It (123 page)

Mr. Keene wrapped a bunched, bony, liverspotted hand around the balloon and squeezed. The balloon bulged over and under his fist and Eddie winced, trying to get ready for the pop. Simultaneously he felt his breathing stop altogether. He leaned over the desk and grabbed for the aspirator on the blotter. His shoulder struck the heavy ice-cream-soda glass. It toppled off the desk and shattered on the floor like a bomb.

Eddie heard that only dimly. He was clawing the top off the aspirator, slamming the nozzle into his mouth, triggering it off. He took a tearing heaving breath, his thoughts a ratrun of panic as they always were at moments like this:
Please Mommy I'm suffocating I can't BREATHE oh my dear God oh dear Jesus meekandmild I can't BREATHE please I don't want to die don't want to die oh please—

Then the fog from the aspirator condensed on the swollen walls of his throat and he could breathe again.

“I'm sorry,” he said, nearly crying. “I'm sorry about the glass . . . I'll clean it up and pay for it . . . just please don't tell my mother, okay? I'm sorry, Mr. Keene, but I couldn't
breathe—”

There was that double tap at the door again and Ruby poked her head in. “Is everything—”

“Everything's fine,” Mr. Keene said sharply. “Leave us.”

“Well I'm
saw-ry!”
Ruby said. She rolled her eyes and closed the door.

Eddie's breath was starting to whistle in his throat again. He took another pull at the aspirator and then began his fumbling apology once more. He ceased only when he saw that Mr. Keene was smiling
at him—that peculiar dry smile. Mr. Keene's hands were laced over his middle. The balloon lay on his desk. A thought came to Eddie; he tried to hold it back and couldn't. Mr. Keene looked as if Eddie's asthma attack had tasted better to him than his half-finished coffee soda.

“Don't be concerned,” he said. “Ruby will clean up the mess later, and if you want to know the truth, I'm rather glad you broke the glass. Because I promise not to tell your mother that you broke it if
you
promise not to tell her we had this little talk.”

“Oh, I promise that,” Eddie said eagerly.

“Good,” Mr. Keene said. “We have an understanding. And you feel much better now, don't you?”

Eddie nodded.

“Why?”

“Why? Well . . . because I had my medicine.” He looked at Mr. Keene the way he looked at Mrs. Casey in school when he had given an answer he wasn't quite sure of.

“But you
didn't
have any medicine,” Mr. Keene said. “You had a
placebo.
A placebo, Eddie, is something that
looks
like medicine and
tastes
like medicine but
isn't
medicine. A placebo isn't medicine because it has no active ingredients. Or, if it
is
medicine, it's medicine of a very special sort. Head-medicine.” Mr. Keene smiled. “Do you understand that, Eddie?
Head-medicine.”

Eddie understood, all right; Mr. Keene was telling him he was crazy. But through numb lips he said, “No, I don't get you.”

“Let me tell you a little story,” Mr. Keene said. “In 1954, a series of medical tests on ulcer patients was run at DePaul University. One hundred ulcer patients were given pills. They were all told the pills would help their ulcers, but fifty of the patients really got placebos. . . . They were, in fact, M&M's given a uniform pink coating.” Mr. Keene uttered a strange shrill giggle—that of a man describing a prank rather than an experiment. “Of those one hundred patients, ninety-three said they felt a definite improvement, and eighty-one
showed
an improvement. So what do you think? What conclusion do you draw from such an experiment, Eddie?”

“I don't know,” Eddie said faintly.

Mr. Keene tapped his head solemnly. “Most sickness starts in here, that's what
I
think. I've been in this business a long long time, and
I knew about placebos a mighty stretch of years before those doctors at DePaul University did their study. Usually it's old folks who end up getting the placebos. The old fellow or the old girl will go to the doctor, convinced that they've got heart disese or cancer or diabetes or some damn thing. But in a good many cases it's nothing like that at all. They don't feel good because they're old, that's all. But what's a doctor to do? Tell them they're like watches with wornout mainsprings? Huh! Not likely. Doctors like their fees too much.” And now Mr. Keene's face wore an expression somewhere between a smile and a sneer.

