American Psycho

by Bret Easton Ellis

  “I did,” I say, my back still to her.

  “You’ve hung the Onica upside down.” She laughs.

  “Hmmm?” I’m standing at the armoire, squeezing the nail gun, getting used to its weight in my gloved fist.

  “I can’t believe it’s upside down,” she says. “How long has it been this way?”

  “A millennium,” I whisper, turning around, nearing her.

  “What?” she asks, still studying the Onica.

  “I said, what in the fuck are you doing with Robert Hall?” I whisper.

  “What did you say?” As if in slow motion, like in a movie, she turns around.

  I wait until she’s seen the nail gun and the gloved hands to scream, “What the fuck are you doing with Robert Hall?”

  Perhaps on instinct, perhaps from memory, she makes a futile dash for the front door, crying out. Though the chardonnay has dulled her reflexes, the Scotch I’ve drunk has sharpened mine, and effortlessly I’m leaping in front of her, blocking her escape, knocking her unconscious with four blows to the head from the nail gun. I drag her back into the living room, laying her across the floor over a white Voilacutro cotton sheet, and then I stretch her arms out, placing her hands flat on thick wooden boards, palms up, and nail three fingers on each hand, at random, to the wood by their tips. This causes her to regain consciousness and she starts screaming. After I’ve sprayed Mace into her eyes, mouth, into her nostrils, I place a camel-hair coat from Ralph Lauren over her head, which drowns out the screams, sort of. I keep shooting nails into her hands until they’re both covered—nails bunched together, twisted over each other in places, making it impossible for her to try and sit up. I have to remove her shoes, which slightly disappoints me, but she’s kicking at the floor violently, leaving black scuff marks on the stained white oak. During this period I keep shouting “You bitch” at her and then my voice drops to a raspy whisper and into her ear I drool the line “You fucking cunt.”

  Finally, in agony, after I’ve taken the coat off her face, she starts pleading, or at least tries to, the adrenaline momentarily overpowering the pain. “Patrick oh god stop it please oh god stop hurting me …” But, typically, the pain returns—it’s too intense not to—and she passes out again and vomits, while unconscious, and I have to hold her head up so she doesn’t choke on it and then I Mace her again. The fingers I haven’t nailed I try to bite off, almost succeeding on her left thumb which I manage to chew all the flesh off of, leaving the bone exposed, and then I Mace her, needlessly, once more. I place the camel-hair coat back over her head in case she wakes up screaming, then set up the Sony palm-sized Handycam so I can film all of what follows. Once it’s placed on its stand and running on automatic, with a pair of scissors I start to cut off her dress and when I get up to her chest I occasionally stab at her breasts, accidentally (not really) slicing off one of her nipples through the bra. She starts screaming again once I’ve ripped her dress off, leaving Bethany in only her bra, its right cup darkened with blood, and her panties, which are soaked with urine, saving them for later.

  I lean in above her and shout, over her screams, “Try to scream, scream, keep screaming.…” I’ve opened all the windows and the door to my terrace and when I stand over her, the mouth opens and not even screams come out anymore, just horrible, guttural, animal-like noises, sometimes interrupted by retching sounds. “Scream, honey,” I urge, “keep screaming.” I lean down, even closer, brushing her hair back. “No one cares. No one will help you.…” She tries to cry out again but she’s losing consciousness and she’s capable of only a weak moan. I take advantage of her helpless state and, removing my gloves, force her mouth open and with the scissors cut out her tongue, which I pull easily from her mouth and hold in the palm of my hand, warm and still bleeding, seeming so much smaller than in her mouth, and I throw it against the wall, where it sticks for a moment, leaving a stain, before falling to the floor with a tiny wet slap. Blood gushes out of her mouth and I have to hold her head up so she won’t choke. Then I fuck her in the mouth, and after I’ve ejaculated and pulled out, I Mace her some more.

  Later, when she briefly regains consciousness, I put on a porkpie hat I was given by one of my girlfriends freshman year at Harvard.

  “Remember this?” I shout, towering over her. “And look at this!” I scream triumphantly, holding up a cigar. “I still smoke cigars. Ha. See? A cigar.” I light it with steady, bloodstained fingers, and her face, pale to the point of blueness, keeps contracting, twitching with pain, her eyes, dull with horror, close, then open halfway, her life reduced to nightmare.

