American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Unable to maintain a credible public persona, I find myself roaming the zoo in Central Park, restlessly. Drug dealers hang out along the perimeter by the gates and the smell of horse shit from passing carriages drifts over them into the zoo, and the tips of skyscrapers, apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue, the Trump Plaza, the AT&T building, surround the park which surrounds the zoo and heightens its unnaturalness. A black custodian mopping the floor in the men’s room asks me to flush the urinal after I use it. “Do it yourself, nigger,” I tell him and when he makes a move toward me, the flash of a knifeblade causes him to back off. All the information booths seem closed. A blind man chews, feeds, on a pretzel. Two drunks, faggots, console each other on a bench. Nearby a mother breast-feeds her baby, which awakens something awful in me.
The zoo seems empty, devoid of life. The polar bears look stained and drugged. A crocodile floats morosely in an oily makeshift pond. The puffins stare sadly from their glass cage. Toucans have beaks as sharp as knives. The seals stupidly dive off rocks into swirling black water, barking mindlessly. The zookeepers feed them dead fish. A crowd gathers around the tank, mostly adults, a few accompanied by children. On the seals’ tank a plaque warns: COINS CAN KILL—IF SWALLOWED, COINS CAN LODGE IN AN ANIMAL’S STOMACH AND CAUSE ULCERS, INFECTIONS AND DEATH. DO NOT THROW COINS IN THE POOL. So what do I do? Toss a handful of change into the tank when none of the zookeepers are watching. It’s not the seals I hate—it’s the audience’s enjoyment of them that bothers me. The snowy owl has eyes that look just like mine, especially when it widens them. And while I stand there, staring at it, lowering my sunglasses, something unspoken passes between me and the bird—there’s this weird kind of tension, a bizarre pressure, that fuels the following, which starts, happens, ends, very quickly.
In the darkness of the penguin habitat—Edge of the Icepack is what the zoo pretentiously calls it—it’s cool, in sharp contrast to the humidity outside. The penguins in the tank glide lazily underwater past the glass walls where spectators crowd in to stare. The penguins on the rocks, not swimming, look dazed, stressed out, tired and bored; they mostly yawn, sometimes stretching. Fake penguin noises, cassettes probably, play over a sound system and someone has turned up the volume because it’s so crowded in the room. The penguins are cute, I guess. I spot one that looks like Craig McDermott.
A child, barely five, finishes eating a candy bar. His mother tells him to throw the wrapper away, then resumes talking to another woman, who is with a child around the same age, the three of them staring into the dirty blueness of the penguin habitat. The first child moves toward the trash can, located in a dim corner in the back of the room, that I am now crouching behind. He stands on tiptoes, carefully throwing the wrapper into the trash. I whisper something. The child spots me and just stands there, away from the crowd, slightly scared but also dumbly fascinated. I stare back.
“Would you like … a cookie?” I ask, reaching into my pocket.
He nods his small head, up, then down, slowly, but before he can answer, my sudden lack of care crests in a massive wave of fury and I pull the knife out of my pocket and I stab him, quickly, in the neck.
Bewildered, he backs into the trash can, gurgling like an infant, unable to scream or cry out because of the blood that starts spurting out of the wound in his throat. Though I’d like to watch this child die, I push him down behind the garbage can, then casually mingle in with the rest of the crowd and touch the shoulder of a pretty girl, and smiling I point to a penguin preparing to make a dive. Behind me, if one were to look closely, one could see the child’s feet kicking in back of the trash can. I keep an eye on the child’s mother, who after a while notices her son’s absence and starts scanning the crowd. I touch the girl’s shoulder again, and she smiles at me and shrugs apologetically, but I can’t figure out why.
