Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  Jade nodded knowingly at my silence. "We'll have to do something about it then," she said, sighing.

  After this painful revelation, on Friday nights, after I got clearance from Dad to spend the night at her house ("And this Jade individual—she's one of your Joycean aficionados?"), Jade, Leulah and I, decked out in Jefferson's Studio 54 prom getup, drove an hour to a roadside bar in Redville, just over the South Carolina border.

  It was called the Blind Horse Saloon (or lin ors loon, as the sign whispered in dying pink neon), a grouchy place Jade claimed the five of them had been frequenting for "years," which, from the outside looked like a burnt loaf of pound cake (rectangular, black, no windows) stranded in an expanse of stale-cookie pavement. Armed with farcically fake IDs (I was brown-eyed Roxanne Kaye Loomis, twenty-two, five-feet-seven, a Virgo organ donor; I attended Clemson with a major in Chemical Engineering; "Always say you're seriously into engineering," Jade instructed. "People don't know what it is and they won't ask because it sounds mind-numbing."), we edged past the bouncer, a large black man who stared at us as if we were cast members of Disney on Ice who'd forgotten to remove our costumes. Inside, the place was stuffed with country music and middle-aged men in plaid shirts clutching their beers like handrails. Most of them stared open-mouthed at four televisions suspended from the ceiling broadcasting some baseball game or local news. Women, standing in tight circles, fiddled with their hair as they talked, as if putting finishing touches on a sagging flower arrangement. They always glared at us, particularly Jade (see "Snarling Coon Dogs," Appalachian Living, Hester, 1974, p. 32).

  "Now we find Blue's lucky man," Jade announced, her eyes creeping all over the room, past the linebacker jukebox, the bartender pouring shots with a strange brawny energy, as if he were a GI who'd just arrived in Saigon, and the wooden benches along the far wall where girls waited with foreheads so hot and oily you could fry eggs on them.

  "I don't see any melted Milk Duds," I said.

  "Maybe you should hold out for true love," Leulah said. "Or Milton."

  It was a running joke between Jade and Lu that I "had it bad for Black," that I desperately wanted to be "Black and Blue," make "the beast with two Blacks," and so on—allegations I refused to admit to (even though they were true).

  "Haven't you heard the expression, 'Don't shit where you eat?' " Jade said. "God, you people have no faith. There. The cute one at the end of the bar talking to that malaria mosquito. He's wearing tortoiseshell glasses. Know what tortoiseshell glasses mean?"

  "No," I said.

  "Stop pulling down your dress, it makes you look five. It means he's intellectual. You can never be too far in the backwoods if someone at the bar's wearing tortoiseshell glasses. He's perfect for you. I'm parched."

  "Me too," I said.

  "I'll go," said Leulah. "What do you want?"

  "We didn't drive all the way to this shantytown to purchase our own beverages," said Jade. "Blue? My cigarettes please."

  I took them out of my purse and handed them to her.

  Jade's pack of Marlboro Lights was the instrument (boleadoras) she used to ambush unsuspecting men (cimarron). (Jade's best subject—the only one at which she excelled—was Spanish.) She began by roaming the bar (estancias), singling out an attractive, beefy guy standing a little apart from everyone else (vaca perdida, or lost cow). She approached him slowly and with no sudden jerks of the head or hands, tapped him lightly on the shoulder.

  "Got a light, hombre?"

  There were two inevitable scenarios this opening evoked:

  He eagerly obliged.

  If he didn't have a light, he started a frantic quest to find one.

  "Steve, got a light? Arnie, you? Henshaw? A light. Matches okay too. McMundy, you? Cig—know if Marcie has one? Go ask—right. Does Jeff? No? I'll go ask the bartender."

  Unfortunately, if the outcome was #2, by the time the cimarron returned with fire, Jade was already on the lookout for more lost cattle. He'd stand motionlessly at her back for a minute, sometimes up to five or ten minutes, not doing anything but chewing his lower lip and staring straight ahead, occasionally mooing a dreary "Excuse me?" at her back or shoulder.

  Eventually, she acknowledged him.

  "Hmm? Oh, gracias, chiquito."

  If she was feeling at home on the range, she tossed him two questions:

  Where do you see yourself in, say, twenty years, cavron?

