Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“When we go in March, there won’t be bugs. And if there are, I’ll drown you in Off,” Hannah said in a severe voice (see “1940 publicity still for Torrid Zone ,” Bulldog in a Henhouse: The Life of James Cagney , Taylor, 1982, p. 339).

Jade said nothing, bulldozing her spinach with a fork.

“For goodness’ sake,” Hannah continued, frowning at us, “what — what’s the matter with you? I try to plan something fun, a little different — didn’t you read, weren’t you inspired by Thoreau, Walden ? Didn’t you read it in English class? Or don’t they teach that anymore?”

She looked at me. I found it difficult to look back. In spite of her styling efforts, the haircut was still distracting. It looked like one of those alarming styles directors used in 1950s movies to illustrate that the main character had recently spent time in an institution or been branded a harlot by bigoted townsfolk. And the longer you looked at her, the more her shorn head seemed to isolate and float on its own like Jimmy Stewart’s in Vertigo , when he suffers from a nervous breakdown and psychedelic colors, the pinks and greens of madness, swirl behind him. The haircut made her eyes unhealthily huge, her neck pale, her ears vulnerable as snails missing shells. Perhaps Jade was right; she was going to have a nervous breakdown. Perhaps she was “sick and tired of going along with Man’s Great Lie” (see Beelzebub , Shorts, 1992,p. 212). Or a more frightening possibility: perhaps she’d read too much of the Charles Manson Blackbird book. Even Dad said — Dad who wasn’t in the least superstitious or fainthearted — such an explicit dissection of the workings of evil was truly not safe for the “impressionable, the confused, or the lost.” For this very reason, he no longer included it on his syllabus.

“ You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

Her eyes were bumper-stickered to my head.

“‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,’” she started to recite. “‘I wanted to suck all that marrow out of life, and — and afterwards, learn that if I had not lived, that — that I,’ what is it, something or other deliberately…’”

Her words slumped to the ground and stopped moving. No one spoke. She chuckled, but it was a sad, dying sound.

“I need to read it again myself.”

Leontyne Bennett skillfully dissected in The Commonwealth of Lost Vanities (1969) Virgil’s renowned quotation: “Love conquers all.”

“For centuries upon centuries,” he writes on p. 559, “we have been misinterpreting this famed trio of words. The uninformed masses breathlessly hold up this dwarfish phrase as a justification for snogging in public squares, abandoning wives, cuckolding husbands, for the escalating divorce rate, for swarms of bastard children begging for handouts in the Whitechapel and Aldgate tube stations — when in fact, there is nothing remotely encouraging or cheerful about this oft-quoted phrase. The Latin poet wrote ‘Amor vincit omnia,’ or ‘Love conquers all.’ He did not write, ‘Love frees all’ or ‘liberates’ all, and therein lies the first degree of our flagrant misunderstanding. Conquer: to defeat, subjugate, massacre, cream, make mincemeat out of. Surely, this cannot be a positive thing. And then, he wrote ‘conquers all ’— not exclusively the unpleasant things, destitution, assassination, burglary, but all, including pleasure, peace, common sense, liberty and self-determination. And thus we may appreciate that Virgil’s words are not encouragement, but rather a caveat, a cue to evade, shirk, elude the feeling at all costs, else we risk the massacre of the things we hold most dear, including our sense of self.”

Dad and I always snickered about Bennett’s long-winded protestations (he never married and died, in 1984, of cirrhosis of the liver; no one attended his funeral but a housekeeper and an editor from Tyrolian Press) but by February, I actually noticed the value in what he prattled on about for over eight hundred pages. Because it was love that caused Charles to act increasingly sullen and inconsistent, wandering St. Gallway with his hair disheveled, a consumed look on his face (something told me he wasn’t contemplating The Eternal Why). During Morning Announcements, he fidgeted restlessly in his seat (often banging the back of my chair) and when I turned around to smile at him, he didn’t see me; he gazed at the stage the way sailor widows probably stared at the sea. (“I’ve had it with him,” Jade announced.)

Love, too, could pick me up and chuck me into a bad mood with the relative easiness of a tornado uprooting a farmhouse. Milton would only have to say, “Old Jo” (what he called Joalie now — a pet name the most devastating of all high school relationship developments; like superglue, it could hold any couple together for months), and instantly I’d feel like I was dying inside, as if my heart, lungs and stomach were all punching their time card, closing up shop and heading home, because there was no point of beating, breathing, day in, day out, if life was this sore.

And then there was Zach Soderberg.

I’d completely forgotten about him, with the exception of thirty seconds during the plane ride home from Paris, when a frazzled stewardess accidentally spilled Bloody Mary mix on an elderly gentleman across the aisle. Instead of growling, the man’s face crinkled into a smile as he dabbed his now gruesome-looking jacket with napkins, and he said without a smidgin of sarcasm: “Don’t worry about it, my dear. Happens to the best of us.” I’d thrown Zach contrite little smiles every now and then during AP Physics (but didn’t wait to find out if he caught them or let them fall to the floor). I was taking Dad’s counsel: “The most poetic of endings to love affairs isn’t apology, excuse, extensive investigation into What Went Wrong — the St. Bernard of options, droopy-eyed and slobbery — but stately silence.” One day, however, immediately following lunch, when I slammed my locker door, I found Zach standing directly behind me, smiling one of those tent smiles, one side hoisted way up, the other limp.

“Hello, Blue,” he said. His voice was stiff as new shoes.

My heart, rather unexpectedly, began to jump-rope. “Hi.”

“How are you?”

“Fine.” I had to come up with something decent to say, of course, an excuse, an apology, my reason for forgetting him at the Christmas Cabaret like a winter glove. “Zach, I’m sorry abo—”

“I have something for you,” he interrupted, his voice not angry, but cheerfully official, as if he were Deputy Manager of Such-and-Such, happily emerging from his office to inform me I was a valued customer. He reached into his back pocket and handed me a thick blue envelope. It was emphatically sealed, even at the very, very corners, and my name had been written in schmaltzy cursive across the front.

“Feel free to do whatever you want with them, you know,” he said. “I just got a part-time job at Kinko’s, so I could inform you of some printing options. You could do a blow-up, poster-size, then total lamination. Or you could go the greeting card route. Or a calendar, wall or desk. Then there’s the T-shirt option. That’s pretty popular. We just got in some baby tees. And then, what do they call it — there’s art print on canvas. That’s very nice. Higher quality than you’d expect. We also offer sign and banner options in a range of sizes, including vinyl.”

He nodded to himself and seemed on the verge of saying something more — his lips were cracked, barely, like a window — but then, frowning, he appeared to change his mind.