Special Topics in Calamity Physics (35 page)

"Find any smoking guns?" I asked. She didn't answer, so I turned and walked down the first row of desks, staring up at the row of framed movie posters on the walls (Visual Aid 14.0).

In total, there were thirteen, including the two in the back by the bookshelf. Maybe it was because of the eggnog, but it only took a minute to realize how odd the posters were —not the fact that every one was foreign, or an American movie in Spanish, Italian or French, or even that they were each spaced some three inches apart and straight as soldiers, a level of exactitude you learned never to expect from the Visual Aids caking the walls of a classroom, not even one of Science or Mathematics. (I went up to
II Caso Thomas Crown,
moved back the frame and saw, around the nail, distinct pencil lines, where she'd made the measurements, the blueprint of meticulousness.)

With the exception of two
(per un Pugno di Dollari, Fronte del Porto),
all the posters featured an embrace or kiss of some kind. Rhett was there grasping Scarlett, sure; and Fred holding onto Holly and Cat in the rain
(Colazione da Tiffany);
but there was also Ryan O'Neal Historia del Amoring with Ali MacGraw; Charlton Heston clutching Janet Leigh, making her head fall at an uncomfortable angle in
La Soif du Mal;
and Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr getting a great deal of sand in their bathing suits. In a funny way too, I noticed—and I didn't think I was getting too carried away—the way the woman was positioned in each of the posters, it could very well have been
Hannah
embraced from there to eternity. She had their same fine china bones, their hairpin, coastal-road profiles, the hair that tripped and fell down their shoulders.

It was surprising, because she'd never struck me as the dizzy type to surround herself with firework displays of untold passion (as Dad called it, a "big to-don't"). That she'd so meticulously assembled these Coming Attractions that had come and gone—it made me a little sad.

"Somewhere in a woman's room there is always something, an object, a detail, that is her, wholly and unapologetically," Dad said. "With your mother, of course, it was the butterflies. Not only could you ascertain the extreme care she took in preserving and mounting them, how much they meant to her, but each one shed a tiny yet persistent light on the complex woman she was. Take the glorious Forest Queen. It reflects your mother's regal bearing, her fierce reverence for the natural world. The Clouded Mother of Pearl? Her maternal instinct, her understanding of moral relativism. Natasha saw the world not in blacks or whites, but as it really is—a decidedly dim landscape. The Mechanitis Mimic? She could impersonate all the greats, from Norma Shearer to Howard Keel. The insects themselves were her in many ways—glorious, heartbreakingly fragile. And so you see, considering each of these specimens, we end up with —if not your mother
precisely—
at the very least, a close approximation of her soul."

I wasn't sure why, at this moment, I thought of the butterflies, except that these posters seemed to be the details that were Hannah, "wholly and unapologetically." Maybe Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr getting sand in their bathing suits were her ardor for living coupled with a passion for the sea, the origin of all life, and
Bella di giorno
featuring Catherine Deneuve with her mouth hidden, was her need for shiftiness, secrets, Cottonwood.

"Oh, God," Jade said behind me. She threw a thick paperback into the air and it fluttered, crashing against the window.

"What?"

She didn't say anything, only pointed at the book on the floor, her breathing exaggerated. I walked over to the windows and picked it up.

It was a gray book with the photograph of a man on the front, its title in orange letters:
Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night: The Life of Charles

Milles Manson
(Ivys, 1985). The cover and pages were extremely tattered.

"So?" I asked.

"Don't you know who Charles Manson
is?"

"Of course."

"Why would she have that book?"

"A lot of people have it. It's the definitive biography."

