Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  I ran to the kitchen, dialed 911. The woman was a hybrid between person and machine and I had to repeat our address twice. Finally, she said an ambulance was on the way and I returned to the porch, kneeling next to him. I tried to remove his jacket, but he moaned and grabbed at what I realized was a gunshot wound in his lower left side, under his ribs.

  "Yo telefoneé una ambulancia," I said. (I called an ambulance.)

  I rode in the back with him.

  NO STOP NO GOOD STOP PAPA STOP

  "Listed va a estarbien," I said. (You're going to be fine.)

  At the hospital, the paramedics raced his gurney through the smudged, white double doors and the nurse in charge of the emergency room roster, petite, perky Nurse Marvin, handed me a bar of soap and paper-towel pajamas and told me to use the bathroom at the end of the hall; the cuffs of my jeans were splattered with blood.

  After I changed, I left a message on the machine for Dad and then sat quietly on a pastel plastic seat in the waiting room. I sort of dreaded Dad's inevitable appearance. Obviously I loved the man, but unlike some of the other fathers I observed at Pappy-Comes-to-School Day at Walhalla Elementary, dads who were shy and talked in cottony voices, my dad was a loud, uninhibited man, a man of resolute action with little patience or innate tranquility, more Papa Dop in temperament than Paddington Bear, Pavlova or Petting Zoo. Dad was a man who, due to his underprivileged background perhaps, never hesitated when it came to the verbs to get or to take. He was always getting something off the ground, his act together, his hands dirty, the show on the road, someone's goat, the message, out more, on with things, lost, laid, away with murder. He was also always taking charge, the bull by the horns, back the night, something in stride, someone to the cleaners, a rain check, an ax to something, Manhattan. And when it came to looking at things, Dad was something of a Compound Microscope, one who viewed life through an adjustable eyepiece lens and thus expected all things to be in focus. He had no tolerance for The Murky, The Blurry, The Hazy or The Soiled.

  He charged into the emergency room shouting, "What the hell is going on here? Where is my daughter?" causing Nurse Marvin to scuttle off her chair.

  After ensuring that I too had not suffered a gunshot wound, nor had any open cuts or scrapes through which I might have been fatally contaminated by "that Latino son-of-a-bitch," Dad barged through the smudged, white double doors with the giant red letters screaming AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY (Dad was always electing himself an AUTHORIZED PERSON) and demanded to know what had happened.

  Any other dad would have been cursed, expelled, expunged, maybe even arrested, but this was Dad, part Pershing missile, part People's Prince. Within minutes, various excitable nurses and the odd redheaded intern were scurrying around the major shock-trauma unit, working not for the third-degree burn victim or the boy who'd overdosed on ibuprofen now weeping silently into the crook of his arm, but for Dad.

  "Well, he's upstairs in surgery and he's stable/' said the odd redheaded intern, standing very close to Dad and smiling up at him (see "Bulldog Ant," Meet the Bugs, Buddie, 1985).

  "We will have some more up-to-date information for you as soon as the doctor comes down from surgery. Let's pray it'll be good news!" exclaimed a nurse (see "Wood Ant," Meet the Bugs).

  Shortly Dr. Michael Feeds appeared from Floor 3, Surgery, and told Dad Andreo had suffered a gunshot wound to his abdomen, but was going to live.

  "Do you know what he was up to tonight?" he asked. "From the look of the bullet wound, he was shot at close range, which could mean it was an accident, his own gun maybe. He could have been cleaning the barrel and it accidentally discharged. Some semiautomatics can do that. . ."

  Dad stared down at poor Dr. Mike Feeds until Dr. Mike Feeds was cross-sectioned, positioned on a spotless examination slide and firmly clamped to the specimen stage.

  "My daughter and I know nothing about that human being."

  "But I thought—"

  "He happened to mow our lawn twice a week and did an inadequate job at that, so exactly why in Christ's name he chose to drip up onto our porch is beyond my comprehension. Of course," Dad said, glancing at me, "we understand the situation is tragic. My daughter was more than happy to save his life, getting him proper treatment or what have you, but I will tell you quite bluntly, Dr. . . ."

  "Dr. Feeds," said Dr. Feeds. "Mike."

  "I will tell you, Dr. Meeds, that we are of no relation to this individual and I will not involve my daughter in whatever it was that got him into such a predicament—gang warfare, gambling, any number of those insalubrious activities of the underworld. Our involvement ends here."

