Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  I was shocked. Dad, hailing from his visiting professorship at Hicksburg State College or the University of Kansas at Petal, certainly had not been amassing great reserves of wealth (Federal Forum paid a derisory $150 per essay) and almost every other address at which we'd lived, the 19 Wilson Streets, the 4 Clover Circles, had been tiny, forgettable houses. And yet Dad had selected the SPRAWLING 5BR TUDOR FURNISHED IN KINGLY LUXURY, which looked, at least in Dianne's glossy photo, like an enormous two-humped Bactrian Camel at rest. (Dad and I would discover that the Sherwig photographer took particular care to conceal the fact that it was a molting Bactrian Camel at rest. Almost all of the gutters were detaching and many of the wooden beams decorating the exterior fell down during Fall Term.)

  Within minutes of our arrival at 24 Armor Street, Dad began his customary effort to transform himself into Leonard Bernstein, orchestrating the men of Feathery Touch Moving Co. as if they weren't simply Larry, Roge, Stu and Greg hoping to get off early and go for a beer, but sections of Brass, Woodwinds, Strings and Percussion.

  I snuck away and did my own tour of the house and grounds. Not only did the mansion come with 5BR, a COOK'S HEAVEN ON EARTH W/GRANITE, HARDWOODS, IN-DRAWER FRIDGE and CUSTOM HEART PINE CABINETS, but also a MASTER SUITE w/ MARBLE BATH, an ENCHANTING FISH POND and a BOOKWORM'S FANTASY LIBRARY.

  "Dad, how are we paying for this place?"

  "Hmm, oh, don't worry about that—excuse me, must you carry that box on its side? See the arrow there and those words that read, 'This End Up'? Yes. That means, this end up."

  "We can't afford it."

  "Of course we —I ask you once and I will ask you again, that goes in the living room, not here, please don't drop—there are valuables —I've saved a little in the last year, sweet. Not there! You see, my daughter and I employ a system. Yes, if you read the boxes you will discover that there are words written there in permanent marker and those words correspond to a particular room in this house. That's right! You get a gold star!"

  Carrying a gigantic box, Strings lumbered past us into COOK'S HEAVEN ON EARTH.

  "We should leave, Dad. We should go to 52 Primrose."

  "Don't be ridiculous. I worked out a fine price with Miss Seasons

  Greetings—yes, now that goes downstairs into my study, and please, there are actual butterflies in that box, do not drag—don't you read? Yes, lighten your griP" Brass clumsily made his way down the stairs with the giant box marked BUTTERFLIES FRAGILE.

  "Hmm? Now, yes, simply relax and enjoy—"

  "Dad, this is too much money."

  "I'm, well, yes, I understand your point, sweet, and certainly, this is . . ." Dad's eyes drifted up to the giant, brass light hanging from the ten-foot plaster ceiling, an upside-down representation of the 1815 Mt. Tambora eruption (see Indonesia and the Ring of Fire, Priest, 1978). "It's somewhat more ornate than we're used to, but why not? We're going to be here the entire year, aren't we? It's the last chapter, so to speak, before you go off, conquer the world. I want to make it memorable."

  He adjusted his glasses and looked back down into the opened box labeled LINENS like Jean Peters gazing into the Trevi Fountain, about to throw in a coin and make a wish.

  I sighed. It was evident, and had been for some time, that Dad was determined to make une grande affaire out of this year, my senior year (hence, the Bactrian Camel and other perplexing Auntie Mame-like lavishes I shall soon detail). Yet he was dreading it too (hence, the gloomy gaze into LINENS). Part of it was that he didn't want to think about me leaving him at the end of the year. I didn't particularly want to think about leaving him either. The thought was difficult to fathom. Abandoning Dad felt like de-boning all the old American musicals, separating Rodgers from Hammerstein, Lerner from Loewe, Comden from Green.

  The other reason why I thought Dad was feeling a little blue, and perhaps the more significant one, was that our scheduled year-long stay in a single location would mark an undeniably monotonous passage within chapter 12, "American Teachings and Travel" of Dad's otherwise thrilling mental biography.

  "Always live your life with your biography in mind," Dad was fond of saying. "Naturally, it won't be published unless you have a Magnificent Reason, but at the very least you will be living grandly." It was painfully obvious Dad was hoping his posthumous biography would be reminiscent not of Kissinger: The Man (Jones, 1982) or even Dr. Rhythm: Living with Bing (Grant, 1981) but something along the lines of the New Testament or the Qur'an.

