Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,69

get into his truck, drive off to who knows where. Hannah leaves in the morning."

"How do you know?"

"Charles usually stays the whole time."

I didn't especially want to ask any more questions, so the three of us lapsed into silence again, a quiet that went on even after Jade moved the car closer so we could make out the 22, the safari leaf pattern on the pulled curtains and the dent in Hannah's car. It was strange, the wartime effect of the parking lot. We were stationed somewhere, oceans from home, afraid of things unseen. Leulah was shell-shocked, back straight as a flagpole, her eyes magnetized to the door. Jade was the senior officer, crabby, worn-out and perfectly aware nothing she said could comfort us so she only reclined her seat, turned on the radio and shoved potato chips into her mouth. I sort of Vietnamed too. I was the cowardly homesick one who ends up dying unheroically from a wound he accidently inflicts upon himself that squirts blood like a grape Capri Sun. I wouldVe given my left hand to be away from this place. My Pie in the Sky was to be next to Dad again, wearing cloud flannel pajamas and grading a few of his student research papers, even the awful ones by the slacker who employed a huge bold font in order to reach Dad's minimum requirement of twenty to twenty-five pages.

I remembered what Dad said when I was seven at the Screamfest Fantasy Circus in Choke, Indiana, after we'd taken the House of Horrors ride and I'd been so terrified I'd ridden the thing with my fingers nailed to my eyes— never peeking, never once glimpsing a single horror. After I pried my hands off my face, rather than chastising my cowardice, Dad had looked down at me and nodded thoughtfully, as if I'd just revealed startling new insights on revolutionizing welfare. 'Yes," he'd said. "Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging—not enlightenment but enleadenment. If one recognizes the difference and prepares oneself—it is extraordinarily brave. Because when it comes to certain human miseries, the only eyewitnesses should be the pavement and maybe the trees."

"Promise I won't ever do this," Lu said suddenly in a mousey voice.

"What," said Jade in a monotone, her eyes papercuts.

"When I'm old." Her voice was something frail you could tear right through. "Promise me I'll be married with kids. Or famous. That. . ."

There wasn't an end to her sentence. It just stopped, a grenade that'd been thrown but hadn't exploded.

None of us said anything more, and at 4:03 A.M. someone turned off the lights in Room 22. We watched the man emerge, fully clothed (though his heels, I noticed, were not fully inside his shoes) and he drove away in the rusty Blue Bird Taxicab (I-8OO-BLU-BIRD), purring as it waited for him by the Registration Office.

It was just as Dad said (if he'd been in the car with us he would have tipped up his chin, just a little, raised an eyebrow, his gesture for both Never Doubt Me and I Told You So) because the only eyewitnesses should have been the neon sign shuddering VACANCY, and the thin asthmatic trees seductively trailing their branches down the spine of the roof, and the sky, a big purple bruise fading too slowly over our heads.

We drove home.

PART TWO

MOBY DICK

Two weeks after the night we spied on Hannah ("Observed," Chief Inspector Ranulph Curry clarified in The Conceit of a Unicom [Lavelle,

X 1901]), Nigel found an invitation in the wastepaper basket in her den, the tiny room off the living room filled with world atlases and half-dead hanging plants barely surviving on her version of flora life support (twenty-fourhour plant lights, periodic Miracle-Gro).

It was elegant, printed on a thick, cream, embossed card.

The Burns County Animal Shelter

Cordially invites you to

Our annual charity event

In support of all animals in need

At 100 Willows Road

On Saturday November 22nd

At Eight o’ clock in the evening

Price $40 Per Person

RSVP

Costume Required, Masks Preferred

"I think we should go," Nigel announced that Friday at Jade's.

"Me too' said Leulah.

"You can't," Charles said. "She didn't invite you."

"A minor detail," Nigel said.

In spite of Charles' words of warning, the following Sunday, halfway through dinner, Nigel removed the invitation from his back pocket and brazenly placed it next to the platter of veal chops, without saying a word.

In that instant, the dining room became nail-bitingly unbearable (see Midday Face-Off at Sioux Falls: A Mohave Dan Western, Lone Star Publishers,