  "Oh, I see," said Dr. Feeds softly. Dad gave a curt nod, planted a hand on my shoulder, and steered me through the smudged, white double doors.

  That night in my room, I stayed awake imagining a humid reunion with Andreo surrounded by Philippine figs and peacock plants. His skin would smell of cacao and vanilla, mine of passion fruit. I wouldn't be paralyzed with shyness, not anymore. After a person had come to you with his/her gunshot wound, after his/her blood had been all over your hands, socks and jeans, you

  were tied together by a powerful bond of human existence that no one, not even a Dad, could comprehend. jNo puedo vivir sin mi vidai No puedo vivir sin mi alma! (I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!)

  He ran his hand through his black hair, oily and thick.

  YOU SAVE MY LIFE STOP ONE NIGHT I MAKE YOU COMIDA CRIOLLA STOP But such an exchange was not meant to be.

  The following morning, after the police called and Dad and I made a statement, I made him drive me to St. Matthew's hospital. I carried in my arms a dozen pink roses ("You will not take that boy red roses, I draw the line," Dad bellowed in the Seasonal Flowers aisle at Deal Foods, causing two mothers to stare) and a melted chocolate milkshake.

  He was gone.

  "Disappeared from his room 'round five this morning," reported Nurse Joanna Cone (see "Giant Skink," Encyclopedia of Living Things, 4th éd.). "Ran a check on his insurance. The card he gave was a fake. Doctors think that's why he hightailed it outta here, but the thing is" Nurse Cone leaned forward, jutting out her round, pink chin and speaking in the same emphatic whisper she probably used to tell Mr. Cone to stay awake during church, "he didn't speak aworda English so Dr. Feeds never got outa him how he got the bullet. Police don't know either. What I'm thinkin', and this is just a hunch, but I wonder if he was one of them illegal aliens who come to this country to find steady work and a good benefit program with disability and unlimited sick days. They've been spotted in this area before. My sister Cheyenne? She saw a whole slew of them in a checkout aisle at Electronic Cosmos. Know how they do it? Rubber rafts. The dead of night. Sometimes all the way from Cuba, fleeing Fidel. You know what I'm talking about?"

  "I believe I have heard a few rumors," said Dad.

  Dad made Nurse Cone call AAA from the Recovery Unit desk, and when we returned home, Andreo's truck was being towed. A large white van, discreetly marked Industrial Cleaning Co., was parked under our banyan tree. At Dad's request, ICC, specializing in the sanitization of former crime scenes, had driven the half hour north from Baton Rouge to attend to the trail of Andreo's blood staining the walkway, the front porch and a few maidenhair ferns.

  "We're putting this sad incident behind us, my little cloud," Dad said, squeezing my shoulder as he waved to grim-faced ICC employee Susan, age 40-45, wearing a blinding white slicker and green rubber gloves that extended beyond her elbows to her upper arms. She stepped onto our porch like an astronaut stepping on the moon.

  The appearance of Andreo's blurb in The Howard Sentinel (FOREIGNER SHOT, VANISHES) marked the end of The Verduga Incident, as Dad called it (a minor scandal that had only briefly tarnished an otherwise spotless Administration).

  Three months later, when the allspice and cassava plants had successfully quarantined the lawn, when twisting liana had choked every porch pillar and gutter and begun its murderous designs on the roof, when ra
ys of sunlight, even at noon, rarely had the nerve to trespass beyond the understory to the ground, we still knew nothing about Andreo, and in February, Dad and I left Howard for Roscoe, Michigan, official homeland of the Red Squirrel. Though I never said his name and remained silent in supposed indifference whenever Dad mentioned him ("Wonder what ever happened to that Latino thug"), I thought about him all the time, my stop-spoken gamekeeper, my Heathcliff, my Something.

  There was one more incident.

  When Dad and I were living in Nestles, Missouri, immediately following my fifteenth birthday celebration at The Hashbrown Hut, we were loafing around Wal-Mart so I could pick out a few birthday presents. ("Sundays at Wal-Mart," said Dad. "Parkies feasting for an afternoon on a football stadium of spectacular savings so the Waltons may buy an extra château in the south of France.") Dad had gone to Jewelry and I was perusing Electronics when I looked up and noticed a man with shaggy hair black as an eight ball. He was moving past the display of digital cameras with his back to me. He wore faded jeans, a gray T-shirt and an army camouflage baseball cap pressed way down over his forehead.

