Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  Somehow I'd managed to walk all the way to Pigalle, so I entered the first métro I could find, switched trains at Concorde and was walking out of the St. Paul station, when I passed a man and a woman moving quickly down the stairs. I stopped in my tracks, turning to watch them. She was one of those short, dark, severe-looking women who didn't walk, but mowed, with jaw-length brown hair and a boxy green coat. He was considerably taller than she, in jeans, a suede bomber jacket, and as she talked to him —in French, it seemed—he laughed, a loud but supremely lethargic sound, the unmistakable laugh of a person reclining in a hammock soaked with sun. He was reaching into his back pocket for the ticket.

  Andreo Verduga.

  I must have whispered it, because an elderly French woman with a floral scarf wrapping her withered face tossed me a look of contempt as she pushed past me. Holding my breath, I hurried back down the stairs after them, jostled by a man trying to exit with an empty stroller. Andreo and the girl were already through the turnstiles, strolling down the platform and I would have followed, but I'd only purchased a single ride and four people were waiting in line at the ticket counter. I could hear the shudders of an approaching train. They stopped walking, far to my right, Andreo with his back to me, Green Coat facing him, listening to what he said, probably something along the lines of, YES STOP I SEE WHAT YOU MEAN STOP (OUI ARRETTE JE COMPRENDS ARRETTE), and then the train rushed in, the doors groaned open and he turned, chivalrously letting Green Coat enter in front of him. As he stepped into the car, I could just make out a splinter of his profile.

  A smack of the doors, the train belched and pulled out of the station.

  I wandered back to Servo's apartment in a daze. It couldn't have been he; no, not really. I was like Jade, making things more exotic than they actually were. I thought I'd noticed, as he moved past me, unzipping his jacket as he hurried down the stairs, a heavy silver watch hanging on his wrist, and Andreo the Gardener, Andreo of the Bullet Wound and Badly Fractured English wouldn't have that kind of watch, unless, in the three years since I'd seen him (not counting the Wal-Mart sighting), he'd become a successful entrepreneur or inherited a small fortune from a distant relative in Lima. And yet—the shard of face I'd seen, the passing blur on the stairs, the muscular cologne that strolled through the air behind him like pompous tan men on yachts —it added up to something real. Or perhaps I'd just witnessed his doppelgànger. After all, I'd been spotting Jade and the others all over the city, and Allison Smithson-Caldona in her relentless study of all things double and dittoed, Twin Paradox and Atomic Clocks (1999), actually tried to scientifically prove the somewhat mystical theory that everyone had a twin wandering the planet. She was able to confirm this as fact in three out of every twenty-five examined individuals, no matter their nationality or race (p. 250).

  When I finally eased open the front door to Servo's apartment, I was surprised to hear Dad and Servo in the living room just off the dark foyer and hall. The bloom was finally off the rose, I noted with satisfaction. They were fighting like Punch and Judy.

  "Highly hysterical over—" That was Dad (Judy). "You can't comprehend what it actually means—!" That was Servo

  (Punch). "Oh, don't give me—you're hot-headed as—go, go— " "—always content, aren't you, to hide behind the lecture podium?" "—you act like a hormonal preteen! Go take a cold shower, why—!" They must have heard the door (though I tried to close it silently), because their voices cut off like a big ax had just swung down on their words. A second later, Dad's head materialized in the doorway. "Sweet," he said, smiling. "How was the sightseeing?" "Fine." Servo's white round head bobbed into view by Dad's left elbow. His shiny roulette eyes tripped ceaselessly around my face. He didn't say a word, but his lips twitched in evident irritation, as if there were invisible threads knotted to his mouth's corners and a toddler was yanking the ends.

  "I'm going to take a nap," I said brightly. "I'm exhausted."

  I shrugged off my coat, tossed my backpack to the floor and, smiling nonchalantly, headed upstairs. The plan was to remove my shoes, stealthily tiptoe back to the first floor, eavesdrop on their heated dispute resumed in irate hisses and fizz (hopefully not in Greek or some other unfathomable language)—but when I did this, standing stone still on the bottom step in my socks, I heard them banging around the kitchen, bickering about nothing more calamitous than the difference between absinthe and anisette.

