sits before me, sullen but hopeful, characterless, about to dissolve into tears. I squeeze her hand back, moved, no, touched by her ignorance of evil. She has one more test to pass.
“Do you own a briefcase?” I ask her, swallowing.
“No,” she says. “I don’t.”
“Evelyn carries a briefcase,” I mention.
“She does …?” Jean asks.
“And what about a Filofax?”
“A small one,” she admits.
“Designer?” I ask suspiciously.
“No.”
I sigh, then take her hand, small and hard, in mine.
… and in the southern deserts of Sudan the heat rises in airless waves, thousands upon thousands of men, women, children, roam throughout the vast bushland, desperately seeking food. Ravaged and starving, leaving a trail of dead, emaciated bodies, they eat weeds and leaves and … lily pads, stumbling from village to village, dying slowly, inexorably; a gray morning in the miserable desert, grit flies through the air, a child with a face like a black moon lies in the sand, scratching at his throat, cones of dust rising, flying across land like whirling tops, no one can see the sun, the child is covered with sand, almost dead, eyes unblinking, grateful (stop and imagine for an instant a world where someone is grateful for something) none of the haggard pay attention as they file by, dazed and in pain (no—there is one who pays attention, who notices the boy’s agony and smiles, as if holding a secret), the boy opens and closes his cracked, chapped mouth soundlessly, there is a school bus in the distance somewhere and somewhere else, above that, in space, a spirit rises, a door opens, it asks “Why?”—a home for the dead, an infinity, it hangs in a void, time limps by, love and sadness rush through the boy …
“Okay.”
I am dimly aware of a phone ringing somewhere. In the café on Columbus, countless numbers, hundreds of people, maybe thousands, have walked by our table during my silence. “Patrick,” Jean says. Someone with a baby stroller stops at the corner and purchases a Dove Bar. The baby stares at Jean and me. We stare back. It’s really weird and I’m experiencing a spontaneous kind of internal sensation, I feel I’m moving toward as well as away from something, and anything is possible.