The Shards

by Bret Easton Ellis

I could make out the rippled abs and pectorals beneath it and my eyes casually traced the muscled thighs very lightly lined with brown hair and I averted my gaze when I caught the whiteness of his underwear beneath the red shorts as he sat down.

He was just part of the overall erasure that I was enacting: the eradication of my real self into the tangible participant who saw everything as normal.

I’d gotten pissed off and felt trapped in a totally fake conversation—he had won a contest he put into play by coming to the top of the stands and asking me why I’d been avoiding him even if I hadn’t. He locked me into something I didn’t want to be a part of, starting a nonsensical conversation that put me on the defensive.

I sat very still while I looked down at him, displayed like a teenage Greek god, and I couldn’t help thinking that Robert knew he was taunting me, and in ways that were different from how he was probably taunting Thom Wright and Matt Kellner. I resented the paranoia he inspired and yet I also found him undeniably erotic, an unparalleled object of teen boy desire and lust, and I hated the fact that these two opposite feelings coexisted within me. I simply stared at him silently, wondering what he looked like naked.

I felt completely unmoored from everything in that moment. “I’m just trying to be nice to you,” Robert said softly. “Even though…I heard you have problems with me.” This was a conversation one had in a dream, I thought.

I just sat on the bleacher above him, momentarily paralyzed until a distant anger started reanimating me, bringing me closer into the reality of the moment we were sharing.

A rage I’d never felt before flared and left me speechless. I stared at him, hoping I looked uncaring, as if none of this bothered me in the slightest, that I was too cool to give a shit about the pitiful mini-dramas and gossip of my classmates, but I was legitimately enraged at Susan, at Thom, at myself, and I felt ashamed sitting in front of Robert—they had talked about me to Robert, they had told Robert that I mistrusted him.

“I mean, look, I don’t know,” he started gently. “I guess I probably need to tell you things but…I can’t just yet,” he said. He left it there. It was my turn.

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.

I didn’t know if I trusted Susan in the way I once had—because of Robert Mallory—and in that same moment she asked me the question I realized I couldn’t tell her the truth and this revelation was so sudden and landed with such force that any hope of relief was wiped away. I could only be half honest with her—I had known Susan for a long time and I loved her in such a way that meant I could never fully lie to her and up to that point I never had. But we weren’t there anymore.

“Well, didn’t Robert find out and tell you?” I asked, continuing to control myself so I didn’t spit this out at her, so my features wouldn’t become twisted with rage, so that my hands wouldn’t gnarl into claws, so I wouldn’t let her see what I was really feeling in that moment. Instead my mood remained placid, my face blank.

“So nothing happened between you and Matt when you started dating Debbie?” I hated the way she asked this. I hated that this mattered to her. I hated the way she used the word dating. It suggested a different Susan than the numb, uncaring beauty I had become so enamored of in the past few weeks. It suggested that there were rules we needed to follow and a kind of propriety I thought Susan had abandoned. She was confirming we were in high school, where there were football games and assemblies and prom kings and Homecoming queens and boys didn’t fuck each other and everyone was faithful and abided by the laws we set up and conformed to.

“I think that was what started driving us apart.” I paused for emphasis. “Debbie. It was my relationship with Debbie.” I nodded as if realizing this for the first time. “That she had become my girlfriend…” Susan thought about this and nodded slightly as if she understood. And what made the moment so much worse was that she exhibited relief and relaxed. This lie caused a small wave of nausea to crest over me but then it dissolved when I realized it was all going to play.

She looked back at me and tried to lighten the moment by saying, “Your secret is safe with me,” but now it sounded ironic, not lightly joking like all the other times she’d said this, and I suddenly realized there was bemusement intertwined with her relief and I reacted to the irony by mimicking a shy schoolboy smiling bashfully and turning away. This made her laugh.

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.

I was so horrified by what I was looking at I became paralyzed. The pictures of Matt were so traumatic that one part of my life was now over and I had entered into another world, where I would remain forever. There was no going back to innocence or childhood—this moment was my official introduction into the realm of adults and death.

I made a decision in that moment: I was going to pretend that everything was normal and that yesterday hadn’t happened. I removed the uniform I’d passed out in and masturbated for the first time in what seemed like weeks and came so hard that it blew apart any remnants of the hangover and I felt such immense relief I was able to sit up and clearly orient myself and create a schedule I was going to follow daily and embody a new attitude.

Ryan Vaughn, who passed me into the classroom and muttered, “You’re ridiculous,” and I didn’t say anything back. I didn’t let it bother me—I might have fallen in love with him but there was no way for this to happen, to actualize itself in this particular time and place, in the atmosphere at Buckley, in high school, in 1981, so fuck it, go with the counter-narrative. Who cared anyway? It was all bullshit. It felt so cleansing to look at things from this angle. I wanted to be where Susan Reynolds was. 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.

I didn’t know what I was doing there with two girls who obviously knew something that they thought I didn’t have a clue about and that was tied to Robert Mallory and being kept from me. I wasn’t the gay best friend you could confide everything to for Susan and Debbie, and yet in reality I actually was, but they didn’t know this. And I might have been exactly that if I’d played things differently or if we were in another world. Here, in this situation, in the confines of Buckley, I was, in so many ways, an impostor.

