Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  To describe this singular quality of hers (which I believe holds one of the brightest lanterns to her sometimes shadowy profile) is impossible, because what she did had nothing to do with words.

  It was just this way about her.

  And the wasn't premeditated, condescending, or forced (see Chapter 9, "Get Your Teen to Consider You The 'In' Crowd," Befriending Your Kids, Howards, 2000).

  Obviously, being able to simply , was a skill supremely underestimated in the Western world. As Dad was fond of pointing out, in America, apart from those who won the lottery, generally all Winners were in possession of a strident voice, which was successfully used to overpower the thrum of all the competing voices, thereby producing a country that was insanely loud, so loud, most of the time no actual meaning could be discerned—only "nationwide white noise." And thus when you met someone who listened, someone content to do nothing but , so overwhelming was the difference, you had the startling and quite lonely epiphany that everyone else, every person you'd encountered since the day you were born who'd supposedly listened, had really not been listening to you at all. They'd been subtly checking out their own reflection in the glass bureau a little to the west of your head, thinking what they had to do later that evening, or deciding that next, as soon as you shut up, they were going to tell that classic story about their bout of Bangladeshi beachside dysentery, thereby showcasing how worldly, how wild (not to mention how utterly enviable) a human being they were.

  Hannah did ultimately speak, of course, but it wasn't to tell you what she thought or what you had to do, but only to ask you certain relevant questions, which were often laughable in their simplicity (one, I remember, was, "Well, what do you think?"). Afterward, when Charles cleared the plates, Lana and Turner jumped into her lap, fashioning her arm bracelets out of their tails, and Jade turned on the music (Mel Tormé detailing how you were getting to be a habit with him), you didn't feel the edgy feeling of being alone in the world. As stupid as this sounds—you felt you had an answer.

  It was this quality, I think, that made her have such an influence on the others. She was the reason Jade, for example, who sometimes talked of becoming a journalist, joined The Gallway Gazette as a freelance staff writer even though she downright loathed Hillary Leech, the editor-in-chief who pulled out a copy oïThe New Yorker and read it before every class (sometimes chuckling irritatingly at something in "The Talk of the Town"). And Charles sometimes carried around a three-inch textbook, How to Be a Hitchcock (Lerner, 1999), which I secretly paged through one Sunday and beheld the first-page inscription: "To my master of suspense. Love, Hannah." Leulah tutored fourth-graders in Science every Tuesday after school at Elmview Elementary, Nigel read The Definitive Foreign Service Exam Study Guide (2001 éd.), and Milton had taken an acting class at the UNCS the previous summer, Introduction to Shakespeare: The Art of the Body—acts of humanitarianism and self-improvement I couldn't help but think had originally been Hannah's suggestions, though proposed in her way, they probably believed they'd thought of it themselves.

  I, too, was not immune to her brand of inspiration. At the beginning of October, Hannah arranged with Evita for me to drop out of AP French with drapery-drab Ms. Filobeque and enroll with a bunch of freshmen in Beginning Drawing with the Dalf-decadent Mr. Victor Moats. (I did so without breathing a word to Dad.) Moats was Hannah's favorite teacher at Gallway.

  "I absolutely adore Victor/' she said, biting her bottom lip. "He's wonderful. Nigel's in one of his classes. Isn't he wonderful? I think he's wonderful. Really."

  And Victor was wonderful. Victor sported faux suede shirts in Permanent Magenta and Burnt Sienna and had hair that, under the art room lights, channeled the gleam of film noir streets, Humphrey Bogart's wingtips, opera footlights and tar, all at the same time.

  Hannah also bought me a sketchbook and five ink pens, which she wrapped in old-fashioned parcel paper and sent to my school mailbox. (She never talked about things. She simply did them.) On the inside cover, she'd written (in a handwriting that was a perfect extension of her—elegant, with tiny mysteries in the curves of her n's and h's): "For your Blue Period. Hannah."

  In the middle of class, occasionally I'd take the thing out and covertly try to draw something, like Mr. Archer's ranidae hands. Though I showed no signs of being an untapped El Greco, I enjoyed pretending I was a rheumatoid artiste, some Toulouse concentrating on the outline of bony arm of a can-can girl, instead of plain old Blue van Meer, who might go down in history for the talent of feverishly copying down every syllable a teacher uttered (including ums and ehs) in case it showed up on the Unit Test.

