The Shards

by Bret Easton Ellis

I froze again. 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.