Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  Eva then put the lamp down on Dad's desk, tenderly, the way one handles a baby, and, avoiding my eyes, walked past me, up the stairs. After a moment, I heard the front door slam and the sputter of her car as she drove away.

  With a samurai-like precision and clarity of mind that promptly settles over one following the weirder episodes of one's life, I resolved to clean everything up before Dad returned home.

  I obtained a screwdriver from the garage and, one by one, removed the destroyed boxes from the wall. I swept up the glass and the wings, vacuumed under Dad's desk, along the edges of the floor, the bookshelves and stairs. I returned the legal pads to their respective drawers, organizing them by university and date, and then carried to my room their cardboard moving box (BUTTERFLIES FRAGILE) in which I'd put all that was salvageable. It wasn't much—only torn white paper, a handful of brown wings still in one piece and the single Small Postman, Heliconius erato, which had emerged from the slaughter miraculously unscathed after hiding behind Dad's filing cabinet. I tried to read more of Henry V as I waited for Dad to return home, but the words snagged my eyes. I found myself staring at a single point on the page.

  Despite the throb in my right cheek, I had no illusions Dad was anything other than the pitiless villain in this evening's freaky drama. Sure, I hated her, but I hated him, too. Dad had finally gotten what was coming to him, except he'd been otherwise engaged, so I, his guiltless direct descendant, had gotten what was coming to him. I knew it was melodramatic, but I found myself wishing Kitty had killed me (at the very least, knocked me provisionally unconscious) so when Dad returned home, he'd see me lying on his study floor, my body saggy and gray as a hundred-year-old sofa, my neck twisted at the disturbing angle indicating Life caught a bus out of town. After Dad fell to his knees, uttered King Learean cries ("No! Noooo! Don't take her God! I'll do anything!") my eyes would open, I'd gasp, then deliver my mesmerizing speech, touching upon Humanity, Compassion, the fine line between Kindness and Pity, the necessity of Love (a theme rescued from the trite and the maudlin by sturdy support from the Russians: ["Everything that I understand, I understand only because I love."] and a little Irving Berlin to keep things snappy ["They say that falling in love is wonderful, it's wonderful, so they say."]). I'd end with the pronouncement that the Jack Nicholson, Dad's customary modus operandi, would henceforth be replaced by the Paul New-man, and Dad would nod with his eyes lowered, his face pained. His hair would turn gray, too, a uniform steel-gray, like Hecuba's, the emblem of Purest Sorrow.

  What about the others? Had he hurt the others as much as he'd hurt Eva Brewster? What about Shelby Hollows with her bleached moustache? Or Janice Elmeros with cactus-prickly legs under her sundresses? And the others, like Rachel Groom and Isabelle Franks who never came to see Dad without bearing gifts like contemporary Wise Men (Dad, mistaken for a Christ Child), cornbread, muffins and straw dolls with wincing faces (as if they'd all just eaten a Sour Patch Kid), their gold, frankincense and myrrh? How many hours had Natalie Simms slaved constructing the birdhouse out of popsicle sticks?

  The blue Volvo cruised down the driveway at a quarter to twelve. I heard him unlock the front door.

  "Sweet, come down at once! You'll laugh your eyes out!"

  (Laughing one's eyes out was a particularly irritating Dadism, as was crying until the bulls come home and being the pear of one's eye.)

  "Turns out little Arnie Sanderson couldn't hold his liquor! He fell down, I swear to you, fell down in the restaurant on his way to the men's room. I had to drive the thug home, to his Calcutta-inspired university housing. A terrifying place—tatty carpeting, a stench of curdled milk, graduate fellows wandering the halls with feet that appeared to support more exotic life forms than the Galapagos Islands. I had to carry him up the stairs. Three flights! Do you remember Teacher's Pet, that rather delightful film starring Gable and Doris we watched—where was it? Missouri? Well, I lived it this evening, only without the perky blonde. I believe I deserve a drink."

  He was silent.

  "Have you gone to bed?"

  Dad dashed up the stairs, knocked lightly, pushed open the door. He was still wearing his coat. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, staring at the wall with my arms crossed.

  "What's happened?" he asked.

