Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“Sweet? What’s the matter?”

I told Dad I wanted to see the policeman. Reluctantly, he agreed and twenty minutes later I was telling Officer Coxley everything I could remember.

According to Dad, Officer Gerard Coxley had been waiting patiently in the Emergency waiting room for over three hours, shooting the shit with the attendant nurse and other Low Priority patients, drinking Pepsi and “reading Cruising Rider with such an immersed expression I could tell it’s his secret instruction manual,” Dad reported with distaste. Yet Still Life patience appeared to be one of Gerard Coxley’s predominating characteristics (see False Fruits, Drupes and Dry Fruits , Swollum, 1982).

He sat with his long skinny legs crossed like a lady’s on the low blue plastic chair Stern Brow had carried in for the occasion. He balanced a withered green notepad on his left thigh and wrote on it, left-handedly, in ALL CAPS, with the speed of an apple seed burgeoning into a ten-foot tree.

Midforties, with messy auburn hair melting over his head and the drowsy squint of a late-August lifeguard, Officer Coxley was also a man of reductions, of distillations, of one-liners. I was propped up with pillows (Dad shadowing Coxley at the foot of the bed), trying my hardest to tell him everything, but when I completed a sentence — a complex sentence, full of invaluable details painstakingly mined from all that darkness, because confusingly, none of it seemed real anymore; every recollection now seemed Mr. DeMille-lighted in my head, all klieg lights and special effects and lurid stage makeup, pyrotechnics, atmospherics — after all of this, Officer Coxley would write down only one, maybe two words. ST. GALLWAY 6 KIDS HANA SCHEDER TEACHER DEAD? SUGARTOP VIOLET MARTINEZ.

He could shrink any plot of Dickens into haiku.

“Only a few more questions,” he said, squinting at his e.e. cummings poem.

“And when she came and found me in the woods,” I said, “she was wearing a large satchel, which she hadn’t had on before. Did you get that?”

“Sure I got it.” SATCHEL

“And that person who followed us, I want to say it was a man, but I don’t know. He was wearing large glasses. Nigel, one of the kids with us, he wears glasses, but it wasn’t him. He’s very slight and he wears tiny spectacles. This person was large and the glasses were large. Like Coke bottles.”

“Sure.” BOTTLES

“To reiterate,” I said, “Hannah wanted to tell me something.”

Coxley nodded.

“That was the reason she took me away from the campsite. But she never got to tell me what it was. That was when we heard this person near us and she went after him.”

By now my voice was nothing more than wind, at its most emphatic, a jet stream, but I wheezed on and on, in spite of Dad’s concerned frown.

“Okay, okay. I got it.” CAMPSITE Officer Coxley looked at me, raising rambutan-eyebrows and smiling as if he’d never had an Eyewitness quite like me before. In all probability, he hadn’t. I had a disturbing feeling Officer Coxley’s experience with Eyewitnesses was geared not toward murder or even burglary, but motor vehicle accidents. The fifth of his series of questions (posed in such a bland voice, one could almost see the paper labeled EYEWITNESS QUESTIONNAIRE thumbtacked to the station bulletin board next to a sign-up sheet for the 52nd Annual Auto Theft Weekend Roundtable and the Police Intra-Personals Corner, where department singles posted their Seekings in twenty-eight words or less) had been the supremely disheartening: “Did you notice any problems at the scene of the mishap?” I think he was hoping I’d say, “Out-of-order traffic signal,” or “Heavy foliage obscuring a stop sign.”

“Have any of them been found yet?” I asked.

“We’re working on it,” said Coxley.

“What about Hannah?”

“Like I said. Everyone’s doing their job.” He ran a thick podlike finger down the green notepad. “Now can you tell me more about your relationship to—?”

“She was a teacher at our school,” I said. “St. Gallway. But she was more than that. She was a friend.” I took a deep breath.

“You’re talking about—”

“Hannah Schneider. And there’s an ‘i’ in her last name.”

“Oh, right.” I

“Just to be clear, she’s the person I think I saw…”

“Okay,” he said, nodding as he wrote. FRIEND

At this point, Dad must have decided I’d had enough, because he stared at Coxley very intensely for a moment and then, as if deciding something, stood up from the end of the bed (see “Picasso enjoying high times at Le Lapin Agile, Paris,” Respecting the Devil , Hearst, 1984, p. 148).

“I think you must have everything then, Poirot,” Dad said. “Very methodical. I’m impressed.”

“What’s that?” asked Officer Coxley, frowning.

“You’ve given me a new respect for law enforcement. How many years on the job now, Holmes? Ten, twelve?”

“Oh. Uh, going on eighteen now.”

Dad nodded, smiling. “Impressive. I’ve always loved the lingo — DOA, DT, OC, white shirts, skels — isn’t that right? You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve watched more than my share of Columbo . I can’t help but regret never going into the profession. May I ask how you got into it?”

“My father.”

“How wonderful.”

“His father too. Go back generations.”

“If you ask me, there aren’t nearly enough young people going into the force. Bright kids all go for the high-flying jobs and does it make them happy? I doubt it. We need sound people, smart people. People who know their head from their elbows.”

“I say the same thing.”

“Really?”

“Good friend of mine’s son went to Bryson City. Worked as a banker. Hated it. Came back here, I hired him. Said he’d never been happier. But it takes a special kind of man. Not everyone—”

“Certainly not, ” said Dad, shaking his head.

“Cousin of mine. Couldn’t do it. Didn’t have the nerves.”

“I can imagine.”

“I can tell straight off if they’re going to make it.”

“No kidding.”

“ Sure. Hired one guy from Sluder County. Whole department thought he was great. But me. I could tell from the look in his eyes. It wasn’t there. Two months later he ran off with the wife of a fine man in our Detective Division.”

“You never know,” said Dad, sighing as he glanced at his watch. “As much as I’d love to keep talking—”

“Oh—”

“The doc out here, I think he’s pretty good, he suggested Blue get home to rest and get her voice back. I guess we’ll wait to hear about the others.” Dad extended his hand. “I know we’re in good hands.”

“Thank you,” said Coxley, rising to his feet, shaking Dad’s hand.

“Thank you. I trust you’ll contact us at home in the event of additional questions? You have our telephone number?”

“Uh, yes, I do.”

“Terrific,” said Dad. “Let us know any way we can be of service.”

“Sure. And best of luck to you.”

“Same to you, Marlowe.”

And then, before Officer Coxley knew quite what had happened to him, before I knew what had happened to him, Officer Coxley was gone.

In severe circumstances, when you inadvertently witness a person dead, something inside of you gets permanently misplaced. Somewhere (within the brain and nervous system, I’d imagine) there’s a snag, a delay, a stumbling block, a slight technical problem.

For those who’ve never had such bad luck, picture the world’s fastest bird, the Peregrine Falcon, Falco peregrinus, splendidly diving toward its quarry (unwitting dove) at over 250 mph, when abruptly, seconds before its talons are to strike a lethal blow, it feels light-headed, loses its focus, goes into a tailspin, two bogies, three o’clock high, break, break, Zorro got your wingman, barely managing to pull up, up, righting itself and floating, quite shaken, to the nearest tree on which it could once again get its bearings. The bird is fine — and yet, afterward, really for the rest of its life span of twelve to fifteen years, it is never able to nosedive with quite the same speed or intensity of any of the other falcons. It is always a little off-center somehow, always a little wrong.