Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  "She kind of looked like Liz when she was young," he said dreamily. "Very National Velvet"

  The picture was of Hannah when she eleven or twelve. It was a photo taken from the waist up so you couldn't tell if she was outside or inside, but she was smiling hugely (frankly, I'd never seen her so happy). Her arm was mink-shrugged around the neck of another girl who was also probably quite beautiful, but she'd shyly twisted away from the camera, smiling, but blinking just as the photo was taken so you could only see into the foyer of her face (cheek, a bit of regal forehead, rumors of eyelash) and maybe a bit of parlor room (perfect ski slope nose). They wore the same school uniform (white blouse, a navy jacket—on Hannah's, a gold lion insignia on the breast pocket) and it was one of those snapshots that seemed to have trapped not only an image but a grainy reel of life—their ponytails were full of static, stands of hair cobwebbed in the wind. You could almost hear their laughs twisting together.

  And yet—there was something eerie about them. I couldn't help but think of Holloway Barnes and Eleanor Tilden, the girls who'd conspired to murder their parents in Honolulu in 1964, subject of Arthur Lewis' chilling nonfiction account, Little Girls (1988). Holloway killed Eleanor's parents with a pick-ax as they slept and Eleanor killed Holloway's with a rifle, shooting them in the face as if playing a game, hoping to win a stuffed panda, and in the photographs section in the middle of the book, there'd been a picture of the girls almost exactly like this one, the two of them in Catholic schoolgirl uniforms, their arms pretzeled, their brutal smiles piercing their faces like fish hooks.

  "Wonder who the other one is," Nigel said. He sighed wistfully. "Two people that beautiful should die. Immediately."

  "Does Hannah have a sister?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "Don't know."

  I moved back over to the three framed photographs on the chest of drawers. "What?" he asked, walking up behind me. I held up the picture for comparison. "It's not the same person." "Huh?" "These photos. They're not of Hannah." "Aren't those baby pictures?" "But it's not the same face." He leaned closer, nodding. "Maybe it's a fat cousin." I turned over the picture of Hannah with the blonde. There was a date

  written in the corner in blue pen: 1973. "Wait" Nigel whispered suddenly, a hand pressed to the pearls around his neck, his eyes wide. "Oh, fuck. Listen." The music downstairs, which had been beating with the steadiness of a healthy heart, had stopped, leaving total silence.

  I moved toward the door, unlocked it and peered down the hall.

  It was deserted.

  "Let's get out of here," I said.

  Nigel, with a small squeak, was already at the closet, madly trying to refold the sweaters and matching lids to shoe boxes. I considered swiping the photograph of Hannah and the other girl—but then, did Howard Carter blithely help himself to treasures in the tomb of Tutankhamen? Did Donald Johanson covertly pocket a piece of Lucy, the 3.18-million-year-old hominid? Reluctantly, I handed the photograph back to Nigel who slipped it into the Evan Picone shoe box, standing on his tiptoes to return it to the shelf. We switched off every light, grabbed our shoes, did a final check of the room to make sure we hadn't dropped something ("All thieves leave behind a calling card because the human ego craves recognition the way junkies crave smack," noted Detective Clark Green in Fingerprints [Stipple, 1979]). We closed Hannah's bedroom door and hurried down the hall.

  The stairs were empty, and below, in the whirlpools of people, some sweaty bird in a crooked feather headdress was screeching something, a hysterical "Ooooooooo" that went on and on, cutting through the noise like a sword during any climatic fight scene. Charlie Chaplin was trying to restrain

  her. "Breathe! Fuckin' breathe, Amy!" Nigel and I glanced at each other, baffled, then continued down the stairs, only to find ourselves drowning in a flood of feet, plastic masks, tails, wands, wigs, all of them trying to shove their way toward the back door, out onto the patio.

  "Stop pushing!" someone shouted. "Stop pushing, motherfucker!" "I saw it," said a penguin. "But what about the police?" wailed a fairy. "I mean, why aren't they here? Did someone call nine-one-one?" "Hey," said Nigel, grabbing the shoulder of the merman pushing in front of us. "What's going on?" "Someone's dead," he said.

  A Moveable Feast

  When he was seven years old, Dad almost drowned in Lake Brienz. He claimed it was the second most illuminating experience of his life, trailing in significance only to one other occasion, the day he saw Benno Ohnesorg die.

