Bret Easton Ellis - The Informers

New York: Random House, 1994

One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the very middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under the door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.

JOHN FANTE

Ask the Dust

Heading straight into darkness, staring out the window of a plane at a starless black canvas beyond the window, placing a hand to a window that's so cold it numbs my fingertips and staring at my hand, I withdraw my hand slowly from the window and Roger makes his way down the darkened aisle.

"Set your watch ahead, man," Roger says.

"What, man?" I ask.

"Set your watch ahead. There's a time difference. We're landing in Tokyo." Roger stares at me, his smile slipping. "Tokyo in, um, Japan, okay?" No response, and Roger runs his hand through short blond hair until he's fingering a ponytail in back, sighing.

"But I... can't... see... anything, man," I tell him, slowly pointing to the darkened window.

"That's because you're wearing sunglasses, man," Roger says.

"No, that's not... it. It's... real"l think of the right word"um... dark," and then, "... man."

Roger looks at me for a minute.

"Well, that's because the windows are, um, tinted," Roger says carefully. "The windows on this plane are tinted, okay?"

I don't say anything.

"Do you want some Valium, a 'lude, some gum, what?" Roger offers.

I shake my head, answer, "No ... I might OD."

Roger slowly turns around, makes his way up the aisle toward the front of the jet. Pressing my fingertips, still cold from the window, to my forehead causes my eyes to shut tightly.

Naked, waking up bathed in sweat, on a large bed in a suite in the penthouse of the Tokyo Hilton, sheets rumpled on the floor, a young girl nude and sleeping by my side, her head cradled by my arm, which is numb, and it surprises me how much effort it takes to lift it, finally, my elbow brushing carelessly over the girl's face. Clumps of Kleenex that I made her eat, stuck to the sides of her cheeks, her chin, dry, fall off. Turning over, away from the girl, is a boy, sixteen, seventeen, maybe younger, Oriental, nude, on the other side of the bed, arms dangling off the edge, the smooth beige lower back covered with fresh red welts. I reach for a phone by the nightstand but there is no nightstand and the phone is on the floor, disconnected, on top of damp white sheets. Panting, I reach across the boy, connect the phone, which takes about fifteen minutes, finally ask someone on the other end for Roger but Roger, I am told, is at a fruit-eating contest and is not available for comment.

"Get these two kids out of here, okay?" I mumble into the receiver.

I get out of bed, knocking an empty vodka bottle over onto a bourbon bottle which spills onto potato chip bags and an issue of Hustler Orient that this girl on the bed is in this month and I kneel down, open it up, feeling weird while studying how different her pussy looks in the layout compared to how it looked three hours ago and when I turn around and look at the bed, the Oriental boy's eyes are open, staring at me. I just stand there, unembarrassed, nude, hungover, and stare back into the boy's black eyes.

"You feel sorry for yourself?" I ask, relieved when two bearded guys open the door and move toward the bed, and I walk into a bathroom and lock the door.

Turning on the bathwater full blast, willing the sound of rushing water hitting the mammoth porcelain tub to drown out the noise of two roadies dragging the girl and boy out of the bed, out of the room, taking their turn, I lean toward the tub, making sure only cold water pours out of the faucet. I move toward the door, press my ear against it to hear if anybody's still in the room, and pretty sure no one is, I open it, peer out, and nobody's in the room. From a small refrigerator I take out a plastic ice bucket and then move toward the ice machine that was placed at my request in the middle of the suite and get some ice. Then, on my way back to the bathroom, I kneel by the bed and open a drawer and take out a bag of Librium and then I'm back in the bathroom and locking the door and pouring the bucket of ice into the tub, making sure there's enough water at the bottom of the bucket so that I can wash the Librium down my throat, and I step into the tub, lie down, only my head above water, unsettled by the fact that maybe the freezing water and the Librium aren't really such a great combo.

In the dream I'm sitting in the restaurant on top of the hotel near a wall of windows and staring out over the blanket of neon lights that pass for a city. I'm drinking a Kamikaze and sitting across from me is the young Oriental girl from Hustler but her smooth brown face is covered with geisha makeup and the geisha makeup and the tight, fluorescent-pink dress and the expression creasing her flat, soft features and the gaze in the blank dark eyes are predatory, making me uneasy, and suddenly the entire blanket of lights flickers, fades, sirens are wailing and people I never noticed are running out of the restaurant, screams, shouts from the black city below, and huge arcs of flame, orange and yellow highlighted against a black sky, shoot up from points on the ground and I'm still staring at the geisha girl, the arcs of flame reflected in her black eyes, and she's mumbling something to me and there's no fear in those large and slanted wet eyes because she's smiling warmly now, saying the same word again and again and again but the sirens and screams and various explosions drown the word out and when I'm shouting, panicked, asking her what she's saying, she just smiles, blinking, and takes out a paper fan and her mouth keeps moving, forming the same word, and I'm leaning toward her to hear the word but a huge claw bursts through the window, showering us with glass, and it grabs me and the claw is warm, pulsing with anger and covered with a slime that drenches the suit I'm wearing and the claw pulls me out the window and I twist toward the girl, who says the word again, this time clearly.

"Godzilla... Godzilla, you idiot... I said Godzilla...

Screaming silently, I'm lifted toward its mouth, eighty, ninety stories up, looking through what's left of the smashed wall of glass, a cold black wind whipping furiously around me, and the Oriental girl with the pink dress on is now standing on the table, smiling and waving her fan at me, crying out "Sayonara" but it doesn't mean goodbye.

Sometime later, after I climb nude and sobbing from the bathtub, after Roger calls on one of the extensions and tells me that my father has called seven times in the last two hours (something about an emergency), after I tell Roger to tell my father that I'm asleep or out or anything or in another country, after I smash three champagne bottles against one of the walls in the suite, I'm finally able to sit in a chair I've moved over to a window and look out over Tokyo. I'm holding a guitar, trying to write a song, because for the past week a number of chord progressions have been repeating themselves in my head but I'm having a hard time sorting them out and then I'm playing old songs I wrote when I was playing with the band and then I stare at broken glass on the floor that surrounds the bed, thinking: that's a cool album cover. Then I'm picking up a half-empty package of M&M's and washing them down with some vodka and then since it makes me sick I have to head for the bathroom but I trip over the telephone cord and my hand slams into a thick piece of champagne-bottle glass and for a long time I'm staring at my palm, at a thin rivulet of blood racing down my wrist. Unable to shake the glass out, I pull it out and the hole in my hand looks soft and safe and I take the jagged stained piece of glass that still has part of a Dom Perignon label on it and seal the wound by placing it back into it where it looks complete, but the glass falls out and streaming blood covers the guitar I'm beginning to strum and the bloodied guitar will make a pretty good record cover too and I'm able to light a cigarette, blood soaking it only a little. More Librium and I'm asleep but the bed shakes and the earth moving is part of my dream, another monster approaching.