Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  "But she didn't have an electrical cord when I was with her."

  "She probably had it in the pouch around her waist. There was nothing in it but a compass." "What about a suicide note?" "Didn't leave one. Not everyone does. People with no family usually don't. She was an orphan, after all. Grew up at the Horizon House, a group home for orphans in New Jersey. She had no one. Never did."

  I was so surprised I couldn't immediately speak. Like an unexpected result in a Physics lab, this ruthlessly canceled out all I'd believed about Hannah. Of course, she'd had never told us anything about her past (apart from a few anecdotes, dangled like sausages in front of hungry dogs before snatching them away), and yet I'd assumed her childhood had been teeming with sailboats, lake houses and horses, a father with a pocket watch, a mother with bony hands who never left the house without her Face (a childhood that, funnily enough, overlapped my own mother's in my head).

  I hadn't pulled such a past out of thin air—had I? No, the way Hannah lit cigarettes, put her profile on display like an expensive vahze, chaise-longued over everything, the way she idly picked out words for sentences as if choosing shoes—these details hinted, however loosely, she'd come from a privileged background. There was, too, all that rhetoric she'd droned on about at Hyacinth Terrace —"ft takes years to overturn this conditioning. I tried my whole life."—words symptomatic of "Waiting Room Righteousness," but also another one of Dad's phrases, "Bloated Plutocrat Guilt," perpetually "slipshod and short-lived." And even in Cottonwood, when Hannah had slipped into the Country Styles Motel, Room 22, after Doc, one could just have easily assumed she was entering a La Scala opera box for Mozart's Cost Fan Tutte (1790), so straight her spine, so heiressesque the angle of her chin.

  Sergeant Harper took my silence for grudging acknowledgment. "She tried it once before, too," she went on. "The exact same way. Electrical extension cord. Right in the woods."

  I stared at her."When?"

  "Just before she left the home. When she was eighteen. Almost died."

  Harper leaned forward so her big face hovered six inches from mine.

  "Now"—she leaned in another inch, her voice raspy—"I've told you more than enough. And you got to listen. Time and again, I've seen innocent people get ruined by these things. And it's no good. Because it's not them that did it. It's between that person and God. So you got to go home, get on with life, not think about it. She was your friend and you want to help her. But I'll tell you, plain as day, she planned it all along. And she wanted the six of you there for it. You understand me?"

  "Yes."

  "Someone who would do that to innocent children isn't worth getting worked up over, understand?" I nodded. "Good." She cleared her throat, picked up Hannah's file and slid it into the filing cabinet.

  A minute later, Dad and I were walking to the car. Heavy sun drooped over Main Street, made it a compost heap of mushy shadows falling off the hot cars hunched along the curb, and the spindly parking signs, and the bicycle dead on its side, chained to a bench.

  "Everything's fine now, I trust?" he asked merrily. "Case closed?"

  "I don't know."

  "How did Big Red treat you?"

  "She was nice."

  "You two seemed to have a rather tantalizing conversation."

  I shrugged.

  "You know, I don't think I've ever seen a woman so obscenely orange in all my life. You suppose her hair naturally sprouts from her head that precise shade of carrots, or do you think it's a special kind of peroxide rinse one buys in the hope that it will temporarily blind people? A deliberate police weapon for her to use against the dissolute and depraved."

  He was trying to make me laugh, but I only shaded my eyes and waited for him to unlock the car.

  27

  Justine

  Hannah's Memorial Service, held the following Friday, April 16, was a sham. It was a Gallwanian ceremony, so naturally there was no coffin.

  On Tuesday, when Havermeyer announced the date of the service (also that we were free from class afterward, a Hannah Holiday) he further clarified in a voice with the unmistakable tone of an Epilogue or Afterword, that Hannah had been buried in New Jersey. (It was a dismal prospect. I'd never even heard Hannah say New Jersey. )