  His face was hidden—apart for a bit of tan, unshaved cheek—and yet, as he rounded into the aisle of TVs, my heart began to pound, because instantly I recognized the showy sigh, the slouch, that slow, underwater movement— his overall sense of Tahiti. No matter what time of day or amount of work to be done, someone with Tahiti could close his eyes and the reality of moody lawnmowers, scruffy lawns, threats of termination of employment would recede and in seconds he'd simply be in Tahiti, stark naked and drinking from a coconut, aware only of the percussion of the wind and girlish sighs of the ocean. (Few people were born with Tahiti, although there was a natural proclivity in Greeks, Turks and male South Americans. In North America, there was prevalence amongst Canadians, particularly in the Yukon territories, but in the United States it could be found only in first- and second-generation hippies and nudists.)

  I slipped after him, so I could find out it wasn't him but only someone who looked like him with a flat nose or Gorbachev birthmark. Yet, when I reached the aisle of TVs, as if he was in one of his restless, drowsy moods (exactly why he'd never tended the Neptune orchids), he'd drifted out the other end of the aisle, seemingly headed toward Music. I darted back the other way, slipping past the CDs, the cardboard CLEARANCE display of Bo Keith Badley's "Honky-tonk Hookup," but, again, when I peered around the FEATURED ARTIST OF THE MONTH sign, he'd already disappeared into the Photo Center.

  "Find some respectably rolled-back prices?" Dad suddenly asked behind me.

  "Oh-no."

  "Well, if you'd accompany me to Garden and Patio, I believe I've found a winner. The Beech Total Ovation Symphony Hot Tub Spa with Stereo. Typhoon back and neck jets. Maintenance free. Eight people may pile in for the fun at once. And price? Firmly rolled back. Hurry. We don't have much time."

  I managed to extricate myself from Dad under the somewhat shaky guise of wanting to peruse Apparel, and after I saw him head merrily toward Pets, I quickly circled back to the Photo Center. He wasn't there. I checked Pharmacy; Gifts & Flowers; Toys, where a red-faced woman was spanking her kids; Jewelry, where a Latino couple was trying on watches; the Vision Center, where an old woman bravely considered life behind brown-tinted billboard frames. I ran through a slew of cranky mothers in Baby; dazed newlyweds in Bath; Pets, where I covertly observed Dad discussing freedom with a goldfish ("Life ain't so good in the slammer, is it, old boy?"); and Sewing, where a bald man weighed the pros and cons of pink-and-white cotton chintz. I patrolled the café and the checkout aisles, including Customer Service and the Express Lane where a fat toddler screamed and kicked the candy bars.

  But again—he was gone. There'd be no awkward reunion, no WHEN LOVE SPEAKS STOP THE VOICE OF THE GODS MAKE HEAVEN DROWSY WITH THE HARMONY STOP.

  It wasn't until I dejectedly returned to the Photo Center that I noticed the shopping cart. Abandoned by the Drop-Off counter, jutting out into the middle of the aisle, it was empty—as I could have sworn his had been—apart from one item, a small plastic package of something called, ShifTbush™ Invisible Gear, Fall Mix.

  Puzzled, I picked up the bag. It was stuffed with crunchy nylon leaves. I read the back: "ShifTbush™ Fall Mix, a blend of 3-D, photo-enhanced, synthetic forest leaves. Apply it using EZStik™ to your existing camo and you'll be instantly invisible in your woodland surroundings, even to the keenest of animals. ShifTbush™ is the accomplished hunter's dream."

  "Don't tell me you're about to go through a deer-hunting phase," Dad said behind me. He sniffed. "What is that horrific smell —men's cologne, acidic sap. I couldn't find you. Figured you'd disappeared into that black hole known as the public restroom."

  I tossed the package back into the cart. "I thought I saw someone."

  "Oh? Now tell me your gut reaction to the following words. Colonial. DeWahay. Wood. Patio. Five Pieces. Sun resistant, wind resistant, Judgment Day resistant. Amazing value at just $299. And consider the Dellahay motto neatly inscribed on their cute little tags: 'Patio furniture isn't furniture. It's a state of mind.' " Dad smiled, putting his arm around me as he pushed me gently toward Garden. "I'll give you ten thousand dollars if you can tell me what that means."