  “And another thing,” I yell, pacing. “It’s not Garrick Anderson either. The suit is by Armani! Giorgio Armani.” I pause spitefully and, leaning into her, sneer, “And you thought it was Henry Stuart. Jesus.” I slap her hard across the face and hiss the words “Dumb bitch,” spraying her face with spit, but it’s covered with so much Mace that she probably can’t even feel it, so I Mace her again and then I try to fuck her in the mouth once more but I can’t come so I stop.

  Thursday

  Later, the next night in fact, three of us, Craig McDermott, Courtney and myself, are in a cab heading toward Nell’s and talking about Evian water. Courtney, in an Armani mink, has just admitted, giggling, that she uses Evian for ice cubes, which sparks a conversation about the differences in bottled water, and at Courtney’s request we each try to list as many brands as we can.

  Courtney starts, counting each name off on one of her fingers. “Well, there’s Sparcal, Perrier, San Pellegrino, Poland Spring, Calistoga …” She stops, stuck, and looks over at McDermott for help.

  He sighs, then lists, “Canadian Spring, Canadian Calm, Montclair, which is also from Canada, Vittel from France, Crodo, which is Italian …” He stops and rubs his chin thoughtfully, thinking of one more, then announces it as if surprised. “Elan.” And though it seems he’s on the verge of naming another one, Craig lapses into an unilluminating silence.

  “Elan?” Courtney asks.

  “It’s from Switzerland,” he says.

  “Oh,” she says, then turns to me. “It’s your turn, Patrick.”

  Staring out the window of the cab, lost in thought, the silence I’m causing filling me with a nameless dread, numbly, by rote, I list the following. “You forgot Alpenwasser, Down Under, Schat, which is from Lebanon, Qubol and Cold Springs—”

  “I said that one already,” Courtney cuts in, accusingly.

  “No,” I say. “You said Poland Spring.”

  “Is that right?” Courtney murmurs, then tugging at McDermott’s overcoat, “Is he right, Craig?”

  “Probably.” McDermott shrugs. “I guess.”

  “You must also remember that one should always buy mineral water in glass bottles. You shouldn’t buy it in plastic ones,” I say ominously, then wait for one of them to ask me why.

  “Why?” Courtney’s voice is tinged with actual interest.

  “Because it oxidizes,” I explain. “You want it to be crisp, with no aftertaste.”

  After a long, confused, Courtney-like pause, McDermott admits, staring out the window, “He’s right.”

  “I really don’t understand the differences in water,” Courtney murmurs. She’s sitting between McDermott and myself in the back of the cab and under the mink has on a wool twill suit by Givenchy, tights by Calvin Klein and shoes by Warren Susan Allen Edmonds. Earlier, in this same cab, when I touched the mink suggestively, with no intent other than to check its quality and she could sense this, Courtney quietly asked me if I had a breath mint. I said nothing.

  “What do you mean?” McDermott inquires solemnly.

  “Well,” she says, “I mean what’s really the difference between something like spring water and natural water, for instance, or, I mean, is there one?”

  “Courtney. Natural water is any water from an underground source,” Craig sighs, still staring out the window. “Mineral content hasn’t been changed, although the water may have been disinfected or filter
ed.” McDermott is wearing a wool tuxedo with notched lapels by Gianni Versace, and he reeks of Xeryus.

  I momentarily break out of my conscious inertia to explain further: “And in spring water, minerals may have been added or removed and it’s usually filtered, not processed.” I pause. “Seventy-five percent of all bottled water in America is actually spring water.” I pause again, then ask the cab, “Did anyone know that?”

  A long, soulless pause follows and then Courtney asks another question, this one only half finished. “The differences between distilled and purified water is …?”

  I’m not really listening to any of this conversation, not even to myself, because I’m thinking of ways to get rid of Bethany’s body, or at least debating whether or not I should keep it in my apartment another day or so. If I decide to get rid of it tonight, I can easily stuff what’s left of her into a Hefty garbage bag and leave it in the stairwell; or I can exert the extra effort and drag it into the street, leaving it with the rest of the trash on the curb. I could even take it to the apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and pour lime over it, smoke a cigar and watch it dissolve while listening to my Walkman, but I want to keep the men’s bodies separate from the women’s, and besides, I also want to watch Bloodhungry, the videotape I rented this afternoon—its ad line reads, “Some clowns make you laugh, but Bobo will make you die and then he’ll eat your body”—and a midnight trip to Hell’s Kitchen, even without a stop at Bellvue’s for a small bite to eat, wouldn’t give me enough time. Bethany’s bones and most of her intestines and flesh will probably get dumped into the incinerator down the hall from my apartment.

