American Psycho (58 page)

“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.