Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  She took a sip of wine and I sipped my oolong tea feeling pangs of guilt. It was harrowingly clear Hannah knew the things Jade had said about her—

  either for certain, if Jade had called her and confessed (Jade could never be a confidence woman, mortgage shark or shyster due to her overwhelming need to explain things to her victim), or simply assumed it given their argument. Most spectacular of all though, Hannah was visibly irked by it. Dad said people do all kinds of odd things when they're on the defensive, and now Hannah was frowning as she rubbed her thumb around the rim of her wineglass, and her eyes, they kept moving between my face and the wineglass and the piece of apple pie (that looked like it'd been stepped on) back to her wineglass.

  I couldn't help but stare at her (her left arm boa-constricting her hip) like an investigator inspecting fingerprints on a bedpost, desperate to find the truth —if only a smudge of it. I knew it was an absurd thing—lunacy, guilt and love couldn't be eked out by connecting freckles, or shining a tiny light in the dugout of a collarbone—but I couldn't help myself. Some of the things Jade had said had stuck to me. Could she have purposefully drowned that man? Had she really slept with Charles? Was there a lost love hiding somewhere in her outskirts, her periphery—Valerio? Even when she was in a sullen, distracted mood, as she was now, Hannah still grabbed one's headlines, shoved other less captivating stories (Dad, Fort Peck) to page 10. FADE OUT: Dad, Fort Peck (my dream he'd go play Che in the Democratic Republic of the Congo), FADE IN: Hannah Schneider twisted along the couch like a piece of shimmering trash that had washed up on a beach, her face speckled with sweat, her fingertips nervously playing with the seam meandering through her dress.

  "So you didn't make it to the dance?" I probed, my voice flimsy.

  The question shook her awake; it was obvious she'd forgotten the question of why I was here, that I'd just shown up in a four-door Chevy Colorado truck in Sunburst Orange, unannounced, with no shoes. Not that I minded; Dad was a man who always assumed he was the Primary Subject, Group Focus, Chief Plan Under Discussion, so the fact that Hannah, after I'd mentioned my fight with him, blatantly snubbed him, shook him off as a non-event—it was kind of fantastic.

  "Things ran late," she said blandly. "We made pie." She looked at me. "Jade went, didn't she? She stormed out of here saying she was going to find you."

  I nodded.

  "She can be a strange girl. Jade. Sometimes she can say things that are — how should I .. . well, they're horrifying." "I don't think she means anything by it," I suggested quietly. Hannah tilted her head. "No?" "Sometimes people say things simply to fill silence. Or as a way to shock

  and provoke. Or as exercise. Verbal aerobics. Loquacious cardio. There are any number of reasons. Only very rarely are words used strictly for their denotative meanings," I said, and yet Dad's comments from "Modes of Oration and the Brawn of Language" weren't making the slightest dent in Hannah. She wasn't paying attention. Her gaze was snagged somewhere near the piano in the dark corner of the room. And then, scowling (lines I'd never noticed before darting through her forehead), she reached over the arm of the couch, yanked open the end-table drawer and seized a half-empty pack of Camel cigarettes. She tapped one out, windmilled it agitatedly between her fingers and looked at me with anxious interest, like I was a dress on sale, the last in her size.

  "Surely, you must realize," she said. "You're such a perceptive person; you don't miss anything" —she interrupted herself—"or maybe not. No. She hasn't told you. I think she's jealous—you speak so lovingly of your father. I'm sure it's hard for her."

  "Tell me what?" I asked.

  "Do you know anything at all about Jade? Her history?"

  I shook my head.

  Hannah nodded, and sighed again. She fished a pack of matches from the drawer and lit the cigarette quickly. "Well, if I tell you, you have to promise me you won't say anything to any of them. But I think it's important that you know. Otherwise, on nights like this, when she comes to you so angry . . . she was drunk, wasn't she?"

  Slowly, I nodded.

  "Well, on occasions like—well, like tonight, I can understand if you'd feel" —Hannah thought hard about what'd I'd feel, biting her lip like she was deciding what to order off a menu — "confused. Disturbed, even. I know I would. Knowing the truth will put everything into context for you. Maybe not immediately. No—you can't understand what something is when you're close to it. That's like looking at a billboard an inch away. We're all .. . what do they say .. . farsighted .. . or is it near—but later, no, that's when"—she was talking all of this over with herself—"yes, that's when it always becomes clear. Afterward."