  Courtney, McDermott and I have just left a Morgan Stanley party that took place near the Seaport at the tip of Manhattan in a new club called Goldcard, which seemed like a vast city of its own and where I ran into Walter Rhodes, a total Canadian, whom I haven’t seen since Exeter and who also, like McDermott, reeked of Xeryus, and I actually told him, “Listen, I’m trying to stay away from people. I’m avoiding even speaking to them,” and then I asked to be excused. Only slightly stunned, Walter said, “Uh, sure, I, um, understand.” I’m wearing a six-button double-breasted wool-crepe tuxedo with pleated trousers and a silk grosgrain bow tie, all by Valentino. Luis Carruthers is in Atlanta for the week. I did a line of coke with Herbert Gittes at Goldcard and before McDermott hailed this cab to head for Nell’s I took a Halcion to get rid of the edge from the cocaine, but it hasn’t sunk in yet. Courtney seems attracted to McDermott and since her Chembank card wasn’t functioning tonight, at least not at the automated teller we stopped at (the reason being she uses it too often to cut lines of coke with, though she would never admit this; cocaine residue has, at various times, fucked up my card also) and McDermott’s was working, she bypassed mine in favor of his, which means, knowing Courtney, that she wants to fuck McDermott. But it doesn’t really matter. Even though I’m more handsome than Craig, we both look pretty much the same. Talking animals were the topic of this morning’s Patty Winters Show. An octopus was floating in a makeshift aquarium with a microphone attached to one of its tentacles and it kept asking—or so its “trainer,” who is positive that mollusks have vocal cords, assured us—for “cheese.” I watched, vaguely transfixed, until I started to sob. A beggar dressed as a Hawaiian frets over a garbage can on the darkened corner of Eighth and Tenth.

  “With distilled or purified water,” McDermott is saying, “most of the minerals have been removed. The water has been boiled and the steam condensed into purified water.”

  “Wheras distilled water has a flat taste and it’s usually not for drinking.” I find myself yawning.

  “And mineral water?” Courtney asks.

  “It’s not defined by the—” McDermott and I start simultaneously.

  “Go ahead,” I say, yawning again, causing Courtney to yawn also.

  “No, you go ahead,” he says apathetically.

  “It’s not defined by the FDA,” I tell her. “It has no chemicals or salts or sugars or caffeine.”

  “And sparkling water gets its fizz from carbon dioxide, right?” she asks.

  “Yes.” Both McDermott and I nod, staring straight ahead.

  “I knew that,” she says hesitantly, and by the tone of her voice I can sense, without looking over, that she probably smiles when she says this.

  “But only buy naturally sparkling water,” I caution. “Because that means the carbon dioxide content is in the water at its source.”

  “Club soda and seltzer, for example, are artificially carbonated,” McDermott explains.

  “White Rock seltzer is an exception,” I mention, nonplussed by McDermott’s ridiculous, incessant one-upmanship. “Ramlösa sparkling mineral water is also very good.”

  The cab is about to turn onto Fourteenth Street, but maybe four or five limousines are trying to make the same right so we miss the light. I curse the driver but an old Motown song from the sixties, maybe it’s the Supremes, plays muted, up front, the sound blocked by the fiberglass partition. I try to open it but it’s locked and won’t slide across. Courtney asks, “What kind should you drink after exercising?”

  “Well,” I sigh. “Whatever it is, it should be really cold.”

  “Because?” she asks.

  “Because it’s absorbed faster than if it was at room temperature.” Absently I check my Rolex. “It should probably be water. Evian. But not in plastic.”

  “My trainer says Gatorade’s okay,” McDermott counters.

  “But don’t you think water is the best fluid replacer since it enters the bloodstream faster than any other liquid?” I can’t help but add, “Buddy?”

