Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  "Fine," said the Nasty One. "But be quick about it."

  "Would you like some help cutting the cantaloupe?" asked another.

  I couldn't stop picking up the phone, staring at the receiver, asking,

  "Should I report him missing to the police?" I waited for it to tell me, "Yes, Definitely," "My Reply Is No" or "Concentrate and Ask Again." I could call the Sluder County Sheriffs Department, tell A. Boone I had to speak to Detective Harper. "Remember me? The one who talked to you about Hannah Schneider? Well, now my father's missing. Yes. I keep losing people." Within an hour, she'd be at the door with her pumpkin hair and complexion of refined sugar, narrowing her eyes at Dad's vacant reading chair. "Tell me the last thing he said. Does your family have a history of mental illness? Do you have anyone? An uncle? A grandmother?" Within four hours, I'd have my own green folder in the filing cabinet next to her desk, #55io-VANM. An article would appear in The Stockton Observer, "Local Student Angel of Death, Witness to Teacher's Demise, Now Missing Father." I hung up the phone.

  I searched the house again, this time not allowing myself to whimper, not allowing myself to miss a thing, not the shower curtain, or the cabinet under the bathroom sink full of Q-tips and cotton balls, or even the roll of toilet paper inside of which he might have taken a moment to scrawl, They've taken me do not worry with a toothpick. I examined every book we'd returned to the shelves the night before in the library, for he might have swiftly slipped a page of legal paper into its pages on which he'd written, I'll get out of this I swear. I turned over every one, shook them, but found nothing at all, apart from The Heart of the Matter losing another clump of pages. This searching continued until Dad's bedside clock read that it was after

  2:OO A.M.

  Denial is like Versailles; it isn't the easiest thing to maintain. To do so took an astounding amount of resolve, oomph, chutzpah, none of which I had, starfished as I was across the black-and-white tiles of Dad's bathroom floor.

  Clearly, I had to accept the notion of Dad's kidnapping being up there with the Tooth Fairy, the Holy Grail or any other dream concocted by people bored to tears with reality, wanting to believe in something bigger than themselves. No matter how charitable these radicals were, they wouldn't have permitted Dad to pack each and every one of his personal items, including checkbooks, credit cards and statements, even his favorite needlepoint by June Bug Dorthea Driser, the tiny, framed "To Thine Own Self Be True," which had been hanging to the right of the kitchen telephone, now gone. They also would have put their foot down when Dad took a half hour to cherry-pick the selection of texts he wished to take with him, Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press 1955 two-volume edition of Lolita, Ada orArdor, the Paradise Lost he hadn't wanted me to throw, the hulking Delovian:A Retrospective (Finn, 1998), which featured Dad's favorite work, the appropriately titled Secret (see p. 391, #61,1992, Oil on linen). Also missing was La Grimace, Napoleons Progress, Beyond Good and Evil and a photocopy of "In the Penal Colony" (Kafka, 1919).

  My head throbbed. My face felt tight and hot. I pulled myself out of the bathroom into the middle of Dad's spongy bedroom carpet, the one thing he loathed about the house —"one feels as if one is walking on marshmallows"— and began to cry, but after a while, my tears, either bored or frustrated, sort of quit, threw in the towel, stormed off the set.

  I didn't do anything but stare at the bedroom ceiling, so pale and quiet, dutifully holding His tongue. Somehow, out of pure exhaustion, I fell asleep.

  For the next three days—frittered away on the couch in front of Cherry Jeffries—I found myself imagining Dad's final moments in our house, our beloved 24 Armor Street, setting of our last year, our last chapter, before I "conquered the world."

  He was all plan and calculation, all bird-quick glances to his wristwatch, five minutes fast, silent steps through our dim-drenched rooms. There was nervousness too, a nervousness only I'd be able to detect; I'd seen him before a new university, giving anew lecture (the barely discernible trembling of index fingers and thumbs).

  The change in his pocket rattled like his withered soul as he moved through the kitchen, downstairs to his study. He turned on only a few lamps, his desk lamp and the red one on his bedroom nightstand that drowned the room in the jelly-red of stomachs and hearts. He spent a great deal of time organizing his things. The Oxford shirts on the bed, red on top, followed by blue, blue patterned, blue-and-white stripe, white, each folded like sleeping birds with wings tucked under them, and the six sets of cufflinks in silver and gold (including, of course, his favorite, those 24-karat ones engraved with GUM, given to Dad for his forty-seventh birthday by Bitsy Plaster, age 42, a misprint by the jeweler due to Bitsy's bubbly handwriting) all tucked into the Tiffany felt pocket like a bag of prized seeds. And then there were his socks herded together, black, white, long, short, cotton, wool. He wore his brown loafers (he could walk fast in them), the gold and brown tweed (faithfully hanging around him like an old dog) and the old khaki slacks so comfortable he claimed "they made the most unbearable tasks bearable." (He wore them trudging through the "squishy Thesis Statements, fetid quagmires of Supporting Evidence" inevitably found within student research papers. They even allowed him to feel no guilt as he wrote C- next to the kid's name before continuing on, relentlessly.)

