Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  My heart stopped.

  Staring back at me,

  “Baker, Catherine.-I R.637911. ,

  Female, White, Blue eyes

  "Gracey, George. I.R. 329573. Male, White, Heavy build. Fed. Warrant #78-3298. Tattoos on right chest. Walks with limp. Subjects should be considered armed and dangerous"

  Was Baba au Rhum

  Granted, in the police photo, Servo sported a dense steel-wool beard and mustache, both doing their best to scrub out his oval face, and the photograph (a still taken from a security camera) was in sloppy black and white. Yet Servo's burning eyes, his lipless mouth reminiscent of the plastic gap in a Kleenex box with no Kleenex, the way his small head stood up against his bullying shoulders —it was unmistakable. "He always hobbled," Dad had said to me in Paris. "Even when we were at Harvard."

  I grabbed the paper, which also featured the sketch of Catherine Baker, the one I'd seen on the Internet. ("Federal Authorities and the Harris County Sheriffs Department are asking for public assistance in obtaining information leading to the Grand Jury indictment of these persons. . ." it read on the second page.) I ran upstairs to my room, yanked open my desk drawers, and dug through my old homework papers and notebooks and Unit Tests, until I found the Air France boarding passes, some Ritz stationery, and then, the small piece of graph paper on which Dad had scribbled Servo's home and mobile telephone numbers the day they'd left me and gone to La Sorbonne.

  After some confusion —country codes, reversing ones and zeros —I managed to correctly dial the mobile number. Instantly, I was met with the hisses and heckling of a number no longer in service. When I called the home number, after a great deal of "Como?" and "Que?" a patient Spanish woman informed me that the apartment wasn't a private residence, no, it was available for weeklong lettings via Go Chateaux, Inc. She pointed me toward the vacation Web site and an 8oo-number (see "ILE-297," www.gochateaux.com). I called the Reservations line and was curtly told by a man that the apartment hadn't been a private residence since the company's inception in 1981. I then tried to wrench free whatever info he had on the individual who'd leased the unit the week of December 26, but was informed Go Chateaux wasn't authorized to disclose their client's personal records.

  "Have I done what I could to assist you on this call?"

  "This is a matter of life and death. People are being killed."

  "Have I satisfied all of your questions?"

  "No."

  "Thank you for calling Go Chateaux."

  I hung up and did nothing but sit on the edge of my bed, stunned by the blasé response of the afternoon. Surely, the sky should have split open like plumber's pants; at the very least, smoke should be unraveling from the trees, their topmost branches singed —but no, the afternoon was a dead-eyed teenager, a weathered broad hanging around a dive bar, old tinsel. My revelation was my problem; it had nothing whatsoever to do with the bedroom, with the light like drunk wallflowers in shapeless gold dresses slouching along the radiator and bookshelf, the windowpane shadows like idiot sunbathers sprawled all over the floor. I remembered picking up Servo's cane after it had toppled off the edge of a boulangerie counter, rapping a woman standing behind him directly on her black shoe making her gasp and light up red like she was a twenty-five-cent theme park game of sledgehammer and bell, and the top of the walking stick, a bald eagle head, had been hot and sticky from Servo's steak-fat palm. As I returned the cane to the spot by his elbow, he'd tossed words over his left shoulder, hastily, like he'd spilled salt: "Mmmm, merci beaucoup. Need a leash for that thing, don't I?" I supposed it was no use berating myself for not quilting together, in a more timely fashion, these obviously well-matched scraps of life (How many men had I ever known with hip trouble? None but Servo was the pitiful answer) and naturally (though I resisted) I thought of something Dad had said: "A surprise is rarely a stranger, but a faceless patient who's been reading across from you in the waiting room the entire time, his head hidden by a magazine but his orange socks in plain view, as well as his gold pocket watch and frayed trousers."

  But if Servo was George Gracey, what did that make Dad?

  Servo is to Gracey as Dad is to—suddenly, the answer came lurching out of hiding, hands up, throwing itself to the ground, begging for forgiveness, praying I wouldn't flay it alive.

