Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  They'd used the same delicate words to describe the same delicate person.

  Time and again, Dad handpicked a cute slogan for a person and rudely bumper-stuck it to them for all ensuing conversations (Dean Roy at the University of Arkansas at Wilsonville had been the uninspired "sweet as candy"). Hannah must have heard him say it once when describing my mother. And just as she'd blatantly recited Dad's favorite quotation to me at the dinner table (happiness, dog, sun) and planted Dad's favorite foreign film in her VCR (L'Avventura) (Hannah was now dusted, cast in ultraviolet light; I could see Dad's fingerprints all over her), she had tantalizingly tossed me that phrase, thereby letting bits of her dark secret, the hot one she'd clutched tightly in her hands, fall through her fingers, so that I might see it, follow it like the barest trail of sand. Not even when I was alone with her in the woods did she have the guts (Mut, in German) to let go of it, throw it all into the air so it showered over our heads, got caught in our hair and mouths.

  The truth they'd hidden (Dad with Fifth Symphony ferocity, Hannah messily) that they'd known each other (since 1992, I calculated) in the movie-poster sense of the word (and I'd never know if they were II Caso Thomas Crown or Colazione da Tiffany or if they'd flossed their teeth next to each other three hundred times), it didn't garner a gasp from me —not a whimper or wheeze.

  I only went back to the moving box and sat on my knees, running my fingers through the velvet splinters, the antennae and forewings and the thoraxes and torn mounting papers and pins, hoping Natasha had left me a code, a suicide letter identifying her traitorous husband just as she'd identified the part of the Red-based Jezebel that indicated it was repugnant to birds—an explanation, a puzzle to pore over, a whisper from the dead, a Visual Aid. (There was nothing.)

  By then, my CASE NOTES filled an entire legal pad, some fifty pages, and I'd remembered the photograph Nigel had shown me in Hannah's bedroom (which she must have destroyed before the camping trip since I'd been unable to find it in the Evan Picone shoe box), the one of Hannah as a girl with the blonde floating away from the camera lens and on the back, written in blue pen, 1973. And I'd driven the Volvo to the Internet café on Orlando, Cyberroast, and matched the gold-lion insignia, which I recalled from the pocket of Hannah's school uniform blazer, to the crest of a private school on East 81st Street, the one Natasha had attended in 1973 after her parents made her quit the Larson Ballet Conservatory (see www.theivyschool.edu). (Salva veritate was their irksome motto.) And after staring for hours at that other photo of Hannah, the one I'd stolen from her garage, Rockstar Hannah of the Rooster-Red Hair, I'd realized why, back in January, when I'd seen her with the madwoman haircut, I'd felt that persistent itch of déjà vu.

  The woman who'd driven me home from kindergarten after my mother died, the pretty one in jeans with short red porcupine hair, the one Dad had told me was our next-door neighbor—it had been Hannah.

  I cut out pieces of evidence from every other conversation I could remember, gluing them together, awed, but also sickened by the resulting graphic collage (see "Splayed Nude Patchwork XI," The UnauthorizedBiography of Indonesia Sotto, Greyden, 1989, p. 211). "She had a best friend growing up," Hannah had said to me, cigarette smoke pirouetteing off her fingers, "a beautiful girl, fragile; they were like sisters. She could confide in her, tell her everything under the sun—for the life of me, I can't remember her name." "There are people. Fragile people, that you love and you hurt them, and I-I'm pathetic, aren't I?" she'd said to me in the woods. "Something awful happened in her twenties, a man was involved," Eva Brewster had said, "her friend—she didn't go into details, but not a day went by when she didn't feel guilt over what she'd done—whatever it was."

  Was Hannah the reason Servo and Dad (in spite of their dynamic working relationship) warred with each other—they'd loved (or perhaps it was never anything so grand, simply a case of poorly wired electricity) the same woman? Was Hannah why we moved to Stockton, remorse over her dead best friend who committed suicide from a broken heart, the reason she'd showered me with breathy compliments and squeezed me against her bony shoulder? How was it possible scientists were able to locate the edge of the observable universe, the Cosmic Light Horizon ("Our universe is 13.7 billion light years long," wrote Harry Mills Cornblow, Ph.D., with astounding confidence in The ABCs of the Cosmos [2003]) and yet, mere human beings stayed so fuzzy, beyond all calculation?

  Yes, Not Sure, Probably, and Who the Hell Knew were my answers.

