Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  "Goddamn miserable," he said almost inaudibly to the overhead light. "Guess we should go home. Forget this stuff. Call it a day."

  I let my left hand fall off my bare knee so it touched the side of his face. It had a dampness to it, a humidity of basements. Immediately, his eyes slipped onto me and I must have had an Open Sesame look on my face because he grabbed me and pulled me down onto his lap. His big sticky hands covered both sides of my head like earphones. He kissed me as if biting into fruit. I kissed him back, pretending to bite into peaches and plums—nectarines, I didn't know. I think I also made funny noises (egret, loon). He gripped my shoulders, as if I was the sides of a carnival ride and he didn't want to fall out.

  I'd imagine it occurred a great deal during excavations.

  Yes, I'd wager quite a bit of money that more than a few hips, knees, feet, and bottoms have rubbed up against royal sepulchres in the Valley of the Kings, hearth remains in the Nile Valley, Aztec portrait beakers on an island in Lake Texcoco, that a lot of fast, rabbity sex transpires on Babylonian-dig cigarette breaks and Bog Mummy examination tables.

  Because, after a strenuous dig with your trowel, your pick-ax, you've seen that sweaty compatriot of yours from every critical angle (90, 60, 30,1), also in a variety of lights (flashlight, sun, moon, halogen, firefly) and all of a sudden you're overwhelmed with the feeling that you understand the person, the way you understand stumbling upon the lower jaw and all the teeth of Proconsul Africanus meant not only that the History of Human Evolution would be transformed, forever afterward mapped with a little more detail, but also that your name would be up there with Mary Leakey's. You, too, would be world renowned. You, too, would be entreated to write lengthy articles in Archaeological Britain. You feel as if this person next to you was a glove you'd managed to turn inside out, and you could see all the little strings and the torn lining, the hole in the thumb.

  Not that we did It, mind you, not that we had blank-faced handshake sex rampant among America's twitchy youths (see "Is Your Twelve-Year-Old a Sex Fiend?", Newsweek, August 14, 2000). We did take off our clothes, however, and roll around like logs. His angel tattoo said hello to more than a few freckles on my arm and back and side. We scratched each other accidentally, our bodies blunt and mismatched. (No one tells you about the frank lighting or lack of mood music.) When he was on top of me, he looked calm and inquisitive, as if he were lying at the edge of a swimming pool, staring at something shiny at the bottom, contemplating diving in.

  I will thus confess a stupid truth regarding this encounter. For a minute afterward, lying on Hannah's bed with him, my head on his shoulder, my skinny white arm garlanding his neck, when he said, wiping his drenched forehead, "Is it fuckin' hot in here or is it me?" and I said without thinking, "It's me," I sort of felt—well, fantastic. I felt as if he was my American in Paris, my Brigadoon. ("Young love come like roseth petals," writes Géorgie Lawrence in his last collection, So Poemesque [1962], "and like lightning boltheth flees.")

  "Tell me about the streets," I said softly, staring at Hannah's ceiling, square and white. Then I was horrified: without thought, the sentence had drifted out of my mouth like a boat Victorian people float around on with parasols, and he hadn't immediately answered so obviously I'd blown things. That was the problem with the Van Meers; they always wanted more, had to dig deeper, get dirtier, doggedly cast their fishing line in the river over and over again, even if they only caught dead fish.

  But then he answered, yawning: "Streets?"

  He didn't continue, so I swallowed, my heart on the edge of its seat.

  "I just meant. . . when you were involved with your . . . gang—you don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."

  "I'll talk about anythin' with you," he said.

  "Oh. Well. . . you ran away from home?"

  "No. You?"

  "No."

  "Wanted to on plenty of occasions, but I never did."

  I was confused. I'd been expecting shifty eyes, words jamming in his throat like coins in a faulty pay phone.

  "But then how did you get your tattoo?" I asked.

  He turned his right shoulder around and stared at it, the corners of his mouth plunging down. "My older bro, fuckin' John. His eighteenth birthday. He and his friends took me to a tattoo parlor. Total shithole. We both got tattoos, only he royally fucked me, because his, freakin' salamander, is this big"—he displayed the width of a blueberry in his fingers —"an' he talked me into getting this monster motherfuckin' can of worms. You shoulda seen my mom's face." He chuckled, remembering. "Never seen her so pissed. It was classic."

