Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  But Nigel shook his head and held on to my wrist. As we were trapped by a sheikh waiting for someone to come out of the upstairs bathroom and a group of men dressed as tourists (Polaroids, Hawaiian shirts) I could do nothing but brace myself for what was coming.

  I was marginally reassured, however, when I saw the man. If she'd been with Doc three weeks ago, at least she'd traded up and was now arm in arm with Big Daddy (see The Great Patriarchs of American Theatre: 1821—1990, Park, 1992). Though he was gray haired, overweight in that Montgomery, Alabama way (when the stomach looked like a great big bag of loot and the rest of the body ignored that rude, uncouth section, going about its business of being perfectly fit and trim), something about him was satisfying, impressive. Dressed in a Red Army uniform (presumably as Mao Zedong), he had a chancellor's posture, and his face, if not flat-out handsome, was at the very least, splendid: rich, glistening and rosy, like a block of salted ham at a state dinner. It was also evident he was a little bit in love with her. Dad said being in love had nothing to do with words, action or the heart ("the most overrated of organs"), but with the eyes ("Everything essential concerns the eyes.") and this man's eyes couldn't stop slipping and sliding off every curve of her face.

  I wondered what she could possibly be saying to him, her profile puzzling into the space between his jaw and shoulder. Maybe she was wowing him with an ability to recite pi out to sixty-five decimal places, which I secretly thought would be sort of electrifying if some kid heatedly whispered it into my ear ("3.14159265 . . ."). Or maybe she was repeating a Shakespearean sonnet, #116, Dad's favorite ("If there are authentic words of love that exist in this English language, these are the ones people with any real affection should say, rather than the shopworn, 'I love you,' which can be uttered by any hebetudinous Tom, Dick or Moe"): "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. . ."

  Whatever it was, the man was mesmerized. He looked as if he couldn't wait for her to garnish him with fresh bay leaves, slice him, pour him all over with gravy.

  They were three stairs away now, passing the cheerleader, the woman dressed as Liza Minnelli leaning against the wall with makeup clogging her eyes like rotten leaves in old gutters.

  And then she saw us.

  There was a skid of her eyes, a brief suspension of smile, a catch, a soft sweater snagging a tree branch. All Nigel and I could do was stand with lousy smiles safety-pinned to our faces like HELLO MY NAME IS name tags. She didn't say anything until she was next to us.

  "Shame on you," she said.

  "Hi," said Nigel brightly, as if he thought she'd said, "Overjoyed to see you," and to my horror, he was now extending his hand to the man, who'd turned his large, soggy face curiously in our direction. "I'm Nigel Creech."

  The man raised one white eyebrow and tilted his head, smiling good-naturedly. "Smoke," he said. His eyes were a crisp seersucker blue, and shrewd—surprisingly so. Dad said you could tell how sharp someone was by the tempo of his/her eyes on your face when you were introduced. If they barely did the box step or took to being wallflowers somewhere between your eyebrows, the person had "the IQ of caribou," but if they waltzed from your eyes to your shoes, not nervously, but with easy, untroubled curiosity, then the person had "a respectable acumen." Well, Smoke's eyes macumbaed from Nigel to me back to Nigel and I felt in that simple movement he grasped every embarrassment of our lives. I couldn't help but like him. Laugh lines parenthesized his mouth.

  "You're visiting for the weekend?" Nigel asked.

  Smoke glanced at Hannah before he answered. "Yes. Hannah's been kind enough to show me around." "Where are you from?" Nigel's aggressive curiosity wasn't lost on Smoke. Again, he looked at

  Hannah. "West Virginia," he said.

  And then it was horrifying because Hannah didn't say a word. I could see she was angry: redness soaked her cheeks, her forehead. She smiled, somewhat shyly, and then (and I noticed this because I was one step up from Nigel and could see her entirely, her too-long cuff and sleeve, the cane in her hand) she squeezed, tightly, Smoke's bicep. This seemed to be a signal of sorts, because he smiled again, and said in his bear-hug voice: "Well, nice meeting you. So long."

  They continued on, passing the sheikh and the tourists ("Not many people realize the electric chair's not a bad way to go," shouted one) and some private dancer, a dancer for money in a tiny silver dress and white go-go boots.

  At the top of the stairs, they turned down the hall, out of sight.

  "Shit," said Nigel, grinning.