  And so it was only us that day, the students, the faculty dressed in earth tones, the St. Gallway Choral Society (seventeen humdrum kids who'd recently tacked the word Society onto the end of their name in order to taste exclusivity) and St. Gallway's part-time chaplain, who wasn't Reverend Alfred Johnson, Preacher Johnson or Evangelist Johnson, but the spayed and sanitized Mr. Johnson. Supposedly he'd gone to divinity school, but "as what" nobody knew. He was a minister of indeterminate denomination, a truth Headmaster Havermeyer forbade him to disclose or even indirectly allude to during his Friday morning service, in order to avoid offending the one kid whose parents were Latter-Day Saints (Cadence Bosco). In the St. Gallway Admissions Catalogue, Higher Learning, Higher Grounds, the two-story stone chapel was described as a "sanctuary," technically unaffiliated with a particular religion (though during the holiday season, there were "secular tidings"). It was simply a "house of faith." Exactly which faith was anybody's guess. I doubt even Mr. Johnson knew. Mr. Johnson didn't wear a vicar's collar but khakis and short-sleeve polo shirts in forest green and royal blue, giving him the air of a golf caddy. And when he talked about a Higher Power, he used words like gratifying, restorative and life-changing. It was something that "got you through the tough times," which "any young person could manage with a little hard work, trust and tenacity." God was a trip to Cancun.

  I sat with the seniors, second pew from the front, staring down at the play I'd brought with me, A Moon for the Misbegotten (O'Neill, 1943) in order to avoid any eye contact with the Bluebloods. Apart from Jade and Nigel (whose mother had dropped him off one morning directly in front of the Volvo— which I stalled leaving by unzipping and zipping my backpack until he disappeared inside Hanover), I hadn't seen the others a single time.

  I'd heard tidbits of rumor: "I can't remember what I ever saw in Milton," said Macon Campins in AP English. "I was next to him in Biology and he totally doesn't look hot anymore." "Joalie broke up with him for that very reason," said Engella Grand. During Morning Announcements and lunch (occasions when I hoped to sneak a speedy look at one of them the way Dad and I had peeked inside the trailer of the world's smallest she-male at the Screamfest Fantasy Circus) they were nowhere to be found. I could only assume their parents had made some sort of arrangement with Mr. Butters and all five of them were attending rigorous morning and afternoon counseling sessions with Deb Cromwell. Deb, a short, yellow-complexioned woman, slow in movement and fatty in word (a walking wedge of Camembert) had made herself right at home in Hanover Room 109, erecting a variety of posters and cardboard displays. On my way to AP Calculus, as I darted past her room, I noticed, unless Mirtha Grazeley had wandered in (probably by accident, they said she often confused other rooms in Hanover with her office, including the Men's Room), Deb was always sitting in there alone, keeping herself occupied by paging through her own Depression pamphlets.

  Now, behind us on the balcony, the Choral Society started to sing, "All Glory, laud, and honor," and the Bluebloods were still missing. I was just starting to presume, yet again, they were marooned in Deb Cromwell's office, Deb turning them on to the pleasures of Self-Acceptance and Letting Go, when Deb herself, a smile gooped onto her face, hastened into the chapel with Ms. Jarvis, the school nurse, lumping herself onto the end of a pew where Havermeyer was sitting with his wife, Gloria, so massively pregnant she looked like she'd been pinned to the ground by a boulder.

  Then, I heard someone gasp —it was Donnamara Chase sitting behind me; she needed smelling salts—and most of the school, including a few teachers, swiveled around to watch the five of them saunter in, single file and self-loving (see Abbey Road, The Beatles, 1969). They were head to toe in black. Milton and Nigel looked like ninjas (one XS, the other XL), Leulah, in a long-skirted, high-ne
cked chiffon number, looked vaguely vampiric. Jade was blatantly ripping off Jackie at Arlington (saucer-sized sunglasses on her head and a vintage black alligator handbag were stand-ins for the veil and John-John). Charles was the charred elephant bringing up the rear. He was in black, too, but the giant plaster cast on his left leg (ankle to upper thigh) jutted out like a giant ivory tusk. As he limped along with his crutches, glowering at the floor, disturbingly pasty and thin, his face wet with sweat (gold hair stuck in Os along his forehead like soggy Cheerios in a bowl) I felt sick—not because I wasn't with them or dressed in black (I hadn't thought about my outfit; I'd put on a stupid short floral thing), but because he looked so unlike that first time I'd seen him, when he tapped my shoulder during Morning Announcements back in the fall. He was a different person. If once he'd been a Goodnight Moon (Brown, 1947), now he was a Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963).

  The Bluebloods wedged themselves into the row in front of me.

