Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  I didn't answer, because obviously Hannah hadn't said anything to me, not a single sentence of encouragement, however inscrutable and bizarre it sounded (no offense to Milton, but frankly, he didn't strike me as the astronaut type; it was dangerous for a kid that size to float through the shuttle at zero gravity).

  "See, I don't want to believe suicide," he went on thoughtfully, "because it makes me feel stupid. In hindsight, though, it adds up. She was always alone. That haircut Then, there's what happened to the Smoke guy. And her thing for truckers who eat at Stuckey's. Shit. It was all just sittin' there. Obvious. And we didn't see it. How's it possible?"

  He looked to me for help, but obviously I didn't have a decent answer. I watched his eyes ski down the front of my dress, stopping somewhere around my bare knees.

  "Any idea why she'd want me to take you to her house? Alone?"

  I shrugged, but the way he asked made me wonder if Hannah, after my flat-falling attempt to fix her up with Dad (mind you, that'd been B.c., or, before I knew about Cottonwood; A.C, or after Cottonwood, I'd sort of decided, for health reasons, she really wasn't Dad's dish), wanted to return the favor and had decided to tuck this sexy question mark of a sentence into Milton's breast pocket, thereby ensuring at some point, in the Big-Bang aftermath of the camping trip (it was a simple scientific principle: after explosions, new beginnings) we'd conveniently find ourselves together, alone, in her empty house. Maybe she'd caught wind of my fixation from Jade or Lu or had figured it out on her own, given my graceless behavior at dinner. (I wouldn't be surprised if all Fall and Winter Semester I'd had bird-nervous eyes: at Mil-ton's slightest movement, instantly airborne.)

  "Hopefully, she left you a suitcase full of cash," Milton said, smiling lazily. "And maybe if I'm nice, you'll split it with me."

  As we approached Hannah's house, slipping past the pastures, the quiet barns, the horses waiting like men in bus stations (the sun had cemented their hooves to the grass), the corkscrew tree, that little patch of hill where Jade always floored the Mercedes so the car flew over the top and our stomachs flipped like pancakes, I told Milton my account of what happened on the mountain. (As with Jade, I omitted the section where I found Hannah dead.)

  When he asked me what I thought Hannah was going to tell me, why she'd led me away from the campground, I lied and said I didn't have a clue.

  Well, it wasn't exactly a lie. I didn't know. But it wasn't as if I hadn't outlined, in the middle of the night, in meticulous detail, in the library silence of my room, on my Citizen-Kane desk (switching out my light if I heard Dad skulking around the stairs to make sure I was asleep), the Infinite Possibilities.

  After laying some groundwork, I'd concluded there were two generalized schools of thought arising from this mystery. (This wasn't including the possibility Milton had just disclosed, that Hannah might have wanted to hand me a few lukewarm good-byes—that one day I'd be strolling Mars, or that I shouldn't hesitate to repaint my house in a flamboyant color since I was the one who lived there—stale, crumbly, oyster-cracker phrases she could have easily said to me as we hiked the trail. No, I'd have to assume what Hannah wanted to tell me was entirely different, more vital than anything she'd whispered to the Bluebloods.)

  The first school of thought then, was that Hannah wished to confess something to me. It was an attractive idea, considering her hoarse voice, moth-moving eyes, the fitful starts and stops of her sentences as if she were operated by sporadic electricity. And what she wanted to confess could be any number of things, ranging from the crass to the crazy—her Cottonwood habit, for example, or an accidental affair with Charles, or that somehow she'd managed to kill Smoke Harvey; or perhaps she'd cultivated (another one of Jade's shot put accusations, flung out with all her might, then forgotten as she strolled back to the locker room for stretches) a secret association with the Manson Family. (Incidentally, I still had Hannah's copy of Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night stored in a bottom desk drawer. My heart had stopped when I'd overheard Dee mention in second period Study Hall that Hannah had asked her Intro to Film class if anyone had removed a book from her desk. "Some bird book," Dee said with a shrug.)

