Marisha Pessl: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

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 took 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 daddylong-legged 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 is what they call ‘outstanding.’”). I set the papers on the lectern, 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.

“In one of the first well-known Valedictorian Speeches,” I began; somewhat disconcertingly my voice boomeranged over everyone’s coiffed head, presumably reaching the tall man in the blue suit in the very back, a man I’d thought, for a split second, was Dad (it wasn’t, unless like a plant without light, Dad without me had withered, lost serious amounts of hair), “transcribed in 1801 at Doverfield Academy in Massachusetts, seventeen-year-old Michael Finpost announced to his peers, ‘We will look back on these golden days and remember them as the best years of our lives.’ Well, for each of you sitting before me, I really hope that’s not the case.”

A blonde in the front row of the Parents Section wearing a short skirt crossed, uncrossed her legs and did a restless swinging gesture with them, a stretch of some kind, also a movement used at airports to direct planes.

“And I–I’m not going to stand here and tell you, ‘To Thine Own Self Be True.’ Because the majority of you won’t. According to the Crime Census Bureau America is experiencing a marked increase in grand larceny and fraud, not only in cities but rural vicinities as well. For that matter, too, I doubt any of us in four years of high school have managed to locate our self in order to be true to it. Maybe we’ve found what hemisphere it’s in, maybe the ocean — but not the exact coordinates. I’m also”—for a terrifying second my hobo concentration fell off the train, the moment started to speed by, but then to my relief it managed to shake itself off, sprint, hurtle on board again—“I’m also not going to tell you to wear sunscreen. Most of you won’t. The New England Journal of Medicine reported in June 2002 skin cancer in the under-thirty demographic is on the rise and in the Western World, forty-three out of every fifty people consider even plain-looking people twenty times more attractive when they’re tan.” I paused. I couldn’t believe it; I said tan and a little seismic laughter quaked through the crowd. “No. I’m going to try to assist you with something else. Something practical. Something that might help you when something happens in your life and you’re worried you might never recover. When you’ve been knocked down.”

I noticed Dee and Dum, front row, fourth from the left. They stared up at me with evenly weirded-out faces, half-smiles caught up in their teeth like skirt hems caught in pantyhose.

“I’m going to ask that you seriously consider modeling your life,” I said, “not in the manner of the Dalai Lama or Jesus — though I’m sure they’re helpful — but something a bit more hands-on, Carassius auratus auratus, commonly known as the domestic goldfish.”

There was party favor laughter, little bits of it strewn here and there for fun, but I pressed on.

“People make fun of the goldfish. People don’t think twice about swallowing it. Jonas Ornata III, Princeton class of ’42, appears in The Guinness Book of World Records for swallowing the greatest number of goldfish in a fifteen minute interval, a cruel total of thirty-nine. In his defense, though, I don’t think Jonas understood the glory of the goldfish, that they have magnificent lessons to teach us.”

I glanced up and my gaze smacked right into Milton, first row, fourth from the left. He had tilted his chair back and was talking to someone behind him, Jade.

“If you live like a goldfish,” I continued, “you can survive the harshest, most thwarting of circumstances. You can live through hardships that make your cohorts — the guppy, the neon tetra — go belly up at the first sign of trouble. There was an infamous incident described in a journal published by the Goldfish Society of America — a sadistic five-year-old girl threw hers to the carpet, stepped on it, not once but twice — luckily she’d done it on a shag carpet and thus her heel didn’t quite come down fully on the fish. After thirty harrowing seconds she tossed it back into its tank. It went on to live another forty-seven years.” I cleared my throat. “They can live in ice-covered ponds in the dead of winter. Bowls that haven’t seen soap in a year. And they don’t die from neglect, not immediately. They hold on for three, sometimes four months if they’re abandoned.”

One or two restless people were dribbling into the aisles, hoping to escape my notice, a silver-haired man needing to stretch his legs, a woman bouncing a toddler, whispering secrets into its hair.

“If you live like a goldfish, you adapt, not across hundreds of thousands of years like most species, having to go through the red tape of natural selection, but within mere months, weeks even. You give them a little tank? They give you a little body. Big tank? Big body. Indoor. Outdoor. Fish tanks, bowls. Cloudy water, clear water. Social or alone.”