  In customary fashion, Dad was trying to outperform one Hendrik Salzmann, a twelve-year-old, another boy at the Zurich Waisenhaus. Although Dad "showed dogged endurance and athleticism" as he splashed past the weary Hendrik, when he was some thirty or forty meters beyond the swimmer's boundary, Dad found himself too exhausted to go on.

  The bright green shore floated far behind him. "It appeared to be waving good-bye," Dad said. As he slumped into the gurgling darkness, arms and legs heavy as bags of stones, after an initial panic, which was "really nothing more than surprise, that this was it, what it all comes down to," Dad claimed he felt what is frequently referred to as the "Socrates Syndrome," a feeling of utter tranquility moments before death. Dad closed his eyes and saw not a tunnel, not blinding light, not a slide show of his short, Dickensian life, not even a Smiling Bearded White Man in a Robe, but sweets.

  "Caramel truffles, marmalade," Dad said, "Babel cookies, marzipan. I could smell them. I really believed I was falling not to my watery grave, but into a Café Conditorei."

  Dad also swore he heard, somewhere in the depths, Beethoven's Fifth, which some beloved nun named Fraulein Uta (the first June Bug in recorded history, der erste Maikàfer in der Geschichte) played in her room on Saturday evenings. When he was wrenched from this sugary euphoria and hauled ashore by none other than Hendrik Salzmann (experiencing a heroic second wind), Dad said his first conscious thought was that he wanted to go back, down into the dark water, for dessert and the Allegro-Presto.

  Dad, on Death: "When it's your time—and naturally, none of us know when we'll be drafted—there's no use sniveling. Please. You should walk out a warrior, even if the revolution you waged in your life was for biology or neurology, the origins of the sun, bugs, the Red Cross, like your mother. Might I remind you of the way Che Guevara went out? He was a deeply flawed man —his pro-Chinese, pro-Communist viewpoints were blinkered, naive at best. Yet"—Dad sat up in his chair and leaned forward, his hazel eyes huge behind his glasses, his voice rising up then plunging deep into himself—"on October 9,1967, after a traitor alerted CIA operatives to the secret location of Guevara's guerrilla encampment, after he was so badly injured he couldn't stand and he surrendered to the Bolivian army and René Barrientos ordered his execution, after a lily-livered officer drew the short straw and, trembling so severely witnesses thought he was having a seizure, entered the windowless schoolhouse in order to put a bullet in Guevara's head. He was going to murder, once and for all, the man who charged into battle for those he believed in, the man who said, 'Freedom,' and 'Justice,' without a hint of sarcasm, Guevara, who knew what was coming, he turned to the officer . . ." Here, Dad turned to an imaginary officer standing to his left. "They say he wasn't afraid, sweet, not a bead of sweat, not the slightest tremor in his voice—he said, 'Shoot, coward. You are only going to kill a man.' "

  Dad stared at me.

  "May you and I aspire to such certainty."

  After Hannah told us about Smoke Harvey, with a raw voice and a certain grayness seeping around her eyes (as if something inside her had spilled), and her every detail about him laid a pink brick in the re-creation of his big, noisy plantation of a life, I found myself wondering about Smoke's certainty. As he drowned, I tried to imagine what it was that wooed him, if not Dad's childhood loves of sugar and Beethoven, then Cuban cigars, or his first wife's doll hands ("She was so tiny she couldn't wrap her arms all the way around him," said Hannah), or a glass of Johnnie Walker on the rocks (Blue Label probably, as Hannah said he enjoyed "the fine thi
ngs"), anything to gently push him away from the fact that the culmination of his life, sixty-eight years lived with great vigor and force ("gusto" and "zest" Hannah said) was to be in her swimming pool, inebriated and dressed as Mao Zedong, drifting over a concrete floor eight feet under and no one noticing.

  His full name was Smoke Wyannoch Harvey, age 68. Not many people knew who he was, unless they lived in Findley, West Virginia, or used him as a Portfolio Manager when he worked at DBA LLC, or found the book he'd written in the 8o-percent off bin, The Doloroso Treason (1999), or browsed the two articles about his death in The Stockton Observer on November 24 and November 28 (see "West Virginia Man Drowns in Pool," "Weekend Drowning Ruled Accidental," Local News, 2B, 5B, respectively).

