Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“It’s standard, sir, with these sorts of mishaps—”

“ Mis haps?”

“I mean—”

“A mishap is spilling Kool-Aid on a white carpet. A mishap is losing a fucking earring. ”

“She — she’ll only speak to him if she’s up to it. You have my word.”

“You’re going to have to do a lot better than your word, Doctor what does that thing say, Dr. Thomas, Tom Smarts? ”

“Actually, it’s without the s. ”

“What is that, your stage name?”

I rolled off the bed and, making sure my arm and the other plastic cords to which my chest was attached did not fully tear out of whatever machine I was rigged to, I walked the few feet to the curtain, the bed reluctantly trolleying after me. I peered out.

Standing next to the large white administrative hexagon in the middle of the Emergency Room was Dad, in corduroy. His gray-blond hair flopped across his forehead — something that happened during lectures — his face was red. In front of him stood White Lab Coat, clasping his hands and nodding. To his left, behind the counter, sat Fuzzy Hair and, faithfully at her side, Mars Orange Lipstick, both of them gazing at Dad, one pressing a phone receiver to her pink neck, the other pretending to scrutinize a clipboard but eavesdropping.

“Dad,” I scraped.

He heard me immediately. His eyes widened.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

As it turned out, although I had no recollection of it whatsoever, I’d apparently been quite the Talk Show Host with John Richards and his son, when they carried me, their limp bride, half a mile to their pickup truck. (White Lab Coat was very informative when he explained, where memory was concerned, I could “expect anything and everything”—as if I’d only bumped my head, as if I’d merely had a head-on collision.)

With what I imagine to be the energized yet charred voice of someone recently struck by lightning (over 100 million volts of direct current) with dilated pupils and splinter sentences I told them my name, address, telephone number, that I’d been on a camping trip in the Great Smoky Mountains, that something bad had happened. (I actually used the word bad. ) I didn’t respond to their direct questions — I was unable to tell them specifically what I’d seen — but apparently I repeated the words “She’s departed” throughout the forty-five minute ride to Sluder County Hospital.

This detail was particularly unsettling. “She’s Departed” was a grim nursery song Dad and I used to sing on the highways when I was five, learned in Ms. Jetty’s kindergarten in Oxford, Mississippi. It followed the generic melody of “Oh, My Darlin’ Clementine”: “She’s departed, she’s a nowhere, she’s my girl and she’s a-gone / She went drownin’ in the river, washed up somewhere in Babylon.”

(Dad learned most of this after bonding with my two knights in shining armor in the Emergency waiting room, and though they left well before I was awake, Dad and I later sent them a thank-you note and three hundred dollars’ worth of new fly-fishing equipment blindly purchased from Bull’s-eye Bait and Tackle.)

Due to my bizarre lucidity, Sluder County Hospital had been able to contact Dad immediately, also alert the Park Ranger on duty, a man by the name of Roy Withers, who began a search of the area. It was also why the Burns County Police dispatched an officer from their Patrol Unit, Officer Gerard Coxley, to the hospital, so he could talk to me.

“I’ve already made arrangements,” Dad said. “You’re not talking to anyone.”

Once again I was behind the spearmint curtain in the spongy bed, mummified by heated flannel blankets, trying to eat with one pipe cleaner arm the turkey sandwich and chocolate chip cookie Mars Orange Lipstick had brought me from the cafeteria. My head felt like that colorful balloon they used in the classic film Around the World in80Days . I seemed to be able only to stare at the curtain, chew and swallow, and sip the coffee Fuzzy Hair had brought according to Dad’s specific instructions (“Blue likes her coffee with skim milk, no sugar. I like mine black.”): stare, chew, swallow, stare, chew, swallow. Dad was on the left side of the bed.

“You’re going to be fine,” he said. “My girl’s a champion. Not afraid of anything. We’ll get you home in an hour. You’ll rest. Soon be right as rain.”

I was aware Dad, all Trumanish voice and Kennedyesque grin, was repeating these cheerleader phrases to inspire team spirit in himself, not me. I didn’t mind. I’d been given some sedative via the IV and hence felt too balmy to grasp the full extent of his anxiety. To explain: I’d never actually told Dad about the camping trip. I’d told him I’d be spending the weekend at Jade’s. I didn’t mean to be deceitful, especially in lieu of his newfound McDonald’s-styled approach to parenting (Always Open and Ready to Serve), but Dad despised outdoor activities such as camping, skiing, mountain biking, para-sailing, base jumping and, even more, the “dimwitted dulls” who did them. Dad had not even the remotest desire to take on the Forest, the Ocean, the Mountain or the Thin Air, as he detailed extensively in “Man’s Hubris and the National World,” published in 1982 in the now-obsolete Sound Opinions Press .

I present Paragraph 14, the section entitled “Zeus Complex”: “The egocentric Man seeks to taste immortality by engaging in demanding physical challenges, wholeheartedly bringing himself to the brink of death in order to taste an egotistical sense of accomplishment, of victory. Such a feeling is false and short-lived, for Nature’s power over Man is absolute. Man’s honest place is not in extreme conditions, where, let’s face it, he’s frail as a flea, but in work. It is in building things and governing, the creation of rules and ordinances. It is in work Man will find life’s meaning, not in the selfish, heroin-styled rush of hiking Everest without oxygen and nearly killing himself and the poor Sherpa carrying him.”

Due to Paragraph 14, I didn’t tell Dad. He’d never have let me go, and though I hadn’t especially wanted to go myself, I also didn’t want the others to go and have a mind-blowing experience without me. (I had no idea how mind-blowing it would actually be.)

“I’m proud of you,” Dad said.

“Dad,” was all I could scuff. I did manage to touch his hand and it responded like one of those mimosa plants, but in the opposite way, opening.

“You will be fine, little cloud. Fine. Fine as a fiddle.”

“Fit,” I scratched.

“Fit as a fiddle.”

“Promise?”

“Of course I promise.”

An hour later, my voice had begun to tiptoe back. A new nurse, Stern Brow (illicitly kidnapped by White Lab Coat from another floor of the hospital, in order to placate Dad) took my blood pressure and pulse (“Doin’ fine,” she said before humphing off).

Although I felt bug-snug under the sunshine lights, the hospital beeps, clicks and toots soothing as fish noises one hears in the ocean while snorkeling, gradually, I noticed my memory of the night before had begun to show signs of life. As I sipped my coffee listening to the aggravated mutters of a croaky gentleman recovering from an asthma attack on the other side of the curtain (“Reely now. Got to get home and feed my dog.” “Just another half hour Mr. Elphinstone.”), suddenly I was aware Hannah had snuck into my head: not as I’d seen her— God no —but sitting at her dining room table listening to one of us, her head tilted, smoking a cigarette, then ruthlessly stabbing it out on her bread plate. She did that on two occasions. I also thought about the heels of her feet, a tiny detail not many others noticed: sometimes they were black and so dry, they resembled pavement.