Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  "Wait." My heart felt as if it was being toothpaste-squeezed into my neck. I started to follow her. "Where are you going?"

  "I said stay here."

  It was a harsh voice and it stopped me cold.

  "I bet that was Charles," she added gently. "You know him—so jealous. Don't be afraid." Her face was large, serious, and even though she smiled, that small smile floating there like a Fall Webworm Moth in the dark, I knew she didn't actually believe what she said.

  She leaned forward, kissed me on the cheek. "Give me five minutes."

  Words tangled in my mouth, in my head. But in the end, I just stood there. I let her go. "Hannah?" I began to snivel her name after a minute or two, when I could still hear

  her footsteps and the realization I was standing alone in this wild jungle hit me, when the woods' indifference seemed to imply I'd probably die here, shivering, alone, lost, a statistic to be tacked to a police station's bulletin board, my stiff-smiling class picture (I hoped they didn't use the one from Lamego High) stuck to the front of a local newspaper, some article about me hashed, rehashed, then recycled into toilet paper or used for house training a pet.

  I called her name at least three or four times, but she didn't answer and soon, soon I couldn't hear her anymore.

  I don't know how long I waited.

  It felt like hours, but the night whirred on, without interruption, so maybe it was fifteen minutes. It was the one thing, oddly enough, I found utterly unbearable: not knowing the time. I understood in full why convicted murderer Sharp Zulett had written in his surprisingly glib autobiography Living in the Pit (1980) (a book I wrongly once thought exceedingly hyper and melodramatic), that "in the fleapit"—the "fleapit" was the pitch-black four-by-nine-foot cell at Lumgate, the maximum-security federal prison outside of Hartford — "you have to make yourself let go of the rope of Time, let yourself float there in the dark, live in it. Otherwise you'll go mad. You'll start to see devils. One guy came out of the fleapit after only two days, and he'd pulled out his own eye" (p. 131).

  I did my best to live in it. Aloneness settled over me, heavy, like that thing they put over you during X-rays. I sat down on the prickly pine-needled ground, and soon found myself unable to move. Sometimes I thought I heard her coming back, that sweet munch of footsteps, but it was nothing but the trees crashing their arms together as if pretending, in the escalating wind, to play the cymbals.

  Whenever I heard an awful noise, one I couldn't identify, I told myself it was nothing but Chaos Theory, the Doppler Effect or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applied to lost people in the dark. I think I repeated the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in my head at least one thousand times: the mathematical product of the combined uncertainties of concurrent measurements of position and momentum in a specified direction could never be less than Planck's constant, h, divided by 471. This meant, rather encouragingly, that my uncertain position and zero momentum and the Beast Responsible for the Sound's uncertain position and uncertain momentum had to sort of null each other out, leaving me with what is commonly known in the scientific world as "wide-ranging perplexity."

  When a person is unaided and terrified for over an hour (again, an approximation), the fear becomes part of the person, another arm. You stop noticing it. You wonder what other people—people who never let others "see them sweat" to use a familiar phrase—would do in your shoes. You try to let that guide you.

  Dad said at the end of his Musical Chair Survival: The Quintessence of Predicaments seminar at the University of Oklahoma at Flitch, that one or two individuals in times of crisis turn into Heroes, a handful into Villains, the rest into Fools. "Try not to be a simpering idiot, the Fool category, where one descends into simian simpering, paralyzed by the desire to just die, quickly, painlessly. They want to roll over like possums. Well, decide. Are you a man or are you a nocturnal animal? Do you have courage? Can you comprehend the meaning of 'do not go gentle into that good night'? If you're a worthwhile human being, if you're not just filler, Styrofoam, stuffing for a Thanksgiving turkey, garden mulch—you must fight. Fight. Fight for what you believe in."

  (When Dad said the second-to-last "fight," he slammed his fist onto the podium.)

  I stood up, my knees stiff. I turned on the flashlight. I hated the seedy light the flashlight made. I felt as if I was shining it into an orgy of trees, gaunt, naked bodies crowding together to hide themselves. Little by little, I began to proceed in what I guessed was the direction Hannah had gone. I followed the flashlight, playing a little game with myself by pretending I wasn't directing it, but God was (with the help of a few bored angels), not because He favored me over everyone else on earth in a quandary, but because it was a slow night, and He had very little on his radar in terms of Widespread Panic or Genocide.