  He was, of course, the distinguished gray-haired man Nigel and I had met with Hannah on the stairs, the one I'd liked (Visual Aid 12.0).

  After we heard someone was dead, Nigel and I pushed our way to one of the windows overlooking the patio. We could only see the backs of people, all of them staring at something in front of them, as if watching a stirring street performance of King Lear. Most of them were half-birthed from their costumes, so they looked between species, and the ground was littered with pipe-cleaner antennae and beached-jellyfish wigs.

  Screams from an ambulance ripped through the night. Red light hurtled around the lawn. Everyone on the patio was herded into the living room.

  "Things'll go quick soon as everyone gets quiet," the blond police officer said from the door. He chewed gum. From the way he leaned against the doorjamb, rested one foot on Hannah's jug of umbrellas and took seconds too long to blink, you could tell his body was present, but his mind was back at some red felt pool table where he'd missed an easy draw shot, or else, back with his wife in their swayback bed.

  I was in an O-mouthed state of shock—wondering who it was, wanting to make sure it wasn't Milton or Jade or any of them (if it has to be someone, it could be that sick caterpillar)—but Nigel was acting like a Boy Scout Leader. Grabbing my hand again, he forced us across the room, stepping on the hippies who'd sat down on the floor to give each other contrition massages. He ejected a sick Jane from the bathroom (she'd lost Tarzan) and, locking the door, instructed me to start drinking water.

  "We don't want to be asked by a flatfoot to take a Breathalyzer," he said agitatedly. I was shocked by his intensity. Dad said emergencies created an elemental shift in everyone, and while most people liquefied immediately, Nigel was turning into a denser, somewhat more formidable version of himself. "I'm going to find the others," he said with Rockette-kick fervor. "We have to come up with a good story as to why we're here because they're going to be securing the scene, taking names and addresses," he said as he opened the door, "and I'll be damned if I'm getting kicked out of school for some slob who can't hold his liquor and never took a swimming lesson."

  Some people have a knack for finding themselves, if not the star of every Detective Film, Skin Flick, Love Story or Spaghetti Western, at the very least, one of the supporting players, or appearing in an unforgettable cameo for which they garner critical acclaim and considerable buzz.

  Unsurprisingly, it was Jade who was cast as Unwitting Eyewitness. She was outside talking to Ronald Reagan, who, in a drunken desire to show off, flopped into the heated pool, and, backstroking in his blue suit, avoiding the four rats playing Marco Polo, he shouted out names as Jade looked on, trying to guess who she was dressed as ("Pam Anderson! Ginger Lynn!"). He accidentally kicked the dark, submerged body with his foot.

  "What the — ?" The Gipper said.

  "Someone's unconscious! Call nine-one-one! Who knows CPR? Get me a fucking doctor!" Jade claimed she screamed, though Milton, who'd just returned to the patio after smoking the remainder of his joint in the woods, said she didn't do or say anything until the Great Communicator and one of the rats hauled the great whale of a body out of the water, at which point she sat down in the deck chair and only watched, biting her nails while people began to murmur their "Oh, my fucking Gods." A man in zebra print tried to resuscitate him.

  Jade was still on the patio with Dutch and the other main characters waiting to be interviewed by the police, but Nigel returned to the bathroom with Charles, Milton and Lu. Charles and Lu looked as if they'd barely survived the War of 1812, but Milton looked as he always did, laid-back and lumpy, a smear of smile on his face.

  "Who died?" I asked.

  "A very large man," Leulah said, sitting down on the edge of the bathtub, an unfocused look in her eyes. "And he really is dead. There's a dead body on Hannah's patio. He's sopping wet. And this terrible blubbery color." She pressed a hand to her stomach. "I might throw up."

  "Life, death," sighed Nigel. "It's all so Hollywood."

  "Did anyone see Hannah?" asked Charles quietly.

  It was a grisly thought. Even if it was an accident, it was never a good thing for someone to die unexpectedly at one's house while one is entertaining, for a person to "walk out of this outrageous world" (as Dad was fond of saying) on one's property, in one's kidney-shaped pool. None of us spoke. Behind the closed door, a few tadpole-words wriggled free of the noise ("Ow," "Sheila!" "Did you know him?" "Hey, what's going on?") and through the open window by the tub, the police car radios fizzed, ceaseless and indecipherable.

