Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  I stared at the ceiling, racking my brain to recover every detail from that night. Hannah had changed into heavier clothes while we were eating dinner. When she came to find me in the woods, she wore a satchel around her waist. As she led me away, she'd known exactly where she was going because she'd walked resolutely, checking the map and compass. She'd intended to tell me something, a confession of some kind, then abandon me. Using the compass, she'd intersect with a predetermined trail, which would lead to one of the minor Park roads, then to U.S. 441 and a campground where a car awaited her (perhaps it was Carlos in a silver Hummer). By the time we were rescued and she was declared missing—a lag time of at least twenty-four hours, most likely longer, given the weather conditions—she'd be states away, maybe even Mexico.

  And maybe the stranger who'd come upon us had not been so strange. Maybe he was Hannah's Carlos (her Valerio) and the ambush, the "Give me five minutes," the "I said stay here," had been a hoax; maybe she'd intended to go after him all along, and together they'd make their way to the trail, the road, car, Mexico, margaritas, fajitas. In this case, when I was found, I'd report to authorities someone had come upon us, and when no sign of Hannah turned up, when German Shepherds tracked her to a spot on a nearby road, the police would suspect Kidnapping or other Foul Play, or, that she'd planned to vanish, in which case, unless she was WANTED for something, they'd do little. (Detective Harper had not hinted at Hannah having a criminal record. And I could only assume she wasn't related to the Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese, Lucchese or Colombo crime families.)

  Sure, it was a brutal thing she'd done, to purposefully abandon me in the dark, but when people were desperate they did, with little conscience, all kinds of brutal things (see How to Survive" The Farm" Louisiana State Prison at Angola, Glibb, 1979). Yet, she hadn't been totally without concern; before she left me, she'd given me the flashlight, the map, told me not to be afraid. And during the afternoon hike up Bald Creek Trail, on four or five occasions, she'd pointed out on our maps, not only our location, but the fact that Sugar-top Summit was only four miles away from the Park's main road, U.S. 441.

  If I could determine the reason Hannah had wished to flee her life, I could determine who'd killed her. Because it'd been a first-rate rub out, a button man well acquainted with autopsies, because he'd understood the consequence of the ligature marks, how to make them look like suicide. He'd planned in advance the ideal spot for the lynching, that small, round clearing, and thus he'd known she was running away and what trail she was taking to reach the road. Maybe he'd been wearing night-vision goggles, or hunter's camouflage—like the disturbing kind I'd seen in Andreo Verduga's Wal-Mart shopping cart in Nestles, Missouri, ShifTbush™ Invisible Gear, Fall Mix, "the accomplished hunter's dream"—and, "instantly invisible in his woodland surroundings," he'd stepped onto a tree stump or some other sturdy, elevated position, silently waiting for her, poised with the electrical cord in a noose, which was in turn rigged to the tree. As she stumbled past, trying to find her way, trying to find him—because she'd known who he was—he looped it over her head, wrenching his end of the rope hard so she rose into the air. She didn't have time to react, to kick or scream, to organize the last thoughts of her life. ("Even the devil deserves last thoughts," wrote William Stonely in Ash Complexions [1932].)

  As I reenacted this scene in my head, my heart began to thud. Sickening chills began to inchworm down my arms and legs, and then, rather abruptly, one more detail fell motionless at my feet like a lead-poisoned canary, like a pugface nose-toasted by a mean right to his chin.

  Hannah had instructed Milton to take me to her house, not to play matchmaker (though perhaps that played a part; I couldn't discount the movie posters in her classroom), but so I, a thought-ridden and inquisitive person, would engage in a little gumshoe: "You're such a perceptive person; you dont miss anything" she'd told me that night at her house. She had not foreseen her death, and thus presumed, after she'd disappeared, when the search party turned up no trace of her, the Bluebloods and I would be left with the maddening question of what had happened, the kind of question that could kill a person, turn a person into a Bible-spewer, a rocking-horsed corn-shucking mountie with no teeth. And thus I, along with Milton, had been meant to discover, sitting entirely alone on that strangely immaculate coffee table (ordinarily littered with ashtrays and matchbooks, National Geographies and junk mail) an item that would be our reassurance, the end to her story: a film, L'Avventura.