  What's your favorite position?

  Most of the time he was unable to answer either off the top of his head, but even if he answered #2 without hesitation, if he said, "Assistant Manager of Sales and Marketing at Axel Corp, where I work and I'm months away from a promotion," Jade had no choice but to butcher him and cook him immediately over an open fire (the asado).

  "Unfortunately we have nothing else to talk about. Beat it, muchacho."

  Most of the time he didn't react, only stared at her with drippy, red eyes.

  "Vamos!" she shouted. Biting our lips in suppressed laughter, Leulah and I raced after her, hacking our way across the room (pampas), fertile with elbows, shoulders, big hair and beer cups, all the way to GIRLS. Jade elbowed past the dozen muchachas standing in line, telling them I was pregnant and about to be sick.

  "Bullshit!"

  "If she's pregnant how come she's so scrawny?"

  "And why's she drinkin? Don't alcohol cause preemies?"

  "Oh, stop hurting your cerebrums, putas," said Jade.

  We took turns laughing and peeing in the handicapped stall.

  Sometimes, if the lighting of Jade's cigarette was done with swift precision, she began to have a real conversation, though it was usually so loud, most of it consisted of Jade firing off more questions and the guy mooing, "Huh?" over and over as if trapped in a Beckett play.

  Occasionally, the guy had a friend who rested his heavy load of a gaze on Leulah, and once, a man with apparent color blindness and more hair than an Old English Sheepdog fixed his gaze on me. Jade nodded excitedly and pulled her own earlobe (her sign for "This is the one"), but when the guy bent his bushy head down to inquire how I was "likin' Leisure City," for some reason I couldn't think of anything to say. (" 'Fine' is mind-numbing. Never ever say, 'fine,' Retch. And, another thing. Granted, he's hot as hell, but if you bring up your dad in conversation one more time, I'll cut out your tongue.") After too long a pause I said, "Not much."

  Frankly, I was a little terrified of how he leaned over me, so confident of his beer breath and his chin, which, underneath the masses of hair, appeared to be modeled after a sugar cone, how his eyes looked down my front as if he'd like nothing better than to lift my hood and inspect my carburetor. "Not much" wasn't the answer he was looking for, because he forced a smile and set about trying to raise Leulah's hood.

  There were times too, when I'd glance back to the spot by the door where Jade, minutes before, had been inspecting her Angus bull, trying to decide if he was worth buying to improve her herd—and she wasn't there. She wasn't anywhere, not by the jukebox, or by the girl showing another girl her gold necklace —"He got me this, innit sweet?" (it looked like a gilded thumbnail) —not in the breath-dampened hallway that lead to the back by the couches and pinball machines, not by the man fossilized at the bar mesmerized by closed captions ("A tragedy coming out of Burns County this evening with a robbery that left three dead. Cherry Jeffries is live at the scene."). The first time it happened, I was terrified (I'd read The Girl Done Gone [1982] by Eileen Crown when I was too young and thus it'd made a gruesome impression) and immediately, I alerted Leulah (who, though she looked prim and old-fashioned, could turn pretty vixeny with her nosegay smile, the way she coiled her thick braid around her hand and spoke in a little-girl voice so men tilted over her like big beach umbrellas trying to block the sun).

  "Where's Jade?" I asked. "I don't see her."

  "Around," she said airily, not looking away from a guy named Luke with a white T-shirt like cling film and arms like basement lead pipes. Using words with no more than
two syllables, he was telling her the fascinating story of how he'd been kicked out of West Point for hazing.

  "But I don't see her," I said nervously, my eyes wandering the room.

  "She's in the bathroom."

  "Is she all right?"

  "Sure." Leulah's eyes were hooked to Luke's face; it was like the guy was Dickens, fucking Samuel Clemens. I pushed my way into the GIRLS bathroom. "Jade?" It was sticky, murky as unclean aquariums. Girls in tube tops and tight

  pants swarmed the mirror, applying lipstick, running fingernails through hair stiff as soft-drink straws. Unrolled toilet paper wormed along the floor and the hand dryer shrieked, though no one dried their hands.

  "Jade? Jade? Hello?"

