Marisha Pessl: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

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 Sanjay 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.”

“Ex cuse me?”

“I’m sorry. It’s just — if anyone knows any thing, 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 ed.). 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 were 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.”