Marisha Pessl: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

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.

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 %). 1You 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.

Section I: True/False?

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

2. 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?

3. 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?

4. 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?

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

6. Smoke Harvey clubbed seals. T/F?

7. 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?

8. 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 HCl — 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?

9. 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/m 3). T/F?

10. 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 child politics. T/F?

11. 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 Savile 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?

12. 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 had 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?

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

14. 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 Liberation’s 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.Murder 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 deeply, 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.