  In her absorbing memoir, There's a Great Day Coming Mariana (1973), Florence "Feisty Freddie" Frankenberg, a 1940s their-girl-Friday actress whose great claim to fame was appearing on Broadway with Al Jolson in Hang on to Your Handkerchiefs (she also palled around with Gemini Cervenka and Oona O'Neill), wrote in Chapter 1 that at first glance, Saturday night at the Stork Club was an "oasis of rarified fun" and that, despite WWII grimly unfolding across the Atlantic like a telegram delivering bad news, when one was in a "new gown, perched on those comfy banquettes," one had the feeling "nothing bad could happen" because one was protected by "all the money and the mink" (p. 22-3). At second glance, however, as Feisty Freddie goes on to reveal in Chapter 2, the swanky Stork Club was in fact "as vicious as Rudolph Valentino with a dame who wouldn't knock knees with him" (p. 41). She writes that everyone, from Gable and Grable to Hemingway and Hayworth, was so anxious about where the proprietor, Sherman Billings-ley, placed them in the room, whether they'd be allowed into that rarefied-room-of-the-already-absurdly-rarefied, the Cub Room, one could "use the space between folks' necks and shoulders as a nutcracker" (p. 49). Freddie further reveals in Chapter 7 that on more than one occasion, she overheard certain studio honchos admitting they wouldn't think twice about "letting off a bullet or two into some balmy broad," in order to permanently secure that coveted banquette in the corner, Table 25, the Royal Circle, with its ideal view of the bar and the door (p. 91).

  And thus I have to mention tensions ran quite high at Hannah's, too, though I often wondered if I, like Feisty Freddie, was the only one who noticed. Sometimes it felt as if Hannah was J. J. Hunsecker and the others were sinuous Sidney Falcos vying to be her chosen charlie, her preferred pajama playboy, her dreamy de luxe.

  I remember those occasions Charles was working on his Third Reich timeline or his research paper on the USSR collapse for AP European History. He'd throw his pencil across the room. "I can't do this fucking assignment! Fuck Hitler! Fuck Churchill, Stalin and the Red Fuckin' Army!" Hannah would run upstairs to get a history book or an EncyclopaediaBritannica and when she returned, for an hour, their brown and gold heads huddled together like cold pigeons under the desk lamp, trying to figure out the month of Germany's invasion of Poland or exactly when the Berlin wall fell (September 1939, November 9, 1989). Once I spoke up, tried giving them a hand by pointing them in the direction of the 1200-page history text Dad always put at the top of his Required Reading, Hermin-Lewishon's famed History Is Power (1990) but Charles looked through me, and Hannah, flipping through the Britannica, was apparently one of those people who, while reading, could sit through an entire civil war between Sandinistas and U.S.backed Contras and hear nothing. During these interludes, though, I always noticed Jade, Lu, Nigel and Milton stopped working, and if their perpetual glances across the room were any indication, they sort of became hyperaware of Hannah and Charles, maybe even a little jealous, like a pride of starving lions in a zoo when only one of them is singled out and hand-fed.

  To be honest, I didn't particularly care for the way they acted around her. With me, they were edgy and aloof, but with Hannah—they seemed to confuse her rapt attention for Cecil B. DeMille's camera and a couple of klieg lights turned in their direction for principal shooting of The Greatest Show on Earth. Hannah would only have to ask Milton a question, commend him on some B+ he received in Spanish, and without delay he'd shuck off
his usual deliberating Alabama drawl and weirdly take to the stage as plucky HI' Mickey Rooney, posturing posin', moonin' and muggin' all over the place like a six-year-old vaudeville veteran.

  "Spent all night studyin', never worked so hard in my life," he'd gush, his eyes running around her face, desperate for praise like spaniels after retrieving a shot duck. Leulah and Jade, too, were not above turning into HI' Bright Eyes and Curly Tops themselves. (I especially detested the occasions Hannah referred to Jade's beauty, as she turned into the sweetiest of all sweetie pies, Little Miss Broadway.)