  "We gather here today in this sacred haven both to grieve and to give thanks," began Mr. Johnson in the pulpit. He licked his lips as he paused to glance down at his papers. (He was always licking his lips; they were like potato chips, salty and addictive.) "Since our beloved Hannah Schneider left us over three weeks ago, throughout our community there have been resounding accolades, words of warmth and kindness, stories of how she affected our lives in ways both great and small. Today, we join together to give thankfulness for being blessed with such an extraordinary teacher and friend. We give thanks for her kindness, her humanity and caring, her courage in adversity and the overwhelming joy she brought to so many. Life is eternal and love is everlasting and death is nothing but a horizon and a horizon is nothing but the boundary of our sight."

  Johnson went on and on, giving an equal amount of eye contact to every third of the congregation with the mechanized surety of a sprinkler system, most likely having learned this from a course, How to Give a Mesmerizing Sermon, with its concepts of Bringing Everyone In and Evoking a Feeling of Togetherness and Universal Humanity. The speech wasn't terrible, but it wasn't at all specific to Hannah. It was teeming with She Was a Lights and She Would Have Wanteds, mentioning nothing of her real life, a life, which Havermayer and the rest of the administration were now all deeply afraid of, as if they'd secretly discovered asbestos in Elton House or found out Christian Gordon, St. Gallway's Head Chef, had Hepatitis A. I could almost see the paper on the podium filled with (Insert Deceased's Name Here) (see www.123eulogy.com, #8).

  When it was over, the Choral Society erupted, marginally off-key, into "Come Down O Love, Divine," and students began to spill out of the pews, smiling, laughing, loosening their ties, tightening their ponytails. I took my last contraband look at the Bluebloods, shocked at how still they sat, how stony their faces. They hadn't whispered or grimaced a single time during Johnson's speech, although Leulah, as if feeling my eyes on her, had abruptly turned her doilied face in my direction during Eva Brewster's Psalms Reading and, teeth clenched so her cheek dented, looked straight at me. (But then, almost immediately, she'd turned into one of those Highway Window Gazers; Dad and I would speed past them in the Volvo all the time, and they always stared past us, at something infinitely more interesting than our faces: the grass, the billboards, the sky.)

  As Havermeyer made his way down the aisle, smiling a lead pipe smile with no joy behind it, rolling Gloria along next to him, and Mr. Johnson after her, jolly as Fred Astaire fox-trotting with one helluva girl ("Have a great day everybody!" he sang), without a word to anyone, chins held at the exact angle Hannah held hers while salsaing with her wineglass to Peggy Lee's "Fever" (or at dinner, pretending to be interested in one of their meandering stories), one by one, the Bluebloods rose and paraded down the aisle, disappearing into the bright bland day waiting for them.

  I'd forgotten to tell Dad it was a half day, so I hurried down the deserted first floor of Hanover to use the pay phone.

  "Olives," I heard someone shout behind me. "Wait up."

  It was Milton. I wasn't exactly overjoyed at the prospect of chatting with him—who knew what sort of abuse I'd have to endure, unleashed by that tepid memorial service—but I forced myself to stand ground. "Never retreat unless death is certain," wrote Nobunaga Kobay^shi in How to Be a Shogun Assassin (1989).

  "Hey," he said with one of his sloth smiles.

  I only nodded.

  "How ya doin'?"

  "Great."

  He raised his eyebrows at this and shoved his big hands into his pockets.

  Yet again, he took his Grand Ole Time with conversation. One Ming Dynasty rose and fell between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next.

  "I wanted to talk to you," he said.

  I didn't say a word. Let the big ninja do the talking. Let him scrounge around for a few sentences. "Well." He sighed. "I don't see how she coulda killed herself." "Not bad, Quiet Man. Now why don't you tie that notion into a noose and see if it's strong enough to hang yourself?"

  He looked stunned, maybe even flabbergasted. Dad said it was nearly impossible to flabbergast a person in this tawdry day and age, when "kinky sex was mundane," "a flasher in a trench coat in a public park, routine as cornfields in Kansas," but I think I'd done it to this kid—I really did. Obviously, he wasn't used to my tough ranchero tone of voice. Obviously, he wasn't used to the new Blue, Blue the Conqueror, the Hondo, King of the Pecos, Blue Steel, the feral Born to the West Blue, that Lucky Texan, that Lady from Louisiana, who shot from the hip, sat tall in the saddle and rode the lonely trail. (Obviously, he'd never read Grit [Reynolds, 1974]. It was what Buckeye Birdie said to Shortcut Smith.)

