by Donna Tartt
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, flashbulbs 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. Radio Detecting And Ranging.” 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 mustache—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?”
“Right,” said Danny, after a brief pause, trying hard to hit just the right note, falling a little flat. What was Farish getting at, with all this broken-record talk about surveillance and spying, unless he was using it to conceal his true suspicions?
Except he doesn’t know a thing, thought Danny in a sudden panic. He can’t. Farish didn’t even drive.
Farish cracked his neck and said, slyly: “Hell, you know it.”
“What?” said Danny, looking around; for a moment he thought he’d spoken aloud without meaning to. But before he could jump up and protest his innocence, Farish began to pace in a tight circle with his eyes fixed on the ground.
“This isn’t generally known, by the American people, the military application of these waves,” he said. “And I’ll tell you what the fuck else. Even the fucking Pentagon don’t know what these waves really are. Oh, they can generate ’em, and track ’em—” he laughed, a short, sharp-pitched laugh—“but they don’t know what the fuck they’re made of.”
I have got to cut this shit out. All I have to do, Danny told himself—horribly aware of a fly which buzzed, repetitively, at his ear, like a tape loop in some endless fucking nightmare—all I have to do is get on the ball, clean up, sleep for a day or two. I can go grab the crank and get out of town while he’s still sitting on the ground out here gibbering about radio waves and tearing up toasters with a screwdriver.…
“Electrons damage the brain,” said Farish. As he said this, he looked keenly at Danny, as if he suspected that Danny disagreed with him on some point.
Danny felt faint. It was past time for his hourly bump. Pretty soon—without it—he’d have to crash, as his over-taxed heart fluttered, as his blood pressure sank to a thread, half-crazy with the fear it would stop altogether because sleep ceased to be sleep when you never had any; dammed up, irresistible, it rolled
in at the last and crushed you senseless, a high, black wall that was more like death.
“And what are radio waves?” said Farish.
Farish had been through this with Danny before. “Electrons.”
“Exactly, numbnuts!” Farish, with a manic, Charles Manson glitter, leaned forward and thumped his own skull with surprising violence. “Electrons! Electrons!”
The screwdriver glinted: bang, Danny saw it, on a giant movie screen, like a cold wind blowing from his future … saw himself lying on his sweaty little bed, knocked out and defenseless and too weak to move. Clock ticking, curtains stirring. Then creak went the trailer’s padded door, ever so slowly, Farish easing quietly to his bedside, butcher knife in his fist.…
“No!” he cried, and opened his eyes to see Farish’s good eye bearing down on him like a power drill.
For a long, bizarre moment, they stared at each other. Then Farish snapped: “Look at your hand. What you done to it? ”
Confused, Danny brought both hands up, trembling, before his eyes and saw that his thumb was covered in blood where he’d been picking at the hangnail.
“Better look after yourself, brother,” Farish said.
————
In the morning, Edie—dressed soberly in navy blue—came by Harriet’s house to pick up Harriet’s mother, so the two of them could go out for breakfast before Edie met the accountant at ten. She’d called to arrange the date three days earlier, and Harriet—after answering the telephone, and getting her mother to pick up—had listened to the first part of their conversation before putting down the receiver. Edie had said that there was something personal they needed to talk about, that it was important, and that she didn’t want to talk about it over the telephone. Now, in the hallway, she refused to sit down and kept glancing at her wristwatch, glancing at the top of the stairs.
“They’ll be through serving breakfast by the time we get there,” she said, and recrossed her arms with an impatient little clucking sound: tch tch tch. Her cheeks were pale with powder and her lips (sharply drawn in a cupid’s bow, in the waxy scarlet lipstick that Edie usually saved for church) were less like a lady’s lips than the thin, pursed lips of old Sieur d’Iberville in Harriet’s Mississippi history book. Her suit—nipped at the waist, with three-quarter-length sleeves—was very severe, stylish too in its old-fashioned way, the suit that (Libby said) made Edie look like Mrs. Simpson who had married the King of England.
Harriet, who was sprawled across the bottom step and glowering at the carpet, raised her head and blurted: “But WHY can’t I go?”
“For one,” said Edie—looking not at Harriet but over her head—“your mother and I have something to discuss.”
“I’ll be quiet!”
“In private. For two,” Edie said, turning her chilly bright gaze quite ferociously on Harriet, “you aren’t dressed to go anywhere. Why don’t you go upstairs and get in the bathtub?”
“If I do, will you bring me back some pancakes?”
“Oh, Mother,” said Charlotte, hurrying down the stairs in an unpressed dress with her hair still damp from the bath. “I’m so sorry. I—”
“Oh! That’s all right!” said Edie, but her voice made it plain that it wasn’t all right, not at all.
Out they went. Harriet—all in a sulk—watched them drive away, through the dusty organdy curtains.
Allison was still upstairs, asleep. She’d come in late the night before. Except for certain mechanical noises—the tick of the clock, the whir of the exhaust fan and the hum of the hot-water heater—the house was as silent as a submarine.