  That night we decided not to go to Le Georges. It rained, so we stayed in, watching Canal Plus, eating leftover chicken and playing Scrabble. Dad combusted with pride when I won two games in a row, hologram and monocular being the coups de grâce that caused Servo (who insisted the Cambridge Dictionary was wrong, license was spelled "lisence" in the UK, he was sure of it) to turn crimson, say something about Elektra being president of the Yale Debate Team and mutter he himself had not fully recovered from the flu.

  I hadn't been able to get Dad alone, and even at midnight, neither of them showed signs of tiring or, regrettably enough, any residual bitterness toward each other. Baba was fond of sitting in his giant red chair sans shoes and socks, his chunky red feet propped in front of him on a large velvet pillow (veal cutlets to be served to a king). I had to resort to my A-Little-Bread-a-Crust-a-Crumb look, which Dad, frowning over his row of letters, didn't pick up on, so I resorted to my A-Dying-Tiger-Moaned-for-Drink look, and when that went unobserved, A-Day!-Help!-Help!-Another-Day!

  At long last, Dad announced he'd see me to bed. "What were you fighting about when I came home?" I asked when we were upstairs, alone in my room.

  "I would have preferred if you hadn't heard that." Dad shoved his hands into his pockets and gazed out the window where the rain seemed to be drumming its fingernails on the roof. "Servo and I have a great deal of lost baggage between us —mislaid items, so to speak. We both think the other is to blame for the deficiency."

  "Why did you tell him he was acting like a hormonal preteen?"

  Dad looked uncomfortable. "Did I say that?"

  I nodded.

  "What else did I say?"

  "That's pretty much all I heard."

  Dad sighed. "The thing with Servo is—everyone has a thing, I suppose; but nevertheless, Servo's thing—everything is an Olympic competition. He derives great pleasure from setting people up, putting them in the most discomforting of situations, watching them flounder. He's an idiot, really. And now he has the absurd notion that I must remarry. Naturally, I told him he was preposterous, that it's none of his business, the world does not revolve around such social—"

  "Is he married?"

  Dad shook his head. "Not for years. You know, I don't even remember what happened to Sophie."

  "She's in an insane asylum."

  "Oh, no," Dad said, smiling, "when controlled, given parameters, he's harmless. At times, ingenious."

  "Well, I don't like him," I pronounced.

  I rarely, if ever, used such petulant one-liners. You had to have a strong, experienced, ain't-no-other-way-'round-it face to say them with any authority (see Charlton Heston, The Ten Commandments). Sometimes, though, when you had no sound reason for your sentiments—when you simply had a feeling—you had to use one no matter what kind of face you had.

  Dad sat down next to me on the bed. "I suppose I can't disagree. One can only take so much inflated self-importance before one feels ill. And I'm a bit angry myself. This morning, when we went to the Sorbonne, me with my briefcase full of notes, essays, my résumé—like a fool —it turned out there was no job opening as he'd led me to believe. A Latin professor had requested three months' leave this fall, and that was it. Then came the actual reason we'd ventured to the school— Servo spent an hour trying to get me to ask Florence of the guttural r's to dinner, some femme who was a leading expert in Simone de Beauvoir—of all hellish things to be an expert in—a woman who wore more eyeliner than Rudolph Valentino. I was trapped in her crypt-office for hours. I didn't leave in love but with lung cancer. The woman chain-smoked like nobody's business."r />
  "I don't think he has children," I said in a hushed voice. "Maybe just the one in the Colombian rain forest. But I think he's making the others up."

  Dad frowned. "Servo has children."

  "Have you met them?

  He considered this. "No."

  "Seen pictures?"

  He tilted his head. "No."

  "Because they're figments of his unhinged imagination."

  Dad laughed.

  And then I was about to tell him about the other incredible incident of the day, Andreo Verduga with the suede jacket and the silver watch shuffling through the métro, but I stopped myself. I noticed how outlandish it was, such a coincidence, and reporting it in all seriousness made me feel stupid— tragic even. "It is adorable and healthily childlike secretly to believe in fairy tales, but the instant one articulates such viewpoints to other people, one goes from darling to dumbo, from childlike to chillingly out of touch with reality," wrote Albert Pooley in The Imperial Consort of the Dairy Queen (1981, p. 233).

  "Can we go home?" I asked quietly.