  "Want to get the hell out of here?" Milton asked.

  I nodded.

  I suppose everyone has his/her Open Sesame, his/her Abracadabra or Presto Chango, the arbitrary word, event or unforeseen signal that knocks a person down, causes him/her to behave, either permanently or for the short term, out of the blue, contrary to expectation, from nowhere. A shade is pulled, a door creaks open, some kid goes from Geek to Glamour Boy. And Milton's Hocus-Pocus, his Master Key, happened to be a flowy sentence in Mr. Johnson's generic speech, a speech Dad would call "stirring as a wall of cinder blocks," indicative of the "Hallmark fever infecting our politicians and official spokesmen of late. When they speak, actual words don't emerge, but summer afternoons of draining sun and tepid breeze and chirping Tufted Titmice one would feel gleeful shooting with a handgun."

  "When he said that thing about Hannah bein' like a flower," Milton said, "like a rose and all, I felt kinda moved." His big right arm lumber-rolled on top of the steering wheel as he edged the Nissan between the cars and out of the Student Parking Lot. "I couldn't stay angry 'bout what happened, 'specially not at my girl, Olives. I tried telling Jade and Charles it wasn't your fault, but they're not seein' straight."

  He smiled. It was like one of those Viking ships in amusement parks, swerving up onto his face, dangling there for a few seconds nearly vertical to the ground, before swinging off again. Love, or more accurately, infatuation ("Take as much care with words expressing your sentiments as you will crafting your doctoral dissertation," Dad said.) was one of those no-good drifter emotions. After everything that happened, I didn't think I felt a thing for Milton, not anymore; I assumed my feelings had skipped town. But now he smiled, and there they were, those old sweaty sentiments slinking down the road again, waiting for me to acknowledge them by the bus station in a greasy wife-beater, cowboy hat, muscles frighteningly potholed and slick.

  "Hannah told me I had to take you to her house when we got back from the camping trip. I figured we'd head over there, if you can handle it."

  I glanced over at him, confused. "What?"

  He let my words sit on the dock of the bay for at least thirty seconds before answering. "Remember Hannah had those private conversations with each us hikin' up the mountain?"

  I nodded.

  "That's when she said it. I forgot about it 'til a couple of days ago. And n
ow—" "What did she say?"

  " 'Take Blue to my house when you get back. Just the two of you.' She repeated it three times. Remember how crazy she was that day? Orderin' everyone around, screamin' off mountaintops? And when she said it, I didn't even recognize her. She was mean. Still, I laughed it off and said, 'I don't get it. You can have Blue over anytime.' Instead of answering directly, she only repeated the sentence. 'Take Blue to my house when you get back. You'll understand.' She made me swear I'd do it and that I wouldn't say anything to the others."

  He switched on the radio. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, so when he shifted gears, the cute burnt toes of the tattoo angel became visible like the edge of a seashell peeking out of sand.

  "What was strange," he continued in his buffalo voice, "was that she said you. 'When you get back.' Not when we get back. Well, I've been thinking about the you. It can only mean one thing. She never planned to return with us."

  "I thought you didn't think she committed suicide."

  He seemed to tobacco-chew this for a minute, squinting in the sun, shoving down the sun visor. We were speeding along the highway now, barreling through the thickened sunshine and the limp-rag shadows of the trees standing stiffly on the shoulder of the road. They held their branches high in the air—as if they knew the answer to an important question, as if they hoped to be called on. The Nissan was old and as Milton shifted the gears it rattled like one of those famished motel beds one feeds quarters to, a bed I'd never seen first-hand, though Dad claimed he'd counted seven within a one-mile radius in Northern Chad. ("They don't have running water or bathrooms, but never fear, they have beds that buzz.")

  "She was sayin' good-bye to us during those talks," he said, clearing his throat. "She told Leulah, 'Never be scared to cut your hair.' And Jade. She said, 'A lady should be a lady even when she removes her little black dress'— whatever the hell that means. She told Nigel to be himself, then somethin' about wallpaper. 'Change the wallpaper as much as you like and screw how much it costs. You're the one who has to live there.' And she said to me, before the thing about you, she said, 'You just might be an astronaut. You just might walk on the moon.' And Charles —no one knows what she said to him. He refuses to say. But Jade thinks she confessed she loved him. What'd she say to you?"