When the mother finally notices him she doesn’t scream because she can see only his feet and assumes that he’s playfully hiding from her. At first she seems relieved that she’s spotted him, and moving toward the trash can she coos, “Are you playing hide-and-seek, honey?” But from where I stand, behind the pretty girl, who I’ve already found out is foreign, a tourist, I can see the exact moment when the expression on the mother’s face changes into fear, and slinging her purse over her shoulder she pulls the trash can away, revealing a face completely covered in red blood and the child’s having trouble blinking its eyes because of this, grabbing at his throat, now kicking weakly. The mother makes a sound that I cannot describe—something high-pitched that turns into screaming.
After she falls to the floor beside the body, a few people turning around, I find myself shouting out, my voice heavy with emotion, “I’m a doctor, move back, I’m a doctor,” and I kneel beside the mother before an interested crowd gathers around us and I pry her arms off the child, who is now on his back struggling vainly for breath, the blood coming evenly but in dying arcs out of his neck and onto his Polo shirt, which is drenched with it. And I have a vague awareness during the minutes I hold the child’s head, reverently, careful not to bloody myself, that if someone makes a phone call or if a real doctor is at hand, there’s a good chance the child can be saved. But this doesn’t happen. Instead I hold it, mindlessly, while the mother—homely, Jewish-looking, overweight, pitifully trying to appear stylish in designer jeans and an unsightly leaf-patterned black wool sweater—shrieks do something, do something, do something, the two of us ignoring the chaos, the people who start screaming around us, concentrating only on the dying child.
Though I am satisfied at first by my actions, I’m suddenly jolted with a mournful despair at how useless, how extraordinarily painless, it is to take a child’s life. This thing before me, small and twisted and bloody, has no real history, no worthwhile past, nothing is really lost. It’s so much worse (and more pleasurable) taking the life of someone who has hit his or her prime, who has the beginnings of a full history, a spouse, a network of friends, a career, whose death will upset far more people whose capacity for grief is limitless than a child’s would, perhaps ruin many more lives than just the meaningless, puny death of this boy. I’m automatically seized with an almost overwhelming desire to knife the boy’s mother too, who is in hysterics, but all I can do is slap her face harshly and shout for her to calm down. For this I’m given no disapproving looks. I’m dimly aware of light coming into the room, of a door being opened somewhere, of the presence of zoo officials, a security guard, someone—one of the tourists?—taking flash pictures, the penguins freaking out in the tank behind us, slamming themselves against the glass in a panic. A cop pushes me away, even though I tell him I’m a physician. Someone drags the boy outside, lays him on the ground and removes his shirt. The boy gasps, dies. The mother has to be restrained.
I feel empty, hardly here at all, but even the arrival of the police seems an insufficient reason to move and I stand with the crowd outside the penguin habitat, with dozens of others, taking a long time to slowly blend in and then back away, until finally I’m walking down Fifth Avenue, surprised by how little blood has stained my jacket, and I stop in a bookstore and buy a book and then at a Dove Bar stand on the corner of Fifty-sixth Street, where I buy a Dove Bar—a coconut one—and I imagine a hole, widening in the sun, and for some reason this breaks the tension I started feeling when I first noticed the snowy owl’s eyes and then when it recurred after the boy was dragged out of the penguin habitat and I walked away, my hands soaked with blood, uncaught.
Girls
My appearances in the office the last month or so have been sporadic to say the least. All I seem to want to do now is work out, lifting weights, mostly, and secure reservations at new restaurants I’ve already been to, then cancel them. My apartment reeks of rotten fruit, though actually the smell is caused by what I scooped out of Christie’s head and poured into a Marco glass bowl that sits on a counter near the entranceway. The head itself lies covered with brain pulp, hollow and eyeless, in the corner of the living room beneath the piano and I
Midnight. The conversation I have with the two girls, both very young, blond hardbodies with big tits, is brief, since I’m having a difficult time containing my disordered self.
“You live in a palace, mister,” one of the girls, Torri, says in a baby’s voice, awed by Owen’s ridiculous-looking condo. “It’s a real palace.”
Annoyed, I shoot her a glance. “It’s not that nice.”
