Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  sequins of the cars. Jade was more or less her usual self, though as she chewed a strand of licorice (the girl was chain-licoricing; "Hand me another one/' she demanded three times before I wedged the packet by the emergency brake), she wouldn't stop fiddling with the radio.

  We drove a half hour before swerving down Exit 42—"Cottonwood," read the sign—barreling across the deserted two-lane road into a truck stop. A gas station was off to our left, and, in front of the eighteen-wheelers slung across the pavement like dead whales, a wooden A-framed restaurant sat glumly on bald hill. STUCKEY'S, announced the yellow letters over the entrance. Jade was slinking the Toyota between the trucks.

  "See her car?" she asked.

  Leulah shook her head. "It's already 2:30. Maybe she's not coming."

  "She's coming."

  We circled the lot until Leulah tapped a fingernail on the window.

  "There." She was indicating Hannah's red Subaru; it was sandwiched between a white pickup truck and a van.

  Jade swung into the next row and reversed into a spot by a bank of pine needles and the road. Leulah flung off her seatbelt, crossed her arms, and Jade blithely helped herself to another black shoelace, gnawing one end, and wrapping the other fast around her knuckles like a boxer before he puts on his gloves. Hannah's Subaru was in front of us, two lines of cars away. Across the parking lot on the hill slumped the restaurant, legally blind (three windows in the back boarded up) and seriously balding (roofing coming off in clumps). You couldn't see much in the dimmed windows—a few shifts of tired color, a row of green lamps hanging down like moldy showerheads — but one didn't have to go inside to know the menus were sticky, the tables seasoned with pie crumb, the waitresses crabby, the clientele beefy. One definitely had to beat the saltshaker senseless — maggot-like grains of rice visible inside—to coax out a mere speck of salt. ("If they can't do salt, I wonder what makes them think they can do chicken cacciatore," Dad would say in such a place, holding the menu at a safe distance from his face in case it sprang to life.)

  I hunched forward and cleared my throat, a signal for Jade or Lu to explain what we were doing at this awful roadie watering hole (a place Dad and I would go to great distances to avoid; it wasn't unheard for us to take a twenty-mile detour simply to avoid breaking bread with "men and women who, if one squinted, resembled piles of tires") but when they still said nothing (Lu, too, was stuffing her mouth with licorice now, chewing goatishly) I realized it was one of those things they couldn't put into words. Putting it into words made it real and they'd be guilty of something.

  For ten minutes, the only sound was an occasional door slam—some loot-stomached trucker coming, going, starving, stuffed—and the angry hisses of the freeway. Visible through the dark trees edging the parking lot was a bridge with an endless bullet-fire of cars, red-and-white sparks shooting into the night.

  "Who'll it be?" Jade asked blandly, looking through the binoculars.

  Lu shrugged, chewing her licorice cud. "Don't know."

  "Fat or skinny."

  "Skinny."

  "See, I think pork this time."

  "She doesn't like pork."

  "Yes, she does. They're her Beluga. Reserved for special occasions. Oh." Jade jolted forward, banging the binoculars on the windshield. "Oh, fuck me . . . shit."

  "What—is he a baby?"

  Jade's mouth was open. Her lips moved, but there were no words. Then she exhaled heavily: "Ever seen Breakfast at Tiffany's?"

  "No," Lu said sarcastically, putting her hands on the dashboard and leaning forward to survey the two people who'd just emerged from the restaurant.

  "Well"—without looking away from the binoculars, Jade's right hand plunged into the bag of chips and stuffed a clump into her mouth —"it's that awful Doc person. Only ancient. Normally, I'd say at least it's not Rusty Trawler, but in this case I'm not so sure." She sat back, swallowed, and, with a grim look, handed Lu the binoculars. "Rusty has teeth."

  After a quick glimpse (a revolted expression spilled all over her face), Lu handed me the binoculars. I swallowed and pressed them to my eyes: Hannah Schneider had just left the restaurant. She was walking with a man.

  "I always hated Doc," Lu said softly.