I didn't feel like going into the fact that J had the book too, that Dad included it on the syllabus for a course he'd last taught at the University of Utah at Rockwell, Seminar on Characteristics of a Political Rebel. The author, Jay Burne Ivys, an Englishman, had spent hundreds of hours interviewing assorted members of the Manson Family, which, in its heyday, included at least one hundred and twelve people, and thus the book was remarkably comprehensive in Parts II and III explaining the origins and codes of Manson's ideology, the daily activities of the sect, the hierarchy (Part I entailed a fastidious psychoanalysis of Manson's difficult childhood, which Dad, not being a Freud aficionado, found less effective). Dad addressed the book, juxtaposed with Miguel Nelson's
Zapata
(1989), for two, sometimes three classes under the lecture title "Freedom Fighter or Fanatic?" "Fifty-nine people who encountered Charles Manson during his years living in Haight-Ashbury went on the record saying he had the most magnetic eyes and most stirring voice of any human being they'd ever encountered," Dad boomed into the microphone at the lectern. "Fifty-nine
different
sources. So what was it? The It-factor. Charisma. He had it. So did Zapata. Guevara. Who else? Lucifer. You're born with, what? That certain je ne sais quoi, and according to history, you can move, with relatively little effort, a group of ordinary people to take up guns and fight for your cause, whatever cause it is; the nature of the cause actually matters very little. If you say so —if you toss them something to believe in—they'll murder, give their lives, call you Jesus. Sure, you laugh, but to this day, Charles Manson receives more fan mail than any other inmate in the entire U.S. penitentiary system, some sixty thousand letters per year. His CD,
Lie,
continues to be a mover on Amazon .com. What does that tell us? Or, let me rephrase that. What does that tell us about
us?"

"There's no other book in here, Gag," Jade said in a nervous voice. "Look." I walked over to the desk. Inside the open drawer were a pile DVDs,
All

the Kings Men, The Deer Hunter, La Historia Oficial,
a few others, but no

books. "I found it in the back," she said. "Hidden." I opened the shabby cover, flipped through a few pages. Maybe it was the

stark light in the room, slashing and deboning everything, including Jade (her emaciated shadow fell to the floor, crawled toward the door), but I felt genuine chills skidding down my neck when I saw the name written in faded pencil in the upper corner of the title page.
Hannah Schneider.

"It doesn't mean anything," I said, but noticed, with surprise, I was trying

to convince myself. Jade's eyes widened. "You think she wants to kill us?" she whispered. "Oh, please." "Seriously. We're targets because we're bourgeois." I frowned. "What is it with you and that word?" "It's Hannah's word. Ever noticed when she's drunk everyone's a pig?" "She's just kidding," I said. "Even my Dad jokes about that sometimes."

But Jade, her teeth bricked into a tiny wall, grabbed the book from my hands and started furiously spinning through the pages, stopping at the black-andwhite photographs in the middle, tilting them so they caught the light. " 'Charles called Susan Atkins Sexy Sadie,' " she read slowly. "Ew. Look how freaky this woman looks. Those eyes. Honestly, they kind of look like

Hannah's—"

"Stop it," I said, snatching the book from her. "What's the matter with you?"

"What's the matter with
you?"
Her eyes were narrowed, tiny incisions. Sometimes, Jade had a very severe way of looking at you that made you feel as if she was a 1780 sugarcane plantation owner and you, the branded slave on the Antiguan auction block who hadn't seen your mother and father in a year and probably never would again. "You miss your coupon, is that it? You want to give birth to food stamps?"

At this point, I think we would have broken into an argument, which would have ended with me fleeing the building, probably in tears, her laughing and shouting a variety of names. The terrified look on her face, however, caused me to turn and follow her stare out the windows.

Someone was walking down the sidewalk toward Loomis, a heavy-set figure wearing a bulging, bruise-colored dress. "It's Charles Manson," Jade whimpered. "In
drag."
"No," I said. "It's the dictator."

In horror, we watched Eva Brewster move to the front doors of Loomis, yanking on the handles before turning and walking out onto the lawn by the giant pine tree, shading her eyes as she peered into the classroom windows.

"Oh, fuck
me,"
said Jade.

