Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  I don't think Dad ever quite understood it himself, treating these sobs as he did, with a muddle of embarrassment and regret. When he came home that night, he did what he always did. He played the messages (turning down the volume when he realized who it was) and deleted them.

  "Have you eaten, Christabel?" he asked.

  He knew I'd heard her messages, but like Emperor Claudius in 54 A.D. upon hearing the thrum of Roman rumor that his dear wife, Agrippina, was plotting to poison him with a dish of mushrooms presented to him by his favorite eunuch, for some unknown reason, Dad chose to ignore these signs of impending doom (see Lives of the Caesars, Suetonius, 121 A.D.).

  He never learned.

  Two weeks later, the Saturday night of Maxwell's Christmas Cabaret, I was being unlawfully detained at Zach Soderberg's house. I was wearing one of Jefferson Whitestone's old black cocktail dresses, which Jade claimed Valentino himself had designed specifically for her, though when they feuded for the affections of "a shirtless bartender at Studio 54 named Gibb," she'd furiously ripped out the label, leaving the dress an amnesiac. ("This is how empires fall," Jade had said, sighing dramatically as she and Leulah pinned the armholes and waist so the thing no longer fit like a life jacket. "Trust me. You start breeding with the nimrods and that's the end of your civilization. But I suppose you couldn't help it. I mean, he asked you in front of all the whole school. What could you say, except that you'd be ecstatic to be his saltine? I feel sorry for you. That you have to spend an entire evening with the coupon." It's what they called Zach now, "the coupon," and it fit him. He really was all bar code, all Great Savings, all $5~0ff with Proof of Purchase.)

  "Have some bonbons," said Zach's dad, Roger, holding out a bowl of powdery chocolates.

  "Don't force her to eat," said Zach's mom, Patsy, shooing his hand.

  "You like chocolate? You must. Everyone likes chocolate."

  "Roger," protested Patsy. "No girl wants to eat before a party, when she's got the jitters! hater's when she gets the munchies. Zach, make sure she eats something."

  "Okay," said Zach, blushing like a nun. He raised his eyebrows and tossed me a repentant smile as Patsy got down on one knee in the snowdrift carpet of the living room and squinted at us through the Nikon's viewfinder.

  Unbeknownst to Patsy, Roge had moved to my left and was holding out the ceramic bowl again.

  "Go on," he mouthed, winking. It seemed Roge, in his yellow cotton sweater and khaki pants—creases down each leg, clear cut as the International Date Line—would make a very convincing wholesaler of junk, white girl, afghan black, billy whiz and joy powder.

  I obliged, took one. It began to melt in my hand.

  "Roger!" said Patsy, tisking (two dimples snagging her cheeks) as she took what was now our sixteenth picture, this one with Zach and me on the floral couch, our knees positioned at a perfect ninety degrees.

  Patsy was a self-proclaimed "picture nut," and all around us, covering every hard, flat surface like thousands of wet, unraked leaves in a gazebo, were framed photos of skew-smiled Zach, urn-eared Bethany Louise, a few with Roge when he had sideburns and Patsy when her hair was a redder brown, which she wore as an amaretto bundt cake atop her head, drizzled with ribbons. The only hard, flat surface in the living room devoid of pictures—the coffee table in front of us—supported a paused game of Parcheesi.

  "I hope Zach didn't embarrass you with his dance," said Patsy.

  "Not at all," I said.

  "He was practicing all the time. So nervous! He had Bethany Louise up all hours of the night going over the steps."

  "Mom," said Zach.

  "He knew it was risky," said Roge. "But I told him to take that leap of faith."

  "It runs in the family," said Patsy, nodding toward Roge. "You should have seen this one when he proposed." "Sometimes you just can't help yourself." "Thank goodness for that!" "Mom, we should get going," said Zach. "All right! All right! One more by the window." "Mom." "Just one. There's gorgeous light over there. One. I promise." I'd never been inside a household full of ! and even more !!! I wasn't even

  aware these nests of goodwill, these bubble baths of clasps and cuddles actually existed, except in one's head when one compared one's own fitful family to the seemingly blissful one across the street.

  An hour ago, as Zach and I drove up the driveway and I saw his wooden house — up-front as an open-faced sandwich, served to the sky on skinny wooden stilts—Patsy in her beetle-green blouse scurried down the porch steps to greet us before Zach had even parked the car ("You said she was pretty, you didn't say drop dead! Zach never tells us anything!" she exclaimed. And that was her voice, even when she wasn't greeting people on the driveway, an exclamation).

