Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

"I'm not going to be here this summer," I said.

  "Where're you going?"

  "To visit my grandparents. Maybe somewhere else." ("Chippawaa, New Mexico, Land of Enchantment, Homeland of the Roadrunner, Blue Gamma Mosquito Grass, the Cutthroat Trout, Industries, mining, silver, potash . . .")

  "You and your dad, or just you?" he asked.

  The kid had an uncanny ability to nail every question, again and again. Dad was the first to debunk the No Wrong Questions policy thrown out to make dimwits feel better about themselves; yes, whether one wanted to accept it or not, there were a handful of right questions and billions of wrong ones and out of these, out of all of these, Zach had selected the one that made me feel like I'd sprung a leak in my throat, the one that made me afraid I'd cry or fall over, also causing an outbreak of those pretend itches on my arm and neck. Dad probably would have liked him—that was the funny thing. This one, this bull's-eye, would have impressed Dad.

  "Just me," I said.

  And then I walked away—without really realizing it. I headed up the wet hill, across the road. Not upset or crying or anything like that—no, I was remarkably fine. Well, not fine ("Fine is for dulls and slows.") but something else—something I actually didn't have a word for. I felt a shock from the blankness of the pale gray sky on which it was possible to draw anything, art or goldfish, as tiny or as huge as I wanted.

  I continued up the sidewalk, past Hanover and the lawn in front of the cafeteria littered with branches, and the Scratch, the rain turning it all to soup. And Zach, without "Wait," or "Where are you — ?" he stayed right there, right by my right shoulder without needing to chat about it. We walked without formula, hypothesis or detailed conclusion. His shoes moved cleanly through the rain, fishtail splashes in a pond, the fishes themselves mysteries— mine too. He held the umbrella a precise distance over my head. And I tested it—because Van Meers always had to test things—inching a little outside the shelter of it, imperceptibly to the right; I accelerated, slowed, paused to wipe more grass off my shoes, curious if I could get a small percentage of my knee or elbow, some part wet, but he held it over my head with remarkable consistency. By the time we reached the top of the stairs and the Volvo, and the trees crowding the road danced, but only very slightly—they were extras after all, not wanting to distract from the leads—not a new drop of rain had touched me.

  Final Exam

  Directions. This all-inclusive final examination will test your deepest understanding of giant concepts. It consists of three sections to be completed to the best of your ability (percentage of Final Grade specified in parentheses): 14 True or False Questions (30%), 7 Multiple Choice Questions (20%) and 1 Essay (50%).' You may have a clipboard to write upon, but no supplemental textbooks, encyclopedias, legal pads or extraneous papers. If you are not presently sitting with one seat between you and anyone else, please arrange for this now.

  Thank you and good luck.

  1.1 suggest using a No. 2 pencil on the off chance you make a mistake in your initial perceptions and, provided you have a little bit of time left, wish to change your answer.

  Section I: True/False?

  Blue van Meer has read too many books. T/F?

  Gareth van Meer was a handsome, charismatic man of big (and often long-winded) ideas, ideas that just might, when vigorously applied to reality, have unpleasant consequences. T/F?

  Blue van Meer was blind, and yet one can't hold it against her, because one is almost always blind when it comes to considering oneself and one's immediate family members; one might as well be staring with naked eyes at the sun, trying to see in that blinding ball sunspots, solar flares and prominences. T/F?

  June Bugs are incurable romantics, known to turn up at even the most formal gatherings with lipstick on their teeth and hair as frazzled as any businessman stuck in rush hour traffic. T/F?

  Andreo Verduga was a gardener who wore heavy cologne, no more, no less. T/F?

  Smoke Harvey clubbed seals. T/F?

  The fact that Gareth van Meer and Hannah Schneider have the same sentence underlined —"When Manson listened to you it was like he was drinking up your face/' on p. 481 of their respective copies of Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night: The Life of Charles Milles Manson—probably doesn't mean as much as Blue would like to think. The most she should take from this tidbit is that they both found the behaviors of lunatics fascinating. T/F?

