The Shards

by Bret Easton Ellis

MANY YEARS AGO I REALIZED THAT A BOOK, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written in the same way we fall in love with someone: the dream becomes impossible to resist, there’s nothing you can do about it, you finally give in and succumb even if your instincts tell you to run the other way because this could be, in the end, a dangerous game—someone will get hurt.

that night, which I remember few specific details of, seems in retrospect like one of the last innocent nights of my life despite the fact that we should have never been there, underage and slightly high on cocaine and with a much older gay man who would be murdered three years later by one of our private-school peers.

This was an assumption my mind made—it was the drama the writer encouraged.

To Debbie, I had realized over the summer, the constant shrugging on my part suggested a kind of masculinity—a strong, silent type I was supposedly embodying when, in fact, I just didn’t care.

But I was a storyteller and I liked decorating an otherwise mundane incident that maybe contained one or two facts that made it initially interesting to be retold in the first place but not really, by adding a detail or two that elevated the story into something legitimately interesting to the listener and gave it humor or surprise or shock, and this came naturally to me. These weren’t lies exactly—I just preferred the exaggerated version.

There was a way out of the trap, I realized. This was an escape from the pantomime. Terry’s call confirmed I had plans, I was mapping out my own destiny, I was a writer.

Sex and novels and music and movies were the things that made life bearable—not friends, not family, not school, not social scenes, not interactions—and that was the summer when I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark every other week but barely had dinner with my separated parents even twice. I had no stakes in the real world—why would I? It wasn’t built for me or my needs or desires.

For a very brief moment I was on the verge of admitting something to her—a truth, my real feelings.

I wasn’t even looking at the video projected on the wall because I was dreaming a different one.

And I wanted to write like this as well: numbness as a feeling, numbness as a motivation, numbness as the reason to exist, numbness as ecstasy.

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.