Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  "You know," she said smoothly, turning to look at me. "None of us could figure it out."

  I stared back, unaccountably afraid.

  "Why you? Why Hannah wanted to bring you into our little group. I'm not trying to be rude, but from the beginning none of us could stand you. We called you 'pigeon.' Because that's how you acted. This grimy pigeon clucking around everyone's feet desperate for crumbs. But she loved you. 'Blue's great. You have to give her a chance. She's had a tough life.' Yeah, right. It didn't make sense. No, you have some weirdly dreamy home life with your virtuoso dad you blather on about like he's the fucking second coming. But no. Everyone said I was mean and judgmental. Well, now it's too late and she's dead."

  She saw the look on my face and did a Ha. The Ones Making an Exit had to have a Ha, a truncated laugh that brought to mind videogame Game Overs and typewriter dings.

  "Guess that's life's little joke," she said.

  At the end of the hall, she pushed open the door and was illuminated for a second by a puddle of yellow light, and her shadow was tossed, elongated and thin, in my direction like piece of towrope, but then she stepped nimbly through the doorway, and the door slammed and I was left with the carnations. ("The only flower that, when given to someone, is only marginally superior to giving dead ones," Dad said.)

  26

  The Big Sleep

  The next day, Saturday, April 10, The Stockton Observer finally published a terse article on the coroner's findings.

  LOCAL WOMAN'S HANGING DEATH RULED SUICIDE

  The death of Burns County woman, Hannah Louise Schneider, 44, was ruled a suicide by Sluder County Coroner's Bureau yesterday afternoon. Cause of death was determined to be "asphyxiation due to hanging."

  "There was no evidence whatsoever of foul play," said Sluder County Coroner Joe Villaverde yesterday.

  Villaverde said there was also no evidence of drugs, alcohol or other toxins in Schneider's body and the manner of death was consistent with suicide.

  "I'm basing my ruling on the autopsy report as well as the evidence found by the sheriff's department and state legislators," Villaverde said.

  Schneider's body was found March 28 hanging from a tree by an electrical cord in the Schull's Cove area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She had accompanied six local high school students on a camping trip. The six students were recovered without injury.

  "This can't have happened," I said. Dad looked at me, concerned. "My dear—"

  "I'm going to be sick. I can't take this anymore."

  "They just might be right. One never knows with

  "They're not right!" I screamed.

  Dad agreed to take me to the Sluder County Sheriffs Department. It was astonishing he actually consented to my outlandish, fitfully proposed demand. I assumed he felt sorry for me, noticed how pale I looked of late, how I could barely eat, didn't sleep, how I sprinted downstairs like a Beat junkie looking for a fix to catch First News at Five, how I reacted to all questions, both ordinary and existential, with a five-second transatlantic delay. He was also familiar with the quotation, "When your child is seized by an idea with the zeal of a fundamentalist Bible salesman from Indiana, stand in his or her way at your own risk" (see Rearing the Gifted Child, Pennebaker, 1998,

  p. 232).

  We found the address on the Internet, climbed into the Volvo and drove for forty-five minutes to the station, located west of Stockton in the tiny mountain town of Bicksville. It was a bright, chipper day, and the flat, sagging police building sat like an exhausted hitchhiker on the side of the road.

  "Do you want to wait in the car?" I asked Dad.

  "No, no, I'll come in." He held up D. F. Young's Narcissism and Culture Jamming the U.S.A. (1986). "I've brought some light reading."

  "Dad?"

  "Yes, sweet."

  "Let me do the talking."

  "Oh. By all means."

  The Sluder County Sheriff's Department was a single ransacked room that resembled the Primates section of any midlevel zoo. All efforts, within budget, had been made to lead the ten or twelve captive policemen to believe they were in their natural environment (bleating phones, cinder-block walls painted taupe, dead plants with leaves like tendriled bows on birthday presents, chunky filing cabinets lined up in the back like football players, Department star patches barnacling their clay brown shirts). They were given a restricted diet (coffee, donuts) and plenty of toys to play with (swivel chairs, radio consoles, guns, a ceiling-suspended TV hiccupping the Weather Channel). And yet there remained the unmistakable whiff of artificiality to this habitat, of apathy, of everyone simply going through the motions of being a law enforcer, as struggling for survival was no longer an immediate concern. "Hey, Bill!" shouted one of the men pacing in the very back by the water cooler. He held up a magazine. "Check out the new Dakota." "Already did," said Bill, coma-staring at his blue computer screen.