  Patsy was pretty (though some twenty-five pounds heavier than her bundt cake days) with a cheerful, round face suggestive of a fresh vanilla cake blessed with a cherry and placed lovingly in a sweet shoppe's window. Roge was handsome, but in the opposite way of Dad. Roge (Have enough gas in the car Zaehary, Just had her filled, Good boy) displayed the sparkling air of a brand new bathroom fixture in sought-after White Heat tile. He had sparkling blue eyes and skin so clear, you almost expected to see your own reflection winking back at you when you peered into his face.

  Finally, after logging photo number twenty-two (Patsy made that word all her own, foe-toe) Zach and I were finally granted permission to leave. We were heading out of the living room into the neat beige foyer when Roge stealthily passed me a cloth napkin full of bonbons he ostensibly hoped I'd traffic out of the house.

  "Oh, wait," said Zach. "I wanted to show Blue the Turner. I think she'd like it."

  "Of course!" said Patsy, clapping her hands.

  "Just for a second," Zach said to me.

  Grudgingly, I followed him up the stairs.

  For the record, Zach had held up remarkably well during his encounter with Dad when he picked me up in his Toyota. He'd shaken Dad's hand (from the looks of things it wasn't a "wet washcloth," Dad's pet peeve), called him "Sir," jumpstarted a conversation about what a beautiful night it was going to be and what Dad did for a living. Dad gave him the thrice-over and answered in stark replies that would've frightened Mussolini: "Is it?" and "I teach civil war." Other dads would have felt sorry for Zach, recalling their own wobbly days of adolescence, and they'd take pity, try to Make the Kid Feel Comfortable. Unfortunately, Dad decided to Make the Kid Feel Small and Less Than a Man, simply because Zach hadn't known, innately, what Dad did for a living. Even though Dad knew the readership of Federal Forum was less than 0.3 percent of the United States and hence only a handful of individuals had scoured his essays or noted his romantic (a June Bug would say "rugged" or "dashing") black-and-white foe-toe on display in "Contributors of Note," Dad still didn't like to be reminded that he and his educational efforts weren't as recognizable as say, Sylvester Stallone and Rocky.

  Yet Zach displayed the optimism of a cartoon.

  "Midnight," decreed Dad as we walked outside. "I mean it."

  "You have my word, Mr. Van Meer!"

  At this point, Dad wasn't bothering to hide his You've-Got-to-Be-Kidding face, which I ignored, though it quickly dissolved into his This-Is-the-Winterof-My-Discontent look, and then, Shoot-If-You-Must-This-Old-Gray-Head.

  "Your dad's nice," Zach said as he started the car. (Dad was an infinite number of things, yet clammy-handed, sigh-by-night Nice was the one thing the man absolutely wasn't.)

  Now I trailed after him, down the airless, carpeted hallway, which he presumably shared with his sister if one went by the his-n-her hallkill along the floor and the onslaught of sibling odor (smell of athletic socks bullying peach perfume, cologne competing with fumes off a limp gray sweatshirt and threatening to go tell mom). We walked by what had to be Bethany Louise's room, painted gum pink, a pile of clothes on the floor (see "Mount McKinley," Almanac of Major Landmarks, 2000 éd.). We then passed a second bedroom, and through the crack of the not-quite-closed door I made out blue walls, trophies, a poster of an ove
rcooked blonde in a bikini. (Without much imagination, I could fill in the other obvious detail: held captive under the mattress, a ravished Victoria's Secret catalogue with the majority of its pages stuck together.)

  At the end of the hall, Zach stopped. In front of him was a small painting, no bigger than a porthole, illuminated by a crooked gold light on the wall.

  "So my father's a minister at the First Baptist Church. And when he did one of his sermons last year, 'The Fourteen Hopes,' there was a man in the congregation visiting from Washington, D.C. A guy by the name of Cecil Roloff. Well, this guy was so inspired he told my dad afterward he was a changed man." Zach pointed at the painting. "So a week later this came by UPS. And it's real. You know Turner, the artist?"

  Obviously I was familiar with the "King of Light," otherwise known as J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), having read Alejandro Penzance's eight hundred-page X-rated biography of the man, published only in Europe, Poor and Decayed Male Artist Born in England (1974).

