The Shards

by Bret Easton Ellis

“Well, I don’t want you to think that I don’t care,” I said. “I don’t think anything,” he said, glancing over at me, holding it. “I don’t think anything.” His eyes returned to whatever he was looking for. “I mean, what are you doing? What do you want?” He asked this in a quietly frustrated, almost pleading voice.

Robert felt he needed to make as much of an impression as possible in those initial days because he needed everyone to perceive him as normal—that was his plan—but it also seemed to me, and later to Thom Wright, when it was too late, that Robert Mallory was already playing a kind of game with us. And it didn’t help that his beauty made me feel as if I was collapsing inside—it didn’t offer pleasure, it just created confusion and caused a faint, dull pain in my chest. I was the only one, I believed then, who intuitively understood that Robert’s handsomeness was going to alter everything around us: I wasn’t going to be its only victim, there would be other casualties.

I had no stakes in the real world—why would I? It wasn’t built for me or my needs or desires.

I found the Dodgers T-shirt and lifted it up to smell it but there was no trace of Matt’s scent. And then my eyes landed on three pairs of white jockey shorts next to the T-shirts and an overwhelming signal of lust pulsed within me and I picked one of them up and pressed it to my face, inhaling deeply, pushing it into my mouth, tasting it, chewing on it—I couldn’t help myself. They were clean: there were no stains, no odor, no hint of Matt, everything about him washed away.

When I looked at the piece of tissue I noticed there was a small streak of blood from where his fingernail had scratched my rectum. I dampened a Kleenex and wiped again until there was no more blood. I washed my mouth out with warm water and then stared at my face in the mirror. I looked not only remarkably composed but as if I’d actually accomplished something—it wasn’t what I wanted but it wasn’t so bad. I was okay.