  I crouched down and spotted her green metallic sandals in the handicapped stall. "Jade? Are you okay?" "Oh, forfuck's sake, what is it? WHAT?.'" She unlatched the door. It bashed against the wall. She marched out.

  Behind her, stuffed between the toilet and the toilet-paper dispenser, was a man, approximately forty-five years old with a thick brown beard that cut his face into crude shapes first graders tape to windows during Art Time. He wore a jean jacket too short in the sleeves and looked as if he'd respond to various shouted commands, including, "C'mere boy!" and "Sick 'em!" His belt was undone, hanging like a rattlesnake.

  "Oh, I-I-" I stuttered. "I-"

  "Are you dying?" Her face was pale green in the light, seal slick. Fine gold hairs stuck to her temples in question marks and exclamation points. "No," I said. "Are you planning to die anytime soon?" "No-" "Then what are you bothering me for? What am I, your fucking mother?"

  She turned on her heel, slammed the door, and locked it.

  "What a bitchy slut," said a Hispanic woman reapplying liquid eyeliner at the sink, her top lip stretched tight over her teeth like Saran Wrap over leftovers. "That your friend?"

  I nodded, somewhat dazed.

  "You kick her skanky ass."

  There were times, to my infinite horror, Leulah disappeared, too, for fifteen, sometimes twenty, minutes into GIRLS (Beatrice had come a long way in seven hundred years; so had Annabel Lee) and afterward, she and Jade both sported pleased, even conceited looks on their faces, as if, in that handicapped stall they believed they'd single-handedly come to the last digit of pi, discovered who killed Kennedy, found the Missing Link. (From the looks of some the guys they brought in with them, maybe they had.)

  "Blue should try it," Leulah said once on the drive home.

  "No way" Jade said. "You have to be a pro."

  Obviously, I wanted to ask them what they thought they were doing, but I sensed they didn't care to know what Robard Neverovich, the Russian who'd volunteered in more than 234 American runaway shelters, wrote in Kill Me (1999) or his follow-up account of his trip to Thailand to investigate the child porn industry, Wanting It All, All At Once (2003). It was evident Jade and Leulah were doing just fine, thank you, and certainly didn't need the feedback of a girl who stands "deaf and dumb when some dude wants to buy her a hurricane," who "wouldn't know what to do with a guy if she had a manual with illustrations and an interactive CD-rom." But at the same time, as scared as I was every time one of them vanished, afterward, when we were back in the Mercedes; when they were howling over some scab they'd taken into GIRLS together, who'd emerged from that handicapped stall with a sort of madness and, as we walked outside, chased after them shouting, "Cammie! Ashley!" (the names on their fake IDs) before the bouncer threw him down like a sack of potatoes; when Jade was speeding back to her house, crisscrossing between semis and Leulah screamed for no reason, head back, hair tangling around the headrest, her arms reaching out of the sunroof as if grabbing at the tiny stars sticking to the sky and picking them off like lint, I noticed there was something incredible about them, something brave, that no one in my immediate recollection had written about—not really.

  I doubted I could write about it either, being "the total flat tire in any bar or club," except that they seemed to inhabit a completely different world than the one I did —a world that was hilarious, without repercussion or revolting neon light or stickiness or rug bum, a world in which they ruled.

  There was one night that wasn't like the others.

  "This is it, Hurl," Jade said. "The night that will change your everything."

  It was the first Friday of November and Jade had gone to considerable lengths to pick out my outfit: four-inch malevolent gold sandals two sizes too big and a gold lamé dress that rippled all over me like a Sharpei (see "Traditional Wife's Bound Feet," History of China, Ming, 1961, p. 214; "Darcel," Remembering "Solid Gold "LaVitte, 1989, p. 29).

  It was one of the rare occasions someone at the Blind actually approached me—a guy in his thirties named Larry, heavy as a keg of beer. He was attractive only in the way of a seriously unfinished Michelangelo sculpture. There were tiny patches of remarkable detail in his delicate nose, full lips, even in his large, well-molded hands, but the rest of him—shoulders, torso, legs—had not been liberated from the raw slab of marble, nor would they be any time soon. He'd bought me an Amstel Light and stood close to me while he talked about quitting smoking. It had been the most difficult thing he'd ever done in his life. "Patch is the greatest thing medical science's come up with. They should use that technology for everything. Don't know 'bout you, but I got no problem eatin' and drinkin' with the patch. Days you're really busy. 'Stead of fast food, ya stick on the patch. Half hour later? You're full. We could all have sex with the patch too. Sure save everyone a lot of time and energy. What's yer name?"