  The Nightwatchmen still exist, at the very least, in the minds of conspiracy theorists, neo-Marxists, bloodshot-eyed bloggers and champions of Che, also individuals of all races and creeds who take pleasure in the thought that there may be teaspoons of, if not justice, per se (justice tends to hold up in the hands of men the way Chabazite does in HC1—disintegrating slowly, often leaving slimy residue) then a simple leveling of a tiny section of the world's playing field (currently without referee). T/F?

  The Houston police photograph of George Gracey is unquestionably Baba au Rhum; Blue can conclude this simply from the man's unmistakable eyes, which are like two black olives pushed deep into a plate of hummus —no matter if the rest of the head, in the grainy picture, is obscured with facial hair denser than the neutron (1018 kg/m3). T/F?

  Each of the impromptu films Hannah played for her Intro to Film class, movies that—as Dee revealed to her sister, Dum—never appeared on the actual syllabus, had subversive themes, evidence of her freaky flower chile politics. T/F?

  Hannah Schneider, with the help of other Nightwatchmen (rather sloppily) killed a man, to the infinite exasperation of Gareth van Meer; while he took pleasure in his role as Socrates (the job fit him like a bespoke suit from Saville Row)—touring the country, lecturing new recruits about Determination and other compelling ideas detailed in countless Federal Forum essays, including "Viva Las Violence: Transgressions of the Elvis Empire" —Gareth still preferred to be a man of theory, not violence, the Trotsky, rather than the Stalin; you may recall, the man eschewed all contact sports. T/F?

  In all probability (though admittedly, this is the conjecture of someone with little more than a remembered photograph to go on), Natasha van Meer killed herself upon learning that her best friend, with whom she attended the Ivy School, had been having a hot-breathy affair with her husband, a man who adored the sound of his own voice. T/F?

  One can't really believe it, but Life is, rather confusingly, both sad and funny at the same time. T/F?

  Reading an obscene number of reference books is greatly advantageous to one's mental health. T/F?

  Section II: Multiple Choice

  1. Hannah Schneider was:

  A. An orphan who grew up at the Horizon House in New Jersey (which required its children to wear uniforms; the house seal, a gold pegasus that could also pass for a lion if one squinted, was stitched into the jacket on the breast pocket). She wasn't the most attractive of children. After reading The Liberations Woman (1962) by Arielle Soiffe, which featured an extensive chapter on Catherine Baker, she found herself wishing she'd done something that bold with her life, and in a moment of gloomy restlessness found herself hinting to Blue that she was, in fact, that fearless revolutionary, that "hand-grenade of a woman" (p. 313). In spite of these efforts to align her life with something a bit more majestic, she was nevertheless in jeopardy of turning into her worst fear, one of The Gone, if it weren't for Blue writing about her. Her house is currently #22 on Sherwig Realty's "Hot List."

  B. Catherine Baker, equal parts runaway, criminal, myth, moth.

  C. One of those lost civilization women, poorly lit but with astonishing architecture; many rooms, including an entire banquet hall, will never be found.

  D. Flotsam and jetsam of all the above.

  2. Miss Schneider's passing was really:

  A. A suicide; in a sloppy moment (and she'd had many), when she'd danced too long with her wineglass, she'd slept with Charles, an error in judgment that began to corrode her from the inside out, prompting her to spin fantastical stories, hack off her hair, end her life.

  B. Murd
er by a member of The Nightwatchmen (Nunca Dormindo in Portuguese); as Gareth "Socrates" and Servo "Nero" Gracey hashed over during their emergency powwow in Paris, Hannah was now a liability. Ada Harvey was digging too deep, was weeks away from contacting the FBI, and thus Gracey's freedom, their entire antigreedian movement, was at risk; she had to be eliminated—a difficult call ultimately made by Gracey. The man in the woods, the person Blue is positive she heard as surely as she knows the Bumblebee Bat is the smallest mammal on earth (1.3 in.), was their most sophisticated button man, Andreo Verduga, decked in ShifTbush™ Invisible Gear, Fall Mix, the accomplished hunter's dream.

  C. Murder by "Sloppy Ed," the member of the Vicious Three still at large.

  D. One of those muddy events in life, which one will never know with certainty (see Chapter 2, "The Black Dahlia," Slain, Winn, 1988).

