Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

A smack of the doors, the train belched and pulled out of the station.

I wandered back to Servo’s apartment in a daze. It couldn’t have been he; no, not really. I was like Jade, making things more exotic than they actually were. I thought I’d noticed, as he moved past me, unzipping his jacket as he hurried down the stairs, a heavy silver watch hanging on his wrist, and Andreo the Gardener, Andreo of the Bullet Wound and Badly Fractured English wouldn’t have that kind of watch, unless, in the three years since I’d seen him (not counting the Wal-Mart sighting), he’d become a successful entrepreneur or inherited a small fortune from a distant relative in Lima. And yet — the shard of face I’d seen, the passing blur on the stairs, the muscular cologne that strolled through the air behind him like pompous tan men on yachts — it added up to something real. Or perhaps I’d just witnessed his doppelgänger. After all, I’d been spotting Jade and the others all over the city, and Allison Smithson-Caldona in her relentless study of all things double and dittoed, Twin Paradox and Atomic Clocks (1999), actually tried to scientifically prove the somewhat mystical theory that everyone had a twin wandering the planet. She was able to confirm this as fact in three out of every twenty-five examined individuals, no matter their nationality or race (p. 250).

When I finally eased open the front door to Servo’s apartment, I was surprised to hear Dad and Servo in the living room just off the dark foyer and hall. The bloom was finally off the rose, I noted with satisfaction. They were fighting like Punch and Judy.

“Highly hysterical over—” That was Dad (Judy).

“ You can’t comprehend what it actually means—!” That was Servo (Punch).

“Oh, don’t give me —you’re hot-headed as — go, go —”

“— always content, aren’t you, to hide behind the lecture podium?”

“— you act like a hormonal preteen! Go take a cold shower, why—!”

They must have heard the door (though I tried to close it silently), because their voices cut off like a big ax had just swung down on their words. A second later, Dad’s head materialized in the doorway.

“Sweet,” he said, smiling. “How was the sightseeing?”

“Fine.”

Servo’s white round head bobbed into view by Dad’s left elbow. His shiny roulette eyes tripped ceaselessly around my face. He didn’t say a word, but his lips twitched in evident irritation, as if there were invisible threads knotted to his mouth’s corners and a toddler was yanking the ends.

“I’m going to take a nap,” I said brightly. “I’m exhausted.”

I shrugged off my coat, tossed my backpack to the floor and, smiling nonchalantly, headed upstairs. The plan was to remove my shoes, stealthily tiptoe back to the first floor, eavesdrop on their heated dispute resumed in irate hisses and fizz (hopefully not in Greek or some other unfathomable language) — but when I did this, standing stone still on the bottom step in my socks, I heard them banging around the kitchen, bickering about nothing more calamitous than the difference between absinthe and anisette.

That night we decided not to go to Le Georges. It rained, so we stayed in, watching Canal Plus, eating leftover chicken and playing Scrabble. Dad combusted with pride when I won two games in a row, hologram and monocular being the coups de grâcey that caused Servo (who insisted the Cambridge Dictionary was wrong, license was spelled “lisence” in the UK, he was sure of it) to turn crimson, say something about Elektra being president of the Yale Debate Team and mutter he himself had not fully recovered from the flu.

I hadn’t been able to get Dad alone, and even at midnight, neither of them showed signs of tiring or, regrettably enough, any residual bitterness toward each other. Baba was fond of sitting in his giant red chair sans shoes and socks, his chunky red feet propped in front of him on a large velvet pillow (veal cutlets to be served to a king). I had to resort to my A-Little-Bread-a-Crust-a-Crumb look, which Dad, frowning over his row of letters, didn’t pick up on, so I resorted to my A-Dying-Tiger-Moaned-for-Drink look, and when that went unobserved, A-Day! — Help! — Help! — Another-Day!

At long last, Dad announced he’d see me to bed.

“What were you fighting about when I came home?” I asked when we were upstairs, alone in my room.

“I would have preferred if you hadn’t heard that.” Dad shoved his hands into his pockets and gazed out the window where the rain seemed to be drumming its fingernails on the roof. “Servo and I have a great deal of lost baggage between us — mislaid items, so to speak. We both think the other is to blame for the deficiency.”

“Why did you tell him he was acting like a hormonal preteen?”

Dad looked uncomfortable. “Did I say that?”

I nodded.

“What else did I say?”

“That’s pretty much all I heard.”

Dad sighed. “The thing with Servo is — everyone has a thing, I suppose; but nevertheless, Servo’s thing —everything is an Olympic competition. He derives great pleasure from setting people up, putting them in the most discomforting of situations, watching them flounder. He’s an idiot, really. And now he has the absurd notion that I must remarry. Naturally, I told him he was preposterous, that it’s none of his business, the world does not revolve around such social—”

“Is he married?”

Dad shook his head. “Not for years. You know, I don’t even remember what happened to Sophie.”

“She’s in an insane asylum.”

“Oh, no,” Dad said, smiling, “when controlled, given parameters, he’s harmless. At times, ingenious.”

“Well, I don’t like him,” I pronounced.

I rarely, if ever, used such petulant one-liners. You had to have a strong, experienced, ain’t-no-other-way-’round-it face to say them with any authority (see Charlton Heston, The Ten Commandments ). Sometimes, though, when you had no sound reason for your sentiments — when you simply had a feeling —you had to use one no matter what kind of face you had.

Dad sat down next to me on the bed. “I suppose I can’t disagree. One can only take so much inflated self-importance before one feels ill. And I’m a bit angry myself. This morning, when we went to the Sorbonne, me with my briefcase full of notes, essays, my résumé—like a fool — it turned out there was no job opening as he’d led me to believe. A Latin professor had requested three months’ leave this fall, and that was it . Then came the actual reason we’d ventured to the school — Servo spent an hour trying to get me to ask Florence of the guttural r’s to dinner, some femme who was a leading expert in Simone de Beauvoir — of all hellish things to be an expert in — a woman who wore more eyeliner than Rudolph Valentino. I was trapped in her crypt-office for hours. I didn’t leave in love but with lung cancer. The woman chain-smoked like nobody’s business.”

“I don’t think he has children,” I said in a hushed voice. “Maybe just the one in the Colombian rain forest. But I think he’s making the others up.”

Dad frowned. “Servo has children.”

“Have you met them?

He considered this. “No.”

“Seen pictures?”

He tilted his head. “No.”

“Because they’re figments of his unhinged imagination.”

Dad laughed.

And then I was about to tell him about the other incredible incident of the day, Andreo Verduga with the suede jacket and the silver watch shuffling through the métro, but I stopped myself. I noticed how outlandish it was, such a coincidence, and reporting it in all seriousness made me feel stupid — tragic even. “It is adorable and healthily childlike secretly to believe in fairy tales, but the instant one articulates such viewpoints to other people, one goes from darling to dumbo, from childlike to chillingly out of touch with reality,” wrote Albert Pooley in The Imperial Consort of the Dairy Queen (1981, p. 233).