  Fourteen days after Dad was gone (two days after I received the cordial greeting from Mr. William Baumgartner of the Bank of New York notifying me of my account numbers; in 1993, the year we left Mississippi, it seemed Dad had set up a trust fund in my name) I was downstairs in the storage room off of Dad's former study, weeding through the shelves piled with damaged stuff, most of it belonging to the owner of 24 Armor Street, though some of it was junk Dad and I had accumulated over the years: matching lamps in mint green, a marble obelisk paperweight (a gift from one of Dad's worshipful students), a few faded picture books of little consequence (A Travel Guide to South Africa [1968] by J. C. Bulrich). I happened to push aside a small flat cardboard box Dad had marked SILVERWARE and saw, next to it, wedged in the corner behind a crinkled, jaundiced newspaper (the grimly titled, Rwandan Standard-Times), Dad's Brighella costume, the black cloak in a ball, the bronze mask with its peeling paint and fishhook nose sneering at the shelves.

  Without thinking, I picked up the cloak, shook it loose and pressed my face into it, a sort of embarrassing, lost thing to do, and immediately, I noticed a distantly familiar smell, a smell of Howard and Wal-Mart, Hannah's bedroom—that old Tahitian acidic sap, the kind of cologne that barged into a room and held it up for hours.

  But then —it was a face in a crowd. You noticed a jaw, eyes or one of those fascinating chins that looked like a needle and knotted thread had been stuck and pulled tightly through the center and you wanted, sometimes were desperate, to glimpse it one last time, but you couldn't, no matter how hard you fought through the elbows, the handbags, the high-heeled shoes. As soon as I recognized the cologne and the name panthered through my head, it slipped out of sight, drowned somewhere, was gone.

  36

  Metamorphoses

  knew something screwballed and romantic would happen on Graduation Day, because the morning sky wouldn't stop blushing over the house and Jiwhen I opened my bedroom window, the air felt faint. Even the girlish pines, crowded in their tight cliques around the yard, shivered in anticipation; and then I sat down at the kitchen table with Dad's Wall Street Journal (it still turned up for him in the wee hours of the morning like a John returning to a street corner where his favorite hooker had once strutted her stuff), switched on WQOX News 13 at 6:30 A.M., The Good Morning Show with Cherry, and Cherry Jeffries was missing.

  In her place sat Norvel Owen wearing a tight sports jacket the blue of Neptune. He wove his chubby fingers together, and with his face glowing, blinking as if someone was shining a flashlight in his eyes, he began to read the news without a single comment, plea, passing remark, or personal aside about the reason for Cherry Jeffries' absence. He didn't even throw out a bland and unconvincing, "Wishing Cherry the best of luck," or "Wishing Cherry a speedy recovery." Even more astonishing was the show's new title, which I noticed when the program cut to commercial: The Good Morning Show with Norvel. The Executive Producers at WQOX News 13 had erased the very being of Cherry with the same ease of deleting an eyewitness' "uhs," "ers," and "see heres" out of a top news story in the Editing Room.

  With his half-a-slice-of-pineapple grin, Norvel turned the floor over to Ashleigh Goldwell who did Weather. She announced Stockton could expect "high humidity with an eighty percent chance of rain."

  Despite this dismal forecast, as soon as I arrived at St. Gallway (after running my last few errands, Sherwig Realty, the Salvation Army), Eva Brewster

  made the announcement over the intercom that proud parents would still be ushered to their designated meta
l folding chairs on the field in front of the Bartleby Sports Center precisely at the stroke of 11:00 A.M. (Five chairs maximum were allotted per student. Any relative spillover would be relegated to the bleachers.) The ceremony would still begin at 11:30. Contrary to the circulating rumors, all events and speakers would proceed as scheduled, including the post-ceremony Garden Hour of Hors d'oeuvres (music and entertainment provided by the Jelly Roll Jazz Band and those St. Gallway Fosse Dancers who were not graduating) where parents, faculty and students alike could circle like Pallid Monkey Moths among the whisperings of Who Got in Where and the sparkling cider and the calla lilies.

  "I've telephoned a few radio stations and the rain isn't forecast until later this afternoon," Eva Brewster said. "As long as all seniors line up on time we should be fine. Good luck and congratulations."