  "But how old are you?"

  "Seventeen."

  "Not twenty-one?"

  "Uh, not unless I fell into a coma."

  "You never lived on the streets?"

  "What?" He scrunched up his face like he had sun in his eyes. "I can't even sleep on those fuckin' couches at Jade's. I like my own bed, Sealy Posturepedic or whatever—hey, what's with the questions?"

  "But Leulah," I persisted, my voice crashing out of my mouth now, determined to hit something. "When she was thirteen she ran away with a-a Turkish math teacher and he was arrested in Florida and he went to jail."

  "What?"

  "And Nigel's parents are in prison. That's why he has a preoccupation with suspense novels and is vaguely pathological —he doesn't feel guilt and Charles was adopted — "

  "You can't be serious." He sat up, looking down at me like I was loco. "Nigel feels stuff. He still feels bad for ditchin' that kid last year, what's his name, sits next to you in Mornin' Announcements and second of all, Charles is not adopted."

  I frowned, feeling that vague sense of irritation when tabloid stories turned out not to be true. "How do you know? Maybe he just never said anything."

  "Ever met his mom?"

  I shook my head.

  "They could be brother and sister. And Nigel's parents aren't in prison. Jesus. Who told you that?"

  "But what about his real parents?"

  "His real parents own that pottery place—Diana and Ed—"

  "They didn't serve time for shooting a police officer?"

  That particular claim made Milton guffaw (I'd never heard a real guffaw, but what he did was definitely one) and then, seeing I was serious and more than a little worked up—blood was rushing into my cheeks; I'm sure I was red as a carnation—he lay back and rolled toward me so the bed went ugh, and his puffy lips and eyebrows and the tip of his nose (on which stood, rather heroically, a freckle) were inches from my own.

  "Who told you this stuff?"

  When I didn't answer, he whistled.

  "Whoever he is, he's a nut case."

  28

  Quer pasticciaccio Brutto de via Merulana

  ‘I do not believe in madness," Lord Brummel notes dryly at the end of Act IV in Wilden Benedict's charming play about the sexual depravity of the

  British upper class, A Bev'y of Ladies (1898). "It's too uncouth."

  I agreed.

  I believed in the madness of destitution, drug-induced madness, also Dictator Dementia and Wartime Whacked (with its tragic subsets, Frontline Fever, Napalm Non Compos Mentis). I could even confirm the existence of Checkout-Aisle Crackers, which abruptly afflicts an ordinary, unassuming person standing behind a man with seventy-five exotic grocery items, none of which sport price tags, but I did not buy Hannah's madness, even though she had the hair for it, had killed or hadn't killed herself, had slept or hadn't slept with Charles, had picked up strange men and shamelessly fashioned lavish lies out of the plain cotton histories of the Bluebloods.

  Thinking about it, I felt dizzy, because it'd been such a classy con; she'd been Yellow-Kid Nickel, the most acclaimed confidence man in history, and I'd been the easy mark, the fall guy, the unwitting casino.

  "If Jade rode a mile in some cruddy eighteen-wheeler then I'm Elvis reincarnated," Milton said as he drove me home.

  Naturally, I now felt dim for believing her. It was true. Jade wouldn't go f
ifty feet unless there was fur, silk or fine Italian leather involved. Sure, the girl disappeared into handicapped stalls with men who had faces like busted-up Buicks, but that was simply her brand of thrill, her bump of cocaine at fifteen minutes a pop. She wouldn't ride out of the parking lot with one of them, much less into a sunset. I'd also completely overlooked how much the girl shirked responsibility. She had trouble dropping a History class. "Can't deal with the paperwork," she said, the paperwork being a slip of paper requiring three lines to be filled out. When I admitted to Milton Hannah had told me these stories, he declared her certifiable.

  "In your defense, I see how you'd believe her," he said, stopping the Nissan by my front door. "If she told me that story about myself, that I'd joined a gang—hell, that my parents were aliens—I'd probably believe it. She made everythin' real." He hooked his fingers on the steering wheel. "So that's it, I guess. Hannah was bojangled. Never woulda guessed it. I mean, why go through the trouble to invent that shit?"

  "I don't know," I said grimly as I climbed from the car.

  He blew me a kiss. "See you Monday? You. Me. A movie."

  I nodded and smiled. He drove away.