Eddie just sat there waiting for it to be over, to be over, to be over.
You didn't have any medicine:
those words clanged in his mind.

“The doctors don't tell them that, and I don't tell them that, either. Why bother? Sometimes an old party will come in with a prescription blank that will say it right out:
Placebo,
or
25 grains Blue Skies,
which was how old Doc Pearson used to put it.”

Mr. Keene cackled briefly and then sucked on his coffee soda.

“Well, what's wrong with it?” he asked Eddie, and when Eddie only sat there, Mr. Keene answered his own question. “Why, nothing! Nothing at all!

“At least . . . usually.

“Placebos are a blessing for old people. And then there are other cases—folks with cancer, folks with degenerative heart disease, folks with terrible things that we don't understand yet, some of them children just like you, Eddie! In cases like that, if a placebo makes the patient feel better, where is the harm? Do you see the harm, Eddie?”

“No sir,” Eddie said, and looked down at the splatter of chocolate ice cream, soda-water, whipped cream, and broken glass on the floor. In the middle of all this was the maraschino cherry, as accusing as a blood-clot at a crime scene. Looking at this mess made his chest feel tight again.

“Then we're like Ike and Mike! We think alike! Five years ago, when Vernon Maitland had cancer of the esophagus—a painful, painful sort of cancer—and the doctors had run out of anything effective they could give him for his pain, I came by his hospital room with a bottle of sugar-pills. He was a special friend, you see. And I said, ‘Vern, these are special experimental pain-pills. The doctor doesn't know I'm giving them to you, so for God's sake be careful
and don't tattle on me. They might not work, but I think they will. Take no more than one a day, and only if the pain is especially bad.' He thanked me with tears in his eyes.
Tears,
Eddie! And they worked for him!
Yes!
They were only sugar-pills, but they killed most of his pain . . . because pain is here.”

Solemnly, Mr. Keene tapped his head again.

Eddie said: “My medicine does so work.”

“I know it does,” Mr. Keene replied, and smiled a maddening complacent grownup's smile. “It works on your chest because it works on your head. HydrOx, Eddie, is water with a dash of camphor thrown in to give it a medicine taste.”

“No,” Eddie said. His breath had begun to whistle again.

Mr. Keene drank some of his soda, spooned some of the melting ice cream, and fastidiously wiped his chin with his handkerchief while Eddie used his aspirator again.

“I want to go now,” Eddie said.

“Let me finish, please.”

“No! I want to go, you've got your money and I want to go!”

“Let me finish,” Mr. Keene said, so forbiddingly that Eddie sat back in his chair. Grownups could be so hateful in their power sometimes. So hateful.

“Part of the problem here is that your doctor, Russ Handor, is weak. And part of the problem is that your mother is determined you are ill. You, Eddie, have been caught in the middle.”

“I'm not crazy,” Eddie whispered, the words coming out in a bare husk.

Mr. Keene's chair creaked like a monstrous cricket. “What?”

“I said I'm not crazy!” Eddie shouted. Then, immediately, a miserable blush rose into his face.

Mr. Keene smiled. Think what you like, that smile said. Think what
you
like, and I'll think what
I
like.

“All I'm telling you, Eddie, is that you're not physically ill. Your
lungs
don't have asthma; your
mind
does.”

“You mean I'm crazy.”

Mr. Keene leaned forward, looking at him intently over his folded hands.

“I don't know,” he said softly. “Are you?”

“It's all a lie!” Eddie cried, surprised the words came out so strongly
from his tight chest. He was thinking of Bill, how Bill would react to such amazing charges. Bill would know what to say, stutter or not. Bill would know how to be brave. “All a great big lie! I
do
have asthma, I
do!”

“Yes,” Mr. Keene said, and now the dry smile had become a weird skeletal grin. “But who gave it to you, Eddie?”

Eddie's brain thudded and whirled. Oh, he felt sick, he felt very sick.

“Four years ago, in 1954—the same year as the DePaul tests, oddly enough—Dr. Handor began prescribing this HydrOx for you. That stands for hydrogen and oxygen, the two components of water. I have condoned this deception since then, but I will not condone it anymore. Your asthma medicine works on your mind rather than your body. Your asthma is the result of a nervous tightening of the diaphragm that is ordered by your mind . . . or your mother.

