Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

He stared at the side of his brother’s face. I didn’t do anything , he told himself. Just went up there to look at it. Ain’t took nothing .

But he knows I wanted to take it . And there was something else besides. Somebody had been watching him. Down in the scrub of sumac and kudzu behind the tower, something had moved. White flash, like a face. A little face. On the scummy, shady clay of the path, the footprints were those of a child, dug deep and switching every which way, and this was creepy enough but farther on—alongside a dead snake on the trail—he’d found a flimsy little black-and-white picture of himself. Of himself ! A tiny school picture, back from junior high, cut from a yearbook. He picked it up and stared at it, not believing what he saw. And all sorts of old memories and fears from that long-ago time rose and mingled with the mottled shadows, the red clay mud and the stench of the dead snake … he’d nearly fainted from the indescribable weirdness of it, of seeing his younger self in a new shirt smiling up at him from the ground, like the hopeful photographs on muddy new graves in country cemeteries.

And it was real, he hadn’t imagined it, because the picture was now in his wallet and he’d taken it out to look at it maybe twenty or thirty times in sheer incredulity. Could Farish have left it there? As a warning? Or a sick joke, something to psych Danny out as he stepped on the toe-popper or walked into the fish-hook dangling invisibly at eye level?

The eeriness of it haunted him. Around and around turned his mind in the same useless groove (like the doorknob to his bedroom, which turned and turned quite easily without actually opening the door) and the only thing that kept him from taking the school picture out of his wallet and looking at it again, right now, was Farish standing in front of him.

Danny gazed off into space and (as often happened, since he’d given up sleeping) was paralyzed by a waking dream: wind blowing on a surface like snow or sand, a blurred figure in the far distance. He’d thought it was her, and walked closer and closer until he realized it wasn’t, in fact there was nothing in front of him at all, just empty space. Who was this damn girl? Only the day before, some children’s cereal had been sitting out in the middle of Gum’s kitchen table—some kind of flakes that Curtis liked, in a brightly colored box—and Danny had stopped dead on his way to the bathroom and stared, because her face was on the box . Her! Pale face, black bowl haircut, leaning over a bowl of cereal that cast a magical glow up into her downturned face. And all around her head, fairies and sparkles. He ran, snatched up the box—and was confused to see that the picture wasn’t her at all (any more) but some different child, some child he recognized from television.

In the corner of his eye, tiny explosions popped, flash-bulbs firing everywhere. And all of a sudden, it occurred to him—jolted back into his body, sitting in a sweaty flash on the steps of his trailer again—that when she slipped through whatever dimension she came from and into his thoughts, the girl, she was preceded in his mind by something very like an opened door and a whirl of something bright blowing through it. Points of light, glittery dust flecks like creatures in a microscope—meth bugs, that would be your scientific explanation, because every itch, every goose bump, every microscopic speck and piece of grit that floated across your tired old eyeballs was like a living insect. Knowing the science of it didn’t make it any less real. At the end, bugs crawled on every imaginable surface, long, flowing trails that writhed along the grain in the floorboards. Bugs on your skin that you couldn’t scrub off, though you scrubbed until your skin was raw. Bugs in your food. Bugs in your lungs, your eyeballs, your very squirming heart. Lately Farish had begun placing a paper napkin (perforated by a drinking straw) over his glass of iced tea to keep away the invisible swarms he perpetually swatted from his face and head.

And Danny too had bugs—except his thank Heavens weren’t burrowing bugs, crawling bugs, maggots and termites of the soul—but fireflies. Even now, in broad daylight, they flickered at the corner of his vision. Dust flecks, experienced as electronic pops: twinkle, twinkle everywhere. The chemicals had possessed him, they had the upper hand now; it was chemicals—pure, metallic, precise—that boiled up vaporous to the surface and did the thinking and talking and even the seeing now.

That’s why I’m thinking like a chemist , he thought, and was dazed by the clarity of this simple proposition.

He was resting in the snowy fallout of sparks which showered about him at this epiphany when, with a start, he became aware that Farish was talking to him—had been talking to him, actually, for some time.

“What?” he said, with a guilty jump.

“I said, you do know what that middle D in Radar stands for,” said Farish. Though he was smiling, his face was stony red and congested with blood.

Danny—aghast at this weird challenge, at the horror which had wormed its way so deep into even the most innocuous contact with his own kind—sat up and spasmodically twisted his body away, rooting in his pocket for a cigarette he knew he did not have.

“ Detection . R adio D etecting And R anging.” Farish unscrewed a hollow part from the can opener, and held it up to the light and looked through it before he tossed it away. “Here you’ve got one of the most sophisticated surveillance tools available—standard equipment in every law-enforcement vehicle—and anybody tells you that the police use it to trap speeders is full of shit.”

Detection ? thought Danny. What was he getting at?

“Radar was a wartime development, top secret, for military purposes—and now every single damn police department in the country uses it to monitor the movements of the American populace in peacetime. All that expense? All that training? You’re telling me that’s just to know who’s going five miles over the speed limit?” Farish snorted. “ Bullshit .”

Was it his imagination, or was Farish giving him an extremely pointed look? He’s messing with me , thought Danny. Wants to see what I’ll say . The hell of it was: he wanted to tell Farish about the girl, but he couldn’t admit he’d been at the tower. What reason did he have to be there? He was tempted to mention the girl anyway, though he knew he shouldn’t; no matter how carefully he brought it up, Farish would get suspicious.

No: he had to keep his mouth shut. Maybe Farish knew he was planning to steal the drugs. And maybe—Danny couldn’t quite figure this one out, but just maybe—Farish had something to do with the girl being down there in the first place.

“Those little short waves echo out—” Farish fanned his fingers—“then they ripple back in to report your exact position. It’s about supplying information .”

A test , thought Danny, in a quiet fever. That was how Farish went about things. For the past few days, he’d been leaving huge piles of dope and cash unsupervised around the laboratory, which of course Danny hadn’t touched. But possibly these recent events were part of a more complicated test. Was it just a coincidence that the girl had come to the door of the Mission the very night that Farish had insisted on going over there, the night the snakes were set loose? Something fishy about it from the get-go, her showing up at the door. But Farish hadn’t actually taken very much notice of her, had he?

“My point, is,” said Farish, inhaling heavily through his nostrils as a cascade of mechanical parts from the can opener fell tinkling to the ground, “if they’re beaming all these waves at us, there has to be somebody at the other end . Right?” At the top of his moustache—which was wet—clung a rock of amphetamine the size of a pea. “All this information is worthless without somebody receiving, somebody schooled, somebody trained . Right? Am I right?”