Later that afternoon, I drove to the Bank of America on Ventura Boulevard to retrieve my father’s ashes. I did not leave the bank with them.
I had dinner with my mother and two sisters and their various husbands and boyfriends on Saturday night in the house on Valley Vista in Sherman Oaks (an exact, if much smaller, replica of the house on Elsinore Lane, with an identical layout). My mother and sisters understood (once the press reported I was the father of Jayne Dennis’s son) that only when I had acquainted myself with Robby to the point at which he felt comfortable enough would my family meet their grandson and nephew. This was the understanding that Jayne and I, and our therapists, had reached—everyone except for Robby (who knew nothing about this arrangement and had never, to my knowledge, inquired about aunts or a grandmother). The saddest moment of the night came when I realized—once they asked—that I carried no photographs of my son. There were questions about Jayne, about life back East in the suburbs, about the damage to my face (“I fell”). My sisters marveled at how much I had begun resembling our father as I moved toward middle age. I just nodded and asked my sisters about their recent triumphs and dramas: one was an assistant to Diane Keaton; the other was just out of rehab. I helped my mother’s boyfriend—a man from Argentina whom she had been living with for the past fifteen years—grill salmon. Dinner was calm, but afterward, out by the pool, while smoking cigarettes with my sisters, a tense debate ensued about what to do with Dad’s ashes (I did not say anything about what I had found in the safe-deposit box earlier that afternoon) and then morphed into various old issues: the girl he was living with at the time of his death had a boyfriend—had I even known about this? I couldn’t remember. Of course I couldn’t remember, my sisters argued, since I had run away and refused to deal with anything. And then, in rapid succession: the invalid will, the lack of an autopsy, the conspiracy theories, the paranoia. I escaped this by heading upstairs to retrieve something from my old bedroom. (This was another reason that I was in L.A.) Plus the backyard was haunting me; the pool, the chaise longues, the deck—they were all identical to the backyard on Elsinore Lane. As I stood up to leave, my sisters commented on how guarded I seemed. I told them I was just tired. I didn’t want to keep our father alive, which is what we did whenever we had these inevitable conversations. I did not tell them anything about what had been happening to me during the last week. There wasn’t enough time. Inside the house I stopped at the top of the stairs and gazed down into the living room. My reaction was dulled.
Not only was my bedroom just as I had left it as a teenager but it was also Robby’s room as well. I had stayed here often when I visited L.A., after I made the move to Camden and then to New York, and over the years part of this large space overlooking the San Fernando Valley had slowly transformed itself into an office, where I stored old manuscripts and files on shelves built into a walk-in closet. This was where I was heading. I immediately started rummaging carelessly through stacks of papers—drafts of novels, magazine essays, children’s books—until the floor became littered with them. And then I finally located what I was looking for: the original manuscript copy of American Psycho, which had been typed on an electric Olivetti (four drafts in all, which continued to fill me with disbelief). I sat on the futon beneath the framed Elvis Costello poster that still hung on the wall and began flipping through its pages. Without even knowing what I was looking for, I felt a vague desire to touch the book and rid myself of something that Donald Kimball had said. There was a piece of information that had never fit into the pattern revealing itself to us. I wanted to make sure it did not exist. But as I kept turning pages I began knowing what it was.
It made itself apparent the moment I hit page 207 in the original manuscript.
On page 207 was the drawing of a face.
I had drawn a face onto the thin sheet of typing paper (leaving enough space between the chapter breaks to fit it in).
And beneath the face I drew the words, scrawled in red pen: “I’m B a c k.”
This image of words scrawled in blood was used later on, but I had cut the scene that preceded this warning.
This chapter had been omitted.
And I had also removed the crude drawing of the face from any subsequent manuscripts.
Something became confirmed.
This was a copy of the manuscript I had shown no one.
This was the copy that had been rewritten before I handed the book to my agent.
This was the copy that no editor or publisher had ever seen.
This was the one chapter I had cut from the very first draft and that no one but me had ever read.
It included details of the murder of a woman called Amelia Light.
I flashed on the phone call I received on November 5.
“What did you do to her?”
“I’d check the text of that dirty little book you wrote again.”
The fictional details—the missing arms and head, the ropes, the blowtorch—were identical to the details of the murder in the Orsic Motel in a place called Stoneboat, according to what Donald Kimball had imparted.
As I kept turning pages, I realized even before I arrived at the next chapter that it would be titled “Paul Owen.”
The murder that followed Amelia Light’s would be Paul Owen’s.
Donald Kimball was wrong.
Someone was tracking the book.
And a man named Paul Owen in Clear Lake would be the next victim.
I reached for a phone to call Donald Kimball.
But something stopped me.
I reminded myself again, this time with more force, that no one except me had ever seen this copy of the manuscript.
This led to: What was I going to say to Kimball?
What was there to say? That I was going insane? That my book was now reality?
I had no reaction—emotional, physical—to any of this. Because I was now at a point at which I accepted anything that presented itself to me.
I had constructed a life, and this is what it now offered me in return.
I pushed the original manuscript away from myself.
I stood up. I was moving toward a wall of bookshelves.
I was flashing on something else now.
I pulled a copy of the Vintage edition of American Psycho from a shelf.
I flipped through it until, on page 266, I found a chapter titled “Detective.”
I sat back on the bed and began to read.
May slides into June which slides into July which creeps towards August. Because of the heat I’ve had intense dreams the last four nights about vivisection and I’m doing nothing now, vegetating in my office with a sickening headache and a Walkman with a soothing Kenny G CD playing in it, but the bright midmorning sunlight floods the room, piercing my skull, causing my hangover to throb, and because of this, there’s no workout this morning. Listening to the music I notice the second light on my phone blinking off and on, which means that Jean is buzzing me. I sigh and carefully remove the Walkman.
“What is it?” I ask in monotone.
“Um, Patrick?” she begins.
“Ye-es, Je-an?” I ask condescendingly, spacing the two words out.
“Patrick, a Mr. Donald Kimball is here to see you,” she says nervously.
“Who?” I snap, distracted.
She emits a small sigh of worry, then, as if asking, lowers her voice. “Detective Donald Kimball.”