  These manic tap dances were nothing compared to the awful occasions Hannah gave me the spotlight, like the night she mentioned I had the highest rank in school and was thus poised to be valedictorian. (Lacey Ronin-Smith had announced the coup d'etat during Morning Announcements. I'd ousted Radley Clifton who'd reigned, uncontested, for three years, and apparently believed, because his brothers, Byron and Robert, had been valedictorian, he, Radley the Razor-dull, held Divine Right to the title. Passing me in Barrow, his eyes narrowed and his mouth shrank, doubtlessly praying I'd be found guilty of Cheating and exiled.)

  "Your father must be so proud of you," Hannah said. "I'm proud of you. And let me tell you something. You're a person who can do anything with your life. I mean that. Anything. You can be a rocket scientist. Because you have the rare thing everyone wants. The smarts, but also the sensitivity. Don't be afraid of it. Remember—God, I can't remember who said it—'Happiness is a hound dog in the sun. We aren't on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things.' "

  This happened to be one of Dad's favorite quotations (it was Coleridge and Dad would tell her she'd butchered it; "If you're using your own words it isn't quite a quotation, is it?"). And she wasn't smiling as she said it to me, but looked solemn, as if talking about death (see I'll Think About That Tomorrow, Pepper, 2000). (She also sounded like FDR declaring war against Japan in his historical 1941 radio address, Track 21 on Dad's GreatSpeeches, Modern Times three-CD boxed set.)

  On the very best of days I was their burden, their bête noire, and so, if you considered Newton's Third Law of Motion, "All actions have an equal and opposite reaction," and the five of them spontaneously turned into HI' Baby Face Nelsons and Dimples, they also had to turn into old Lost Weekends and Draculas, which best describes the looks on their faces in that instance. For the most part though, I did my best to deflect such personal attention. I didn't especially long for Table 25, The Royal Circle. I was still elated to be one of the jelly beans allowed in off the street, and was thus perfectly content to spend the evening, rather the entire swank decade, sitting at wholly undesirable Table 2, too close to the orchestra and with an obscured view of the door.

  Hannah, during their song'n'dance antics, remained impassive. She was all diplomatic smiles and kind "Fantastic, darlings," and it was during these moments I found myself wondering if I'd made a few errors in my breathless reading of her, if, as Dad said bluntly in the rare event he admitted he was wrong (accompanying said sentence with a contrite gaze at the floor): "I'd been a blind ass."

  She was, after all, highly peculiar when it came to talking about herself. Attempts to exhume details about her life, indirectly or otherwise, went nowhere. You think it'd be impossible for someone not to give some semblance of an answer when asked a question point-blank, making some very revealing dodge (sharp intake of breath, shifty eyes), which you could subsequently translate into a Dark Truth About Her Childhood using Freud's The Psychopathology of EverydayLife (1901) or The Ego and the Id (1923). But Hannah had a very plain way of saying, "I lived outside Chicago, then San Francisco for two years. I'm not that interesting, guys."

  Or she'd shrug.

  "I —I'm a teacher. I wish I could say something more interesting."

  "But you're part-time," Nigel said once. "What do you do with the other part?"

  "I don't know. I wish I knew where the time went."

  She laughed and said nothing more.

  There was also the question of a certain word: Valerio. It was their mythical, tongue-and-cheek nickname for Hannah's secret Cyrano, her cloak-anddagger Darcy and her QT Oh Captain! My Captain! I'd heard them mention the word on countless occasions, and when I finally found the courage to inquire who, or what it was, so exciting was the subject, they forgot to ignore me. Eagerly, they recounted a puzzling incident. Two years ago, when they were sophomores, Leulah had left behind an Algebra textbook at Hannah's house. When her parents drove her back for the book the following day, while Hannah retrieved it upstairs, Lu went into the kitchen for a glass of water. She noticed, by the telephone, a small yellow notepad. On the topmost page, Hannah had doodled a strange word.

  "She'd written Valerio all over it," Lu said heatedly. She had a funny way of wrinkling her nose, which made it look like a tiny bunched-up sock. "Like a million times. Kind of crazily too, the way psycho killers write things when the investigator breaks into his house on CSI. The one word over and over, like she was talking on the phone, unaware of what she was drawing. Still, I do stuff like that, so I didn't think anything of it. Until she walked in. She picked up the notepad immediately, facing the pages toward her so I couldn't see it. I don't think she put it down until I was in my car, driving away. I'd never seen her act so strange."

