Lunar Park - Bret Easton Ellis [105]
My armpits were damp with sweat.
I wasn’t relieved
(Aimee Light is missing)
because even though no crime like this was featured in the Vintage edition of American Psycho, there was still a detail that bothered me. There was a suggestion in Kimball’s description of something I had once come across. Immediately my eyes refocused on the footprints as Kimball’s voice drifted in and out.
“. . . won’t have a positive ID for at least a week . . . maybe longer . . . maybe never . . . basically a wait-and-see situation . . .”
His stoicism was supposed to be comforting, and I realized he thought he was taking away something that was ruining my life and that I should be relieved. The more he spoke—in the soft voice meant to rid me of guilt and stress—the deeper my fear increased. Because what could I tell him at this point? Kimball waited patiently after he asked what it was I had called about, and he was unrewarded by my silence. My face actually reddened when I realized I had nothing to offer him—no proof, not even a name, just a young man who resembled me. And when he saw that I had nothing to give him—that I was hiding—he retreated back into trying to process what had hit him at the Orsic Motel earlier that day. He had no questions to ask me. I had no answers to give him. A train of futile incidence had led us here—that was all. Nothing was connected anymore. And while we both fell into our respective silences my mind started widening with possibilities I couldn’t share with the detective.
A boy was making a book come true. But I did not have the name of this boy.
He had been in my house. (He denied this.)
He had been in Aimee Light’s car. (But had you really seen him?)
He was involved with a girl I was involved with.
(Bring this up. Admit the affair. Let Jayne know. Lose everything.)
And he had been in a video that was made the night my father died twelve years ago.
(But don’t forget: in the video he is the same age as he is now. That’s the crowning detail. That’s the admission that will really make this case fly. That’s the thing that would be used against you.)
In the end it was the fear that Kimball might view me as insane that was the most legitimate reason I had for not saying anything.
(The wind? What do you mean, the wind stopped you from searching a parking lot? What were you looking for? The car of a nonexistent student? A phantom? Someone who had the same exact car that you had driven as a teenager and was—)
Another horrible feeling: I was gradually being comforted by the unreality of the situation. It made me tense, but it also disembodied me. The last day and night were so far out of the realm of anything I had experienced before that the fear was now laced with a low and tangible excitement. I could no longer deny becoming addicted to the adrenaline. The sweeps of nausea were subsiding and a terrible giddiness was taking their place. When I thought of “order” and “facts” I simply began laughing. I was living in a movie, in a novel, an idiot’s dream that someone else was writing, and I was becoming amazed—dazzled—by my dissolution. If there had been explanations for all the dangling strands in this reversible world, I would have acted on them
(but there could never be any explanations because explanations are boring, right?)
though at this point I just wanted it all to hang in the limbo of uncertainty.
Someone has been trying to make a novel you wrote come true.
Yet isn’t that what you did when you wrote the book?
(But you hadn’t written that book)
(Something else wrote that book)
(And your father now wanted you to notice things)
(But something else did not)
(You dream a book, and sometimes the dream comes true)
(When you give up life for fiction you become a character)
(A writer would always be cut off from actual experience because he was the writer)
“Mr. Ellis?”
Kimball was calling to me from someplace far away,