  Though he certainly never said so, it was evident Dad adored being in motion, in transit, in the midst. He found standstills, halts, finishing points, termini, to be unappetizing, dull. Dad wasn't concerned with the fact that he was seldom at a university long enough to learn his students' names and was forced, for the sake of assigning their grades correctly at the end of term, to give them certain pertinent monikers, such as Too Many Questions, Tadpole Glasses, Smile Is All Gums and Sits on My Left.

  Sometimes I was afraid Dad felt having a daughter was a last stop, a finishing point. Sometimes when he was in a Bourbon Mood, I worried he wanted to ditch me and America and return to former Zaire, presently the Democratic Republic of the Congo (democratic in Africa, a word like the slang usage of totally and bobbing for fries, used purely for cool effect) in order to play a Che-cum-Trotsky-cum-Spartacus to the native people's fight for freedom. Whenever Dad spoke of the four treasured months spent in the Congo River Basin in 1985, hobnobbing with the "kindest, hardest-working, most genuine" people he'd ever met, he adopted an unusually flimsy appearance. He resembled an aged silent movie star photographed with buttery lights and lens.

  I'd accuse him of secretly wanting to return to Africa in order to spearhead a well-organized revolution, single-handedly stabilizing the DRC (expunging Hutu-aligned forces), then moving on to other countries waiting to be freed like exotic maidens tied to railroad tracks (Angola, Cameroon, Chad). When I voiced these suspicions, he'd laugh of course, but I always felt the laugh wasn't quite hard enough; it was conspicuously hollow, which made me wonder if I'd haphazardly thrown in my line and caught the biggest, most unlikely of fishes. This was Dad's deep-sea secret, never before photographed or scientifically classified: he wished to be a hero, a poster boy for freedom, silk-screened, reduced to bright colors and printed on a hundred thousand T-shirts, Dad with Marxist beret, martyr-ready eyes, and a threadbare mustache (see The Iconography of Heroes, Gorky, 1978).

  There was too a certain uncharacteristic, boyish gusto he reserved solely for sticking another pushpin through the Rand-McNally map and briefing me on our next location in a show-offy factoid riff, his version of Gangsta Rap: "Next stop Speers, South Dakota, homeland of the Ring-necked Pheasant, the Black-footed Ferret, the Badlands, Black Hills Forest, Crazy Horse Memorial, capital, Pierre, largest city, Sioux Falls, rivers, Moreau, Cheyenne, White, James. . ."

  "You take the large bedroom at the top of the stairs," he said now, watching Percussion and Woodwinds as they carried a heavy box across the yard toward the separate gabled entrance of the EXPANSIVE MASTER SUITE, "Hell, have the upstairs wing to yourself. Isn't it nice, sweet, to have a wing? Why shouldn't we live it up like Kubla Khan for a change? If you go up there, you'll find a surprise. I think you'll be pleased. I had to bribe a housewife, a real estate agent, two furniture salesmen, a UPS Head of Operations —now listen, yes, I'm talking to you — if you could go downstairs and aid your compatriot in unpacking the materials for my study, it would be most effective. He seems to have fallen down a rabbit hole."

  Over the years, Dad's surprises, large and small, had been scholarly in nature, a set of 1999 Lamure-France Encyclopedias of the Physical World translated from the French and unavailable for purchase in the United States. ("All Nobel Prize-winners have a set of these," Dad said.)

  But as I pushed open the bedroom door at the top of the stairs and walked into the large blue-walled room covered in pastoral oil paintings, giant arc windows along the far wall blistered with bubble curtains, I discovered not a rare,
underground edition of Wie schafft man ein Meisterwerk, or The Step-by-Step Manual for Crafting Your Magnum Opus (Lint, Steggertt, Cue, 1993), but astonishingly, my old Citizen Kane desk pushed into the corner by the window. It was the real thing: the elephantine, walnut, Renaissance Revival library table I'd had eight years ago at 142 Tellwood Street in Wayne, Oklahoma.

  Dad had found the desk at the Lord and Lady Hillier Estate Sale just outside of Tulsa, to which antiques wheeler-and-dealer June Bug, Partie "Let's Make a Deal" Lupine, had dragged Dad one stuffy Sunday afternoon. For some reason, when Dad saw the desk (and the five struggling Arnies it took to get it on the auction platform), he saw me and only me presiding over it (though I was only eight with a wingspan less than half its length). He paid a huge, undisclosed amount for it and announced with great flourish that this was "Blue's Desk," a desk "worthy of my little Eve of St. Agnes, upon which she will unmask all the Great Ideas." A week later, two of Dad's checks bounced, one at a grocery store, another at the university bookstore. I secretly believed it was because he'd paid "way above treasure price" for the desk, according to Let's Make a Deal, though Dad claimed he'd simply been slapdash with his bookkeeping. "Snubbed a decimal point," he'd said.

