Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Beneath a raisined basketball, among nail polish, dead spiders and other junk, I found a faded photograph of Hannah with cropped, spiky red hair and brilliant purple eye shadow painted all the way to her eyebrows. She was singing onstage, a microphone in hand, wearing a yellow plastic miniskirt, beetle-green-and-white-striped tights and a black corset made from either garbage bags or used tires. She was midnote, so her mouth was wide open — you could possibly pop a chicken egg in there and it’d disappear.

“Holy fuck,” Milton said, staring down at the photograph.

I turned it over, but there was nothing written on it, no date.

“It’s her, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Hell yeah, it’s her. Shit.”

“How old do you think she is?”

“Eighteen? Twenty?”

Even with boy-short red hair, clown-like makeup, eyes wincing due to the angry look crashing through her face, she was still gorgeous. (Guess that’s absolute beauty for you: like Teflon, impossible to deface.)

After I found the photograph and looked through the last cardboard box, Milton said it was time for the house.

“Feelin’ good, Olives? On your game?”

He knew about an extra set of keys under the geranium pot on the porch, and jamming the key into the dead bolt, suddenly his left hand reached back and found my wrist, squeezing it, letting go (a bland gesture one did with a stress ball; still, my heart leapt, did an agitated “Ahh,” then fainted).

We crept inside.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t frightening — not in the least. In fact, in Hannah’s absence, the house had taken on the solemn properties of a lost civilization. It was Machu Picchu, a piece of ancient Parthian Empire. As Sir Blake Simbel writes in Beneath the Blue (1989), his memoir detailing the Mary Rose excavation, lost civilizations were never frightening, but fascinating, “reserved and riddle-filled, a gentle testament to the endurance of earth and objects over human life” (p. 92).

After I left a message for Dad telling him I had a ride home, we excavated the living room. In some ways, it was like seeing it for the first time, because without the distractions of Nina Simone or Mel Tormé, without Hannah herself gliding around in her worn-out clothing, I was able to really see things: in the kitchen, the blank notepad and ballpoint pen (BOCA RATON it read in fading gold) positioned under the 1960s phone (the same spot and type of notepad on which Hannah supposedly had scrawled Valerio, though there were no exciting indentations on the page I could shade over with light pencil — as TV detectives do so effectively). In the dining room, the room where we’d eaten a hundred times, there were actually objects Milton and I had never seen before: in the big wooden and glass display case behind Nigel’s and Jade’s chairs, two hideous porcelain mermaids and a Hellenistic Terra-cotta female figure, approximately six inches tall. I wondered if Hannah had just received them as gifts a few days prior to the camping trip, but judging by the thick dust, they’d been there for months.

And then, from the VCR in the living room, I ejected a movie, L’Avventura . It was fully rewound.

“What’s that?” Milton asked.

“An Italian movie,” I said. “Hannah was teaching it in her film class.” I handed it to him and picked up the video box, alone on the coffee table. I scanned the back.

“Laventure?” Milton asked uncertainly, staring down at the tape with his mouth pushed to the side. “What’s it about?”

“A woman who goes missing,” I said. My words made me shiver a little.

Milton nodded and then, with a frustrated sigh, tossed the videotape onto the couch.

We combed the remaining rooms downstairs, but found no revolutionary relics — no drawings of bison, aurochs or stags from flint, wood or bone, no carving of Buddha, no crystal reliquary or steatite casket from the Mauryan Empire. Milton suggested Hannah might have kept a diary, so we made our way upstairs.

Her bedroom was unchanged from the last time I’d seen it. Milton checked her bedside and vanity table (he found my copy of Love in the Time of Cholera, which Hannah had borrowed and never returned) and I did a quick tour of the bathroom and closet, finding those things Nigel and I had exhumed: the nineteen bottles of pills, the framed childhood photos, even the knife collection. The only thing I didn’t find was that other schoolgirl picture, the one of Hannah with the other girl in uniforms. It wasn’t where I thought Nigel had put it — in the Evan Picone shoe box. I looked for it in some of the other boxes along the shelf, but after the fifth one, I gave up. Either Nigel had put it back somewhere else, or Hannah had moved it.

“I’ve lost steam,” Milton said, leaning against the part of Hannah’s bed where I was sitting. He tilted his head back so it was less than an inch from my bare knee. A strand of his black hair actually slipped off his sticky forehead and touched my bare knee. “I can smell her. That perfume she wore.”

I looked down at him. He looked like Hamlet. And I’m not talking about the Hamlets enamored with the language, the ones always thinking ahead to the upcoming sword fight or where to stress the line (Get thee to a nunnery, Get thee to a nunn er y ), not the Hamlet worried about how well his tunic fits or whether he can be heard in the back. I’m talking about the Hamlets who actually start to wonder if they should be, or not be, the ones who are bruised by Life’s Elbows, Kidney Punches, Head Butts and Bites on the Ear, the ones who, after the final curtain, can barely speak, eat or take off their stage makeup with cold cream and cotton balls. They go home and do a lot of staring at walls.

“Goddamn miserable,” he said almost inaudibly to the overhead light. “Guess we should go home. Forget this stuff. Call it a day.”

I let my left hand fall off my bare knee so it touched the side of his face. It had a dampness to it, a humidity of basements. Immediately, his eyes slipped onto me and I must have had an Open Sesame look on my face because he grabbed me and pulled me down onto his lap. His big sticky hands covered both sides of my head like earphones. He kissed me as if biting into fruit. I kissed him back, pretending to bite into peaches and plums — nectarines, I didn’t know. I think I also made funny noises (egret, loon). He gripped my shoulders, as if I were the sides of a carnival ride and he didn’t want to fall out.

I’d imagine it occurred a great deal during excavations.

Yes, I’d wager quite a bit of money that more than a few hips, knees, feet, and bottoms have rubbed up against royal sepulchres in the Valley of the Kings, hearth remains in the Nile Valley, Aztec portrait beakers on an island in Lake Texcoco, that a lot of fast, rabbity sex transpires on Babylonian-dig cigarette breaks and Bog Mummy examination tables.

Because, after a strenuous dig with your trowel, your pickax, you’ve seen that sweaty compatriot of yours from every critical angle (90, 60, 30, 1), also in a variety of lights (flashlight, sun, moon, halogen, firefly) and all of a sudden you’re overwhelmed with the feeling that you under stand the person, the way you understand stumbling upon the lower jaw and all the teeth of Proconsul Africanus meant not only that the History of Human Evolution would be transformed, forever afterward mapped with a little more detail, but also that your name would be up there with Mary Leakey’s. You, too, would be world renowned. You, too, would be entreated to write lengthy articles in Archaeological Britain . You feel as if this person next to you was a glove you’d managed to turn inside out, and you could see all the little strings and the torn lining, the hole in the thumb.