Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  "Someone was here five minutes ago," said Leulah.

  I turned from the lookout point. She was standing in the middle of the clearing, pointing at the ground. "What?" asked Jade next to her. I walked over to them. "Look." In front of the toe of her boot was a cigarette butt. "It was burning three seconds ago." Crouching down, Jade picked it up as one picks up a dead goldfish.

  Carefully, she sniffed it.

  "You're right," she said, throwing it on the ground. "I can smell it. Great. All we need. Some mountain scab waiting for nightfall to come fuck us all in the ass."

  "Hannah!" shouted Lu. "We have to get out of here!"

  "What's wrong?" asked Hannah.

  Jade pointed at the cigarette butt.

  "This is a very popular place to camp," Hannah said.

  "But it was burning," Leulah said, her eyes saucered. "That's how I saw it. It was orange. Someone's here. Watching us." "Don't be ridiculous." "But none of us were smoking," said Jade.

  "It's fine. It was probably a hiker stopping for a rest on his way up the trail. Don't worry about it." Hannah strolled back over to Milton, Charles and Nigel, who were trying to set up the tents.

  "It's all such a joke to her," said Jade. "We have to leave," said Leulah. "That's what I've been saying from the beginning," said Jade, walking

  away. "Would anyone listen to me? No. I was the killjoy. The wet blanket." "Hey," I said to Leulah, smiling. "I'm sure it's okay." "Really?" Despite having no evidence to back up my claim, I nodded.

  Half an hour later, Hannah was starting a campfire. The rest of us were sitting on the bald rock eating rigatoni with Newman's Own Fra Diavolo tomato sauce, heated up on the ministove, and French bread hard as igneous rock. We faced the view, even though there was nothing to see but a cauldron of darkness, a dark blue sky. The sky was a little nostalgic; it didn't want to let go of the last frayed streak of light.

  "What would happen if you fell off this rock thing?" asked Charles. "You'd die," said Jade through pasta. "There's no sign or anything. No 'Please Remain Alert.' No 'Bad Place to

  Get Wasted.' It's just there. You fall? Too damn bad." "Is there any more parmesan cheese?" "Wonder why it's called Sugartop Summit," said Milton. "Yeah, who cooks up the lame names?" asked Jade, chewing. "Rural folk," said Charles. "The best part is the quiet," said Nigel. "You never notice how loud everything is until you're up here." "I feel sorry for the Native Americans," said Milton. "Read Redfoot's Dispossessed," I said. "I'm still hungry," said Jade. "How're you still hungry?" asked Charles. "You ate more than everyone.

  You commandeered the hot pot." "I didn't commandeer anything." "Thank God I didn't go in for seconds. You probably would've bitten my

  hand off." "If you don't eat enough, your body goes into starvation mode and then when you eat a slice of angel food cake your body treats it like it's penne à la vodka. You balloon within twenty-four hours." "I don't like the fact that someone was here' Leulah said suddenly. Everyone looked at her, startled by her voice. "That cigarette butt," she whispered. "Don't worry about it," Milton said. "Hannah's not worried. And she goes

  camping all the time."

  "Anyway, we couldn't leave now if we wanted to," said Charles. "It's the middle of the night. We'd get lost. Probably would stumble into whatever it is that wanders around—"

  "Convicts," said Jade, nodding. "And that guy who bombed abortion clinics." "They found him," I said. "But you didn't see Hannah's face," said Leulah. "What was wrong with her face?" asked Nigel. Lu looked forlorn in her blue windbreaker, her arms hugging her knees,

  that Rapunzeled cord of hair roping her left shoulder, touching the ground. "You could tell she was as scared as I was. But she didn't want to say so

  because she thought she had to be an adult, responsible and everything." "Anyone pack a firearm?" asked Charles. "Oh, I should have brought Jefferson's," Jade said. "It's this big. Adorable.

  She keeps it in her underwear drawer."

  "We don't need guns," said Milton, lying back, staring at the sky. "If I had to go —I mean if it was really my fuckin' time —I wouldn't mind doing it here. Under these stars."

  "Well, you're one of those contented morbid people," said Jade. "I for one will do anything I can to make sure my number doesn't come up for at least seventy-five years. If that means shooting someone in the head or biting off some parkie's chu-chu, so be it." She looked in the direction of the tents. "Where is she anyway? Hannah. I don't see her."

