Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

The other reason why I thought Dad was feeling a little blue, and perhaps the more significant one, was that our scheduled year-long stay in a single location would mark an undeniably monotonous passage within chapter 12, “American Teachings and Travel,” of Dad’s otherwise thrilling mental biography.

“Always live your life with your biography in mind,” Dad was fond of saying. “Naturally, it won’t be published unless you have a Magnificent Reason, but at the very least you will be living grandly.” It was painfully obvious Dad was hoping his posthumous biography would be reminiscent not of Kissinger: The Man (Jones, 1982) or even Dr. Rhythm: Living with Bing (Grant, 1981) but something along the lines of the New Testament or the Qur’an.

Though he certainly never said so, it was evident Dad adored being in motion, in transit, in the midst. He found standstills, halts, finishing points, termini, to be unappetizing, dull. Dad wasn’t concerned with the fact that he was seldom at a university long enough to learn his students’ names and was forced, for the sake of assigning their grades correctly at the end of term, to give them certain pertinent monikers, such as Too Many Questions, Tadpole Glasses, Smile Is All Gums and Sits on My Left.

Sometimes I was afraid Dad felt having a daughter was a last stop, a finishing point. Sometimes when he was in a Bourbon Mood, I worried he wanted to ditch me and America and return to former Zaire, presently the Democratic Republic of the Congo ( democratic in Africa, a word like the slang usage of totally and bobbing for fries, used purely for cool effect) in order to play a Che-cum-Trotsky-cum-Spartacus to the native people’s fight for freedom. Whenever Dad spoke of the four treasured months spent in the Congo River Basin in 1985, hobnobbing with the “kindest, hardest-working, most genuine” people he’d ever met, he adopted an unusually flimsy appearance. He resembled an aged silent movie star photographed with buttery lights and lens.

I’d accuse him of secretly wanting to return to Africa in order to spearhead a well-organized revolution, single-handedly stabilizing the DRC (expunging Hutu-aligned forces), then moving on to other countries waiting to be freed like exotic maidens tied to railroad tracks (Angola, Cameroon, Chad). When I voiced these suspicions, he’d laugh of course, but I always felt the laugh wasn’t quite hard enough; it was conspicuously hollow, which made me wonder if I’d haphazardly thrown in my line and caught the biggest, most unlikely of fishes. This was Dad’s deep-sea secret, never before photographed or scientifically classified: he wished to be a hero, a poster boy for freedom, silk-screened, reduced to bright colors and printed on a hundred thousand T-shirts, Dad with Marxist beret, martyr-ready eyes, and a threadbare mustache (see The Iconography of Heroes , Gorky, 1978).

There was too a certain uncharacteristic, boyish gusto he reserved solely for sticking another pushpin through the Rand-McNally map and briefing me on our next location in a show-offy factoid riff, his version of Gangsta Rap: “Next stop Speers, South Dakota, homeland of the Ring-necked Pheasant, the Black-footed Ferret, the Badlands, Black Hills Forest, Crazy Horse Memorial, capital, Pierre, largest city, Sioux Falls, rivers, Moreau, Cheyenne, White, James…”

“You take the large bedroom at the top of the stairs,” he said now, watching Percussion and Woodwinds as they carried a heavy box across the yard toward the separate gabled entrance of the EXPANSIVE MASTER SUITE. “Hell, have the upstairs wing to yourself. Isn’t it nice, sweet, to have a wing? Why shouldn’t we live it up like Kubla Khan for a change? If you go up there, you’ll find a surprise. I think you’ll be pleased. I had to bribe a housewife, a real estate agent, two furniture salesmen, a UPS Head of Operations — now listen, yes, I’m talking to you — if you could go downstairs and aid your compatriot in unpacking the materials for my study, it would be most effective. He seems to have fallen down a rabbit hole.”

Over the years, Dad’s surprises, large and small, had been scholarly in nature, a set of 1999 Lamure-France Encyclopedias of the Physical World translated from the French and unavailable for purchase in the United States. (“All Nobel Prize — winners have a set of these,” Dad said.)

But as I pushed open the bedroom door at the top of the stairs and walked into the large blue-walled room covered in pastoral oil paintings, giant arc windows along the far wall blistered with bubble curtains, I discovered not a rare, underground edition of Wie schafft man ein Meisterwerk , or The Step-by-Step Manual for Crafting Your Magnum Opus (Lint, Steggertt, Cue, 1993), but astonishingly, my old Citizen Kane desk pushed into the corner by the window. It was the real thing: the elephantine, walnut, Renaissance Revival library table I’d had eight years ago at 142 Tellwood Street in Wayne, Oklahoma.

Dad had found the desk at the Lord and Lady Hillier Estate Sale just outside of Tulsa, to which antiques wheeler-and-dealer June Bug, Pattie “Let’s Make a Deal” Lupine, had dragged Dad one stuffy Sunday afternoon. For some reason, when Dad saw the desk (and the five struggling Arnies it took to get it on the auction platform), he saw me and only me presiding over it (though I was only eight with a wingspan less than half its length). He paid a huge, undisclosed amount for it and announced with great flourish that this was “Blue’s Desk,” a desk “worthy of my little Eve of St. Agnes, upon which she will unmask all the Great Ideas.” A week later, two of Dad’s checks bounced, one at a grocery store, another at the university bookstore. I secretly believed it was because he’d paid “way above treasure price” for the desk, according to Let’s Make a Deal, though Dad claimed he’d simply been slapdash with his bookkeeping. “Snubbed a decimal point,” he’d said.

And then, rather anticlimactically, I was only able to unmask Great Ideas in Wayne, because we weren’t able to take the desk with us to Sluder, Florida — something to do with the movers (the falsely advertised You Can Take It With You Moving Co.) being unable to fit it in the van. I shed ferocious tears and called Dad a reptile when we had to leave it, as if it wasn’t just an oversized table with elaborate talon legs and seven drawers requiring seven individual keys, but a black pony I was abandoning in a barn.

Now I hurried back down the TWELVE OAKS STAIRCASE, finding Dad in the basement carefully opening the BUTTERFLIES FRAGILE box containing my mother’s specimen — the six glass display cases she’d been working on when she’d died. When we arrived at a new house, he took hours to mount them, always in his office, always on the wall opposite his desk: thirty-two lined up girls in a petrified beauty pageant. It was why he didn’t like June Bugs — or anyone, for that matter — nosing around his study, because the most devastating aspect of the Lepidoptera was not their color, or the unexpected furriness of the Polyphemus Moth antennae, not even the gloomy feeling you felt whenever you stood in front of something that had once zigzagged madly through the air, now still, wings uncouthly spread, body pinned to a piece of paper in a glass case. It was the presence of my mother within them. As Dad said once, they allowed you to see her face in greater close-up than any photographic likeness (Visual Aid 4.0). I’d always felt too that they held a strange adhesive power, so when a person looked at them, it was difficult to yank his/her gaze away.