  When he was ready to load the boxes and duffle bags into the car—I didn't know what waited for him; I imagined a simple yellow cab driven by some sea urchin driver with goose-bumped hands, tapping the steering wheel to Public Radio's Early Bluegrass Hour, waiting for John Ray Jr., Ph.D., to emerge from the house, thinking about the woman he left at home, Alva or Dottie, warm as a dinner roll.

  When Dad knew he'd forgotten nothing, when it was all gone, he walked back inside and up to my room. He didn't turn on a light, or even look at me as he unbuckled my backpack and perused the legal pad on which I'd scrawled my research and theory. After he reviewed what I'd written, he returned it to the bag and hung it on the back of my desk chair.

  He was incorrect putting it there. That wasn't where I'd put it; I'd placed it where I always did, at the end of my bed on the floor. Yet, he was pressed for time and no longer needed to worry about such details. Such details mattered very little now. He probably laughed at the Irony. At the most unlikely of moments, Dad took time to laugh about the Irony; or, perhaps it was one instance he didn't have time to, because if he moved toward Laughter, he might have to continue down that shoulderless, exitless road of Feeling, which could lead one, rather swiftly, into Whimpering, Full-on Howling and he didn't have time for that kind of detour. He had to get out of the house.

  He looked at me as I slept, memorizing my face as if it was a passage of an extraordinary book he'd come across, the crux of which he wished to commit to memory in the off chance he found use for it during an exchange with a Dean.

  Or else, staring at me—and I like to think this was the case —Dad came undone. No book tells one how to look at one's child one is leaving forever and will never see again (unless it's clandestinely, after thirty-five, forty years, and only then from a great distance, through binoculars, a telephoto lens or an $89.99 satellite photo). One probably gets close and tries to determine the exact degree of the nose from the face. One counts freckles, the ones never noticed before. And one also counts the faint creases in the eyelids, in the forehead, too. One watches the breathing, the peaceful smile —or, in the absence of such a smile, one willfully ignores the gaping, wheezing mouth, in order to make the memory polite. One probably gets a little carried away, too, introducing a little moonlight to silver the face, covering up those dark circles under the eyes, sound-looping adorable insects—better still, a gorgeous night bird—to lessen the cold, cell silence of the room.

  Dad closed his eyes to make sure he knew it by heart (forty-degrees, sixteen, three, one, a sea way of breathing, peaceful smile, silvery eyes, enthusiastic nightingale). He pushed the comforter close to my check, kissed me on the forehead.

  "You'll be fine, sweet. You really will."
>
  He slipped from my room, downstairs, and outside to the taxi.

  "Mr. Ray?" asked the driver.

  "Dr. Ray," Dad said.

  And just like that—he was gone.

  35

  The Secret Garden

  The days shuffled by like bland schoolgirls. I didn't notice their individual faces, only their basic uniform: day and night, day and night. I had no patience for showers or balanced meals. I did a lot of lying on floors—childish certainly, but when one can lie on floors without anyone seeing one, trust me, one will lie on a floor. I discovered, too, the fleeting yet discernable joy of biting into a Whitman's chocolate and throwing the remaining half behind the sofa in the library. I could read, read, read until my eyes burned and the words floated like noodles in soup.

  I ditched school like a boy with rusty breath and glue-stick palms. Instead, I took up with Don Quixote (Cervantes, 1605) —one would think I'd have driven to Videomecca and rented porn, at the very least Wild Orchid with Mickey Rourke, but alas, no—then some steamy paperback I'd kept hidden from Dad for years called Speak Not, My Love (Esther, 1992).

  I thought about Death —not suicide, nothing that histrionic—more a begrudged acknowledgment, as if I'd snubbed Death for years, and now, having no one else, I had no choice but to exchange pleasantries with him. I thought about Evita, Havermeyer, Moats, Dee and Dum forming a nighttime Search Party, wielding torches, lanterns, pitchforks, clubs (as bigoted townspeople did when hunting a monster), discovering my wasted body slung over the kitchen table, arms limp at my sides, my head facedown in the crotch of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1903).