  Strange indeed. I took the liberty of looking up the word in Cambridge etymologist Louis Bertman's Words, Their Origin and Relevance (1921). Valerio was a common Italian patronymic meaning "brave and strong," derived from the Roman name Valerius, derived in turn from the Latin verb valere, "to be in healthy sprits, to be robust and sturdy." It was also the name of several minor saints in the fourth and fifth centuries.

  I asked them why they didn't simply ask Hannah outright who he was.

  "Can't do that," said Milton.

  "Why?"

  "We already did," said Jade with irritation, exhaling smoke from her cigarette. "Last year. And she turned a weird red color. Almost purple."

  "Like we'd smacked her in the head with a baseball bat," said Nigel.

  "Yeah, I couldn't tell if she was sad or pissed," Jade went on. "She just stood there with her mouth open, then disappeared into the kitchen. And when she came out, like, five minutes later, Nigel apologized. And she said in a fake administrator voice, oh, no, it's fine, it's just that she doesn't like us snooping or talking about her behind her back. It's hurtful."

  "Total bullshit," said Nigel.

  "It wasn't bullshit," Charles said angrily.

  "Well, we can't bring it up again," Jade said. "We don't want to give her another heart attack."

  "Maybe it's her Rosebud," I said, after a moment. Naturally, none of them were ever thrilled when I opened my mouth, but this time, every one of their heads swiveled toward me, almost in unison.

  "Her what?" asked Jade.

  "Have you seen Citizen Kane?" I asked.

  "Sure," said Nigel with interest.

  "Well, Rosebud is what the main character, Kane, searches for his entire life. It's what he's desperate to get back to. An unrequited, aching yearning for a simpler, happier time. It's the last thing he says before he dies."

  "Why didn't he just go to a florist?" asked Jade distastefully.

  And thus Jade (who, although sometimes very literal, had a flair for the dramatic) enjoyed fashioning all kinds of exciting conclusions out of Hannah's mysteriousness whenever Hannah happened to be out of the room. Sometimes Hannah Schneider was an alias. At other times, Hannah was a member of the Federal Witness Protection Program after testifying against crime-tsar Dimitri "Caviar" Molotov of the Howard Beach Molotovs, and was thus chiefly responsible for his being found guilty of sixteen counts of fraud. Or else, she figured Hannah was one the Bin Ladins: "That family's big as the Coppolas." Once, after she happened to watch Sleeping with the Enemy at midnight on TNT, she told Leulah Hannah was hiding in Stockton in order to avoid detection by her ex-husband, who happened to be both physically abusive and clinically insane. (Naturally, Hannah's hair w
as dyed, her eyes, colored contacts.)

  "And that's why she hardly ever goes out and pays cash for everything. She doesn't want him to trace her credit cards."

  "She doesn't pay cash for everything," said Charles.

  "Sometimes she does."

  "Everyone on the planet sometimes pays cash."

  I humored these wild speculations, even designed a few interesting ones of my own, but of course, I didn't genuinely believe them.

  Dad, on Double Lives: "It's fun to imagine they're as epidemic as illiteracy or chronic fatigue syndrome or any other cultural malaise that graces the covers oîTime and Newsweek, but sadly, most Bob Joneses off the street are just that, Bob Jones, with no dark secrets, dark horses, dark victories, or dark sides of the moon. It's enough to make you give up on Baudelaire. Mind you, I'm not counting adultery, which isn't dark in the slightest, but rather clichéd."

  I thus secretly concluded Hannah Schneider was a typo. Destiny had been sloppy. (Most likely because she was overworked. Kismet and Karma were too flighty to get anything done and Doom couldn't be trusted.) Quite by accident, she'd assigned an outstanding person of breathtaking beauty to a buried mountain town, where grandeur was like that slighted tree always falling in the woods and no one noticing. Somewhere else, in Paris, or Hong Kong probably, someone named Chase H. Niderhann with a face compelling as a baked potato and a voice like a throat clearing, happened to be living her life, a life of opera, of sun and lakes and weekend excursions to Kenya (pronounced "keen-YA"), of gowns that went "Shhhhh" across a floor.