  "What's the matter with you?" I asked. I wanted to slap the smile off his face. "What?" "How could you do that?" He shrugged. "I wanted to know who her boyfriend was. Could have been Valerio."

  Doc do-si-doed into my head. "I'm not sure Valerio exists."

  "Well, you, doll face, may be an atheist but I'm a believer. Let's get some air," he said, and then he grabbed my hand and yanked me down the stairs after him, stepping around Tarzan and Jane (Jane pressed against the wall, Tarzan leaning way in) and outside onto the patio.

  Jade and the others had joined the crowd by now, which hadn't thinned, but buzzed like a porch wasp nest after a housewife stabs it with a broom. Leulah and Jade shared a deck chair talking to two men who wore their swollen, fleshy masks as hats. (They depicted Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Clark Gable, or any renowned man over fifty with formidable ears.) I didn't see Milton (Black could come and go like stormy weather) but Charles was by the barbecue flirting with a woman in a lioness costume who'd pulled her mane down around her neck and casually stroked it every time Charles said something. Abraham Lincoln threw himself against a jackrabbit, banging into the picnic table so a platter of wilted lettuce fireworked into the air. Rock music screamed from speakers rigged by the hanging plants, and the electric guitar, the roars of the singer, so many shrieks and laughs, the moon, a sickle stabbing the pine trees off to the right—it all fused into a strange suffocating violence. Maybe it was because I was a little drunk and my thoughts moved slowly like blobs in a lava lamp, but I felt it was a crowd that could attack, loot, rape, cause a "violent uprising that detonated like a bomb, and ended a day later with the whimper of a silk scarf pulled from the flabby neck of an old lady—as all rebellions do, if they arise purely from emotion and no forethought" (see "The Last of the Summer Whine: A Study of the Novgorod Rebellion, USSR, August 1965," Van Meer, The SINE Review, Spring, 1985).

  Sharp light from the tiki torches cut into the masks, turning even the sweet costumes, the cute black cats and tutu angels into ghouls with buried eyes and dagger chins.

  And then, my heart stopped.

  On the brick wall, staring out over the crowd, stood a man. He wore a black hooded cloak and a gold mask with a hooked nose. Not a centimeter of human was visible. It was that horrible Brighella mask, worn during carnivals in Venice and Mardi Gras—Brighella, the lascivious villain from the Commedia dell'arte—but the sick thing, the thing that made the rest of the beasts at the party shiver out of focus, was not that the mask was demonic, that it turned eyes to bullet holes, but the fact that it was Dad's costume. In Erie, Louisiana, June Bug Karen Sawyer had coerced him into participating in her Junior League Halloween Fashion Show and she'd brought the outfit back for him from her trip to New Orleans. ("Is it me or do I look robustly absurd?" Dad had asked when he'd first tried on the velvet robe.) And the figure opposite me, far across the patio, as tall as Dad so he rose out of the crowd like a crucifix, what he wore was identical, down to the bronze color of the mask, the blistered nose, the satin trim around the hood, the tiny fish-eye buttons down the front. The man didn't move. He seemed to watch me. I could see cigarette cinders in his eyes.

  "Retch?"

  "I see—my dad—" I managed to say. My heart rolling in my chest, I pushed through the Flintstones, red-faced Rapunzel, squeezing past shoulders and tinseled backs and elbows and stuffed tails stabbing me in the stomach. The wire edge of an angel wing knifed my cheek. "I —excuse me." I pushed a caterpillar. "Screw you!" it shoute
d, its bloodshot eyes infected with glitter. I was shoved hard and fell onto the brick, snaring in sneakers and fishnet stockings and plastic cups.

  Seconds later, Nigel was crouching next to me. "What a beaatch. I'd shout 'catfight,' but I don't think you want to go there."

  "The man," I said.

  "Hmm?"

  "Standing on the wall. A tall man. I-is he there?"

  "Who?"

  "He's wearing a mask with a long nose."

  Nigel looked at me, puzzled, but stood up, and I watched his red Adidas sneakers turn in a circle. He bent down again. "I don't see anyone."

  My head felt if it were unstitching from my neck. I blinked and he helped me up. "Come on, old girl. Easy does it." Holding onto his shoulder, I craned my neck around the orange wig, the halo, to catch another glimpse of that face, to be sure, to realize I was only intoxicated, imagining impossible, highly dramatic things—but there were only Cleopatras on the brick wall now, their wide faces sweaty and rainbowed like oil puddles in parking lots: "Haaaaarveeeeey!" one screamed, shrilly, pointing at someone in the crowd.

