Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis — Read

As consciousness returned I felt hungover even though I wasn't. I wanted a cigarette but it passed. The hours blurred as I sat outside in a chair on the deck. I had wrapped a blanket around myself and walked out of the house and sat in a chair on the deck. When the sky became a huge white screen I finally faced the house with my insomniac glare as its inhabitants began waking up. The blandness of its exterior contradicted what lay within the house and there was no reason to go back inside, even though I felt something pulling me toward it, some kind of force urging me to reenter. The reassuring smile was now useless. I was plastic. Everything was veiled. Objectivity, facts, hard information-these were things only in the outline stage. There was nothing tying anything together yet, so the mind built up a defense, and the evidence was restructured, and that was what I tried to do on that morning-to restructure the evidence so it made sense-and that is what I failed at. There was a crow hidden somewhere in the barren trees behind me and I could hear the flapping of wings and when I saw it circle above me tirelessly I stared at it since there was nothing else to look at in the blank air and there were things I didn't want to think about

(and on this deck tonight another squirrel will be turned inside out by a doll you bought for a little girl) but this was what happened when you didn't want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you. My father was following me