The Secret History - Donna Tartt [136]
This part, for some reason, is difficult for me to write, largely because the topic is inextricably associated with too many nights like this one (sour stomach, wretched nerves, clock inching tediously from four to five). It is also discouraging, because I recognize attempts at analysis are largely useless. I don’t know why we did it. I’m not entirely sure that, circumstances demanding, we wouldn’t do it again. And if I’m sorry, in a way, that probably doesn’t make much difference.
I am sorry, as well, to present such a sketchy and disappointing exegesis of what is in fact the central part of my story. I have noticed that even the most garrulous and shameless of murderers are shy about recounting their crimes. A few months ago, in an airport bookstore, I picked up the autobiography of a notorious thrill killer and was disheartened to find it entirely bereft of lurid detail. At the points of greatest suspense (rainy night; deserted street; fingers closing around the lovely neck of Victim Number Four) it would suddenly, and not without some coyness, switch to some entirely unrelated matter. (Was the reader aware that an IQ test had been given him in prison? That his score had been gauged as being close to that of Jonas Salk?) By far the major portion of the book was devoted to spinsterish discourses on prison life—bad food, hijinks in the exercise yard, tedious little jailbird hobbies. It was a waste of five dollars.
In a certain way, though, I know how my colleague feels. Not that everything “went black,” nothing of the sort; only that the event itself is cloudy because of some primitive, numbing effect that obscured it at the time; the same effect, I suppose, that enables panicked mothers to swim icy rivers, or rush into burning houses, for a child; the effect that occasionally allows a deeply bereaved person to make it through a funeral without a single tear. Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things—naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror—are too terrible to really ever grasp at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory, that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself—quite to one’s surprise—in an entirely different world.
When we got back to the car it had not begun to snow, but already the woods shrank beneath the sky, hushed and waiting, as if they could sense the weight of the ice that would be on them by nightfall.
“Christ, look at this mud,” said Francis as we bounced through yet another pothole, brown spray striking the window with a thick rataplan.
Henry shifted down into first.
Another pothole, one that rattled the teeth in my head. As we tried to come out of it the tires whined, kicking up fresh splatters of mud, and we fell back into it with a jolt. Henry swore, and put the car in reverse.
Francis rolled down his window and craned his head outside to see. “Oh, Jesus,” I heard him say. “Stop the car. There’s no way we’re going to—”
“We’re not stuck.”
“Yes we are. You’re making it worse. Christ, Henry. Stop the—”
“Shut up,” Henry said.
The tires whined in the back. The twins, sitting on either side of me, turned to look out the rear window at the muddy spray. Abruptly, Henry shifted into first, and with a sudden leap that made my heart glad we were clear of the hole.
Francis slumped back in his seat. He was a cautious driver, and riding in the car with Henry, even in the most propitious of circumstances, made him nervous.
Once in town, we drove to Francis’s apartment. The twins and I were to split up and walk home—me to campus, the twins to their apartment—while Henry and Francis took care of the car. Henry turned off the engine. The silence was eerie,