Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  "He's gay?" I asked in amazement.

  "Earth to Retch? Hello?" She looked at me as if I were a snag in tights. "You know, sometimes I wonder if you're all there, if you know what I mean. Have you ever gone to a doctor to make sure you have all your furniture upstairs? Because I have serious doubts about it, Gag. I really do."

  Such things as anguish, woe, affliction, guilt, feelings of awfulness and utter wretchedness, the bread and butter of Days of Yore and Russians, sadly have very little staying power in these lickety-split Modern Times.

  One has only to consult the 2002 edition of R. Stanbury's Illuminating Statistics and Cross-Century Comparisons, under "Grieving," to learn that the very idea of being Broken-hearted, Wretched, Desolate and Despairing is a thing of the past, soon to take on the amusing novelty of such archaic things as the Jalopy, the Jitterbug and Jams. The average American widower in 1802 waited an average of 18.9 years before remarrying, while in 2001 he holds out for an average 8.24 months. (In the "By State" snapshot, you will see in California he holds out for a horrifying 3.6 months.)

  Of course, Dad made it his business to rage against this "cultural anesthetizing," this "ironing out of deep human sentiment, leaving only a flat, unwrinkled vacuity," and thus he'd deliberately raised me to be an insightful, sensitive sort of person, someone aware, beneath even the most tedious surfaces, of good, evil and the smoky shades in between. He made sure I took the time between Muders, Ohio, and Paducah, Washington, to commit to memory not one or two, but all of Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience," and thus I couldn't look at a fly buzzing around a hamburger without fretting, "Am not I / A fly like thee? / Or art not thou / A man like me?"

  When I was with the Bluebloods though, it was easy to pretend I hadn't committed anything to memory except the lyrics of a thousand corn syrup R&B songs, that I'd never heard of anyone named Blake except that junior who always had his hands in his pockets and looked like he wanted to hit someone, that I could simply notice a fly and not think anything but shrill girlish expressions (Ew). Naturally, if Dad knew about my attitude, he would've called it "stomach-turning conformity," maybe even "a disgrace to the Van Meers." (It often slipped his mind he was an orphan.) Yet I saw it as thrilling, Romantic, if I allowed the current to take me along the "willowy hills and fields," or wherever it wanted, regardless of the consequences (see "The Lady of Shalott," Tennyson, 1842).

  This was why I had no objections the following slattern Saturday night, November 22, when Jade made an entrance in the Purple Room wearing a black wig and a billowing white pantsuit. Colossal shoulder pads jutted off of her like the White Cliffs of Dover and she'd drawn duomo eyebrows over her eyes with what appeared to be a burnt sienna Crayola crayon.

  "Guess who I am."

  Charles turned to survey her. "Dame Edna."

  " 'I never go out unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. You want The Girl Next Door? Go next door.' " She threw her head back and villain-laughed, falling onto the leather couch, and putting her feet with their big, dinghy-like, black pumps in the air. "Guess where I'm headed."

  "Hell," said Charles.

  She rolled over, sitting up. A clump of wig stuck to her lipstick.

  "The Burns County Animal Shelter cordially invites you to our annual—"

  "Not a chance."

  "—charity soiray—"

  "We can't."

  "-RSVP-"

  "Absolutely not."

  "Rowdy sex very possible."

  "No."

  "I'll go," said Leulah.

  In the end, we couldn't agree on a group costume, so Charles was Jack the Ripper (for blood, Leulah and I doused him with A.1. Steak Sauce), Leulah was a French maid (helping herself to the array of Hermès silk scarves in various equestrian motifs, folded into neat squares in Jefferson's bureau), Milton, refusing to dress up, was Plan B (the ambiguous sense of humor that bubbled up whenever he smoked pot), Nigel was Antonio Banderas as Zorro (he used Jeff's toenail scissors to cut small holes around the rhinestone zzzzzs of her black sleeping mask), Jade was Anita Ekberg of La Dolce Vita replete with stuffed kitten (she duct-taped it to a headband). I was one very unlikely Pussy Galore in shrublike red wig and baggy, teal nylon bodysuit (see "Martian 14," Profiling Little Green Men: Sketches of Aliens from EyewitnessAccounts, Diller, 1989, p. 115).