  I raced to my desk, seized my CASE NOTES, scoured the pages for those odd little nicknames I'd taken such haphazard note of, eventually finding them cowering at the bottom of Page 4: Nero, Bull's-Eye, Mohave, Socrates and Franklin. It was farcically obvious now. Dad was Socrates, otherwise known as The Thinker according to www.looseyourrevolutioncherry.net—of course, he'd be Socrates—who else would Dad be? Marx, Hume, Descartes, Sartre, none of those nicknames were good enough for Dad ("out-of-date, blubbering scribblers"), and he wouldn't be caught dead going by Plato ("hugely overhyped as a logician"). I wondered if one of The Nightwatchmen had dreamt up the nickname; no, it was more likely Dad himself had casually suggested it in private to Servo before a meeting. Dad didn't do well with subtlety, with off the cuff; when it came to All Things Gareth, Dad wore indifference like a socialite thin as a cheese cracker forced to lunch in a football jersey. My eyes were staggering down the page now, through my own neatly written words: "January 1974 marked a change in tactics for the group from evident to invisible." In January 1974, Dad had been enrolled in Harvard's Kennedy School of Government; in March 1974, "police had come close to raiding one of The Nightwatchmen's gatherings in an abandoned Braintree, Massachusetts, warehouse"; Braintree was less than thirty minutes from Cambridge, and thus The Nightwatchmen had been less than thirty minutes from Dad—a highly likely intersection of two moving bodies across Space and Time.

  It must have been Dad's admittance into The Nightwatchmen that led to their shift in strategy. "Blind Dates: Advantages of a Silent Civil War" and "Rebellion in the Information Age" were two of Dad's most popular Federal Forum essays (every now and then he still received fan mail), and it was a Primary Theme that had served as the basis for his highly regarded Harvard dissertation of 1978, "The Curse of the Freedom Fighter: The Fallacies of Guerrilla Warfare and Third-World Revolution." (It was also the reason he called Lou Swann a "hack.") And then there was Dad's palpable Moment of Turning, a moment he spoke lovingly about in a Bourbon Mood (as if it were a woman he'd seen in a train station, a woman with silky hair who tilted her head close to the glass so Dad saw a cloud where her mouth should be), when he stood on Benno Ohnesorg's stiff shoelace at a Berlin protest rally and the innocent student was shot dead by police. This was when he realized that "the man who stands up and protests, the lone man who says no—he will be crucified."

  "And that was my Bolshevik moment, so to speak," Dad said. "When I decided to storm the Winter Palace."

  When charting what I knew to be my life, somehow I'd managed to omit an entire continent (see Antarctica: The Coldest Place on Earth, Turg, 1987). "Always content, aren't you, to hide behind the lecture podium?" I'd overheard Servo shouting at Dad. Servo was the "hormonal teenager," Dad, the theorist. (Frankly, Servo had hit the nail on the head; Dad didn't like dishwasher soap on his hands, much less the blood of men.) And Servo doubtlessly paid Dad well for his theorizing. Though Dad, over the years, had always pleaded poverty, when it came down to it, he could still live it up like Kubla Kahn, renting an ornate house like 24 Armor Street, staying at the Ritz, shipping a 200-pound, $17,000 antique desk across the country and lying about it. Even Dad's choice of bourbon, George T. Stagg, was considered by Stuart Mills Booze Bible (2003 ed.) "the Bentley of all bourbons."

  In Paris, had I come upon them arguing about Hannah Schneider, or the encroaching problem of Ada Harvey? Highly hysterical, problem, Simone de Beauvoir—the overheard conversation was a mule; it wouldn't come back willingly. I had to coax and cajole it, tug it back into my head, so by the time I lined up the shards of conversation for inspection, I was just as confused as when I began. My head felt hollowed out with a spoon.

  After the initial sting
, my life —jam packed with highways, Sonnetathons, Bourbon Moods, notable quotations by people who were dead—it peeled away with remarkable ease.