I found myself fighting that particular brand of hopelessness that was again invading the cloud of positivity the tangible participant was trying to float within. Why are you so upset? the tangible participant asked. What is so upsetting? it asked. None of this is real.

I guess I’m always surprised by a person’s level of, um, propriety or lack of it, I guess. Or self-interest. Or self-delusion.” He said this calmly and with no rancor but it sounded like the insult he intended. “How badly they want something. La la la.” He paused again. “I’m always surprised what they think they’re capable of. What they think they’re going to get away with.” He paused once more. “I guess I shouldn’t be, but I am.”

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.

The living room was entirely white—the couches, the armchairs, the coffee table, the wet bar lined with four leather stools—and gave off an immaculate sci-fi vibe, as if it was a movie set no one inhabited. It embodied a starkness that was incongruous with how friendly both Donald and Gayle Reynolds always seemed to me throughout the time I’d known Susan, but the house, which they’d moved into three years ago and which was specifically redesigned by Gayle, suggested something about Susan’s mother that I’d never quite grasped previously and Susan had always hinted at: her mother could be a cold bitch.

The day was getting wrecked, but softly, in a hushed way.

The article was a jagged piece of insanity and I had no idea why the Los Angeles Times was quoting so liberally from this madman’s letter—it was repellent, ghastly, and yet I inhaled it like I was starving because it confirmed something for me and I located the hideous truth being expressed: the secret madness of the world was revealed.

I kept asking myself as I lay in bed before the Valium hit: how many people were involved in a lie and how long could they keep it going before everything cracked open and the truth spilled out?

The sadness I felt was tied to Thom’s impending pain and it was something I didn’t want to process: Thom didn’t deserve this. But, then, I thought, as the fear started overriding my sadness: who deserved anything? We get what we get.

I felt invested—weren’t we all connected as classmates, and if something affected one of us then wouldn’t the others feel the reverberations of our suffering and therefore console and protect us? But in that moment I realized this wasn’t true. Because no one had been affected by Matt Kellner’s death and my anguish. Everything was futile. There was no hope. The world didn’t notice your pain.

I realized I’d been so afraid that I hadn’t even known it—the fear had been so massive and abstract—and now it was specific, and this caused me to stand, hunched, and glance over at the front door, figuring out an escape.

There had been a point along the line in the last seven weeks where Susan had fallen in love with Robert Mallory and I couldn’t have imagined anything more hopeless happening than this—at least socially—because it could only be hidden for so long and once it was revealed everything would get altered, everyone’s relationships would become rearranged, sides would be chosen and this would completely change the mood of our senior year, and I was afraid it would ruin Thom, no matter how sunny and strong he appeared on the surface.

I couldn’t imagine visually what had happened—and what made it worse was that I had to guess, and that’s when the writer’s fantasies were more alarming than what mundane reality probably offered and I had to shut it out.

You couldn’t tell that Susan and Robert were a couple that morning on Gilley Field because they’d cast themselves and were now performing in different, more innocent roles, and yet because of this the fake rapport between the four of us eased into something that seemed almost genuine.

I was looking at Susan Reynolds and Robert Mallory talking to each other on a walkway beneath the eaves when Ryan said this and then I was staring back at his face, and noticed that he’d glanced at them as well, and in that moment I realized I didn’t trust him anymore, if I ever really had, and that there was nothing to save, things were already ruined, there was nothing to hope for. But I just smiled and said I was looking forward to the movie.

My increasing boredom and the closeness to Ryan was maddening: the movie was so well intentioned and noble that by a certain point I didn’t even know what was going on. I wanted to touch Ryan’s cock.

If everything was lost, then why not throw in a grenade: tell Ryan that you loved him and just let everything blow up.

Ryan was under Robert’s spell and trying to sound more sophisticated than he actually was, but Robert wasn’t gay, so why was Ryan trying to impress him? Then I realized Ryan wasn’t gay either, so none of this mattered in the manufactured dream we existed in. But I decided to be real and started interrupting Ryan and criticized the movie and the things I didn’t like about it—it was boring, it was anticlimactic, there was no excitement, I made fun of the religious element. This was a performance and it took a physical commitment that was exhausting, but I maintained it.

She was so reserved it was like sitting with an actress straining to play a part in a scene she hadn’t remembered the lines to.

She didn’t say anything. She kept studying me as if she couldn’t figure out if I was trustworthy or not, someone who could act with her in this scene she was creating as a confidant, a co-conspirator, another performer who would get on her level.

Abigail was trying to focus intently on me as she spoke so she could keep gauging my reaction to the information she was relaying instead of just being lost in the buzz of three glasses of wine.

If she had been sober I don’t think she would have been capable. But, buzzed on three glasses of wine, she decided to be honest and give it a shot.

The day really became effortless once you faked it and it actually became more real because of your changed demeanor; the act became the reality and it affected everything in what seemed like a positive way. In fact, it was preferable to reality.

I made this connection and though it was tenuous I was haunted by it. And since I felt so alone that day it became a friend.