Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“This freaking hurts, ” said Jade. “I need a local anesthetic for my legs.”

“Stop complaining,” said Charles.

“How’s everyone doing?” shouted Hannah at the front, walking backward up the hill.

“Marvelous, marvelous. This is fucking Candy Land.”

“Only a half hour to the first lookout point!”

“I’m going to throw myself off,” said Jade.

We trudged on. In the woods, with its endless procession of malnourished pines and lop-eared rhododendrons and wan gray rocks, time seemed to speed up and slow down without provocation. I fell into a strange lull as I lumbered along in the very back, staring for minutes at a time at Jade’s red kneesocks (hiked up over her jeans; some precaution against rattlesnakes), the thick brown roots caterpillaring through the trail, the splotches of fading gold light staining the ground. The seven of us seemed to be the only things alive for miles (apart from a few invisible birds and a gray squirrel skittering up a tree’s torso) and one couldn’t help but wonder if Hannah was right, if this experience she’d forced us into was, in fact, a gateway to something else, some brave new understanding of the world. Pines frothed, imitating the ocean. A bird fluttered up, up, swiftly, like an air bubble, to the sky.

Oddly enough, the only person who appeared not to have fallen under this plodding spell was Hannah. Whenever the path stiffened into a straight line, I could see she’d hung back to walk with Leulah and talked animatedly — a little too animatedly — nodding and looking over at Lu’s face as if to memorize her expressions. And every now and then, she laughed, an abrupt and harsh sound, puncturing the bland peace of everything.

“Wonder what they’re gossiping about,” said Jade.

I shrugged.

We reached the first vista, Abram’s Peak, around 6:15 P.M.. It was a large rock promontory off to the right of the trail that opened up, like a stage, to reveal a grand expanse of mountains.

“That’s Tennessee,” Hannah said, shading her eyes.

We stood next to her in a line, staring at Tennessee. The only immediate sound was Nigel unwrapping the blueberry Pop-Tart he’d removed from his backpack. (As fish are impervious to drowning, Nigel was impervious to all Quietly Profound Moments.) The cold air tightened my throat, my lungs. The mountains hugged each other sternly, similar to the way men hugged other men, not letting their chests touch. Thin clouds hung around their necks, and the mountains farthest away, the ones passed out against the horizon, were so pale, you couldn’t see where their backs ended and the sky began.

The view made me sad, but I suppose everyone, when happening upon a sprawling expanse of earth, all light and mist, all breathlessness and infinity, felt sad—“the enduring gloom of man,” Dad called it. You couldn’t help but think, not only about shortages of food, safe water, shockingly low averages of adult literacy and life expectancy in various developing nations, but also that shopworn thought about how many people were, at this precise moment, being born, and how many were dying, and that you, like some 6.2 billion others, were simply between these two ho-hum milestones, milestones that felt earth shattering while they were happening, but in the context of Hichraker’s 2003 edition of the World Geographical Factbook or M. C. Howard’s Finding the Cosmos in a Grain of Sand: The Nativity of the Universe (2004) they were ordinary, run-of-the-mill. It made one feel as if one’s life was no more imperative than a pine needle.

“Fuck you!” Hannah screamed.

The sound didn’t echo, as it would in a Looney Tune, but was swallowed immediately, like a thimble hurled at the sea. Charles turned and stared at her. The look on his face clearly indicated he thought she was crazy. The rest of us shifted like nervous cattle in a boxcar.

“F — Fuck you!” she shouted again, her voice hoarse.

She turned to us. “You should all say something.” She took another deep breath, tipped her head back and closed her eyes in the manner of someone preparing to sunbathe on a deck chair. Her eyelids trembled, her lips too.

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments!” she screamed.

“You okay?” Milton asked her, laughing.

“There’s nothing funny about this,” Hannah said with a serious face. “Put some muscle into it. Pretend you’re a bassoon. And then say something. Something that comes from your soul.” She took a deep breath. “Henry David Thoreau!”

“Don’t be afraid to be afraid!” Leulah gasped rather abruptly, sticking out her chin like a child in a spitting contest.

“Nice,” said Hannah.

Jade huffed. “Oh, God. I guess we’re going to be born again from this experience?”

“I can’t hear you,” Hannah said.

“This is fucking ridiculous! ” Jade shouted.

“Better.”

“Dang,” said Milton.

“Wimpy.”

“Dang!”

“Jenna Jameson?” shouted Charles.

“Is it a question or an answer?” said Hannah.

“Janet Jacme!”

“Get me the fuck out of here!” screamed Jade.

“Set limits and goals with equal precision!”

“I want to fucking go home!”

“Say hello to my leetle friend!” yelled Nigel, his face red.

“Sir William Shakespeare!” shouted Milton.

“He wasn’t a sir,” said Charles.

“Yes, he was.”

“He wasn’t knighted.”

“Let it go,” said Hannah.

“Jenna Jameson!”

“Blue?” Hannah asked.

I didn’t know why I hadn’t shouted anything. I felt like a person who couldn’t unstick her stutter. I believe I was trying to think of someone with a decent last name, someone who deserved this privilege of being sent into the wind. Chekhov, I’d been about to say him, but he seemed too stilted, even if I added the first name. Dostoevsky was too long. Plato seemed irritating, as if I were trying to one-up everyone by choosing the Very Root of Western Civilization and Thought. Nabokov, Dad would have approved, but no one, Dad included, seemed certain of the pronunciation. (“NA-bo-kov” was incorrect, the pronunciation of amateurs who bought Lolita under the impression it was a bodice ripper; yet “Na-BO-kov” fired like a defunct pistol.) It was even worse with Goethe. Molière was an interesting choice (no one had yet mentioned a Frenchman) but there was a problem shouting the guttural R. Racine was too obscure, Hemingway too macho, Fitzgerald fine, but in the end it was unforgivable what he did to Zelda. Homer was a good choice, though Dad said The Simpsons had bastardized his reputation.

“Be — be true to yourself!” shouted Leulah.

“Scorsese!”

“Behave yourself!” said Milton.

“That’s not a good one,” said Hannah. “Never behave yourself.”

“Never behave yourself!”

“Just do it!”

“Be all that you can be!”

“Don’t rely on the sound-bites of American advertising to tell you how you feel,” said Hannah. “Use your own words. What you have to say, what’s in your heart, is always powerful.”

“Full-sleeved tattoos!” shouted Jade. Jade’s face was now screwed up with emotion like a wringing out washcloth.

“Blue, you’re thinking too much,” said Hannah, turning to me.

“I — uh—” I said.

“The Canterbury Tales!”

“Mrs. Eugenia Sturds! May she live happily ever after with Mr. Mark Butters but may they not procreate and terrorize the world with their offspring!”