American Psycho (47 page)

Again I make the two of them eat each other out but it starts failing to turn me on—all I can think about is blood and what their blood will look like and though Torri knows what to do, how to eat pussy, it doesn’t subdue me and I push her away from Tiffany’s cunt and start licking and biting at the pink, soft, wet cuntness while Torri spreads her ass and sits on Tiffany’s face while fingering her own clit. Tiffany hungrily tongues her pussy, wet and glistening, and Torri reaches down and squeezes Tiffany’s big, firm tits. I’m biting hard, gnawing at Tiffany’s cunt, and she starts tensing up. “Relax,” I say soothingly. She starts squealing, trying to pull away, and finally she screams as my teeth rip into her flesh. Torri thinks Tiffany is coming and grinds her own cunt harder onto Tiffany’s mouth, smothering her screams, but when I look up at Torri, blood covering my face, meat and pubic hair hanging from my mouth, blood pumping from Tiffany’s torn cunt onto the comforter, I can feel her sudden rush of horror. I use Mace to blind both of them
momentarily and then I knock them unconscious with the butt of the nail gun.

Torri awakens to find herself tied up, bent over the side of the bed, on her back, her face covered with blood because I’ve cut her lips off with a pair of nail scissors. Tiffany is tied up with six pairs of Paul’s suspenders on the other side of the bed, moaning with fear, totally immobilized by the monster of reality. I want her to watch what I’m going to do to Torri and she’s propped up in a way that makes this unavoidable. As usual, in an attempt to understand these girls I’m filming their deaths. With Torri and Tiffany I use a Minox LX ultra-miniature camera that takes 9.5mm film, has a 15mm f/3.5 lens, an exposure meter and a built-in neutral density filter and sits on a tripod. I’ve put a CD of the Traveling Wilburys into a portable CD player that sits on the headboard above the bed, to mute any screams.

I start by skinning Torri a little, making incisions with a steak knife and ripping bits of flesh from her legs and stomach while she screams in vain, begging for mercy in a high thin voice, and I’m hoping that she realizes her punishment will end up being relatively light compared to what I’ve planned for the other one. I keep spraying Torri with Mace and then I try to cut off her fingers with nail scissors and finally I pour acid onto her belly and genitals, but none of this comes close to killing her, so I resort to stabbing her in the throat and eventually the blade of the knife breaks off in what’s left of her neck, stuck on bone, and I stop. While Tiffany watches, finally I saw the entire head off—torrents of blood splash against the walls, even the ceiling—and holding the head up, like a prize, I take my cock, purple with stiffness, and lowering Torri’s head to my lap I push it into her bloodied mouth and start fucking it, until I come, exploding into it. Afterwards I’m so hard I can even walk around the blood-soaked room carrying the head, which feels warm and weightless, on my dick. This is amusing for a while but I need to rest so I remove the head, placing it in Paul’s oak and teak armoire, and then I’m sitting in a chair, naked, covered with blood, watching HBO on Owen’s TV, drinking a Corona, complaining out loud, wondering why Owen doesn’t have Cinemax.

Later—now—I’m telling Tiffany, “I’ll let you go, shhh …,”
and I’m stroking her face, which is slick, owing to tears and Mace, gently, and it burns me that she actually looks up hopefully for a moment before she sees the lit match I’m holding in my hand that I’ve torn from a matchbook I picked up in the bar at Palio’s where I was having drinks with Robert Farrell and Robert Prechter last Friday, and I lower it to her eyes, which she instinctively closes, singeing both eyelashes and brows, then I finally use a Bic lighter and hold it up to both sockets, making sure they stay open with my fingers, burning my thumb and pinkie in the process, until the eyeballs burst. While she’s still conscious I roll her over, and spreading her ass cheeks, I nail a dildo that I’ve tied to a board deep into her rectum, using the nail gun. Then, turning her over again, her body weak with fear, I cut all the flesh off around her mouth and using the power drill with a detachable, massive head I widen that hole while she shakes, protesting, and once I’m satisfied with the size of the hole I’ve created, her mouth open as wide as possible, a reddish-black tunnel of twisted tongue and loosened teeth, I force my hand down, deep into her throat, until it disappears up to my wrist—all the while her head shakes uncontrollably, but she can’t bite down since the power drill ripped her teeth out of her gums—and grab at the veins lodged there like tubes and I loosen them with my fingers and when I’ve gotten a good grip on them violently yank them out through her open mouth, pulling until the neck caves in, disappears, the skin tightens and splits though there’s little blood. Most of the neck’s innards, including the jugular, hang out of her mouth and her whole body starts twitching, like a roach on its back, shaking spasmodically, her melted eyes running down her face mixing with the tears and Mace, and then quickly, not wanting to waste time, I turn off the lights and in the dark before she dies I rip open her stomach with my bare hands. I can’t tell what I’m doing with them but it’s making wet snapping sounds and my hands are hot and covered with something.