  We carried the plates and pots back to the clearing and found Hannah eating a granola bar in front of the fire. She'd changed her clothes. She was wearing a green-and-black checkered button-down shirt. She asked us if we were still hungry and when Jade responded in the affirmative, suggested we make S'mores.

  As we roasted marshmallows and Charles told his ghost story (cab driver, ghoulish fare), I became aware that Hannah, sitting on the opposite side of the fire, was staring at me. The campfire jack-o-lanterned everyone, made them orange, carved certain parts of their faces away, and the sockets around her dark eyes, blazing with light, appeared unusually hollow, as if they'd been further dug out with a spoon. I smiled as fiddle-dee-deeishly as I could, then pretended to be entranced with the Art of Roasting a Marshmallow. Yet, when I glanced at her not a minute later, her gaze hadn't budged. She held on to my eyes, then, almost imperceptibly, pointed to her left, toward the woods. She touched her wristwatch. Her right hand motioned Five.

  "And then the cab driver turned around," Charles was saying. "The woman was gone. All that was left on the seat? A white chiffon scarf." "That's it?" "Yeah," said Charles, smiling. "Suckiest ghost story I ever heard." "Sucked balls—" "If I had a tomato I'd be throwing it at your head." "Who knows that one about the dog with no tail?" asked Nigel. "He goes around looking for it. Terrorizing people."

  "You're thinking of The Monkey's Paw,' " said Jade, "that awful short story you read in fourth grade but will remember for the rest of your life for unknown reasons. That and 'The Most Dangerous Game.' Right, Retch?"

  I nodded. "There is one about a dog, but I can't remember it." "Hannah knows a good one," said Charles. "I don't," said Hannah. "Come on." "No. I'm an awful storyteller. Always have been." She yawned. "What time is it?" Milton checked his watch. "A little after ten." "We really shouldn't stay up too late tonight," she said. "We need to be

  rested. We're starting early tomorrow." "Great." Needless to say, Fear and Anxiety typhooned through me. None of the others appeared to have noticed Hannah's signal, not even Leulah, who'd forgotten all about the ominous cigarette butt. Now, rather blissfully, she ate her S'more (lint of melted marshmallow on her lip), smiling at whatever Milton was going on about, those tiny dimples splintering her chin. I sat on my knees and stared at the fire. I considered ignoring her ("When in doubt, feign oblivion"), but after five minutes, I noticed with horror Hannah was staring at me again, this time expectantly, as if I was playing Ophelia and had gotten so deep into character, into the throes of mental illness, I was missing all my cues, forcing Laertes and Gertrude to ad-lib. From the sheer force of her gaze, I found myself standing up, dusting myself off.

  "I'll—I'll be right back," I said.

  "Where're you going?" asked Nigel.

  Everyone stared at me.

  "To the bathroom," I said.

  Jade giggled. "I'm dreading that."

  "If the Native Americans could do it," said Charles, "so can you."

  "Native Americans also scalped people."

  "Might I suggest dry leaves? A bit of moss?" said Nigel smirking.

  "We have toilet paper," Hannah said. "It's in my tent."

  "Thanks," I said.

  "In my bag," she said.

  "Is there any more chocolate?" Jade asked.

  I walked to the other side of the tents where it was dark and sandpapery and waited for my eyes to adjust. When I was certain no one had followed me, when I could hear their voices crackling with the fire, I stepped into the woods. Branches rubber-banded against my leg
s. I turned around and saw with surprise that the pines had fallen into place behind me, like those hippie beads decorating a doorway. Slowly, I moved along the arc of the clearing, back in the trees, so no one would see me, and stopped somewhere near the far left side, where I thought Hannah had pointed.

  The campfire was close, some ten yards in front of me, and I could see Hannah still sitting with the others, resting her head in her hand. Her face looked so sleepy and satisfied, for a second I wondered if I'd been hallucinating. I told myself that if she didn't appear in three minutes, I'd go back and never speak to that crazy woman again—rather, two minutes, for two minutes was all it took for almost half of the nuclei in a lump of aluminum-28 to decay, for one to die from VX exposure (pronounced "VEEKS"), for 150 Sioux men, women and children to be shot at the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890, for a Norwegian woman in 1866 by the name of Gudrid Vaaler to give birth to a son, Johan Vaaler, future inventor of the paper clip.

