The Secret History - Donna Tartt [115]
“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 whined 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, à 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 concentration of 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