"Waiter?" she asks, as soon as he sets down the decaf espresso, the port and the dry beer. "I'll have a… I'll have a… a what?" She looks over at me tearfully, confused and panicked. "A Corona? Is that what you drink, Patrick? A Corona?"
"Oh my god. Give it up. Please, just excuse her," I tell the waiter, then, as soon as he walks away, "Yes. A Corona. But we're in a fucking Chinese-Cajun bistro so–"
"Oh god, Patrick," she sobs, blowing her nose into the handkerchief I've tossed at her. "You're so lousy. You're… inhuman."
"No, I'm…" I stall again.
"You… are not…" She stops, wiping her face, unable to finish.
"I'm not what?" I ask, waiting, interested.
"You are not" – she sniffs, looks down, her shoulders heaving – "all there. You" – she chokes – "don't add up."
"I do too," I say indignantly, defending myself. "I do too add up."
"You're a ghoul," she sobs.
"No, no," I say, confused, watching her. "You're the ghoul."
"Oh god," she moans, causing the table next to ours to look over, then away. "I can't believe this."
"I'm leaving now," I say soothingly. "I've assessed the situation and I'm going."
"Don't," she says, trying to grab my hand. "Don't go."
"I'm leaving, Evelyn."
"Where are you going?" Suddenly she looks remarkably composed. She's been careful not to let the tears, which actually I've just noticed are very few, affect her makeup. "Tell me, Patrick, where are you going?"
I've placed a cigar on the table. She's too upset to even comment. "I'm just leaving," I say simply.
"But where?" she asks, more tears welling up. "Where are you going?"
Everyone in the restaurant within a particular aural distance seems to be looking the other way.
"Where are you going?'.' she asks again.
I make no comment, lost in my own private maze, thinking about other things: warrants, stock offerings, ESOPs, LBOs, IPOs, finances, refinances, debentures, converts, proxy statements, 8-Ks, 10-Qs, zero coupons, PiKs, GNPs, the IMF, hot executive gadgets, billionaires, Kenkichi Nakajima, infinity, Infinity, how fast a luxury car should go, bailouts, junk bonds, whether to cancel my subscription to The Economist, the Christmas Eve when I was fourteen and had raped one of our maids, Inclusivity, envying someone's life, whether someone could survive a fractured skull, waiting in airports, stifling a scream, credit cards and someone's passport and a book of matches from La Côte Basque splattered with blood, surface surface surface, a Rolls is a Rolls is a Rolls. To Evelyn our relationship is yellow and blue, but to me it's a gray place, most of it blacked out, bombed, footage from the film in my head is endless shots of stone and any language heard is utterly foreign, the sound flickering away over new images: blood pouring from automated tellers, women giving birth through their assholes, embryos frozen or scrambled (which is it?), nuclear warheads, billions of dollars, the total destruction of the world, someone gets beaten up, someone else dies, sometimes bloodlessly, more often mostly by rifle shot, assassinations, comas, life played out as a sitcom, a blank canvas that reconfigures itself into a soap opera. It's an isolation ward that serves only to expose my own severely impaired capacity to feel. I am at its center, out of season, and no one ever asks me for any identification. I suddenly imagine Evelyn's skeleton, twisted and crumbling, and this fills me with glee. It takes a long time to answer her question – Where are you going? – but after a sip of the port, then the dry beer, rousing myself, I tell her, at the same time wondering: If I were an actual automaton what difference would there really be?
"Libya," and then, after a significant pause, "Pago Pago. I meant to say Pago Pago," and then I add, "Because of your outburst I'm not paying for this meal."
Tries to Cook and Eat Girl
Dawn. Sometime in November. Unable to sleep, writhing on my futon, still in a suit, my head feeling like someone has lit a bonfire on it, in it, a constant searing pain that keeps both eyes open, utterly helpless. There are no drugs, no food, no liquor that can appease the forcefulness of this greedy pain; all my muscles are stiff, all my nerves burning, on fire. I'm taking Sontinex by the hour since I've run out of Dalmane, but nothing really helps and soon even the box of Sominex is empty. Things are lying in the corner of my bedroom: a pair of girl's shoes from Edward Susan Bennis Allen, a hand with the thumb and forefinger missing, the new issue of Vanity Fair splashed with someone's blood, a cummerbund drenched with gore, and from the kitchen wafting into the bedroom is the fresh smell of blood cooking, and when I stumble up out of bed into the living room, the walls are breathing, the stench of decay smothers everything. I light a cigar, hoping the smoke will mask at least some of it.