  At certain times, I stopped, listened, tiptoed around grimy thoughts of being followed, raped and killed by an enraged parkie with pointy teeth and a chest like a sandbag, my life ending up nothing more than an agonizing ? in the vein of Violet Martinez. I concentrated instead on the laminated map Hannah had given me, labeled at the top, "The Great Smoky Mountain National Park" (underneath this headline, rather meekly: "Courtesy of Friends of the Smokies") with its helpful labels and blobs of mountains, color corresponding to elevation —"Cedar Gorge," I read, "Gatlinburg Welcome Center," "Hatcher Mountain," "Pretty Hollow Gap," "6,592 ft. above sea level." Having no inkling where I was, I'd have been just as well off with a page from Where's Waldo? (Handford, 1987). Still, I took great care to shine the flashlight onto it, study all those squiggly lines and the pleasant Times New Roman font, that prim Key, little pledges, little pats on the back, assuring me that in this dark there was an Order, a Grand Scheme of Things, that the armless, headless tree standing in front of me, was somewhere, a speck, on the map here, and all I needed to do was find the thing that would link the two elements and suddenly (with a little poof of light) the night would flatten and divide into asparagus green squares I could follow home, A3ing, Bmng, D2ing back to Dad.

  I also couldn't stop thinking about the blueprint of a story Hannah had mentioned back in the fall (no details, only bare bones dimensions of what happened)—the occasion in the Adirondacks when she'd saved the life of a man who injured his hip. She'd said she "ran and ran," eventually finding campers with radios and I thus started mentally cheerleading: perhaps I, too, would come across Campers with Radios, perhaps Campers with Radios were simply around the bend. But the longer I walked and the trees swarmed like prisoners wanting to be fed, the more it occurred to me I was as likely to find Campers with Radios as I was to find a brand-new Jeep Wrangler parked in a clearing with keys in the ignition and a full tank of gas. There was nothing here, nothing but me, the branches, the quicksand darkness. I couldn't help but wonder what screwy environmentalists were always complaining about, the "diminishing environment" and such, because there was a surplus, an overkill of Environment; it was time to come in here and start clear-cutting, put up Dunkin' Donuts and a parking lot as far as the eye could see, big, square and exposed, lit up at midnight like an August afternoon. In such a wonderful place, one's shadows were not mangled but drifting behind you in long neat lines. You could take a protractor to them and effortlessly determine the exact angle to your feet: thirty degrees.

  I'd been walking for a while, maybe an hour or so, forcing my head to float on these rickety rafts of thought to avoid sinking—when I first heard the noise.

  It was so acute, so rhythmic and confident, the entire night-tarred world seemed to quiet itself like sinners at church. It sounded—I stood very still, tried to reign in my breathing—like a child swinging. ("A child swinging" sounds très horrorfilmesque, but I found nothing immediately frightening about the sound.) And though it appeared to fly in the face of reason and common sense, without thinking very much, I began to follow it.

  It ceased every now and then. I wondered if I was hearing things. Then it resumed, shyly. I walked on, the flashlight thrusting all those pines bac
k, trying to think, trying to figure out what it could be, trying not to be afraid, but pragmatic and strong like Dad, trying to follow his Determination Theory. I found myself channeling Ms. Gershon of AP Physics, because whenever there was a question in class, she never answered it outright, but turned to the dry-erase board and without a word, dully wrote out five to seven bullet points explaining the answer. She always stood at a forty-five-degree angle to the dry-erase board because she was shy about her back. And yet Ms. Pamela "PMS" Gershon's back told stories; there was a spot of thinning hair on the back of her head, her pants in tan and taupe clung to her like baggy second skins, her bottom was squashed like a sat-upon Sunday hat. Ms. Gershon, if she were here, would attempt to illuminate all there was to illuminate about this sound, this child on a swing, writing at the top of the dry-erase board (she stood on tiptoe, her right arm high above her head as if she were rock climbing): "Phenomenon of a Child on a Swing in a Heavily Wooded Region: The Seven-Point Spectrum of Conceptual Physics." Her first bullet point would read: "As Atoms: Both Child on a Swing and Swing are composed of small moving particles," and her last bullet point would read, "As Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity: if a Child on a Swing had a Twin who boarded a spaceship and traveled close to the speed of light, the Twin would return to Earth younger than the Child on the Swing."