  When I told him (doing my best to keep my manner like that of the Loosened Steel Girder, dangerous and unforgiving) Dad turned into one of those things twirling outside of vintage barber shops: he went red when he saw the red splotch on my face, white when I escorted him downstairs and expertly re-enacted the scene (including snippets of actual dialogue, the exact position in which I was ruthlessly chucked to the ground and Eva's revelation that Dad was "a small"), and upstairs again, when I showed him the box full of butterfly and moth remains, red again.

  "If I'd known such a thing was possible," Dad said, "that she could became a Scylla—worse than a Charybdis in my book—I'd have murdered that nut." He pressed the washcloth full of ice to my cheek. "I must think what measures to take."

  "How'd you meet her?" I asked gloomily, without looking at him.

  "Of course, I've heard stories of this nature from colleagues, seen the movies, Fatal Attraction being the gold stand—"

  "How, Dad?" I screamed.

  He was taken aback by my voice, but rather than getting angry, he only lifted the ice, and frowning in grave concern (his impression of the nurse in For Whom the Bell Tolls), touched my cheek with the back of his fingers.

  "How did I—let's see if, what was it—late September," he said, clearing his throat. "I made that second trip to your school to discuss your class ranking. Remember? I found myself lost. That officer in charge, that off-the-wall Ronin-Smith—she told me to meet her in a different room because her office was being repainted. But she gave me the wrong location, and thus I made an imbecile of myself knocking on Hanover 316 and encountered an unpleasantly bearded History professor attempting to clarify—rather unsuccessfully, I gathered from the benumbed expressions of his class—the Hows and Whys of the Industrial Age. I stopped by the main office to inquire after the correct location and encountered the manic Miss Brewster."

  "And it was love at first sight." Dad gazed at the box of remains on the floor. "To think all this might

  have been avoided if that goat had simply told me Barrow 316." "It isn't funny." He shook his head. "It was wrong not to tell you. I apologize. But I was uncomfortable with it, my" —he held his breath in discomfort—"connection with someone from your school. I certainly didn't mean for it to escalate as it did. In the beginning, it all seemed rather harmless."

  "That's what the Germans said when they lost World War II." "I take full responsibility. I was an ass." "A liar. A cheat. She called you a liar. And she was right—" "Yes." "—you lie about anything and everything. Even, 'Nice to see you.' " He didn't respond to this, only sighed. I crossed my arms, still glowering at the wall, but I didn't move my head

  away when he pressed the cold washcloth to my cheek again. "As I see it," he said, "I'll have to call the police. That, or the more appealing option. Going to her house with an illegally obtained firearm." "You can't call the police. You can't do anything." He looked at me. "But I thought you'd want that beast behind bars." "She's just a normal woman, Dad. And you didn't treat her with respect.

  Why didn't you return her phone calls?" "I suppose I didn't feel much like talking." "Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world. Haven't you read Hit and Run: Crisis in Singlehood America?" "I don't believe I have— " "The least you can do now is leave her alone." He was about to add something, but stopped himself. "Who'd you send the flowers to anyway?" I asked. "Hmm?" "Those flowers she was talking about—" "Janet Finnsbroke. One of the administrators in the department who dates back to the Paleozoic Period. Her fiftieth wedding anniversary. I thought it'd be nice — " Dad caught my eye "— no, I most certainly am not in love with her. For Pete's sake."

  I pretended not to notice, but Dad looked sort
of deflated there on the edge of my bed. A lost, even humbled look was wandering around his face (quite surprised to be there). Seeing him like this, so un-Dad, made me feel sorry for him—though I didn't let on. His befuddled expression reminded me of those unflattering photographs of presidents The New York Times and other newspapers adored sticking on their front page in order to show the world how the Great Leader looked between the staged waves, the scripted sound-bites, the rehearsed handshakes—not staunch and stately, not even steady, but frail and foolish. And though these candid photographs were amusing, when you actually thought about it, the underlying implication of such a photograph was scary, for they hinted how delicate the balance of our lives, how tenuous our calm little existences, if this was the man in charge.

  21

  Deliverance

  And so, I come to the perilous part of my story.

  If this narrative were a quotidian account of the history of Russia, this chapter would be a proletarian's account of the Great October Soviet Socialist Revolution of 1917, if a history of France, the beheading of Marie Antoinette, if a chronicle of America, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth.