While making drinks from Owen’s well-stocked bar, I mention to both of them that I work on Wall Street, at Pierce & Pierce. Neither seems particularly interested. Again, I find myself hearing a voice—one of theirs—asking if that’s a shoe store. Tiffany flips through an issue of GQ that’s three months old, sitting on the black leather couch beneath the strip of faux-cowhide paneling, and she’s looking confused, like she doesn’t understand something, anything. I’m thinking, Pray, you bitch, just pray, and then I have to admit to myself what a turn-on it is encouraging these girls to debase themselves in front of me for what amounts to pocket change. I also mention, after pouring them another drink, that I went to Harvard, and then I ask, after a pause, “Ever hear of it?”
I’m shocked when Torri answers, “I had a business acquaintance who said he went there.” She shrugs dumbly.
“A client?” I ask, interested.
“Well,” she starts nervously. “Let’s just say a business acquaintance.”
“Was this a pimp?” I ask—then the weird part happens.
“Well”—she stalls again before continuing—“let’s just call him a business acquaintance.” She sips from her glass. “He said he went to Harvard, but … I didn’t believe him.” She looks over at Tiffany, then back at me. Our mutual silence encourages her to keep talking and she continues haltingly. “He had, like, this monkey. And I would have to watch this monkey in … his apartment.” She stops, starts, continues in monotone, occasionally gulping. “I’d want to watch TV all day, ’cause there was nothing else to do while the guy was out … and while I tried to keep an eye on the monkey. But there was … something wrong with this monkey.” She stops and takes a deep breath. “The monkey would only watch …” Again she stops, takes in the room, a quizzical expression creasing her face as if she’s not sure she should be telling us this story; if we, me and the other bitch, should be privy to this information. And I brace myself for something shocking, something revelatory, a connection. “It would only watch …” She sighs, then in a sudden rush admits, “The Oprah Winfrey Show and that’s all it would watch. The guy had tapes and tapes of it and he had made all of them for this monkey”—now she looks over at me, imploringly, as if she’s losing her mind here, right now, in Owen’s apartment and wants me to, what, verify it?—“with the commercials edited out. One time I tried to … turn the channel, turn one of the tapes off … if I wanted to watch a soap instead or something … but”—she finishes her drink and rolling her eyes, obviously upset by this story, continues bravely—“the monkey would s-s-screech at me and it would only calm down when Oprah was on.” She swallows, clears her throat, looks like she’s going to cry but doesn’t. “And you know, you try to turn the channel and that d-damn monkey would try to scratch you,” she concludes bitterly and hugs herself, shivering, uselessly trying to warm herself.
Silence. Arctic, frigid, utter silence. The light burning over us in the apartment is cold and electric. Standing there, I look at Torri then at the other girl, Tiffany, who looks queasy.
I finally say something, stumbling over my own words. “I don’t care … whether you’ve led a … decent life … or not.”
Sex happens—a hard-core montage. After I shave Torri’s pussy she lies on her back on Paul’s futon and spreads her legs while I finger her and suck it off, sometimes licking her asshole. Then Tiffany sucks my cock—her tongue is hot and wet and she keeps flicking it over the head, irritating me—while I call her a nasty whore, a bitch. Fucking one of them with a condom while the other sucks my balls, lapping at them, I stare at the Angelis silk-screen print hanging over the bed and I’m thinking about pools of blood, geysers of the stuff. Sometimes it’s very quiet in the room except for the wet sounds my cock makes slipping in and out of one of the girls’ vaginas. Tiffany and I take turns eating Torri’s hairless cunt and asshole. The two of them come, yelling simultaneously, in a sixty-nine position. Once their cunts are wet enough I bring out a dildo and let the two of them play with it. Torri spreads her legs and fingers her own clit while Tiffany fucks her with the huge, greased dildo, Torri urging Tiffany to fuck her cunt harder with it, until finally, gasping, she comes.
