The Secret History (39 page)

Perhaps the oddest thing of all, though, I saw one afternoon when I’d hitched a ride into Hampden with Judy Poovey. I wanted to take some clothes to the cleaners and Judy, who was going into town, offered to drive me; we’d done our errands, not to mention an awful lot of cocaine in the parking lot of Burger King, and we were stopped in the Corvette at a red light, listening to terrible music (“Free Bird”) on the Manchester radio station, and Judy rattling on, like the senseless cokehead she was, about these two guys she knew who’d had sex in the Food King (“Right in the store! In the frozen food aisle!”), when she glanced out her window and laughed. “Look,” she said. “Isn’t that your friend Four Eyes over there?”

Startled, I leaned forward. There was a tiny head shop directly across the street—bongs, tapestries, canisters of Rush, and all sorts of herbs and incense behind the counter. I’d never seen anyone in it before except the sad old hippie in granny glasses, a Hampden graduate, who owned it. But now to my astonishment I saw Henry—black suit, umbrella and all—among the celestial maps and unicorns. He was standing at the counter looking at a sheet of paper. The hippie started to say something but Henry, cutting him short, pointed to something behind the counter. The hippie shrugged and took a little bottle off the shelf. I watched them, half-breathless.

“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 very fine distinction. So, knowing this much, how do I go about calculating the rest?”

I leaned against my dresser and stared at him, my haircut forgotten. “Let’s see what you have,” I said.

He looked at me intently for a moment or two, then reached into his pocket. When his hand opened, I couldn’t believe my eyes, but then I stepped closer. A pale, slender-stemmed mushroom lay across his open palm.

“
Amanita caesaria,
” he said. “Not what you think,” he added when he saw the look on my face.

“I know what an amanita is.”

“Not all amanitae are poisonous. This one is harmless.”

“What is it?” I said, taking it from his hand and holding it to the light. “A hallucinogen?”

“No. Actually they are good to eat—the Romans liked them a great deal—but people avoid them as a rule because they are so easily confused with their evil twin.”

“Evil twin?”

“
Amanita phalloides,
” said Henry mildly. “Death cap.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment.

“What are you going to do?” I finally asked.

“What do you think?”

I got up, agitated, and walked to my desk. Henry put the mushroom back in his pocket and lit a cigarette. “Do you have an ashtray?” he said courteously.

I gave him an empty soda can. His cigarette was nearly finished before I spoke. “Henry, I don’t think this is a good idea.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”

Why not, he asks me
. “Because,” I said, a little wildly, “they can trace poison. Any kind of poison. Do you think if Bunny keels over dead, people won’t find it peculiar? Any idiot of a coroner can—”

“I know that,” said Henry patiently. “Which is why I’m asking you about the dosage.”

“That has nothing to do with it. Even a tiny amount can be—”

“—enough to make one extremely ill,” Henry said, lighting another cigarette. “But not necessarily lethal.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” he said, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, “that strictly in terms of virulence there are any number of excellent poisons, most of them far superior to this. The woods will be soon full of foxglove and monkshood. I could get all the arsenic I needed from flypaper. And even herbs that aren’t common here—good God, the Borgias would have wept to see the health-food store I found in Brattleboro last week. Hellebore, mandrake, pure oil of wormwood.… I suppose people will buy anything if they think it’s natural. The wormwood they were selling as organic insect repellent, as if that made it safer than the stuff at the supermarket. One bottle could have killed an army.” He toyed with his glasses again. “The problem with these things—excellent though they are—is one, as you said, of administration. Amatoxins are messy, as poisons go. Vomiting, jaundice, convulsions. Not like some of the little Italian comfortives,
which are relatively quick and kind. But, on the other hand, what could be easier to give? I’m not a botanist, you know. Even mycologists have a hard time telling amanitae apart. Some handpicked mushrooms … a few bad ones get mixed in the lot … one friend gets dreadfully ill and the other …?” He shrugged.

We looked at each other.

“How can you be sure you won’t get too much yourself?” I asked him.

“I suppose I can’t be, really,” he said. “My own life must be plausibly in danger, so you can see I have a delicate margin to work with. But still, chances are excellent that I can bring it off. All I have to worry about is myself, you know. The rest will take care of itself.”

I knew what he meant. The plan had several grave flaws, but it was brilliant at its heart: if anything could be relied upon with almost mathematical certainty, it was that Bunny, at any given meal, would somehow manage to eat almost twice as much as anyone else.

Henry’s face was pale and serene through the haze of his cigarette. He put his hand in his pocket and produced the mushroom again.

“Now,” he said. “A single cap, roughly this size, of
A. phalloides is
enough to make a healthy seventy-pound dog quite ill. Vomiting, diarrhea, no convulsions that I saw. I don’t think there was anything as severe as liver dysfunction but I suppose we will have to leave that to the veterinarians. Evidently—”

“Henry, how do you
know
this?”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said: “Do you know those two horrible boxer dogs who belong to the couple who live upstairs?”

It was dreadful but I had to laugh, I couldn’t help it. “
No,
” I said. “You didn’t.”

“I’m afraid I did,” he said dryly, mashing out his cigarette. “One of them is fine, unfortunately. The other one won’t be dragging garbage up on
my
front porch anymore. It was dead in twenty hours, and only of a slightly larger dose—the difference perhaps of a gram. Knowing this, it seems to me that I should be able to prescribe how much poison each of us should get. What worries me is the variation in concentration of poison from one mushroom to the next. It’s not as if it’s measured out by a pharmacist. Perhaps I’m wrong—I’m sure you know more about it than I do—but a mushroom that weighs two grams might well
have just as much as one that weighs three, no? Hence my dilemma.”

He reached into his breast pocket and took out a sheet of paper covered with numbers. “I hate to involve you in this, but no one else knows a thing about math and I’m far from reliable myself. Will you have a look?”

Vomiting, jaundice, convulsions
. Mechanically, I took the sheet of paper from him. It was covered with algebraic equations, but at the moment algebra was frankly the last thing on my mind. I shook my head and was on the point of handing it back when I looked up at him and something stopped me. I was in the position, I realized, to put an end to this, now, right here. He really did need my help, or else he wouldn’t have come to me; emotional appeals, I knew, were useless but if I pretended that I knew what I was doing I might be able to talk him out of it.

I took the paper to my desk and sat down with a pencil and forced myself through the tangle of numbers step by step. Equations about chemical concentration were never my strong point in chemistry, and they are difficult enough when you are trying to figure a fixed concentration in a suspension of distilled water; but this, dealing as it did with varying concentrations in irregularly shaped objects, was virtually impossible. He had probably used all the elementary algebra he knew in figuring this, and as far as I could follow him he hadn’t done a bad job; but this wasn’t a problem that could be worked with algebra, if it could be worked at all. Someone with three or four years of college calculus might have been able to come up with something that at least looked more convincing; by tinkering, I was able to narrow his ratio slightly but I had forgotten most of the little calculus I knew and the answer I wound up with, though probably closer than his own, was far from correct.

I put down my pencil and looked up. The business had taken me about half an hour. Henry had got a copy of Dante’s
Purgatorio
from my bookshelf and was reading it, absorbed.

“Henry.”

He glanced up absently.

“Henry, I don’t think this is going to work.”

He closed the book on his finger. “I made a mistake in the second part,” he said. “Where the factoring begins.”

“It’s a good try, but just by looking at it I can tell that it’s insolvable without chemical tables and a good working knowledge
of calculus and chemistry proper. There’s no way to figure it otherwise. I mean, chemical concentrations aren’t even measured in terms of grams and milligrams but in something called moles.”

“Can you work it for me?”