Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  Only when Dad, with a small, self-satisfied smile, closed his worn leather folder full of chicken-scratch notes (placed on the podium for effect, because he never looked at them), removed the linen handkerchief from his jacket pocket, and delicately touched it to his forehead (we'd driven through Nevada's Andamo Desert in the middle of July and he hadn't needed to blot his forehead like that a single time), only then did anyone move. Some of the kids grinned in disbelief, others walked out of the lecture hall with surprised faces. A few were starting to page through the Littleton book.

  Now, Dad answered his own question, his voice low and scratchy in the receiver. "We are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things," he said.

  18

  A Room with a View

  The late great Horace Lloyd Swithin (1844-1917), British essayist, lecturer, satirist and social observer, wrote in his autobiographical Appointments, 1890-1901 (1902), "When one travels abroad, one doesn't so much discover the hidden Wonders of the World, but the hidden wonders of the individuals with whom one is traveling. They may turn out to afford a stirring view, a rather dull landscape or a terrain so treacherous one finds it's best to forget the entire affaire and return home."

  I didn't see Hannah during Finals Week and only encountered Jade and the others once or twice before an exam. "See ya next year, Olives," Milton said when we passed each other outside the Scratch. (I thought I detected wrinkles in his forehead hinting at his advanced age when he winked at me, but I didn't want to stare.) Charles, I knew, was off to Florida for ten days, Jade was going to Atlanta, Lu to Colorado, Nigel to his grandparents — Missouri, I think—and I was thus resigned to an uneventful Christmas vacation with Dad and Rikeland Gestault's latest critique of the American justice system, Ride the Lightning (2004). After my last exam, however, AP Art History, Dad announced that he had a surprise.

  "An early graduation present. A final Abenteuer—I should say, aventure — before you're rid of me. It's only a matter of time before you refer to me as—what do they say in that mawkish film with the cranky elderly? An old poop."

  As it turned out, an old friend of Dad's from Harvard, Dr. Michael Servo Kouropoulos (Dad affectionately called him "Baba au Rhum," and thus I assumed he bore a resemblance to rum-soaked sponge cake), had, for some time, been entreating Dad to visit him in Paris, where he'd been teaching archaic Greek literature at La Sorbonne for the past eight years.

  "He invited us to stay with him. Which we will, certainly; I understand he has a palatial apartment somewhere along the Seine. Comes from a family drowning in money. Imports and exports. First, however, I thought it'd be swell to stay a few nights in a hotel, get a taste of la vie parisienne. I booked something at the Ritz."

  "The Ritz?"

  "A suite au sixième étage. Sounds quite electrifying."

  "Dad-"

  "I wanted the Coco Suite, but it was taken. I'm sure everyone wants the Coco Suite."

  "But-"

  "Not a word about the cost. I told you I've been saving for a few extravagances."

  I was surprised by the trip, the proposed lavishness, sure, but even more by the childlike zeal that'd overtaken Dad, a Gene Kelly Effect I had not witnessed in him since June Bug Tamara Sotto of Pritchard, Georgia, invited Dad to Monster Mash, the statewide tractor pull in which it was impossible for someone without trucker connections to get tickets. ("Do you think if I slip one of those toothless marvels a fifty, he'd allow me to get behind the wheel?" Dad asked.) I'd also recently discovered (crumpled paper sadly staring out of the kitchen trash) Federal Forum had declined to print Dad's latest essay, "The Fourth Reich," an offense which, under normal circumstances, would have caused him to grumble under his breath for days, perhaps launch into spontaneous lectures on the dearth of critical voices in American media forums, both popular and obscure.

  But, no, Dad was all "Singin' in the Rain," all "Gotta Dance," all "Good Mornin'." Two days before our scheduled departure, he came home laden with guidebooks (of note, Paris, Pour Le Voyageur Distingué [Bertraux, 2000]), city shopping maps, Swiss Army suitcases, toiletry kits, miniature reading lights, inflatable neck pillows, Bug Snuggle plane socks, two strange brands of hearing plug (EarPlane and Air-Silence), silk scarves ("All Parisian women wear scarves because they wish to create the illusion of being in a Doisneau photo," said Dad), pocket phrase books and the formidable, hundred-hour La Salle Conversation Classroom ("Become bilingual in five days," ordered the side of the box. "Be the toast of dinner parties.").

