Less than zero.

While reading the paper at twilight by the pool, I see a story about how a local man tried to bury himself alive in his backyard because it was "So hot, too hot." I read the article a second time and then put the paper down and watch my sisters. They're still wearing their bikinis and sunglasses and they lie beneath the darkening sky and play a game in which they pretend to be dead. They ask me to judge which of them can look dead the longest; the one who wins gets to push the other into the pool. I watch them and listen to the tape that's playing on the walkmen I'm wearing. The Go-Go's are singing "I wanna be worlds away / I know things will be okay when I get worlds away." Whoever made the tape then let the record skip and I close my eyes and hear them start to sing 'Vacation' and when I open my eyes, my sisters are floating face down in the pool, wondering who can look drowned the longest.

The words of a Psycho.

'...there is an idea of Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontigent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold onto one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behaviour must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I so not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this-and I have, countless times, in just about every act I've committed- and coming face to face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing..."

I've just about finished this book in under a week. I have been entirely engulfed in the peculiar but extraordinary mindset of Ellis' Patrick Bateman as well as had to re-think about your everyday interactions of everyday life with everyday people. Strangers. People are strange when they're a stranger. Makes you realise no one is really what they seem. Like a friend said to me once, "isn't it weird how you'll have secrets that I'll never know, as in you won't think they're that particularly amazing or secretive but perhaps I would if I actually knew what you were thinking...I might even be shocked." Might even kill you.