Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Sharp light from the tiki torches cut into the masks, turning even the sweet costumes, the cute black cats and tutu angels into ghouls with buried eyes and dagger chins.

And then, my heart stopped.

On the brick wall, staring out over the crowd, stood a man. He wore a black hooded cloak and a gold mask with a hooked nose. Not a centimeter of human was visible. It was that horrible Brighella mask, worn during carnivals in Venice and Mardi Gras — Brighella, the lascivious villain from the Commedia dell’arte — but the sick thing, the thing that made the rest of the beasts at the party shiver out of focus, was not that the mask was demonic, that it turned eyes to bullet holes, but the fact that it was Dad’s costume. In Erie, Louisiana, June Bug Karen Sawyer had coerced him into participating in her Junior League Halloween Fashion Show and she’d brought the outfit back for him from her trip to New Orleans. (“Is it me or do I look robustly absurd?” Dad had asked when he’d first tried on the velvet robe.) And the figure opposite me, far across the patio, as tall as Dad so he rose out of the crowd like a crucifix, what he wore was identical, down to the bronze color of the mask, the blistered nose, the satin trim around the hood, the tiny fish-eye buttons down the front. The man didn’t move. He seemed to watch me. I could see cigarette cinders in his eyes.

“Retch?”

“I see — my dad—” I managed to say. My heart rolling in my chest, I pushed through the Flintstones, red-faced Rapunzel, squeezing past shoulders and tinseled backs and elbows and stuffed tails stabbing me in the stomach. The wire edge of an angel wing knifed my cheek. “I — excuse me.” I pushed a caterpillar. “Screw you!” it shouted, its bloodshot eyes infected with glitter. I was shoved hard and fell onto the brick, snaring in sneakers and fishnet stockings and plastic cups.

Seconds later, Nigel was crouching next to me. “What a beaatch. I’d shout ‘catfight,’ but I don’t think you want to go there.”

“The man,” I said.

“Hmm?”

“Standing on the wall. A tall man. I — is he there?”

“Who?”

“He’s wearing a mask with a long nose.”

Nigel looked at me, puzzled, but stood up, and I watched his red Adidas sneakers turn in a circle. He bent down again. “I don’t see anyone.”

My head felt as if it were unstitching from my neck. I blinked and he helped me up. “Come on, old girl. Easy does it.” Holding on to his shoulder, I craned my neck around the orange wig, the halo, to catch another glimpse of that face, to be sure, to realize I was only intoxicated, imagining impossible, highly dramatic things — but there were only Cleopatras on the brick wall now, their wide faces sweaty and rainbowed like oil puddles in parking lots: “Haaaaarveeeeey!” one screamed, shrilly, pointing at someone in the crowd.

“We have to get the fuck out of here or we might be trampled,” Nigel said. He tightened his grip on my wrist. I assumed he was going to lead me out into the yard, but instead he was pulling me back inside.

“I have an idea,” he said with a smile.

As a rule, Hannah’s bedroom door remained closed.

Charles once told me she was peculiar about it — she hated people in her “private space”—and, rather incredibly, none of them, in the three years they’d known her, had ever been inside or seen it, except at a passing glance.

I wouldn’t have intruded in a million Ming Dynasties if I hadn’t been tipsy and marginally catatonic after conjuring Dad as Brighella, or if Nigel hadn’t been there, hauling me up the stairs past the hippies and the cavemen, knocking three times on the closed door at the end of the hall. And though I certainly knew it was wrong to take refuge in her bedroom, I also felt, as I removed my shoes—“We don’t want heavy footprints on the carpet,” Nigel said, as he closed and locked the door behind us — that perhaps Hannah herself wouldn’t mind so much, if it was only this once, and besides, it was her fault everyone was so curious about her, so spellbound. If she hadn’t cultivated her own aire de mystère, always being reluctant to answer even the most humdrum of questions, maybe we wouldn’t have gone into her bedroom in the first place — maybe we’d have gone back to the car or even home. (Dad said all criminals have complicated means of rationalizing their aberrant behavior. This twisty logic was mine.)

“I’ll fix you right up,” Nigel said, planting me on the bed and switching on the bedside lamp. He disappeared into the bathroom and returned with a glass of water. Away from the music and ferocious crowd, I realized, with a little wonder, I was much more lucid than I’d thought, and after only a few sips of water, some deep breaths, staring at the starkness of Hannah’s bedroom, I began to come around, feel twinges of what was commonly known in paleontologist circles as “Dig Fever,” a blind, untiring enthusiasm for unearthing the history of life. (It was allegedly experienced by both Mary and Louis Leakey when they first wandered around Oldupai Gorge in the eastern Serengeti Plains of Tanzania, a location that would go on to become one of the most revealing archeological sites in the world.)

Her bedroom walls were beige, without a single picture or painting. The carpet under the bed was preppy green. Considering the rest of her house, muddled with animals, cat hair, oriental wall hangings, handicapped furniture, every National Geographic since 1982, the austere furnishings here were bizarre and, I felt, a definitive sign of something (“A man’s bedroom is direct insight into his character,” wrote Sir Montgomery Finkle in 1953’s Gory Details ). The few pieces of humble furniture — chest of drawers, wooden Quaker chair, a vanity table — had been relegated to the corners of the room as if they’d been punished. The bed was queen sized, neatly made (although where I was sitting it wrinkled), and the comforter (or bedspread, as there was nothing comforting about it) was a thorny blanket the color of brown rice. The bedside table featured a lamp, and on the bottom shelf only a single well-worn book, I Ching, or The Book of Changes . (“There’s nothing more irritating than Americans hoping to locate their inner Tao,” Dad said.) Standing up, I noticed a faint but unmistakable smell hanging in the air, like a flashy guest that refused to go home: men’s musky cologne, the sort of persistent syrup a Miami hunk doused on his trunk-thick neck.

Nigel was having a look around too. He’d stuffed his Zorro mask into his pocket and had a subdued, almost reverential look on his face, as if we’d snuck into a monastery and he didn’t want to disturb nuns at prayer. He crept over to Hannah’s closet and, very slowly, slid open the door.

I was about to follow him — the closet was crowded with clothes, and when he tugged the string to turn on the light, a black pump fell from a shelf piled with shoe boxes and shopping bags — but then, I noticed something I’d never seen in the house before, three framed photographs positioned along the edge of the chest of drawers. They each strictly faced forward like suspects in a police lineup. I tiptoed over to them, but realized immediately they were not the obvious evidence of an extinct species (ex-boyfriend) or Jurassic period (fierce Goth phase) I’d been hoping to discover.

No, they each featured (one in black and white, the others in outdated 1970s colors, Brady Bunch brown, M*A*S*H* maroon) a girl who was presumably Hannah between the ages of, say, nine months and six, and yet the baby with hair like a squirt of icing on its bald cupcake head, the toddler wearing nothing but a diaper, looked nothing like her — not at all. This thing looked portly and red as an alcoholic uncle; if you squinted, it looked like it’d passed out in its crib from too much scotch. Even the eyes were dissimilar. Hannah’s were almond-shaped, and these were the same color, black-brown, but round. I was prepared to accept that maybe these pictures weren’t of Hannah, but a beloved sister — and yet, peering closer, particularly at the one of her at four, sitting atop a fierce Whitman-shaggy pony, the resemblance did surface: the perfect mouth, upper lip fitting with bottom lip like delicate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and as she stared down at the reins held tightly in her fists, that intense yet secret expression.