  We were drunk. Outside, the air was supple and warm as a dance hall girl after her opening number; and in our costumes, we sprinted sloppily across the nighted lawn, laughing at nothing.

  Jade, in her giant conch-shell gown, crunchy with crinolines, ruffles and ribbons, screamed and threw herself against the grass, rolling down the hill. "Where are you going?" shouted Charles. "It started at eight! It's nine-thirty!"

  "Come on, Retch!" shouted Jade.

  I crossed my arms over my chest and hurled myself forward.

  "Where are you?"

  I rolled. Grass needled me and my wig ripped off. Stars catapulted between dull pauses of ground, and at the bottom, the quiet hit me. Jade was lying a few feet away, her face serious and blue. Staring at the stars naturally encouraged one's face to appear serious and blue, and Dad had a variety of theories explaining this phenomenon, the majority of which centered on human insecurity and sobering realizations of absolute smallness when measured against such unfathomable things as the Spiral, the Barred Spiral, the Elliptical and the Irregular Galaxy.

  But I remember, I couldn't recall a single one of Dad's theories at that moment. The black sky, pinpricked with light, couldn't help but show off like Mozart at five. Voices scratched the air, words wobbly and unsure of themselves, and soon Milton was hurtling through the darkness, and Nigel's loafers rocketed past my head, and Leulah fell right next to me with a teacup sound ("Ahh!"). The silk scarf escaped her hair and settled over my neck and chin. When I breathed, it bubbled like a pond when something drowns in it.

  "You bastards!" screamed Charles. "By the time we get there, it'll be over! We need to leave now!"

  "Shut up, Nazi," Jade said.

  "Think Hannah will be mad?" asked Leulah.

  "Probably."

  "She'll kill us," said Milton. He was only a few feet away. When he breathed it was dragon breaths. "Hannah shmanna," Jade said. Somehow, we peeled ourselves off the ground and trekked up the hill to

  the Mercedes, where Charles was waiting in a bad mood wearing Jade's eighth-grade clear plastic raincoat so he didn't get A.1. Steak Sauce all over the driver's seat. I was the smallest, and Jade said it was necessary to take one car, so I acted as the human seat belt across Nigel, Jade and Leulah, who was making babies' feet with her fist in the fogged window. I concentrated on the car light, my big white high heels touching the door handle, the cloud of smoke loitering around Milton's head in the front seat where he smoked one of his joints thick as lipstick.

  "Gonna be messy," he said, "showin' up there unannounced. Not too late to change the plan, friends." "Stop being mind-numbing," Jade said, plucking the joint from his fingers. "We see Evita, we hide. Make like rugs. It'll be fun."

  "Peron won't be there," said Nigel.

  "Why not?"

  "Hannah didn't really invite her. She was lying. She said it just to have a valid reason why we couldn't come." "You're paranoid." Nigel shrugged. "She showed the classic signs of lying. I'd bet my life

  Eva Brewster will not be at the party. And if anyone asks her about it on Monday, she wouldn't have a clue what you're talking about." "You are the spawn of Satan," Jade pronounced, then accidentally bumped her head against the window. "Ow."

  "Want some?" asked Leulah, handing me the joint.

  "Thanks," I said.

  At the risk of protesting too much, I'd become well acquainted with the crafty behavior of both ceilings and floors under the influence of nip, tipple, hooch, booze, jet fuel, grog, zip, ex, pippin, poison and snifter (the Tremble, the Swoop Out of Nowhere, the Apparently Sinking Ship, the Fraudulent Earthquake). Much of the time when I was with them, I was only pretending to take all thos
e superhuman swigs from Milton's silver M.E.B. flask full of his preferred liquid arsenic, Wild Turkey, passed around the Purple Room like a Native American Peace Pipe.

  Unbeknownst to the others, midway through any given evening, I was not, as it appeared, throwing them back with the best of them. "Look. Hurl's deep in thought," Nigel once commented as I stared into space on the couch. I wasn't deep in thought, I was trying to pin down a covert means via which I might dispose of Leulah's latest potion, something she simply called "Claw," a deceitfully clear concoction that charred one's esophagus and entire digestive system. One of my preferred scenarios was walking outside unaccompanied for some "fresh air" and, with the porch light off, stealthily pouring whatever it was down one of Jeff's bronze, open-mouthed lions, final gifts from Andy Warhol in January 1987, a month before he died from complications after a gallbladder operation. Obviously, I could have simply dumped it in the grass, but I found a certain woozy satisfaction in feeding it to the lions, who obediently held their giant mouths open and stared up at me as if hoping with this final batch I'd finish them off. I only prayed Jeff never decided the hulking beasts would look better by the front door; when she uprooted them, she'd drown in a tidal wave of nip, tipple, hooch, booze, jet fuel, poison and snifter.