  "It's called Fishermen at Sea" Zach said.

  Nimbly I stepped around the pair of green plastic gym shorts dead on the floor and leaned in to examine it. I guessed it probably was real, though it wasn't one of the "light fests" where the artist "screwed convention and took painting by the testicles!' as Penzance described Turner's hazy, almost completely abstract work (p. viii, Introduction). This painting was an oil, yet dark, depicting a tiny boat seemingly lost in a storm at sea, painted in hazy grays, browns and greens. There were slurpy waves, a wooden boat forceful as a matchbox, a moon, wan and small and a little bit of an acrophobe as it peered fretfully through the clouds.

  "Why is it hanging up here?" I asked. He laughed shyly. "Oh, my mom wants it close to my sister and me. She says it's healthy to sleep close to art."

  "A very interesting use of light," I said. "Faintly reminiscent of The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons. Especially in the sky. But a different palette obviously."

  "My favorite part's the clouds." Zach swallowed. A soup spoon had to be stuck in his throat. "Know what?"

  "What."

  "You kind of remind me of that boat."

  I looked at him. His face was about as cruel as a peanut butter sandwich with the crusts cut off (and he'd had a haircut so his Panama-hat hair didn't slant quite so low over his forehead) but his remark still made me—well, suddenly unable to stand him. He had likened me to a diminutive vessel manned by faceless dots of brown and yellow—poorly manned at that, because in a matter of seconds (if one took into account the oiled swell curled to strike down with vengeance), the thing was about to go under and that brown smudge on the horizon, that unwitting passing ship, wasn't coming to rescue the dots anytime soon.

  It was the cause of many of Dad's outrages too, when people elected themselves his personal oracle of Delphi. It was the grounds for many of his university colleagues going from nameless, harmless peers to individuals he referred to as "anathemas" and "bête noires." They'd made the mistake of abridging Dad, abbreviating Dad, putting Dad in a nutshell, watering Dad down, telling Dad How It Was (and getting it all wrong).

  Four years prior, at Dodson-Miner College's opening day World Symposium, Dad had delivered a forty-nine-minute lecture entitled, "Models of Hate and the Organ Trade," a lecture he was particularly fond of, having traveled in 1995 to Houston to interview one mustachioed Sletnik Patrutzka who'd sold her kidney for freedom. (Through tears, Sletnik had showed us her scars; "Steel hurts," she'd said.) Immediately following Dad's speech, College Provost Rodney Byrd scuttled across the outdoor stage like a shooed cockroach, dabbed his sloppy mouth with a handkerchief and said, "Thank you, Dr. Van Meer, for your keen insight into post-Communist Russia. It is very rare that we have a bona fide Russian émigré on campus"—he said it as if it were some mysterious individual who was a no-show, a very elusive Ms. Emmie Gray—"and we look forward to spending the semester with you. If anyone has a question about War and Peace I suspect he's your man." (Of course, Dad's lecture had covered the organ trade rife in Western Europe and he'd never set foot in Russia. Though proficient in other languages, Dad actually knew no Russian at all except a well-known Russian proverb, which meant, "Trust in God, but lock your car,".)

  "The act of being personally misconstrued," Dad said, "informed to one's face one is no more complex than a few words haphazardly strung together like blotchy undershirts on a clothesline—well, it can gall the most self-possessed of individuals."

  There was no sound in the claustrophobic hallway except Zach's breathing, which heaved like the interior of a conch shell. I could feel his eyes dripping down me, coursing through the folds of Jefferson's crispy black dress that resembled an upside-down shitake mushroom if you squinted at it. The silvery-black fabric felt flimsy, as if it could stiffly peel away like tinfoil around cold fried chicken.

  "Blue?"

  I made the grave error of glancing up at him again. His face—head light-bright from the light on the Turner, eyelashes absurdly long like those of a Jersey Cow—was heading straight toward me, drifting on down like Gondwanaland, the giant Southern landmass that inched toward the South Pole 200 million years ago.