  With the nervous expectation "one can only feel when one parts with one's personal baggage and holds fast to the shabby hope of reuniting with it after journeying two thousand miles," Dad and I, on the eve of December 20, boarded an Air France flight out of Atlanta's Hartsfield airport and safely landed in Paris at Charles de Gaulle, the cold, drizzling afternoon of December 21 (see Bearings, 1890-1897, Swithin, 1898, p. 11).

  We weren't scheduled to meet up with Baba au Rhum until the 26 (Baba was supposedly visiting family in the south of France), so we spent those first five days in Paris alone as we'd been in the old Volvo days, speaking to no one but each other and not even noticing.

  We ate crêpes and coq au vin. At night, we dined in expensive restaurants crawling with city views and men with bright eyes that fluttered after women like caged birds hoping to find a tiny hole through which they might escape. After dinner, Dad and I entombed ourselves at jazz clubs like au Caveau de la Huchette, a smoky crypt in which one was required to remain mute, motionless and alert as a coonhound while the jazz trio (faces so sweaty, they had to have been lined with Crisco) ripped, riffed and warped with their eyes closed, their fingers tarantuling up and down keys and strings for over three and a half hours. According to our waitress, the place had been a favorite of Jim Morrison, and he'd shot up heroin in the same dark corner in which Dad and I were sitting.

  "We'd like to move to that table there, s'il vous plaît," said Dad.

  Despite these rousing environs, I thought about home all the time, about that night with Hannah, the strange stories she told me. As Swithin wrote in State of Affairs: 1901-1903 (1902), "Whilst man is in one location, he thinks of another. Dancing with one woman, he can't help but long to see the quiet curve of another's nude shoulder; to never be satisfied, to never have the mind and body cheerfully stranded in a single location—this is the curse of the human race!" (p. 513).

  It was true. Contented as I was (especially those moments Dad was unaware of the bit of éclair at the corner of his mouth, or when he rattled off a sentence in "perfect" French and was met with confused stares), I found myself staying awake at night, worried about them. And, this is awful to admit, because the correct thing was to be wholly unfazed by what Hannah had told me—I really couldn't help but see them all in a slightly different light now, a very severe overhead light in which they bore a startling resemblance to smudged street urchins who sang and marched in the chorus of "Consider Yourself" in Oliver!, which Dad and I watched over salty popcorn one dull evening in Wyoming.

  After nights such as these, the next morning I found myself squeezing Dad's arm a little tighter as we dashed in front of traffic crossing the Champs Elysées, giggling a little louder over his comments regarding fat Americans in khaki when a fat American in khaki asked the madame at the pâtisserie counter where the bathrooms were. I began to behave like someone with a grave prognosis, searching Dad's face all the time, feeling on the verge of tears when I noticed the delicate wrinkles blooming around his eyes, or the prick of black in his left iris, or the frayed cuffs of his corduroy jacket—a direct result of my childhood, of my tugging on his sleeve. I found myself thanking God for these dusty details, these things no one else noticed, because they, fragile as spiderwebs and thread, were the only things separating me from them.

  I must have thought about the others more than I realized, because they began to make Hitchcock cameos. I saw Jade on countless occasions. There she was, just in front of us, walking a haughty p
ug down Rue Danton — wheat-bleached hair, blunt red lipstick, gum and jeans—perfectly jaded. And there was Charles, the thin, sullen blond kid melting into the bar at Café Ciseaux, drinking his café, and poor Milton, beached outside the Odéon Métro with nothing but a sleeping bag and a recorder. With gnarled fingers he played a woeful Christmas song—some sad, four-note tune—his feet raw, his skin heavy as a wet pair of jeans.

  Even Hannah made a brief appearance, in what turned out to be the only incident of our stay Dad had not planned (at least, not to my knowledge). There was a bomb scare in the early morning of December 26. Alarms screamed, hallways flashed, all guests in the hotel, as well as employees — bathrobes, bald heads, bare chests a-flying—were emptied out into Place Vendôme like cream of potato soup from a can. Smooth Efficiency, the implacable quality exuded by all Ritz staff, turned out to be nothing more than a flimsy magic spell, valid only when workers were physically inside the hotel. Dumped into the night, they pumpkined back into shivery humans, red-eyed, runny-nosed people with windswept hair.

  Naturally, Dad found this dramatic interlude all very exciting, and as we awaited the arrival of the fire brigade ("I imagine we'll be on France 2," Dad speculated with glee) in front of a waxen bellboy, draped in rippling silk pajamas the color of peas, I spotted Hannah. She was much older, still slim, but most of her beauty had corroded. The sleeves of her pajamas were rolled up

  like a truck driver's.

