Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

"Hey," she said.

  I stood my ground. (" 'I don't care if they're giving birth, don't let a witness fly the coop,' " ordered Miami Police Detective Frank Waters to his immature partner, Melvin, in The Trouble with Twists [Brown, 1968]. " 'No brush offs. No rain checks. You don't want them to reflect. Surprise a witness and he'll inadvertently send his mother to the slammer.' ")

  "For God's sake, what's the matter with you?" Evita asked with irritation, letting go of the handle. "What's that look—listen, someone dying isn't the end of the world. You're sixteen for Pete's sake. Your spouse left you, you got three kids, mortgages, diabetes—then we'll talk. Concentrate on seeing the forest through the trees. If you want, like I said, we can talk tomorrow."

  She was turning on the charm now: smiling up at me, making sure her voice curled sweetly on the ends like gift-wrap ribbons.

  "You destroyed the only thing I have left of my mother in the world," I said. "I think you can spare five minutes of your time." I stared down at my shoes and did my best to look miserable and melanchôlica. Evita responded only to the descamisados, the shirtless ones. Everyone else was a complicit member of the oligarchy and hence, worthy of imprisonment, blacklisting, torture.

  She didn't immediately respond. She shifted, the vinyl seat moaning beneath her. She pressed the hem of her purple dress over her knees.

  "You know, I was out with the girls," she said in a quiet voice. "I had a few kamikazes at El Rio and I got thinking about your father. I didn't mean—"

  "I understand. Now what do you know about Hannah Schneider?"

  She made a face. "Nothing."

  "But you don't think she committed suicide."

  "I never said that. I don't have a clue what happened." She looked up at me. "You're a strange girl, you know that? Does pa know you're running around, intimidating people? Asking questions?"

  When I didn't respond, she checked her watch again, muttered something about spinning (something told me there was no spin class, no Fitness Exchange, but I had bigger fish to fry), then yanked open the glove compartment, removing a packet of Nicorette gum. She shoved two pieces in her mouth, swung her left then her right leg out of the car, crossing them and making a big to-do about it, like she'd just sat down at the bar at El Rio. Her legs were like giant thick candy canes minus the red stripe.

  "I know what you do. Next to nothing," she said simply. "My only concern was that it didn't seem like her. Suicide, especially hanging yourself—I guess, I could understand pills, maybe—but not hanging."

  She fell silent for a minute, chewing thoughtfully, staring out across the parking lot at the other hot cars.

  "There was a kid couple years back," she said slowly, glancing at me. "Howie Gibson IV. Dressed like a prime minister. Couldn't help it, I guess. He was a fourth and everyone knows sequels don't do well at the box office. Two months into Fall Term his mother found him hanging from a hook he'd put up in his bedroom ceiling. When I found out"—she swallowed, crossed and recrossed her legs —"I was sad. But I also wasn't surprised. His dad, a third, obviously no blockbuster himself, he was always here to pick him up in the afternoon in a big black car and when the boy got in, he sat in the back, like his dad was the chauffeur. Neither of them ever talked. And they drove away like that." She sniffed. "After it happened we opened up his locker and there was all kinds of stuff taped to the door, drawings of devils and upside-down crosses. Actually, he was a pretty talented artist, but let's just say in terms of subject matter, he wasn't going to be designing any Hallmark cards. The point is—you saw signs. I'm not an expert, but I don't think suicide happens out of nowhere."

  She fell silent again, examining the ground, her purple pumps.

  "I'm not saying Hannah didn't have her share of problems. Sometimes she'd stay late and there was no reason for her to—film class, what do you do, you pop in the DVD. I got the feeling she hung around because she needed someone to talk to. And sure, she had a lot of lint in her head. At the beginning of every school year, it was always her last. 'Then I'm getting out, Eva. I'm going to Greece.' 'What're ya gonna do in Greece?' I'd ask. 'Love myself,' she'd say. Oh, boy. Usually I have zero tolerance for that kind of self-help crap. I've never been the type to buy improvement books. You're over forty and you still haven't won friends or influenced people? You're still the poor dad, not the rich dad? Well, I hate to break it to you, but it ain't gonna happen."

  Eva was laughing about this to herself but then, suddenly, the laugh fluttered awkwardly in her mouth and flew away, and she sniffed, staring after it maybe, at the sky and the sun tucked into the trees with a few wispy clouds.

