Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,80

eerie about them. I couldn't help but think of Holloway Barnes and Eleanor Tilden, the girls who'd conspired to murder their parents in Honolulu in 1964, subject of Arthur Lewis' chilling nonfiction account, Little Girls (1988). Holloway killed Eleanor's parents with a pick-ax as they slept and Eleanor killed Holloway's with a rifle, shooting them in the face as if playing a game, hoping to win a stuffed panda, and in the photographs section in the middle of the book, there'd been a picture of the girls almost exactly like this one, the two of them in Catholic schoolgirl uniforms, their arms pretzeled, their brutal smiles piercing their faces like fish hooks.

"Wonder who the other one is," Nigel said. He sighed wistfully. "Two people that beautiful should die. Immediately."

"Does Hannah have a sister?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Don't know."

I moved back over to the three framed photographs on the chest of drawers. "What?" he asked, walking up behind me. I held up the picture for comparison. "It's not the same person." "Huh?" "These photos. They're not of Hannah." "Aren't those baby pictures?" "But it's not the same face." He leaned closer, nodding. "Maybe it's a fat cousin." I turned over the picture of Hannah with the blonde. There was a date

written in the corner in blue pen: 1973. "Wait" Nigel whispered suddenly, a hand pressed to the pearls around his neck, his eyes wide. "Oh, fuck. Listen." The music downstairs, which had been beating with the steadiness of a healthy heart, had stopped, leaving total silence.

I moved toward the door, unlocked it and peered down the hall.

It was deserted.

"Let's get out of here," I said.

Nigel, with a small squeak, was already at the closet, madly trying to refold the sweaters and matching lids to shoe boxes. I considered swiping the photograph of Hannah and the other girl—but then, did Howard Carter blithely help himself to treasures in the tomb of Tutankhamen? Did Donald Johanson covertly pocket a piece of Lucy, the 3.18-million-year-old hominid? Reluctantly, I handed the photograph back to Nigel who slipped it into the Evan Picone shoe box, standing on his tiptoes to return it to the shelf. We switched off every light, grabbed our shoes, did a final check of the room to make sure we hadn't dropped something ("All thieves leave behind a calling card because the human ego craves recognition the way junkies crave smack," noted Detective Clark Green in Fingerprints [Stipple, 1979]). We closed Hannah's bedroom door and hurried down the hall.

The stairs were empty, and below, in the whirlpools of people, some sweaty bird in a crooked feather headdress was screeching something, a hysterical "Ooooooooo" that went on and on, cutting through the noise like a sword during any climatic fight scene. Charlie Chaplin was trying to restrain

her. "Breathe! Fuckin' breathe, Amy!" Nigel and I glanced at each other, baffled, then continued down the stairs, only to find ourselves drowning in a flood of feet, plastic masks, tails, wands, wigs, all of them trying to shove their way toward the back door, out onto the patio.

"Stop pushing!" someone shouted. "Stop pushing, motherfucker!" "I saw it," said a penguin. "But what about the police?" wailed a fairy. "I mean, why aren't they here? Did someone call nine-one-one?" "Hey," said Nigel, grabbing the shoulder of the merman pushing in front of us. "What's going on?" "Someone's dead," he said.

A Moveable Feast

When he was seven years old, Dad almost drowned in Lake Brienz. He claimed it was the second most illuminating experience of his life, trailing in significance only to one other occasion, the day he saw Benno Ohnesorg die.

In customary fashion, Dad was trying to outperform one Hendrik Salzmann, a twelve-year-old, another boy at the Zurich Waisenhaus. Although Dad "showed dogged endurance and athleticism" as he splashed past the weary Hendrik, when he was some thirty or forty meters beyond the swimmer's boundary, Dad found himself too exhausted to go on.

The bright green shore floated far behind him. "It appeared to be waving good-bye," Dad said. As he slumped into the gurgling darkness, arms and legs heavy as bags of stones, after an initial panic, which was "really nothing more than surprise, that this was it, what it all comes down to," Dad claimed he felt what is frequently referred to as the "Socrates Syndrome," a feeling of utter tranquility moments before death. Dad closed his eyes and saw not a tunnel, not blinding light, not a slide show of his short, Dickensian life, not even