  And then, rather anticlimactically, I was only able to unmask Great Ideas in Wayne, because we weren't able to take the desk with us to Sluder, Florida—something to do with the movers (the falsely advertised You Can Take It With You Moving Co.) being unable to fit it in the van. I shed ferocious tears and called Dad a reptile when we had to leave it, as if it wasn't just an oversized table with elaborate talon legs and seven drawers requiring seven individual keys, but a black pony I was abandoning in a barn.

  Now I hurried back down the TWELVE OAKS STAIRCASE, finding Dad in the basement carefully opening the BUTTERFLIES FRAGILE box containing my mother's specimen—the six glass display cases she'd been working on when she'd died. When we arrived at a new house, he took hours to mount them, always in his office, always on the wall opposite his desk: thirty-two lined up girls in a petrified beauty pageant. It was why he didn't like June Bugs—or anyone, for that matter—nosing around his study, because the most devastating aspect of the Lepidoptera was not their color, or the unexpected furriness of the Polyphemus Moth antennae, not even the gloomy feeling you felt whenever you stood in front of something that had once zigzagged madly through the air, now still, wings uncouthly spread, body pinned to a piece of paper in a glass case. It was the presence of my mother within them. As Dad said once, they allowed you to see her face in greater close-up than any photographic likeness (Visual Aid 4.0). I'd always felt too that they held a strange adhesive power, so when a person looked at them, it was difficult to yank his/her gaze away.

  "So how do you like it?" he asked cheerfully, lifting out one of the cases, frowning as he inspected the corners.

  "It's perfect," I said.

  "Isn't it? The perfect surface on which to draft an admissions essay to make any Harvard graybeard shiver in his dress slacks." "But how much did it cost for you to buy it again—and then the shipping!" He glanced at me. "Hasn't anyone told you it's blasphemous to ask the price of a gift?"

  "How much? In total."

  He stared at me. "Six hundred dollars," he said with a resigned sigh, and then, returning the case to the box, squeezed my shoulder and moved past me, back up the stairs, shouting at Brass and Woodwinds to speed up the tempo of their last movement.

  He was lying. I knew this, not only because his eyes had flicked to the side when he'd said "six hundred" and Fritz Rudolph Scheizer, MD, had written in The Conduct of Rational Creatures (1998) that the cliché of a person's eyes flicking to the side when he or she lies is "utterly true," but also because, while surveying the underside of the desk, I'd spotted the tiny red price tag still knotted around the leg in the far corner ($17,000).

  I hurried back upstairs, into the foyer where Dad was looking through another box, BOOKS LIBRARY. I felt bewildered—a little upset, too. Dad and I had long put into effect the Sojourner Agreement, the understanding we'd always give each other The Truth "even if she was a beast, frightening and foul smelling." Over the years, there'd been countless occasions when the average dad would've cooked up an elaborate story, just to preserve the Parental Ruse, that they were sexless and morally flawless as Cookie Monsters—like the time Dad disappeared for twenty-four hours and when home, sported the tired yet satisfied look of a ranch hand who'd successfully horse whispered a touchy Palomino. If I asked for The Truth (and sometimes I chose not to ask), he never let me down —not even when it let me hold his character up to the light and I could see him for what he sometimes was: harsh, scratchy, a few unexpected holes.

  I had to confront him. Otherwise, the lie could wear me away (see "Acid Rain on Gargoyles/' Conditions, Eliot, 1999, p. 513). I ran upstairs, removed the price tag and kept it in my pocket for the rest of the day, waiting for the perfect checkmate moment to fling it at him.

  But then, just before we left for dinner at Outback Steakhouse, he was in my room examining the desk, and he looked so absurdly cheerful and proud of himself ("I'm good" he said, animatedly rubbing his hands together like Dick Van Dyke. "Fit for St. Peter, hmm, sweet?"). I couldn't help but feel to call him out on this well-intentioned extravagance, to embarrass him, was sort of unnecessary and cruel —not unlike informing Blanche Dubois that her arms looked flabby, her hair dry and that she was dancing the polka dangerously close to the lamplight.

  It was better not to say anything.

  V

  The Woman in White

  We were in the Frozen section of Fat Kat Foods when I first saw Hannah Schneider, two days after our arrival in Stockton. I was standing by our shopping cart, waiting for Dad to choose which flavor of ice cream he preferred.