  3. Jade Churchill Whitestone is:

  A. A phony.

  B. Beguiling.

  C. Irksome as a stubbed toe.

  D. An ordinary teenager who couldn't see the sky through the air.

  4. Making out with Milton Black was like:

  A. Kissing squid.

  B. Being sat upon by an Octopus vulgaris.

  C. Doing a jackknife into Jell-O.

  D. Floating on a bed of frontal lobes.

  5. Zach Soderberg is:

  A. A peanut butter sandwich with the crusts cut off.

  B. Guilty of lion sex performed in Room 222 at The Dynasty Motel.

  C. Still, after a myriad of explanations and Visual Aids presented to him by Blue van Meer as they toured the country for a summer in a blue Volvo station wagon, somewhat disturbingly unable to grasp even the most rudimentary concepts behind Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. He is currently learning to recite pi out to sixty-five decimal places.

  D. An Oracle of Delphi.

  6. Gareth van Meer abandoned his daughter because:

  A. He had had enough of Blue's paranoia and hysterics.

  B. He was, to quote Jessie Rose Rubiman, "a pig."

  C. He finally had the guts to take a stab at immortality, follow his lifelong dream to go play Che in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; this was what he and his sham professors across the country had been organizing in secret; this was also why countless African newspapers were found strewn around the house in the immediate aftermath of his departure, including Inside Angola.

  D. He couldn't bear to lose face with his daughter, Blue, Blue who always thought The World of him, Blue who, even after learning he was an intellectual outmoded as the Great October Soviet Socialist Revolution of 1917, a disaster-prone dreamer, a showboat theorist (and only a very minor one), a philanderer whose illicit affairs caused the suicide of her mother, a man who doubtless will end up like Trotsky if he isn't careful (ice pick, head), still can't help but think The World of him, Blue who whenever she is running late to her lecture, "American Government: A New Perspective," or passing by a park with trees that whisper overhead as if they wish to let slip a secret, can't help but wish to find him sitting on a wooden bench, in tweed, waiting for her.

  7. Blue's detailed theory of love, sex, guilt and murder scrawled across fifty pages of a legal pad is:

  A. 100% Truth, as things are 100% Cotton.

  B. Preposterous and delusional.

  C. A frail web spun by a garden spider, not in some sensible porch corner, but in a massive space, a space so huge and far-fetched one could easily fit two Cadillac DeVille Stretch Limos in it, end to end.

  D. The materials Blue used for her boat, in order to pass without serious injury through a harrowing patch of sea (see Chapter 9, "Scylla and Charybdis," The Odyssey, Homer, Hellenistic Period).

  Section III: Essay Question

  Many classic films and published academic works do their best to shine tiny lights on the state of American culture, the surreptitious sorrow of all people, the struggle for selfhood, the generalized bewilderment of living. Nimbly utilizing specific examples from such texts, structure a sweeping argument around the premise that, while such works are enlightening, amusing, comforting, too—particularly when one is in a new situation and one needs to divert the mind—they can be no substitution for experience. For, to quote Danny Yeargood's exceptionally brutal memoir of 1977, The Edgycation of Eyetalians, life is "one blow after another and even when you're on the ground, you can't see nothin' 'cause they hit you on the part of the head where sight comes from, and you can't breathe 'cause they kicked you in the stomach where breathin' comes from, and your nose's all blood 'cause they held you down and punched you in the face, you crawl to your feet and feel fine. Beautiful even. Because you're alive."

  Take all the time you need.

  I am deeply indebted to Susan Golomb and Carole DeSanti for their tireless enthusiasm, criticism and sound advice. Many thanks to Kate Barker, and also to Jon Mozes for his feedback on those early drafts (making the imperative suggestion that I replace high heels with stilettos). Thank you to Carolyn Horst for meticulously dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Thank you to Adam Weber for being the most big-hearted friend on earth. Thank you to my family, Elke, Vov and Toni and my amazing husband, Nic, my Clyde, who graciously watches his wife disappear daily into a dark room with her computer for ten to twelve hours at a time and asks no questions. Most of all, I thank my mother, Anne. Without her inspiration and extraordinary generosity, this book would not be possible.