  "All worthwhile tales possess some element of violence," Dad said. "If you don't believe me, simply reflect for a moment on the utter horror of having something threatening lurking outside your front door, hearing it huff and puff and then, cruelly, callously, blowing your house down. It's as horrifying as any story on CNN. And yet where would the Three Little Pigs' be without such brutality? No one would have heard of them, for happiness and placidity are not worth recounting by the fire, nor, for that matter, reporting by a news anchor wearing pancake makeup and more shimmer on her eyelids than a peacock feather."

  Not that I am trying to imply my story can hold a candle to complex world histories (each one worth over one thousand pages of fine print) or three-hundred-year-old fables. Yet one can't help but notice that violence, although officially abhorred in modern Western and Eastern cultures (only officially, for no culture, modern or otherwise, hesitates using it for the pursuit of their own interests) is unavoidable if there is to be change.

  Without the disturbing incident of this chapter, I'd never have taken on the task of writing this story. I'd have nothing to write. Life in Stockton would have continued exactly as it was, as placid and primly self-contained as Switzerland, and any strange incidents—Cottonwood, Smoke Harvey's death, that strange conversation with Hannah prior to Christmas Break—might be regarded as unusual, certainly, but in the end, nothing that couldn't be dully reviewed and accounted for by Hindsight, forever unsurprised and shortsighted.

  I cannot help but anticipate a little, run on ahead (much in the manner of Violet Martinez in the Great Smoky Mountains), and so, given this lapse in patience, I will only hopscotch through the two months between Eva's destruction of my mother's butterflies and moths and the camping trip, which Hannah, in spite of our patent lack of enthusiasm ("Won't do it, couldn't pay me," pledged Jade), maintained was scheduled for the weekend of March 26, the beginning of Spring Break.

  "Make sure you bring hiking shoes," she said.

  St. Gallway doggedly marched on (see Chapter 9, "The Battle of Stalingrad," The Great Patriotic War, Stepnovich, 1989). With the exception of Hannah, most teachers had returned from Christmas vacation cheerfully unchanged, apart from small, pleasant enhancements to their appearance: a new red Navajo sweater (Mr. Archer), shiny new shoes (Mr. Moats), a new boysenberry rinse that turned hair into something that had to be consciously matched, like paisley (Ms. Gershon). These distracting details caused one to daydream in class about who had given Mr. Archer that sweater, or how Mr. Moats must be insecure about his height because all of his shoes possessed soles thick as sticks of butter, or the exact look on Ms. Gershon's face when her hairdresser removed the towel from her head and said, "Don't worry. The plum tones just look extreme now because it's wet."

  St. Gallway students were also the same, rodent-like in their ability to carry on foraging, storing, burrowing and eating a huge amount of plant food in spite of humiliating national scandals and harrowing world events. ("This is a critical time in our nation's history," Ms. Sturds was always informing us during Morning Announcements. "Let's make sure we look back in twenty years and feel proud. Read the newspaper. Take sides. Have an opinion.") Student Council President Maxwell Stuart unveiled elaborate plans for a Spring Term Barbecue Hoedown, replete with square dancing, bluegrass band and Faculty Scarecrow Contest; Mr. Carlos Sandborn of AP World History stopped using gel in his hair (it no longer looked wet, as if it'd been swimming laps, but windblown, as if it'd been doing figure-eights in a propeller plane) and Mr. Frank Fletcher, crossword maharishi and monitor of second period Study Hall, was in the throes of a divorce; his wife, Evelyn, had apparently made him move out (though whether the deep circles under his eyes were due to the divorce or crosswords, no one knew), citing Irreconcilable Differences.

  "I guess when they were doing the nasty on Christmas Eve, Mr. Fletcher shouted out, 'Oh, Eleven Down!' not 'Evelyn, Down!' That was the last straw," said Dee.

  I saw Zach all the time in Physics, but apart from a handful of hellos, we didn't speak. He never materialized at my locker anymore. Once, during the Dynamics Lab we found ourselves at the back of the room together and just as I looked up from my notebook to smile at him, he bumped into the corner of one of the lab tables and spontaneously dropped what he was carrying, a ring stand and a set of known masses. But even as he picked up the equipment, he didn't say anything, only returned swiftly to the front of the room (and his lab partner, Krista Jibsen) with an official spokesperson look on his face. I couldn't tell what he was thinking.