  Frankly, I was astonished how unfazed I felt, how unflappable. After all, if Vivien Leigh suffered from hallucinations and hysteria, requiring shock treatment, ice packing and a diet of raw eggs simply by working on the set of Elephant Walk (a film no one had ever heard of except descendants of Peter Finch), surely it'd be conceivable, maybe even mandatory for me to develop some form of dementia over the fact my life had been a Trompe l'Oeil, Gonzo Journalism, The $64,000 Question, the Feejee Mermaid, a Hitler Diary, Milli Vanilli (see Chapter 3, "Miss O'Hara," Birds of Torment: Luscious Ladies of the Screen and Their Living Demons, Lee, 1973).

  After my Socratic revelation, however, the subsequent truths I unearthed weren't nearly so jaw dropping. (One can only be so hoodzonked before one's hoodzonk maxes out like a credit card.)

  In the ten years we'd traveled the country, Dad appeared to have been concerned, not so much with my education, but with a rigorous Nightwatchmen staffing exercise. Dad had been their powerful Head of HR, his voice intoxicating as the Sirens, most likely directly responsible for that "inspirational recruitment," detailed by Guillaume on www.hautain.fr. It was the only logical explanation: every professor who'd come to dinner over the years, the quiet young men who listened with such intensity while Dad delivered his Sermon on the Mount, his story of Tobias Jones the Damned, his Determination Theory—"There are wolves and there are brine shrimp," he'd said, going for the Hard Sell —not only were they not professors, they didn't exist.

  There was no hearing-impaired Dr. Luke Ordinote spearheading the History Department at the University of Missouri at Archer. There was no fig-eyed Professor of Linguistics Mark Hill. There was a Professor of Zoology Mark Hubbard but I couldn't speak to him because he'd been on sabbatical in Israel for the last twelve years studying the endangered Little Bustard, Tetrax tetrax. Most chillingly, there was no Professor Arnie Sanderson who taught Intro to Drama and History of the World Theater, with whom Dad had had a riotous dinner the night Eva Brewster destroyed my mother's butterflies, also at Piazza Pitti the night he'd disappeared.

  "Hello?"

  "Hello. I was trying to get in touch with an Associate Professor who taught in your English Department in the fall of 2001. His name is Lee San-jay Song."

  "What's the name?"

  "Song."

  There was a brief pause.

  "No one by that name here."

  "I'm not sure if he was full- or part-time."

  "I understand, but no one by that—"

  "Perhaps he's left? Moved to Calcutta? Timbuktu? Maybe he was flattened by a bus." "Excuse me?" "I'm sorry. It's just—if anyone knows anything, if there's someone else I could talk to I'd be grateful — "

  "I have supervised this English Department for twenty-nine years and I assure you, no one with the last name of Song has ever taught here. I'm sorry I can't be of better assistance, miss—"

  Naturally, I wondered if Dad too had been an imposter professor. I'd witnessed him speaking in lecture halls on a handful of occasions, but there were more than a few colleges I hadn't visited. And if I hadn't seen with my own eyes the closet-office Dad referred to as his "cage," his "crypt," his "and they think I can sit in this catacomb and come up with novel ideas to inspire the featureless youths of this country"—perhaps it was similar to that tree falling in a forest. It never happened.

  I was entirely off the mark on this front. Everyone and their grandmother had heard of Dad, including a few departmental secretaries who'd just been hired. It seemed, wherever Dad went, he'd left a blinding Yellow Brick Road of adulation in his wake.

  "How is the old boy?" inquired Dean Richardson of University of Arkansas at Wilsonville.

  "He's fantastic."

  "I've often wondered what happened to him. Thought of him the other day when I came across a Virginia Summa article saluting Mideast policies in Proposals. I could just hear Garry howling with laughter. Come to think of it, I haven't seen an essay of his in a while. Well, I suppose it's tight these days. Mavericks, nonconformists, those who march to the beat of their own drum, speak up, they're not finding the same forums they used to."

  "He's managing."

