Donna Tartt - The Secret History

Bunny, unawares, had himself supplied us with such an impetus. I would like to say I was driven to what I did by some overwhelming, tragic motive. But I think I would be lying if I told you that; if I led you to believe that on that Sunday afternoon in April, I was actually being driven by anything of the sort.

An interesting question: what was I thinking, as I watched his eyes widen with startled incredulity ('come on, fellas, you're joking, right?') for what would be the very last time? Not of the fact that I was helping to save my friends, certainly not; nor of fear; nor guilt. But little things. Insults, innuendos, petty cruelties. The hundreds of small, unavenged humiliations which had been rising in me for months. It was of them The thought, and nothing more.

It was because of them that I was able to watch him at all, without the slightest tinge of pity or regret, as he teetered on the cliff's edge for one long moment – arms flailing, eyes rolling, a silent-movie comedian slipping on a banana peel – before he toppled backwards, and fell to his death.

Henry, I believed, had a plan. What it was I didn't know. He was always disappearing on mysterious errands, and perhaps these were only more of the same; but now, anxious to believe that someone, at least, had the situation in hand, I imbued them with a certain hopeful significance. Not infrequently he refused to answer his door, even late at night when a light was burning and I knew he was at home; more than once he appeared late for dinner with wet shoes, and windblown hair, and mud on the cuffs of his neat dark trousers. A stack of mysterious books, in a Near Eastern language which looked like Arabic and bearing the stamp of the Williams College Library, materialized in the back seat of his car. This was doubly puzzling, as I did not think he read Arabic; nor, to my knowledge, did he have borrowing privileges at the Williams College Library. Glancing surreptitiously at the back pocket of one of them, I found the card was still in it, and that the last person to check it out was an F.

Lockett, back in 1929.

Perhaps the oddest thing of all, though, I saw one afternoon when I'd hitched a ride into Hampden with Judy Poovey. I wanted to take some clothes to the cleaners and Judy, who was going into town, offered to drive me; we'd done our errands, not to mention an awful lot of cocaine in the parking lot of Burger King, and we were stopped in the Corvette at a red light, listening to terrible music ('Free Bird') on the Manchester radio station, and Judy rattling on, like the senseless cokehead she was, about these two guys she knew who'd had sex in the Food King ('Right 2.55 I in the store! In the frozen food aisle!'), when she glanced out her «window and laughed. 'Look,' she said. 'Isn't that your friend '

Four Eyes over there?'

Startled, I leaned forward. There was a tiny head shop directly across the street – bongs, tapestries, canisters of Rush, and all sorts of herbs and incense behind the counter. I'd never seen anyone in it before except the sad old hippie in granny glasses, a Hampden graduate, who owned it. But now to my astonishment I saw Henry – black suit, umbrella and all – among the celestial maps and unicorns. He was standing at the counter looking at a sheet of paper. The hippie started to say something but Henry, cutting him short, pointed to something behind the counter. The hippie shrugged and took a little bottle off the shelf. I watched them, half-breathless.

'What do you think he's doing in there, trying to harass that poor old Deadhead? That's a shitty store, by the way. I went in there once for a pair of scales and they didn't even have any, just a bunch of crystal balls and shit. You know that set of green plastic scales I – Hey, you're not listening,' she said when she saw I was still staring out the window. The hippie had leaned down and was rummaging under the counter. 'You want me to honk or something?'

'No,' I shouted, edgy from the cocaine, and pushed her hand away from the horn.

'Oh, God. Don't scare me like that.' She pressed her hand to her chest. 'Shit. I'm speeding my brains out. That coke was cut with meth or something. Okay, okay,' she said irritably, as the light turned green and the gas truck behind us began to honk.

Stolen Arabic books? A head shop in Hampden town? I couldn't imagine what Henry was doing, but as disconnected as his actions seemed, I had a childlike faith in him and, as confidently as Dr Watson observing the actions of his more illustrious friend, I waited for the design to manifest itself.

Which it did, in a certain fashion, in a couple of days.

On a Thursday night, around twelve-thirty, I was in my pajamas and attempting to cut my own hair with the aid of a mirror and some nail scissors (I never did a very good job; the finished product was always very thistly and childish, a la Arthur Rimbaud) when there was a knock at the door. I answered it with scissors and mirror in hand. It was Henry. 'Oh, hello,' I said.

'Come in.'

Stepping carefully over the tufts of dusty brown hair, he sat down at my desk. Inspecting my profile in the mirror, I went back to work with the scissors. 'What's up?' I said, reaching over to snip off a long clump by my ear.

'You studied medicine for a while, didn't you?' he said.

I knew this to be a prelude to some health-related inquiry. My one year of pre-med had provided scanty knowledge at best, but the others, who knew nothing at all of medicine and regarded the discipline per se as less a science than a kind of sympathetic magic, constantly solicited my opinion on their aches and pains as respectfully as savages consulting a witch doctor. Their ignorance ranged from the touching to the downright shocking; Henry, I suppose because he'd been ill so often, knew more than the rest of them but occasionally even he would startle one with a perfectly serious question about humors or spleen.

'Are you sick?' I said, one eye on his reflection in the mirror.

'I need a formula for dosage.'

'What do you mean, a formula for dosage? Dosage of what?'

'There is one, isn't there? Some mathematical formula which tells the proper dose to administer according to height and weight, that sort of thing?'

'It depends on the drug,' I said. 'I can't tell you something like that. You'd have to look it up in a Physicians' Desk Reference.'

'I can't do that.'

'They're very simple to use.'

'That's not what I mean. It's not in the Physicians' Desk Reference.'

'You'd be surprised.'

For a moment there was no sound except the grinding of my scissors. At last he said: 'You don't understand. This isn't something doctors generally use.'

I brought down my scissors and looked at his reflection in the mirror.

'Jesus, Henry,' I said. 'What have you got? Some LSD or something?'

'Let's say I do,' he said calmly.

I put down the mirror and turned to stare at him. 'Henry, I don't think that's a good idea,' I said. 'I don't know if I ever told you this but I took LSD a couple of times. When I was a sophomore in high school. It was the worst mistake I ever made in my '

'I realize that it's hard to gauge the concentration of such a drug,' he said evenly. 'But say we have a certain amount of empirical evidence. Let's say we know, for instance, that x amount of the drug in question is enough to affect a seventy pound animal and another, slightly larger amount is sufficient to kill it. I've figured out a rough formula, but still we are talking about a very fine distinction. So, knowing this much, how do I go about calculating the rest?'

I leaned against my dresser and stared at him, my haircut forgotten. 'Let's see what you have,' I said.

He looked at me intently for a moment or two, then reached into his pocket. When his hand opened, I couldn't believe my eyes, but then I stepped closer. A pale, slender-stemmed mushroom lay across his open palm.