Chapter 17

I hide in a house. I had to break through the window to get here, but I doubt that Mitsuko will be able to find me, the random choice of streets that I took to get here make the chances of Mitsuko finding me very slim indeed.  

I have made sure that there are no mirrors around. As strong as the desire is to look at myself and judge myself, I know that this would risk everything concerning Bateman. Instead, he is doing the judging himself. I only listen, occasionally breaking his flow to fill out the details that he has missed. Nothing he says is inaccurate. Nothing he says is wrong. If anything, he is being too kind. He is not being kind at all. Just correct. 

I have a gun in my hand. I always believed that if I ever should, the temptation to put it to my head and pull the trigger would be strong if not fatal. Having a gun in my hand has certainly proved to be dangerous or fatal in every instance that I have. I have tried shooting myself. That failed. I have shot Annette. I have shot Hemmingway twice and killed him. As, in the time that I have held the gun, I have pulled the trigger, I have purged that urge. Should I put it down and then pick it up again, I will only pull the trigger one more time. At who and why, I do not know. It is never me doing the reasoning. Yet it is supposedly me in control. I want to put down this hateful object. I want to reject the object that killed Hemmingway. But I fear the consequences too much. I hold the gun, not to hurt but for safety. Safety against myself. 

I know that it was not Hemmingway or the others choice to fly. I know that it was Bateman manipulating me, making me shoot Hemmingway to get me to kill myself. I know that I should blame Bateman. I know that I should hate him. I don’t. I can only blame myself.

If I have not managed it before, I have now completely alienated myself from the others. Whether anybody was right or wrong, I at least had people who stood by me. Whether their concern was for me or not, at least I was part of a team, even if it meant me being locked in my room. By being pushed away, at least I was being acknowledged and my role was defined. 

My role now is murderer. My acknowledgement is being hunted.

I am alone. And I do not know what to do. I feel as if I can only wait for the next thing to happen and respond to that, no matter what side of the good/bad extreme the event falls on. I feel as if I can only wait, but I am getting impatient. Just as before, inactivity only makes everything harder. 

In my mind, I watch myself getting up and leaving, finding Mitsuko to face up to her. But I don’t do anything. In my mind I watch myself putting the gun to my head and pulling the trigger. But I don’t do anything. In my minds eye, I release Bateman, but I don’t do anything. In my mind’s eye, I give Bateman to the ghosts, but I don’t do anything. The impulses are strong, my body is almost tricked into movement, but it doesn’t do anything. I know that it is possible to get up and move, do anything, but the choice isn’t really viable. The above are the only options that I have. All of them result ultimately in deaths of thousands of people. If I kill myself, if I find Mitsuko, if I release Bateman, the ghosts will only, one way or the other, get hold of Bateman. He is trapped in here. It can only be a matter of time. It is inevitable. All I am doing is stalling for time. The only way I can save anyone is to stall for time. Otherwise everyone is dead. 

Any way that I look at it, I am dead. If Hemmingway hadn’t made me come in here with Bateman, maybe everybody could live. But I am going to die. It will be a meaningless death because if I die before the ghosts get Bateman, it doesn’t matter. If I die after the ghosts get Bateman, it doesn’t matter. If I am killed from an external force. It doesn’t matter. If I kill myself, it doesn’t matter. 

Whether I have a gun in my hand or not. My life has actually ended. I don’t know if I can be angry at this, as where there is life, there is stupid stubbornness. If there weren’t, I would have killed myself a long time ago. But there is relief as I can absolve myself of any responsibility. After all, why should I be responsible for any of this? I can’t help it if Bateman exists. I can’t help it if shit loads of dead people want to make more people dead. I can’t help it that I was born me, and two and a half decades later I was plucked out of my life and placed here. Everything is inevitable. If I stall for more time, only more people are going to end up dead, but that seems irrelevant as the figure of certain dead is already too high to contemplate. 

The only way forward for me is to play Silly Buggers. 

I get up, feeling good that my body has listened to me, that I am united in a decision. 

I step outside the door. 

“You want Bateman?! Kill me first!” I scream into the sky. Around me buildings explode, I do my best to dodge the huge fragments and the small. I know that they do not want me dead. I know they only want to scare me into giving Bateman to them. But it feels good. We are playing devil’s advocate. We are playing Russian roulette. And it feels good. Energy and adrenalin kick back into my body as I dodge and move and shift. My brain flies as I calculate the safe areas to be from the fatal areas as the buildings continue to explode. I do feel free as I am responsible only for myself. I do feel in control of myself. My talents and my skills are pushed and tested and I am passing with flying colours. I was right. Spiderman, with his reliance on skill is a far superior superhero to Superman. I am mortal and I am making myself very aware of it. And I laugh as a boulder flies past my head. I am empty of everything, of pain, of memories, everything with the exception of mortality.

