Marisha Pessl: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

They’d used the same delicate words to describe the same delicate person.

Time and again, Dad handpicked a cute slogan for a person and rudely bumper-stuck it to them for all ensuing conversations (Dean Roy at the University of Arkansas at Wilsonville had been the uninspired “sweet as candy”). Hannah must have heard him say it once when describing my mother. And just as she’d blatantly recited Dad’s favorite quotation to me at the dinner table (happiness, dog, sun) and planted Dad’s favorite foreign film in her VCR (L’Avventura) (Hannah was now dusted, cast in ultraviolet light; I could see Dad’s fingerprints all over her), she had tantalizingly tossed me that phrase, thereby letting bits of her dark secret, the hot one she’d clutched tightly in her hands, fall through her fingers, so that I might see it, follow it like the barest trail of sand. Not even when I was alone with her in the woods did she have the guts ( Mut, in German) to let go of it, throw it all into the air so it showered over our heads, got caught in our hair and mouths.

The truth they’d hidden (Dad with Fifth Symphony ferocity, Hannah messily) that they’d known each other (since 1992, I calculated) in the movie-poster sense of the word (and I’d never know if they were Il Caso Thomas Crown or Colazione da Tiffany or if they’d flossed their teeth next to each other three hundred times), it didn’t garner a gasp from me — not a whimper or wheeze.

I only went back to the moving box and sat on my knees, running my fingers through the velvet splinters, the antennae and forewings and the thoraxes and torn mounting papers and pins, hoping Natasha had left me a code, a suicide letter identifying her traitorous husband just as she’d identified the part of the Red-based Jezebel that indicated it was repugnant to birds — an explanation, a puzzle to pore over, a whisper from the dead, a Visual Aid. (There was nothing.)

By then, my CASE NOTES filled an entire legal pad, some fifty pages, and I’d remembered the photograph Nigel had shown me in Hannah’s bedroom (which she must have destroyed before the camping trip since I’d been unable to find it in the Evan Picone shoe box), the one of Hannah as a girl with the blonde floating away from the camera lens and on the back, written in blue pen, 1973. And I’d driven the Volvo to the Internet café on Orlando, Cyberroast, and matched the gold-lion insignia, which I recalled from the pocket of Hannah’s school uniform blazer, to the crest of a private school on East 81st Street, the one Natasha had attended in 1973 after her parents made her quit the Larson Ballet Conservatory (see www.theivyschool.edu). ( Salvaveritate was their irksome motto.) And after staring for hours at that other photo of Hannah, the one I’d stolen from her garage, Rockstar Hannah of the Rooster-Red Hair, I’d realized why, back in January, when I’d seen her with the madwoman haircut, I’d felt that persistent itch of déjà vu.

The woman who’d driven me home from kindergarten after my mother died, the pretty one in jeans with short red porcupine hair, the one Dad had told me was our next-door neighbor — it had been Hannah.

I cut out pieces of evidence from every other conversation I could remember, gluing them together, awed, but also sickened by the resulting graphic collage (see “Splayed Nude Patchwork XI,” The Unauthorized Biography of Indonesia Sotto , Greyden, 1989, p. 211). “She had a best friend growing up,” Hannah had said to me, cigarette smoke pirouetteing off her fingers, “a beautiful girl, fragile; they were like sisters. She could confide in her, tell her everything under the sun — for the life of me, I can’t remember her name.” “There are people. Fragile people, that you love and you hurt them, and I–I’m pathetic, aren’t I?” she’d said to me in the woods. “Something awful happened in her twenties, a man was involved,” Eva Brewster had said, “her friend — she didn’t go into details, but not a day went by when she didn’t feel guilt over what she’d done — whatever it was.”

Was Hannah the reason Servo and Dad (in spite of their dynamic working relationship) warred with each other — they’d loved (or perhaps it was never anything so grand, simply a case of poorly wired electricity) the same woman? Was Hannah why we moved to Stockton, remorse over her dead best friend who committed suicide from a broken heart, the reason she’d showered me with breathy compliments and squeezed me against her bony shoulder? How was it possible scientists were able to locate the edge of the observable universe, the Cosmic Light Horizon (“Our universe is 13.7 billion light years long,” wrote Harry Mills Cornblow, Ph.D., with astounding confidence in The ABCs of the Cosmos [2003]), and yet mere human beings stayed so fuzzy, beyond all calculation?

Yes, Not Sure, Probably, and Who the Hell Knew were my answers.

Fourteen days after Dad was gone (two days after I received the cordial greeting from Mr. William Baumgartner of the Bank of New York notifying me of my account numbers; in 1993, the year we left Mississippi, it seemed Dad had set up a trust fund in my name) I was downstairs in the storage room off of Dad’s former study, weeding through the shelves piled with damaged stuff, most of it belonging to the owner of 24 Armor Street, though some of it was junk Dad and I had accumulated over the years: matching lamps in mint green, a marble obelisk paperweight (a gift from one of Dad’s worshipful students), a few faded picture books of little consequence ( A Travel Guide to South Africa [1968] by J. C. Bulrich). I happened to push aside a small flat cardboard box Dad had marked SILVERWARE and saw, next to it, wedged in the corner behind a crinkled, jaundiced newspaper (the grimly titled, Rwandan Standard-Times ), Dad’s Brighella costume, the black cloak in a ball, the bronze mask with its peeling paint and fishhook nose sneering at the shelves.

Without thinking, I picked up the cloak, shook it loose and pressed my face into it, a sort of embarrassing, lost thing to do, and immediately, I noticed a distantly familiar smell, a smell of Howard and Wal-Mart, Hannah’s bedroom — that old Tahitian acidic sap, the kind of cologne that barged into a room and held it up for hours.

But then — it was a face in a crowd. You noticed a jaw, eyes or one of those fascinating chins that looked like a needle and knotted thread had been stuck and pulled tightly through the center and you wanted, sometimes were desperate, to glimpse it one last time, but you couldn’t, no matter how hard you fought through the elbows, the handbags, the high-heeled shoes. As soon as I recognized the cologne and the name panthered through my head, it slipped out of sight, drowned somewhere, was gone.

Iknew something screwballed and romantic would happen on Graduation Day, because the morning sky wouldn’t stop blushing over the house and when I opened my bedroom window, the air felt faint. Even the girlish pines, crowded in their tight cliques around the yard, shivered in anticipation; and then I sat down at the kitchen table with Dad’s Wall Street Journal (it still turned up for him in the wee hours of the morning like a john returning to a street corner where his favorite hooker had once strutted her stuff), switched on WQOX News 13 at 6:30 A.M., The Good Morning Show with Cherry , and Cherry Jeffries was missing.

In her place sat Norvel Owen wearing a tight sports jacket the blue of Neptune. He wove his chubby fingers together, and with his face glowing, blinking as if someone were shining a flashlight in his eyes, he began to read the news without a single comment, plea, passing remark, or personal aside about the reason for Cherry Jeffries’ absence. He didn’t even throw out a bland and unconvincing “Wishing Cherry the best of luck,” or “Wishing Cherry a speedy recovery.” Even more astonishing was the show’s new title, which I noticed when the program cut to commercial: The Good Morning Show with Norvel . The Executive Producers at WQOX News 13 had erased the very being of Cherry with the same ease of deleting an eyewitness’ “uhs,” “ers,” and “see heres” out of a top news story in the Editing Room.