The Informers - Bret Easton Ellis [87]
I’m staring at what I think are ostriches. “I don’t know if we are,” I say. “Yes.”
“No, we’re not,” he calls out, walking ahead.
I follow him to where he stops, staring at a zebra.
“ ‘The zebra is truly a magnificent-looking animal,’ ” he reads from a description hanging next to the habitat.
“It looks very … Melrose,” I say.
“I get the feeling an adjective just escaped you, baby,” he says.
A child suddenly appears at my side and waves at the zebra.
“Bruce,” I start. “Did you tell her?”
We move to a bench. It has become overcast but it’s still hot and windy and Bruce smokes another cigarette and says nothing.
“I want to talk to you,” I say, grabbing his hands, squeezing them, but they lie there limply, lifeless in his lap.
“Why do they give some animals big cages and some not?” he wonders.
“Bruce. Please.” I start crying. The bench has suddenly become the center of the universe.
“The animals remind me of things I can’t explain,” he says.
“Bruce.” I choke.
I swiftly move a hand up to his face, touching his cheek gently, pressing.
He takes my hand and pulls it away from him and holds it between us on the bench and he quickly tells me. “Listen—my name is Yocnor and I am from the planet Arachanoid and it is located in a galaxy that Earth has not yet discovered and probably never will. I have been on your planet according to your time for the past four hundred thousand years and I was sent here to collect behavioral data which will enable us to eventually take over and destroy all other existing galaxies, including yours. It will be a horrible month, since Earth will be destroyed in increments and there will be suffering and pain on a level your mind will never be able to understand. But you will not experience this demise first-hand because it will occur in Earth’s twenty-fourth century and you will be dead long before that. I know you will find this hard to believe but for once I am telling you the truth. We will never speak of this again.” He kisses my hand, then looks back at the zebra and at the child wearing a CALIFORNIA T-shirt, still standing there, waving at the animal.
On the way out we find the gibbons. It’s as if they appear from nowhere, materializing for Bruce only. I have never seen a gibbon before and I don’t particularly want to see one now, so it’s basically a rather unilluminating experience. I sit on another bench and wait for Bruce, the sun beating down through haze, breaking it up, swirling it around, and it dawns on me that Bruce might not leave Grace and it also dawns on me that I might fall in love with someone else and I might even leave college and head for England or at least the East Coast. A lot of things might keep me away from Bruce. In fact, the odds look pretty good that something will. But I can’t help it, I think to myself as we leave the zoo and get back into my red BMW and he starts it up, I have faith in this man.
Books by BRET EASTON ELLIS
Less Than Zero
The Rules of Attraction
American Psycho
The Informers
BRET EASTON ELLIS
THE INFORMERS
Bret Easton Ellis is the author of Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho. He was born in 1964 and raised in Los Angeles. He is a graduate of Bennington College and lives in New York City and Richmond, Virginia.
BOOKS BY BRET EASTON ELLIS
AMERICAN PSYCHO
American Psycho is set in a world (Manhattan) and an era (the eighties) recognizably our own. The wealthy elite grows wealthier, the poor are turned out onto the streets in droves, and anything seems possible. Even so, Bateman—the handsome, well-educated, wealthy young man who expresses his true self through torture and murder—prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
Fiction/0-679-73577-1
LESS THAN ZERO
Set in L.A. in the early 1980s, this mesmerizing novel is a powerful portrait of a lost generation. Clay comes home on break from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of absolute moral entropy, where the natives drive Porsches, and snort mountains of cocaine. When Clay finds his childhood friend Julian