  Even when I tried to collect myself, pull myself together as Molly Brown had done in that Titanic lifeboat, or even find a productive hobby like the Birdman of Alcatraz, I failed. I thought Future. I saw Black Hole. I was spaghettified. I didn't have a friend, driver's license or survival instinct to my name. I didn't even have one of those Savings Accounts set up by a conscientious parent so their kid could learn Money. I was a minor, too, would remain so for another year. (My birthday was June 18.) I had no desire to end up in a Foster Home, the Castle in the Sky of which was to be supervised by a pair of retirees named Bill and Bertha, who wielded their Bibles like handguns, asked me call them "Mamaw" and "Papaw," and got tickled pink every time they stuffed me, their brand new turkey, with all the fixins (biscuits, poke salad and possum pie).

  Seven days after Dad left, the phone began to ring. I didn't answer it, though I remained poised by the answering machine, my heart banging in my chest, in case it was he. "Gareth, you're causing quite a stir around here," said Professor Mike Devlin. "I'm wondering where you are."

  "What on earth have you done with yourself? Now they say you're not coming back," said Dr. Elijah Masters, Chairman of the English Department and Harvard Alumni Interviewer. "I'll be sorely disappointed if that is the case. As you know, we have an unfinished chess game and I'm beating you to a pulp. I'd hate to think you've disappeared simply so I have to forgo the pleasure of telling you, 'Checkmate.' "

  "Dr. Van Meer, you must call the office as soon as possible. Again, your daughter Blue has not appeared in class all week now. I hope you're aware that if she does not begin to make up some of the work, the idea of her graduating on time will be more and more— "

  "Dr. Van Meer, this is Jenny Murdoch who sits on the front row of your Patterns of Democracy and Social Structure seminar? I was wondering if Solomon is now going to be in charge of our research papers, because he's like, totally giving us new parameters. He says it only has to be seven to ten pages. But you wrote on the syllabus twenty to twenty-five, so everyone's totally baffled. Some clarification would be much appreciated. I also wrote you an e-mail."

  "Please call me as soon as possible at my home or office, Gareth," said Dean Kushner.

  I'd told Dad's assistant, Barbara, that I'd written down the incorrect contact number for Dad at the conference and asked her to let me know as soon as she heard from him. She hadn't called however, so I called her.

  "We still haven't heard," she said. "Dean Kushner's having a heart attack. Solomon Freeman is going to have to take over his classes for finals. Where is he?"

  "He had to go to Europe," I said. "His mother had a heart attack."

  "Ohhh," said Barbara. "I'm sorry. Is she going to be all right?"

  "No."

  "Gosh. That's so sad. But then why hasn't he — ?"

  I hung up.

  I wondered if my steady stupor, my inertia, marked the onset of madness. Only a week ago I'd believed madness to be a far-fetched idea, but now I recalled a handful of occasions when Dad and I encountered a woman muttering expletives as if she was sneezing. I wondered how she'd become that way, if it was a debutante's dreamy descent down a grand flight of stairs or else a sudden misfire in the brain, its effects immediate, like a snakebite. Her complexion was red like raw dishwasher hands and the soles of her feet were black, as if she'd meticulously dipped them in tar. As Dad and I passed her, I held my breath, squeezed his hand. He'd squeeze back—our tacit agreement he'd never allow me to wander the streets with my hair like a bird's nest, my overalls marred with urine and dirt.

  Now I could, with no trouble at all, wander the streets with hair like a bird's nest in overalls of urine and dirt. The That's-Ridiculous, the Don't-Be-Absurd had happened. I'd be selling my body for a frozen Lender's bagel. Obviously, I'd been wrong all along about madness. It could happen to anyone.

  For those who are Marat/Sade aficionados, I must deliver bad news. The shelf life of a depressed torpor for any otherwise healthy individual is ten, eleven, at the most, twelve days. After that, the mind can't help but notice such a disposition is as much use as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest, and that, if one didn't stop bouncing around like a big girl's blouse, Pimms and strawberries, Bob's your uncle and God save the bloody Queen, one just might not make it (see Go See a Man About a Dog: Beloved Englishisms, Lewis, 2001).

