He’s so drunk by the time dinner is over that I (1) make him pay the check, which comes to two hundred and fifty dollars, (2) make him admit what a dumb son-of-a-bitch he really is, and (3) get him back to my place, where he makes himself another drink—he actually opens a bottle of Acacia I thought I had hidden, with a Mulazoni sterling silver wine opener that Peter Radloff bought me after we completed the Heatherberg deal. In my bathroom I take out the ax I’d stashed in the shower, pop two five-milligram Valium, washing them down with a tumblerful of Plax, and then I move into the foyer, where I put on a cheap raincoat I picked up at Brooks Brothers on Wednesday and move toward Owen, who is bent over near the stereo system in the living room looking through my CD collection—all the lights in the apartment on, the Venetian blinds closed. He straightens up and walks slowly backward, sipping from his wineglass, taking in the apartment, until he seats himself in a white aluminum folding chair I bought at the Conran’s Memorial Day sale weeks ago, and finally he notices the newspapers—copies of USA Today and W and The New York Times—spread out beneath him, covering the floor, to protect the polished white-stained oak from his blood. I move toward him with the ax in one hand, and with my other I button up the raincoat.

  “Hey, Halberstam,” he asks, managing to slur both words.

  “Yes, Owen,” I say, drawing near.

  “Why are there, um, copies of the Style section all over the place?” he asks tiredly. “Do you have a dog? A chow or something?”

  “No, Owen.” I move slowly around the chair until I’m facing him, standing directly in his line of vision, and he’s so drunk he can’t even focus in on the ax, he doesn’t even notice once I’ve raised it high above my head. Or when I change my mind and lower it to my waist, almost holding it as if it’s a baseball bat and I’m about to swing at an oncoming ball, which happens to be Owen’s head.

  Owen pauses, then says, “Anyway, I used to hate Iggy Pop but now that he’s so commercial I like him a lot better than—”

  The ax hits him midsentence, straight in the face, its thick blade chopping sideways into his open mouth, shutting him up. Paul’s eyes look up at me, then involuntarily roll back into his head, then back at me, and suddenly his hands are trying to grab at the handle, but the shock of the blow has sapped his strength. There’s no blood at first, no sound either except for the newspapers under Paul’s kicking feet, rustling, tearing. Blood starts to slowly pour out of the sides of his mouth shortly after the first chop, and when I pull the ax out—almost yanking Owen out of the chair by his head—and strike him again in the face, splitting it open, his arms flailing at nothing, blood sprays out in twin brownish geysers, staining my raincoat. This is accompanied by a horrible momentary hissing noise actually coming from the wounds in Paul’s skull, places where bone and flesh no longer connect, and this is followed by a rude farting noise caused by a section of his brain, which due to pressure forces itself out, pink and glistening, through the wounds in his face. He falls to the floor in agony, his face just gray and bloody, except for one of his eyes, which is blinking uncontrollably; his mouth is a twisted red-pink jumble of teeth and meat and jawbone, his tongue hangs out of an open gash on the side of his cheek, connected only by what looks like a thick purple string. I scream at him only once: “Fucking stupid bastard. Fucking bastard.” I stand there waiting, staring up at the crack above the Onica that the superintendent hasn’t fixed yet. It takes Paul five minutes to finally die. Another thirty to stop bleeding.

- American Psycho, Paul Owen