Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“And then Milton,” Hannah said, her voice sort of caressing his name. “He was involved in that street gang — I can’t remember what it was, something ‘night’—”

“ Mil ton?” I repeated. I saw him immediately: junkyard, leaning against a chain-link fence (he was always swaybacked against something), combat boots, one of those scary nylon scarves in red or black knotted over his head, his eyes tough, his skin faintly rifle colored.

“Yes. Mil ton.” She repeated, mimicking me. “He’s older than everyone thinks. Twenty-one. God — don’t let on you know. He had a few lost years, blackouts, when he doesn’t even remember what he did. He lived on the streets…raised hell. But of course, I understand. When you don’t know what to believe, you feel like you’re sinking, so you grab on to as many different ideas as possible. Even the crazy ones. Eventually one will keep you afloat.”

“So this was when he was in Alabama?” I asked.

She nodded.

“So that must be why he got his tattoo,” I said.

I’d seen it by now — the tattoo — and the breathtaking occasion in which he’d shown it to me had become a timeless film clip I replayed incessantly in my head. We’d been alone in the Purple Room — Jade and the others had gone to the kitchen to make pot brownies — and Milton was fixing himself a drink at the bar, plopping ice cubes into his glass, leisurely, as if counting out ducats. He’d pushed up the long shirtsleeves of his Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, so on his right bicep I could just make out the black toes of something. “You wanta see it?” he’d asked suddenly, and then strolled over to me, whiskey in hand, sitting down, hard, so his back collided with my left knee, the couch wincing. His brown eyes stapled to mine, he pulled up the sleeve, sloooowly — obviously enjoying my rapt attention — to reveal, not the crude black splotch everyone at St. Gallway whispered about, but a cheeky cartoon angel the size of a beer can. She was winking like a lascivious grandpa, one chubby knee in the air, the other leg straight down as if she’d frozen solid doing a jackknife off a diving board. “There she is,” Milton said in his drooping voice, “Miss America.” Before I could speak, hunt and gather a few words, he’d stood, pushed the sleeve down and wandered from the room.

“Yes,” Hannah said abruptly. “So anyway,” she was tapping out another cigarette, “they all had things happen to them, earthquakes, you know, when they were twelve, thirteen, things most people don’t have the guts to recover from.” She lit it swiftly, tossed the matches onto the coffee table. “Know anything about The Gone?”

Hannah, I noticed, had been about to run out of gas when she talked about Milton. If she’d started out in a slick and self-assured Monte Carlo roadster with Jade’s story, by the time Milton’s yarn rolled around, she was in one of those rusty jalopies panting along the side of the highway, hazards on. I sensed she was experiencing pangs of remorse about what she was doing, weighing me down with this confession; her face looked like a pause between sentences as her mind ran back over to the words she’d just said, poking them, listening to their little heartbeats, hoping they weren’t fatal.

But now, with this new question, she seemed to have regained speed. She stared at me, a fierce look on her face (her eyes gripping my eyes, not letting go), a look that reminded me of Dad; as he combed supplemental textbooks on Rebellion and Foreign Affairs in order to find that bright bloom of evidence that, when transplanted into his lecture, would have the capacity to stun, to intimidate, make the “little shits melt in their seats, leaving them mere stains on the carpet,” he often sported this militant look, making his features look so hard, I felt if I was blind and had to run my hand over his face to recognize him, he’d feel like a bit of stone wall.

“They’re missing persons,” Hannah said. “They fall through those ubiquitous cracks, in the ceiling, on the floor. Runaways, orphans, they’re kidnapped, killed — they vanish from public record. After a year, the police stop looking. They leave behind nothing but a name, and even that’s forgotten in the end. ‘Last seen in the evening hours of November 8, 1982, as she was completing her shift at an Arby’s in Richmond, Virginia. She drove away in a blue 1988 Mazda 626, which was later found abandoned on the side of the road, in what was possibly a staged accident.’”

She fell silent, lost in memory. Certain memories were like that — swamps, bogs, pits — and while most people avoided these muggy, unmapped, wholly uninhabited recollections (wisely understanding they were liable to disappear in them forever), Hannah seemed to have taken the risk and tiptoed into one of hers. Her gaze had fallen, lifeless, to the floor. Her bent head eclipsed the lamp and a thin ribbon of light clung to her profile.

“Who are you talking about?” I asked as gently as I could. Noah Fishpost, MD, in his captivating book on the adventures of modern psychiatry, Meditations on Andromeda (2001), mentioned one had to proceed as unobtrusively as possible when questioning a patient, because truth and secrets were cranes, dazzling in size yet notoriously shy and wary; if one made too much noise, they’d disappear into the sky, never to be seen again.

She shook her head. “No — I used to collect them as a girl. I’d memorize the listings. I could recite hundreds of them. ‘The fourteen-year-old girl disappeared on October 19, 1994, when she was walking home from school. She was last seen at a pay telephone booth between 2:30 and 2:45 on the corner of Lennox and Hill.’ ‘Last seen by her family in their residence in Cedar Springs, Colorado. At approximately 3:00 A.M. a family member noticed the television still on in her bedroom, but she was no longer inside.’”

Goose bumps pinched my arms.

“I think it was why I sought them out,” she said. “Or they sought me — I can’t even remember anymore. I was worried they’d fall through the cracks, too.”

Her gaze finally picked itself up and I saw, with horror, her face was red. There were giant tears looming in her eyes.

“And then there’s you,” she said.

I couldn’t breathe. Run for Larson’s truck, I told myself. Run for the highway, for Mexico, because Mexico was where everyone went when they had to escape (though no one ever got there; they were all killed tragically, mere yards from the border) or if not Mexico, then Hollywood, because Hollywood was where everyone went when they wanted to reinvent themselves and end up a movie star (see The Revenge of Stella Verslanken , Botando, 2001).

“When I saw you in that grocery store back in September, I saw a lonely person.” She didn’t say anything for a moment, just let those words rest there like tired workmen on a curb. “I thought I could help.”

I felt like a wheeze. No — I was a cough, a bed creak, something humiliating, the frayed ruffle on discolored pantaloons. But just as I was going to glue together some childish excuse to run out of her house, never to return (“The most catastrophic thing to befall any man, woman or child is abject pity,” wrote Carol Mahler in the Plum Award — winning Color Doves [1987]) — I glanced over at Hannah and was struck dumb.

Her anger, irk, aggravation — whatever that mood was she’d been mired in since I’d first arrived, when the phone screamed, when she’d sworn me to secrecy, even the apparent melancholy of moments ago — had fizzled. She was now disturbingly peaceful (see “Lake Lucerne,” A Question of Switzerland , Porter, 2000, p. 159).

True, she’d lit yet another cigarette, and smoke tangled out of her fingers. She’d also fluffed her hair and so it swayed one way, then the other across her forehead as if seasick. But her face, rather bluntly, boasted the relieved and somewhat satisfied expression of a person who’d just accomplished something, a harrowing feat; it was a face of slammed-shut textbooks, doors dead bolted, switched-off lights, or else, after a bow, amidst a drizzle of applause, heavy red curtains swinging closed.