Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  He sat there, his face burnt-tan and brutal in the gold lamplight, supremely arrogant and unapologetic (see "Picasso enjoying the fine weather in the South of France," Respecting the Devil, Hearst, 1984, p. 210). He was waiting for me to retire, retreat, as if I was one of his limp-jawed students who'd shown up during Office Hours, interrupting his research to pose some crackpot question about right and wrong.

  I wanted to kill him. I wanted to take a fire poker to his too, too solid flesh (anything hard and pointy would do) so his hard-bitten face would deform in fear and out of his mouth, not that perfect piano sonata of words, but a strangled, soul-ripped Ahhhhhhhhhl, the kind of sob one hears reverberating through damp chronicles of medieval torture and the Old Testament. Hot tears had begun their exodus, making their slow, stupid way down my face.

  "I—I'm not leaving," I said again. "You go. Go back to the Congo."

  He gave no indication he'd even heard me, because his cherished lecture on the ABCs of Reaganism had already snagged his attention. His head was down, glasses returned to the end of his nose, an implacable smile. I tried to think of something to say, something huge and thrilling—a hypothesis of some kind, an obscure quotation that would knock him off his seat, turn his eyes to quarters. But as so often happens when one is thinking and feeling in the commotion of the present moment, I couldn't think of a thing. All I could do was stand with my arms at my sides, arms that felt like chicken wings.

  The next few moments transpired in a detached haze. I felt the same sensation convicted murderers saturated in inmate orange describe in detail when asked by a keen news reporter wearing crummy bronze makeup how he/she, so seemingly average a human being, came to brutally wring the life out of a certain harmless person. Such offenders speak, a little dizzily, of the lonely clarity that settled over them on that fateful day, light as a swooping cotton sheet, an awake anesthesia that permitted them for the first time in their quiet lives, to ignore Prudence and Discretion, to give Good Sense the cold shoulder, to snub Self-Preservation and look right through Second Thoughts.

  I walked out of the library, down the hall. I stepped outside, closing the front door behind me as softly as I could, so the Prince of Darkness didn't hear. I stood for two or three minutes on the steps, staring at the barebones trees, the strict light from the windows quilting the lawn.

  I began to run. It was awkward at first in Jefferson's high heels, so I took them off, flung them over my shoulder. I hurried down the driveway and then down the street, past the empty cars and the flower beds cruddy with pinecones and dead flower stalks, past the potholes and mailboxes and the fallen branches grasping the street and the greenish puddles of light leaking from the streetlights.

  Our house, 24 Armor Street, was buried in a densely forested section of Stockton known as Maple Grove. Though it wasn't one of those Orwellian gated communities like Pearl Estates (where we lived in Flitch) with identical white houses lined up like post-orthodontics teeth and the entry gate an aging actress (shrill, rusty, temperamental), Maple Grove still boasted its own exclusive Town Hall, Police Force, Zip Code and its own Unfriendly Welcome Sign ("You are now entering the Township of Maple Grove, an elegant and private residential community").

  The fastest way out of the Grove was to cut directly south off our street, head into the woods and skulk through some twenty-two elegant and private backyards. I carefully made my way, hiccupping and crying at the same time, the houses noiseless and sedate, slumped against the smooth lawns like dozing elephants on ice rinks. I crawled through a barricade of blue spruce, scrambled through a reef of pines, shimmied down a hill, until I was unceremoniously emptied out, like water from a gutter, onto Orlando Avenue, Stockton's answer to the Sunset Strip.

  I was without plan, plum out of ideas, at a loss. Even within fifteen minutes of running away from home, unmooring oneself from one's parent, one was struck by the vastness of things, the typhoon ferocity of the world, the frailty of one's boat. Without thinking, I hurried across the street to the BP gas station and pushed open the door to the Food Mart. It dinged a pleasant hello. The kid always working, Larson, was incarcerated in the front in his bulletproof holding pen, talking to one of his girlfriends dangling in front of his window like an air freshener. I ducked into the nearest aisle.