  Another step forward, the sound was louder now. I found myself in a small open space paved with pine needles, fragile, trembling bushes at my feet. I turned, my yellow light shuffling, tripping like a roulette ball across the tree trunks, and then it stopped.

  She was astoundingly close, hanging by her neck by an orange rope three feet above the ground. Her tongue bulged from her mouth. My flashlight electrified her giant eyes and the green squares on her checkered shirt. And her inflated face, her expression—it was so inhuman, so sickening, I still don't know how I knew, in that instant, it was she. Because it wasn't Hannah, it was unreal and monstrous, something no textbook or encyclopedia could ever prepare you for.

  And yet, it was.

  The aftermath of seeing her has been locked away into an unassailable prison cell of Memory. ("Witness traumatization," Sergeant Detective Fayonette Harper later explained.) Despite nights lying awake, trying all sorts of probing keys, I cannot recall my screams, or falling down, or running so fast that I sideswiped something and cut open my left knee, which would need three stitches, or even letting go of the map she'd asked me to hold on to in that dry whisper like a piece of paper touching your cheek.

  I was found the next morning, at approximately 6:45 A.M. by one John Richards, age 41, on a trout fly-fishing excursion with his son, Ritchie, 16. My voice had ripped to nothing. My face and hands were so covered in needlelike scratches and mud, a little bit of my own blood, too, they told Dad when they first saw me —(close to Forkridge Trail, nine miles from Sugartop Summit) sitting against a tree, a dead-eyed look on my face, still gripping a dying flashlight—they thought I was the boogeyman.

  23

  One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest

  I opened my eyes and found myself on a bed in a curtained cubicle. I attempted to speak, but my voice was a scrape. A white flannel blanket covered me from chin to woolly green ankle sock. I seemed to be wearing a light-blue cotton hospital gown patterned with faded sailboats, an Ace bandage on my left knee. Jabbering incessantly, everywhere, was hospital Morse Code: beeps, toots, rings, clicks, a page for Dr. Bullard to pick up Line 2. Someone was talking about a recent trip to Florida with the wife. A square piece of gauze and a small hypodermic needle were stuck into my left hand (mosquito), which was linked by a thin tube to a bag of clear liquid hanging over me (mistletoe). My head, rather my whole body, felt helium-ballooned. I stared at the folds of the spearmint curtain on my left.

  It swooshed. A nurse came in. She swooshed it closed behind her. She glided over to me as if she wasn't on feet but casters with wheel locks.

  "You're awake," she announced. "How do you feel? Are you hungry? Don't try to talk. Sit tight and let me change this bag and then I'll get the doctor."

  She replaced the IV-bag and wheeled herself away.

  I smelled latex and rubbing alcohol. I stared at the ceiling, at the white rectangles mottled with brown specks like vanilla ice cream. Someone was asking where Johnson's crutches were. "They were labeled when he came in." A woman was laughing. "Married for five years. The key is to act like it's your first date every day." "Got kids?" "We're trying."

  Another swoosh and a small tan doctor appeared, girlishly boned with crow-black hair. Around his neck he wore a plastic Backstage Pass that featured, beneath a pixilated picture of himself with the skin tone of a jalapeno, a barcode, as well as his name: THOMAS C. SMART, SENIOR ER RESIDENT. As he walked over to me, his considerable white lab coat whimsically floated out behind him.

  "How're we doing?" he asked. I tried to speak—my okay came out like a knife spreading jelly on burnt toast—and he nodded understandingly, as if he spoke the language. He jotted something down on his clipboard, and then asked me to sit up and take slow, deep breaths as he pressed the icy stethoscope into my back in different places.

  "Looking good," he said with a tired fake smile.

  In a gust of white, a swoosh—he disappeared. Once again, I stared at the glum spearmint curtain. It trembled whenever someone rushed past it on the opposite side, as if it were afraid. A phone rang, was hastily answered. A stretcher rolled down the hall: chick peeps of wobbly wheels.

  "I understand, sir. Fatigue, exposure, no hypothermia, but dehydration, the cut to her knee, other minor cuts and scrapes. Evident shock too. I'd like to keep her here a few more hours, have her eat something. Then we'll see. We'll give her a prescription for the knee pain. A mild sedative too. The stitches will come out in a week."

  "You're not following me. I'm not talking about stitches. I want to know what she's been through."