  I felt faint. Because it was chic, oh, yes, it was brilliant, très Schneideresque: neatly precise yet sweetly hush-hush. (It was an act of personal punctuation even Dad would've considered nimble.) It was thrilling because it illustrated a premeditation, a craftiness of action and mind of which I hadn't thought Hannah capable. She was hurtfully beautiful; sure, she could listen to you, and rumba remarkably well with a wineglass; she could also pick up men like they were socks cluttering the floor, but for a person to orchestrate, however gently, such a subtle end to her life—at least, her life as everyone at St. Gallway knew it—that was something else, something dramatic, yet sad, because this murmur of an ending, this classy question mark, had not happened.

  I tried to calm myself. ("Emotion, especially excitement, is the enemy of dick work," said Detective Lieutenant Peterson in Wooden Kimono [Lazim, 1980].)

  L'Avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni's lyrical black-and-white masterpiece of i960 happened to be one of Dad's favorite films and thus, over the years, I'd seen it no less than twelve times. (Dad had a soft spot for all things Italian, including curvy women with poofy hair and Marcello Mastroianni's squints, shrugs, winks and smiles, which he tossed like overripe cherry tomatoes at women strolling Via Veneto. When Dad fell into a Mediterraneo Bourbon Mood, he'd even do bits of La Dolce Vita with pitch-perfect, seedy Italian flair: "Tu sei la prima donna del primo giorno délia creazione, sei la madré, la sorella, l'amante, l'arnica,l'angelo, il diavolo, la terra, la casa . . .")

  The film's simple plot unraveled as follows:

  A wealthy socialite, Anna, goes on a yachting trip with her friends off the coast of Sicily. They go ashore to sunbathe on a deserted island. Anna wanders away and never returns. Anna's fiancé, Sandro, and her best friend, Claudia, search the island, and subsequently, all of Italy, pursuing a variety of dead-end clues and embarking on a love affair of their own. At the film's end, Anna's disappearance remains as mysterious as the day she disappeared. Life continues—in this case, one of hollow desire and material excess —and Anna is all but forgotten.

  Hannah had hoped I'd find this film. She hoped —no, she knew—I'd perceive the similarities between Anna's unexplained tale and her own. (Even their names were virtually identical.) And she was confident I'd explain it to the others, not only that she'd planned this departure but that she wanted us to move on with our lives, with dancing barefoot with a wineglass, with shouting off of mountaintops ("Living Italian-Style," as Dad was fond of saying, though being Swiss-born it was violently against nature for him to follow his own advice).

  "L'Avventura," Dad said, "has the sort of ellipsis ending most American audiences would rather undergo a root canal than be left with, not only because they loathe anything left to the imagination—we're talking about a country that invented spandex—but also because they are a confident, self-assured nation. They know Family. They know Right from Wrong. They know God—many of them attest to daily chats with the man. And the idea that none of us can truly know anything at all —not the lives of our friends or family, not even ourselves—is a thought they'd rather be shot in the arm with their own semi-automatic rifle than face head on. Personally, I think there's something terrific about not knowing, relinquishing man's feeble attempt to control. When you throw up your hands, say, 'Who knows?' you can get on with the sheer gift of being alive, rather like the paparazzi, the puttane, the cognoscenti, the tappisti. . ." (Around here, I always tuned Dad out, because when he went on in Italian he was like a Hell's Angel on a Harley; he loved to go fast and loud an
d for everyone to stop in the streets and stare at him.)

  By now, it was after 6:00 P.M. The sun was loosening its grip on the lawn and frilly black shadows had collapsed all over my bedroom floor like skinny widows killed with arsenic. I rolled off the bed, putting the folder and photo of punk-rocked Hannah in the top left desk drawer (where I also kept her Charles Manson paperback). I considered calling Milton, telling him everything, but then I heard the Volvo swerving down the driveway. Moments later, Dad was in the hall.

  I found him by the front door, which he hadn't closed because he was reading the front page of South Africa's Cape Daily Press.