  I check my watch again. If I have one J&B on the rocks at Nell’s I can make it home in time to watch all of Bloodhungry by two. Again it’s silent in the cab, which moves steadily toward the crowd outside the club, the limousines dropping off passengers then moving on, each of us concentrating on that, and also on the sky above the city, which is heavy, looming with dark clouds. The limousines keep blaring their horns at each other, solving nothing. My throat, because of the coke I did with Gittes, feels parched and I swallow, trying to wet it. Posters for a sale at Crabtree & Evelyn line the boarded windows of abandoned tenement buildings on the other side of this street. Spell “mogul,” Bateman. How do you spell mogul? M-o-g-u-1. Mo-gul. Mog-ul. Ice, ghosts, aliens—

  “I don’t like Evian,” McDermott says somewhat sadly. “It’s too sweet.” He looks so miserable when he admits this that it moves me to agree.

  Glancing over at him in the darkness of the cab, realizing he’s probably going to end up in bed with Courtney tonight, I feel an instantaneous moment of pity for him.

  “Yes, McDermott,” I say slowly. “Evian is too sweet.”

  Earlier, there was so much of Bethany’s blood pooled on the floor that I could make out my reflection in it while I reached for one of my cordless phones, and I watched myself make a haircut appointment at Gio’s. Courtney breaks my trance by admitting, “I was afraid to try Pellegrino for the first time.” She looks over at me nervously—expecting me to … what, agree?—then at McDermott, who offers her a wan, tight smile. “But once I did, it was … fine.”

  “How courageous,” I murmur, yawning again, the cab inching its way toward Nell’s, then, raising my voice, “Listen, does anyone know of a device you can hook up to your phone to simulate that call-waiting sound?”

  Back at my place I stand over Bethany’s body, sipping a drink contemplatively, studying its condition. Both eyelids are open halfway and her lower teeth look as if they’re jutting out since her lips have been torn—actually bitten—off. Earlier in the day I had sawed off her left arm, which is what finally killed her, and right now I pick it up, holding it by the bone that protrudes from where her hand used to be (I have no idea where it is now: the freezer? the closet?), clenching it in my fist like a pipe, flesh and muscle still clinging to it though a lot of it has been hacked or gnawed off, and I bring it down on her head. It takes very few bl
ows, five or six at most, to smash her jaw open completely, and only two more for her face to cave in on itself.

  Whitney Houston

  Whitney Houston burst onto the music scene in 1985 with her self-titled LP which had four number one hit singles on it, including “The Greatest Love of All,” “You Give Good Love” and “Saving All My Love for You,” plus it won a Grammy Award for best pop vocal performance by a female and two American Music Awards, one for best rhythm and blues single and another for best rhythm and blues video. She was also cited as best new artist of the year by Billboard and by Rolling Stone magazine. With all this hype one might expect the album to be an anticlimactic, lackluster affair, but the surprise is that Whitney Houston (Arista) is one of the warmest, most complex and altogether satisfying rhythm and blues records of the decade and Whitney herself has a voice that defies belief. From the elegant, beautiful photo of her on the cover of the album (in a gown by Giovanne De Maura) and its fairly sexy counterpart on the back (in a bathing suit by Norma Kamali) one knows that this isn’t going to be a blandly professional affair; the record is smooth but intense and Whitney’s voice leaps across so many boundaries and is so versatile (though she’s mainly a jazz singer) that it’s hard to take in the album on a first listening. But you won’t want to. You’ll want to savor it over many.

  It opens with “You Give Good Love” and “Thinking About You,” both produced and arranged by Kashif, and they emanate warm, lush jazz arrangements but with a contemporary synthesized beat and though they’re both really good songs, the album doesn’t get kicking until “Someone for Me” which was produced by Jermaine Jackson, where Whitney sings longingly against a jazz-disco background and the difference between her longing and the sprightliness of the song is very moving. The ballad “Saving All My Love for You” is the sexiest, most romantic song on the record. It also has a killer saxophone solo by Tom Scott and one can hear the influences of sixties girl-group pop in it (it was cowritten by Gerry Goffin) but the sixties girl groups were never this emotional or sexy (or as well produced) as this song is. “Nobody Loves Me Like You Do” is a glorious duet with Jermaine Jackson (who also produced it) and just one example of how sophisticated lyrically this album is. The last thing it suffers from is a paucity of decent lyrics which is what usually happens when a singer doesn’t write her own material and has to have her producer choose it. But Whitney and company have picked well here.