The Shards

by Bret Easton Ellis

The atmosphere got instantly complicated in that moment and it was as if a new person suddenly possessed Robert and all the traces of warmth and vulnerability that had manifested themselves only seconds before were now gone and replaced by the three faces behind the whirring eyes. There was the innocent face that was squinting up at me trying to figure Bret out, and there was the face that was looking at everything else in a master shot, wide-screened, where all the pieces were visible and in play and offering a number of paths to navigate from this vantage point, and then there was the increasingly hostile face of a dangerously ill psychopath who had been institutionalized and was trying to contain himself and really didn’t care about anything.

And I just stood there in the fading afternoon light, realizing at seventeen that I was already staring into my past—that the past had a meaning that would always define you. I remember this being one of my first moments nearing adulthood, when I realized how powerful memory was—or at least it was the first time it hurt the most. And there was nothing I could do about the pain of the past—it just settled over me. The pool house and Matt were a part of my life that had happened and now they were gone. That was all. No one else knew about it. No one cared.

Our odds looked good: we were young and alive and strong and nothing could hurt us, and there wasn’t anything clouding this perception, a fable about our place in the world, and we ignored the intrusive notions of fate and horror and hideous death that might kidnap us from the golden dome of adolescence we resided under.

EVERYTHING SEEMED DREAMLIKE on that Thursday—a silent movie played out in slow motion, and it was about evasion, encroaching despair, secrets, everything leading up to a vague trap, and we were aware that we were all in the same film even though we all wanted different endings.