The aftermath. No fear, no confusion. Unable to linger since there are things to be done today: return videotapes, work out at the gym, a new British musical on Broadway I promised Jeanette I’d take her to, a dinner reservation to be made somewhere. What’s left of both bodies is in early rigor mortis. Part
of Tiffany’s body—I think it’s her even though I’m having a hard time telling the two apart—has sunken in and her ribs jut out, most broken in half, from what’s left of her stomach, both breasts having been pierced by them. A head has been nailed to the wall, fingers lie scattered or arranged in some kind of circle around the CD player. One of the bodies, the one on the floor, has been defecated on and seems to be covered with teeth marks where I had bitten into it, savagely. With the blood from one of the corpses’ stomachs that I dip my hand into, I scrawl, in dripping red letters above the faux-cowhide paneling in the living room, the words
I AM BACK
and below it a scary drawing which looks like this

The following are delivered mid-October.

An audio receiver, the Pioneer VSX-9300S, which features an integrated Dolby Prologic Surround Sound processor with digital delay, plus a full-function infrared remote control that masters up to 154 programmed functions from any other brand’s remote and generates 125 watts of front speaker power as well as 30 watts in back.

An analog cassette deck by Akai, the GX-950B, which comes complete with manual bias, Dolby recording level controls, a built-in calibrated tone generator and a spot-erase editing system enabling one to mark the beginning and end points of a certain musical passage, which can then be erased with a single push of a button. The three-head design features a self-enclosed tape unit, resulting in minimized interference, and its noise-reduction setup is fortified with Dolby HX-Pro while its front-panel controls are activated by a full-function wireless remote.

A multidisc CD player by Sony, the MDP-700, which spins both audios and videos—anything from three-inch digital audio singles to twelve-inch video discs. It contains a still-frame slowmotion
multispeed visual/audio laser that incorporates four-times-over sampling and a dual-motor system that helps ensure consistent disc rotation while the disc-protect system helps prevent the discs from warping. An automatic music sensor system lets you make up to ninety-nine track selections while an auto chapter search allows you to scan up to seventy-nine segments of a video disc. Included is a ten-key remote control joy-shuttle dial (for frame-by-frame search) and a memory stop. This also has two sets of gold-plated A-V jacks for topnotch connections.

A high-performance cassette deck, the DX-5000 from NEC, which combines digital special effects with excellent hi-fi, and a connected four-head VHS-HQ unit, which comes equipped with a twenty-one-day eight-event programmer, MTS decoding and 140 cable-ready channels. An added bonus: a fifty-function unified remote control lets me zap out TV commercials.

Included in the Sony CCD-V200 8mm camcorder is a seven-color wipe, a character generator, an edit switch that’s also capable of time-lapse recording, which allows me to, say, record a decomposing body at fifteen-second intervals or tape a small dog as it lies in convulsions, poisoned. The audio has built-in digital stereo record/playback, while the zoom lens has four-lux minimum illumination and six variable shutter speeds.

A new TV monitor with a twenty-seven-inch screen, the CX-2788 from Toshiba, has a built-in MTS decoder, a CCD comb filter, programmable channel scan, a super-VHS connection, seven watts per channel of power, with an additional ten watts dedicated to drive a subwoofer for extra low-frequency oomph, and a Carver Sonic Holographing sound system that produces a unique stereo 3-D sound effect.