  "You've got to be kidding me," he muttered disgustedly, "poor disorganized fools—when will the madness—no, it wont end, not until they educate—but it's possible, crazier things have happened . . ." He glanced at me, a dour expression on his face, before returning to the article. "They're slaughtering more rebels in the D.R.C., sweet, some five hundred — "

  He looked at me again, startled. "What's the matter? You look exhausted."

  He frowned. "Are you still not sleeping? I went through quite a nasty period of insomnia myself, Harvard '74—"

  "I'm fine."

  He studied me, about to argue, then decided against it. "Well, never fear!" With a smile, he folded the newspaper. "Remember what we're doing tomorrow or have you forgotten our bid for a day of repose? The great Lake Pennebaker!"

  I had forgotten; Dad had been planning the day trip with all the excitement of Britain's Captain Scott planning the world's first expedition to the South Pole, hoping to beat Norway's Captain Amundsen in the process. (In Dad's case, he hoped to beat the retirees so he'd be first in line for a paddle-boat and a picnic table in the shade.)

  "A lake excursion," he went on, kissing me on the cheek before picking up his briefcase and moving down the hall. "I must say I'm stirred by the idea, especially since we'll be catching the tail end of the Pioneer Crafts Fair. I think you and I both require an afternoon in the sun, to take our minds off the flabby state of the world —though something tells me when I see the onslaught of RVs I'll realize I'm not in Switzerland anymore."

  29

  Things Fall Apart

  By Monday morning, I hadn't slept a wink, having spent Saturday night and most of Sunday reading all 782 pages of The Evaporatists (Buddel, '1980), a biography about Boris and Bemice Pochechnik, husband-and-wife Hungarian grifters who, some thirty-nine times, staged their deaths and rebirths under aliases with the meticulous choreography and grace of the Bolshoi Ballet doing Swan Lake. I'd also re-examined disappearance statistics in the Almanac of American Strange Habits, Tics and Behaviors (1994 éd.), learning that while two out of every thirty-nine adults who absconded from their lives did so out of "sheer boredom" (99.2 percent of these were married, the ennui a result of a "lackluster spouse"), twenty-one out of the thirty-nine did so because of heat, the "iron-cleated sole of the law descending quickly upon them"; they were criminals—petty crooks, con artists, embezzlers and felons. (Eleven out of thirty-nine did so due to drug addiction, three out of thirty-nine because they were "made" and fleeing the Italian or Russian mobs and two for unknown reasons.)

  I'd also finished The History of Lynching in the American South (Kittson, 1966), and it was in that book I'd made my most exciting discovery: popular among Georgia slave owners and later re-emerging during the second founding of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915, there was an effective hanging technique supposedly invented by Judge Charles Lynch himself, nicknamed "The Flying Demoiselle" due to the "quick soaring motion of the body as it is yanked into the air" (p. 213). "This method stayed popular due to its convenience," the author Ed Kittson writes on p. 214. "A man with sufficient musculature could hang someone single-handedly, without the assistance of a mob. The noose and pulley is detailed but easy to learn with practice: a type of running bowline, tightening under strain, usually a Honda Knot, coupled with a Logger's Hitch, around a strong tree limb. Once the victim is pulled three to six feet into the air depending on the slack, the Logger's Hitch tightens and holds like a constrictor knot. Some thirty-nine lynchings transpired in this manner in 1919 alone." The accompanying Visual Aid featured a lynching postcard— "common souvenirs in the Old South"—and written along the edge, was "1917, Melville, Mississippi: 'Our Flying Demoiselle / his body soars, his soul goes to hell' " (p. 215).

  Enthused by this illuminating development, during second period Study Hall I opted to blow off Operation Barbarossa in my AP World History textbook, Our Life, Our Times (Clanton, 2001 ed.) opting instead to tackle Death Codes (Lee, 1987), a gory little paperback I'd brought from Dad's library penned by Franklin C. Lee, one of L.A.'s greatest private snoopers, which I'd started reading during first period. ("Blue! Why are you sitting in the back?" Ms. Simpson had demanded in AP English, visibly aghast; "Because I'm solving a homicide, Ms. Simpson, because no one else will get off their ass and do it for me," I'd wanted to shout—but didn't, of course; I said there was a glare on the dry-erase board and I couldn't see from my usual seat.) Dee and Dum, by the Hambone Bestseller Wish List, had just started their daily round of gossip, egged on by their accomplice, Little Nose Hemmings—Mr. Fletcher with The Ultimate Crossword Omnibus (Johnson éd., 2000) once again turning a blind eye —and I was just about to stalk over and tell them to shut their mugs (it was incredible, the resolve crime-solving gave a person) when I began to eavesdrop on their conversation.