Now for phase two. I start screaming out Mitsuko’s name. Finding her should be easier with all of this commotion. She’ll notice it, won’t be drawn into it, but she’ll be nearby, knowing that I am in here somewhere. She’ll have to know the outcome. Too much is at stake. And she’ll be pissed off when she discovers that I am making games out of it all. 

Silly Buggers. Isn’t that the game of life?

I start sprinting forward, the way ahead is clear of explosions. It should be, as they are no doubt guiding me back to the epicentre, back to the glow where there is no way of escape. I watch as a boulder comes flying towards my head. I prepare to shift out if its way, judging my time for a clear path through. It gets very close and I am about to move when it bounces away, as if hitting an invisible shield. I continue running, but becoming more and more aware of the debris that bounces away without touching me. I had been focusing more on the larger chunks, the debris that I could see coming and that I could prepare for. But it is the smaller pieces that fly everywhere, creating an impenetrable blanket, the stone sized fragments right down to the grains of sand that you cannot see until too late. The pieces that could hit my leg and cause me to stumble. Everything bounces away from me. I stop, watching a gigantic snooker game all around me, but not one thing hitting me.

“You little prick,” comes a voice from my hands.

Eventually, even the ghosts get the point. My mortality is being protected. 

“You bastard,” I tell Bateman.

“Kill yourself.”

“Fuck off.”

I wait until the clouds of dust settle enough to be able to see where I am going, and I start screaming out Mitsuko’s name once more. I hope that she will have been curious enough to come and watch the little spectacle

I carry on like this for a short while until I turn a corner and I see her standing there, halfway down the road with Bunuel by her side. She has obviously heard me because she has prepared herself, restraining herself against every instinct she must have to avenge Hemmingway’s death. I walk up to her, knowing that she must be taunted by every step that I take. 

“You killed Hemmingway.”

“That I did.”

“I should kill you.”

“So why don’t you?”

“Bastard. Don’t tempt me.”

“Come on. I deserve it. Who’d ever know?”

“Bastard.”

I step over to Bunuel. I slap him hard around the face. Mitsuko has grabbed me and is halfway through a punch before she even realises what she’s doing. The realisation puts a little extra weight into her punch. It knocks me off my feet and I dangle below her whilst she still holds my jacket. It is not too long before she drops me to the ground. 

“Don’t fucking tempt me,” she hisses. “If it wasn’t for this Bateman bullshit, I really would kill you.”

I hold out the hand that holds the mirror. My hand is in serious pain due to cramp as I’ve been holding the mirror far too tightly for far too long. In my other hand is the gun. I hold that out too. Mitsuko, threatened by the gun, pulls back her jacket for quick access to her gun should she need it. I crouch down and put the gun down. I stand back up. Mitsuko still keeps her gun ready. I know that if I pick that gun up, someone is going to die again. It is why I put it down in the first place. 

And now for the final insult. I drop the mirror, already Bateman is making his escape before it so much as hits the ground. I stamp my foot down hard, hoping that I have caused Bateman even a little pain. I keep my foot held down, not firmly, nor do I intend to keep it there for long.

Mitsuko draws her gun. I stumble backwards as Bateman pushes from below. She shoots. She never hits me, instead she flies backwards. At first I think that the bullet has hit her, until she springs back up again, both of us looking at the bullet spinning in mid air, frozen in space. 

She aims her gun at me. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“I’m not responsible for anything, Mitsuko, nothing. The second we came in here, we were all doomed. The ghosts will get Bateman in the end. They’ll just keep sucking people in, growing the glow at the epicentre until Bateman is caught and nothing that we do will have mattered. You care about Hemmingway being murdered? You care about me hitting Bunuel? We’re all going to die. It’s just a matter of time.”

Bateman stands, watching us, smirking. “So you don’t think you’re responsible, eh, Nosferatu?”

“Fuck off Bateman. I’ve let you go. There’s no point in taunting me. You can’t win. Neither can I. Give up. Accept your fate, or try and hide. Don’t bother with me. I’m no longer a part of any of this.”

“So you think you’ve absolved yourself of the tiny responsibility that you had? That you were an innocent bystander who somehow managed to get himself sucked into all of this by unlucky coincidence. You think that you were here only to carry me through the sphere and that is it, game over for you, let someone else play, watch thousands die from a front row seat?

“Do you want to know what responsibility you really have? You created me. I’m your little imaginary friend Bateman, only I’m back and I’ve grown up as you did. You, with your freakish little powers gave birth to me. You, with all your negativity was all the food I was ever given to grow. Soon my body started rejecting any kind of positivity, and so did you. I craved bitterness, self-pity, misery and I sought it out through you. But soon you became alienated from everyone around you, you became comfortable, but I was greedy, I needed more because the bitterness was too comfortable. I sought it from others, in the mirrors, feeding and feeding, always wanting the fix to be more until they died and I got stronger. I got stronger until I could come back to you, because I have been your shadow and I want you gone. 

