Special Topics in Calamity Physics (53 page)

She replaced the IV-bag and wheeled herself away.

I smelled latex and rubbing alcohol. I stared at the ceiling, at the white rectangles mottled with brown specks like vanilla ice cream. Someone was asking where Johnson's crutches were. "They were labeled when he came in." A woman was laughing. "Married for five years. The key is to act like it's your first date every day." "Got kids?" "We're trying."

Another swoosh and a small tan doctor appeared, girlishly boned with crow-black hair. Around his neck he wore a
plastic Backstage Pass that
featured, beneath a pixilated picture of himself with the skin tone of a jalapeno, a barcode, as well as his name: THOMAS C. SMART, SENIOR ER RESIDENT. As he walked over to me, his considerable white lab coat whimsically floated out behind him.

"How're we doing?" he asked. I tried to speak—my
okay
came out like a knife spreading jelly on burnt toast—and he nodded understandingly, as if he spoke the language. He jotted something down on his clipboard, and then asked me to sit up and take slow, deep breaths as he pressed the icy stethoscope into my back in different places.

"Looking good," he said with a tired fake smile.

In a gust of white, a swoosh—he disappeared. Once again, I stared at the glum spearmint curtain. It trembled whenever someone rushed past it on the opposite side, as if it were afraid. A phone rang, was hastily answered. A stretcher rolled down the hall: chick peeps of wobbly wheels.

"I understand, sir. Fatigue, exposure, no hypothermia, but dehydration, the cut to her knee, other minor cuts and scrapes. Evident shock too. I'd like to keep her here a few more hours, have her eat something. Then we'll see. We'll give her a prescription for the knee pain. A mild sedative too. The stitches will come out in a week."

"You're not following me. I'm not talking about stitches. I want to know what she's been through."

"We don't know. We notified the park. There are rescue personnel — "

"I don't give a flying
fuck
about rescue personnel — "

"Sir,
I-"

"Do not
sir
me. I want to see my daughter. I want you to get her something to eat. I want you to find her a decent nurse, not one of these guinea pigs who'd unwittingly kill any kid with an ear infection. She needs to go home and
rest,
not relive whatever
ordeal
she's been through with some bozo, some
clown
who couldn't even graduate from high school, who wouldn't know a motive if it bit him on the
ass,
all because some chicken-'n-biscuits police force doesn't have the proficiency to figure it out themselves."

"It's standard, sir, with these sorts of mishaps—"

"Mishaps?"

"I mean — "

"A mishap is spilling Kool-Aid on a white carpet. A
mishap is losing a fucking earring."

"She
-
she'll only speak to him if she's up to it. You have my word."

"You're going to have to do a lot better than your word, Doctor what does that thing say, Dr. Thomas, Tom
Smarts?"

"Actually, it's without the
s.
"

"What is that, your
stage
name?"

I rolled off the bed and, making sure my arm and the other plastic cords to which my chest was attached did not fully tear out of whatever machine I was rigged to, I walked the few feet to the curtain, the bed reluctantly trolleying after me. I peered out.

Standing next to the large white administrative hexagon in the middle of the Emergency Room was Dad, in corduroy. His gray-blond hair flopped across his forehead—something that happened during lectures—his face was red. In front of him stood White Lab Coat, clasping his hands and nodding. To his left, behind the counter, sat Fuzzy Hair and, faithfully at her side, Mars Orange Lipstick, both of them gazing at Dad, one pressing a phone receiver to her pink neck, the other pretending to scrutinize a clipboard but eavesdropping.

"Dad," I scraped.

He heard me immediately. His eyes widened.

"Jesus Christ," he said.

As it turned out, although I had no recollection of it whatsoever, I'd apparently been quite the Talk Show Host with John Richards and his son, when they carried me, their limp bride, half a mile to their pickup truck. (White Lab Coat was very informative when he explained, where memory was concerned, I could "expect anything and everything"—as if I'd only bumped my head, as if I'd merely had a head-on collision.)

With what I imagine to be the energized yet charred voice of someone recently struck by lightning (over 100 million volts of direct current) with dilated pupils and splinter sentences I told them my name, address, telephone number, that I'd been on a camping trip in the Great Smoky Mountains, that something
bad
had happened. (I actually used the word
bad.)
I didn't respond to their direct questions —I was unable to tell them specifically what I'd seen—but apparently I repeated the words "She's departed" throughout the forty-five minute ride to Sluder County Hospital.

This detail was particularly unsettling. "She's Departed" was a grim nursery song Dad and I used to sing on the highways when I was five, learned in

Ms. Jetty's kindergarten in Oxford, Mississippi. It followed the generic melody of "Oh, My Darlin' Clementine":
"She's departed, she's a nowhere, she's my girl and she's a-gone I She went drownin in the river, washed up somewherein Babylon."

