The Dogfish | His Nihilistic Vanity

Oh, great. The local idiot is at it again.

We better not look at him. Eyes on your shoes, on the floor. Whatever. Make eye contact for a split second and he’ll think he’s got a groupie.. If he comes over here, I’m walking away.

Photo by Krzysztof Hepner on Unsplash

It was an innate pattern of his - one that had defined his character long before this moment and would undoubtedly persist long after.

A man, as they say, is a sum of his parts; in his case, a subtraction.

He harbored a compulsive, vulgar strain of misogyny. He didn't dislike women. If anything, he couldn't get enough of them. It was a borderline obsession.

It was his callous, grotesque need to reduce them to a single role, insisting that every woman he encountered should just be a whore.

His worldview was stunted. All that came out of him was filtered and squeezed through the narrowest aperture of a tiny drainpipe. Through it, he saw women as nothing more than instruments for sex. His mind was as shallow as his sight.

Everything else was merely noise, or worse - fair game.

He soon found a new target in an old schoolmate who owned a local business. It was a decent, legitimate business, yet Bateman seemed personally offended by its existence.

He jumped at every chance to undermine her, hiding behind a wall of cheap gatekeeping and condescending questions.

It peaked with a set of absolute idiotic questions. He specifically demanded to know why a business like hers needed an accountant, as if she had no business doing her civic duty of reporting and paying tax.

That particular question carried an ugly subtext, even though the answer was entirely self-evident.

A few actual accountants in the group, finally exhausted by his nonsensical ravings, cut him off with a sharp correction, laying out the objective facts of business management making him look incompetent in front of his peers and squashed his ego.

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. The more he tried to belittle her, the more glaring his own ignorance became. O, that he were as wise as he is proud.

His obsession grew more malignant with time, eventually spilling over into public settings. At a wedding, casting aside all social decorum, he sat at a different table - far enough away that a normal conversation would have been impossible - and bellowed across the room.

With performative disgust, he loudly voiced something resembling a judgment on her work. He expressed it with a theatrical squirmishness as if recoiling from the sight of crawling maggots, acting as if her skin care business were something vile and contagion-ridden; it was meant as a public announcement - or, more accurately, a public desecration.

Bateman, methinks thou dost protest too much. Anybody there could have seen that you were the dirty one as you sought to shame her, latching onto whatever you could find to throw at her like ammunition. You were a vulture, circling for easy prey.

He then exchanged a triumphant glance with the person sitting next to him. One could almost see those comical, villainous sparkles flashing from their eyes and fangs as they rambled and cackled on among themselves.

That person was his sycophantic cousin. He who was almost his equal in every toxic way. They shared a dark rapport where they just echoed each other and fed each other's egos.

It was incredibly nauseating to be in the same room as them. Their shrill, hyena-like laughter choked the air like transboundary haze. There are no words to describe that kind of disgust.

He played the fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy - or so he believed. In truth, no one else at the table was entertained by his brand of vulgar idiocy; the rest of the room simply went on ignoring them, leaving isolated duo to create a scene where none was needed.

It does make one wonder if this is merely a social failing or something deeper - some kind of hereditary curse. Perhaps the history of this malice runs deeper than we think. In the day of his ancestors, one suspects, the cruelty was just as sharp. Undiluted.

An interesting combination, really.

One can imagine the grotesque theater of their family gatherings. It was a miserable, closed loop of nihilistic vanity where the wretched and the clods just kept feeding each other a load of bollocks until the cows came home.

Until no one was left to tell the difference.

In the end, they were all the same brand of extreme unpleasantness.

©Britt H.

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