“You are not sick.”

A terrible silence descended.

Eddie sat in his chair, his mind whirling. For a moment he considered the possibility that Mr. Keene might be telling the truth, but there were ramifications in such an idea that he could not face. Yet why would Mr. Keene lie, especially about something so serious?

Mr. Keene sat and smiled his bright dry heartless desert smile.

I
do
have asthma, I
do.
The day that Henry Bowers punched me in the nose, the day Bill and I were trying to make a dam in the Barrens, I almost
died.
Am I supposed to think that my mind was just . . . just making all of that up?

But why would he lie?
(It was only years later, in the library, that Eddie asked himself the more terrible question:
Why would he tell me the truth?)

Dimly he heard Mr. Keene saying: “I've kept my eye on you, Eddie. I told you all this because you're old enough to understand, but also because I've noticed you've finally made some friends. They are good friends, aren't they?”

“Yes,” Eddie said.

Mr. Keene tilted his chair back (it made that cricketlike noise again), and closed one eye in what might or might not have been a wink. “And I'll bet your mother doesn't like them much, does she?”

“She likes them fine,” Eddie said, thinking of the cutting things
his mother had said about Richie Tozier
(He has a foul mouth . . . and I've smelled his breath, Eddie . . . I think he smokes),
her sniffing remark not to loan any money to Stan Uris because he was a Jew, her outright dislike of Bill Denbrough and “that fatboy.”

He repeated to Mr. Keene: “She likes them
a lot.”

“Does she?” Mr. Keene said, still smiling. “Well, maybe she's right and maybe she's wrong, but at least you
have
friends. Maybe you ought to talk to them about this problem of yours. This . . . this mental weakness. See what they have to say.”

Eddie didn't reply. He was through talking to Mr. Keene; that seemed safer. And he was afraid that if he didn't get out of here soon, he really would cry.

“Well!” Mr. Keene said, standing up. “I think that just about finishes us up, Eddie. If I've upset you, I'm sorry. I was only doing my duty as I saw it. I—”

But before he could say any more, Eddie had snatched up his aspirator and the white bag of pills and nostrums and had fled. One of his feet skidded in the ice-creamy mess on the floor and he almost fell. Then he was running, bolting from the Center Street Drug Store in spite of his whistling breath. Ruby stared after him over her movie magazine, her mouth open.

Behind him he seemed to sense Mr. Keene standing in the doorway of his office and watching his graceless retreat over the prescription counter, gaunt and neat and thoughtful and smiling. Smiling that dry desert smile.

He paused outside on the three-way corner of Kansas, Main, and Center. He took another deep pull from his aspirator while sitting on the low stone wall by the bus-stop—his throat was now positively slimy with that medicinal taste

(nothing but water with some camphor thrown in)

and he thought that if he had to use the aspirator again today he would probably puke his guts.

He slipped it into his pocket and watched the traffic pass back and forth, headed up Main Street and down Up-Mile Hill. He tried not to think. The sun beat down on his head, blaringly hot. Each passing car threw bright darts of reflection into his eyes, and a headace was starting in his temples. He couldn't find a way to stay angry at Mr. Keene, but he had no trouble at all feeling bad for Eddie Kaspbrak.
He felt
real
bad for Eddie Kaspbrak. He supposed that Bill Denbrough never wasted time feeling sorry for himself, but Eddie just couldn't seem to help it.

More than anything else he wanted to do exactly what Mr. Keene had suggested: go down to the Barrens and tell his friends everything, see what they would say, find out what answers they had. But he couldn't do that now. His mother would expect him home with her medicines soon

(your mind . . . or your mother)

and if he wasn't there

(your mother is determined you are ill)

trouble would follow. She would assume he had been with Bill or Richie or “the Jewboy,” as she called Stan (insisting that she meant no prejudice by so calling him, but was simply “slapping down the cards”—her phrase for truth-telling in difficult situations). And standing here on this corner, trying hopelessly to sort out his flying thoughts, Eddie knew what she would say if she knew one of his other friends was a Negro and another was a girl—a girl old enough to be getting bosoms.