Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“Maybe he was doing shots,” said Jade.

“I wish the article said more about the autopsy.”

Hannah spun around from the coffee table, where she’d just placed the tray of oolong tea.

“For God’s sake! Stop it!”

There was a long silence.

I find it difficult to sufficiently describe how strange, how disconcerting her voice was in that moment. It was neither outright angry (though anger was certainly in there somewhere) nor exasperated, neither weary nor bored, but strange (with the “a” of that word drawn out in “ayyy”).

Without saying anything more, head down, her hair quickly falling over the sides of her face like a curtain when a magic trick goes wrong, she vanished into the kitchen.

We stared at each other.

Nigel shook his head, stunned. “First she gets sloshed at Hyacinth Terrace. Now she just snaps —?”

“You are a fucking asshole,” said Charles through his teeth.

“Keep your voices down,” Milton said.

“Hold on, though,” Nigel went on excitedly. “That was exactly what she did when I asked her about Valerio. Remember?”

“It’s Rosebud again,” Jade said. “Smoke Harvey’s another Rosebud. Hannah has two Rosebuds—”

“Let’s not get graphic,” said Nigel.

“Shut the fuck up,” said Charles angrily. “ All of you, I—”

The door thumped and Hannah emerged from the kitchen carrying a platter of sirloin steaks.

“I’m sorry, Hannah,” Nigel said. “I shouldn’t have said that. Sometimes I get caught up in the drama of a situation and I don’t think about how it sounds. How it might hurt someone. Forgive me.” His voice I thought a little hollow and bland, but he went over with rave reviews.

“It’s okay,” Hannah said. And then her smile appeared, a promising little towrope for all of us to grab onto. (You wouldn’t be surprised at all if she said, “When I lose my temper, honey, you can’t find it anyplace,” or “It’s the kissiest business in the world,” one hand poised in the air, holding an invisible martini.) She brushed Nigel’s hair off his forehead. “You need a haircut.”

We never mentioned Smoke Wyannoch Harvey, age 68, around her again. And thus concluded his Lazarus-like resurrection, fueled by her boozey Hyacinth Terrace monologue, our If Onlys and Might Have Dones. Out of empathy for Hannah (who, as Jade said, “must feel like a person who killed someone in a car accident”) we tactfully returned the Great Man — a latter-day Greek hero, I liked to imagine, an Achilles, or an Ajax prior to going mad (“Dubs lived the lives of a hundred people, all at once,” Hannah had said, baton-twirling that dessert spoon expertly in her fingers like a late-night Swingin’ Door Suzie) — to that unknown place people go when they die, to silence and ever afters, to cursivy The Ends materializing out of black-and-white streets and his-and-her deliriously happy faces pressed together against a soundtrack of scratchy strings.

Rather, we returned him there for the time being.

I’d like to make a minor adjustment to Leo Tolstoy’s oft-quoted first sentence: “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and when it comes to the Holiday Season, happy families can abruptly become unhappy and unhappy families can, to their great alarm, be happy. ”

The Holiday Season was, without fail, a special time for the Van Meers.

Since I was very small, over any December dinner, during which Dad and I cooked our acclaimed spaghetti with meat sauce (J. Chase Lamberton’s Political Desire [1980] and L. L. MacCaulay’s 750-page Intelligensia [1991] were also known to join us), Dad was fond of asking me to explain, in great detail, how my latest school was getting into the Holiday Mood. There was Mr. Pike and his Infamous Yule Log in Brimmsdale, Texas, and Santa’s Secret Shoppe in the Cafeteria Featuring Twisty Rainbow Candles and Crude Jewelry Boxes in Sluder, Florida, the Forty-Eight-Hour Toymaker Village Hideously Vandalized by Spiteful Seniors in Lamego, Ohio, and one appalling recital in Boatley, Illinois, “The Christ Child Story: A Mrs. Harding Musical.” For some reason, this subject made me as sidesplitting as Stan Laurel in a two-reel comedy for Metro in 1918. Within minutes, Dad was in stitches.

“For the life of me,” he said between howls, “I cannot comprehend why no producer has realized its untapped potential as a horror movie, Nightmare of the American Christmas and such. There’s even enormous commercial promise for a number of sequels and television spin-offs. St. Nick’s Resurrection, Part6: The Final Nativity . Or perhaps, Rudolph Goes to Hell with a certain ominous tagline, ‘ Don’t Be Home for Christmas.’”

“Dad, it’s a time of good cheer. ”

“So I am thus inspired to good cheerfully inject fuel into the U.S. economy by purchasing things I don’t need and can’t afford — most of which will have funny little plastic parts that suddenly snap off, rendering them inoperative within weeks — thereby digging myself a debt of elephantine proportions, causing me extreme anxiety and sleepless nights yet, more importantly, arousing a sexy economic growth period, hoisting up droopy interest rates, breeding jobs, the bulk of which are inessential and able to be executed faster, cheaper and with greater precision by a Taiwanese-manufactured central processing unit. Yes, Christabel. I know what time it is.”

Ebenezer had very little criticism and no remarks at all on “the plague of American consumerism,” “corporate gluttons and their Botswana-sized bonuses” (not even a passing allusion to one of his choice social theories, that of the “Tinseled American Dream”) when I detailed how lavishly St. Gallway was celebrating the season. Every banister (even the one in Loomis, Hannah’s banished building) was wrapped in boughs of pine, thick and bristly as a lumberjack’s mustache. Massive wreaths had been posted Reformation-style with what had to be iron spikes to the great wooden doors of Elton, Barrow and Vauxhall. There was a Goliath Christmas tree, and, looping around the iron gates of Horatio Way, white lights blinking like demented fireflies. A brass menorah, staunch and skeletal, flickering at the end of second-floor Barrow stalwartly staved off, as best it could, Gallway’s Christian proclivities (AP World History professor Mr. Carlos Sandborn was responsible for this brave line of defense). Sleigh bells the size of golf balls fell around the handles of Hanover’s main doors and they jingle-sighed every time a kid hurried through them, late for class.

I believe it was the sheer force of the school’s festivities that allowed me to set the uneasiness of the preceding weeks a little bit off to the side, pretend it wasn’t there like a largish stack of unopened mail (which, when finally confronted at a belated date, indicated I’d have to declare bankruptcy). Besides, if Dad was to be believed, the American holidays were a time for “coma-inspired denial” anyway, an occasion of “pretending the working poor, widespread famine, unemployment and the AIDS crisis were simply exotic, tart little fruits that, mercifully, were out of season,” and thus I wasn’t completely responsible for letting Cottonwood, the costume party, Smoke, the unusual behavior of Hannah herself be upstaged by the encroaching cloud of Finals Week, Perón’s used clothing drive (the kid who brought in the most trash bags of clothes won a Brewster’s Gold Ticket, ten points added onto any Final Exam; “Hefty Cinch Sak Lawn and Leaf Bags,” she roared during Morning Announcements, “Thirty-nine gallons!”) and, most dizzying of all, Student Council President Maxwell Stuart’s pet project, the Christmas formal, which he’d rechristened “Maxwell’s Christmas Cabaret.”