  "What's going on?" she asked.

  "Eh," said the frightened bellboy. "Je ne sais pas, madame."

  "What d'ya mean tu ne sais pas?"

  "Je ne sais pas."

  "Does anyone know anything around here? Or are you all just a bunch of frogs on lily pads?"

  (The "bomb scare," to Dad's evident displeasure, turned out to be nothing more than an electrical malfunction, and the following morning, our last in the hotel, Dad and I awoke to free breakfast in our suite and a note calmly printed in gold, apologizing for le dérangement.)

  On the windy afternoon of the 26, we said good-bye to the Ritz and took our suitcases across the city to Baba au Rhum's five-bedroom apartment, occupying the top two floors of a seventeenth-century stone building on Ile St. Louis.

  "Not bad, hmmm?" said Servo. "Yes, the girls enjoyed this old shed growing up. All their French friends wanted to come over every weekend, couldn't get rid of them. How do you like Paris, mmm?"

  "It's extr—"

  "Elektra does not like Paris. Prefers Monte Carlo. I agree. Tourists make life difficult for us true Parisians, and Monte's a theme park you can't enter unless you have, what, Soc —one, two million? Been on the phone with Elektra all morning. Calls me up. 'Daddy,' she says, 'Daddy, they want me for the embassy.' Salary they offered her, I fall off my chair. Barely nineteen, skipped three grades. They adore her at Yale. Psyche too. She just started as a freshman. And they still want her for all the modeling, did top modeling in the summers. Made enough to buy all of Manhattan, and what is his name with the underwear, Calvin Klein. He fell madly in love with her. Nine years old, she was writing like Balzac. Her teachers would cry when they read her work, they were always telling me she's a poet. And poets are born, you see, they're not made. Only one comes along in a single, what do they say? Mmm? A single century."

  Dr. Michael Servo Kouropoulos was a severely tanned Greek man of many opinions, tales and chins. He was overweight, in his mid- to late sixties with white sheep's hair and dull brown dice eyes that never stopped rolling around a room. He sweated, suffered from the strange tic of slapping then rubbing in circular motions his own chest, threaded each of his sentences together with a belly-deep "mmm" and treated idle conversations that had nothing to do with his family as if they were termite-infested houses in dire need of being exterminated with another story about Elektra or Psyche. He moved speedily, in spite of the limp that warped his walk and the wooden cane that, after propping it against some counter while ordering un pain au chocolat, came clattering noisily to the floor, sometimes hitting people on the shin or foot ("Mmmm? Oh, dear, excusez-moi.").

  "He always hobbled," Dad said. "Even when we were at Harvard."

  As it turned out, too, he was severely averse to having his picture taken. The first time I removed my disposable camera from my backpack, Dr. Kouropoulos put his hand over his face and refused to remove it. "Mmmm, no, I don't photograph well." The second time, he disappeared for ten minutes in the Men's Room. "Excuse me, hate, hate to break up the photo op, but, nature. She's calling." The third time, he threw out that shopworn detail people loved to repeat about the Masai people, thereby drawing attention to their sensitivity and savoir faire when it came to primitive cultures: "They say it steals the soul. I don't want to take any chances." (This factoid was painfully outdated. Dad had spent time in the Great Rift Valley, and said for five dollars, most Masai under seventy-five would let you steal their soul as many times as you wished.)

  I asked Dad what his problem was. "I'm not sure. But I wouldn't be surprised if he was wanted for tax evasion."

  To imagine that Dad had deliberately chosen to spend five minutes with this man, let alone six days, was inconceivable. They were not friends. In fact, they appeared to loathe each other.

  Meals with Baba au Rhum were not joyous affairs, but prolonged torture. He ended up so filthy after pulling apart his braised beef or leg of lamb, I found myself wishing he'd taken the gauche yet critical precaution of tucking his napkin around his neck. His hands behaved like fat, startled tabby cats; without warning, they'd pounce two to three feet across the table in order to seize the saltshaker or the bottle of wine. (He'd pour himself a glass first, then in a dull afterthought, one for Dad.)

  My primary discomfort during these meals derived not from his table manners, but from the general repartee. Midway through the appetizers, sometimes even before, Dad and Servo became engaged in a strange, spoken locking-of-horns, a masculine battle of one-upmanship widespread among such species as the Rutting Bull Elk and the Sabre-toothed Ground Beetle.