  Well, it just so happened Hello, My Name Is LARSON was a kid Dad took to like a Surinam Cockroach to bat droppings. He was one of those unsinkable eighteen-year-olds, with a Hardy Boy face no one had anymore, all freckles and gee-whiz grin, thick brown hair that grew around his face like an urn plant and a lanky body in constant motion as if he was being operated by a ventriloquist on speed (see Chapter 2, "Charlie McCarthy," The Puppets That Changed Our Lives, Mesh, 1958). Dad found Larson wondrous. And that was the thing with Dad: he'd teach Modes of Mediation to a thousand John Dorys he was barely able to stomach, and then he'd pay a kid for berry-flavored Turns and fall head over heels, declaring him a veritable dolphin who'd spiral through the air when you whistled. "Now that's a promising young man," said Dad. "I'd exchange every Happy, Sleepy and Doc to teach him. He has spark. You don't find that often."

  "If it ain't the girl with the dad," announced the store intercom. "Innit past yer bedtime?"

  Doused in the dead light of the Food Mart, I felt absurd. My feet hurt, I was wearing an overcooked marshmallow and my face (I could see it plainly in the reflective shelving) was decaying by the minute into an unstable mess of crusty tears and bad makeup (see "Radon-221," Questions of Radioactivity, Johnson, 1981, p. 120). I was also festooned with one billion pine needles.

  "Come on over here and say hello! Whatcha doin' out so late?"

  Reluctantly, I made my way to the cashier window. Larson was wearing jeans and a red T-shirt that read MEAN REDS, and he was grinning. And that was the thing with Larson; he was one of those people who grinned all the time. He had ticklish eyes too, which had to explain the multitude of nutty-eyed peanut-butter parfaits thawing all over his Food Mart on any given night. Even when you were standing in front of his window innocuously paying for gas, his eyes, the clear-cut color of milk chocolate or mud, had a way of oozing all over you, so you couldn't help but have a feeling he was seeing something private about you—you stark naked, for example, or you saying humiliating things in your sleep, or worst of all, you in your favorite dumb fantasy, in which you walked a red carpet and wore a long beaded gown everyone took great pains not to step on.

  "Lemme guess," he said. "Boyfriend trouble."

  "Oh. I, uh, had a fight with my dad." I sounded like scrunched aluminum foil. "Yeah? Saw him the other day. Came by with his girlfriend." "They broke up." He nodded. "Hey, Diamanta, go get her a Slurpee." "Whut," said Diamanta, making a sour face. "Seventy-ounce. Any flavor. On me." Diamanta, in glittery pink shirt and sparkly jean miniskirt, was Pixy-stick skinny and had that wan, white parchment skin through which, in harsher lights, you could glimpse thin blue veins swimming through her arms and legs. Scowling at me, she removed her black platform boot from the bottom of the greeting card stand, turned and twinkled down the aisle.

  "Sure," Larson said, shaking his head. "Old mans. They can be tough. When I was fourteen my pops cleared out. Left me nothin' but work boots and his subscription to People magazine, I kid you not. Two years? Did nothin' but glance over my shoulder, look for him every place. Think I'd see him 'cross the street. Passin' by on a bus. An I'd tail the bus one enda town to the other, thinkin' it was him, waitin', waitin' like a crazy man, just for him to get out at the stop. Only when he got out, it was someone else's old man. Wudn't mine. Things turned out, though, what he did? Best thing ever happened to me. Wanta know why?"

  I nodded.

  He leaned down, hitching his elbows on the counter.

  "Cuza him I kin play King Layer."

  "What flavor?" yelled Diamanta by the Slurpee machine.

  "What flavor?" asked Larson. Without blinking, he recounted the names like an auctioneer overseeing a livestock sale. "Rootbeer, Blue Bubbagum,

&nb
sp; 7-Up, 7-Up Tropicale, Grapermelon, Crystallat, 'Nana Split, Code Red, Live-War-"

  "Rootbeer is fine. Thanks."

  "Lady without shoes would like Rootbeer," he said into the intercom.

  "King what did you say?" I asked.

  He grinned, revealing two severely crooked front teeth, one peeking out from behind the other as if it had stage fright.