  I didn't go mad. I got mad (see "Peter Finch," Network). Rage, not Abe Lincoln, is the Great Emancipator. It wasn't long before I was tearing through 24 Armor Street, not limp and lost, but throwing shirts and June Bug needlepoints and library books and cardboard moving boxes marked THIS END UP like Jay Gatsby on a rampage, searching for something—even if it was something minor—to give me proof of where he'd gone and why. Not that I let myself hope I'd discover a Rosetta Stone, a twenty-page confession thoughtfully tucked into my pillowcase, between mattresses, in the icebox: "Sweet. So now you know .I am sorry, my little cloud. But allow me to explain. Why don't we start with Mississippi..." It wasn't likely. As Mrs. McGillicrest, that penguin-bodied shrew from Alexandria Day informed our class, so triumphantly: "A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements."

  The shock of Dad gone (shock didn't do it justice; it was astonishment, stunned, a bombshell—astunshelled), the fact he had blithely hoodwinked, bamboozled, conned (again, too tepid for my purposes —hoodzonked) me, me, me, his daughter, a person who, to quote Dr. Luke Ordinote, had "startling power and acumen," an individual who, to quote Hannah Schneider, did not "miss a thing," was so improbable, painful, impossible (impainible), I understood now Dad was nothing short of a madman, a genius and imposter, a cheat, a smoothie, the Most Sophisticated Sweet Talker Who Ever Lived.

  Dad must be to secrets as Beethoven is to symphonies, I chanted to myself. (It was the first of a series of stark statements I'd concoct in the ensuing week. When one has been hoodzonked, one's mind crashes, and when rebooted, reverts to unexpected, rudimentary formats, one of which was reminiscent of the mind-bending "Author Analogies" Dad devised as we toured the country.)

  But Dad wasn't Beethoven. He wasn't even Brahms.

  And Dad not being an unsurpassed maestro of mystery was regrettable, because infinitely more harrowing than being left with a series of obscure, incomprehensible Questions—which one can fill in at one's whim without fear of being graded—was having a few disquieti
ng Answers.

  My rampage through the house uncovered no evidence of note, only articles about civil unrest in West Africa and Peter Cower's Inside Angola (1980), which had fallen in the crevice between Dad's bed and bedside table (as nutritionless pieces of evidence as they come) and $3,000 in cash, crisply rolled up inside June Bug Penelope Slate's SPECIAL THOUGHTS ceramic mug kept on top of the refrigerator (Dad had purposefully left it for me, as the mug was usually reserved for loose change). Eleven days after he left, I wandered down to the road to collect the day's mail: a book of coupons, two clothing catalogues, a credit card application for Mr. Meery von Gare with 0% APR financing and a thick manila envelope addressed to Miss Blue van Meer, scrawled in majestic handwriting, the handwriting equivalent of trumpets and a stagecoach pulled by noble steeds.

  Immediately, I ripped it open, pulling out the inch-thick stack of papers. Instead of a map of the South American White Slavery network with rescue instructions, or Dad's unilateral Declaration of Independence ("When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for a father to dissolve the paternal bands which have connected him to his daughter . . ."), I found a brief note on monogrammed stationery paper clipped to the front.

  "You asked for these. I hope they help you/' Ada Harvey had written, then scrawled her loopy name beneath the knot of her initials.

  Even though I'd hung up on her, hacked off her voice without a word of apology like a sushi chef chopping off eel heads, exactly as I'd asked, she'd sent me her father's research. As I raced back up the driveway and into the house with the papers, I found myself crying, weird condensation tears that spontaneously appeared on my face. I sat down at the kitchen table and carefully began to page through the stack.

  Smoke Harvey had handwriting that was a distant cousin of Dad's, minuscule script blustered by a cruel northeasterly, THE NOCTURNAL CONSPIRACY, the man had written in caps in the top right corner of every page. The first few papers detailed the history The Nightwatchmen, the many names and apparent methodology (I wondered where he'd gotten his information, because he referenced neither Dad's article nor the Littleton book), followed by thirty pages or so on Gracey, most of it barely readable (Ada had used a photocopier that printed tire treads across the page): "Greek in origin, not Turkish," "Born February 12, 1944, in Athens, mother Greek, father American," "Reasons for radicalism unknown." I continued on. There were photocopies of old West Virginia and Texas newspaper articles detailing the two known bombings, "Senator Killed, Peace Freaks Suspected," "Oxico Bombing, 4 Killed, Nightwatchmen Sought," an article from Life magazine dated December 1978, "The End of Activism," about the dissolution of the Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society and other dissident political organizations, a few papers about COINTELPRO and other FBI maneuverings, a tiny California article, "Radical Sighted at Drugstore," and then, a newsletter. It was dated November 15,1987, Daily Bulletin, Houston Police Department, Confidential, For Police Use Only, WANTED BY LOCAL AND FEDERAL AUTHORITIES, Warrants on file at Harris County Sheriff Warrant Section, Bell 432-6329 —