  Hannah was dolled up as I'd never seen her before ("painted," they'd say at Coventry Academy) wearing a furry black coat—I guessed rabbit, due to its teeny-bopperish look (the zipper graced with a pompom)—gold hoops, dark lipstick charring her mouth. Her hair recoiled from her shoulders and sharp, white high heels peered out of the cuffs of her Saran-tight jeans. When I shifted the binoculars to inspect her companion, I immediately felt sick, because in comparison to Hannah, he was shriveled. Wrinkles Etch A Sketched his face. He was in his late sixties, maybe even early seventies, shorter than she and skinny as a roadside curb. His torso and shoulders were meatless, like thick plaid flannel had been chucked over a picture frame. His hair was pretty thick, his hairline not eroding (his lone, remotely attractive feature). It mopped up whatever light was around, going green as they passed under the floodlight, then an oxidized, bicycle-spoke gray. As he moved down the steps after her—Hannah was walking swiftly, unzipping a weird pink fur purse, searching for her car keys—his bony legs jerked out to the sides like a retractable drying rack.

  "Retch, you going to let anyone else look or what?"

  I handed Jade the binoculars. She peered through them, gnawing her lip. "Hope he brought Viagra," she muttered. Lu slouched down in her seat and froze as they climbed into Hannah's car.

  "Oh, for God's sake, you idiot, she can't see us," Jade said irritably, though she, too, sat very still, waiting for the Subaru to move out of its space, sneaking behind one of the semis, before starting the car.

  "Where are they going?" I asked, though I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

  "Fleabag motel," Jade said. "She'll bang the guy for a half-hour to forty-five minutes, then throw him out. I'm always surprised she doesn't bite off his head like a praying mantis."

  We followed the Subaru (maintaining a polite distance) for three, maybe four miles, soon entering what I assumed was Cottonwood. It was one of those skin-and-bone towns Dad and I had driven through a million times, a town wan and malnourished; somehow it managed to survive on nothing but gas stations, motels, and McDonald's. Big scab-like parking lots scarred the sides of the road.

  After fifteen minutes, Hannah switched on her blinker and turned left into a motel, the Country Style Motor Lodge, a white flat arc-shaped building sitting in the middle of a barren lot like a lost pair of dentures. A few maple trees sulked close to the road, others slouched suggestively in front of the Registration Office, as if mimicking the clientele. We pulled in thirty seconds after her, but quickly swung to the right, stopping by a gray sedan, while Hannah parked by the office and disappeared inside. Two or three minutes later, when she reappeared, slimy light from the carport splattered her face and her expression scared me. I saw it only for a few seconds (and she wasn't exactly close) but to me, she looked like an off TV—no breathy soap opera or courtroom drama, not even a wan western rerun — just blank. She climbed back into the Subaru, started the car, and slowly pulled past us.

  "Shit," squeaked Lu, slipping down in the seat.

  "Oh please," Jade said. "You'd be the crummiest assassin."

  The car stopped in front of one of the rooms on the far left. Doc emerged with his hands in his pockets, Hannah with a minute grin spearing her face. She unlocked the door and they disappeared inside.

  "Room 22," Jade reported from behind the binoculars. Hannah must have immediately pulled the curtains, because when a light flicked on, the drapes, the color of orange cheddar, were completely closed, without a splinter through them.

  "Does she know him?" I asked. It was more a far-flung hope than an actual question.

  Jade shook her head. "Nope." She turned around in the seat, staring at me. "Charles and Milton found out about it last year. They were out one night, decided to swing by her house but then passed her
car. They followed her all the way out here. She starts at Stuckey's at 1:45. Eats. Picks one out. The first Friday of every month. It's the one date she keeps."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You know. She's pretty disorganized. Well, not about this."

  "And she doesn't. . . know you know?"

  "No way." Her eyes pelted my face. "And don't even think about telling her."

  "I won't," I said, glancing at Lu, but she didn't seem to be listening. She sat in her seat as if strapped to an electric chair. "So what happens now?" I asked. "A taxi pulls up. He'll emerge from the room with half his clothes, some

  times his shirt balled in his hands or without his socks. And then he'll limp away in the taxi. Probably back to Stuckey's where he'll get into his truck, drive off to who knows where. Hannah leaves in the morning."

  "How do you know?"

  "Charles usually stays the whole time."

