Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,76

tilted his head, smiling good-naturedly. "Smoke," he said. His eyes were a crisp seersucker blue, and shrewd—surprisingly so. Dad said you could tell how sharp someone was by the tempo of his/her eyes on your face when you were introduced. If they barely did the box step or took to being wallflowers somewhere between your eyebrows, the person had "the IQ of caribou," but if they waltzed from your eyes to your shoes, not nervously, but with easy, untroubled curiosity, then the person had "a respectable acumen." Well, Smoke's eyes macumbaed from Nigel to me back to Nigel and I felt in that simple movement he grasped every embarrassment of our lives. I couldn't help but like him. Laugh lines parenthesized his mouth.

"You're visiting for the weekend?" Nigel asked.

Smoke glanced at Hannah before he answered. "Yes. Hannah's been kind enough to show me around." "Where are you from?" Nigel's aggressive curiosity wasn't lost on Smoke. Again, he looked at

Hannah. "West Virginia," he said.

And then it was horrifying because Hannah didn't say a word. I could see she was angry: redness soaked her cheeks, her forehead. She smiled, somewhat shyly, and then (and I noticed this because I was one step up from Nigel and could see her entirely, her too-long cuff and sleeve, the cane in her hand) she squeezed, tightly, Smoke's bicep. This seemed to be a signal of sorts, because he smiled again, and said in his bear-hug voice: "Well, nice meeting you. So long."

They continued on, passing the sheikh and the tourists ("Not many people realize the electric chair's not a bad way to go," shouted one) and some private dancer, a dancer for money in a tiny silver dress and white go-go boots.

At the top of the stairs, they turned down the hall, out of sight.

"Shit," said Nigel, grinning.

"What's the matter with you?" I asked. I wanted to slap the smile off his face. "What?" "How could you do that?" He shrugged. "I wanted to know who her boyfriend was. Could have been Valerio."

Doc do-si-doed into my head. "I'm not sure Valerio exists."

"Well, you, doll face, may be an atheist but I'm a believer. Let's get some air," he said, and then he grabbed my hand and yanked me down the stairs after him, stepping around Tarzan and Jane (Jane pressed against the wall, Tarzan leaning way in) and outside onto the patio.

Jade and the others had joined the crowd by now, which hadn't thinned, but buzzed like a porch wasp nest after a housewife stabs it with a broom. Leulah and Jade shared a deck chair talking to two men who wore their swollen, fleshy masks as hats. (They depicted Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Clark Gable, or any renowned man over fifty with formidable ears.) I didn't see Milton (Black could come and go like stormy weather) but Charles was by the barbecue flirting with a woman in a lioness costume who'd pulled her mane down around her neck and casually stroked it every time Charles said something. Abraham Lincoln threw himself against a jackrabbit, banging into the picnic table so a platter of wilted lettuce fireworked into the air. Rock music screamed from speakers rigged by the hanging plants, and the electric guitar, the roars of the singer, so many shrieks and laughs, the moon, a sickle stabbing the pine trees off to the right—it all fused into a strange suffocating violence. Maybe it was because I was a little drunk and my thoughts moved slowly like blobs in a lava lamp, but I felt it was a crowd that could attack, loot, rape, cause a "violent uprising that detonated like a bomb, and ended a day later with the whimper of a silk scarf pulled from the flabby neck of an old lady—as all rebellions do, if they arise purely from emotion and no forethought" (see "The Last of the Summer Whine: A Study of the Novgorod Rebellion, USSR, August 1965," Van Meer, The SINE Review, Spring, 1985).

Sharp light from the tiki torches cut into the masks, turning even the sweet costumes, the cute black cats and tutu angels into ghouls with buried eyes and dagger chins.

And then, my heart stopped.

On the brick wall, staring out over the crowd, stood a man. He wore a black hooded cloak and a gold mask with a hooked nose. Not a centimeter of human was visible. It was that horrible Brighella mask, worn during carnivals in Venice and Mardi Gras—Brighella, the lascivious villain from the Commedia