Imperial Bedrooms - By Bret Easton Ellis Page 0,54

licenses for the club he wants to open in Hollywood have finally been approved, and that I should stop telling people not to put Rain in their movies.

The new disk arrives that afternoon. I remove the disk of Amanda Flew and me at JFK and put the new disk into the computer but I turn it off almost immediately once I see what it is: Julian tied to a chair, naked.

After I drink enough gin to calm down I stand at my desk in the office. They had drawn lines with a black marker all over his body - the "nonlethal entry wounds" as the Los Angeles County coroner's office was quoted in the Los Angeles Times article about the torture-murder of Julian Wells. These are the stab wounds that will allow Julian to live long enough to understand that he will slowly bleed to death. There are more than a hundred of them drawn all over his chest and torso and legs as well as his back and neck and the head which has been freshly shaved, and when I'm able to look back at the screen one of the hooded figures standing over Julian whispers something to another hooded figure but the second I pause the disk I get a text from a blocked number that asks What are you waiting for? About twenty minutes into the disk I mistake static for the clouds of flies swarming around the room below the flickering fluorescent lights and crawling over Julian's abdomen which has been painted dark red, and when Julian starts screaming, weeping for his dead mother, the video goes black. When it resumes Julian's making muffled sounds and that's when I realize they've cut out his tongue and that's why his chin is slathered with blood, and then within a minute he's blinded. In the final moments of the disk the sound track is of the threatening message I left on Julian's phone two weeks ago and accompanied by my drunken voice the hooded figures start punching him randomly with the knives, chunks of flesh spattering the floor, and it seems to go on forever until the cement block is raised over his head.

At the Hollywood Forever Cemetery I recognize very few of the people who show up for the memorial and they're mostly just figures from the past who I don't know anymore and I wasn't even going to go but I had finished two projects in the last couple days that I had been ignoring, one was a remake of The Man Who Fell to Earth and the other was a script about the reformation of a young Nazi, and the last scene I wrote was when a boy in a castle is being shown a row of fresh corpses by a madman in a uniform who keeps asking the boy if he knows any of the dead and the boy keeps answering no but he's lying, and I was staring at the bottle of Hendrick's that sat on my desk while on the TV in my office Amanda Flew's mother was being interviewed on CNN, after she had filed a complaint about the release of the video but she was told that privacy rights don't extend to the dead even though Amanda's body hasn't been found, and there was a montage of Amanda's brief career with "Girls on Film" playing on the sound track as the piece segues into the dangers of the drug wars across the border, and I was trying to make a decision that seemed daunting either way and for a moment I thought about checking out.

I arrive late just as the memorial concludes, and I'm standing in the back of the room scanning the small crowd as Julian's father walks by and doesn't recognize me. Rain isn't here and neither is Rip, who for whatever reason I thought would be, and Trent didn't show up but Blair's here with Alana and I duck out before she sees me, and then I'm walking past the Buddhist cemetery where the dead are guarded by mirror-lined stupas and peacocks roam the graves and I'm staring up at the Paramount water tower, through the bristling palm trees, and I'm wearing a Brioni suit that had once fit but is now too loose and I keep thinking I see figures lurking behind the headstones but I tell myself it's just my imagination, taking my sunglasses off, squeezing my eyes shut. The cemetery pushes up to the