  I didn't especially want to ask any more questions, so the three of us lapsed into silence again, a quiet that went on even after Jade moved the car closer so we could make out the 22, the safari leaf pattern on the pulled curtains and the dent in Hannah's car. It was strange, the wartime effect of the parking lot. We were stationed somewhere, oceans from home, afraid of things unseen. Leulah was shell-shocked, back straight as a flagpole, her eyes magnetized to the door. Jade was the senior officer, crabby, worn-out and perfectly aware nothing she said could comfort us so she only reclined her seat, turned on the radio and shoved potato chips into her mouth. I sort of Vietnamed too. I was the cowardly homesick one who ends up dying unheroically from a wound he accidently inflicts upon himself that squirts blood like a grape Capri Sun. I wouldVe given my left hand to be away from this place. My Pie in the Sky was to be next to Dad again, wearing cloud flannel pajamas and grading a few of his student research papers, even the awful ones by the slacker who employed a huge bold font in order to reach Dad's minimum requirement of twenty to twenty-five pages.

  I remembered what Dad said when I was seven at the Screamfest Fantasy Circus in Choke, Indiana, after we'd taken the House of Horrors ride and I'd been so terrified I'd ridden the thing with my fingers nailed to my eyes— never peeking, never once glimpsing a single horror. After I pried my hands off my face, rather than chastising my cowardice, Dad had looked down at me and nodded thoughtfully, as if I'd just revealed startling new insights on revolutionizing welfare. 'Yes," he'd said. "Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging—not enlightenment but enleadenment. If one recognizes the difference and prepares oneself—it is extraordinarily brave. Because when it comes to certain human miseries, the only eyewitnesses should be the pavement and maybe the trees."

  "Promise I won't ever do this," Lu said suddenly in a mousey voice.

  "What," said Jade in a monotone, her eyes papercuts.

  "When I'm old." Her voice was something frail you could tear right through. "Promise me I'll be married with kids. Or famous. That. . ."

  There wasn't an end to her sentence. It just stopped, a grenade that'd been thrown but hadn't exploded.

  None of us said anything more, and at 4:03 A.M. someone turned off the lights in Room 22. We watched the man emerge, fully clothed (though his heels, I noticed, were not fully inside his shoes) and he drove away in the rusty Blue Bird Taxicab (I-8OO-BLU-BIRD), purring as it waited for him by the Registration Office.

  It was just as Dad said (if he'd been in the car with us he would have tipped up his chin, just a little, raised an eyebrow, his gesture for both Never Doubt Me and I Told You So) because the only eyewitnesses should have been the neon sign shuddering VACANCY, and the thin asthmatic trees seductively trailing their branches down the spine of the roof, and the sky, a big purple bruise fading too slowly over our heads.

  We drove home.

  PART TWO

  MOBY DICK

  Two weeks after the night we spied on Hannah ("Observed," Chief Inspector Ranulph Curry clarified in The Conceit of a Unicom [Lavelle,

  X 1901]), Nigel found an invitation in the wastepaper basket in her den, the tiny room off the living room filled with world atlases and half-dead hanging plants barely surviving on her version of flora life support (twenty-fourhour plant lights, periodic Miracle-Gro).

  It was elegant, printed on a thick, cream, embossed card.

  The Burns County Animal Shelter

  Cordially invites you to

  Our annual charity event

  In support of all animals in need

  At 100 Willows Road

  On Saturday November 22nd

  At Eight o’ clock in the evening

  Price $40 Per Person

  RSVP

  Costume Required, Masks Preferred

  "I think we should go," Nigel announced that Friday at Jade's.

  "Me too' said Leulah.

  "You can't," Charles said. "She didn't invite you."

  "A minor detail," Nigel said.

  In spite of Charles' words of warning, the following Sunday, halfway through dinner, Nigel removed the invitation from his back pocket and brazenly placed it next to the platter of veal chops, without saying a word.

  In that instant, the dining room became nail-bitingly unbearable (see Midday Face-Off at Sioux Falls: A Mohave Dan Western, Lone Star Publishers, Bendley, 1992). Dinners had already become a teensy bit unbearable since I'd gone to Cottonwood. I found it impossible to look at Hannah's face, to smile gaily, to shoot the breeze about schoolwork or term papers or Mr. Moats' penchant for textured shirts without envisioning Doc and his accordion legs, his wrinkled face like wood once infested with termites, not to mention the horror of their Hollywood Kiss, which granted, had taken place off-screen, but was still scary. (It was two different movies crudely edited together—Gilda with Cocoon.)

