Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  At this point, I felt as if I was drowning in the shadowed floats and the holdfasts and the Blood Henry Starfish clinging to the overhead lamp, but I told myself to take a deep breath, remember I couldn't believe all or any of what she said —not necessarily. Much of what Jade swore by, when she was drunk or sober, could be trapdoors, quicksand, trompe l'oeil, the hoax of light as it speeds through the air at a variety of temperatures.

  I'd made the mistake of taking her words at face value for the first and last time when she confided to me how much she "hated" her mother, was "dying" to go live with her father, a judge in Atlanta, who was "decent" (despite having run off some four years prior with a woman she simply referred to as Meathead Marcy, about whom little was known, except that she was a paralegal with full-sleeve tattoos) and then, not fifteen minutes later, I watched her pick up the phone to call her mother, who was still in Colorado, happily trapped in some avalanche of a love affair with the ski instructor.

  "But when are you coming home? I hate being looked after by Morella. I need you for my proper emotional development," she said tearfully, before noticing me, shouting, "What the fuck are you looking at?" and slamming the door in my face.

  Though lovable (her signature tic, that absentminded way of blowing her hair out of her face couldn't be surpassed in charm by Audrey Hepburn), also blessed with the enviable properties of a mink coat—graceful, unreasonable and impractical no matter what she was draped over, whether it be couches or people (a quality that didn't diminish even when she was marginally torn and tatty, as she was now)—Jade was nevertheless one of those people whose personality proved to be the bane of modern mathematicians. She was neither a flat nor a solid shape. She showed no symmetry at all. Trigonometry, Calculus and Statistics all proved useless. Her Pie Chart was a muddle of arbitrary wedges, her Line Graph, the silhouette of the Alps. And just when one listed her under Chaos Theory—Butterfly Effects, Weather Predictions, Fractals, Bifurcation diagrams and whatnot—she showed up as an equilateral triangle, sometimes even a square.

  Now she was on the floor with her filthy feet over her head, demonstrating a Pilâtes exercise that she explained, "made more blood flow along the spinal cord." (Somehow this translated into living longer.) I downed my glass of egg-nog.

  "I say we go to her classroom," she said in a keyed-up whisper. She swung her skinny legs back onto the carpet in the fast, violent movement of a guillotine. "We could take a look around. I mean, it's not completely insane to imagine that she'd keep evidence in her classroom."

  "Evidence of what?" "I told you. Murder. She killed that Smoke person." I took a deep breath. "Criminals put things where people are the least likely to look, right?"

  she asked. "Well, who'd think to look in her classroom?" "We would." "We find something? Then we know. Not that it means anything. I

  mean, giving her the benefit of the doubt, maybe Smoke had it coming to

  him. Maybe he clubbed seals." "Jade — " "We don't find anything? Who cares? No harm, no foul." "We cannot go to her classroom." "Why not?" "Any number of reasons. One, we might get caught and kicked out of

  school. Two, it makes no logical sense— "

  "Oh, fuck off!" she shouted. "Can you forget your fucking stellar college career for once and have a good time? You're a fucking drag!" She looked furious, but then almost immediately, the anger slipped off her face. She sat up, an inchworm smile. "Just think, Olives," she whispered. "We have a higher cause. Undercover investigations. Recon work. We could end up on the news. We could be America's fucking sweethearts."

  I stared at her. " 'Once more unto the breach, dear friends/ " I said. "Good. Now help me find my shoes."

  Ten minutes later, we were scurrying down the hall. Hanover had an old accordion floor, wheezing flat notes with every step. We pushed open the door, rushed down the hollow stairwell, outside into the cold, down the sidewalk trickling in front of the courtyard and Love. Stalactites of shadow grew around us, making Jade and me instinctively pretend we were nineteenth-century schoolgirls pursued by Count Dracula. We shivered and leaned into each other tightly, pretzeling our arms. We began to run, her hair splashing against my bare shoulder and face.