  To my surprise, Dad nodded. "I was actually going to ask you the very same thing this afternoon, after my dispute with Servo. I think we've had enough of la vie en rose, don't you? Personally, I prefer to see life as it actually is." He smiled. "En noir."

  Dad and I said farewell to Servo, to Paris, two days before we were scheduled to depart. Perhaps it wasn't so incredible a thing, Dad calling the airline and changing the tickets. He looked deflated, eyes bloodshot, his voice prone to sighs. For the first time since I could remember, Dad had very little to say. Saying good-bye to Baba au Rhum, he managed only "thank you" and "see you soon" before climbing into the waiting taxi.

  I, however, took my time.

  "Next time I look forward to meeting Psyche and Elektra in person," I said, staring straight into the man's hole-punched eyes. I almost felt sorry for him: the bristly white hair drooped over his head like a plant that hadn't had nearly enough water or light. Tiny red veins were taking root around his

  nose. If Servo were in a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, he'd be the Painfully Tragic character, the one who wore bronze suits and alligator shoes, the man who worshipped all the wrong things so Life had to bring him to his knees.

  " 'One's real life is, so often, the life that one does not lead,' " I added as I turned toward the taxi, but he only blinked, that nervous, sly smile again twitching through his face.

  "So long, my dear, mmmm, safe flight."

  On the drive to the airport, Dad barely said a word. He rested his head against the taxi window, mournfully staring out at the passing streets —such an unusual pose for him, I covertly took the disposable camera out of my bag, and while the taxi driver muttered at people dashing across the intersection in front of us, I took his picture, the last photo on the roll.

  They say when people didn't know you were taking their picture, they appeared as they really were in life. And yet Dad didn't know I was taking his picture and he appeared as he never was—quiet, forlorn, somehow lost

  "As far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the Taj Mahal to the Siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunate conclusion —usually while he's lying in bed, staring at the thatched ceiling of some substandard accommodation in Indochina," writes Swithin in his last book, the posthumously published Whereabouts, 1917 (1918). "It is impossible to rid himself of the relentless, cloying fever commonly known as Home. After seventy-three years of anguish I have found a cure, however. You must go home again, grit your teeth and however arduous the exercise, determine, without embellishment, your exact coordinates at Home, your longitudes and latitudes. Only then, will you stop looking back and see the spectacular view in front of you."

  Part Three

  Howl and Other Poems

  Upon my return to St. Gallway and the commencement of Winter Term, the first odd thing I noticed about Hannah—rather, what the whole

  school noticed ("I think that woman was committed to an institution over vacation," surmised Dee during second period Study Hall)—was that over Christmas Break, she'd cut off all her hair.

  No, it was not one of those cute 1950s haircuts labeled by fashion magazines as chic and gamine (see Jean Seberg, Bonjour Tristesse). It was harsh and choppy. And, as Jade noticed when we were at Hannah's for dinner, there was even a tiny bald patch behind her right ear.

  "What the hell?" said Jade.

  "What?" asked Hannah, spinning around.

  "There's a—hole in your haircut! You can see your scalp!"

  "Really?"

  "You cut your own hair?" asked Lu.

  Hannah stared at us and then nodded, visibly embarrassed. "Yes. I know it's crazy and looks, well —different." She touched the back of her neck. "But it was late at night. I wanted to try something."

  The acute masochism and self-hatred behind a woman willfully defacing her appearance was a concept that featured prominently in the angry tome by proto-feminist Dr. Susan Shorts, Beelzebub Conspiracy (1992), which I'd noticed peeking out of the L. L. Bean canvas tote belonging to my sixth-grade science teacher, Mrs. Joanna Perry of Wheaton Hill Middle. In order to better understand Mrs. Perry and her mood swings, I procured my own copy. In Chapter 5, Shorts contends that since 1010 B.c., many women who'd tried and failed to be self-governing were forced to take action upon their very selves, because their physical appearance was the lone thing on which they could immediately "exert power," due to the "colossal masculine plot at work since the beginning of time, ever since man began to walk on his two stubby, hairy legs and noticed that he was taller than poor woman," growls Shorts (p. 41). Many women, including St. Joan and Countess Alexandra di Whippa, "crudely chopped off their hair," and cut themselves with "clippers and knives" (p. 42-43). The more radical ones branded their stomachs with hot irons to the "distress and revulsion of their husbands" (p. 44). On p. 69, Shorts goes on to write, "A woman will mar her exterior because she feels she is a part of a greater scheme, a plot, which she cannot control."

