I was “allowed” to resign from the college. When I cleaned out the office a week after my release from the hospital, I finally looked at the manuscript that “Clayton” had left on November fourth. Entitled “Minus Numbers,” it seemed almost to the word the rough draft of the novel I had written my freshman term at Camden—the novel that became Less Than Zero. Only one copy existed before I rewrote it (and, like the others, it was on a shelf, in a closet, in the bedroom in Sherman Oaks). But by then I had stopped wondering how “Clayton” had gotten ahold of this. When I went back to L.A., I compared the manuscript to mine and it was a total duplicate—an exact replica. Even the misspellings and typos had been transcribed. The reason I let go of this was that there was no information suggesting that “Clayton” had ever existed. This is the easiest route to take, the writer assured me.
But Aimee Light had existed. And the body that was discovered in the Orsic Motel was, in fact, hers. The man responsible for her murder, Bernard Erlanger, had presented himself to me as Donald Kimball, a man who believed he was, in fact, Patrick Bateman. A man who had become so obsessed with a book and its main character that he fell over the edge. Bernard Erlanger, who had run an unsuccessful detective agency in Pearce (that never had any affiliation with the Midland County Sheriff’s Department), confessed to the killings that “Donald Kimball” had told me about in my home on November first. These admissions were made after Bernard Erlanger was arrested outside a residence in Clear Lake, wearing an Armani linen suit, a cotton shirt and silk tie, leather wingtips from Cole Hahn and a raincoat. He was also carrying an ax. The residence belonged to Paul Owen, sixty-five, a widower who ran an independent bookstore in Stoneboat. At approximately 2:30 a.m. on the Sunday morning of November ninth, Paul Owen heard someone breaking into his home. He dialed 911. He locked himself in his bedroom. He waited. Someone tried to open the door. There was a pause before Bernard Erlanger began swinging the ax at the door repeatedly, until a patrol car arrived. He was arrested and without any questioning simply admitted to the killings of Robert Rabin, Sandy Wu, Victoria Bell and Aimee Light, as well as the attack on Albert Lawrence, the transient he had blinded the previous December. I did not want to know anything more about Bernard Erlanger. I did not want to believe that Bernard Erlanger had anything to do with the murders in Midland County because I wanted to believe the killer never existed. I never disputed the crimes—they actually happened and people had died brutally. But I still wanted to believe that the killer was fictional. That his name was Patrick Bateman (not Bernard Erlanger, or even Donald Kimball), and for a brief time over the course of a year he had become real, as so many fictional characters ultimately are for their creators—and for their readers as well. The reasons I wanted to believe this (and a part of me still does) not only lay in the Amelia Light murder in that unread draft of American Psycho but also because at the exact moment I finished the story at the Bel Air Hotel in which Patrick Bateman dies burning on a pier, the Clear Lake Patrol arrived at Paul Owen’s residence.
Four weeks after Robby was officially declared missing, Ashton Allen disappeared.
Jayne left Midland County and moved to Manhattan, as did I. She wanted a divorce, and there was nothing to negotiate, but I learned a few things. I hadn’t known there was a house in Amagansett that Jayne had recently purchased for the family, or that she had already planned an elaborate Christmas trip to London that was going to be a surprise (and now, of course, was canceled). When I had arrived in Midland County that summer I did not pay attention to the fact that Jayne wanted to build a long future with her husband. She really had wanted things to work out between us. But she should have known that you could look right through me. She should have known that the reason I was there had nothing to do with her, but that I was just trying to locate someplace where I might find the will to live again. The process of the divorce struck me as fairly meaningless since we had hardly seemed married in the first place. But her lawyer insisted. Jayne wanted a complete break and she did not want anything connecting us ever again. I would give her that: no contact whatsoever with her or Sarah. I was distressed but explained to my lawyer that our strategy was one of acceptance. So I met with our respective lawyers (men we were paying six hundred dollars an hour to help terminate everything) on a warm, rainy day the following April in an office in the Empire State Building. I apologized for being late. My reason: “I’ve never been to the Empire State Building before.” An important pause seemed to fill the room after I admitted this. Hands were extended, smiles were forced. It was hard for me to stay awake because of the heroin I was now taking daily. As if in an echo chamber, I heard someone mention that since there had been no prenuptials, would this cause a “difficulty” with the proceedings? No. Our son was lost, so the word “custody” never came up. Jayne waived alimony. My lawyer tiredly went through the rest of the motions. Jayne was thinner and did not say anything to me, which made me flash back to a time when we were so close that we could finish each other’s sentences. I wanted to tell her that I still loved her, but that was not what she wanted to hear. She kept tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, a gesture I had never seen her make before but which she constantly repeated during the forty-five minutes in her lawyer’s office. We were so high above the city that I had to focus very hard on the wide oak desk in front of us in order not to drop free-falling into vertigo. What was framed within the window was an aerial photograph. I was considering Europe when I asked myself: Why are Jayne and I taking the easy way out? But then it was over. The papers had been signed. I was the first to leave the office. As I pushed the button for the elevator I had to clench my jaw tightly so I wouldn’t start crying. For reassurance I reached in my raincoat and touched the gun lodged there that I now carried with me everywhere. On Fifth Avenue I could barely raise my arm to hail the cab that would take me back to the condo on 13th Street, the space I had first moved to in the spring of 1987 when I was a young and famous novelist and didn’t know anything except that luck kept sighing over me, a place where it seemed as if I had all kinds of time, a place where fame seemed to be a good idea and the flash from a light meter had been my only source of guidance. By now I was living with a young sculptor named Mike Graves (who was about twelve years younger than I) and sometimes he was in the condo on 13th Street, and sometimes he was in his studio in Williamsburg. I fell into the relationship not knowing what I was doing or whom I needed, and I assumed he felt the same, or at least I hoped he did. He had a grimness, a resolve, that I mildly responded to, and I liked the way he folded himself against me, and how he would trace his fingers over the scars on my leg, and I needed him on the mornings when summer lightning would awake me from nightmares and twisting in bed I would grasp his hand and moan my son’s name.