“Everything here is happening because of you.”

I wish that this news could have come as some kind of surprise. I was completely unaware of any of these details, but somehow I expected something like this. Maybe I unconsciously knew, maybe my ego is just large and I expect the world to revolve around me, but the news comes as no shock. I look down at the gun on the floor next to me. So does Bateman. So does Mitsuko. So does Bunuel.

“If I created you, does that mean I can kill you?”

“What do you think?”

“I think no. I can kill myself. But that would give you your freedom as you’ve grown too independent of me, you are no longer a mere parasite. You are physical, but not in a mere sense of the word. You have no human fragility. You exist on a psychic and metaphysical plane that happens to verge on ours. I have no idea how the ghosts can actually kill you, but I have some kind of notion that it is to do with emotions. They want redemption, revenge. They will be pleased to have you trapped. Pleased is barely the word to describe it, but that level of positivity will shock your system, killing you. Any kind of explosion, however the ghosts intend to kill everyone else, is purely coincidental, bitterness and fury exaggerated by you, but not connected to you.”

“You’re a clever guy. Too bad you always hid it.”

Those words cut right through me. This is something that I’ve always refused to believe. And here I am, taking a compliment from someone who has fed off my negativity my entire life. But then, he knew I wouldn’t accept it as a compliment. He knew what my reaction would be. “I’m not clever. I just know how I feel, and I can’t imagine the ghosts even begin to reach my level.” It isn’t much, but I feel that I’ve been able to get back at him in some small way, eliminate some of his smugness, and not accept myself to being in any way positive or negative. About as neutral as I could be. 

“Correct. Only you’re not going to do anything. You’re too scared that you’re completely wrong.” 

I don’t know what I think. With the knowledge that Bateman has imparted on me, I am doing the best I can to suppress all emotions, push them into the Freudian boiling pot of repression. I have to do this because all my life, all I have been capable of is negative emotions. I know why, but even without Bateman taking the claim for it, I knew. I just don’t want to feed him in any way, though I know I won’t be able to starve him for long. I won’t be able to starve him, perhaps just make him slightly peckish. And there we go, with thoughts like that, already I have lost. 

But these thoughts are only tiddlers compared to the really big fish that I am keeping in my rather small tank. Stuff that I wouldn’t want to acknowledge, regardless of Bateman’s existence. And I find it surprising just how hard it is to know what to do. How much of our thoughts, how much of our decisions come from emotions? The chemicals that are pumped around our body as a reaction to external surprises and events. If I acknowledged my negativity I’d want revenge or to run away or to apologise and be forgiven. If I had positivity, who knows what I’d want, but whatever it is, I would want. Between the two, I would have a spectrum of options. Between the two, I would be able to apply logic. With neither, not even logic seems to exist. No emotions, no options equals only immobility. 

I turn to face Bateman. “Incorrect. I think that I am going to do something.” I reach down and pick up the gun. Less than a week ago, it would have felt such a foreign object in my hands, despite the fact I have held many a toy gun in my life. Less than a week ago, I would not have understood what it is that I know hold. To understand goes merely beyond just knowing. Before, I would question its purpose, I would question its existence. Now it doesn’t matter. My understanding comes through experience. It has a purpose, because I am using it specifically, not just potentially. Potentia beckons questioning. Specifically is absolute. “And if I am wrong, then it doesn’t matter.”

As much as I try to repress them, I cannot deny my feelings completely. They keep attacking me in short, sharp bursts and my thoughts are guided accordingly. Guilt, and I know that it is me that has brought all these people to their doom. Betrayal, and I know that it is a part of me has caused all this to happen. Self loathing, and I know that I am scum, scum, scum. Revenge, and I know that I want Bateman dead and I will do whatever it takes to see him dead. 

I cock the gun and place it to my head. I look around, trying to suppress my final thoughts before I take action. I look at Bateman. He waits expectantly, with certainty. I shan’t disappoint. I look at Mitsuko. She has remained quiet. Nor does she make any move. Maybe I have convinced her that nothing matters. Maybe she understands that my death will make no difference to the proceedings. Maybe she is bitter that she isn’t the one killing me. Her face is blank and I don’t care to speculate much more. And I look at Bunuel. I wish that Mitsuko would shield his eyes, take him away, not let him be a part of the proceedings. I understand that he won’t have any feelings about me in particular. But much as I wouldn’t let a ten year old watch an eighteen certificate film, nor would I want to subject him to the real life material. 

And now I can acknowledge my final thoughts. I intend to join the ghosts. I intend to kill Bateman that way. If I can stop them killing everyone else, I will try. But that is secondary. I must kill Bateman. This is the only way.

I fire the gun.