  Nearly an hour later, we turned down Hannah's driveway. Charles expertly navigated the Mercedes through the corridor of empty cars parked along the road. Frankly, I was surprised he was able to drive so well given his state of impairment (see "Unidentified Fluid," Chapter 4, "Engine Troubleshooting," Automobile Mechanics, Pont, 1997).

  "Don't get a ding," said Jade. "If you get a ding I'm in trouble."

  "She knows more people than we thought," Leulah said.

  "Shit," said Milton.

  "This is perfect," said Jade, clapping her hands. "Absolutely ideal. We'll blend. I just hope we don't see Hannah."

  "You're worried about seeing Hannah?" shouted Charles. "Then we need to go back, because let me give you the heads up, honey bunch! We're going to see her!"

  "Keep your eyes on the road. It's fine." Jade huffed. "It's just. . ." "What?" Charles slammed his foot on the brake. We all went forward and backward together like children on a bus.

  "It's just a party. And Hannah won't really mind. We're not doing anything terrible or anything. Right?"

  Anxiety, Doubt and Uncertainty had unexpectedly stood up in Jade's voice and now they were meandering through it making Helluva Good Time quite nervous.

  "Kind of," said Leulah.

  "No," said Nigel.

  "Could go either way," said Milton.

  "Somebody make a fucking decision!" shouted Charles.

  "Let Gag decide," said Jade. "She's the responsible one."

  To this day, I'm not sure how or why I said what I did. Perhaps it was one of those uncanny occasions when it really isn't you speaking, but Fate, who intervenes every so often to make sure that, rather than your choosing the easy road, recently paved, with clearly labeled street signs and maple trees, she, with the cruelty of drill sergeants, dictators, and office personnel, makes certain you stick to the dark, thorny path she's already laid out for you.

  "We're going in," I said.

  Hannah was a Snowy Egret, and when one heard she was planning a social affair, one couldn't help but expect a Snowy Egret kind of party—flutes of champagne, cigarette holders and a string quartet, people asking each other to dance with delicate rests of cheeks against shoulders and very few clammy palms, adulterous intrigues behind laurel hedges and grandiflora roses—the sort of elegant, whispery affair the Larrabees could host with their eyes closed, the kind Sabrina observed from her tree.

  As we approached the house, however, and saw the weird crowd of animal, vegetable and mineral dribbling through the front yard and across the driveway, Milton suggested we cut into the woods and head to the other side of the house, maybe sneak in the door off the patio where Hannah had a kidney-shaped swimming pool, which she never used.

  "We can still leave if we want to," said Jade.

  We parked the car behind a van and sat in the dark, at the edge of pine trees, watching in the loose light of fourteen tiki torches, some fifty or sixty people crowding Hannah's patio. They all wore surprisingly complicated costumes (ghouls, alligators, devils, the entire crew of the USS Enterprise), those in masks sipping straws in blue and red plastic cups, others eating pretzels and crackers, trying to make themselves heard over the meat-cleaving

  music. "Who're all these people?" asked Charles, frowning. "I don't recognize them," said Jade. "I guess they're friends of Hannah's," said Leulah, "You see her?" "No." "Even if she was here," said Milton, "it'd be impossible to tell which one

  she was. Everyone's wearin' masks." "I'm freezing," said Jade. "We should have masks," Milton said. "That's what the invite said." "Where the fuck are we going to find masks now?" asked Charles. "There's Perôn," said Lu. "Where?" "The woman with the sparkly halo thing." "That's not her." "Seriously," said Jade uneasily, "what are we even doing here?" "You guys can sit here all night," said Nigel, "but I, for one, am going to

  enjoy myself." He was wearing his Zorro mask and his glasses. He looked like

  an erudite raccoon. "Who else wants to have some fun?" For some reason, he was looking at me. "What do you say, old broad? Shall we dance?" I adjusted my wig. We left the others, hurrying across the yard—one nerdy raccoon and an inverted carrot—to Hannah's patio.

