Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“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 had tilted her head close to the glass so Dad saw a cloud where her mouth should have been), 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 lectern?” 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 Mill’s 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, Sonnet-a-thons, 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 $64,000Question , 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 be only 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.