  Of course, when I considered Jade, Lu, and the handicapped stall, I also felt queasy; but with Hannah it was worse. As Dad said, the difference between a dynamic and a wasted uprising depends upon the point at which it occurs within a country's historic timeline (see Van Meer, "The Fantasy of Industrialization," Federal Forum, Vol. 23, Issue 9). Jade and Lu were still developing nations. And thus, while it wasn't fantastic, it also wasn't too terrible for them to have a backward infrastructure and a poor human development index. But Hannah—she was much farther along. She should have already established a robust economy, peacefulness, free trade—and as these things weren't yet assured, frankly, it wasn't looking good for her democracy. She could very well struggle forever, with "corruption and scandal perpetually undermining [her] credibility as a self-ruled state."

  Milton had opened a window. A puppyish draft tore around the dining room, causing my paper napkin to fly off my lap, the flames to dance violently atop the candles like lunatic ballerinas. I couldn't believe what Nigel had done, acted like a jealous husband presenting his wife with an incriminating cufflink.

  And yet, Hannah gave no reaction.

  She didn't even seem to notice the invitation, concentrating instead on her veal chop, cutting it into identically sized pieces with an elegant handbag of a smile on her face. Her blouse, satin and sea-green (one of her few articles of clothing that didn't carry itself like a refugee), clung to her as a languid, iridescent skin, moving when she moved, breathing when she breathed.

  This uneasiness continued for what felt like an hour. I toyed with the idea of stretching my arms over my veal chop in the direction of the sautéed spinach, grabbing the thing, stealthily slipping it under my leg, but, to be honest, I didn't have the moral aplomb to perform such things as The Sir Thomas More or The Jeanne d'Arc. Nigel was sitting in his chair staring at Hannah, and the way his eyes were buried behind his glasses, reflecting the candles, until he turned his head and they emerged for a moment like beetles in sand, the way he sat so straight, so small yet so substantial, he looked like Napoleon, especially the unappealing oil rendering of the diminutive French Emperor on the cover of Dad's foundational seminar textbook, Mastering Mankind (Howards & Pat
h, 1994). (He looked as if he could perform a coup d'état in his sleep and had no qualms being at war with every major European power.)

  "I didn't tell you," Hannah said suddenly, "because if I did, you'd want to come. And you can't. I'm inviting Eva Brewster, which makes your attendance out of the question if I'm to keep my job."

  Not only was her reaction surprising (also a bit of a let-down; I suppose I was in the stands, drinking Anis del Toro, awaiting the matador), but also remarkable and slick was the way she'd seen the invitation but appeared not to have seen it.

  "Why'd you invite Eva Brewster?" asked Leulah.

  "She heard I was planning the fund-raiser and asked if she could come. I couldn't say no. Nigel, I don't appreciate your going through my things. Please give me the courtesy of privacy."

  No one said anything. It was Nigel's cue to explain himself, to give some semblance of an apology, attempt some flea-bitten joke about his sticky fingers or refer to Cool Parenting s Chapter 21, "Teenagers and the Joy of Kleptomania," quoting one of the surprising statistics, that it was common for teenagers to go through a period of "appropriation" and "embezzlement" (Mill, 2000). Sixty percent of the time it was something "the youngster eventually grew out of, like Gothic eye makeup and skateboarding" (p. 183).

  But Nigel wasn't paying attention. He was cheerfully helping himself to the last veal chop.

  Soon the food was cold. We cleared the plates, collected our books, said weak good-byes into the monstrous night. Hannah leaned against the doorway, saying what she always did —"Drive home safely!"—but something in the timbre of her voice, that certain campfire quality, was gone. As Jade and I drove down the driveway, I looked back and saw her still standing on the porch, watching us, her green blouse in the gold light shivering like a swimming pool.

  "I feel sick," I said.

  Jade nodded. "Utterly wretched."

  "Wonder if she'll forgive him."

  "Of course she will. She knows him like the back of her hand. Nigel was born without the feeling gene. Other people have no appendix, not enough white blood cells. He doesn't have enough feeling. I guess they did a scan of his brain when he was kid and where other people have emotion, he has a vacuum of total space, poor kid. And he's gay, too. And sure, everyone's open-minded and accepting—all that jazz—but it still can't be easy in high school."