  "Layer. Shakespeare personage. Contrary to popular belief, person needs heartbreak an' betrayal. Else you got no stayin' power. Can't play a lead for five whole acts. Can't play two performances inna day. Can't fashion a character arch from Point A ta Point G. Can't get through the denewment, create a convincin' through line—all that stuff. See whut I'm sayin'? Person's gotta get banged up. Gotta get jerked around, lived in. So he's got somethin' to use, see. Hurts like hell. Sure. Feels bad. Not sure you wanna go on. But that gives way to what they commonly call emotive re-zone-ance. An emotive rezonance makes it impossible fer people to take their eyes offa you, when yer onstage. Ever turned round in a good movie and seen the faces? Pretty intense. Diamanta?"

  "Ain't coming out right," she cried.

  "Turn off the machine, put it back on and try again."

  "Where's the switch at?"

  "On the side. Red."

  "Looks all nasty," she said.

  I stared up at him. Dad was right. There was something riveting about the kid. It was his outdated earnestness, the way his eyebrows did the polka when he talked and his mountain accent, which made the words jut out like pointy, slippery rocks on which he might get hurt. It was also the thousands of copper freckles dusting him head to toe as if he'd been dipped in glue, then in fine, penny-iridescent confetti.

  "See," he said, leaning in and widening his eyes, "ya ain't felt pain, you kin only play yerself. And that ain't gonna move people. Maybe yer good for toothpaste, hemorrhoid commercials and such. But that's it. You'll never be a legend in yer own time. Ain't that what ya wanna be?"

  Diamanta shoved the gigantic Slurpee into my hands and resumed her droop by the greeting cards. "Now," Larson said, slapping his hands together, "ya got to tell us what yer name is." "Blue."

  "Got to tell us. Blue. Came to my doorstep tonight in yer hour a need.

  Whud we do now?" I looked from Larson to Diamanta, back to Larson again. "What do you mean?" I asked. He shrugged. "Ya turned up here ona dark stormy night. At"—he

  glanced at his watch —"2:06." He peered at my feet and nodded. "No shoes.

  Swut they call dramatic action. Swut happens in the beginnin' of a scene." He stared at me, his face grave as any photo of Sun Yat-sen. "Gotta tell us if we're in a comedy or a mellow drama or a whodidit or what they call a theater of the absurd. Ya just can't leave us standin' on stage with no dialogue."

  I was aware of a certain convenience-store calm coursing through me, steady and ho-hum as the thrum of the beer fridge. Where I wanted to go, whom I had to talk to, was plain as the mirrored windows, the display of gum and batteries, Diamanta's hoop earrings.

  "It's a whodunit," I said. "I was wondering if I could borrow your car."

  16

  Laughter in the Dark

  Hannah was wearing a housedress the color of sandpaper, crudely scissored off at the hem so tiny threads hula-danced around her shins when she opened the door. Her face was bare as an unpainted wall, but it was obvious she hadn't been sleeping. Her hair hung serenely by her cheekbones and her bright black eyes bumblebeed from my face to my dress to Larson's truck to my face—all in a matter of seconds. "Goodness," she said in a hoarse voice. "Blue." "I'm sorry I woke you," I said. It was the sort of thing you said when you arrived on someone's doorstep at2:45 AM

  "No, no—I was awake." She smiled, but it wasn't a real smile, more of a cardboard cutout, and instantly I wondered if I'd made a mistake in coming, but then she put her arm around me. "God, come on in. It's freezing."

  I'd only ever been in her house with Jade and the others, with Louis Armstrong warbling like toads, the air full of carrots, and it felt claustrophobic now, forsaken and dim like the cockpit of an old crashed plane. The dogs peered at me from behind her bare legs, their gaunt army of shadows slowly advancing toward my feet. There was a light on, the goosenecked lamp in the living room, and it spotlighted papers on the desk, bills, a few magazines.

  "Why don't I fix you some tea?" she asked.

  I nodded and after squeezing me again on the shoulder, she disappeared into the kitchen. I sat down on the lumpy plaid armchair next to the stereo. One of the dogs, Brody with three legs and the face of a senile sea captain woofed in disgust, then hobbled over to me, pressing his cold wet nose into my hand, smuggling a secret. Pots coughed behind the kitchen door, a tap whimpered, a few moans from a drawer—I tried to concentrate on these mundane sounds, because frankly, I wasn't feeling all that marvelous about being there. When she'd opened the door, I'd expected a terrycloth bathrobe, her hair a hornet's nest, a heavy-eyed, "Sweet Jesus, what's happened?" Or, hearing the doorbell, she should have taken me for a mulleted highwayman thirsty for gruel and a warm lady, or a livid ex-boyfriend with tattoos on his knuckles ("V-A-L-ER-IO," it spelled).