  Obviously, if a corner of one's life ended up covertly cultivating a shocking amount of slime mold, one must switch on unflattering fluorescent lights (the cruel kind of chicken coops), get down on one's hands and knees and scrub every corner. I thus found it necessary to investigate another thrilling possibility: What If June Bugs were not June Bugs, but Spanish Moon Moths (Graellsia isabellae), the most captivating and well bred of all the European moths? What If they, too, like the bogus professors, were gifted individuals Dad had meticulously handpicked for The Nightwatchmen? What If they only pretended to bond vigorously to Dad as lithium does to fluorine (see The Strange Attractions of Opposite Ions, Booley, 1975)? I wanted it to be true; I wanted to pull my boat up next to theirs, rescue them from their wasted African violets and quivery-voiced phone calls, from their tepid waters with nothing flourishing in them, no reefs, parrot or angelfish (and certainly no sea turtles). Dad had left them stranded on that boat, but I'd set them free, send them away on a powerful Trade Wind. They'd disappear to Casablanca, to Bombay, to Rio (everyone wanted to disappear to Rio) —never heard of, never seen again, as poetic a fate as any they could hope for.

  I began my investigation by calling Information and obtaining the telephone number of June Bug Jessie Rose Rubiman, still living in Newton, Texas, and still heiress to the Rubiman Carpeting franchise: "Mention his name one more time—know what? I'm still considering finding out where he lives, coming into his bedroom while he sleeps and chopping off his doohickey. That's what that son-of-a-bitch's got coming to him."

  I ended my investigation by calling Information and obtaining the telephone number of June Bug Shelby Hollow: "Night watch? Wait—I won a free Indiglo Timex?"

  Unless June Bugs were skilled actresses in the tradition of Davis and Dietrich (suitable for the A movies, not the B or C movies), it seemed evident that the only moth flying through this sticky night, doggedly figure-eighting (like a confused kamikaze pilot) around every porch light and lamppost, refusing to be deterred even if I switched out the lights and ignored her, was Hannah Schneider.

  That was the startling thing about this business of abandonment, of finding oneself so without conversation, one's thoughts had the entire world to themselves; they could drift for days without bumping into anyone. I could swallow Dad calling himself Socrates. I could swallow The Nightwatchmen too, hunt down every whisper of their workings like a private detective desperate to find The Missing Dame. I could even swallow Servo and Hannah as lovers (see "African Egg-Eating Snake/' Encyclopedia of Living Things, 4th éd.). I could assume Baba au Rhum hadn't always rattled and Mmmmed; back in the stringy-haired summer of 1973, no doubt he'd cut an arresting rebel figure (or resembled Poe just enough that thirteen-year-old Catherine decided to be his Virginia forevermore).

  What I couldn't swallow, couldn't stare at with the naked eye, was Dad and Hannah. I noticed, as the days drifted past, I kept tucking that thought away, saving it like a grandmother for a Special Occasion that would never come. I attempted and sometimes succeeded diverting my mind (not with a book or play and, yes, reciting Keats was an idiotic idea, boarding a rowboat for refuge in an earthquake) but with TV, shaving and Gap commercials, prime-time melodramas with tan people named Brett declaring, "It's payback time."

  They were gone. They were giant specimens splayed in glass cases in dim, deserted rooms. I could stare down at them, ridicule my stupidity for never noticing their blatant similarities: their awe-inspiring size (personas larger than life), brightly-colored hind wings (conspicuous in any room), their spined caterpillar beginnings (orphan, poor little rich girl, respectively), taking flight solely at night (their endings swathed in mystery), boundaries of their distribution unknown.

  If a
man bemoaned a woman as noisily as Dad ("commonplace," "strange and wayward," a "sob story," he'd called her), behind Curtain #1 of such severe dislike there was almost always a brand new Sedona Beige Love parked there, big, bright and impractical (destined to break down within the year). It was the oldest trick in the book, one I never should have fallen for, having read all of Shakespeare, including the late romances, and the definitive biography of Cary Grant, The Reluctant Lover (Murdy, 1999).

  BUTTERFLIES FRAGILE. Why, when I forced myself to consider Dad and Hannah, did that old moving box crash into my head? They were the words Dad almost always used to describe my mother. After the fuss of battement frappés and demi-pliés, the Technicolor Dream dress, those words often showed up like unwanted, impoverished guests at a splendid party, embarrassing and sad, as if Dad was talking about her glass eye or absence of an arm. At Hyacinth Terrace, her black eyes like clogged drains, her mouth stained plum, Hannah Schneider had said the same frilly words, spoken not to the others but to me. With a stare pressing down on me, she'd said: "Some people are fragile, as-as butterflies."