“I think you should go,” she says.

“I think… I want to know what happened.” I feel sick, my chest and back covered with sweat, drenched, it seems, instantaneously.

“Don’t make any trouble,” she says.

All frontiers, if there had ever been any, seem suddenly detachable and have been removed, a feeling that others are creating my fate will not leave me for the rest of the day. This… is… not… a… game, I want to shout, but I can’t catch my breath though I don’t think she can tell. I turn my face away. I need rest. I don’t know what to say. Confused, I reach out for a moment to touch Mrs. Wolfe’s arm, to steady myself, but I stop it in midair, move it to my chest instead, but I can’t feel it, not even when I loosen my tie; it rests there, trembling, and I can’t make it stop. I’m blushing, speechless.

“I suggest you go,” she says.

We stand there in the hallway facing each other.

“Don’t make any trouble,” she says again, quietly.

I stand there a few seconds longer before finally backing away, holding up my hands, a gesture of assurance.

“Don’t come back,” she says.

“I won’t,” I say. “Don’t worry.”

The couple appears in the doorway. Mrs. Wolfe watches me until I’m at the elevator door, pressing the button for the attendant. In the elevator, the smell of the roses is overpowering.

Free weights and Nautilus equipment relieve stress. My body responds to the workout accordingly. Shirtless, I scrutinize my image in the mirror above the sinks in the locker room at Xclusive. My arm muscles burn; my stomach is as taut as possible, my chest steel, pectorals granite hard, my eyes white as ice. In my locker in the locker room at Xclusive lie three vaginas I recently sliced out of various women I’ve attacked in the past week. Two are washed off, one isn’t. There’s a barrette clipped to one of them, a blue ribbon from Hermès tied around my favorite.

The smell of blood works its way into my dreams, which are, for the most part, terrible: on an ocean liner that catches fire, witnessing volcanic eruptions in Hawaii, the violent deaths of most of the inside traders at Salomon, James Robinson doing something bad to me, finding myself back at boarding school, then at Harvard, the dead walk among the living. The dreams are an endless reel of car wrecks and disaster footage, electric chairs and grisly suicides, syringes and mutilated pinup girls, flying saucers, marble Jacuzzis, pink peppercorns. When I wake up in a cold sweat I have to turn on the wide-screen television to block out the construction sounds that continue throughout the day, rising up from somewhere. A month ago was the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. Football games flash by, the sound turned off. I can hear the answering machine click once, its volume lowered, then twice. All summer long Madonna cries out to us, “life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone...”

When I’m moving down Broadway to meet Jean, my secretary, for brunch, in front of Tower Records a college student with a clipboard asks me to name the saddest song I know. I tell him, without pausing, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Beatles. Then he asks me to name the happiest song I know, and I say “Brilliant Disguise” by Bruce Springsteen. He nods, makes a note, and I move on, past Lincoln Center. An accident has happened. An ambulance is parked at the curb. A pile of intestines lies on the sidewalk in a pool of blood. I buy a very hard apple at a Korean deli which I eat on my way to meet Jean who, right now, stands at the Sixty-seventh Street entrance to Central Park on a cool, sunny day in September. When we look up at the clouds she sees an island, a puppy dog, Alaska, a tulip. I see, but don’t tell her, a Gucci money clip, an ax, a woman cut in two, a large puffy white puddle of blood that spreads across the sky, dripping over the city, onto Manhattan.

We stop at an outdoor café, Nowheres, on the Upper West Side, debating which movie to see, if there are any museum exhibits we should attend, maybe just a walk, she suggests the zoo, I’m nodding mindlessly. Jean is looking good, like she’s been working out, and she’s wearing a gilt lamb jacket and velvet shorts by Matsuda. I’m imagining myself on television, in a commercial for a new product—wine cooler? tanning lotion? sugarless gum?—and I’m moving in jump-cut, walling along a beach, the film is black-and-white, purposefully scratched, eerie vague pop music from the mid-1960s accompanies the footage, it echoes, sounds as if it’s coming from a calliope. Now I’m looking into the camera, now I’m holding up the product—a new mousse? tennis shoes?—now my hair is windblown then it’s day then night then day again and then it’s night.

“I’ll have an iced decaf au lait,” Jean tells the waiter.

“I’ll have a decapitated coffee also,” I say absently, before catching myself. “I mean… decaff einated.” I glance over at Jean, worried, but she just smiles emptily at me. A Sunday Times sits on the table between us. We discuss plans for dinner tonight, maybe. Someone who looks like Taylor Preston walks by, waves at me. I lower my Ray-Bans, wave back. Someone on a bike pedals past. I ask a busboy for water. A waiter arrives instead and after that a dish containing two scoops of sorbet, cilantro-lemon and vodka-lime, are brought to the table that I didn’t hear Jean order.

“Want a bite?” she asks.

“I’m on a diet,” I say. “But thank you.”

“You don’t need to lose any weight,” she says, genuinely surprised. “You’re kidding, right? You look great. Very fit.”

“You can always be thinner,” I mumble, staring at the traffic in the street, distracted by something—what? I don’t know. “Look… better.”

“Well, maybe we shouldn’t go out to dinner,” she says, concerned. “I don’t want to ruin your… willpower.”

“No. It’s all right,” I say. “I’m not… very good at controlling it anyway.”

“Patrick, seriously. I’ll do whatever you want,” she says. “If you don’t want to go to dinner, we won’t. I mean—”

“It’s okay,” I stress. Something snaps. “You shouldn’t fawn over him…” I pause before correcting myself. “I mean… me. Okay?”

“I just want to know what you want to do,” she says.

“To live happily ever after, right?” I say sarcastically. “That’s what I want.” I stare at her hard, for maybe half a minute, before turning away. This quiets her. After a while she orders a beer. It’s hot out on the street.

“Come on, smile,” she urges sometime later. “You have no reason to be so sad.”

“I know,” I sigh, relenting. “But it’s.. tough to smile. These days. At least I find it hard to. I’m not used to it, I guess. I don’t know.”

“That’s… why people need each other,” she says gently, trying to make eye contact while spooning the not inexpensive sorbet into her mouth.

“Some don’t.” I clear my throat self-consciously. “Or, well, people compensate… They adjust…” After a long pause, “People can get accustomed to anything, right?” I ask. “Habit does things to people.”

Another long pause. Confused, she says, “I don’t know. I guess… but one still has to maintain… a ratio of more good things than… bad in this world,” she says, adding, “I mean, right?” She looks puzzled, as if she finds it strange that this sentence has come out of her mouth. A blast of music from a passing cab, Madonna again, “life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone…” Startled by the laughter at the table next to ours, I cock my head and hear someone admit, “Sometimes what you wear to the office makes all the difference,” and then Jean says something and I ask her to repeat it.

“Haven’t you ever wanted to make someone happy?” she asks.

“What?” I ask, trying to pay attention to her. “Jean?”