  Dad, with a look of unmitigated distaste, sat down in the only seat available in the front, next to a fat and faded girl wearing a tinseled halter top, no shoes, her hair so coarsely bleached it resembled Cheetos. I made my way to the man behind the front desk flipping through a magazine and chewing a red coffee stirrer.

  "I'd like to speak to your chief investigator, if he or she is available," I said.

  "Huh?"

  He had a flat red face, which, discounting his yellowed toothbrush mustache, recalled the bottom of a large foot. He was bald. The topmost part of his head was grease-spattered with fat freckles. The name tag under his police badge read A. BOONE.

  "The person who investigated the death of Hannah Schneider," I said. "The St. Gallway teacher."

  A. Boone continued to chew the coffee stirrer and stared at me. He was what Dad commonly called a "power distender," a person who seized the moment in which he/she possessed a marginal amount of power and brutally rationed it so it lasted an unreasonable amount of time.

  "What's your business with Sergeant Harper?"

  "There's been a grave error in judgment regarding the case," I said with authority. It was essentially the same thing Chief Inspector Ranulph Curry announced at the beginning of Chapter 79 in The Way of the Moth (Lavelle, 1911).

  A. Boone took my name and told me to have a seat. I sat down in Dad's chair and Dad stood next to a dying plant. With a look of faux-interest and admiration (raised eyebrow, mouth turned down) he handed me a copy of The Sheriffs Starr Bulletin, Winter, Vol. 2, Issue 1, which he detached from the bulletin board behind him, along with a small sticker of an American Eagle crying an iridescent tear (America, United We Stand). In the section of the newsletter on p. 2, "Activity Report" (between Famous/Infamous and Bet You Didn't Know . . .) I read that Sergeant Detective Fayonette Harper, for the last five months, had made the greatest number of Fall Arrests in the entire department. Detective Harper's Fall Captures included Rodolpho Debruhl, WANTED for murder; Lamont Grimsell, WANTED for robbery; Kanita Kay Davis, WANTED for welfare fraud, theft and receiving stolen property; and Miguel Rumolo Cruz, WANTED for rape and criminal deviant conduct. (In contrast, Officer Gerard Coxley had the lowest number of Fall Arrests: only Jeremiah Golden, WANTED for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle.)

  Additionally, Sergeant Harper was featured in the black-and-white team photo of the Sluder County Sheriff's Dept. Baseball League on p. 4. She was standing on the right, at the very end, a woman with a sizable crooked nose, and all other features crowded around it as if trying to keep warm on her arctic white face.

  Twenty-five, maybe thirty minutes later, I was sitting next to her.

  "There's a mistake with the coroner's report," I announced with great conviction, clearing my throat. "The suicide ruling is wrong. You see, I was the person with Hannah Schneider before she walked into the woods. I know she wasn't going to go kill herself. She told me she was coming back. And she wasn't lying."

  Sergeant Detective Fayonette Harper narrowed her eyes. With her salt-white skin and bristly lava hair, she was a harsh person to take in at close ra
nge; it was a swipe, whack, a kick in the teeth no matter how many times you looked at her. She had broad, door-knobbish shoulders and a way of always moving her torso at the same time as her head, as if she had a stiff neck.

  If the Sluder County Sheriff's Department was the Primates section of any midlevel zoo, Sergeant Harper was obviously the lone monkey who chose to suspend disbelief and work as if her life depended on it. I'd already noticed she narrowed her eyes at everyone and everything, not only at me and A. Boone when he escorted me over to her desk at the back of the room ("All right," she said with no smile as I sat down, her version of "Hello!"), but she also narrowed her eyes at her TO BE FILED paper tray, the exhausted rubber-and-metal Hand Stress Reliever next to her keyboard, the sign taped above her computer monitor that read, "If you can see, look, and if you can look, observe," even at the two framed photographs on her desk, one of an elderly woman with cotton-hair and an eyepatch, the other of herself and what I assumed was her husband and daughter; in the photo they bookended her with identical long faces, chestnut hair and obedient teeth.