We leapt across the room, to the corner by the bookshelf where it was pitch black (under Cary and Grace, as it so happened,
Caccia al ladro).
"Blue!" Eva shouted. The sound of Evita Perôn shouting one's name could make anyone's heart lurch. Mine thrashed like an octopus thrown to the deck of a ship.

^u
Blue!’

We watched her come to the window. She wasn't the most attractive woman in the world: she had a fire-hydrant's bearing, hair the fluffy texture of home insulation and dyed a hideous yellow-orange, but her eyes, as I'd observed once in the Main Office in Hanover, were shockingly beautiful, sudden sneezes in the dull silence of her face—big, wide-set, in a pale blue that tiptoed toward violet. She frowned now and deliberately pressed her forehead to the glass so it became one of those Ramshell Snails feeding on the side of aquariums. Although I was petrified and held my breath and Jade dug her nails into my right knee, the woman's puffy, slightly blued face, flanked by large, garish pine-cone earrings, didn't
look
particularly angry or devious. Frankly, she appeared more frustrated, as if she'd come to the window with the express hope of glimpsing the rare Barkudia Skink, the limbless lizard notorious among the reptilian elite as something of a Salinger, gallingly incommunicado for eighty-seven years, and now it was choosing to stay hidden under a moist rock in the exhibit, ignoring her no matter how many times she shouted, tapped on the glass, waved shiny objects or took flash pictures.

"Blue!" she called again, a little more emphatically, craning her neck to glance over her shoulder.
"Blue!"

She muttered something to herself, and hurried around the corner of the building, ostensibly to search the opposite side. Jade and I couldn't move, our chins conjoined to our knees, listening for the footsteps that reverberate down the linoleum asylum corridors of one's most terrifying dreams.

But the minutes dripped by and there was only silence and the occasional coughs, sniffs, and throat clearings of a room. After five minutes, I crawled past Jade (she was frozen solid in fetal position) and moved toward the window where I looked out and saw her again, this time standing on the front steps of Loomis.

It would have been a stirring view, one of the Thomas Hardy variety, if she'd been someone else—someone with decent posture, like Hannah — because her cottony hair was blowing up off her forehead and insistent wind had seized her dress and pushed it far behind her, giving her the wild, secret air of a widow staring at the sea, or a magnificent ghost, pausing for a moment before continuing a sad search along the mottled moors for relics of dead love, a Ruined Maid, a Trampwoman's Tragedy. But she was Eva Brewster: stout and sobering, bottlenecked, jug-armed and cork-legged. She tugged at the dress, scowled at the dark, took a last look at the windows (for a harrowing second, I thought she saw me) and then turned, heading briskly back down the sidewalk and disappearing.

"She's gone," I said.

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

Jade lifted her head and pressed a hand to her chest.

"I'm having a heart attack," she said.

"No, you're not."

"It's possible. My family has a history of heart failure. It happens just like this. Out of the blue." "You're fine." "I feel a tightness.
Here.
That's what happens when you're having pulmonary embrosis."

I stared out the window. Where the sidewalk twisted out of sight around Love Auditorium, a lone tree stood guard with a thick black trunk, its shivering, thin limbs with the tops bent backward into tiny wrists and hands, as if feebly holding up the sky.

"That was really strange, huh?" Jade made a face. "How she called your name like that—wonder why she wasn't calling my name."

I shrugged, trying to act nonchalant, though in truth I felt ill. Maybe I had the gauzy constitution of a Victorian woman who fainted because she heard the word
leg,
or perhaps I'd read
L'Idiot
(Petrand, 1920) too attentively with its lunatic hero, the sickly and certifiable Byron Berintaux, who saw in every upholstered armchair his upcoming Death waving at him enthusiastically. Maybe I'd simply had too much darkness for one night. "Night is not good for the brain or the nervous system," contends Carl Brocanda in
Logical Effects
(1999). "Studies show neurons are constricted by 38 percent in individuals who live in locations with little daylight, and nerve impulses are 47 percent slower in prison inmates who go forty-eight hours without seeing the light of day."