  "We don't know. We notified the park. There are rescue personnel — "

  "I don't give a flying fuck about rescue personnel — "

  "Sir, I-"

  "Do not sir me. I want to see my daughter. I want you to get her something to eat. I want you to find her a decent nurse, not one of these guinea pigs who'd unwittingly kill any kid with an ear infection. She needs to go home and rest, not relive whatever ordeal she's been through with some bozo, some clown who couldn't even graduate from high school, who wouldn't know a motive if it bit him on the ass, all because some chicken-'n-biscuits police force doesn't have the proficiency to figure it out themselves."

  "It's standard, sir, with these sorts of mishaps—"

  "Mishaps?"

  "I mean — "

  "A mishap is spilling Kool-Aid on a white carpet. A mishap is losing a fucking earring."

  "She - she'll only speak to him if she's up to it. You have my word."

  "You're going to have to do a lot better than your word, Doctor what does that thing say, Dr. Thomas, Tom Smarts?"

  "Actually, it's without the s. "

  "What is that, your stage name?"

  I rolled off the bed and, making sure my arm and the other plastic cords to which my chest was attached did not fully tear out of whatever machine I was rigged to, I walked the few feet to the curtain, the bed reluctantly trolleying after me. I peered out.

  Standing next to the large white administrative hexagon in the middle of the Emergency Room was Dad, in corduroy. His gray-blond hair flopped across his forehead—something that happened during lectures—his face was red. In front of him stood White Lab Coat, clasping his hands and nodding. To his left, behind the counter, sat Fuzzy Hair and, faithfully at her side, Mars Orange Lipstick, both of them gazing at Dad, one pressing a phone receiver to her pink neck, the other pretending to scrutinize a clipboard but eavesdropping.

  "Dad," I scraped.

  He heard me immediately. His eyes widened.

  "Jesus Christ," he said.

  As it turned out, although I had no recollection of it whatsoever, I'd apparently been qui
te the Talk Show Host with John Richards and his son, when they carried me, their limp bride, half a mile to their pickup truck. (White Lab Coat was very informative when he explained, where memory was concerned, I could "expect anything and everything"—as if I'd only bumped my head, as if I'd merely had a head-on collision.)

  With what I imagine to be the energized yet charred voice of someone recently struck by lightning (over 100 million volts of direct current) with dilated pupils and splinter sentences I told them my name, address, telephone number, that I'd been on a camping trip in the Great Smoky Mountains, that something bad had happened. (I actually used the word bad.) I didn't respond to their direct questions —I was unable to tell them specifically what I'd seen—but apparently I repeated the words "She's departed" throughout the forty-five minute ride to Sluder County Hospital.

  This detail was particularly unsettling. "She's Departed" was a grim nursery song Dad and I used to sing on the highways when I was five, learned in

  Ms. Jetty's kindergarten in Oxford, Mississippi. It followed the generic melody of "Oh, My Darlin' Clementine": "She's departed, she's a nowhere, she's my girl and she's a-gone I She went drownin in the river, washed up somewherein Babylon."

  (Dad learned most of this after bonding with my two knights in shining armor in the Emergency waiting room, and though they left well before I was awake, Dad and I later sent them a thank-you note and three hundred dollars' worth of new fly-fishing equipment blindly purchased from Bull's-eye Bait and Tackle.)

  Due to my bizarre lucidity, Sluder County Hospital had been able to contact Dad immediately, also alert the Park Ranger on duty, a man by the name of Roy Withers, who began a search of the area. It was also why the Burns County Police dispatched an officer from their Patrol Unit, Officer Gerard Coxley, to the hospital, so he could talk to me.

  "I've already made arrangements," Dad said. "You're not talking to anyone."

  Once again I was behind the spearmint curtain in the spongy bed, mummified by heated flannel blankets, trying to eat with one pipe cleaner arm the turkey sandwich and chocolate chip cookie Mars Orange Lipstick had brought me from the cafeteria. My head felt like that colorful balloon they used in the classic film Around the World in 80 Days. I seemed to be able only to stare at the curtain, chew and swallow, and sip the coffee Fuzzy Hair had brought according to Dad's specific instructions ("Blue likes her coffee with skim milk, no sugar. I like mine black."): stare, chew, swallow, stare, chew, swallow. Dad was on the left side of the bed.