  It was jam packed. Four men dressed as rats and a mermaid beauty queen with a half-mask of blue sequins were actually in the swimming pool, laughing, throwing a volleyball. We decided to make our way inside (see "Walking upstream in the Zambezi River during a flood period," Quests, 1992, p. 212). We crammed ourselves into a space between the plaid couch and a pirate talking to a devil oblivious to the repercussions of his massive sweaty back when he suddenly and without warning backed it into two much smaller people.

  For twenty minutes, we didn't do anything but sip vodka out of the red plastic cups and watch the people—none of whom we recognized—crawling, slithering, waddling their way around the room in costumes ranging from the teensy-weensy to the wholly insurmountable.

  "Butterfly hazy!" Nigel shouted, shaking his head.

  I shook my head and he repeated himself.

  "This is totally crazy!"

  I nodded. Hannah, Eva Brewster and the animals were nowhere to be found, only graceless birds, doughy sumo wrestlers, unvelcroed reptiles, a Queen who'd removed her crown and distractedly gnawed on it as her eyes strolled the room, probably searching for a King or Ace to come royally flush her.

  If Dad had been present, he'd undoubtedly have commented that most of the adults present were "dangerously close to relinquishing their dignity" and that it was sad and disturbing, because "they were all searching for something they'd never recognize, even if they found it." Dad was notoriously severe when it came to commenting upon the behaviors of all people other than himself. Yet, watching a mid-forties Wonder Woman stumble backward into Hannah's neat stack of Traveler magazines made me wonder if the very idea of Growing Up was a sham, the bus out of town you're so busy waiting for, you don't notice it never actually comes.

  "What are they speaking?" Nigel shouted in my ear.

  I followed his eyes to the astronaut standing a few feet away. He was holding his pressure helmet, a stocky man with a sideways sigma hairline (X) talking vigorously to a gorilla.

  "I think it's Greek," I said, surprised. ("The language of the Titans, the Oracles, " said Dad. (This last bit apparently meant "the language of heroes.") Dad loved showing off his bizarre aptitude when it came to foreign languages. (He claimed to be fluent in twelve; yet fluent often meant yes and no, plus a few impressive phrases, and enjoyed repeating a certain witticism about Americans and their dearth of language skills: "Americans need to master lingual before they attempt bilingual.")

  "I wonder who that is," I said to Nigel. The gorilla took off its head, revealing a small Chinese woman. She nodded, but answ
ered in some other guttural language that made a person's mouth break-dance. I wasn't even sure I'd heard Greek in the first place. I leaned closer.

  "Aye, Savannah," said Nigel, squeezing my arm.

  "Again," I shouted.

  "I see Hannah."

  He grabbed my hand and yanked me through two Elvises.

  "So where'd you come from?" asked Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii. "Reno," said a very sweaty Elvis on Tour drinking from a blue plastic cup.

  "She went upstairs," Nigel said into my ear, trying to get us past Sodom and Gomorrah, Leopold and Loeb, Tarzan and Jane, who'd just managed to find each other in this jungle and were talking with a great deal of clothing fiddling. I didn't know why Nigel wanted to find Hannah, but midway up, I saw only a six-ton Tyrannosaurus Ex who'd unzipped his costume and sat down on his rubber head.

  "Fuck." "Why do you want to find her?" I shouted, "I thought the — " and just as I turned to look out over the bobbing wigs and masks, I saw her.

  Her face was eclipsed by the brim of a top hat (only a white sliver of chin and red mouth was visible) but I knew it was she, due to the oil and vinegar reaction her presence had with all backdrops, atmospheres and given conditions. The young, the old, the pretty and plain merged to compose some standard room of talking people, but Hannah was permanently separate and distinctive, as if there was always an unmistakable, thin black line drawn around her, or a YOU ARE HERE arrow discreetly floated in her wake reading, SHE is HERE. Or perhaps, due to a certain relationship she had with incandescence, her face exerted a gravitational pull on 50 percent of all the light in the room.

  She was dressed in a tuxedo and heading our way, leading a man up the stairs. She held his left hand as if it was expensive, something she couldn't afford to lose.

  Nigel saw her too. "Who's she dressed as?"

  "Marlene Dietrich, Morocco, 1930. We need to hide."