  Dad once noted (somewhat morbidly, I thought at the time) that American institutions would be infinitely more successful in facilitating the pursuit of knowledge if they held classes at night, rather than in the daytime, from

  8:00 P.M. to 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. As I ran through the darkness, I understood what he meant. Frank red brick, sunny classrooms, symmetrical quads and courts —it was a setting that mislead kids to believe that Knowledge, that Life itself, was bright, clear and freshly mowed. Dad said a student would be infinitely better off going out into the world if he/she studied the periodic table of elements, Madame Bovary, the sexual reproduction of a sunflower, for example, with deformed shadows congregating on the classroom walls, silhouettes of fingers and pencils leaking onto the floor, gastric howls from unseen radiators and a teacher's face not flat and faded, not delicately pasteled by a golden late afternoon, but serpentine, gargoyled, Cyclopsed by the inky dark and feeble light from a candle. He/she would understand "everything and nothing," Dad said, if there was nothing discernible in the windows but a lamppost mobbed by blaze-crazy moths and darkness, reticent and unfeeling, as darkness always was.

  Two tall pines somewhere to our left inadvertently touched branches,

  the sound of a madman's prosthetic limbs. "Someone's coming!" Jade whispered. We raced down the hill, past silent Graydon, and the basement of Love

  Auditorium, and Hypocrite's Alley, where the music classrooms with their long windows were vacant and blind like Oedipus after he hollowed out his eyes.

  "I'm scared," she whispered, tightening her grip on my wrist. "I'm terrified. And freezing." "Have you seen School of Hell?" "No." "Serial killer's a Home Ec teacher." "Ow." "Baking 203. Bakes the students into soufflés. Isn't that sick?" "I stepped on something. I think it went through my shoe." "We have to hurry, Retch. We can't get caught. We'lldie." She broke away from me and skipped up the steps of Loomis, yanking on

  the doors covered with dark, leafy announcements for Mr. Crisp's production of The Bald Soprano (Ionesco, 1950). They were locked. "We'll have to go in another way," she whispered excitedly. "Through the

  window. Or the roof. I wonder if there's a chimney. We'll pull a Santa, Retch.

  A Santa."

  She grabbed my hand. Taking cues from movies featuring cat burglars and silent assassins, we circled the building, crunching through the shrubs and pine needles, trying the windows. Finally, we found one that wasn't latched, which Jade forced open into a narrow space of inward-leaning glass leading into Mr. Fletcher's Driver's Ed classroom. She slipped through the opening easily, landing on one foot. As I went through, I skinned my left shin on the window catch, my stockings ripped, and then I crashed onto the carpet, hitting my head on the radiator. (A poster on the wall featuring a kid wearing braces and a seat belt: "Always Check Your Blind Spot, on the Road and in Life!")

  "Move it, slowpoke," Jade whispered and disappeared through the door.

  Hannah's classroom, Room 102, was located at the very end of the root-canal hallway, a Casablanca poster taped to the door. I'd never been in her classroom before, and inside, when I opened the door, it was surprisingly bright; yellow-white floodlight from the sidewalk outside radiated through the wall of windows, X-raying the twenty-five or thirty desks and chairs and flinging long, skeletal shadows across the floor. Jade was already perched cross-legged on the stool at the front desk, one or two of the drawers hanging open. She paged intensely through a textbook.

  "Find any smoking guns?" I asked. She didn't answer, so I turned and walked down the first row of desks, staring up at the row of framed movie posters on the walls (Visual Aid 14.0).

  In total, there were thirteen, including the two in the back by the bookshelf. Maybe it was because of the eggnog, but it only took a minute to realize how odd the posters were —n
ot the fact that every one was foreign, or an American movie in Spanish, Italian or French, or even that they were each spaced some three inches apart and straight as soldiers, a level of exactitude you learned never to expect from the Visual Aids caking the walls of a classroom, not even one of Science or Mathematics. (I went up to II Caso Thomas Crown, moved back the frame and saw, around the nail, distinct pencil lines, where she'd made the measurements, the blueprint of meticulousness.)

