Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  "In one of the first well-known Valedictorian Speeches," I began; somewhat disconcertingly my voice boomeranged over everyone's coiffed head, presumably reaching the tall man in the blue suit in the very back, a man I'd thought, for a split second, was Dad (it wasn't, unless like a plant without light, Dad without me had withered, lost serious amounts of hair), "transcribed in 1801 at Doverfield Academy in Massachusetts, seventeen-year-old Michael Finpost announced to his peers, 'We will look back on these golden days and remember them as the best years of our lives.' Well, for each of you sitting before me, I really hope that's not the case."

  A blonde in the front row of the Parents Section wearing a short skirt crossed, uncrossed her legs and did a restless swinging gesture with them, a stretch of some kind, also a movement used at airports to direct planes.

  "And I—I'm not going to stand here and tell you, 'To Thine Own Self Be True.' Because the majority of you won't. According to the Crime Census Bureau America is experiencing a marked increase in grand larceny and fraud, not only in cities but rural vicinities as well. For that matter, too, I doubt any of us in four years of high school have managed to locate our self in order to be true to it. Maybe we've found what hemisphere it's in, maybe the ocean—but not the exact coordinates. I'm also"—for a terrifying second my hobo concentration fell off the train, the moment started to speed by, but then to my relief it managed to shake itself off, sprint, hurtle on board again —"I'm also not going to tell you to wear sunscreen. Most of you won't. The New England Journal of Medicine reported in June 2002 skin cancer in the under-thirty demographic is on the rise and in the Western World, forty-three out of every fifty people consider even plain-looking people twenty times more attractive when they're tan." I paused. I couldn't believe it; I said tan and a little seismic laughter quaked through the crowd. "No. I'm going to try to assist you with something else. Something practical. Something that might help you when something happens in your life and you're worried you might never recover. When you've been knocked down."

  I noticed Dee and Dum, front row, fourth from the left. They stared up at me with evenly weirded-out faces, half-smiles caught up in their teeth like skirt hems caught in pantyhose.

  "I'm going to ask that you seriously consider modeling your life," I said, "not in the manner of the Dalai Lama or Jesus—though I'm sure they're helpful—but something a bit more hands-on, Carassius auratus auratus, commonly known as the domestic goldfish."

  There was party favor laughter, little bits of it strewn here and there for fun, but I pressed on.

  "People make fun of the goldfish. People don't think twice about swallowing it. Jonas Ornata III, Princeton class of '42, appears in The Guinness Book of World Records for swallowing the greatest number of goldfish in a fifteen minute interval, a cruel total of thirty-nine. In his defense though, I don't think Jonas understood the glory of the goldfish, that they have magnificent lessons to teach us."

  I glanced up and my gaze smacked right into Milton, first row, fourth from the left. He had tilted his chair back and was talking to someone behind him, Jade.

  "If you live like a goldfish," I continued, "you can survive the harshest, most thwarting of circumstances. You can live through hardships that make your cohorts—the guppy, the neon tetra—go belly up at the first sign of trouble. There was an infamous incident described in a journal published by the Goldfish Society of America—a sadistic five-year-old girl threw hers to the carpet, stepped on it, not once but twice—luckily she'd done it on a shag carpet and thus her heel didn't quite come down fully on the fish. After thirty harrowing seconds she tossed it back into its tank. It went on to live another forty-seven years." I cleared my throat. "They can live in ice-covered ponds in the dead of winter. Bowls that haven't seen soap in a year. And they don't die from neglect, not immediately. They hold on for three, sometimes four months if they're abandoned."

  One or two restless people were dribbling into the aisles, hoping to escape my notice, a silver-haired man needing to stretch his legs, a woman bouncing a toddler, whispering secrets into its hair.

  "If you live like a goldfish, you adapt, not across hundreds of thousands of years like most species, having to go through the red tape of natural selection, but within mere months, weeks even. You give them a little tank? They give you a little body. Big tank? Big body. Indoor. Outdoor. Fish tanks, bowls. Cloudy water, clear water. Social or alone."

  The wind taunted the edges of my papers.

