Emotional Barrier

The Emotional Barrier is the novel’s image for Bret Ellis’s effort to separate himself from unbearable feeling. It is at once a refuge and a constraint: in adolescence it helps him impose routines and imitate composure after Matt Kellner’s death, while in adulthood fear and memory repeatedly break through. The barrier does not resolve the past; it lets Bret postpone contact with it, until the act of remembering and writing makes that postponement impossible.

A defense against immediate feeling

At the party, Valium places Bret behind what he calls the barrier. From that distance, Matt’s death, cocaine, Terry Schaffer’s sexual advances toward Robert Mallory, the Trawler’s violence, and the disappearance of girls all seem absurdly remote. Susan Reynolds calling Robert “babe” briefly appears as a beam of light in a dark cave, a clue Bret reads as confirmation of what is happening around him. Yet this apparent clarity is inseparable from medication and detachment: the barrier mutes the scene even as Bret tries to interpret it.

The same emotional flattening shapes his response to Robert’s condemnation of Terry’s conduct. Bret recognizes the reaction as disturbing in light of the accusations surrounding Robert, but Valium leaves him placid rather than able to confront him. The barrier therefore does not simply protect Bret from pain. It also limits his capacity to act on what he notices, turning perception into something he can observe without fully inhabiting.

Routine as an attempt at control

After surviving a traumatic afternoon, Bret wakes at six-thirty in his Buckley uniform and decides to act as if nothing happened. He makes a schedule: exercise before school, a healthy breakfast, films to see, and less drinking, marijuana, and Valium. He also resolves to ignore news of the Trawler and avoid memories of Matt Kellner and Ryan Vaughn. The plan promises a “semblance of control,” but its organizing purpose is erasure: the future is made into a timetable that can keep the past at a distance.

The clothes he finds in his gray slacks expose the limits of that project. Bret recognizes the white jockey shorts as an item taken from Matt’s pool house, and remembers the photographs Ronald Kellner showed him, which convince him that Matt is dead. Rather than face what the object means, he hides it in a rarely opened desk drawer. He also keeps the paper bearing “RM” and a phone number, despite trying to maintain his new attitude. The barrier is thus enacted through concealment as much as through routine: objects that contradict the desired blankness are put away, not understood or discarded.

Bret’s response to the tape of Matt’s final night marks a further breach. Hearing the boy’s fear and the command to eat the aquarium fish, Bret realizes the recording is genuine, not staged, and recognizes the fish from Matt’s aquarium. The prolonged scene makes his detachment difficult to sustain: he forces himself to keep listening even when he cannot bear it. The evidence connects Matt’s death to a specific, intimate horror, but does not free Bret to disclose everything he knows. Later, when Dr. Croft raises the intimate falling-out between Bret and Matt, Bret understands that revealing the tape would implicate him in the acts described on it. Knowledge and confession remain divided.

The barrier between Bret and others

When Bret warns Debbie Schaffer that Robert is dangerous and may harm Susan, she appears to doubt Bret’s sanity. Bret feels himself slipping behind the barrier, unable to explain the timeline he believes matters. He gives way to the social performance they have built together, apologizes, and says he is tired. In this exchange the barrier is not only private numbness: it helps Bret conform to another person’s account when he cannot make his own narrative persuasive.

That problem intensifies after Bret’s forceful account of Robert’s danger becomes a public story. Once the Trawler’s actions make clear that Robert was a target of the killer’s obsession rather than the murderer Bret had insisted he was, Bret’s standing at Buckley collapses. Students and teachers avert their attention; friends no longer wait for him, include him at lunch, or invite him to a birthday party or a movie. Bret describes the “tangible participant” walking away. His isolation is a social consequence of the narrative he advanced, not simply an inward retreat, and the barrier offers no protection against that exclusion.

Memory breaks through in adulthood

The barrier also organizes the adult narrator’s struggle to revisit the events. In 2006, while living in Los Angeles after more than twenty years in New York, Bret tries to write about the autumn of 1981. He drinks tequila to steady himself, but making notes about the Trawler triggers a severe anxiety attack; he vomits, calls emergency services believing he is having a heart attack, and is taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. His intention to enter the past as a writer does not make it manageable. The body reacts before the experience can be contained in a narrative.

Years later, the sight of a woman outside the Palihouse Hotel and the song “Vienna” return him to the fear of 1981. He had believed that published fiction and the passage of time had enabled him to work through the trauma, but the resurgence of fear reveals that it remained active. During a week in the desert he sleeps only a few hours a night despite benzodiazepines. A prolonged crisis, beginning after the writing attempt, brings anxiety, estrangement, and substantial weight loss before a year of weekly work with a therapist helps it recede. Bret says earlier therapists had required him to make the horror more palatable, rearranging the story rather than confronting its full force.

The attempt to write the book again makes the barrier’s instability part of the novel’s form. Bret’s partner, Todd, disputes the truth of some remembered events and leaves their condo for days as the writing carries Bret toward the ending. Bret returns to old journals, the Buckley yearbook Images, notes, and the period’s songs, sometimes drinking gin and taking Xanax or Ativan to manage the distress. Music once associated with leaving childhood behind now carries the contrary possibility of remaining emotionally trapped in it. The narrative moves between adolescent experience and adult recollection not as a clean recovery of the past, but as a repeated encounter with what the barrier could not erase.

Meaning and limits

The barrier enables Bret to continue functioning: he can devise a schedule, drive to school, and perform calm even when he feels overwhelmed. But its protection is temporary and costly. It encourages concealment, blocks timely speech, and can make a real threat appear merely absurd or distant. The hidden shorts and phone-number note, the tape Bret cannot bring himself to share, and his failure to persuade Debbie all show different consequences of keeping knowledge behind the barrier.

The novel therefore treats numbness neither as recovery nor as a simple failure of courage. It is a strategy Bret repeatedly uses when experience exceeds what he can bear, and the adult narrative shows how that strategy can postpone rather than end the encounter. Memory returns through objects, songs, dreams, and bodily panic; writing approaches what the barrier once kept out, but does not guarantee that the past will become orderly or fully explainable.