  She didn't immediately continue. She contemplated, with narrowed eyes, the fuming end of her cigarette, the tatty ears of Old Bastard who'd crept over to her, licked her kneecap and then slumped to the rug, tired as a summer fling.

  "What do you mean?" I asked softly.

  A shy, sort of mischievous smile was sneaking into her face—though I couldn't be certain of this; every time she moved her head the yellow lamp-light raced across her cheekbones and mouth, but when she faced me fully it dashed away.

  "You can't tell anyone what I tell you," she said sternly. "Not even your father. Promise me."

  I felt a nervous knife-stab in my chest. "Why?"

  "Well, he's protective, isn't he?"

  I supposed Dad was protective. I nodded.

  "Yes, well, it'd traumatize him, I'm sure," she said distastefully. "And what's the point of that?"

  Fear began to course through me. It made me woozy, like I'd injected it into my arm. I found myself rewinding the last six minutes, trying to figure out how we'd taken this bizarre detour. I'd shown up, intent to perform a quiet, un-choreographed routine on Dad, but I'd been shoved into the wings,

  and here she was, the seasoned artiste commanding the stage, about to begin her monologue—a terrifying monologue by the sound of things. Dad said it was imperative to avoid people's fervent confidences and confessions. "Tell the person that you must leave the room/' he instructed, "that you ate something, that you're ill, that your father has scarlet fever, that you feel the end of the world is imminent and you must rush to the grocery store to stock up on bottled water and gas masks. Or simply fake a seizure. Anything, sweet, anything at all to rid yourself of that intimacy they plan to lay on you like a slab of cement."

  "You won't say anything?" she asked.

  For the record, I did consider telling her Dad was riddled with smallpox, that I had to race to his bedside to hear his humble and heartfelt Final Words. But in the end, I found myself nodding, the unavoidable human response when someone asks if you'd like to hear a secret.

  "When Jade was thirteen, she ran away from home," she said, waiting for a moment, letting those words land somewhere in the darkness on the other side of the room before continuing.

  "From what she told me, she was raised to be a very rich, spoiled girl. Her father gave her everything. But he was the worst kind of hypocrite—he was from oil money, so he had the blood and suffering of thousands on his hands, and her mother"—Hannah raised her shoulders, shivered theatrically—"well, I don't know if you've ever had the pleasure of meeting her, but she's someone who doesn't bother to get dressed. She wears a bathrobe in the middle of the day. Anyway, Jade had a best friend growing up—she told me this—a beautiful girl, fragile. They were like sisters. She could confide in her, tell her everything under the sun—you know, the kind of friend everyone wants but never has—for the life of me, I can't remember her name. What was it? Something elegant. Anyway"—she flicked ashes off her cigarette—"she was considered problematic. Was caught stealing for the third or fourth time. She was going to be sent to a juvenile detention center. So she ran away. Made it all the way to San Francisco. Can you imagine? Jade? Atlanta to San Francisco—she was in Atlanta at the time, before her parents divorced. That's twenty-nine-hundred miles. She hitchhiked with truckers, families she encountered at rest stops and was finally picked up by t
he police at a drug store—Lord's Drugstore, I think it was. Of all names, Lord's Drugstore." Hannah smiled and exhaled, the smoke tripping over itself. "She said it changed the course of her life. Those six days."

  She paused for a moment. The living room seemed to have sunk a few inches deeper into the ground, weighed down with the story.