  "The most incredible thing about goldfish, however, is their memory. Everyone pities them for only remembering their last three seconds, but in fact, to be so forcibly tied to the present—it's a gift. They are free. No moping over missteps, slip-ups, faux pas or disturbing childhoods. No inner demons. Their closets are light filled and skeleton free. And what could be more exhilarating than seeing the world for the very first time, in all of its beauty, almost thirty thousand times a day? How glorious to know that your Golden Age wasn't forty years ago when you still had all your hair, but only three seconds ago, and thus, very possibly it's still going on, this very moment." I counted three Mississippis in my head, though I might have rushed it, being nervous. "And this moment, too." Another three seconds. "And this moment, too." Another. "And this moment, too."

  Dad never talked about not moving people during a lecture. He never talked about the funny human need to impart something, anything, to someone, build a tiny bridge to them and help them across, or what to do when the crowd twitched ceaselessly like a horse's back. The endless sniffing, the clearing of throats, fathers' eyes that skate boarded one side of a row to the other side of a row, doing a 180-ollie around the hot mom, sixth from the right—he never said a word. Standing around the rim of the football field the hemlocks stood tall, watching protectively. The wind tugged the sleeves of a hundred blouses. I wondered if that kid, far end, third row, red shirt (oddly gnawing his fist and frowning at me with James-Deanian intensity) if he knew I was an imposter, that I'd secretly cut out only the beautiful part of the truth and discarded the rest. Because, in reality, goldfish were having as rough a time with life as the rest of us; they expired all the time from the shock of new temperatures and the faintest shadow of a heron prompted them to hide under rocks. And yet, maybe it didn't matter so much what I said or didn't say, what I kissed on the cheek or what I gave the cold shoulder. (My god, Red Shirt, hands clamped over his mouth, biting his fingernails, he was now sitting so far forward, his head was nearly a flowerpot on the sill of Sal Mineo's shoulder. I didn't know who he was. I'd never seen him before.) Lectures and Theories, all Tomes of Nonfiction, maybe they deserved the same gentle treatment as works of art; maybe they were human creations trying to shoulder a few terrors and joys of the world, composed at a certain place, at a certain time, to be pondered, frowned at, liked, loathed and then one went to the gift shop and bought the postcard, put it in a shoe box high on a shelf.

  The end of my speech was a disaster, the disaster being that nothing happened. Obviously, I’d hoped—as all people do when they stand before an audience, show a bit of leg—for culmination, illumination, a flake of sky to loosen, crash down on everyone's stiff hair like the big chip of plaster on which Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel had taken a stab at God's index finger, when, in 1789 it unexpectedly freed itself from the ceiling, hitting Father Cantinolli on the head and sending a bevy of visiting nuns into eye-rolling seizures; when they came to, their prevailing line of defense for all actions, from the sacred to the seedy, was "because God told me to" (see Lo Spoke Del Dio Di Giomo, Funachese, 1983).

  But if God existed, today, like most days, He chose to remain mum. There was only wind and faces, yawning sky. To applause that might as well have been laughter on a late, late show (it had the same sense of obligation), I returned to my chair. Havermeyer began to read the list of graduating names, and I didn't pay much attention, until he came to the Bluebloods. I saw their Life Stones flash before my eyes.

  "Milton Black."

  Milton lu
mbered up the stairs, his chin held at that deceitfully sweet angle, around 75 degrees. (He was a lethargic coming-of-age novel.) "Nigel Creech." He smiled—that wristwatch catching light. (He was an unsentimental

  comedy in Five Acts, sequined with wit, lust and pain. The last scene tended to end on a sour note, but the playwright refused to revise.)

  "Charles Loren."

  Charles hobbled up the stairs with his crutches. (He was a romance.)

  "Congratulations, son."

  The sky had yellowed, performing one of its best magic tricks, overcast yet making people squint.

  "Leulah Maloney."