  With the exception of two (per un Pugno di Dollari, Fronte del Porto), all the posters featured an embrace or kiss of some kind. Rhett was there grasping Scarlett, sure; and Fred holding onto Holly and Cat in the rain (Colazione da Tiffany); but there was also Ryan O'Neal Historia del Amoring with Ali MacGraw; Charlton Heston clutching Janet Leigh, making her head fall at an uncomfortable angle in La Soif du Mal; and Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr getting a great deal of sand in their bathing suits. In a funny way too, I noticed—and I didn't think I was getting too carried away—the way the woman was positioned in each of the posters, it could very well have been Hannah embraced from there to eternity. She had their same fine china bones, their hairpin, coastal-road profiles, the hair that tripped and fell down their shoulders.

  It was surprising, because she'd never struck me as the dizzy type to surround herself with firework displays of untold passion (as Dad called it, a "big to-don't"). That she'd so meticulously assembled these Coming Attractions that had come and gone—it made me a little sad.

  "Somewhere in a woman's room there is always something, an object, a detail, that is her, wholly and unapologetically," Dad said. "With your mother, of course, it was the butterflies. Not only could you ascertain the extreme care she took in preserving and mounting them, how much they meant to her, but each one shed a tiny yet persistent light on the complex woman she was. Take the glorious Forest Queen. It reflects your mother's regal bearing, her fierce reverence for the natural world. The Clouded Mother of Pearl? Her maternal instinct, her understanding of moral relativism. Natasha saw the world not in blacks or whites, but as it really is—a decidedly dim landscape. The Mechanitis Mimic? She could impersonate all the greats, from Norma Shearer to Howard Keel. The insects themselves were her in many ways—glorious, heartbreakingly fragile. And so you see, considering each of these specimens, we end up with —if not your mother precisely—at the very least, a close approximation of her soul."

  I wasn't sure why, at this moment, I thought of the butterflies, except that these posters seemed to be the details that were Hannah, "wholly and unapologetically." Maybe Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr getting sand in their bathing suits were her ardor for living coupled with a passion for the sea, the origin of all life, and Bella di giorno featuring Catherine Deneuve with her mouth hidden, was her need for shiftiness, secrets, Cottonwood.

  "Oh, God," Jade said behind me. She threw a thick paperback into the air and it fluttered, crashing against the window.

  "What?"

  She didn't say anything, only pointed at the book on the floor, her breathing exaggerated. I walked over to the windows and picked it up.

  It was a gray book with the photograph of a man on the front, its title in orange letters: Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night: The Life of Charles

  Milles Manson (Ivys, 1985). The cover and pages were extremely tattered.

  "So?" I asked.

  "Don't you know who Charles Manson is?"

  "Of course."

  "Why would she have that book?"

  "A lot of people have it. It's the definitive biography."

  I didn't feel like going into the fact that J had the book too, that Dad included it on the syllabus for a course he'd last taught at the University of Utah at Rockwell, Seminar on Characteristics of a Political Rebel. The author, Jay Burne Ivys, an Englishman, had spent hundreds of hours interviewing assorted members of the Manson Family, which, in its heyday, included at least one hundred and twelve people, and thus the book was remarkably comprehensive in Parts II and III explaining the origins and codes of Manson's ideology, the daily activities of the sect, the hierarchy (Part I entailed a fastidious psychoanalysis of Manson's difficult childhood, which Dad, not being a Freud aficionado, found less effective). Dad addressed the book, juxtaposed with Miguel Nelson's Zapata (1989), for two, sometimes three classes under the lecture title "Freedom Fighter or Fanatic?" "Fifty-nine people who encountered Charles Manson during his years living in Haight-Ashbury went on the record saying he had the most magnetic eyes and most stirring voice of any human being they'd ever encountered," Dad boomed into the microphone at the lectern. "Fifty-nine different sources. So what was it? The It-factor. Charisma. He had it. So did Zapata. Guevara. Who else? Lucifer. You're born with, what? That certain je ne sais quoi, and according to history, you can move, with relatively little effort, a group of ordinary people to take up guns and fight for your cause, whatever cause it is; the nature of the cause actually matters very little. If you say so —if you toss them something to believe in—they'll murder, give their lives, call you Jesus. Sure, you laugh, but to this day, Charles Manson receives more fan mail than any other inmate in the entire U.S. penitentiary system, some sixty thousand letters per year. His CD, Lie, continues to be a mover on Amazon .com. What does that tell us? Or, let me rephrase that. What does that tell us about us?"