  "I heard Evita Perôn telling Martine Filobeque in the Teacher's Lounge she thinks the Hannah Schneider suicide verdict's a load of dung," reported Little Nose. "She said she knew for a fact Hannah didn't commit suicide."

  "What else?" said Dee, narrowing her eyes suspiciously.

  "Nothing—they noticed me standing by the photocopier and that was the end of their conversation." Dee shrugged, looked uninterested and calmly studied her cuticles. "I'm all sick of talking about Hannah Schneider," she said. "Total media overexposure."

  "She's out like carbs," explained Dum with a nod.

  "Besides, when I told my mom some of the films we'd been watching in her class, movies that were totally black marketed to us, never on the syllabus, Mom wigged. She said it was obvious the woman was captain of team nutjob, totally schizophrenical —"

  "Mixed up," translated Dum, "all jumbled inside—"

  "Natch, mom wanted to launch a complaint with Havermeyer, but then she figured the school's been through enough. Admissions applications are in a downward spiral."

  Little Nose wrinkled her nose. "But don't you wanna know what Eva Brewster was talking about? She must know a secret."

  Dee sighed. "I'm sure it's something along the lines of Schneider pregnant with Mr. Fletcher's child." She raised her head, throwing a grenade-gaze at the poor, unwitting bald man across the room. "It was going to be a carnie." She giggled. "The world's first living crossword omnibus."

  "They were going to name it Sunday Times if it was a boy," said Dum.

  The twins erupted into squealish laughter and slapped each other five.

  After school, standing outside of Elton, I watched Perôn making her way to the Faculty Parking Lot (see "Leaving Madrid, June 15, 1947," Eva Duarte Peron, East, 1963, p. 334). She wore a short, dark purple dress with matching pumps, thick white tights and carried an enormous stack of manila folders. A lifeless beige sweater was knotted around her waist, about to fall off, one of the arms dragging on the ground like a hostage being hauled away.

  I was a little afraid, but I made myself go after her. (" 'Keep tightening the screws on those chippies,' " entreated Private Peeper Rush McFadds to his partner in Chicago Overcoat [Bulke, 1948].)

  "Ms. Brewster."

  She was the kind of woman who, when hearing someone shout her name, didn't turn around but continued to charge forward as if riding a moving platform on an airport concourse.

  "Ms. Brewster!" I caught up to her at her car, a white Honda Civic. "I was wondering if we could talk."

  She slammed the door to the backseat where
she'd placed the folders and opened the driver's seat door, brushing her mango-colored hair off her face.

  "I'm late for a spin class," she said.

  "It won't take long. I—I'd like to make amends."

  Her blue eyes pounced on me. (It was probably the same daunting stare she gave Colonel Juan, when he, along with the other flabby Argentine bureaucrats, voiced a lack of enthusiasm for her latest great idea, the joint Peron-Perôn ballot for the 1951 election.)

  "Shouldn't it be the other way around?" she asked.

  "I don't care. I wanted you to help me with something." She checked her watch. "I can't right now. I'm due at Fitness Exchange—" "It doesn't have anything to do with my Dad, if that's what you're worried about."

  "What's it have to do with?"

  "Hannah Schneider."

  She widened her eyes—evidently that topic was even less favorable than Dad—and she pushed the car door wider so it hit my arm.

  "You shouldn't be worrying about that stuff," she said. Struggling against the purple dress, which had the effect on her legs of a narrowed napkin ring, she heaved herself into the driver's seat. She jingled her car keys (on the key-chain, a bright pink rabbit's foot), jamming one in the ignition quickly, like she was knifing someone. "You want to talk to me tomorrow I'll be here. Come to the office in the morning, but right now I do have to go. I'm late." She leaned forward, grabbing the handle to slam the door, but I didn't move an inch. The door hit my knees.