  "There were other things, too," she went on, chewing the Nicorette with her mouth open. "Something awful happened in her twenties, a man was involved, her friend—she didn't go into details, but said not a day went by when she didn't feel guilt over what she'd done—whatever it was. So sure, she was sad, insecure, but vain too. And vain people don't hang themselves. They complain, they whine, make a lot of noise, but they don't string themselves up. It'd ruin their looks."

  She laughed again, this time a pushy laugh, one she probably used on the radio soap opera Oro Blanco, a laugh to intimidate bacon-fingered Radiolandia writers, beef-backed generals, yoke-cheeked compadres. She blew a small bubble and popped it in her teeth, a smacking sound.

  "What do I know? What does anyone know about what goes on in someone's head? In early December she asked to take a week off so she could go to West Virginia, to see the family of that man who drowned at her house."

  "Smoke Harvey?"

  "Was that his name?"

  I nodded and then remembered something. "She invited you to that party, didn't she?" "What party?" "The one taking place when he died." She shook her head, puzzled. "No, I only heard about it afterward. She was pretty upset. Told me she wasn't sleeping at night due to the situation. Anyway, she ended up not taking the vacation. Said she felt too guilty to face the family, so maybe I didn't know the extent of her guilt. I tried telling her you have to forgive yourself. I mean, one time I was asked to watch a neighbor's cat when they went to Hawaii —one of those long-haired jobs straight off a Fancy Feast commercial. Thing hated me. Every time I went into the garage to feed it, it jumped onto the screen door and hung there by its claws like Velcro. One day, by accident, I pressed the button to the garage door. It hadn't gone up three inches before the thing motored out of there. Left track marks. I went outside, searched for hours, couldn't find it. A couple days later, the neighbors came back from Maui and found it flattened on the road, right smack in front of their house. Sure, it was my fault. I paid for the thing. And I felt terrible about it for a while. Had nightmares where the thing was coming after me with rabies—red eyes, claws, the whole shebang. But you have to move on, you know. You have to find your peace."

  Maybe it had to do with her bastardized birth and impoverished Los Toldos upbringing, the trauma of seeing Augustin Magaldi naked at fifteen, shoving to great political heights the wide load of Colonel Juan, the twenty-four-hour workdays at the Secretaria de Trabajo and the Partido Peronista Feminino, looting the National Treasury, stockpiling her closet with Dior— but she had, at some point over the years, become uninterrupted asphalt. Somewhere, of course, there had to be a crack in her where a tiny seed of apple, pear or fig might fall and flourish, yet it was impossible to locate these minuscule fractures. They were constantly being sought and filled.

  "You have to lighten up, kiddo. Don't take it so hard. Adults are complicated. I'm the first to admit—we're sloppy. But it doesn't have anything to do with you. You're young. Enjoy it while it lasts. Because later, that's when things get really tough. The best thing to do is keep laughing."

  One of my pet peeves was when an adult imagined they had to encapsulate Life for you, hand you Life in a jar, in an eyedropper, in a penguin paperweight full of snow—A Collector's Dream. Obviously Dad had his theories, but he always expounded on them with the silent footnote that they weren't answers, per se, but loosely applied s
uggestions. Any one of Dad's hypotheses, as he well knew, applied solely to a smidgin of Life rather than the entire thing, and thinly applied at that.

  Eva checked her watch again. "Now I'm sorry, but I do want to make it to my spin class." I nodded and moved out of the way so she could close the door. She started the engine, smiling at me like I was a tollbooth collector and she wanted me to lift the barrier so she could drive on. She didn't immediately reverse out of her parking space, however. She turned on the radio, some jittery pop tune, and after a second or two of digging through her purse, unrolled the window again.

  "How is he, by the way?"

  "Who?" I asked, even though I knew.

  "Your pa."

  "He's great."

  "Really?" She nodded, tried to look casual and disinterested. Then her eyes inched back over to me. "You know, I'm sorry about that stuff I said about him. It wasn't true."

  "It's okay."

  "No, it isn't. No kid should hear those things. I'm sorry about it." She was giving me the once over, her eyes climbing my face as if it was a jungle gym. "He loves you. A lot. I don't know if he shows it, but he does. More than anything, more than —I don't even know what to call it—his political hooey. We were at dinner once and we weren't even talking about you and he said you were the best thing that ever happened to him." She smiled. "And he meant it."