  Dad and I left Wal-Mart with patio furniture, a coffee machine and one paroled goldfish (freedom was too much for him; he went belly up after a day of living on the outside), and yet, weeks later, even when the Improbables and Highly Unlikelies had taken over my head, I couldn't let go of the thought that it had, in fact, been he, restless and moody Heathcliff. Day after day, he floated through all the Wai-Marts in America, searching for me in a million lonely aisles.

  IV

  The House of the Seven Gables

  Naturally, for me, the idea of a Permanent Home (the definition of which I took to be any shelter Dad and I inhabited in excess of ninety days—the time an American cockroach could go without food) was nothing more than a Pipe Dream, Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, the hope to purchase a brand new Cadillac Coupe DeVille with baby blue leather interior for any Soviet during the drab winter of 1985.

  On countless occasions, I pointed out New York City or Miami on our Rand-McNally map. "Or Charleston. Why can't you teach Conflict Resolution at University of South Carolina at This Is Actually a Civilized Location?" My head mashed against the window, seatbelt strangling me, my gaze dazed by the ceaseless rewinding of cornfields, I'd fantasize that one day, Dad and I would quietly settle somewhere—anywhere—like dust.

  Due to his stock refusals over the years, however, during which he ridiculed my sentimentality ("How can you eschew travel? I don't understand. How can my daughter wish to be dimwitted and dull as some handmade ashtray, as floralized wallpaper, as that sign—yes, that one—Big Slushy. Ninety-nine cents. That's your name from now on. Big Slushy."), during our highway discussions of The Odyssey (Homer, Hellenistic Period) or The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck, 1939), I'd stopped even alluding to such literary themes as the Homestead, Motherland or Native Soil. And thus it was with great fanfare Dad unveiled over rhubarb pie at the Qwik Stop Diner outside of Lomaine, Kansas ("Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead," he sang facetiously, causing the waitress to frown at us suspiciously), that for the entirety of my high school senior year, all seven months and nineteen days, we would reside in a single location: Stockton, North Carolina.

  I'd heard of it oddly enough, not only because I'd read, a few years back, the cover story in Ventures magazine, "Fifty Top Retirement Towns," and Stockton (pop. 53,339), marooned in the Appalachian Mountains, evidently quite pleased with its nickname (The Florence of the South) had been written up as #39, but also because the mountain city had featured prominently in a fascinating FBI account of the Jacksonville fugitives, Escaped (Pillars, 2004), the true story of the Vicious Three who escaped from Florida State Prison and survived for twenty-two years in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. They roamed the thousands of trails veining the foothills between North Carolina and Tennessee, living on deer, rabbi
t, skunk and the refuse of weekend campers, and would have remained at large ("The Park is so expansive it could effectively hide a herd of pink elephants," wrote the author, retired Special Agent Janet Pillars) had one of them not acted on the apparently uncontrollable urge to hang at the local mall. On a Friday afternoon in fall 2002, Billy "The Pit" Pikes wandered into a West Stockton shopping center, Dinglebrook Arcade, bought a few dress shirts, ate a calzone and was identified by a cashier at Cinnabon. Two of the Vicious Three were captured, but the last, known simply as "Sloppy Ed," remained at large, somewhere in the mountains.

  Dad, on Stockton: "As dreary a mountain town as any in which I'll collect a frighteningly diminutive paycheck from UNCS and you'll secure your place next year at Harvard."

  "Hot diggity dog," I said.

  The August before our arrival, while living at the Atlantic Waters Condotel in Portsmouth, Maine, Dad had been in close contact with one Ms. Dianne L. Seasons, a Senior Associate with a very impressive sales and long-term lease record at the Stockton-based Sherwig Realty. Once a week, Dianne mailed Dad glossy photos of Featured Sherwig Properties, each one accompanied with her handwritten note on Sherwig memo stationary, paper-clipped to the corner: "A lovely mountain oasis!" "Full of Southern charm!" "Exquisite and special, one of my all-time favesl"

  Dad, famous for toying with Salespersons Desperate to Close like grassland cats with a limping wildebeest, deferred making a final decision on a house and responded to Dianne's evening phone calls ("Just wanted to know how ya'll liked 52 Primrose!") with melancholic indecision and plenty of sighing and thus, Dianne's handwritten memos became increasingly frenzied ("Won't last the summer!!" "Will go like a hot cake!!!").

  Finally, Dad put Dianne out of her misery when he chose one of the most exclusive of all Featured Sherwig Properties, the fully furnished 24 Armor Street, #1 on the Hot List.