  As she'd started to speak, her voice weirdly relentless, trudging its way through the words, instantly my head switched off the lights and film-reeled: I saw Jade in grainy twilight (tight jeans, umbrella-thin) marching determinedly through the weedy junk along a highway—one in Texas or New Mexico—her gold hair ignited by the headlights, her face red from the unblinking eyes of the cars. But then, when I barreled past her in my mental eighteen-wheeler, I looked back and saw with surprise, it wasn't Jade: only a girl that looked like her. Because "hitchhiked with truckers" didn't sound like her and neither did the "beautiful, fragile" friend. Dad said it took a certain, rare revolutionary spirit to abandon "one's home and family, however bleak the conditions, and hurtle oneself into the unknown." Sure, every now and then, Jade slipped into handicapped stalls with hombres taking their fashion Must Haves off of Wanted posters, got so drunk her head hung from her shoulders like a squirt of glue, but for the girl to take such a chance, a running leap into the air and not be sure where she'd land, if she'd even make it to the other side—it seemed unbelievable. Of course, no detailed history of a human being could be laughed at or dismissed out of hand: "Never presume to know what a person is, was, or will be capable of," Dad said.

  "Leulah was in a similar situation," Hannah continued. "Ran away with her math teacher when she was thirteen, too. She said he was handsome and passionate. In his late twenties. Mediterranean. I want to say Turkish. She thought she was in love. They made it all the way to—where was it .. . Florida, I think, before he was arrested." She took a long drag on her cigarette, letting the smoke drool out of her mouth as she talked on. "This was at her school before St. Gallway, somewhere in South Carolina. Anyway, Charles was a ward of a state for most of his life. His mom was a prostitute, junkie—the usual fare. No dad. Finally, he was adopted. Nigel, too. Both of his parents are in a Texas prison for killing a police officer. I can't remember the exact circumstances. But they shot him dead."

  She raised her chin, staring at the cigarette smoke cowering above the lamp. It seemed deathly afraid of Hannah—as I was, in that moment. I was afraid of her tone of voice, which threw out these secrets impatiently as if she'd been forced to play a dull game of horseshoes.

  "It's kind of funny," she continued (and she must have sensed my alarm because her voice was now pasteled, the harsher edges shaded with fingertips), "the moments on which life hinges. I think growing up you always imagine your life—your success—depends on your family and how much money they have, where you go to college, what sort of job you can pin down, starting salary." Her lips curled into a laugh before there was sound. (She'd been poorly dubbed.) "But it doesn't, you know. You wouldn't believe this, but life hinges on a couple of seconds you never see coming. And what you decide in those few seconds determines everything from then on. Some people pull the trigger and it all explodes in front of them. Other people run away. And you have no idea what you'll do until you're there. When your moment comes, Blue, don't be afraid. Do what you need to do."

  She pulled herself upright, swung her bare feet onto the carpet, stared at her hands. They sat on each leg crumpled and useless like Dad's discarded lecture beginnings. A piece of her hair had fallen over her left eye turning her into a pirate and she didn't bother tucking it behind her ear.

  Meanwhile, my heart was trying to crawl into my mouth. I didn't know if it was right to passively sit there, listening to these awful skin-and-bones confessions, or to try to run for it, scramble to the door, fling it open with the force of Scipio Africanus when he ruthlessly sacked Carthage, sprinting to the truck, taking off into the pillaged night, gravel flying, tires wailing like captives. But where would I go? Back to Dad, like some president's middle initial no one remembered, like some day in History on which nothing ground-breaking occurred apart from a few Catholic missionaries arriving in the Amazon and a minor native uprising in the East.

  "And then Milton," Hannah said, her voice sort of caressing his name. "He was involved in that street gang—I can't remember what it was, something 'night'—"

  "Milton?" I repeated. I saw him immediately: junkyard, leaning against a chain-link fence (he was always swaybacked against something), combat boots, one of those scary nylon scarves in red or black knotted over his head, his eyes tough, his skin faintly rifle colored.

  "Yes. Milton." She repeated, mimicking me. "He's older than everyone thinks. Twenty-one. God—don't let on you know. He had a few lost years, blackouts, when he doesn't even remember what he did. He lived on the streets . . . raised hell. But of course, I understand. When you don't know what to believe, you feel like you're sinking, so you grab on to as many different ideas as possible. Even the crazy ones. Eventually one will keep you afloat."

  "So this was when he was in Alabama?" I asked.

  She nodded.

  "So that must be why he got his tattoo," I said.