  Clumsy, too, were the occasions I passed Eva Brewster in the hallway. We both pretended to be suffering from the effects of Walking and Thinking an Elaborate Thought at the Same Time (Einstein suffered from it, Darwin, de Sade too), and hence the person suffered from an obliviousness toward his/her immediate surroundings that approached that of a temporary blackout or complete loss of consciousness (this, though as we slipped past each other, our eyes fell like curtains when a hooker strolls through a prairie town searching for accommodation). I felt as if I was now privy to a dark, grisly secret about Eva (in certain rare instances, she transformed into a werewolf) and she begrudged me for knowing it. At the same time, as she marched down the hall with an absorbed expression, a hint of lemony perfume, as if she'd spritzed herself with a cleaner for kitchen countertops, I swore I detected in the hunch of her beige sweater, in the angle of her meaty neck, that she was sorry and she'd take it all back if she could. Even if she didn't have the guts to say it to me outright (so few people had the guts to really say things), it made me feel less anxious, as if I understood her a little.

  Ms. Brewster's rampage did have some constructive effects, as all disasters and tragedies do (see The Dresden Upshot, Trask, 2002). Dad, still guilty about Kitty, had adopted a permanently contrite manner, which I found refreshing. The day we returned from Paris, I'd learned I'd been admitted to Harvard, and we finally celebrated this milestone on a blustery Friday evening in early March. Dad donned his Brooks Brothers, French-cuffed dress shirt, his gold GUM cufflinks; I, a gum-green dress from Au Printemps. Dad chose the four-star restaurant purely on the basis of its name: Quixote.

  The dinner was unforgettable for many reasons, one of them being that Dad, in an uncharacteristic display of self-command, paid no attention at all to our gorgeous waitress with the voluptuous body of a swan-necked flask and an astoundingly cleft chin. Her coffee-colored eyes trespassed all over Dad when she took our order and again when she asked Dad if he wanted fresh pepper ("Had enough [pepper]?" she inquired breathily). Yet Dad willfully remained indifferent to this intrusion, and so, somewhat dejectedly, her eyes went back the way they came ("Dessert menu," she announced grimly by the end of the meal).

  "To my daughter," Dad said grandly, clinking his wineglass on the rim of my Coke. A middle-aged woman at the tab
le next to us with heavy hardware jewelry and a thickset husband (whom she seemed anxious to unload like armfuls of shopping bags) beamed at us for the thirtieth time (Dad, a stirring example of Paternity: handsome, devoted, wearing tweed). "May your studies continue to the end of your days," he said. "May you walk a lighted path. May you fight for truth—your truth, not someone else's—and may you understand, above all things, that you are the most important concept, theory and philosophy I have ever known."

  The woman was practically blown off her seat by Dad's eloquence. I thought he was paraphrasing an Irish drinking toast, but later I did check Killing's Beyond Words (1999) and couldn't find it. It was Dad.

  On Friday, March 26, with the same innocence of the Trojans as they gathered around the strange wooden horse standing at the gate to their city in order to marvel at its craftsmanship, Hannah drove our yellow Rent-Me truck into the dirt lot of Sunset Views Encampment and parked in Space 52. The lot was empty, with the exception of a swayback blue Pontiac parked in front of the cabin (a wooden sign slapped crookedly over the door like a Band-Aid: MAIN) and a rusty towable trailer ("Lonesome Dreams") chucked under an evangelist oak tree. (It was in the midst of some violent enlightenment, branches stretched heavenward as if to grab hold of His feet.) A white sky ironed, starched, folded itself primly behind the rolling mountains. Garbage floated across the lot, cryptic messages in bottles: Santa Fe Ranch Lay's potato chips, Thomas' English Muffins, a frayed purple ribbon. Sometime in the last week or so, it had sleeted cigarette butts.

  None of us knew how we'd gotten there. We'd been unenthused with the idea of a camping trip from the beginning (including Leulah, who was always the first to go along with something) and now, here we were, in old jeans and uncomfortable hiking shoes, our distended camping backpacks rented from Into the Blue Mountaineering slumped against the van's backseat windows like fat men who'd dozed off. An empty, nervous canteen, a tired bandana, Special K and ramen noodles rattling, the sudden evaporation of an entire can of contact solution, fitful whines of "Wait, who took my wind-resistant parka?" —it was a testament to Hannah's influence, her startling yet subtle way of getting you to do something when you'd sworn to everyone, including yourself, you never would.