  I nodded and pretended to be entranced by her left front tire. For some reason, I didn't love discussing Dad with random people who had nectarine hair and careened between insults, compliments, terseness and compassion like a driver three sheets to the wind. Talking about Dad with these kinds of people was like talking about stomachs in the Victorian Age: inappropriate, gauche, a perfectly sound reason to look through them at future assemblies and balls.

  She sighed resignedly when I didn't say anything, one of those adult throw-in-the-hand-towel sighs that indicated they didn't understand teenagers and were delighted those days were far behind them. "Well, take care of yourself, kiddo." She was rolling up the window, but stopped again. "And try to eat something once and a while—you're about to disappear. Have some pizza. And stop worrying about Hannah Schneider," she added. "I don't know what happened to her, but I do know she'd want you to be happy, all right?"

  I smiled stiffly as she waved at me, reversed (her brakes sounded as if they were being tortured), then barreled out of the Faculty Parking Lot, her white Honda the limousine to carry her through the poorest pig-pungent barrios where she'd wave from an unrolled window to the hungry, enchanted people in the streets.

  I'd told Dad he didn't need to pick me up. When Milton drove me home on Friday, we'd arranged to meet at his locker after school and I was now a half hour late. I hurried up the stairs to the third floor of Elton, but the hall was empty apart from Dinky and Mr. Ed "Favio" Camonetti standing in the doorway of his Honors English classroom. (As many people enjoy hearing details of the hot and heavy, I shall quickly mention: Favio was Gallway's hottest male instructor. He had a bronzed, Rock-Hudsony face, was married to a plump nondescript woman who wore pinafores and appeared to think he was just as sexy as everyone else did, though personally, I thought his body resembled an inflated raft suffering from a clandestine pinprick.) They stopped talking as I walked past.

  I walked up to Zorba (where Amy Hempshaw and Bill Chews were vined together in an embrace) and then the Student Parking Lot. Milton's Nissan was still parked in his assigned space, so I decided to check the cafeteria, and when I found no one, Hypocrite's Alley in the basement of Love, the center of St. Gallway's black market, where Milton and Charles sometimes rubbed noses with other frantic students trafficking illegal Unit Tests, Final Exams, Straight-A Student Notes and Research Papers, trading sexual favors for a night with the latest copy of The Tricksters Bible, a 543-page ghostwritten manual on how to swindle one's way through St. Gallway, categorized by teacher and text, method and means. (A few titles: "A Room of One's Own: Taking the Makeup Test," "Toy Story: The Beauty of the TI-82 and the Timex Data Link Watch," "Tiny, Handwritten Diamonds on the Soles of Your Shoes.") As I made my way along the dark corridor, however, peering in the small rectangular windows of the seven musical practice rooms, I saw shady figures huddled in the corners, on piano benches, behind the music stands (no one practicing any musical instruments, unless one counts body parts). Not one was Milton.

  I decided to try the clearing behind Love Auditorium; Milton sometimes went there to smoke a joint between classes. I hurried back up the stairs, through the Donna Faye Johnson Art Gallery (modern artist and Gallway alumnus Peter Rocke '87 was deep in his Mud Period and showing no signs of surfacing), out the backdoor with the EXIT sign, across the parking lot with the scabbed Pontiac parked by the garbage dump (they said it was the jam jar of a long-lost teacher found guilty of seducing a student) quickly making my way through the trees.

  I saw him almost immediately. He was wearing a navy blazer and leaning against a tree.

  "Hi!" I shouted.

  He was smiling, and yet as I neared, I realized he wasn't smiling because he saw me, but at something in the conversation because the others were there too: Jade sitting on a thick fallen branch, Leulah on a rock (holding onto her braided hair as if it were a ripcord), Nigel next to her and Charles on the ground, his giant white cast jutting out of him like a peninsula.

  They saw me. Milton's smile curled off his face like unsticky tape. And I knew immediately, I was a boy band, a boondoggle, born fool. He was going to pull a Danny Zuko in Grease when Sandy says hello to him in front of the T-Birds, a Mrs. Robinson when she tells Elaine she didn't seduce Benjamin, a Daisy when she chooses Tom with the disposition of sour kiwi over Gatsby, a self-made man, a man engorged with dreams, who didn't mind throwing a pile of shirts around a room if he wanted to.

