The Dogfish | His Nihilistic Vanity

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

We better not look at him. If we make eye contact, he’ll think he’s earned a fan. 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. It wasn't that he disliked women; he couldn't get enough of them. It was his callous, grotesque need to reduce them to a single role, insisting that every woman he encountered should just be a whore.

In his stunted worldview, filtered through the narrowest aperture of a tiny drainpipe, he saw women only as instruments of sex. Everything else was merely noise, or worse - fair game.

He later found a specific new target in a former schoolmate who operated her own business. It was a decent, legitimate business, yet Bateman seemed personally offended by its existence.

He took every opportunity to belittle her with feigned gatekeeping, loudly questioning why a business like hers would even require an accountant.

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 make her feel small, the more it highlighted his own ignorance. 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 skincare 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 rambled, cackling at his own stale punchlines. Beside him, his sycophant cousin hovered - his familiar, dutifully offering the exact echo required to feed the ego. The room grew nauseous with their shrill, hyena-like laughter.

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 this small, isolated man to frantically 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 only imagine the grotesque theater of their family gatherings: a closed loop of nihilistic vanity where the wretched and the clods feed on one another, and no one is left to tell the difference.

©Britt H.

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