  I was late leaving Ms. Simpson's classroom in Hanover (Soggy Ms. Simpson: "Can I just say, your presence in this classroom has been an honor. When I find a student who demonstrates such a deep understanding of the material . . .") and Mr. Moats also wished to detain me when I turned in my Final Drawing Portfolio. Even though I'd been meticulous in making sure I looked and behaved exactly as I had before my abrupt hiatus from school, a total of sixteen days—dressing the same, walking the same, having the same hair (these were the clues people bloodhounded when trying to chase down Domestic Apocalypse or a Deteriorating Psyche), it still seemed Dad's desertion had altered me in some way. It had revised me, but only very slightly—a word here, a bit of clarification there. I also felt people's eyes on me all the time, though not in the same envious way as in my Blueblood Heyday. No, it was the adults who noticed me now, always with a brief yet baffled stare, as if they now noticed something old within me, as if they recognized themselves.

  "Glad to know things are back on track," Mr. Moats said.

  "Thank you," I said.

  "We were worried. We didn't know what had happened to you."

  "I know. Things became hectic."

  "When you finally let Eva know what'd happened, we were relieved. You must be going through a lot. How's your father doing by the way?"

  "The prognosis isn't good," I said. It was the scripted sentence I'd sort of relished saying to Ms. Thermopolis (who responded by reminding me they can do wonders "fixing" cancer as if it was just a bad haircut) and Ms. Gershon (who speedily changed the subject back to my Final Essay on String Theory), even Mr. Archer (who stared at the Titian poster on the wall, rendered speechless by the ruffles in the girl's dress), but now I felt bad when it rendered Moats visibly sad and mute. He nodded at the floor. "My father died of throat cancer too," he said softly. "It can be grueling. The loss of the voice, a failure to communicate —not easy for any man. I can't imagine how tough it'd be for a professor. Modigliani was plagued with illness, you know. Degas. Toulouse too. Many of the greatest men and women in history." Moats sighed. "And next year you're at Harvard?"

  I nodded.

  "It'll be hard, but you must concentrate on your studies. Your father will want it that way. And keep drawing, Blue," he added, a statement that seemed to comfort him more than me. He sighed and touched the collar of his textured magenta shirt. "And I don't say that to just anyone, you know. Many people should stay far, far away from the blank page. But you—you see, the drawing, the carefully considered sketch of a human being, animal, an inanimate object, is not simply a picture but a blueprint of a soul. Photography? A lazy man's art. Drawing? The thinker, the dreamers medium."

  "Thank you," I said.

  A few minutes later, I was hurrying across the Commons in my long white dress and flat white shoes. The sky had darkened to the color of bullets and parents in pastels drifted toward Bartleby field, some of them laughing, clutching their handbags or the hand of a small child, some of themfluffing their hair as if it was goose-feather pillows.

  Ms. Eugenia Sturds had mandated that we "load" (we were bulls to be unleashed in a ring) in the Nathan Bly '68 Trophy Room no later than

  10:45 AM and when I pushed open the door and made my way into the crowded room, it seemed I was the last senior to arrive. "No disturbances during the ceremony," Mr. Butters was saying. "No laughter. No fidgeting—" "No clapping until all names are called—" chimed Ms. Sturds. "No getting up and going to the bathroom—" "Girls, if you have to pee, go now." Immediately, I spotted Jade and the others in the corner. Jade, wearing a

  suit in marshmallow white, hair slicked into a mais oui twist, reviewed her reflection in a pocket mirror, rubbing lipstick off her teeth and smacking her lips together. Lu was standing quietly with her hands together, looking down, pitching forward and backward on her heels. Charles, Milton and Nigel were discussing beer. "Budweiser tastes like fuckin' rabbit piss," I heard Milton remark loudly, as I skirted to the other side of the room. (I'd often wondered what they talked about now that Hannah was gone and I was sort of relieved to know it was hackneyed and had nothing to do with The Eternal Why; I wasn't missing much.) I pushed past Point Richardson, Donnamara Chase sniffing in distress as she dabbed a wet napkin along a blue pen streak across the front of her blouse, Trucker wearing a green tie with tiny horse heads floating in it and Dee safety-pinning Dum's crimson bra straps to her dress straps so they didn't show.

  "I all can't fathom why you told mom eleven forty-five," Dee said heatedly.

  "What's the big deal?"

  "The procession's the big deal."

  "Why?"