  "We have to get the fuck out of here or we might be trampled," Nigel said. He tightened his grip on my wrist. I assumed he was going to lead me out into the yard, but instead he was pulling me back inside.

  "I have an idea," he said with a smile.

  As a rule, Hannah's bedroom door remained closed.

  Charles once told me she was peculiar about it—she hated people in her "private space"—and, rather incredibly, none of them, in the three years they'd known her, had ever been inside or seen it, except at a passing glance.

  I wouldn't have intruded in a million Ming Dynasties if I hadn't been tipsy and marginally catatonic after conjuring Dad as Brighella, or if Nigel hadn't been there, hauling me up the stairs past the hippies and the cavemen, knocking three times on the closed door at the end of the hall. And though I certainly knew it was wrong to take refuge in her bedroom, I also felt, as I removed my shoes—"We don't want heavy footprints on the carpet," Nigel said, as he closed and locked the door behind us—that perhaps Hannah herself wouldn't mind so much, if it was only this once, and besides, it was her fault everyone was so curious about her, so spellbound. If she hadn't cultivated her own aire de mystère, always being reluctant to answer even the most humdrum of questions, maybe we wouldn't have gone into her bedroom in the first place —maybe we'd have gone back to the car or even home. (Dad said all criminals have complicated means of rationalizing their aberrant behavior. This twisty logic was mine.)

  "I'll fix you right up," Nigel said, planting me on the bed and switching on the bedside lamp. He disappeared into the bathroom and returned with a glass of water. Away from the music and ferocious crowd, I realized, with a little wonder, I was much more lucid than I'd thought, and after only a few sips of water, some deep breaths, staring at the starkness of Hannah's bedroom, I began to come around, feel twinges of what was commonly known in paleontologist circles as "Dig Fever," a blind, untiring enthusiasm for unearthing the history of life. (It was allegedly experienced by both Mary and Louis Leakey when they first wandered around Oldupai Gorge in the eastern Serengeti Plains of Tanzania, a location that would go on to become one of the most revealing archeological sites in the world.)

  Her bedroom walls were beige, without a single picture or painting. The carpet under the bed was preppy green. Considering the rest of her house, muddled with animals, cat hair, oriental wall hangings, handicapped furniture, every National Geographic since 1982, the austere furnishings here were bizarre and, I felt, a definitive sign of something ("A man's bedroom is direct insight into his character," wrote Sir Montgomery Finkle in 1953s Gory Details). The few pieces of humble furniture —chest of drawers, wooden Quaker chair, a vanity table—had been relegated to the corners of the room as if they'd been punished. The bed was queen sized, neatly made (although where I was sitting it wrinkled) and the comforter (or bedspread, as there was nothing comforting about it) was a thorny blanket the color of brown rice. The bedside table featured a lamp, and on the bottom shelf only a single well-worn book, I Ching, or The Book of Changes. ("There's nothing more irritating than Americans hoping to locate their inner Tao," Dad said.) Standing up, I noticed a faint but unmistakable smell hanging in the air, like a flashy guest that refused to go home: men's musky cologne, the sort of persistent syrup a Miami hunk doused on his trunk-thick neck.

  Nigel was having a look around too. He'd stuffed his Zorro mask into his pocket and had a subdued, almost reverential look on his face, as if we'd snuck into a monastery and he didn't want to disturb nuns at prayer. He crept over to Hannah's closet and, very slowly, slid open the door.

  I was about to follow him—the closet was crowded with clothes, and when he tugged the string to turn on the light, a black pump fell from a shelf piled with shoe boxes and shopping bags—but then, I noticed something I'd never seen in the house before, three framed photographs positioned along the edge of the chest of drawers. They each strictly faced forward like suspects in a police lineup. I tiptoed over to them, but realized immediately they were not the obvious evidence of an extinct species (ex-boyfriend) or Jurassic period (fierce Goth phase) I'd been hoping to discover.

