Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

What If Dad really wasn’t my dad, for example? What If he’d found me like some penny on a public promenade? What If Hannah was my real mother who’d given me up for adoption because no one wanted to get married in the late eighties; everyone wanted to go roller-skating and wear shoulder pads? Or What If I had a fraternal twin named Sapphire who was everything I wasn’t — gorgeous, athletic, funny and tan with a carefree laugh, blessed not with an Osmium Dad (the heaviest metal known to man) but a Lithium Mom (the lightest) who slaved not as a vagabond professor and essayist, but was simply a waitress in Reno?

Such paranoid What Ifs caused me, on more than a few occasions, to run downstairs into Dad’s study and quietly rummage through his legal pads, his unfinished essays and faded notes for The Iron Grip , to stare at the photographs: the picture of Natasha at the piano, and the one of her and Dad, standing outside on a lawn in front of a badminton net, holding racquets, arms pretzeled, wearing antique outfits and expressions that made them look as if it was 1946 and they’d survived a World War, rather than the year it really was, 1986, and they were surviving the Brat Pack and Weird Al.

These frail photographs cordoned off my past again, made it staunch and impermeable. I did, however, venture asking Dad a few off-hand yet probing questions, and Dad responded with a laugh.

Dad, on Secret Bastard Siblings: “Don’t tell me you’ve been reading Jude the Obscure .”

Milton had no further light to shed on this conundrum — why Hannah had singled me out, why I wasn’t with them when Charles, trying to ascend a jutting rock promontory in order to get a sense of direction, perhaps spot an electrical tower or a skyscraper sign for a Motel 6, “fell down this Grand Canyon sorta thing and started to yell so loud we thought he was bein’ stabbed.” After I finished telling Milton the remainder of my story, which had drooled a little into my confrontation with Jade in Loomis, he only shook his head in bewilderment and said nothing.

By then we were inching down Hannah’s deserted drive.

For lack of a better plan — embarrassingly inspired by Jazlyn Bonnoco’s Fleet Book Evidence (1989) — I suggested to Milton, maybe Hannah wanted us to find a clue in her house, a treasure map or old letters of blackmail and fraud—“something to tell us about the camping trip or her death,” I explained — we decided to peruse her possessions as discreetly as we could. And Milton read my mind: “Let’s start with the garage, huh?” (I suspected we were both afraid to enter the actual house, for fear we’d find some specter version of her.) The wooden one-car garage, standing a decent distance from the house with a flabby roof, crusty windows, looked like a giant matchbox that’d been in someone’s pocket too long.

I’d been worried about what had happened to the animals, but Milton said Jade and Lu, who’d hoped to adopt them, found out they’d gone to live with Richard, one of Hannah’s coworkers from the animal shelter. He lived on a llama farm in Berdin Lake, north of Stockton.

“It’s fuckin’ sad,” Milton said, pushing open the side door to the garage. “Because now they’re gonna be like that dog.”

“What dog?” I asked, glancing at Hannah’s front porch as I followed him inside. There was no POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape on the door, no immediate sign anyone had been there. “Old Yeller?”

He shook his head and switched on the light. Neon light spilled through the hot, rectangular room. There wasn’t space for two tires, much less an entire car , which explained why Hannah always parked the Subaru in front of the house. Heaps of furniture — blistered lamps, injured armchairs, carpets, chairs — not to mention a few cardboard boxes and random camping gear — had been brutally tossed on top of each other like bodies in an open grave.

“ You know,” Milton said, stepping around one of the boxes. “In The Odyssey . The one always waitin’ for his master.”

“Argos?”

“Yeah. Poor old Argos. He dies, doesn’t he?”

“You want to stop, please? You’re making me…”

“What?”

“Depressed.”

He shrugged. “Hey, don’t mind me.”

We dug.

And the longer we dug, through backpacks, boxes, armoires and armchairs (Milton was still fixated on his suitcase-full-of-cash idea, though now he figured Hannah could have stuffed the unmarked bills into seat cushions and goose-down pillows), the more the experience of digging (Milton and I, cast as unlikely Leading Man and Woman) became sort of electrifying.

Scrutinizing those chairs and lamp shades, something began to happen: I started to imagine myself a woman named Slim, Irene or Betty, a dame who wore penciled skirts, a cone bra, had zigzag hair over an eye. Milton was the disillusioned tough-guy with a fedora, bloody knuckles and a temper.

“ Yep , just makin’ sure the old girl didn’t leave us somethin’,” Milton sang cheerfully as he gutted an orange couch cushion with the Swiss Army knife he’d found an hour ago. “No stone unturned. Because I’d hate her to be an Oliver Stone movie.”

I nodded, opening an old cardboard box. “If you end up a well-publicized mystery,” I said, “you no longer belong to yourself. Everyone steals you and turns you into anything they want. You become their cause.”

“Uh huh.” Thoughtfully, he stared down at the cottage-cheesed foam. “I hate open-ended stuff. Like Marilyn Monroe. What the hell happened? Was she gettin’ too close to somethin’ and the president had to shut her up? That seems crazy . That people can just take a life, like it’s—”

“Free fruit.”

He smiled. “ Yeah . But then maybe it was an accident. Stars align a crazy way. Death happens. Could just as well’ve been the lottery or a broken leg. Or maybe she had a thought that she couldn’t go on. We all have thoughts like that, only she decided to act on hers. She forces herself to. Because she thinks that’s what she deserves. And maybe seconds later she knows she was wrong. Tries to save herself. But it’s too late.”

I stared at him, unsure if he was talking about Marilyn or Hannah.

“S’how it always is.” He was setting aside the seat cushion, picking up an ashtray and turning it over, staring at the bottom of it. “You never know if there’s a conspiracy or it’s just how things unravel, the — I don’t know, one of…”

“Life’s hairball pincurves.”

His mouth was open, but he didn’t go on, apparently floored by a Dadism I’d always thought kind of irritating (it was a sentence you could find in his Iron Grip notes if you were patient enough to sit through his handwriting). He pointed at me.

“That’s good, Olives. Very good.”

I criss-crossed, detoured, fell out of the past.

After two hours of searching, although we’d found no direct clue, Milton and I had managed to dig up all kinds of different Hannahs — sisters, cousins, fraternal twins, stepchildren to the one we’d known. There was Haight-Ashbury Hannah (old records of Carole King, Bob Dylan, a bong, tai chi books, a faded ticket to some peace rally at Golden Gate Park on June 3, 1980), Stripper Hannah (I didn’t feel comfortable going through that box, but Milton exhumed bras, bikinis, a zebra-striped slip, a few more complicated items requiring directions for assembly), also Hand Grenade Hannah (combat boots, more knives), also Hannah, Missing Person Possessed (the same folder full of Xeroxed newspaper articles Nigel had found, though he’d lied about there being “fifty pages at least ” there were only nine). My favorite, however, was Madonna Hannah who material-girled out of a sagging cardboard box.