  She skipped up the stairs. She'd cut off her hair, not as harshly as Hannah, but the result was just as unhappy; the blunt pieces banged against her jaw. (She was a twelve-line poem of repetition and rhyme.) Raindrops the size and texture of wasps started to zing off the shoulder pads of Havermeyer's navy blazer, also off some mother wearing a pink sun hat that sun-rose high over her head. Instantly, umbrellas blossomed—a garden of black, red, yellow, a few striped—and the Jelly Roll Jazz Band began to pack up their instruments, evacuating to the gym.

  "Things aren't looking good, are they?" Havermeyer noted with a sigh. "Better hurry things along." He smiled. "Graduating in the rain. For those of you who think this is a bad omen, we do have some spots available in next year's senior class, if you'd like to wait for an exit that looks a little more promising." No one laughed and Havermeyer started to read the names quickly, jerking his head up and down: microphone, name, microphone; God was fast-forwarding him. It was difficult to hear what name he was on because the wind had found the microphone and sent ghostly, theme park, "Woooooooos" out across the crowd. Havermeyer's wife, Gloria, stepped up onto the stage and held an umbrella over his head.

  "Jade Churchill Whitestone."

  She stood up, carrying her orange umbrella Statue-of-Liberty-style, and grabbed her diploma from Havermeyer as if doing him a favor, as if he was handing her his résumé. She stalked back to her seat. (She was a breathtaking book written in a bleak style. She often didn't bother with "he said" or "she said"; the reader could figure it out. And now and then a sentence made you gasp it was so beautiful.)

  Soon it was Radley's turn to go, and then my own. I'd forgotten my umbrella in Mr. Moats' classroom and Radley was holding his over himself and a strip of rubberized commencement stage on his other side, so I was getting drenched. The rain was an oddly soothing temperature, just right, Goldilocks' porridge. I stood up and Eva Brewster with her small pink cat umbrella, muttered "Christ," and shoved hers into my hands. I took it, but felt bad because the rain started to stick to her hair and bang against her forehead. I quickly shook Havermeyer's cold pruned hand and returned to my seat, handing the umbrella back to her.

  Havermeyer rushed his closing—something about luck—the crowd applauded and began to disband. There were the wet picnic mechanics of moving inside—do we have everything, where'd Kimmie go, what's my hair doing, it's seaweed, hell. Dads with pained faces wrenched toddlers out of chairs. Mothers in soggy white linen were unaware they admitted to the world their underwear.

  I waited another minute, doing my about-To act. One doesn't look suspiciously alone, without blood relation, if one appears industriously About To do something, and so I stood up, made a big deal of removing the mythical rock from my shoe and scratching the fictitious itch on my hand, another one on the back of my neck (they were like fleas), pretending I'd lost something somewhere—granted, for that I didn't have to pretend. Soon I was alone with the chairs and the stage. I slipped down the stairs and began to make my way across the field.

  In the past few weeks, when I'd imagined this day, I'd pictured, at this precise moment, Dad, making a Grand Final Appearance (for One Night Only). Just as I figured all along—there he'd be, far in front of me, a black figure on an empty hill. Or else he'd have climbed up into the topmost branches of one of those hulking oaks, decked in Tiger Striped camouflage in order to spy, unobserved, on my graduation proceedings. Or else he'd be sealed inside a limousine, which, just as I realized it was he, came swooping down Horatio Way, almost knocking me over, cruelly reflecting me back to me before roaring around the curve, past the stone chapel and the wooden Welcome to The St. Gallway School sign, disappearing like a whale in a sound.

  But I saw no swarthy black figure, no limousine and not a single lunatic in a tree. In front of me, Hanover Hall, Elton and Barrow lounged like dogs so old they wouldn't raise their heads if you threw a tennis ball at them.

  "Blue," someone shouted behind me.