(Dad learned most of this after bonding with my two knights in shining armor in the Emergency waiting room, and though they left well before I was awake, Dad and I later sent them a thank-you note and three hundred dollars' worth of new fly-fishing equipment blindly purchased from Bull's-eye Bait and Tackle.)

Due to my bizarre lucidity, Sluder County Hospital had been able to contact Dad immediately, also alert the Park Ranger on duty, a man by the name of Roy Withers, who began a search of the area. It was also why the Burns County Police dispatched an officer from their Patrol Unit, Officer Gerard Coxley, to the hospital, so he could talk to me.

"I've already made arrangements," Dad said. "You're not talking to anyone."

Once again I was behind the spearmint curtain in the spongy bed, mummified by heated flannel blankets, trying to eat with one pipe cleaner arm the turkey sandwich and chocolate chip cookie Mars Orange Lipstick had brought me from the cafeteria. My head felt like that colorful balloon they used in the classic film
Around the World in 80 Days.
I seemed to be able only to stare at the curtain, chew and swallow, and sip the coffee Fuzzy Hair had brought according to Dad's specific instructions ("Blue likes her coffee with skim milk, no sugar. I like mine black."): stare, chew, swallow, stare, chew, swallow. Dad was on the left side of the bed.

"You're going to be fine," he said. "My girl's a champion. Not afraid of anything. We'll get you home in an hour. You'll rest. Soon be right as rain."

I was aware Dad, all Trumanish voice and Kennedyesque grin, was repeating these cheerleader phrases to inspire team spirit in himself, not me. I didn't mind. I'd been given some sedative via the IV and hence felt too balmy to grasp the full extent of his anxiety. To explain: I'd never actually
told
Dad about the camping trip. I'd told him I'd be spending the weekend at Jade's. I didn't
mean
to be deceitful, especially in lieu of his newfound McDonald's
styled approach to parenting (Always Open and Ready to Serve), but Dad despised outdoor activities such as camping, skiing, mountain biking, parasailing, base jumping and, even more, the "dimwitted dulls" who did them. Dad had not even the remotest desire to take on the Forest, the Ocean, the Mountain or the Thin Air, as he detailed extensively in "Man's Hubris and the National World/' published in 1982 in the now-obsolete
Sound Opinions Press.

I present Paragraph 14, the section entitled "Zeus Complex": "The egocentric Man seeks to taste immortality by engaging in demanding physical challenges, wholeheartedly bringing himself to the brink of death in order to taste an egotistical sense of
accomplishment,
of
victory.
Such a feeling is false and short-lived, for Nature's power over Man is absolute. Man's honest place is not in extreme conditions, where, let's face it, he's frail as a flea, but in
work.
It is in building things and governing, the creation of rules and ordinances. It is in work Man will find life's meaning, not in the selfish, heroin-styled rush of hiking Everest without oxygen and nearly killing himself and the poor Sherpa carrying him."

Due to Paragraph 14, I didn't tell Dad. He'd never have let me go, and though I hadn't especially wanted to go myself, I also didn't want the others to go and have a mind-blowing experience without me. (I had no idea how mind-blowing it would actually be.)

"I'm proud of you," Dad said.

"Dad," was all I could scuff. I did manage to touch his hand and it responded like one of those mimosa plants, but in the opposite way, opening.

"You will be fine, little cloud. Fine. Fine as a fiddle."

"Fit," I scratched.

"Fit as a fiddle."

"Promise?"

"Of course I promise."

An hour later, my voice had begun to tiptoe back. A new nurse, Stern Brow (illicitly kidnapped by White Lab Coat from another floor of the hospital, in order to placate Dad) took my blood pressure and pulse ("Doin' fine," she said before humphing off).

Although I felt bug-snug under the sunshine lights, the hospital beeps, clicks and toots soothing as fish noises one hears in the ocean while snorkeling, gradually, I noticed my memory of the night before had begun to show signs of life. As I sipped my coffee listening to the aggravated mutters of a croaky gentleman recovering from an asthma attack on the other side of the curtain ("Reely now. Got to get home and feed my dog." "Just another half hour Mr. Elphinstone."), suddenly I was aware Hannah had snuck into my head: not as I'd seen her—
God no—
but sitting at her dining room table

listening to one of us, her head tilted, smoking a cigarette, then ruthlessly stabbing it out on her bread plate. She did that on two occasions. I also thought about the heels of her feet, a tiny detail not many others noticed: sometimes they were black and so dry, they resembled pavement.

"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.