  Two minutes was enough time for Hannah.

  22

  Heart of Darkness

  I watched her stand up and say something to them. I heard my name, so I guessed she said she wanted to check on me. She walked toward the tents and out of sight.

  I waited another minute, watching the others—Jade was doing her exaggerated impression of Ms. Sturds during Morning Announcements, feet wide apart, that bizarre rocking movement as if she were a ferry crossing a choppy English Channel ("This is a very scary time for our country!" Jade cried, clapping her hands together, eyes bulging)—and then I heard spine cracks of branches and leaves, and saw Hannah coming toward me, her face smudged by the dark. When she saw me, she smiled and pressed a finger to her lips, motioning for me to follow her.

  Obviously, this surprised me. I didn't have my flashlight and the wind was picking up; I was wearing nothing more substantial than jeans, a T-shirt, the sweatshirt Dad had given me from the University of Colorado at Picayune and a windbreaker. But she was already moving swiftly away, weaving in and out of the trees, and so, with a quick glance back at the others— they were laughing, their voices tightly woven together—I headed after her.

  Out of earshot from the campground, I was going to ask what we were doing, but when I looked at her, I saw the focused, intense look on her face, and it silenced me. She removed a flashlight—she was wearing one of those fanny packs in black or dark blue, which I hadn't noticed before—but that meek circle of white light could barely shove back the dark, illuminating nothing but a handful of skinny tree-shins.

  We followed no path. At first I tried keeping a mental Hansel and Gretel trail of crumbs, noticing the irregularities—discoloration of bark, okay, giant toadlike rock next to that dead tree, skeleton branches stretched out in an upside-down crucifixion, that's promising—but such distinctions were rare and ultimately pointless, and after five minutes, I stopped and walked blindly next to her, like a man no longer dog-paddling, allowing himself to drown.

  "They'll be fine for a little while," she said. "But we don't have much time."

  I don't know how long we walked. (In what turned out to be an unbearable oversight, I was not wearing a watch.) After ten minutes or so, she stopped suddenly, and, unzipping the pouch around her waist, removed a map—different from the one she'd given us, colored, much more detailed — as well as a tiny compass. She studied them.

  "A little farther," she said.

  We walked on.

  It was odd, the blind way I followed, and even now, I can't quite explain why I went, without protest or questions or even fear. During those episodes in one's life in which one assumes one will be paralyzed with dread, one isn't. I floated, as if I was doing nothing more than riding the mechanical brown canoe on the Enchanting Amazon River Ride at Walter's Wonderworld in Alpaca, Maryland. I noticed peculiar details: Hannah chewing the inside of her lip (the way Dad did when grading a unexpectedly apt paper), the toe of my leather boot kicking the flashlight beam, the pine trees' restless shifts and heaves, as if they were all unable to sleep, the way she placed her right hand, every minute or two, on that satchel clipped around her waist, like a pregnant women touching her stomach.

  She stopped walking and checked her watch.

  "This is good," she said, turning off the flashlight.

  Slowly my eyes calibrated to the darkness. We appeared to be standing in a spot we'd walked through five minutes before. I could make out the fine corduroy of all those trees enveloping us, and Hannah's rapt face, shiny, a sort of bluish mother-of-pearl.

  "I'm going to tell you something," she said, staring at me. She took a deep breath, exhaled, but said nothing. She was nervous, worried even. She swallowed, took another beleaguered breath, pressed her hand to her collarbone and left it there, a white, wilting hand-corsage. "I'm terrible at this. I'm good at other things. At math. Languages. Orders. Making people comfortable. I'm horrible at this."

  "At what?" I asked.

  "Truth." She laughed, a weird choking sound. She hunched up her shoulders and looked up at the sky. I looked too, because looking up at the sky was contagious, like yawns. There it was: hoisted into the air by the trees, a heavy black patch, the stars, little rhinestones like the ones in June Bug Rachel Groom's cowboy boots.

  "I can't blame anyone, you know," Hannah said. "Just myself. Everyone makes choices. God, I need a cigarette."

  "Are you okay?" I asked.

  "No. Yes." She looked at me. "I'm sorry."