  "America's greatest revelation was not the atom bomb, not Fundamentalism, not fat farms, not Elvis, not even the quite astute observation that gentlemen prefer blondes, but the great heights to which she has propelled ice cream," Dad was fond of commenting while standing with the freezer door open and inspecting every flavor of Ben and Jerry's, oblivious to the customers swarming around him, waiting for him to move.

  As he scrutinized the cartons on the shelves like a scientist engaged in creating an accurate DNA profile from a hair root, I became aware of a woman standing at the far end of the aisle.

  She was dark haired, thin as a riding crop. Dressed in funeral attire, a black suit with black 1980s stilettos (more dagger than shoe), she looked incongruous, bleached in the neon lights and achey tunes of Fat Kat Foods. It was obvious, however, in the way she examined the back of the box of frozen peas that she liked being incongruous, the lone Bombshell slinking into a Norman Rockwell, the ostrich amongst buffalo. She exuded that mix of satisfaction and self-consciousness of beautiful women used to being looked at, which made me sort of hate her.

  I'd long decided to hold in contempt all people who believed themselves to be the subject of everyone else's ESTABLISHING SHOT, BOOM SHOT, REACTION SHOT, CLOSE-UP or CHOKER, probably because I couldn't imagine myself turning up on anyone's storyboard, not even my own. At the same time, I (and the man staring at her with his mouth in an O holding a Lean Cuisine) couldn't help but shout, "Quiet on the set!" and "Roll 'em!" because, even at this distance, she was unbelievably stunning and strange, and as Dad was famous for quoting in one of his Bourbon Moods, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all /Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' "

  She returned the peas to the freezer and began to walk toward us.

  "New York Super Fudge or Phish Food?" asked Dad.

  Her heels stabbed the floor. I didn't want to stare, so I made an unconvincing attempt to examine the nutritional content of various popsicles.

  Dad didn't see her. "There's always Half Baked, I suppose," he was saying. "Oh, look. Makin' Whoopie Pie. I believe that's a new one, though I'm not sure how I feel about marshmallow with what, devil's food. Seems a bit overwrought."

  As she passed, she glanc
ed at Dad gazing into the freezer. When she looked at me, she smiled.

  She had an elegant sort of romantic, bone-sculpted face, one that took well to both shadows and light, even at their extremes. And she was older than I'd realized, somewhere in her late thirties. Most extraordinary though was the air of a Chateau Marmont bungalow about her, a sense of RKO, which I'd never before witnessed in person, only while Dad and I watched Jezebel into the early hours of the morning. Yes, within her carriage and deliberate steps like a metronome (now retreating behind the display of potato chips) was a little bit of the Paramount lot, a little neat scotch and air kisses at Ciro's. I felt, when she opened her mouth, she wouldn't utter the crumbly speech of modernity, but would use moist words like beau, top drawer and sound (only occasionally ring-a-ding-ding), and when she considered a person, took in him/her, she would place those nearly extinct personality traits— Character, Reputation, Integrity and Class—above all others.

  Not that she wasn't real. She was. There were hairs out of place, a quiver of white lint on her skirt. I simply felt somewhere, at some time, she'd been the toast of something. And a confident, even aggressive look in her eyes, made me certain she was planning a comeback.

  "I'm thinking Heath Bar Crunch. What do you think? Blue?"

  If her appearance in my life had amounted only to that single, Hitchcock cameo, I still think I would have remembered her, perhaps not in the same detail I remembered the ninety-five-degree summer night I watched Gone with the Wind for the first time at the Lancelot Dreamsweep Drive-in and Dad found it necessary to provide ongoing commentary on which constellations were visible ("There's Andromeda"), not only while Scarlett took on Sherman and when she got sick on the carrot but even when Rhett said he didn't give a damn.

  As the oily hand of Fate would have it, I'd only wait twenty-four hours to see her again, this time in a speaking role.

  School began in three days and Dad, in keeping with his recent Open-a-New-Window persona, insisted on spending the afternoon at Blue Crest Mall in the Adolescent Department of Stickley's, urging me to try on various articles of Back-2-School clothing and soliciting the fashion expertise of one Ms. Camille Luthers (see "Curly Coated Retriever," Dictionary of Dogs, Vol. 1). Camille was Adolescent Department Manager, who not only had worked in Adolescent for the last eight years but knew which Stickley styles were de rigueur this season due to her own esteemed daughter around my age named Cinnamon.