  And yet, as I made my way upstairs to my room, I realized that in my life, if I'd known someone certifiable, it wouldn't be Hannah Schneider. No, it'd be June Bug Kelsea Stevens whom I caught in Dad's bathroom having a conversation with herself in the mirror ("You look marvelous. No, you look marvelous. No, you loo—how long have you been standing there?") or even June Bug Phyllis Mixer who treated her skittish Standard Poodle like a ninety-year old grandmother ("Up-see-daisies. Good girl. That too much sun for you? No? What would you like for lunch, honey? Oh, you want my sandwich."). And poor June Bug Vera Strauss, whom Dad and I found out later had been manic for years—looking back, she'd had actual signs of lunacy: her eyes were severely depressed (literally, into her face) and when she talked to you, there was something scary about it, as if she were actually addressing a ghost or some sort of poltergeist hovering just behind your left shoulder.

  No, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary, I didn't believe that was the trapdoor out of the maze—that Hannah Schneider was simply nutty as a fruitcake. Any professor worth his salt would throw out that sort of essay, if some kid dared to turn in such an ill-considered, hackneyed Thesis. No, I'd read The Return of the Witness (Hastings, 1974) and its sequel and I'd watched Hannah; I'd seen how she'd marched so assuredly up that trail (there'd been a discernible jaunt in her step) and she'd shouted off that mountaintop with conviction, not despair (there were vast differences in a voice's timbre between those emotions).

  There had to be another reason.

  In my room, I threw down my backpack and removed the materials I'd filched from Hannah's house from the front of my dress and my shoe. I

  hadn't wanted Milton to know I was swiping things. I'd started to feel more than a little embarrassed by the way my mind was working. He'd said, "Look who's sleuthin'," "Olives' got her sleuth on," "That's so sleuthy, baby," six times and it'd sounded less and less cute the more he said it, and so, when we climbed into his Nissan I'd said I'd left my birthstone necklace on the bureau in Hannah's garage (I didn't have, nor had I ever had, a birthstone necklace) and while he waited, I ran inside and grabbed those materials I'd already set aside in the cardboard box in the back corner. I shoved the thin folder of Missing Person articles down my dress so it was pressed around my waist, put the photograph of Hannah with the spiky rockstar hair into my shoe, and when I climbed back into the car and he said, "Got it?" I grinned, pretending to zip it into the front pocket of my backpack. (He wasn't the most perceptive person; I sat stiffly the entire ride home as if perched on pinecones and he didn't bat an eye.)

  Now, I switched on the bedside lamp and opened the manila folder.

  The shock with which the revelation came to me wasn't because the idea was particularly intricate or inspired, but because it was so excitingly obvious, I hated myself for not considering it sooner. I read the newspaper articles first (Hannah appeared to have gone to a library and photocopied them from grainy microfiche): two from The Stockton Observer dated September 19, 1990, and June 2, 1979, "Search for Missing Backpacker Underway," "Roseville Girl, 11, Found Unhurt," respectively; another from The Knoxville Press, "Missing Girl Reunited with Father, Mother Charged"; one from Tennessee's Pineville Herald-Times, "Missing Boy Prostituted," and finally "Missing Woman Found in VT, Using Alias," from The Huntley Sentinel.

  I then read the last page, the book excerpt, which concluded the story of Violet May Martinez, the day she disappeared from the Great Smoky Mountains on August 29,1985.

  97

  the group was one person short. Violet was nowhere to be found. Mike Higgis searched the parking lot and questioned strangers who'd parked there, but no one had seen her. After an hour, he contacted the National Park Service. The Park immediately launched a search, closing the area from Blindmans Bald to Burnt Creek. Violet's father and sister were notified and they brought Violet's clothes so the search dogs could identify her smell. Three German Shepherds tracked Violet to a single spot by a paved road, 1.25 miles from the last place Violet was seen. The road led to U.S. 441 leading out of the Park.

  Ranger Bruel told Violet's father, Roy Jr., that could mean Violet made her way there and was picked up by someone in a vehicle. She also could have been abducted against her will.

  Roy Jr. rejected the idea Violet had planned her disappearance. She did not have a credit card or identification with her. She had taken no money from her checking or savings accounts prior to the trip. She was also looking forward to her 16th birthday the following week at Roller-Skate America.