  "Roxanne Kaye Loomis." "What do you do, Roxy?" "I attend Clemson University with a major in engineering. I'm from

  Dukers, N.C. Also an organ donor." Larry nodded and took a long drink of his beer, shifting his heavy body toward me so my leg pressed against his chunky one. I took a tiny step in the only other possible direction, bumping into the back of a girl with thorny blond hair.

  " 'Scuse you," she said. I tried stepping back in the other direction but effigy-Larry was there. I was a piece of hard candy stuck in a throat. "Where do you see yourself in, say, twenty years?" I asked. He didn't answer. In fact, he looked as if he didn't speak English any

  more. He was losing altitude, and fast. It was like the afternoon Dad and I parked the Volvo station wagon a few meters from the end of the airport runway in Luton, Texas, and spent an hour sitting on the hood, eating pimento cheese sandwiches and watching the planes land. Watching the planes was like floating in the depths of the ocean and observing a 105-foot Blue Whale drift over you, but unlike the private jets, the airbuses, and the 747s, Larry actually crashed. His lips hit my teeth and his tongue darted into my mouth like a tadpole escaping from a jar. He slapped a hand onto my chest, squeezing my right breast like a lemon over dover sole.

  "Blue?" I tore myself away. Leulah and Jade stood next to me. "We're blowing this joint," Jade said. Larry shouted (a markedly unenthusiastic "Wait a minute, Roxy!"), but I didn't turn around. I followed them outside to the car. "Where are we going?" "To see Hannah," Jade said flatly. "By the way, Retch, what's up with your taste in men? That guy was fugly."

  Lu was staring at her apprehensively, her green Bellmondo prom dress sagging open at the neck in a permanent yawn. "I don't think it's a good idea."

  Jade made a face. "Why not?"

  "I don't want her to see us," Lu said.

  Jade yanked on her seatbelt. "We'll take another car. Jefferson's boyfriend's. His heinous Toyota's in our driveway."

  "What's going on?" I asked.

  "We'll probably bump into Charles," Jade said, ignoring me, glancing at Lu as she jammed the key in the ignition and started the car. "He'll be wearing camouflage and those night-vision goggle things."

  Lu shook her head. "He's with Black on a double date. Sophomores."

  Jade turned around to see if I'd overheard this (a triumphantly sympathetic look on her face), then accelerated out of the parking lot, merging onto the highway and heading toward Stockton. It was a c
old night, with thin, greasy clouds streaking the sky. I pulled the gold lamé tight over my knees, staring at the passing cars and Lu's fancy parenthesis profile, the taillights signaling her cheekbones. Neither of them spoke. Their silence was one of those tired adult silences, that of a married couple driving home from a dinner party, not wanting to talk about someone's husband getting too drunk or how they secretly didn't want to go home with each other but someone new, someone whose freckles they didn't know.

  Forty minutes later, Jade had disappeared inside her house for the car keys—"Only be a sec"—and when she emerged, still in her rickety red sandals and firebird dress (it looked like she'd gone through the garbage at a rich kid's birthday, removed the most exotic scraps of wrapping paper and taped them to herself), she carried a six-pack of Heineken, two giant bags of potato chips and a pack of spaghetti licorice, one piece dangling from her mouth. Looped around her shoulder was a giant pair of binoculars.

  "We're going to Hannah's house?" I asked, still confused, but Jade only ignored me again, dumping the food into the backseat of the beat-up white Toyota parked by the garage. Leulah looked furious (her lips were pulled tightly together like a fabric change purse), but without a word, she walked across the driveway, climbed into the front seat and slammed the door.

  "Fuck." Jade squinted at her watch. "We don't have much time."

  Minutes later, we were in the Toyota, merging onto the highway again, this time heading north, the opposite direction of Hannah's house. I knew it was pointless to ask where we were going; both of them had fallen into that trench-silence again, a silence so deep it was difficult and tiring to heave oneself out. Leulah stared at the road, the sputtering white lines, the drifting red