Lunar Park - Bret Easton Ellis [83]
In my office, I couldn’t concentrate on my novel so I reread the scene in American Psycho where Paul Owen is murdered and again was appalled by the details of the crime—the newspapers covering the floor, the raincoat worn by Patrick Bateman to protect his suit, the blade of the ax splitting Paul’s head open, the spraying of blood and the hissing sounds a skull makes coming apart. The thing that scared me the most: What if there was no rage in this person haunting Midland County? What if he just serenely planned his crimes and carried them out methodically, his emotional level akin to pushing a shopping cart through a supermarket while crossing items off a list? There was no rationale for these crimes other than that whoever was committing them liked it.
I did try Aimee Light again. Again she didn’t pick up. Again I didn’t leave a message. I didn’t know what to say anymore, since I had now dreamt seeing her pull out of the Whole Foods parking lot and onto Ophelia Boulevard with Clayton by her side. That—at this point in the dream—had not happened on Saturday afternoon.
I did not see Robby when he came home from school, and he did not sit down to dinner with the family, preferring to eat alone in his bedroom while ostensibly starting his homework. Sarah, sitting with Jayne and me, seemed unaffected by the events of last night, and during the meal I figured out why: she was part of the dream.
I dressed in a suit for parent/teacher night. I looked responsible. I was a concerned adult who yearned for news about his child’s academic progress. The following is the dialogue I wrote for the bedroom scene that night, but which Jayne refused to play and rewrote.
“What should I wear?” I asked.
After a long pause. “I think a smile should be enough.”
“So I can go as the naked grinning idiot?”
Muttered, barely audible: “All you have to do is nod and smile for ten minutes in front of a few teachers and meet the principal. Can you handle that without freaking? Or pulling out a gun?”
Apologetically: “I’ll try.”
“Stop smirking.”
Jayne conferred with Marta about what time we would be returning home.
Jayne did not seem to realize how seriously I was taking things.
We took the Range Rover and drove to the school in silence except when Jayne told me that we were seeing Dr. Faheida tomorrow night. I refrained from asking why we weren’t going at our usual time on Wednesday, because in the dream it no longer mattered.
At Buckley, security guards were everywhere. They stood at the gates, inspecting cars with flashlights while checking names on their lists. At the valet parking, more security guards—some armed—insisted on seeing photo IDs. The entire student body of Buckley, from nursery school through twelfth grade, amounted only to six hundred students (each class held about forty kids) and tonight just the parents of the elementary children were invited, and it seemed as if they had all turned out. The campus was mobbed with neatly dressed young couples, and Jayne received the requisite stares. By the Starbucks cart that had been set up outside the library, we ran into Adam and Mimi Gardner, and once it became apparent that they were ignoring me and no one was going to mention last night, I realized that they were part of my dream as well.
The school was sleek and industrial, with large steel doors that loomed above you wherever you turned, and the entire campus was surrounded by an immense amount of foliage. Trees canopied the school—it was hidden in a forest. Within these woods were a series of block structures—rows of anonymous bungalows dotted with small slotlike windows which comprised the bulk of the classrooms. The architecture was so minimalist that it possessed an unnerving glamour. And it was all based on control, yet it wasn’t claustrophobic, even with all the elms and shrubs that enclosed the school’s grounds. It was