  If this thesis was true—that Hannah had hoped to disclose a secret—I could only surmise she chose me to confess to, over say, Jade or Leulah, because I looked unthreatening. Maybe she sensed, too, I'd read all of Scobel Bedlows Jr., his essays on judgments; basically, you weren't allowed to have any so long as "devastation was directed inwards, at yourself, never other people or animals" (see When to Stone, Bedlows, 1968). Hannah also seemed to have had an innate understanding of Dad and perhaps she figured I was already a highly forgiving person, that I did my best to treat shortcomings like hobos I'd found dozing on my porch: take them in and maybe they'll work for you.

  The second school of thought, and obviously the more disturbing one, was that Hannah wanted to disclose a secret All About Me.

  I was the only one, out of all of them, who hadn't washed ashore and been collected by Hannah after some tempest of a home life. I'd never run off with an old Turk, tried to throw my arms around the torso of a trucker (and strained to touch my hands together on the other side), suffered a street-life blackout, had a parent who was a junkie or in maximum-security prison. I wondered if Hannah knew a secret that revealed me to be like them.

  What If Dad really wasn't my dad, for example? What If he'd found me like some penny on a public promenade? What If Hannah was my real mother who'd given me up for adoption because no one wanted to get married in the late eighties; everyone wanted to go roller-skating and wear shoulder pads? Or What If I had a fraternal twin named Sapphire who was everything I wasn't—gorgeous, athletic, funny and tan with a carefree laugh, blessed not with an Osmium Dad (the heaviest metal known to man) but a Lithium Mom (the lightest) who slaved not as a vagabond professor and essayist, but was simply a waitress in Reno?

  Such paranoid What Ifs caused me, on more than a few occasions, to run downstairs into Dad's study and quietly rummage through his legal pads, his unfinished essays and faded notes for The Iron Grip, to stare at the photographs: the picture of Natasha at the piano, and the one of her and Dad, standing outside on a lawn in front of a badminton net, holding racquets, arms pretzeled, wearing antique outfits and expressions that made them look as if it was 1946 and they'd survived a World War, rather than the year it really was, 1986, and they were surviving the Brat Pack and Weird Al.

  These frail photographs cordoned off my past again, made it staunch and impermeable. I did, however, venture asking Dad a few off-hand yet probing questions, and Dad responded with a laugh.

  Dad, on Secret Bastard Siblings: "Don't tell me you've been reading Jude theObscure."

  Milton had no further light to shed on this conundrum—why Hannah had singled me out, why I wasn't with them when Charles, trying to ascend a jutting rock promontory in order to get a sense of direction, perhaps spot an electrical tower or a skyscraper sign for a Motel 6, "fell down this Grand Canyon sorta thing and started to yell so loud we thought he was bein' stabbed." After I finished telling Milton the remainder of my story, which had drooled a little into my confrontation with Jade in Loomis, he only shook his head in bewilderment and said nothing.

  By then we were inching down Hannah's deserted drive.

  For lack of a better plan—embarrassingly inspired by Jazlyn Bonnoco's Fleet Book Evidence (1989) —I suggested to Milton, maybe Hannah wanted us to find a clue in her house, a treasure map or old letters of blackmail and fraud—"something to tell us about the camping trip or her death," I explained—we decided to peruse her possessions as discreetly as we could. And Milton read my mind: "Let's start with the garage, huh?" (I suspected we were both afraid to enter the actual house, for fear we'd find some specter version of her.) The wooden one-car garage, standing a decent distance from the house with a flabby roof, crusty windows, looked like a giant matchbox that'd been in someone's pocket too long.

  I'd been worried about what had happened to the ani
mals, but Milton said Jade and Lu, who'd hoped to adopt them, found out they'd gone to live

  with Richard, one of Hannah's coworkers from the animal shelter. He lived on a llama farm in Berdin Lake, north of Stockton. "It's fuckin' sad," Milton said, pushing open the side door to the garage. "Because now they're gonna be like that dog."

  "What dog?" I asked, glancing at Hannah's front porch as I followed him inside. There was no POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape on the door, no immediate sign anyone had been there. "Old Yeller?"

  He shook his head and switched on the light. Neon light spilled through the hot, rectangular room. There wasn't space for two tires, much less an entire car, which explained why Hannah always parked the Subaru in front of the house. Heaps of furniture—blistered lamps, injured armchairs, carpets, chairs—not to mention a few cardboard boxes and random camping gear— had been brutally tossed on top of each other like bodies in an open grave.