  Roy Jr. tipped the police off to a potential suspect. Kenny Franks, 24, released January 1985 from a correctional institution for violence and theft, had seen Violet at the mall and become infatuated. He'd been spotted at Besters High and harassed Violet with phone calls. Roy Jr. contacted the police and Kenny left her alone, though his friends reported he still was obsessed with her.

  "Violet said she hated him, but she still wore the necklace he gave her," said her best friend Polly Elms.

  Police investigated the possibility of Kenny Franks having a hand in her disappearance, but sources testified on Aug. 25 he'd been working all day as a busboy at Stagg Mill Bar & Grill and was cleared of suspicion. Three weeks later he moved to Myrtle Beach, S.C. Police investigated if he was in contact with Violet, but no evidence to support this claim ever emerged.

  A Final Enigma

  The search for Violet ended September 14, 1985. With 812 searchers, including Park Personnel, Rangers, the National Guard and FBI, no further leads in her disappearance came to light.

  On October 21, 1985, at Jonesville Nations Bank in Jonesville, Florida, a black-haired woman tried to cash a check from Violet's checking account, made payable to "Trixie Peanuts." When the teller informed the woman she'd have to deposit the check and wait for it to clear, the woman left with it and never returned. The bank teller, when presented with a picture of Violet, was unable to confirm it was she. The woman was never seen in Jonesville again.

  Roy Jr. swore his daughter would never have cause to disappear from her life. Her friend Polly thought otherwise.

  "She was always talking about how much she hated Besters and hated being a Baptist. She got good grades so I think she could plan it so people thought she was dead. That way they'd stop looking for her and she'd never have to come back."

  Seven years later, Roy Jr. still thinks of Violet every day.

  "I put it with God now. 'Trust in the Lord with all your heart,' " he quotes from Proverbs 3:5, 6, " 'and lean not on your own understanding.' "

  All of the articles in the folder were not merely concerning Missing Persons, but disappearances that had appeared to have been staged — definitively, in the case of the Huntley Sentinel article, which detailed the vanishing of a fifty-two-year-old woman, Ester Sweeney of Huntley, New Mexico, married to her third husband, M
ilo, and owing over $800,000 in back taxes and credit card bills. Police ultimately concluded she'd ransacked her home, slashed her kitchen screen and her own right arm (her blood was found in the foyer) in order to make it look like a violent break-in. She was found three years later in Winooski, Vermont, living under an assumed name and married to her fourth husband.

  The other articles were more informative, detailing police procedures, a National Park abduction, search methods. The Missing Backpacker article specified the ways the National Guard conducted a search of Yosemite: "Rangers, after screening search-and-rescue volunteers for physical fitness, employed a grid system, assigning each group sequential areas of the Glacier Point area to sweep."

  I couldn't believe it. And yet it wasn't unheard of; according to the Almanac of American Strange Habits, Tics and Behaviors (1994 ed.) one in every 4,932 United States citizens planned their own kidnapping or death.

  Hannah Schneider had not meant to die, but to disappear.

  Somewhat sloppily (and it wasn't exactly meticulous work; if she'd been a Doctoral Candidate her advisor would've reprimanded her for lethargy), Hannah had compiled these articles as exploratory research before she made a break for it, took it on the lam, copped a sneak, polished off her former life like a button-man did a squealer.

  Anjelica Soledad de Crespo, a pseudonym for the drug-trafficking heroine of Jorge Torres's stirring nonfiction portrait of the Pan-American narcotics cartel, For the Love of Corinthian Leather (2003), fed up with la vida de las drogas, had designed a similar death for herself, though she'd ventured to La Gran Sabana in Venezuela and appeared to tumble over a thousand-foot falls. Nine months prior to the supposed accident, a boat of nineteen Polish tourists had gone over in the same fashion—three of the corpses were never recovered due to the powerful undercurrents at the waterfall's base, which held the bodies under in a vicious spin cycle until they were ripped to shreds, then devoured by crocodiles. Anjeliea was declared dead within forty-eight hours. The truth was, she'd slipped out of her rowboat, making her way to the scuba gear planted for her on a convenient rock formation, which she'd donned and, fully submerged, swam the four miles to a location upriver where her handsome lover, Carlos, originally from El Silencio in Caracas, awaited her in a tricked-out silver Hummer. They hightailed it to an uninhabited section of the Amazon, somewhere in Guyana, where they still live.