Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Yet Zach displayed the optimism of a cartoon.

“Midnight,” decreed Dad as we walked outside. “I mean it.”

“You have my word, Mr. Van Meer!”

At this point, Dad wasn’t bothering to hide his You’ve-Got-to-Be-Kidding face, which I ignored, though it quickly dissolved into his This-Is-the-Winter-of-My-Discontent look, and then, Shoot-If-You-Must-This-Old-Gray-Head.

“Your dad’s nice,” Zach said as he started the car. (Dad was an infinite number of things, yet clammy-handed, sigh-by-night Nice was the one thing the man absolutely wasn’t.)

Now I trailed after him, down the airless, carpeted hallway, which he presumably shared with his sister if one went by the his-n-her hallkill along the floor and the onslaught of sibling odor (smell of athletic socks bullying peach perfume, cologne competing with fumes off a limp gray sweatshirt and threatening to go tell mom). We walked by what had to be Bethany Louise’s room, painted gum pink, a pile of clothes on the floor (see “Mount McKinley,” Almanac of Major Landmarks , 2000 ed.). We then passed a second bedroom, and through the crack of the not-quite-closed door I made out blue walls, trophies, a poster of an overcooked blonde in a bikini. (Without much imagination, I could fill in the other obvious detail: held captive under the mattress, a ravished Victoria’s Secret catalogue with the majority of its pages stuck together.)

At the end of the hall, Zach stopped. In front of him was a small painting, no bigger than a porthole, illuminated by a crooked gold light on the wall.

“So my father’s a minister at the First Baptist Church. And when he did one of his sermons last year, ‘The Fourteen Hopes,’ there was a man in the congregation visiting from Washington, D.C. A guy by the name of Cecil Roloff. Well, this guy was so inspired he told my dad afterward he was a changed man.” Zach pointed at the painting. “So a week later this came by UPS. And it’s real. You know Turner, the artist?”

Obviously I was familiar with the “King of Light,” otherwise known as J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), having read Alejandro Penzance’s eight hundred-page X-rated biography of the man, published only in Europe, Poor and Decayed Male Artist Born in England (1974).

“It’s called Fishermen at Sea ,” Zach said.

Nimbly I stepped around the pair of green plastic gym shorts dead on the floor and leaned in to examine it. I guessed it probably was real, though it wasn’t one of the “light fests” where the artist “screwed convention and took painting by the testicles,” as Penzance described Turner’s hazy, almost completely abstract work (p. viii, Introduction). This painting was an oil, yet dark, depicting a tiny boat seemingly lost in a storm at sea, painted in hazy grays, browns and greens. There were slurpy waves, a wooden boat forceful as a matchbox, a moon, wan and small and a little bit of an acrophobe as it peered fretfully through the clouds.

“Why is it hanging up here?” I asked.

He laughed shyly. “Oh, my mom wants it close to my sister and me. She says it’s healthy to sleep close to art.”

“A very interesting use of light,” I said. “Faintly reminiscent of The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons . Especially in the sky. But a different palette obviously.”

“My favorite part’s the clouds.” Zach swallowed. A soup spoon had to be stuck in his throat. “Know what?”

“What.”

“You kind of remind me of that boat.”

I looked at him. His face was about as cruel as a peanut butter sandwich with the crusts cut off (and he’d had a haircut so his Panama-hat hair didn’t slant quite so low over his forehead) but his remark still made me — well, suddenly unable to stand him. He had likened me to a diminutive vessel manned by faceless dots of brown and yellow— poorly manned at that, because in a matter of seconds (if one took into account the oiled swell curled to strike down with vengeance), the thing was about to go under and that brown smudge on the horizon, that unwitting passing ship, wasn’t coming to rescue the dots anytime soon.

It was the cause of many of Dad’s outrages too, when people elected themselves his personal oracle of Delphi. It was the grounds for many of his university colleagues going from nameless, harmless peers to individuals he referred to as “anathemas” and “bête noires.” They’d made the mistake of abridging Dad, abbreviating Dad, putting Dad in a nutshell, watering Dad down, telling Dad How It Was (and getting it all wrong).

Four years prior, at Dodson-Miner College’s opening day World Symposium, Dad had delivered a forty-nine-minute lecture entitled “Models of Hate and the Organ Trade,” a lecture he was particularly fond of, having traveled in 1995 to Houston to interview one mustachioed Sletnik Patrutzka who’d sold her kidney for freedom. (Through tears, Sletnik had showed us her scars; “Steel hurts,” she’d said.) Immediately following Dad’s speech, College Provost Rodney Byrd scuttled across the outdoor stage like a shooed cockroach, dabbed his sloppy mouth with a handkerchief and said, “Thank you, Dr. Van Meer, for your keen insight into post-Communist Russia. It is very rare that we have a bona fide Russian émigré on campus”—he said it as if it were some mysterious individual who was a no-show, a very elusive Ms. Emmie Gray—“and we look forward to spending the semester with you. If anyone has a question about War and Peace I suspect he’s your man.” (Of course, Dad’s lecture had covered the organ trade rife in Western Europe and he’d never set foot in Russia. Though proficient in other languages, Dad actually knew no Russian at all except, “,” which meant, “Trust in God, but lock your car,” a well-known Russian proverb.)

“The act of being personally misconstrued,” Dad said, “informed to one’s face one is no more complex than a few words haphazardly strung together like blotchy undershirts on a clothesline — well, it can gall the most self-possessed of individuals.”

There was no sound in the claustrophobic hallway except Zach’s breathing, which heaved like the interior of a conch shell. I could feel his eyes dripping down me, coursing through the folds of Jefferson’s crispy black dress, which resembled an upside-down shiitake mushroom if you squinted at it. The silvery-black fabric felt flimsy, as if it could stiffly peel away like tinfoil around cold fried chicken.

“Blue?”

I made the grave error of glancing up at him again. His face — head light-bright from the light on the Turner, eyelashes absurdly long like those of a Jersey Cow — was heading straight toward me, drifting on down like Gondwanaland, the giant Southern landmass that inched toward the South Pole 200 million years ago.

He wanted our tectonic plates to collide, forcing one on top of the other so molten material from the earth’s interior gives rise to a wild and unstable volcano. Well, it was one of those sweaty moments I’d never had before except in dreams, when my head was in the cul-de-sac of Andreo Verduga’s arm, my lips by his alcoholic cologne in the dead end of his neck. And as I stared up at Zach’s face hovering at the intersection of Desire and Shyness, patiently waiting for a green light (even though there wasn’t a soul around), you’d think I’d flee, run for my life, lie back and think of Milton (throughout the evening, I’d been engaged in covert Neverlanding, fantasizing it’d been he who’d met Dad, his mother and father who’d squirreled around the living room), but no, at this bizarre moment, Hannah Schneider slipped into my head.

I’d seen her at school just that afternoon, right after sixth period. She was dressed in a long-sleeved black wool dress, a tight black coat, moving unevenly down the sidewalk toward Hanover carrying a cream canvas bag, her head bent toward the ground. While Hannah had always been thin, her figure, particularly her shoulders, looked unusually hunched and narrow, dented even — as if she’d been smashed in a door.