Patrick and Timothy Price attend Evelyn's dinner party, where Price openly flirts with Evelyn, making Bateman suspect an affair.

At Pastels restaurant, Bateman shows off his new business card but feels intense jealousy when colleagues reveal their superior cards.

Bateman returns bloodstained sheets to a Chinese drycleaner, strongly implying he has recently murdered someone.

Bateman wakes a sleeping homeless man, feigns sympathy, then stabs him in the eyes and stomach before buying a milkshake.

Bateman follows Luis Carruthers into the Yale Club bathroom and begins strangling him, but Luis mistakes the attack for a sexual advance.

Paul Owen repeatedly mistakes Bateman for a colleague named Marcus Halberstam at a U2 concert in New Jersey.

Bateman lures a drunk Paul Owen back to his apartment under a business pretense and murders him with an ax.

Bateman breaks into Owen's apartment and records a new answering machine message implying Owen has traveled to London.

Private investigator Donald Kimball visits Bateman's office and questions him about Paul Owen's disappearance.

Bateman meets his ex-girlfriend Bethany for lunch and learns her new boyfriend co-owns Dorsia, the exclusive restaurant he can never book.

Bateman takes Bethany back to his apartment, knocks her unconscious, nails her hands to a plank, and kills her.

Bateman tricks Evelyn into eating a urinal cake disguised as an expensive dessert, then tells her he is leaving her.

Bateman shoots a street busker, is chased by police, and kills both a cab driver and a police officer while escaping.

Bateman returns to Paul Owen's apartment to find the locks changed and an estate agent selling the property.

Back at Harry's bar with Price and McDermott, Bateman reveals that cash machines have been speaking to him.

American Psycho follows Patrick Bateman, a wealthy New York stockbroker whose violent impulses gradually overtake his carefully constructed life. Beginning with the shallow dinner parties and petty status competitions of his social circle, the novel traces his progression from dark fantasy to horrific action. His murder of Paul Owen, covered up with a manipulated answering machine and a detective who finds no hard evidence, marks a critical point of no return. As Bateman's crimes escalate through the killing of his ex-girlfriend Bethany and a running gun battle with police, the consequences of his actions begin to close in around him. His breakup with Evelyn and the discovery that Owen's apartment is being sold by a stranger signal the disintegration of the world he fabricated. The novel ends with Bateman's complete psychological unraveling, confirmed when he admits that cash machines have been speaking to him.

The core crimes and confrontations that define Bateman's downward spiral.

Bateman describes his elaborate morning hygiene routine in meticulous detail and watches a television program about multiple personality disorders.

Bateman and his colleagues snort cocaine in the toilet cubicles of the Tunnel nightclub after a dinner at Pastels.

Bateman visits his exclusive five-thousand-dollar-a-year health club and re-rents Body Double from a video store.

Bateman goes on a date with Patricia, who sulks throughout their cab ride after failing to get a reservation at her preferred restaurant.

Courtney invites Bateman to Deck Chairs restaurant; their later attempt at sex at her apartment is interrupted twice over contraceptive issues.

At a black-tie party, Courtney warns Bateman that her boyfriend Luis suspects their affair; Bateman leaves early claiming he must return videos.

Bateman strikes up a conversation with a gay man by complimenting his dog, then kills both the man and the animal.

Bateman brings two sex workers back to his apartment and assaults them with a sharpened coat hanger, a knife, and matches.

Bateman slits the throat of a Chinese delivery boy and then attends Evelyn's Christmas party as if nothing happened.

Bateman takes Evelyn on a holiday to the Hamptons, briefly attempts romance, but they quickly grow alienated and return to the city.

Bateman uses Paul Owen's apartment to lure two sex workers and murders them using acid and a power drill.

After a violent confrontation with police, Bateman flees to his office building and hides under his desk.

Bateman lies in bed with Courtney, who tells him she is going to marry Luis despite her obvious reluctance.

Bateman visits his heavily sedated mother at a private nursing home; they have almost nothing to say to each other.

A colleague named Carnes tells Bateman he had dinner with Paul Owen in London just ten days ago.

Pool 2 traces the supporting architecture of Patrick Bateman's existence — the routines, relationships, and violence that fill the spaces between the main plot's pivotal moments. From his obsessive morning grooming rituals and expensive club memberships to drug-fueled nights and awkward dates, Bateman's surface life is one of shallow affluence and compulsive consumption. Beneath this veneer, his violence grows steadily — from assaulting sex workers to killing a gay man and his dog, to committing murders in Paul Owen's borrowed apartment. His brief and unfulfilling trip to the Hamptons with Evelyn and his final night in bed with Courtney, who announces she is marrying Luis, illustrate the collapse of every personal relationship he has. By the novel's end, even his claim to have murdered Owen is thrown into devastating doubt when a colleague casually mentions he dined with the supposedly dead man in London just days ago.

The social rituals, escalating crimes, and hidden consequences surrounding Bateman's secret life.

Bateman has passionless sex with Evelyn, gives up after fifteen minutes, and later masturbates to a Calvin Klein advertisement.

Bateman bumps into actor Tom Cruise in his apartment building elevator and confidently gets the title of a Cruise film wrong.

During a date, Bateman tells Evelyn about murders he has committed and wants to commit, but she remains completely oblivious.

At a U2 concert, Bateman has a brief transcendent experience when Bono appears to look directly at him from the stage.

Bateman wakes from a drug-induced blackout not knowing where he is, buys rats to torture, and consumes all his crack cocaine.

Bateman devotes an entire chapter to explaining in elaborate detail why he loves the music of Genesis.

Luis confronts Bateman in a designer clothing shop, declares his love, and proposes they move to Arizona together; Bateman threatens him with a knife.

Bateman asks his secretary Jean to join him for dinner and declines to go inside her apartment at the evening's end.

Bateman visits the Central Park Zoo, lures a five-year-old boy away from his mother with a cookie, and stabs him in the neck.

Bateman tortures and kills a woman by forcing a live rat into her body, then chainsaws her in half.

Bateman reveals he has been concealing a loaded Uzi submachine gun in his locker at his gym, calling it a symbol of order.

Bateman mails Evelyn a box of live flies for Valentine's Day along with a note saying he never wants to see her again.

Timothy Price, who had seemed to vanish, unexpectedly reappears; Bateman notices what appears to be a strange smudge on Price's forehead.

Bateman spots the homeless man he blinded begging near Trump Tower with a sign falsely claiming he lost his sight in Vietnam.

A taxi driver takes Bateman to an abandoned parking lot, claims to know he killed someone named Solly, and robs him.

This pool charts the turning points and revelations that illuminate Patrick Bateman's psychological collapse and the deepening ambiguity surrounding his reality. Early moments of emptiness — passionless sex with Evelyn, a fleeting mystical connection at a U2 concert — reveal Bateman's desperate hunger for authentic experience in a world of hollow surfaces. His drug-induced blackouts and obsessive music chapters signal a mind steadily detaching from the present, while small gestures of humanity toward his secretary Jean offer brief and ultimately futile glimmers of hope. As his violence reaches new extremes — a child stabbed at the zoo, a woman killed with a live rat — his world becomes irreversibly corrupted and the line between fantasy and reality collapses. The reappearance of the blinded homeless man near Trump Tower and a taxi driver who seems to recognize him as a killer hint at consequences bleeding into the real world, even as Bateman himself can no longer be trusted as a narrator.

The emotional breaks, hidden desires, and reality-blurring moments that expose Bateman's fractured identity.