  I had not foreseen the stiff, clapboard manner with which she'd greeted me, the bare bones welcome, the whisper of a frown—as if I'd been wired for sound all night and she'd been privy to every defamatory chat, banter and tête-à-tête, including the one in which Jade accused her of Mansonian ties, and the one from my head, when the reality of Cottonwood smashed into the reality of Zach Soderberg and I was temporarily manslaughtered. I'd driven to her house (40 mph, barely able to merge, out of my mind when passing a semi or what resembled a wall of tulip poplars) because I loathed Dad, and could think of no other decent place to go, but I also sort of hoped seeing Hannah would lay to rest those other conversations, render them funny and invalid, the way a single scientific sighting of a Mysterious Starling(Aplonis marvornata) could tear it right off the Extinct Species list, throw it up on the dire, but decidedly more encouraging Critically Endangered.

  Seeing her, however, had made it worse.

  Dad always warned that it was misleading when one imagined people, when one saw them in the Mind's Eye, because one never remembered them as they really were, with as many inconsistencies as there were hairs on a human head (100,000 to 200,000). Instead, the mind used a lazy shorthand, smoothed the person over into their most dominating characteristic — their pessimism or insecurity (sometimes really being lazy, turning them into either Nice or Mean)—and one made the mistake of judging them from this basis alone and risked, on a subsequent encounter, being dangerously surprised.

  A gasp of the kitchen door, and she reappeared, carrying a tray piled with a sagging piece of apple pie, a wine bottle, a glass, a pot of tea.

  "Let's turn on some lights," she said, pushing with her bare foot a National Geographic, a TV Guide and some mail off the coffee table before sliding the tray across it. She switched on the yellow lamp by an ashtray, cruddy with dead-worm cigarette butts and thick light splashed all over me and the furniture.

  "I'm sorry to be bothering you like this," I said.

  "Blue. Please. I'm always here for you. You know that." She said the words and the meaning—well, it was there, but it was also sort of grabbing its suitcase and heading for the door. "I'm sorry if I seem a bit... out of sorts. It's been a long night." She sighed, and staring at me, reached forward and squeezed my hand. "Really, I'm glad you showed up. I could use the company. You can stay in the guest room, so forget about driving home tonight. Now tell me everything."

  I swallowed, jittery about where to begin. "I had a fight with my dad," I said, but then to my surprise —just as she picked up the paper napkin and, biting her lip a little, set about folding it into an isosceles triangle—the phone began to ring. It sounded like human screams—Hannah had one of those bleating 1960s telephones, probably picked up for a dollar at a yard sale—and the sound made my heart throw itself melodramatically against my ribs (see Gloria Swanson, Shifti
ng Sands).

  "Oh, God," she whispered, visibly annoyed. "Hold on."

  She disappeared into the kitchen. The ringing stopped.

  I strained to hear her voice, but there was nothing to eavesdrop on, only

  silence and the pings of the dogs' collars; they nervously raised their heads off the floor. Almost immediately, she reappeared, again with that small smile shoved onto her face like a tiny child forced onstage.

  "That was Jade," she said, returning to the couch. With secretarial concentration she became absorbed with the teakettle, lifting the lid, scrutinizing the floating tea bags, tapping them with one finger as if they were dead fish.

  "I take it you two had quite a night?" she asked. Glancing at me, she poured the tea, handed me the 1 HEART SLUGS coffee mug (not reacting when some hot water dripped off the side onto her knee) and then, as if I'd been begging her all night to pose for an oil portrait, she stretched out across the entire couch, glass of red wine in hand, her bare feet pushed beneath the cushions "You know, we had a terrible fight," she said. "Jade and I. She left here absolutely enraged with me." She was speaking in an odd, teacherish voice, as if explaining Photosynthesis. "I don't even remember what it was about. Something mundane." She tilted her head toward the ceiling. "I think it was college applications. I told her she needed to get organized or she might not make it. She flew off the handle."