Bateman- Bret's Computer

  The computer was now a toy made from stone that just stared back at me. The computer was not going to lose this game.

  Each keystroke took me further from where I wanted to be.

  I was receding from the information.

  Within the random flashing and static I could occasionally make out the hills of Sherman Oaks rising up out of the San Fernando Valley, or I glimpsed the shoreline of a hotel in Mexico, my father standing on a pier and he was lifting his hand, and the sound of the ocean was coming from the computer’s speakers.

  Briefly there was a shadow of the Bank of America on Ventura Boulevard.

  Another familiar apparition: Clayton’s face.

  And then the computer was dying.

  Before the sound faded out completely there was the faint and muffled verse from “The Sunny Side of the Street.”

  And then the computer whirred itself into silence and died.
...

  “Dad,” he said softly in an attempt to calm me down, “I’ll show you when I get home.”

  (This, the writer told me, will never happen.

  Why not? I asked.

  Because the computer died this afternoon.

How?

  A virus was sent to infect the computer.

  But what about the files?

Lunar Park, chapter 21