  No, they each featured (one in black and white, the others in outdated 1970s colors, Brady Bunch brown, M*A*S*H* maroon) a girl who was presumably Hannah between the ages of, say, nine months and six, and yet the baby with hair like a squirt of icing on its bald cupcake head, the toddler wearing nothing but a diaper, looked nothing like her—not at all. This thing looked portly and red as an alcoholic uncle; if you squinted, it looked like it'd passed out in its crib from too much scotch. Even the eyes were dissimilar. Hannah's were almond-shaped, and these were the same color, black-brown, but round. I was prepared to accept that maybe these pictures weren't of Hannah, but a beloved sister—and yet, peering closer, particularly at the one of her at four, sitting atop a fierce Whitman-shaggy pony, the resemblance did surface: the perfect mouth, upper lip fitting with bottom lip like delicate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and as she stared down at the reigns held tightly in her fists, that intense yet secret expression.

  Nigel was still in Hannah's closet—he seemed to be trying on shoes—so I slipped into the adjacent master bathroom and switched on the light. In terms of décor, it was an extension of the bedroom, austere, stark as a penitentiary cell: a white-tiled floor, neat white towels, the sink and mirror meticulous, without a single splatter or smear. Words from a certain book flashed into my head, the paperback June Bug Amy Steinman had left at our house, Stranded in the Dark, by P.C. Mailey, Ph.D. (1979). The book detailed in frantic, husky prose, "the surefire signs of depression in single women," one of which was "a stark living space as a form of self-torture" (p. 87). "A severely depressed woman either lives in squalor or in a strict, minimalist living space—without anything that could remind her of her own taste or personality. In other rooms, however, she certainly might have 'stuff' in order to appear normal and happy to her friends" (p. 88).

  I found it somewhat disheartening. However, it was when I knelt down and opened the cabinet under the bathroom sink that I was really taken aback, and I don't think it was the same joyful disbelief Mary Leakey felt in 1959 when she stumbled upon Zinjanthropus or "Zinj."

  Inside, assembled in a pink plastic basket, was a collection of prescription bottles that made anything Judy Garland had popped in her glory days look like a few rolls of Smarties. I counted nineteen orange containers (barbiturates, amphetamines, I was chanting to myself, Secouai, Phénobarbital, Dexedrine; Marilyn and Elvis would've had a heyday) but, rather frustratingly, it was impossible to know what they were; there wasn't a single label, not even evidence they'd been ripped off. On each PUSH DOWN AND TURN cap was a piece of colored tape in blue, red, green or yellow.

  I picked up one of the larger ones, shaking the tiny blue tablets, each marked with a tiny 50.1 was tempted to steal it, then at home, try to decipher what it was by consulting the Internet or Da
d's twenty-pound Encyclopedia of Medicine (Baker & Ash, 2000), but then—What If Hannah had a secret terminal illness and this was the treatment that kept her alive? What If I swiped one of these vital drugs and tomorrow she couldn't take her necessary dosage and lapsed into a coma like Sunny von Bulow and I thus became the shifty Claus character? What If I had to hire Alan Dershowitz who talked about me incessantly with his mob of irksome college students who stuffed themselves with spaghetti and ginger prawns while waxing poetic on Degrees of Innocence and Guilt while my life danced in their hands like a marionette poorly rigged with sewing thread?

  I returned the container.

  "Blue! Come here!"

  Nigel was buried in the closet behind a few garment bags. He was one of those passionate yet chaotic excavators who shamelessly contaminated the site; he'd removed at least ten shoe boxes from the top shelf and left them heedlessly on the floor. Faded cotton sweaters had been strewn between balled up tissue paper, plastic bags, a rhinestone belt, jewelry case, one sweat-petrified burgundy shoe. He was wearing a strand of fake pink pearls around his neck.

  "I'm Hannah Schneider and I'm mysterious," he said in a vampish voice, tossing the end of the necklace over his shoulder as if he were Isadora Duncan, the Mother of Modern Dance (see This Red, So Am I, Hillson, 1965).

  "What're you doing?" I asked, giggling.

  "Window shopping." "You have to put this stuff back. She's going to know we were here. She could come back—"

  "Oh, check this out," he said excitedly and plopped a heavy, intricately carved wooden case into my hands. Biting his bottom lip, he opened the lid. Inside glinted a silver machete approximately eighteen inches long, the sort of horrifying weapon rebels used to cut the arms off of children in Sierra Leone ("Romancing the Stones," Van Meer, The Foreign Quarterly, June 2001). I was speechless. "There's a whole knife collection up here," he was saying. "She must be into S & M. Oh, I also found a picture."

  He cheerfully took back the knife (as if he were the enthusiastic manager of a pawnshop), throwing it on the carpet, and after digging through another shoe box, handed me a faded square photo.