On the counter in the kitchen stood a tin of saltine crackers which had been purchased before Ida’s departure and Libby’s death. Harriet curled up in Ida’s chair and ate a few of them. The chair still smelled like Ida, if she closed her eyes and breathed deep, but it was an elusive scent that vanished if she tried too hard to capture it. Today was the the first day that she hadn’t waked up crying—or wanting to cry—since the morning she left for Camp de Selby but though her eyes were dry and her head was clear she felt restless; the entire house lay still, as if waiting for something to happen.
Harriet ate the rest of her crackers, dusted her hands, and then—climbing on a chair—stood on tiptoe to examine the pistols on the top shelf of the gun cabinet. From among the exotic gambler’s pistols (the pearl-handled Derringers, the rakish dueling sets) she chose the biggest and ugliest pistol of the lot—a double-action Colt revolver, which was most like the pistols she had seen policemen use on television.
She hopped down, closed the cabinet and—placing the gun carefully on the carpet, with both hands (it was heavier than it looked)—ran to the bookcase in the dining room for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Guns. See: Firearms.
She carried the F volume into the living room and used the revolver to prop it open as she sat, cross-legged on the carpet, puzzling over the diagram and text. The technical vocabulary baffled her; after half an hour or so she went back to the shelf for the dictionary but that wasn’t much help, either.
Again and again, she returned to the diagram, leaning over it on all fours. Trigger guard. Swing-out cylinder … but which way did it swing? The gun in the picture didn’t match the gun she had in front of her: crane latch, cylinder crane assembly, ejector rod.…
Suddenly something clicked; the cylinder swung out: empty. The first bullets she tried wouldn’t go in the holes, and neither would the second ones, but mixed in the same box were some different ones that seemed to slide in all right.
Scarcely had she time to begin loading the revolver when she heard the front door open, her mother stepping inside. Quickly, in one broad movement, she pushed everything under Ida’s armchair—guns, bullets, encyclopedia and all—and then stood up.
“Did you bring me some pancakes?” she called.
No answer. Harriet waited, tensely, staring at the carpet (for breakfast, she’d certainly come and gone in a hurry) and listening to her mother’s footfalls skimming up the steps—and was surprised to hear a hiccupy gasp, like her mother was choking or crying.
Harriet—brow wrinkled, hands on hips—stood where she was, listening. When she heard nothing, she went over cautiously and peeked into the hallway, just in time to hear the door of her mother’s room open, then shut.
Ages seemed to pass. Harriet eyed the corner of the encyclopedia, the outline of which protruded ever so slightly beneath the skirt of Ida’s armchair. Presently—as the hall clock ticked on, and still nothing stirred—she stooped and tugged the encyclopedia out from its hiding place and—lying on her stomach, chin propped in her hands—she read the “Firearms” article from beginning to end again.
One by one, the minutes threaded by. Harriet stretched out flat on the floor and lifted the tweed skirt of the chair and peered at the dark shape of the gun, at the pasteboard box of bullets lying quietly alongside it—and, heartened by the silence, she reached under the chair and slid them out. So absorbed was she that she did not hear her mother coming down the stairs until suddenly she said from the hallway, very close: “Sweetie?”
Harriet jumped. Some of the bullets had rolled out of the box. Harriet grabbed them up—fumbling—and stuck them by the handful into her pockets.
“Where are you?”
Harriet had barely enough time to scrape everything under the chair again, and stand up, before her mother appeared in the doorway. Her powder had worn off; her nose was red, her eyes moist; with some surprise, Harriet saw that she was carrying Robin’s little blackbird costume—how black it looked, how small, dangling limp and bedraggled from its padded satin hanger like Peter Pan’s shadow that he’d tried to stick on with soap.
Her mother seemed about to say something; but she had stopped herself, and was looking at Harriet curiously. “What are you doing?” she said.
In apprehension, Harriet stared at the tiny costume. “Why—” she said and, unable to finish, she nodded at it.
Harriet’s mot
her glanced at the costume, startled, almost as if she’d forgotten she was holding it. “Oh,” she said, and dabbed at the corner of her eye with a tissue. “Tom French asked Edie if his child could borrow it. The first ball game is with a team called the Ravens or something and Tom’s wife thought it would be cute if one of the children dressed up like a bird and ran out with the cheerleaders.”
“If you don’t want to lend it to them, you should tell them they can’t have it.”
Harriet’s mother looked a bit surprised. For a long strange moment, the two of them looked at each other.
Harriet’s mother cleared her throat. “What day do you want to drive to Memphis and buy your school clothes?” she said.
“Who’s going to fix them?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Ida always hems my school clothes.”
Harriet’s mother started to say something, then shook her head, as if to clear it of an unpleasant thought. “When are you going to get over this?”
Harriet glared at the carpet. Never, she thought.
“Sweetheart … I know you loved Ida and—maybe I didn’t know how much.…”
Silence.
“But … honey, Ida wanted to leave.”
“She’d have stayed if you asked her.”
Harriet’s mother cleared her throat. “Honey, I feel as bad about it as you do, but Ida didn’t want to stay. Your father was constantly complaining about her, how little work she did. He and I fought about this all the time over the phone, did you know that?” She looked up at the ceiling. “He thought she didn’t do enough, that for what we paid her—”
“You didn’t pay her anything!”
“Harriet, I don’t think Ida had been happy here for … for a long time. She’ll get a better salary somewhere else.… It’s not like I need her any more, like when you and Allison were little.…”