  "There's no other book in here, Gag," Jade said in a nervous voice. "Look." I walked over to the desk. Inside the open drawer were a pile DVDs, All

  the Kings Men, The Deer Hunter, La Historia Oficial, a few others, but no

  books. "I found it in the back," she said. "Hidden." I opened the shabby cover, flipped through a few pages. Maybe it was the

  stark light in the room, slashing and deboning everything, including Jade (her emaciated shadow fell to the floor, crawled toward the door), but I felt genuine chills skidding down my neck when I saw the name written in faded pencil in the upper corner of the title page. Hannah Schneider.

  "It doesn't mean anything," I said, but noticed, with surprise, I was trying

  to convince myself. Jade's eyes widened. "You think she wants to kill us?" she whispered. "Oh, please." "Seriously. We're targets because we're bourgeois." I frowned. "What is it with you and that word?" "It's Hannah's word. Ever noticed when she's drunk everyone's a pig?" "She's just kidding," I said. "Even my Dad jokes about that sometimes."

  But Jade, her teeth bricked into a tiny wall, grabbed the book from my hands and started furiously spinning through the pages, stopping at the black-andwhite photographs in the middle, tilting them so they caught the light. " 'Charles called Susan Atkins Sexy Sadie,' " she read slowly. "Ew. Look how freaky this woman looks. Those eyes. Honestly, they kind of look like

  Hannah's—"

  "Stop it," I said, snatching the book from her. "What's the matter with you?"

  "What's the matter with you?" Her eyes were narrowed, tiny incisions. Sometimes, Jade had a very severe way of looking at you that made you feel as if she was a 1780 sugarcane plantation owner and you, the branded slave on the Antiguan auction block who hadn't seen your mother and father in a year and probably never would again. "You miss your coupon, is that it? You want to give birth to food stamps?"

  At this point, I think we would have broken into an argument, which would have ended with me fleeing the building, probably in tears, her laughing and shouting a variety of names. The terrified look on her face, however, caused me to turn and follow her stare out the windows.

  Someone was walking down the sidewalk toward Loomis, a heavy-set figure wearing a bulging, bruise-colored dress. "It's Charles Manson," Jade whimpered. "In drag." "No," I said. "It's the dictator."

  In horror, we watched Eva Brewster move to the front doors of Loomis, yanking on the handles before turning and walking out onto the lawn by the giant pine tree, shading her eyes as she peered into the classroom windows.

  "Oh, fuck me," said Jade.

  We leapt across the room, to the corner by the bookshelf where it was pitch black (under Ca
ry and Grace, as it so happened, Caccia al ladro). "Blue!" Eva shouted. The sound of Evita Perôn shouting one's name could make anyone's heart lurch. Mine thrashed like an octopus thrown to the deck of a ship.

  uBlue!’

  We watched her come to the window. She wasn't the most attractive woman in the world: she had a fire-hydrant's bearing, hair the fluffy texture of home insulation and dyed a hideous yellow-orange, but her eyes, as I'd observed once in the Main Office in Hanover, were shockingly beautiful, sudden sneezes in the dull silence of her face—big, wide-set, in a pale blue that tiptoed toward violet. She frowned now and deliberately pressed her forehead to the glass so it became one of those Ramshell Snails feeding on the side of aquariums. Although I was petrified and held my breath and Jade dug her nails into my right knee, the woman's puffy, slightly blued face, flanked by large, garish pine-cone earrings, didn't look particularly angry or devious. Frankly, she appeared more frustrated, as if she'd come to the window with the express hope of glimpsing the rare Barkudia Skink, the limbless lizard notorious among the reptilian elite as something of a Salinger, gallingly incommunicado for eighty-seven years, and now it was choosing to stay hidden under a moist rock in the exhibit, ignoring her no matter how many times she shouted, tapped on the glass, waved shiny objects or took flash pictures.

  "Blue!" she called again, a little more emphatically, craning her neck to glance over her shoulder. "Blue!"

  She muttered something to herself, and hurried around the corner of the building, ostensibly to search the opposite side. Jade and I couldn't move, our chins conjoined to our knees, listening for the footsteps that reverberate down the linoleum asylum corridors of one's most terrifying dreams.