  "You know," Milton said, stepping around one of the boxes. "In The Odyssey. The one always waitin' for his master."

  "Argos?"

  "Yeah. Poor old Argos. He dies, doesn't he?"

  "You want to stop please? You're making me . . ."

  "What?"

  "Depressed."

  He shrugged. "Hey, don't mind me."

  We dug.

  And the longer we dug, through backpacks, boxes, armoires and armchairs (Milton was still fixated on his suitcase-full-of-cash idea, though now he figured Hannah could have stuffed the unmarked bills into seat cushions and goose-down pillows), the more the experience of digging (Milton and I, cast as unlikely Leading Man and Woman) became sort of electrifying.

  Scrutinizing those chairs and lamp shades, something began to happen: I started to imagine myself a woman named Slim, Irene or Betty, a dame who wore penciled skirts, a cone bra, had zigzag hair over an eye. Milton was the disillusioned tough-guy with a fedora, bloody knuckles and a temper.

  "Yep, just makin' sure the old girl didn't leave us somethin'," Milton sang cheerfully as he gutted an orange couch cushion with the Swiss Army knife he'd found an hour ago. "No stone unturned. Because I'd hate her to be an Oliver Stone movie."

  I nodded, opening an old cardboard box. "If you end up a well-publicized mystery," I said, "you no longer belong to yourself. Everyone steals you and turns you into anything they want. You become their cause."

  "Uh huh." Thoughtfully, he stared down at the cottage-cheesed foam. "I hate open-ended stuff. Like Marilyn Monroe. What the hell happened? Was she gettin' too close to somethin' and the president had to shut her up? That seems crazy. That people can just take a life, like it's—"

  "Free fruit."

  He smiled. "Yeah. But then maybe it was an accident. Stars align a crazy way. Death happens. Could just as well've been the lottery or a broken leg. Or maybe she had a thought that she couldn't go on. We all have thoughts like that, only she decided to act on hers. She forces herself to. Because she thinks that's what she deserves. And maybe seconds later she knows she was wrong. Tries to save herself. But it's too late."

  I stared at him, unsure if he was talking about Marilyn or Hannah.

  "S'how it always is." He was setting aside the seat cushion, picking up an ashtray and turning it over, staring at the bottom of it. "You never know if there's a conspiracy or it's just how things unravel, the —I don't know, one of. . ."

  "Life's hairball pincurves."

  His mouth was open, but he didn't go on, apparently floored by a Dadism I'd always thought kind of irritating (it was a sentence you could find in his Iron Grip notes if you were patient enough to sit through his handwriting). He pointed at me.

  "That's good, Olives. Very good."

  I criss-crossed, detoured, fell out of the past.

  After two hours of searching, although we'd found no direct clue, Milton and I had managed to dig up all kinds of different Hannahs—sisters, cousins, fraternal twins, stepchildren to the one we'd known. There was Haight-Asbury Hannah (old records of Carole King, Bob Dylan, a bong, tai chi books, a faded ticket to some peace rally at Golden Gate Park on June 3, 1980), Stripper Hannah (I didn't feel comfortable going through that box, but Milton exhumed bras, bikinis, a zebra-striped slip, a few more complicated items requiring directions for assembly), also Hand Grenade Hannah (combat boots, more knives), also Hannah, Missing Person Possessed (the same folder full of Xeroxed newspaper articles Nigel had found, though he'd lied about there being "fifty pages at least"; there were only nine). My favorite, however, was Madonna Hannah who material-girled out of a sagging cardboard box.

  Beneath a raisined basketball, among nail polish, dead spiders and other junk, I found a faded photograph of Hannah with cropped, spiky red hair and brilliant purple eye shadow painted all the way to her eyebrows. She was singing onstage, a microphone in hand, wearing a yellow plastic miniskirt, beetle-green-and-white striped tights and a black corset made from either garbage bags or used tires. She was midnote, so her mouth was wide open— you could possibly pop a chicken egg in there and it'd disappear.

  "Holy fuck," Milton said, staring down at the photograph.

  I turned it over, but there was nothing written on it, no date.

  "It's her isn't it?" I asked.

  "Hell yeah, it's her. Shit."

  "How old do you think she is?"

  "Eighteen? Twenty?"