  From what I gathered, the competition sprung from Servo's subtle insinuations that while it was all fine and dandy Dad had raised one genius ("When we go home, a little bird told me we're going to find good news from Harvard," Dad pompously unveiled during dessert at Lapérouse), he, Dr. Michael Servo Kouropoulos, hailed professor of littérature archaïque, had raised two ("Psyche was tapped by NASA for the Lunar Mission V in 2014. I'd tell you more, but these things are classified. I must remain, for her sake and the sake of the world's declining superpower, mum . . .").

  After considerable word-to-word combat, Dad showed signs of strain — that is, until he located Servo's Achilles' heel, some disappointing younger son apparently mislabeled Atlas, who'd been unable not only to shoulder the world, but a single freshman course load at Rio Grande Universidad in Cuervo, Mexico. Dad made him admit the poor kid was now adrift somewhere in South America.

  I did my best to ignore these ridiculous skirmishes, spending my time eating as daintily as I could, raising White Mercy Flags in the form of long, apologetic stares at the various aggravated waiters and cranky close-at-hand clientele. Only when there appeared to be a stalemate did I placate Dad.

  " 'Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance. Our love of things of the mind does not make us soft,' " I said as gravely as I could after Servo's forty-five minute oration on the famous son of a billionaire (Servo couldn't name names) who in 1996 fell madly in love with tan twelve-yearold Elektra in Cannes, as she sat on the beach making sandcastles with all the modern design sense and keen eye for craftsmanship of Mies van der Rohe. So haunted was the World's Most Eligible Bachelor, Servo was afraid he'd have to get a restraining order, so the man and his four-hundred-foot yacht (which he was threatening to rename Elektra, replete with Pilâtes gym and helicopter landing pad) couldn't come within a thousand feet of the mesmeric girl.

  Hands folded in my lap, I tilted my head and set loose a Powerful Gaze of Omniscience across the room, a gaze remini
scent of the doves Noah set loose from the deck of his Ark, doves that returned to him with twigs.

  "So said Thucydides, Book Two," I whispered.

  Baba au Rhum's eyes bulged.

  After three days of such agonizing meals, I deduced from the defeated look in Dad's eyes he'd come to the same conclusion I had, that it was best we find alternative accommodation, because, although it was all well and good they'd had bell-bottoms and sideburn length in common back at Harvard, this was the era of the ohs, epoch of serious hair and cigarette pants. Being Bon Amis at Harvard in the late 1970s with shirts fashioned out of cheesecloth and a widespread popularity of clogs and clip-on suspenders was certainly not greater than or equal to being Bon Amis now with minimalist fitted shirts in cotton blends and a widespread popularity of collagen and clip-on headsets so one could give orders hands free.

  I was wrong, however. Dad had been severely brainwashed (see "Hearst, Patty," Almanac of Rebels and Insurgents, Skye, 1987). He cheerfully announced he was going to spend the entire day with Servo at La Sorbonne. There was an opening for a government professor at the school, which would be an interesting fit for him while I was marooned at Harvard, and as I’d undoubtedly find an entire day of faculty hobnobbing tedious, I was instructed to go amuse myself. Dad handed me three hundred euros, his MasterCard, a key to the apartment, scribbled down Servo's home and mobile phone numbers on a piece of graph paper. We'd reconvene at 7:30 P.M. at Le Georges, the restaurant on the top of the Centre Pompidou.

  "It'll be an adventure/' said Dad with faux enthusiasm. "Didn't Balzac write in Lost Illusions that the only way to see Paris is on your own?" (Balzac wrote nothing of the kind.)

  Initially, I was relieved to be rid of the two of them. Dad and Baba au Rhum could have each other. But after six hours of wandering the streets, the Musée d'Orsay, stuffing myself with croissants and tartes, at times, pretending I was a young duchess in disguise ("The gifted traveler can't help but affect a traveling persona," notes Swithin in Possessions, 1910 [1911]. "Whilst at home he may merely be a hoi polloi husband, one of a million dull suited financiers, in a foreign land, he can be as majestic as he desires."), my feet were blistered, I had a sugar nadir; I felt drained and entirely irritated. I decided to make my way back to Servo's apartment, resolving (with more than a little satisfaction) to take the opportunity of Me Time to peruse a few of Baba au Rhum's personal belongings, namely, to locate some mislaid foe-toe drowning at the bottom of a sock drawer that revealed his girls not to be the chiseled Olympians their father led everyone to believe, but flabby, pimpled mortals, with dim eyes shoved deep into their heads, mouths long and bendy like pieces of licorice.