  "And why do you say that," Sergeant Harper asked. Her voice was dull and low, a combination of rocks and oboe. (And that was how she asked questions, not bothering to hoist up her voice on the end.)

  I repeated, for the most part, all that I'd told Officer Coxley in the Sluder County Hospital Emergency Room.

  "I don't mean to be rude," I said, "or disrespectful to your-your systematized process of upholding the law, which you've been doing for years, probably quite effectively, but I don't think Officer Coxley wrote down the specifics of what I told him. And I'm a very pragmatic person. If I thought there was even the slightest chance of the suicide ruling being true, I'd accept it. But it's not feasible. First, as I said earlier, someone followed us from the camping ground. I don't know who it was, but I heard him. We both did. And second, Hannah wasn't in that kind of mood. She wasn't depressed—at least, not at that moment. I'll admit she had her moments of being down. But we all do. And when she left me, she was acting very sane."

  Sergeant Harper hadn't moved a muscle. I became acutely aware (particularly from the way her eyes gradually drifted away from me before being jerked, by a certain emphatic word of mine, back to my face) she'd seen my type before. Housewives, pharmacists, dental hygienists, banking clerks, undoubtedly they'd all come to plead their cases, too, with their hands clenched, their perfumes rancid, their eyeliner skid-marking their eyes. They sat on the edge of the same uncomfortable red chair I was sitting on (which made woolly nonfigurative prints on the back of one's bare legs) and they wept, swore on a range of Bibles (Today's English, King James, Illuminated Family Edition) and graves (Grandma's, Pa-paw's, Archie who died young) that, whatever the charges against dear Rodolpho, Lamont, Kanita Kay and Miguel, it was lies, all lies.

  "Obviously, I know how I sound," I tried, attempting to iron the twinges of desperation out of my voice. (I was slowly gathering Sergeant Harper didn't do twinges of desperation, nor did she do pangs of longing, worries to distraction or hearts broken beyond all possible repair.) "But I'm positive someone killed her. I know it. And I think she deserves for us to find out what really happened."

  Harper thoughtfully scratched the back of her neck (as people do when they vehemently disagree with you), leaned to the left of her desk, pulled open a file cabinet and, narrowing her eyes, removed a green folder an inch thick. The labeled tab, I noted, read #55O9~SCHN.

  "Well' she said with a sigh, slapping the file on her lap. "We did account for the person you think you heard." She flipped through the papers— photocopied, typewritten forms, too small a font for me to make out—until she stopped on one, glancing through it. "Matthew and Mazula Church," she read slowly, frowning, "George and Julia Varghese, two Yancey County couples, were camping in the area at the same time as you and your peers. They stopped at Sugartop Summit around six, rested for an hour, decided to continue on to Beaver Creek two and a half miles away, arriving around eight-thirty. Matthew Church confirmed he was wandering the area looking for firewood when his flashlight went dead. He managed to make his way back to the site around eleven and they all went to bed." She looked at me. "Beaver Creek is less than a quarter of a mile from where we found her body."

  "He said he saw Hannah and me?"

  She shook her head. "Not exactly. He said he heard deer. But he'd had three beers and I'm not sure he knows what he saw or heard. It's a wonder he didn't find himself lost, too. But you probably heard him wandering around, crashing through the brush."

  "Does he wear glasses?" She thought about this for a moment. "I think he does." She frowned, scanning the paper. "Yes, here it is. Gold frames. He's nearsighted."

  Something about the way she'd said that particular detail, nearsighted, made me think she was lying, but when I sat up imperceptibly and tried to glimpse where she was reading, she closed the file quickly and smiled, her thin, chapped lips pulling away from her teeth like tinfoil off a chocolate bar.

  "I've been camping," she said. "And the truth is, when you're up there, you don't know what you're seeing. You came across her hanging there, am I right?"

  I nodded.

  "The brain dreams up things to protect itself. Four out of every five witnesses are completely unreliable. They forget things. Or later on, they think they saw things that weren't there. It's witness traumatization. Sure, I'll consider witness testimony, but in the end I can only consider what I can see in front of me. The facts."