  "Well, I'd say run for it," Nigel said, slipping behind the shower curtain, and hunching down as he peered out the window as if someone might open fire. "I doubt they even have a squad car at the end of the driveway. But we can't leave Jade, so we'll have to take our chances following police procedure."

  "Of course we can't flee the crime scene," said Charles irritably. "What are you —nuts?" His face was red. He was obviously worried about Hannah. I noticed, whenever Jade or Nigel did a little guesswork in the Purple Room about what she did on the weekends (if they so much as whispered, "Cottonwood"), he became fiery and short tempered as a Latin American dictator. In a matter of seconds, his entire body—face, hands too—could go the pink of Tropical Punch. Milton, as usual, said nothing, only chuckled as he leaned against the burgundy hand towels.

  "It wouldn't be a big deal," Nigel said. "Drownings are obvious. They can see by the skin if it's an accident or foul play and in this case, there's a high rate of drownings that are linked to alcohol. Some bombed guy falls in the water? Knocks himself out? Dies? What can you do? He did it to himself. And it happens all the time. The Coast Guard's always finding sloshed motherfuckers floating in the ocean who had too many rum and Cokes."

  "How do you know this?" I asked, though I'd read something similar in Murder in La Havre (Monalie, 1992). "My mom's a huge crime fiction fanatic," he said proudly. "Diana could perform her own autopsy."

  When we decided we weren't visibly drunk (Death had the effect of six cups of coffee and a dip in the Bering Sea), we returned to the living room. A new officer had taken charge, Officer Donnie Lee with globular, off-centered features reminiscent of a wrecked urn on a potter's wheel. He was trying to line people up "in orderly fashion, folks," with the sort of manic patience of an Activities Director on a cruise ship organizing a Shore Excursion. Gradually, the crowd ringed around the room.

  "Let me go first," said Nigel. "And don't say anything. I'll give you the advice my mom gave me. No matter what happens, look like you're having a Christ experience."

  Officer Donnie Lee happened to have saturated himself in Paul Revere-like cologne (it rode far ahead of him, alerting all of his impending arrival) so by the time he came to Nigel, wrote down his name, phone number, and asked, "How old are you, son?" Nigel was prepared for the impending massacre.

  "Seventeen, sir."

  "Uh-huh."

  "I assure you Ms. Schneider knew nothing about our showing up this evening. My friends and I mistakenly thought it'd be fun to crash an adult party. To see what it was like. Not, let me add, to partake in illegal substances. I've been a Baptist all my life, head of my own worship circle for two years, and it's against my religion to partake in alcohol of any kind.
Abstinence works well enough for me, sir."

  I thought his performance campy and over-the-top, but to my surprise, he went over like Vanessa Redgrave in Mary, Queen of Scots. Officer Donnie Lee, those big wrinkles pressing through his great clay forehead (as if invisible hands were starting to rework him into a vase or ashtray), only tapped his end-chewed blue Bic pen on the side of his notepad.

  "You kids watch yourselves. I don't wanta hear or see you in this kinda venue again. Do I make myself clear?"

  Without even waiting for our "Yes, sir, absolutely, sirs," he moved on to take the contact details of the whiney Marilyn shivering next to us in her skimpy SevenYear Itch dress with a gruesome brown stain down the front.

  "How long's this gonna take anyway? I got a babysitter."

  "Ma'am, if you'd just bear with us now . . ."

  Nigel grinned. "Nothing like a well-placed honey pot to attract flies," he whispered.

  Officer Lee didn't let anyone leave until after 5.00 A.M. When we were finally allowed outside, we discovered a blued, tubercular morning: sky wan, grass sweaty, a cold breeze wheezing through the trees. Purple feathers roamed the lawn, chasing each other under the POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, pestering a Hulk mask playing dead.

  We followed the wearied procession to the parked cars, bypassing the crowd who wanted to stay to see something (a fairy, a gorilla, a blond golfer struck by lightning), the two police cars, the empty ambulance, the paramedic with dark, sunken eyes smoking a cigarette. Gold-chromed Nefertiti in front of us prattled on and on as she wobbled down the driveway in silver heels like ice picks: "There's respons'bility comes with ownin' a puwl," she said, "second I got outta bed, I had a bad feelin', I'm serius."

  In numb silence, we climbed into the car and waited another fifteen minutes for Jade.