The Secret History - Donna Tartt [59]
I was at Dr. Roland’s office every morning like clockwork. He, an alleged psychologist, noticed not one of the Ten Warning Signs of Nervous Collapse or whatever it was that he was educated to see, and qualified to teach. Instead, he took advantage of my silence to talk to himself about football, and dogs he had had as a boy. The rare remarks he addressed to me were cryptic and incomprehensible. He asked, for example, since I was in the Drama department, why hadn’t I been in any plays? “What’s wrong? Are you shy, boy? Show them what you’re made of.” Another time he told me, in an offhand manner, that when he was at Brown he had roomed with the boy who lived down the hall from him. One day, he said he didn’t know my friend was in Hampden for the winter.
“I don’t have any friends here for the winter,” I said, and I didn’t.
“You shouldn’t push your friends away like that. The best friends you’ll ever have are the ones you’re making right now. I know you don’t believe me, but they start to fall away when you get to be my age.”
When I walked home at night, things got white around the edges and it seemed I had no past, no memories, that I had been on this exact stretch of luminous, hissing road forever.
I don’t know what exactly was wrong with me. The doctors said it was chronic hypothermia, with bad diet and a mild case of pneumonia on top of it; but I don’t know if that accounts for all the hallucinations and mental confusion. At the time I wasn’t even aware I was sick: any symptom, any fever or pain, was drowned by the clamor of my more immediate miseries.
For I was in a bad fix. It was the coldest January on record for twenty-five years. I was terrified of freezing to death but there was absolutely nowhere I could go. I suppose I might’ve asked Dr. Roland if I could stay in the apartment he shared with his girlfriend, but the embarrassment of that was such that death, to me, seemed preferable. I knew no one else, even slightly, and short of knocking on the doors of strangers there was little I could do. One bitter night I tried to call my parents from the pay phone outside the Boulder Tap; sleet was falling and I was shivering so violently I could hardly get the coins in the slot. Although I had some desperate, half-baked hope that they might send money or a plane ticket, I didn’t know what I wanted them to say to me; I think I had some idea that I, standing in the sleet and winds of Prospect Street, would feel better simply by hearing the voices of people far away, in a warm place. But when my father picked up the telephone on the sixth or seventh ring, his voice, beery and irritated, gave me a hard, dry feeling in my throat and I hung up.
Dr. Roland mentioned my imaginary friend again. He’d seen him uptown this time, walking on the square late at night as he was driving home.
“I told you I don’t have any friends here,” I said.
“You know who I’m talking about. Great big boy. Wears glasses.”
Someone who looked like Henry? Bunny? “You must be mistaken,” I said.
The temperature plummeted so low that I was forced to spend a few nights at the Catamount Motel. I was the only person in the place, besides the snaggle-toothed old man who ran it; he was in the room next to mine and kept me awake with his loud hacking and spitting. There was no lock on my door, only the antique sort that can be picked with a hairpin; on the third night I woke from a bad dream (nightmare stairwell, steps all different heights and widths; a man going down ahead of me, really fast) to hear a faint, clicking noise. I sat up in bed and, to my horror, saw my doorknob turning stealthily in the moonlight: “Who’s there?” I said loudly, and it stopped. I lay awake in the dark for a long time. The next morning, I left, preferring