  I ignored the voice, continuing up the hill, but he called out again, closer this time, so I stopped and turned. Red Shirt was walking quickly toward me. Instantly, I recognized him—well, let me revise that. Instantly, I was aware I'd inadvertently done the highly improbable thing of following my own advice—all that goldfish business—because it was Zach Soderberg, sure, yet I'd never seen him before in my life. He looked radically different, because sometime between our last AP Physics class and graduation, he'd decided to shave his entire head. And it wasn't one of those heads plagued with disturbing potholes and dents (as if tipping people off to the fact the brain inside it was a bit squishy), but a pleasantly strong head. His ears, too, were nothing to be ashamed of. He looked brand new, a newness that hurt the eyes and was unsettling, which was why I didn't say, "Sayonara, kid," and break into a sprint, because the Volvo was packed, waiting for me in the Student Parking Lot. I'd said so long to 24 Armor, tallyho to the Citizen Kane desk, returned the three sets of house keys to Sherwig Realty in a sealed manila envelope, including a handwritten Thank-You note to Miss Dianne Seasons, throwing in a few !!! for good measure. I had organized road maps in the glove compartment. I had neatly divided the states between North Carolina and New York (like they were equitable pieces of birthday cake) into audiotapes from the Bookworm Library on Elm (most of them pulpy thrillers Dad would loathe). I had a license with an unfortunate picture and I planned to drive in every sense of the word.

  Zach noticed my surprise at his new haircut and ran a hand over the top of his head. It probably felt like velveteen on a threadbare fainting couch. "Yeah," he said sheepishly. "Last night I decided to turn over a new leaf." He frowned. "So where are you going?" He was standing close to me, holding the black umbrella over my head so his arm was stiff as a drying rail on which one could hang wet towels.

  "Home," I said.

  This surprised him. "But it's just getting good. Havermeyer's dancing with Sturds. There's mini quiche." His bright red shirt was doing that buttercup experiment to his chin—you held it there and if it glowed the person liked butter. I wondered what it meant when red glowed there.

  "I can't," I said, hating how stiff it sounded. If he'd been police and I'd been guilty, he would have known, immediately.

  He studied me and then shook his head, as if across my face someone had written an incomprehensible equation. "Gosh, you know, I liked your speech ... I mean . . .man."

  Something about the way he said that made me feel the urge to laugh — only the urge, though; it lost steam somewhere around my collarbone.

  "Thanks," I said.

  "The part about the—what was it... when you talked about art... and who you are as a person . . . and art. . . that was so amazing."

  I had no idea what he was talking about. Nowhere in my speech had art or who I was as a person been mentioned. They weren't secondary or even tertiary themes. But then, as I stared up at him, so tall—strange, I'd never noticed the minute creases at edges of his eyes; his face was cheating, throwing out hints of the man he'd become —I noticed perhaps that was the point; if we wanted to listen to someone, we heard what we needed to in order to inch closer. And there was nothing wrong with hearing art, or who they were as a person, or goldfish; each of us could choose whatever materials we liked for our rickety boat. There d been something, too, in his leaning so far forward, so awkwardly trying to get to me (giving goosenecked lamps a run for
their money), wanting to catch every word I threw into the air, not wanting to let one hit the ground. I liked this little bit of truth, tried to think it twice, three times, so I wouldn't forget it, so I could think about it on the highway, the best place to think about things.

  Zach cleared his throat. He'd turned to squint at something, at Horatio Way, the part where it squeezed past the daffodils and the birdbath, or maybe higher up, the roof of Elton where the weathervane pointed at something off-screen.

  "So I take it if I invited you and your dad to join us tonight at the club for the roast beef buffet, you'd say no." He looked back at me, his eyes touching my face the sad way people look out, put their hands on windowpanes. And I remembered, in the click-stutter of Mr. Archer's slide projector, that tiny painting trapped in his house. I wondered if it was still there, hanging bravely at the end of the hallway. He'd said I was like that painting, that unmanned boat.

  He arched an eyebrow, another tiny talent I'd never noticed. "Can't tempt you? They have great cheesecake."

  "I actually have to get going," I said.

  He accepted this with a nod. "So I take it if I asked if I could . . . see a little of you over the summer—and it doesn't have to be the whole you, by the way. We could decide on .. . a toe. You'd say it's impossible. You have plans 'til you're seventy-five. You have grass stuck to your shoes, by the way."

  Startled, I leaned down and wiped the grass caked to my sandals, which hours ago had been white but now were blotchy and purpled like old ladies' hands.