  "Maybe we should head back."

  "No, I-I understand if you think I'm nuts."

  "I don't think you're nuts," I said, though as soon as I said it, of course, I began to wonder if she was.

  "It's not bad, what I have to tell you. More for me. Awful for me. Don't think I don't know how awful. How sick. Living like this—oh, you're afraid. I'm sorry. I didn't mean for it to be like this, deep in the enchanted forest, I know, it's a little medieval. But it'd be impossible to talk without one of them coming up, Hannah this, Hannah that. Oh, God. It's impossible."

  "What's impossible?" I asked, though she didn't seem to hear me. She appeared to be saying these things to herself.

  "When I thought about how I was going to say it—God, I'm a coward. Deluded. Sick. Sick." She shook her head, touched her hands to her eyes. "See, there are people. Fragile people, that you love and you hurt them, and I-I'm pathetic, aren't I? Sick. I hate myself, I really do. I . . ."

  In many ways, there is nothing more disturbing than an adult who reveals herself not to be an Adult and all that word is supposed to imply—not solid, but leaking, not fixed, but seriously unglued. It was like being in first grade again, watching some adorable hand puppet rising up, revealing the monstrous human attached. Her chin crinkled with strange unknown emotions. She wasn't crying, but her dark mouth curled down at the edges.

  "You'll listen to what I say?" Her voice was low, quivery like a grandmother's, but needy like a child's. She stepped forward, a little too close to me, her black eyes swerving over my face.

  "Hannah—?"

  "Promise me."

  I stared at her. "Okay."

  This seemed to calm her slightly.

  "Thank you."

  Again, she took a deep breath—but didn't speak.

  "Is this about my father?" I asked.

  I wasn't sure why, without thinking about it, that particular question flew out of my mouth. Maybe I hadn't quite gotten over the revelation of Kitty: if Dad had lied so smoothly about her, it was entirely possible he'd lied about other clammy trysts with St. Gallway staff. Or perhaps it was a reflex; throughout my life, without explanation, teachers had pulled me aside in hallways and lunchrooms, by cubbyholes and jungle gyms, and as I hyperventilated, waited to hear I'd been bad, would be harshly punished, that I'd botched a Unit Test and would be held back a year, they always surprised me by leaning in with their grayed eyes and coffee breaths and asking me inane questions about Dad (Did he smoke? Was he single? / When's a good time to call and mingle?). Frankly, if I was to form a hypothesis for su
ch cases of being bizarrely singled out, it'd be: It All Comes Down to Dad. (Even he upheld this premise; if a supermarket check-out person was sullen, Dad concluded it was because of the condescending way Dad had accidentally looked at him while piling our groceries on the conveyor belt.)

  I couldn't gauge Hannah's reaction, however. She stared at the ground, her mouth open a little, as if in shock, or perhaps she hadn't heard me and was trying to think of something to say. And as we stood in that endless carbonated fizz of trees and I waited for her to respond with "Yes," or "No," or "Don't be crazy"—a few yards behind us, there was a small but distinct shift of something.

  My heart lurched. Instantly, Hannah switched on the flashlight, pointing it in the direction of the noise and to my horror, the light actually snagged something—a reflection of some kind, a pair of glasses—and then it began crashing away from us, barging through the branches and bushes and pine needles and leaves on what was, indisputably, two feet. I was too horrified to move or scream, but Hannah clamped a hand over my mouth and held it there until we couldn't hear it anymore, until there was only the stark night and the sound of the wind shivering in the trees.

  She turned off the flashlight. She pressed it into my hand.

  "Don't turn it on unless you have to."

  I could barely hear her, she spoke so quietly.

  "Take this, too." She handed me a thick piece of paper, the map. "A precaution. Don't lose it. I have the other one, but I'll need this when I come back. Stay here. Don't say a word."

  It happened so quickly. She squeezed my arm, let it go, began to move away in the direction of that thing, which I wanted to believe was a bear or wild boar—the most widely distributed land animal, known for running over 40 mph and ripping meat off a man's bones faster than a truck driver could eat a buffalo wing—but I knew in my heart, it wasn't. No reference book could second-guess the truth: it had been a human being close to us, what zoologist Bart Stuart calls in Beasts (1998), "the most vicious animal of all."