  I'd seen it by now—the tattoo—and the breath-taking occasion in which he'd shown it to me had become a timeless film clip I replayed incessantly in my head. We'd been alone in the Purple Room—Jade and the others had gone to the kitchen to make pot brownies —and Milton was fixing himself a drink at the bar, plopping ice cubes into his glass, leisurely, as if counting out ducats. He'd pushed up the long shirtsleeves of his Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, so on his right bicep I could just make out the black toes of something. "You wanta see it?" he'd asked suddenly, and then strolled over to me, whiskey in hand, sitting down, hard, so his back collided with my left knee, the couch wincing. His brown eyes stapled to mine, he pulled up the sleeve, sloooowly—obviously enjoying my rapt attention—to reveal, not the crude black splotch everyone at St. Gallway whispered about, but a cheeky cartoon angel the size of a beer can. She was winking like a lascivious grandpa, one chubby knee in the air, the other leg straight down as if she'd frozen solid doing a jack-knife off a diving board. "There she is," Milton said in his drooping voice, "Miss America." Before I could speak, hunt and gather a few words, he'd stood, pushed the sleeve down and wandered from the room.

  "Yes," Hannah said abruptly. "So anyway," she was tapping out another cigarette, "they all had things happen to them, earthquakes, you know, when they were twelve, thirteen, things most people don't have the guts to recover from." She lit it swiftly, tossed the matches onto the coffee table. "Know anything about The Gone?"

  Hannah, I noticed, had been about to run out of gas when she talked about Milton. If she'd started out in a slick and self-assured Monte Carlo roadster with Jade's story, by the time Milton's yarn rolled around, she was in one of those rusty jalopies panting along the side of the highway, hazards on. I sensed she was experiencing pangs of remorse about what she was doing, weighing me down with this confession; her face looked like a pause between sentences as her mind ran back over to the words she'd just said, poking them, listening to their little heartbeats, hoping they weren't fatal.

  But now, with this new question, she seemed to have regained speed. She stared at me, a fierce look on her face (her eyes gripping my eyes, not letting go), a look that reminded me of Dad; as he combed supplemental textbooks on Rebellion and Foreign Affairs in order to find that bright bloom of evidence that, when transplanted into his lecture, would have the capacity to stun, to intimidate, make the "little shits melt in their seats, leaving them mere stains on the carpet," he often sported this militant look, making his features look so hard, I felt if I was blind and had to run my hand over his face to recognize him, he'd feel like a bit of stone wall.

  "They're missing persons," Hannah said. "They fall through those ubiquitous cracks, in the ceiling, on the floor. Runaways, orphans, they're kidnapped, killed—they vanish from public record. After a year,
the police stop looking. They leave behind nothing but a name, and even that's forgotten in the end. 'Last seen in the evening hours of November 8, 1982, as she was completing her shift at an Arby's in Richmond, Virginia. She drove away in a blue 1988 Mazda 626, which was later found abandoned on the side of the road, in what was possibly a staged accident.' "

  She fell silent, lost in memory. Certain memories were like that— swamps, bogs, pits—and while most people avoided these muggy, unmapped, wholly uninhabited recollections (wisely understanding they were liable to disappear in them forever), Hannah seemed to have taken the risk and tiptoed into one of hers. Her gaze had fallen, lifeless, to the floor. Her bent head eclipsed the lamp and a thin ribbon of light clung to her profile.

  "Who are you talking about?" I asked as gently as I could. Noah Fish-post, MD, in his captivating book on the adventures of modern psychiatry, Meditations on Andromeda (2001), mentioned one had to proceed as unobtrusively as possible when questioning a patient, because truth and secrets were cranes, dazzling in size yet notoriously shy and wary; if one made too much noise, they'd disappear into the sky, never to be seen again.

  She shook her head. "No —I used to collect them as a girl. I'd memorize the listings. I could recite hundreds of them. The fourteen-year-old girl disappeared on October 19,1994, when she was walking home from school. She was last seen at a pay telephone booth between 2:30 and 2:45 on of Lennox and Hill.' 'Last seen by her family in their residence in Cedar Springs, Colorado. At approximately 3:00 A.M. a family member noticed the television still on in her bedroom, but she was no longer inside.

  Goose bumps pinched my arms.

  "I think it was why I sought them out," she said. "Or they sought me— I can't even remember anymore. I was worried they'd fall through the cracks, too."