  Even with boy-short red hair, clown-like makeup, eyes wincing due to the angry look crashing through her face, she was still gorgeous. (Guess that's absolute beauty for you: like Teflon, impossible to deface.)

  After I found the photograph and looked through the last cardboard box, Milton said it was time for the house.

  "Feelin' good, Olives? On your game?"

  He knew about an extra set of keys under the geranium pot on the porch, and jamming the key into the dead bolt, suddenly his left hand reached back and found my wrist, squeezing it, letting go (a bland gesture one did with a stress ball; still, my heart leapt, did an agitated "Ahh," then fainted).

  We crept inside.

  Surprisingly, it wasn't frightening—not in the least. In fact, in Hannah's absence, the house had taken on the solemn properties of a lost civilization. It was Machu Picchu, a piece of ancient Parthian Empire. As Sir Blake Simbel writes in Beneath the Blue (1989), his memoir detailing the Mary Rose excavation, lost civilizations were never frightening, but fascinating, "reserved and riddle-filled, a gentle testament to the endurance of earth and objects over human life" (p. 92).

  After I left a message for Dad telling him I had a ride home, we excavated the living room. In some ways, it was like seeing it for the first time, because without the distractions of Nina Simone or Mel Tormé, without Hannah herself gliding around in her worn-out clothing, I was able to really see things: in the kitchen, the blank notepad and ballpoint pen (BOCA RATON it read in fading gold) positioned under the 1960s phone (the same spot and type of notepad on which Hannah supposedly had scrawled Valerio, though there were no exciting indentations on the page I could shade over with light pencil—as TV detectives do so effectively). In the dining room, the room where we'd eaten a hundred times, there were actually objects Milton and I had never seen before: in the big wooden and glass display case behind Nigel and Jade's chairs, two hideous porcelain mermaids and a Hellenistic Terracotta female figure, approximately six inches tall. I wondered if Hannah had just received them as gifts a few days prior to the camping trip, but judging by the thick dust, they'd been there for months.

  And then, from the VCR in the living room, I ejected a movie, L'Avventura. It was fully rewound.

  "What's that?" Milton asked.

  "An Italian movie," I said. "Hannah was teaching it in her film class." I handed it to him and picked up the video box, alone on the coffee table. I scanned the back. "Laventure?" Milton asked uncertainly, staring down at the tape with his mouth pushed to the side. "What's it about?"

  "A woman who goes missing," I said. My words made me shiver a little.

  Milton nodded and then,
with a frustrated sigh, tossed the videotape onto the couch.

  We combed the remaining rooms downstairs, but found no revolutionary relics —no drawings of bison, aurochs or stags from flint, wood or bone, no carving of Buddha, no crystal reliquary or steatite casket from the Mauryan Empire. Milton suggested Hannah might have kept a diary, so we made our way upstairs.

  Her bedroom was unchanged from the last time I'd seen it. Milton checked her bedside and vanity table (he found my copy of Love in the Time of Cholera, which Hannah had borrowed and never returned) and I did a quick tour of the bathroom and closet, finding those things Nigel and I had exhumed: the nineteen bottles of pills, the framed childhood photos, even the knife collection. The only thing I didn't find was that other schoolgirl picture, the one of Hannah with the other girl in uniforms. It wasn't where I thought Nigel had put it—in the Evan Picone shoe box. I looked for it in some of the other boxes along the shelf, but after the fifth one, I gave up. Either Nigel had put it back somewhere else, or Hannah had moved it.

  "I've lost steam," Milton said, leaning against the part of Hannah's bed where I was sitting. He tilted his head back so it was less than an inch from my bare knee. A strand of his black hair actually slipped off his sticky forehead and touched my bare knee. "I can smell her. That perfume she wore."

  I looked down at him. He looked like Hamlet. And I'm not talking about the Hamlets enamored with the language, the ones always thinking ahead to the upcoming sword fight or where to stress the line (Get thee to a nunnery, Get thee to a nunnery), not the Hamlet worried about how well his tunic fits or whether he can be heard in the back. I'm talking about the Hamlets who actually start to wonder if they should be, or not be, the ones who are bruised by Life's Elbows, Kidney Punches, Head Butts and Bites on the Ear, the ones who, after the final curtain, can barely speak, eat or take off their stage makeup with cold cream and cotton balls. They go home and do a lot of staring at walls.