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04/26/10(Mon)12:50:49 No. 221044XXX File1272300649.jpg -(35
KB, 496x638, american-psycho-02.jpg ) "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?