Again I make the two of them eat each other out but it starts failing to turn me on—all I can think about is blood and what their blood will look like and though Torri knows what to do, how to eat pussy, it doesn’t subdue me and I push her away from Tiffany’s cunt and start licking and biting at the pink, soft, wet cuntness while Torri spreads her ass and sits on Tiffany’s face while fingering her own clit. Tiffany hungrily tongues her pussy, wet and glistening, and Torri reaches down and squeezes Tiffany’s big, firm tits. I’m biting hard, gnawing at Tiffany’s cunt, and she starts tensing up. “Relax,” I say soothingly. She starts squealing, trying to pull away, and finally she screams as my teeth rip into her flesh. Torri thinks Tiffany is coming and grinds her own cunt harder onto Tiffany’s mouth, smothering her screams, but when I look up at Torri, blood covering my face, meat and pubic hair hanging from my mouth, blood pumping from Tiffany’s torn cunt onto the comforter, I can feel her sudden rush of horror. I use Mace to blind both of them momentarily and then I knock them unconscious with the butt of the nail gun.
Torri awakens to find herself tied up, bent over the side of the bed, on her back, her face covered with blood because I’ve cut her lips off with a pair of nail scissors. Tiffany is tied up with six pairs of Paul’s suspenders on the other side of the bed, moaning with fear, totally immobilized by the monster of reality. I want her to watch what I’m going to do to Torri and she’s propped up in a way that makes this unavoidable. As usual, in an attempt to understand these girls I’m filming their deaths. With Torri and Tiffany I use a Minox LX ultra-miniature camera that takes 9.5mm film, has a 15mm f/3.5 lens, an exposure meter and a built-in neutral density filter and sits on a tripod. I’ve put a CD of the Traveling Wilburys into a portable CD player that sits on the headboard above the bed, to mute any screams.
I start by skinning Torri a little, making incisions with a steak knife and ripping bits of flesh from her legs and stomach while she screams in vain, begging for mercy in a high thin voice, and I’m hoping that she realizes her punishment will end up being relatively light compared to what I’ve planned for the other one. I keep spraying Torri with Mace and then I try to cut off her fingers with nail scissors and finally I pour acid onto her belly and genitals, but none of this comes close to killing her, so I resort to stabbing her in the throat and eventually the blade of the knife breaks off in what’s
Later—now—I’m telling Tiffany, “I’ll let you go, shhh …,” and I’m stroking her face, which is slick, owing to tears and Mace, gently, and it burns me that she actually looks up hopefully for a moment before she sees the lit match I’m holding in my hand that I’ve torn from a matchbook I picked up in the bar at Palio’s where I was having drinks with Robert Farrell and Robert Prechter last Friday, and I lower it to her eyes, which she instinctively closes, singeing both eyelashes and brows, then I finally use a Bic lighter and hold it up to both sockets, making sure they stay open with my fingers, burning my thumb and pinkie in the process, until the eyeballs burst. While she’s still conscious I roll her over, and spreading her ass cheeks, I nail a dildo that I’ve tied to a board deep into her rectum, using the nail gun. Then, turning her over again, her body weak with fear, I cut all the flesh off around her mouth and using the power drill with a detachable, massive head I widen that hole while she shakes, protesting, and once I’m satisfied with the size of the hole I’ve created, her mouth open as wide as possible, a reddish-black tunnel of twisted tongue and loosened teeth, I force my hand down, deep into her throat, until it disappears up to my wrist—all the while her head shakes uncontrollably, but she can’t bite down since the power drill ripped her teeth out of her gums—and grab at the veins lodged there like tubes and I loosen them with my fingers and when I’ve gotten a good grip on them violently yank them out through her open mouth, pulling until the neck caves in, disappears, the skin tightens and splits though there’s little blood. Most of the neck’s innards, including the jugular, hang out of her mouth and her whole body starts twitching, like a roach on its back, shaking spasmodically, her melted eyes running down her face mixing with the tears and Mace, and then quickly, not wanting to waste time, I turn off the lights and in the dark before she dies I rip open her stomach with my bare hands. I can’t tell what I’m doing with them but it’s making wet snapping sounds and my hands are hot and covered with something.