  My heart landslided. My legs earthquaked.

  "Look what the cat dragged in," said Jade.

  "Hi, Retch," Milton said. "How are you today?"

  "What the fuck's she doing here?" asked Charles. I turned to look at him and saw, with surprise, that simply due to my close proximity his face had turned the angry shade of Red Imported Fire Ants (see Insecta, Powell, 1992,

  p. 91). "Hello," I said. "Well, I guess I'll see you late — " "Hold on a minute." Charles had stood up on his good leg and begun to

  hobble toward me, awkwardly, because Leulah was holding one of his crutches. She held it out to him, but he didn't take it. He chose to hobble, as veterans sometimes do, as if there is greater glory in the hobble, the shamble, the limp.

  "I want to have a little talk," he said.

  "Not worth it," said Jade inhaling her cigarette.

  "No, it is. It is worth it."

  "Charles," warned Milton.

  "You're a fucking piece of shit, you know that?"

  "Jesus," Nigel said, grinning. "Take it easy."

  "No, I'm not going to take it easy. I-I'm going to kill her."

  Although his face was red and his eyes bulged from his face in the manner of a Golden Mantella, he was on a single leg, and thus as he leered at me, I wasn't afraid. I knew very well if it came down to it I could push him over with very little force and spirit away before any of them could catch me. At the same time, it was highly unsettling to think I was the reason his features contorted into the wrenched expression of an infant in a delivery room; why his eyes were so narrowed they looked like cardboard slits you stick pennies or dimes into, thereby donating to Kids with Cerebral Palsy, so unsettling that the thought actually crossed my mind maybe I did kill Hannah, maybe I suffered from schizophrenia and had been under the influence of the malevolent Blue, the Blue who took no prisoners, the Blue who ripped people's hearts out and ate them for breakfast (see The Three Faces of Eve). It could be the only reason why he hated me so, why his face was so wounded, scrunched up and bumpy like tire treads.

  "You want to kill her and end up in juvie hall for the rest of your life?" asked Jade.

  "Bad plan," said Nigel.

  "You'd be bett
er off hiring a bounty hunter."

  "I'll do it," said Leulah, raising her hand.

  Jade stubbed out her cigarette on the bottom of her shoe. "Or we could stone her like they do in that short story. When all the townspeople descend and she starts to scream."

  " The Lottery,' " I said, because I couldn't help myself (Jackson, 1948). I shouldn't have said it though, because it made Charles gnash his teeth and jut out his face out even more, so I could see the minute spaces between his bottom teeth, a little white picket fence. I felt his broiler-hot breath on my forehead.

  "You want to know what you did to me?" His hands trembled, and on the word did some of his spit jumped ship, landing somewhere on the ground between us. "You destroyed me — "

  "Charles," said Nigel warily, walking up behind him. "Stop acting like a madman," Jade said. "If you do something to her she'll get you kicked out. Her superhero dad will make sure of it—" "You broke my fucking leg in three places," Charles said. "You broke my heart—"

  "Charles— "

  "And you should know, I think about killing you. I think about stringing you up by your ungrateful little neck, and-and leaving you for dead." He swallowed loudly. It sounded like a rock dropped in a pond. Tears stormed his red eyes. One actually threw itself over the wall, sliding down his face. "Like you did to her."

  "Fuck, Charles— "

  "Stop."

  "She's not worth it."

  "Yeah, man. She's a terrible kisser."

  There was a silence, and then Jade sizzled with laugher. "She is?" Charles instantly stopped crying. He sniffed and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "The worst. She's like kissin' tuna."

  "Tuna?"

  "Maybe it was sardines. Shrimp. I don't remember. I tried to block it from my mind."

  I couldn't breathe. Blood was flooding into my face, as if he hadn't spoken, but kicked me in the face. And I knew it was one of those devastating moments in Life when one had to address one's congress, pull The Jimmy Stuart. I had to show them they were not dealing with a wounded, fearful nation, but an awakened giant. Yet I couldn't retaliate with any old cruise missile. It would have to be a Little Boy, a Fat Man, a gigantic head of cauliflower (bystanders would later claim they saw a second sun) with scorched bodies, the chalky taste of atomic fission in the pilots' mouths. Afterward I might feel regret, probably think the inevitable, "My God, what have I done?" but that never stopped anyone.