Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Dad asked this of a small brown-haired girl wearing a pink T-shirt in the front row. She nodded apprehensively.

“Are you out of your mind? ”

Instantly, she turned six shades pinker than the T-shirt.

“You might have heard of various imbeciles who waged war on the U.S. government in the sixties and seventies. The New Communist Left. The Weather Underground. The Students for the Blah-Blah-No-One-Takes-You-Seriously. In fact, I think they were worse than Stu, because they smashed, not monogamy, but hope for productive protest and objection in this country. With their delusional self-importance, ad hoc violence, it became easy to dismiss anyone voicing dissatisfaction with the way things are as freaky flower chiles.

“ No. I contend we should take a cue from one of the greatest American movements of our time — a revolution in itself really, nobly warring as it does against time and gravity, also accountable for the most widespread perpetuation of alien-looking life forms on Earth. Cosmetic surgery. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. America is in dire need of a nip-tuck. No mass uprising, no widespread revolution. Rather, an eye lift here. A boob job there. Some well-placed liposuction. A minuscule cut behind the ears, tug it up, staple it into place — confidentiality is key — and voilà, everyone will be saying we look mahvelous. Greater elasticity. No sags. For those of you who are laughing, you’ll see precisely what I mean when you do the reading for Tuesday, the treatise in Littleton’s Anatomy of Materialism , ‘The Nightwatchmen and Mythical Principles of Practical Change.’ And Eidelstein’s ‘Repressions of Imperialist Powers.’ And my own meager piece, ‘Blind Dates: Advantages of Silent Civil War.’ Do not forget. You will be pop quizzed.”

Only when Dad, with a small, self-satisfied smile, closed his worn leather folder full of chicken-scratch notes (placed on the lectern for effect, because he never looked at them), removed the linen handkerchief from his jacket pocket, and delicately touched it to his forehead (we’d driven through Nevada’s Andamo Desert in the middle of July and he hadn’t needed to blot his forehead like that a single time), only then did anyone move. Some of the kids grinned in disbelief, others walked out of the lecture hall with surprised faces. A few were starting to page through the Littleton book.

Now, Dad answered his own question, his voice low and scratchy in the receiver.

“We are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things,” he said.

The late great Horace Lloyd Swithin (1844–1917), British essayist, lecturer, satirist and social observer, wrote in his autobiographical Appointments,1890–1901 (1902), “When one travels abroad, one doesn’t so much discover the hidden Wonders of the World, but the hidden wonders of the individuals with whom one is traveling. They may turn out to afford a stirring view, a rather dull landscape or a terrain so treacherous one finds it’s best to forget the entire affaire and return home.”

I didn’t see Hannah during Finals Week and only encountered Jade and the others once or twice before an exam. “See ya next year, Olives,” Milton said when we passed each other outside the Scratch. (I thought I detected wrinkles in his forehead hinting at his advanced age when he winked at me, but I didn’t want to stare.) Charles, I knew, was off to Florida for ten days, Jade was going to Atlanta, Lu to Colorado, Nigel to his grandparents — Missouri, I think — and I was thus resigned to an uneventful Christmas vacation with Dad and Rikeland Gestault’s latest critique of the American justice system, Ride the Lightning (2004). After my last exam, however, AP Art History, Dad announced that he had a surprise.

“An early graduation present. A final Abenteuer —I should say, aventure —before you’re rid of me. It’s only a matter of time before you refer to me as — what do they say in that mawkish film with the cranky elderly? An old poop.”

As it turned out, an old friend of Dad’s from Harvard, Dr. Michael Servo Kouropoulos (Dad affectionately called him “Baba au Rhum,” and thus I assumed he bore a resemblance to rum-soaked sponge cake), had, for some time, been entreating Dad to visit him in Paris, where he’d been teaching archaic Greek literature at La Sorbonne for the past eight years.

“He invited us to stay with him. Which we will, certainly; I understand he has a palatial apartment somewhere along the Seine. Comes from a family drowning in money. Imports and exports. First, however, I thought it’d be swell to stay a few nights in a hotel, get a taste of la vie parisienne. I booked something at the Ritz.”

“The Ritz? ”

“A suite au sixième étage. Sounds quite electrifying.”

“Dad—”

“I wanted the Coco Suite, but it was taken. I’m sure everyone wants the Coco Suite.”

“But—”

“Not a word about the cost. I told you I’ve been saving for a few extravagances.”

I was surprised by the trip, the proposed lavishness, sure, but even more by the childlike zeal that’d overtaken Dad, a Gene Kelly Effect I had not witnessed in him since June Bug Tamara Sotto of Pritchard, Georgia, invited Dad to Monster Mash, the statewide tractor pull in which it was impossible for someone without trucker connections to get tickets. (“Do you think if I slip one of those toothless marvels a fifty, he’d allow me to get behind the wheel?” Dad asked.) I’d also recently discovered (crumpled paper sadly staring out of the kitchen trash) Federal Forum had declined to print Dad’s latest essay, “The Fourth Reich,” an offense which, under normal circumstances, would have caused him to grumble under his breath for days, perhaps launch into spontaneous lectures on the dearth of critical voices in American media forums, both popular and obscure.

But, no, Dad was all “Singin’ in the Rain,” all “Gotta Dance,” all “Good Mornin’.” Two days before our scheduled departure, he came home laden with guidebooks (of note, Paris, Pour Le Voyageur Distingué [Bertraux, 2000]), city shopping maps, Swiss Army suitcases, toiletry kits, miniature reading lights, inflatable neck pillows, Bug Snuggle plane socks, two strange brands of hearing plug (EarPlane and Air-Silence), silk scarves (“All Parisian women wear scarves because they wish to create the illusion of being in a Doisneau photo,” said Dad), pocket phrase books and the formidable, hundred-hour La Salle Conversation Classroom (“Become bilingual in five days,” ordered the side of the box. “Be the toast of dinner parties.”).

With the nervous expectation “one can only feel when one parts with one’s personal baggage and holds fast to the shabby hope of reuniting with it after journeying two thousand miles,” Dad and I, on the eve of December 20, boarded an Air France flight out of Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport and safely landed in Paris at Charles de Gaulle, the cold, drizzling afternoon of December 21 (see Bearings,1890–1897 , Swithin, 1898, p. 11).

We weren’t scheduled to meet up with Baba au Rhum until the 26 (Baba was supposedly visiting family in the south of France), so we spent those first five days in Paris alone as we’d been in the old Volvo days, speaking to no one but each other and not even noticing.

We ate crêpes and coq au vin. At night, we dined in expensive restaurants crawling with city views and men with bright eyes that fluttered after women like caged birds hoping to find a tiny hole through which they might escape. After dinner, Dad and I entombed ourselves at jazz clubs like au Caveau de la Huchette, a smoky crypt in which one was required to remain mute, motionless and alert as a coonhound while the jazz trio (faces so sweaty, they had to have been lined with Crisco) ripped, riffed and warped with their eyes closed, their fingers tarantuling up and down keys and strings for over three and a half hours. According to our waitress, the place had been a favorite of Jim Morrison, and he’d shot up heroin in the same dark corner in which Dad and I were sitting.