  "Mom's all not going to be able to take pictures. Because of your mal a la tête mom's all missing our last day of childhood like a crosstown bus." "She said she was going to beearly—" "Well, I didn't see her and she's wearing that highly visible purple outfit she wears to everything—"

  "I thought you forbade her to wear the highly visible—"

  "It's starting!" squawked Little Nose, perched on the radiator at the window. "We have to go! Now!" "Grab the diploma with the right, shake with the left, or shake with the left, grab with the right?" asked Raging Waters.

  "Zach, did you see our parents?" asked Lonny Felix.

  "I gotta pee," said Krista Jibsen.

  "So this is it," Sal Mineo said solemnly behind me. "This is the end."

  Even though the Jelly Roll Jazz Band had broken into "Pomp and Circumstance," Ms. Sturds callously informed us No One Was Graduating Anywhere until everyone calmed down and formed the alphabetized line. We tapewormed, exactly as we'd practiced all week. Mr. Butters gave the signal, opened the door with American Bandstand flourish and Ms. Sturds, as if unveiling a solid new line of mules, arms raised, her floral skirt jitterbueging around her ankles, stepped out onto the lawn in front of us.

  The sky was a massive bruise; someone had punched it in the kisser. There was an uncouth wind, too. It wouldn't stop teasing the long blue St. Gallway banners hanging on either side of the Commencement Stage, and then, growing bored, turned its attention to the music. In spite of Mr. John-son's cries for the Jelly Roll Jazz Band to play louder (for a second I thought he was shouting, "Sing out, Louise!" but I was wrong), the wind intercepted the notes, sprinting away with them across the field and punted them through the goal posts, so all that was audible was a few shabby clangs and honks.

  We filed down the aisle. Parents frothed excitedly around us, clapping and grinning, and slow-motion grandmothers tried to take foe-toes with cameras they handled like jewelry. A wiry lizard-photographer from Ellis Hills, trying to blend in, scurried ahead of our line, crouching, squinting as he peered through his camera. He stuck out his tongue before snapping a few quick pictures and scuttling away.

  The rest of the class made their way into the metal folding chairs in the front and Radley Clifton and I continued up the five steps to the commencement stage. We sat down in the chairs to the right of Havermeyer and Havermeyer's wife, Gloria (finally relieved of the boulder she'd been carrying, though now she had an equally disturbing pale, rigid, Plexiglas appearance). Eva Brewster was next to her and she tossed me a comforting smile but then almost immediately to
ok it away, like lending me her handkerchief but not wanting it to get dirty.

  Havermeyer sauntered toward the microphone and talked at length about our unparalleled achievements, our great gifts and glowing futures, and then Radley Clifton gave his Salutatorian Speech. He'd just begun to philosophize—"An army marches on its stomach," he said—when the wind, obviously contemptuous of all scholars, truth-seekers, logicians (anyone who tried to address The Eternal Why) I-Spied-With-My-Little-Eye Radley, joking with his red tie, mocking his hair (neatly combed, the color of cardboard), and just when one thought the mischief would subside, it started to rag on the neat white pages of his speech, forcing him to lose his place, repeat himself, stutter and pause so Radley Clifton's Graduation Credo came out jarring, conflicted, confused—a surprisingly resonant life philosophy.

  Havermeyer returned to the podium. Strands of sandy hair daddylonglegged across his forehead. "I now introduce to you our class Valedictorian, a highly gifted young woman, originally from Ohio, who we were honored to have at St. Gallway this year. Miss Blue van Meer."

  He pronounced Meer mare, but I tried not to think about it as I stood up, smoothed down the front of my dress and, in the moderate but perfectly respectable burst of applause, made my way across the rubberized stage (supposedly there'd been a bad wipeout a few years prior: Martine Filobeque, cunning pinecone, girdle). I was grateful for the applause, grateful people were generous enough to clap for a kid who wasn't theirs, a kid who, at least academically, had outtangoed their own kid (as decent a reason as any Dad would find to crack "so this what they call 'outstanding.' "). I set the papers on the podium, pulled down the microphone and made the mistake of glancing up at the two hundred heads facing me blankly like an expansive field of mature white cabbage. My heart was trying out new moves (The Robot, something called The Lightning Bolt) and for a harrowing second I wasn't sure I'd have the courage to speak. Somewhere in the crowd Jade was smoothing her gold hair back, sighing, "Oh, God, not the pigeon again," and Milton was thinking, tuna tataki, salade niçoise—but I quarantined these thoughts as best I could. The edges of the pages seemed to panic too, trembling in the wind.