Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“Can we go home?” I asked quietly.

To my surprise, Dad nodded. “I was actually going to ask you the very same thing this afternoon, after my dispute with Servo. I think we’ve had enough of la vie en rose, don’t you? Personally, I prefer to see life as it actually is.” He smiled. “En noir.”

Dad and I said farewell to Servo, to Paris, two days before we were scheduled to depart. Perhaps it wasn’t so incredible a thing, Dad calling the airline and changing the tickets. He looked deflated, eyes bloodshot, his voice prone to sighs. For the first time since I could remember, Dad had very little to say. Saying good-bye to Baba au Rhum, he managed only “thank you” and “see you soon” before climbing into the waiting taxi.

I, however, took my time.

“Next time I look forward to meeting Psyche and Elektra in person,” I said, staring straight into the man’s hole-punched eyes. I almost felt sorry for him: the bristly white hair drooped over his head like a plant that hadn’t had nearly enough water or light. Tiny red veins were taking root around his nose. If Servo were in a Pulitzer Prize — winning play, he’d be the Painfully Tragic character, the one who wore bronze suits and alligator shoes, the man who worshipped all the wrong things so Life had to bring him to his knees.

VISUAL AID 18.0

“‘One’s real life is, so often, the life that one does not lead,’” I added as I turned toward the taxi, but he only blinked, that nervous, sly smile again twitching through his face.

“So long, my dear, mmmm, safe flight.”

On the drive to the airport, Dad barely said a word. He rested his head against the taxi window, mournfully staring out at the passing streets — such an unusual pose for him, I covertly took the disposable camera out of my bag, and while the taxi driver muttered at people dashing across the intersection in front of us, I took his picture, the last photo on the roll.

They say when people didn’t know you were taking their picture, they appeared as they really were in life. And yet Dad didn’t know I was taking his picture and he appeared as he never was — quiet, forlorn, somehow lost (Visual Aid 18.0).

“As far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the Taj Mahal to the Siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunate conclusion — usually while he’s lying in bed, staring at the thatched ceiling of some substandard accommodation in Indochina,” writes Swithin in his last book, the posthumously published Whereabouts,1917 (1918). “It is impossible to rid himself of the relentless, cloying fever commonly known as Home. After seventy-three years of anguish I have found a cure, however. You must go home again, grit your teeth and however arduous the exercise, determine, without embellishment, your exact coordinates at Home, your longitudes and latitudes. Only then, will you stop looking back and see the spectacular view in front of you.”

Upon my return to St. Gallway and the commencement of Winter Term, the first odd thing I noticed about Hannah — rather, what the whole school noticed (“I think that woman was committed to an institution over vacation,” surmised Dee during second period Study Hall) — was that over Christmas Break, she’d cut off all her hair.

No, it was not one of those cute 1950s haircuts labeled by fashion magazines as chic and gamine (see Jean Seberg, Bonjour Tristesse ). It was harsh and choppy. And, as Jade noticed when we were at Hannah’s for dinner, there was even a tiny bald patch behind her right ear.

“What the hell? ” said Jade.

“What?” asked Hannah, spinning around.

“There’s a — hole in your haircut! You can see your scalp!”

“Really?”

“You cut your own hair?” asked Lu.

Hannah stared at us and then nodded, visibly embarrassed. “Yes. I know it’s crazy and looks, well — different.” She touched the back of her neck. “But it was late at night. I wanted to try something.”

The acute masochism and self-hatred behind a woman willfully defacing her appearance was a concept that featured prominently in the angry tome by proto-feminist Dr. Susan Shorts, Beelzebub Conspiracy (1992), which I’d noticed peeking out of the L. L. Bean canvas tote belonging to my sixth-grade science teacher, Mrs. Joanna Perry of Wheaton Hill Middle. In order to better understand Mrs. Perry and her mood swings, I procured my own copy. In Chapter 5, Shorts contends that since 1010 B.C., many women who’d tried and failed to be self-governing were forced to take action upon their very selves, because their physical appearance was the lone thing on which they could immediately “exert power,” due to the “colossal masculine plot at work since the beginning of time, ever since man began to walk on his two stubby, hairy legs and noticed that he was taller than poor woman,” growls Shorts (p. 41). Many women, including St. Joan and Countess Alexandra di Whippa, “crudely chopped off their hair,” and cut themselves with “clippers and knives” (p. 42–43). The more radical ones branded their stomachs with hot irons to the “distress and revulsion of their husbands” (p. 44). On p. 69, Shorts goes on to write, “A woman will mar her exterior because she feels she is a part of a greater scheme, a plot, which she cannot control.”

Of course, one never thinks about damning feminist texts at the time, and even if one does, it’s to be theatrical and over-the-top. So I simply imagined there came a point in a mature woman’s life when she needed to radically change her appearance, discover what she really looked like, without all the bells and whistles.

Dad, on Understanding Why Women Do the Things They Do: “One has a better chance of squeezing the universe onto a thumbnail.”

And yet, when I sat next to Hannah at the dinner table and looked over at her as she daintily cut her chicken (haircut poised boldly atop her head like an atrocious hat worn to church), I suddenly had the nerve-racking feeling I’d seen her somewhere before. The haircut strip-searched her, uncovered her in a shoulder-cringing fashion, and now, crazily enough, the carved cheekbones, the neck — it was all vaguely familiar. I recognized her, not from an encounter (no, she was not one of Dad’s long-lost June Bugs; it’d take more than glamorous hair to camouflage their brand of monkey face); the feeling was smokier, more remote. I sensed instead I’d seen her in a photograph somewhere, or in a newspaper article, or maybe in a snapshot in some discount biography Dad and I had read aloud.

Instantly, she noticed I was staring at her (Hannah was one of those people who kept tabs on all eyes in a room) and slowly, as she took an elegant bite of food, she turned her head toward me and smiled. Charles was talking on and on about Fort Lauderdale — God, it was hot, stuck at the airport for six hours (telling this rambling story as he always did, as if Hannah was the only person at the table) — and the haircut drew attention to her smile, did to her smile what Coke-bottle lenses did to eyes, made it huge (pronounced, “HYOOOGE”). I smiled back at her and sat for the remainder of the meal with my eyes taped to my plate, shouting silently to myself in a dictator voice (Augusto Pinochet commanding the torture of an opponent) — to stop staring at Hannah.

It was rude.

“Hannah’s going to have a nervous breakdown,” Jade announced flatly that Friday night. She was wearing a jittery black-beaded flapper dress and sitting behind a huge gold harp, plucking the strings with one hand, a martini in the other. The instrument was covered with a thick film of dust like the layer of fat in a pan after frying bacon. “You can quote me on that.”