"No," I say.
She says "Excuse me" and, making her way down the hall, looks back at me, once, with a strange expression on her face, before disappearing around the corner. I'm staring into the apartment. A couple in their late twenties stand, conferring with each other, in the middle of the living room. She's wearing a wool jacket, a silk blouse, wool flannel slacks, Armani, vermeil earrings, gloves, holding a bottle of Evian water. He has on a tweed sport jacket, cashmere sweater vest, cotton chambray shirt, tie, Paul Stuart, Agnes B. cotton trench coat draped over arm. Behind them, the apartment looks spotless. New venetian blinds, the cowhide paneling is gone; however, the furniture, the mural, the glass coffee table, Thonet chairs, black leather couch, all seem intact; the large-screen television set has been moved into the living room and it's been turned on, the volume low, a commercial where a stain walks off a jacket and addresses the camera is on now, but it doesn't make me forget what I did to Christie's breasts, to one of the girls' heads, the nose missing, both ears bitten off, how you could see her teeth through where I had ripped the flesh from her jaws and both cheeks, the torrents of gore and the blood that washed over the apartment, the stench of the dead, my own confused warning that I had drawn in–
"Can I help you?" the real estate agent, Mrs. Wolfe I'm guessing, intrudes. She has a very angular thin face, the nose is large, distressingly real-looking, heavily lipsticked mouth, white-blue eyes. She's wearing a wool boucle jacket, washed silk blouse, shoes, earrings, a bracelet, from where? I don't know. Maybe she's younger than forty.
I'm still leaning against the wall, staring at the couple, who move back into the bedroom, leaving the main room empty. I'm just noticing that bouquets in glass vases, dozens of them, fill the apartment everywhere, and I can smell them from where I'm standing in the hall. Mrs. Wolfe glances behind her to see what I'm staring at, then back to me. "I'm looking for… Doesn't Paul Owen live here?"
A long pause before she answers. "No. He doesn't."
Another long pause. "Are you, like… sure?" I ask, before feebly adding, "I don't… understand."
She realizes something that causes the muscles in her face to tighten. Her eyes narrow but don't close. She's noticed the surgical mask I'm gripping in a damp fist and she breathes in, sharply, refusing to look away. I am definitely not feeling right about any of this. On the TV, in a commercial, a man holds up a piece of toast and tells his wife, "Hey, you're right… this margarine really does taste better than shit." The wife smiles.
"You saw the ad in the Times?" she asks.
"No… I mean yes. Yes, I did. In the Times," I falter, gathering a pocket of strength, the smell from the roses thick, masking something revolting. "But… doesn't Paul Owen… still own this?" I ask, as forcibly as possible.
There's a long pause before she admits, "There was no ad in the Times."
We stare at each other endlessly. I'm convinced she senses I'm about to say something. I've seen this look on someone's face before. Was it in a club? A victim's expression? Had it appeared on a movie screen recently? Or had I seen it in the mirror? It takes what seems like an hour before I can speak again. "But that's… his" – I stop, my heart skips, resumes beating – "furniture." I drop my umbrella, then lean down quickly to retrieve it.
"I think you should go," she says.
"I think… I want to know what happened." I feel sick, my chest and back covered with sweat, drenched, it seems, instantaneously.
"Don't make any trouble," she says.
All frontiers, if there had ever been any, seem suddenly detachable and have been removed, a feeling that others are creating my fate will not leave me for the rest of the day. This… is… not… a… game, I want to shout, but I can't catch my breath though I don't think she can tell. I turn my face away. I need rest. I don't know what to say. Confused, I reach out for a moment to touch Mrs. Wolfe's arm, to steady myself, but I stop it in midair, move it to my chest instead, but I can't feel it, not even when I loosen my tie; it rests there, trembling, and I can't make it stop. I'm blushing, speechless.
"I suggest you go," she says.
We stand there in the hallway facing each other.
"Don't make any trouble," she says again, quietly.
I stand there a few seconds longer before finally backing away, holding up my hands, a gesture of assurance.
"Don't come back," she says.
"I won't," I say. "Don't worry."
The couple appears in the doorway. Mrs. Wolfe watches me until I'm at the elevator door, pressing the button for the attendant. In the elevator, the smell of the roses is overpowering.
Working Out
Free weights and Nautilus equipment relieve stress. My body responds to the workout accordingly. Shirtless, I scrutinize my image in the mirror above the sinks in the locker room at Xclusive. My arm muscles burn; my stomach is as taut as possible, my chest steel, pectorals granite hard, my eyes white as ice. In my locker in the locker room at Xclusive lie three vaginas I recently sliced out of various women I've attacked in the past week. Two are washed off, one isn't. There's a barrette clipped to one of them, a blue ribbon from Hermès tied around my favorite.
End of the 1980s
The smell of blood works its way into my dreams, which are, for the most part, terrible: on an ocean liner that catches fire, witnessing volcanic eruptions in Hawaii, the violent deaths of most of the inside traders at Salomon, James Robinson doing something bad to me, finding myself back at boarding school, then at Harvard, the dead walk among the living. The dreams are an endless reel of car wrecks and disaster footage, electric chairs and grisly suicides, syringes and mutilated pinup girls, flying saucers, marble Jacuzzis, pink peppercorns. When I wake up in a cold sweat I have to turn on the wide-screen television to block out the construction sounds that continue throughout the day, rising up from somewhere. A month ago was the anniversary of Elvis Presley's death. Football games flash by, the sound turned off. I can hear the answering machine click once, its volume lowered, then twice. All summer long Madonna cries out to us, "life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone. . ."
When I'm moving down Broadway to meet Jean, my secretary, for brunch, in front of Tower Records a college student with a clipboard asks me to name the saddest song I know. I tell him, without pausing, "You Can't Always Get What You Want" by the Beatles. Then he asks me to name the happiest song I know, and I say "Brilliant Disguise" by Bruce Springsteen. He nods, makes a note, and I move on, past Lincoln Center. An accident has happened. An ambulance is parked at the curb. A pile of intestines lies on the sidewalk in a pool of blood. I buy a very hard apple at a Korean deli which I eat on my way to meet Jean who, right now, stands at the Sixty-seventh Street entrance to Central Park on a cool, sunny day in September. When we look up at the clouds she sees an island, a puppy dog, Alaska, a tulip. I see, but don't tell her, a Gucci money clip, an ax, a woman cut in two, a large puffy white puddle of blood that spreads across the sky, dripping over the city, onto Manhattan.
We stop at an outdoor café, Nowheres, on the Upper West Side, debating which movie to see, if there are any museum exhibits we should attend, maybe just a walk, she suggests the zoo, I'm nodding mindlessly. Jean is looking good, like she's been working out, and she's wearing a gilt lamb jacket and velvet shorts by Matsuda. I'm imagining myself on television, in a commercial for a new product – wine cooler? tanning lotion? sugarless gum? – and I'm moving in jump-cut, walling along a beach, the film is black-and-white, purposefully scratched, eerie vague pop music from the mid-1960s accompanies the footage, it echoes, sounds as if it's coming from a calliope. Now I'm looking into the camera, now I'm holding up the product – a new mousse? tennis shoes? – now my hair is windblown then it's day then night then day again and then it's night.