Her breasts have been chopped off and they look blue and deflated, the nipples a disconcerting shade of brown. Surrounded by dried black blood, they lie, rather delicately, on a china plate I bought at the Pottery Barn on top of the Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner, though I don't remember doing this. I have also shaved all the skin and most of the muscle off her face so that it resembles a skull with a long, flowing mane of blond hair falling from it, which is connected to a full, cold corpse; its eyes are open, the actual eyeballs hanging out of their sockets by their stalks. Most of her chest is indistinguishable from her neck, which looks like ground-up meat, her stomach resembles the eggplant and goat cheese lasagna at Il Marlibro or some other kind of dog food, the dominant colors red and white and brown. A few of her intestines are smeared across one wall and others are mashed up into balls that lie strewn across the glasstop coffee table like long blue snakes, mutant worms. The patches of skin left on her body are blue-gray, the color of tinfoil. Her vagina has discharged a brownish syrupy fluid that smells like a sick animal, as if that rat had been forced back up in there, had been digested or something.
I spend the next fifteen minutes beside myself, pulling out a bluish rope of intestine, most of it still connected to the body, and shoving it into my mouth, choking on it, and it feels moist in my mouth and it's filled with some kind of paste which smells bad. After an hour of digging, I detach her spinal cord and decide to Federal Express the thing without cleaning it, wrapped in tissue, under a different name, to Leona Helmsley. I want to drink this girl's blood as if it were champagne and I plunge my face deep into what's left of her stomach, scratching my chomping jaw on a broken rib. The huge new television set is on in one of the rooms, first blaring out The Patty Winters Show, whose topic today is Human Dairies, then a game show, Wheel of Fortune, and the applause coming from the studio audience sounds like static each time a new letter is turned. I'm loosening the tie I'm still wearing with a blood-soaked hand, breathing in deeply. This is my reality. Everything outside of this is like some movie I once saw.
In the kitchen I try to make meat loaf out of the girl but it becomes too frustrating a task and instead I spend the afternoon smearing her meat all over the walls, chewing on strips of skin I ripped from her body, then I rest by watching a tape of last week's new CBS sitcom, Murphy Brown. After that and a large glass of J&B I'm back in the kitchen. The head in the microwave is now completely black and hairless and I place it in a tin pot on the stove in an attempt to boil any remaining flesh I forgot to shave off. Heaving the rest of her body into a garbage bag – my muscles, slathered with Ben-Gay, easily handling the dead weight – I decide to use whatever is left of her for a sausage of some kind.
A Richard Marx CD plays on the stereo, a bag from Zabar's loaded with sourdough onion bagels and spices sits on the kitchen table while I grind bone and fat and flesh into patties, and though it does sporadically penetrate how unacceptable some of what I'm doing actually is, I just remind myself that this thing, this girl, this meat, is nothing, is shit, and along with a Xanax (which I am now taking half-hourly) this thought momentarily calms me and then I'm humming, humming the theme to a show I watched often as a child – The Jetsons? The Banana Splits? Scooby Doo? Sigmund and the Sea Monsters? I'm remembering the song, the melody, even the key it was sung in, but not the show. Was it Lidsville? Was it H. R. Pufnstuf? These questions are punctuated by other questions, as diverse as "Will I ever do time?" and "Did this girl have a trusting heart?" The smell of meat and blood clouds up the condo until I don't notice it anymore. And later my macabre joy sours and I'm weeping for myself, unable to find solace in any of this, crying out, sobbing "I just want to be loved," cursing the earth and everything I have been taught: principles, distinctions, choices, morals, compromises, knowledge, unity, prayer – all of it was wrong, without any final purpose. All it came down to was: die or adapt. I imagine my own vacant face, the disembodied voice coming from its mouth: These are terrible times. Maggots already writhe across the human sausage, the drool pouring from my lips dribbles over them, and still I can't tell if I'm cooking any of this correctly, because I'm crying too hard and I have never really cooked anything before.