  Of course, one never thinks about damning feminist texts at the time, and even if one does, it's to be theatrical and over-the-top. So I simply imagined there came a point in a mature woman's life when she needed to radically change her appearance, discover what she really looked like, without all the bells and whistles.

  Dad, on Understanding Why Women Do the Things They Do: "One has a better chance of squeezing the universe onto a thumbnail."

  And yet, when I sat next to Hannah at the dinner table and looked over at her as she daintily cut her chicken (haircut poised boldly atop her head like an atrocious hat worn to church), I suddenly had the nerve-racking feeling I'd seen her somewhere before. The haircut strip-searched her, uncovered her in a shoulder-cringing fashion, and now, crazily enough, the carved cheekbones, the neck—it was all vaguely familiar. I recognized her, not from an encounter (no, she was not one of Dad's long-lost June Bugs; it'd take more than glamorous hair to camouflage their brand of monkey face); the feeling was smokier, more remote. I sensed instead I'd seen her in a photograph somewhere, or in a newspaper article, or maybe in a snapshot in some discount biography Dad and I had read aloud.

  Instantly, she noticed I was staring at her (Hannah was one of those people who kept tabs on all eyes in a room) and slowly, as she took an elegant bite of food, she turned her head toward me and smiled. Charles was talking on and on about Fort Lauderdale—God, it was hot, stuck at the airport for six hours (telling this rambling story as he always did, as if Hannah was the only person at the table)—and the haircut drew attention to her smile, did to her smile what Coke-bottle lenses did to eyes, made it huge (pronounced, "HYOOOGE"). I smiled back at her and sat for the remainder of the meal with my eyes taped to my plate, shouting silently to myself in a dictator voice

  (Augusto Pinochet commanding the torture of an opponent)—to stop staring at Hannah. It was rude.

  "Hannah's going to have a nervous breakdown," Jade announced flatly that Friday night. Sh
e was wearing a jittery black-beaded flapper dress and sitting behind a huge gold harp, plucking the strings with one hand, a martini in the other. The instrument was covered with a thick film of dust like the layer of fat in a pan after frying bacon. "You can quote me on that."

  "You've been sayin' that all fuckin' year," said Milton.

  "Yawn," said Nigel.

  "Actually I kind of agree," said Leulah solemnly. "That haircut's scary."

  "Finally!" Jade shouted. "I have a convert! I have one, do I hear two, two, going, going, sold at the pathetic number of one."

  "Seriously," Lu went on, "I think she might be clinically depressed."

  "Shut up," Charles said.

  It was 11:00 P.M. Sprawled across the leather couches in the Purple Room, we were drinking Leulah's latest, something she called Cockroach, a mishmash of sugar, oranges and Jack Daniel's. I don't think I'd said twenty words the entire evening. Of course, I was excited to see them again (also grateful Dad, when Jade picked me up in the Mercedes, said nothing but "See you soon, my dear," accompanied with one of his bookmark smiles, which would hold my place until I returned), but something about the Purple Room now felt stale.

  I'd had fun on these types of nights before, hadn't I? Hadn't I always laughed and sloshed a little bit of Claw or Cockroach on my knees, and said quick things that sailed across the room? Or, if I'd never said quick things (Van Meers were not known for stand-up comedy), hadn't I allowed myself to drift in a pool with a deadpan expression on an inflatable raft wearing sunglasses as Simon and Garfunkel went "Woo woo woo"? Or if I hadn't allowed myself to drift with a deadpan expression (Van Meers did not excel at poker), hadn't I let myself become, at least while I was in the Purple Room, a shaggy-haired counterculture biker on my way to New Orleans in search of the real America, hobnobbing with ranchers, hookers, rednecks and mimes? Or if I hadn't let myself be a counterculture roadie (no, the Van Meers were not naturally hedonistic) hadn't I let myself wear a striped shirt and shout in a frankfurter American accent, "New York Herald Tribune!" with eyeliner jutting out from my eyes, subsequently absconding with a small-time hood?