Pioneer’s LD-ST disc player with wireless remote and the Sony MDP-700 multidisc player with digital effects and universal-wireless-remote programming (one for the bedroom, one for the living room), which play all sizes and formats of audio and video discs—eight-inch and twelve-inch laser discs, five-inch CD video discs and three- and five-inch compact discs—in two autoload drawers. The LD-Wi from Pioneer holds two full-sized discs and plays both sides sequentially with only a several-second lag per side during the changeover so you don’t have to change or flip the discs. It also has digital
sound, wireless remote and a programmable memory. Yamaha’s CDV-1600 multidisc player handles all disc formats and has a fifteen-selection random-access memory and a wireless remote.

A pair of Threshold monoblock amplifiers that cost close to $15,000 are also delivered. And for the bedroom, a bleached oak cupboard to store one of the new televisions arrives on Monday. A tailored cotton-upholstered sofa framed by eighteenth-century Italian bronze and marble busts on contemporary painted wood pedestals arrives on Tuesday. A new bed headboard (white cotton covered with beige brass nail trim) also arrives on Tuesday. A new Frank Stella print for the bathroom arrives on Wednesday along with a new Superdeluxe black suede armchair. The Onica, which I’m selling, is being replaced by a new one: a huge portrait of a graphic equalizer done in chrome and pastels.

I’m talking to the delivery guys from Park Avenue Sound Shop about HDTV, which isn’t available yet, when one of the new black AT&T cordless phones rings. I tip them, then answer it. My lawyer, Ronald, is on the other end. I’m listening to him, nodding, showing the delivery guys out of the apartment. Then I say, “The bill is three hundred dollars, Ronald. We only had coffee.” A long pause, during which I hear a bizarre sloshing sound coming from the bathroom. Walking cautiously toward it, cordless phone still in hand, I tell Ronald, “But yes … Wait … But I am … But we only had espresso.” Then I’m peering into the bathroom.

Perched on the seat of the toilet is a large wet rat that has—I’m assuming—come up out of it. It sits on the rim of the toilet bowl, shaking itself dry, before it jumps, tentatively, to the floor. It’s a massive rodent and it lurches, then scrambles, across the tile, out of the bathroom’s other entrance and into the kitchen, where I follow it toward the leftover pizza bag from Le Madri that for some reason sits on the floor on top of yesterday’s
New York Times
near the garbage pail from Zona, and the rat, lured by the smell, takes the bag in its mouth and shakes its head furiously, like a dog would, trying to get at the leek-goat cheese-truffle pizza, making squealing sounds of hunger. I’m on a lot of Halcion at this point so the rat doesn’t bother me as much as, I suppose, it should.

To catch the rat I buy an extra-large mousetrap at a hardware store on Amsterdam. I also decide to spend the night at my family’s suite in the Carlyle. The only cheese I have in the apartment is a wedge of Brie in the refrigerator and before leaving I place the entire slice—it’s a really big rat—along with a sun-dried tomato and a sprinkling of dill, delicately on the trap, setting it. But when I come back the following morning, because of the rat’s size, the trap hasn’t killed it. The rat just lies there, stuck, squeaking, thrashing its tail, which is a horrible, oily, translucent pink, as long as a pencil and twice as thick, and it makes a slapping sound every time it hits against the white oak floor. Using a dustpan—which it takes me over a fucking
hour
to find—I corner the injured rat just as it frees itself from the trap and I pick the thing up, sending it into a panic, making it squeal even louder, hissing at me, baring its sharp, yellow rat fangs, and dump it into a Bergdorf Goodman hatbox. But then the thing claws its way out and I have to keep it in the sink, a board, heavy with unused cookbooks, covering it, and even then it almost escapes, while I sit in the kitchen thinking of ways to torture girls with this animal (unsurprisingly I come up with a lot), making a list that includes, unrelated to the rat, cutting open both breasts and deflating them, along with stringing barbed wire tightly around their heads.