  He wanted our tectonic plates to collide, forcing one on top of the other so molten material from the earth's interior gives rise to a wild and unstable volcano. Well, it was one of those sweaty moments I'd never had before except in dreams, when my head was in the cul-de-sac of Andreo Verduga's arm, my lips by his alcoholic cologne in the dead end of his neck. And as I stared up at Zach's face hovering at the intersection of Desire and Shyness, patiently waiting for a green light (even though there wasn't a soul around), you'd think I'd flee, run for my life, lie back and think of Milton (throughout the evening, I'd been engaged in covert Neverlanding, fantasizing it'd been he who'd met Dad, his mother and father who'd squirreled around the living room), but no, at this bizarre moment, Hannah Schneider slipped into my head.

  I'd seen her at school just that afternoon, right after sixth period. She was dressed in a long-sleeved black wool dress, a tight black coat, moving unevenly down the sidewalk toward Hanover carrying a cream canvas bag, her head bent toward the ground. While Hannah had always been thin, her figure, particularly her shoulders, looked unusually hunched and narrow, dented even—like she'd been smashed in a door.

  Now, caught in some gluey moment with this kid, feeling like I was still in Kansas, the reality of her getting so close to Doc she could count the number of gray hairs on his chin felt gruesome. How could she stomach his hands, his rocking-chair shoulders or the next morning, the sky sterile as a hospital floor? What was wrong with her? Something was wrong, of course, yet I'd been too preoccupied with myself, with Black and the number of times he sneezed, with Jade, Lu, Nigel, my hair, to take it to heart. ("The average American girl's principal obsession is her hair—simple bangs, a perm, straightening, split ends—to the breathtaking rebuff of all else, including divorce, murder and nuclear war," writes Dr. Michael Espiland in Always Knock Before Entering [1993].) What had happened to Hannah to make her descend into Cottonwood the way Dante had willfully descended into Hell? What had caused her to perpetuate a marked pattern of self-annihilation, which was obviously replicating at an alarming rate with the death of her friend Smoke Harvey, the drinking and swearing, her thinness, which made her look like a starved crow? Misery multiplied unless it was treated immediately. So did misfortune, according to Irma Stenpluck, author of The Credibility Gap (1988), which detailed on p. 329 one had only to suffer a tiny misfortune before one found one's "entire ship sinking into the Atlantic." Maybe it was none of our business, but maybe it was what she'd been hoping for all along, that one of us would unstick from our self and ask about her for once, not out of snoopy intrigue but because she was our friend and obviously crumbling a little bit.

  I hated myself, standing there in the hallway, next to the Turner and Zach still hovering on the edge of his dry canyon of a kiss.

  "You have something on your mind," he quietly observed. The kid was Carl
Jung, fucking Freud.

  "Let's get out of here," I said harshly, taking a small step backward.

  He smiled. It was incredible; his face had no expression for anger or annoyance, just as some Native Americans, the Mohawks, the Hupa, had no word for purple.

  "You don't want to know why you're like that boat?" he asked.

  I shrugged and my dress sighed.

  "Well, it's because the moon shines right on it and nowhere else in the picture. Right here. On the side. She's the only thing that's incandescent," he said, or some other word-of-the-day response to that effect, full of oozing lava, lumps of rock, ash and hot gas I opted not to stick around for because I'd already turned and headed down the stairs. At the bottom, I again encountered Patsy and Roge, positioned right where we'd left them like two shopping carts abandoned in the cookie aisle.

  "Isn't it something?" Patsy exclaimed.

  They waved good-bye as Zach and I climbed into the Toyota. Big smiles fireworked through their faces when I waved and shouted out the unrolled window, "Thank you! Look forward to seeing you again!" How strange it was that people like Zach, Roge and Patsy floated through the world. They were the cute daisies twirling past the mirror orchids, the milk thistle of the Hannah Schneiders, the Gareth van Meers snared in the branches and the mud. They were the sort of giddy people Dad loathed, called fuzz, frizz (or his most contemptuous put-down of all, sweet people) if he happened to be standing behind one of them in a checkout aisle and eavesdropped on what was always a painfully bland conversation.

  And yet—and I didn't know what was wrong with me—though I couldn't wait to unload Zach as soon as we arrived at the Cabaret (Jade and the others would be there, Black and Joalie too, Joalie, I hoped, suffering from a unforeseen skin irritation that refused to budge, even with persistent entreaties of various over-the-counter medications) I sort of marveled at the kid's buoyancy. I'd approached his would-be kiss with no less dread than if a plague of locusts had started to descend upon my lands, and yet, now, he smiled at me and cheerfully asked if I had enough leg room.