  I didn't hate her for not believing me. I understood. Because of all the Rodolphos, Lamonts, Kanita Kays and Miguels and other delinquents she caught red-handed wearing dirty underwear, watching cartoons, eating Cocoa Puffs, she assumed she knew everything there was to know about The World. She had seen the bowels, the guts, the innards of Sluder County and thus no one could tell her anything she didn't already know. I imagined her husband and daughter found this frustrating, but they probably tolerated her, listened to her over a dinner of sliced ham and peas, all silent nods and supportive smiles. She looked at them and loved them, but noticed a chasm between them, too. They lived in Dream Worlds, worlds of homework, appropriate office conduct, unspoiled milk mustaches, but she, Fayonette Harper, lived in Reality. She knew the ins and outs, the tops and bottoms, the darkest, most mildewed corners.

  I didn't know what else to say, how to convince her. I thought about standing up, knocking over the red chair and shouting, "This is a veritable outrage!" as Dad did when he was at a bank filling out a deposit slip and none of the ten pens at the Personal Banking Counter had ink. A middle-aged man always arrived out of the blue, zipping, buttoning, tucking in shirttails, palming wisps of antenna-hair off his forehead.

  Sensing my frustration, Detective Harper reached out, touched the top of my hand, then abruptly sat back again. It was a gesture intended to be comforting but one that came off like putting a nickel in a casino slot machine. You could tell Sergeant Harper didn't know what to do with Tenderness or Femininity. She treated them like frilly sweaters someone had given her for a birthday that she didn't want to wear, yet couldn't throw away.

  "I appreciate your efforts," she said, her whiskey-colored eyes seeing, looking, observing my face. "You know. Coming out here. Trying to talk to me. That's why I decided to see you. I didn't have to see you. The case is closed. I'm not authorized to discuss it with anyone but immediate family. But you came here out of worry, which was nice. The world needs nice. But I'll be straight with you. We have no doubts about what happened to your friend, Hannah Schneider. The sooner you accept it, the better."

  Without saying anything more, she leaned across her desk, picked up a blank sheet of white paper and a ballpoint pen. In five minutes, she drew four tiny detailed drawings.

  (I've often thought back to this moment, perpetually awed by the simple brilliance of Sergeant Harper. If only everyone, to prove a point, didn't resort to pushy words or aggressive action, but quietly took out a pen, blank paper and drew their reasons. It was shockingly pers
uasive. Unfortunately, I didn't notice this treasure for what it was, and didn't think to take her drawing with me when I left the station. Hence, I've had to draw my own approximations of what she sketched, so meticulously that, intentionally or not, what she'd drawn actually looked a little like Hannah

  "These here are the kinds of marks left on a body when you got a murder," Sergeant Harper said, pointing to the two sketches on the right side of the paper and glancing at me. "And you can't fake it. Say you decide to strangle someone. You'll leave a mark on the neck that's straight across like this one here. Think of it. The hands. Or say you use a rope to kill 'em. Same thing. Most of the time, it comes with bruising too, or fractured cartilage 'cause the perp'll use more force than necessary due to adrenalin."

  She pointed to the other two drawings on the left.

  "And this over here is how it looks when someone does it suicide. See? Rope's an upside-down V from the hanging position, the rope being pulled up. Usually there's no evidence of a struggle on the hands, fingernails or neck unless he had second thoughts. Sometimes they try to get out of it because it hurts so bad. See, most people don't do it right. Real hangings, like in the old days, you had to fall straight down, six to ten feet, and you cut straight through the spinal cord. But your average suicide, he'll do it off a chair with the rope tied to a ceiling beam or a hook, and he'll only fall two or three feet. It's not enough to sever the spine so he chokes to death. Takes a couple minutes. And that's how your friend Hannah did it."

  "Is it possible to murder someone and have an upside-down V?"

  Detective Harper leaned back in her chair. "It's possible. But unlikely. You'd have to have the person unconscious maybe. String them up that way.

  Else take them by surprise. Be a trained assassin like in the movies." She chuckled, then shot me a suspicious look. "That didn't happen."

  I nodded. "She used an electrical cord?"

  "It's fairly common."