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 pan 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 headache 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.
He started slowly toward Up-Mile Hill, dreading the stiff climb in this heat. It felt almost hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. For the first time he found himself wishing for school to be in again, for a new grade and a new teacher's peculiarities to contend with. For this dreadful summer to be over.
He stopped halfway up the hill, not far from where Bill Denbrough would rediscover his bike Silver twenty-seven years later, and pulled his aspirator from his pocket. HydrOx Mist, the label said. Administer as needed.
Something else clicked home. Administer as needed. He was only a kid, still wet behind the ears (as his mother sometimes told him when she was 'slapping down the cards'), but even a kid of eleven knew that you didn't give someone real medicine and then write on the label Administer as needed. If it was real medicine, it would be too easy to kill yourself as you went happy-assholing around and administering as needed. He supposed you could kill yourself with plain old aspirin doing that.
He looked fixedly at the aspirator, unaware of the old lady who glanced curiously at him as she passed on down the hill toward Main Street with her shopping basket over her arm. He felt betrayed. And for one moment he almost cast the plastic squeezebottle into the gutter - better yet, he thought, throw it down that sewer-grating. Sure! Why not? Let It have it down there in Its tunnels and dripping sewer-pipes. Have a pla-cee-bo, you hundred-faced creep! He uttered a wild laugh and came within an ace of doing it. But in the end, habit was simply too strong. He replaced the aspirator in his right front pants pocket and walked on, hardly hearing the occasional blare of a horn or the diesel drone of the Bassey Park bus as it passed him. He was likewise unaware of how close he was to discovering what being hurt - really hurt - was all about.