Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

She fell silent, not out of exhaustion or reflection, but because her eyes had again snagged on the butterflies in front of her.

“He really loves those things,” she said.

I followed her gaze to the wall. “Not really.”

“No?”

“He barely looks at them.”

I actually saw the thought, the light bulb illuminating her head as if she were a comic book character.

She moved quickly, but so did I. I stood in front of them and hastily said something about receiving the flowers myself (“Dad talks about you all the time!” I cried rather pathetically) but she didn’t hear me.

A garish flush bleeding into the back of her neck, she yanked open Dad’s desk drawers and hurled every one of his legal pads (he organized them by university and date) into the air. They flew around the room like giant scared canaries.

I guess she found what she was looking for — a steel ruler, which Dad used for orderly cross-comparison diagrams in his lecture notes — and to my shock, she brutally shoved me aside and tried to stab it through the glass of one of the Ricker’s cases. The ruler, silver aluminum, would have no part of it however, so with an infuriated “Fuckin’ A,” she threw it to the floor and tried punching one of the boxes with her bare fist, and then with her elbow, and when that didn’t work, she scratched the glass with her nails as if she were some lunatic scraping the silver skin off a lottery ticket.

Still thwarted, she turned, her eyes swerving around Dad’s desk until they stopped on the green lamp (a parting gift from the agreeable Dean at the University of Arkansas at Wilsonville). She seized it, jerking the cord out of the wall, and raised it over her head. She used the base, solid brass, to shatter the glass of the first case.

At this point, I ran at her again, lurching at her shoulders, also shouting, “Please!” but I was too weak and, I suppose, too stunned by it all to be effective. She pushed me again, elbowing me right in the jaw so my neck twisted to the side and I fell down.

Glass rained everywhere, all over Dad’s desk, the rug, my feet and hands, all over her, too. Tiny shards glittered in her hair and stuck to her thick white tights, trembling like beads of water. She couldn’t remove the cases from the wall (Dad used special screws to hang them) but she ripped through the pieces of mounting paper and tore the brown cardboard backing from the frames, ripping every butterfly and moth from their pins, squashing their wings so they became colored confetti, which, with eyes wide, her face creased like a wad of paper smoothed out, she tossed around the room, making something of a sacrament out of it like a priest gone mad with holy water.

At one point, with a muffled growl, she actually bit into one, and resembled for a horrifying and faintly surreal moment, a massive orange tabby eating a blackbird. (In the most peculiar of instances, one is struck by the most peculiar of thoughts, and in this case, as Eva bit into the wing of the Night Butterfly, Taygetis echo, I remembered the occasion when Dad and I were driving from Louisiana to Arkansas, when it was ninety degrees and the air-conditioning was broken, and we were memorizing a Wallace Stevens poem, one of Dad’s favorites, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” “‘Among twenty snowy mountains / The only thing moving / was the eye of the blackbird,’” Dad explained to the highway.)

When she stopped, when she finally stood still, astonished herself by what she’d just done, there was the utterest of all utter silences, reserved, I imagined, for the aftermath of massacres and storms. You could probably hear the rustle of the moon if you concentrated, the earth too, its whoosh as it whirled around the sun at 18.5 miles per second. Eva then began to shiver an apology in a trembling voice that sounded as if it were being tickled. She cried a little too, a disquieting, low-pitched seeping sound.

I can’t be sure of her crying, actually; I, too, had been hauled into a state of disorientation under which I could only repeat to myself This did not actually happen as I gazed at the surrounding debris, in particular, at the top of my right foot, my yellow sock, on which rested a brown and furry torso of some moth, the Bent-Wing Ghost Moth perhaps, slightly crooked, as if it were a bit of pipe cleaner.

Eva then put the lamp down on Dad’s desk, tenderly, the way one handles a baby, and, avoiding my eyes, walked past me, up the stairs. After a moment, I heard the front door slam and the sputter of her car as she drove away.

With a samurai-like precision and clarity of mind that promptly settles over one following the weirder episodes of one’s life, I resolved to clean everything up before Dad returned home.

I obtained a screwdriver from the garage and, one by one, removed the destroyed boxes from the wall. I swept up the glass and the wings, vacuumed under Dad’s desk, along the edges of the floor, the bookshelves and stairs. I returned the legal pads to their respective drawers, organizing them by university and date, and then carried to my room their cardboard moving box (BUTTERFLIES FRAGILE) in which I’d put all that was salvageable. It wasn’t much — only torn white paper, a handful of brown wings still in one piece and the single Small Postman, Heliconius erato, which had emerged from the slaughter miraculously unscathed after hiding behind Dad’s filing cabinet. I tried to read more of Henry V as I waited for Dad to return home, but the words snagged my eyes. I found myself staring at a single point on the page.

Despite the throb in my right cheek, I had no illusions Dad was anything other than the pitiless villain in this evening’s freaky drama. Sure, I hated her, but I hated him, too. Dad had finally gotten what was coming to him, except he’d been otherwise engaged, so I, his guiltless direct descendant, had gotten what was coming to him. I knew it was melodramatic, but I found myself wishing Kitty had killed me (at the very least, knocked me provisionally unconscious) so when Dad returned home, he’d see me lying on his study floor, my body saggy and gray as a hundred-year-old sofa, my neck twisted at the disturbing angle indicating Life had caught a bus out of town. After Dad fell to his knees, uttered King Learean cries (“No! Noooo! Don’t take her, God! I’ll do anything!”), my eyes would open, I’d gasp, then deliver my mesmerizing speech, touching upon Humanity, Compassion, the fine line between Kindness and Pity, the necessity of Love (a theme rescued from the trite and the maudlin by sturdy support from the Russians [“Everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”] and a little Irving Berlin to keep things snappy [“They say that falling in love is wonderful, it’s wonderful, so they say.”]). I’d end with the pronouncement that the Jack Nicholson, Dad’s customary modus operandi, would henceforth be replaced by the Paul Newman, and Dad would nod with his eyes lowered, his face pained. His hair would turn gray, too, a uniform steel-gray, like Hecuba’s, the emblem of Purest Sorrow.

What about the others? Had he hurt the others as much as he’d hurt Eva Brewster? What about Shelby Hollows with her bleached moustache? Or Janice Elmeros with cactus-prickly legs under her sundresses? And the others, like Rachel Groom and Isabelle Franks, who never came to see Dad without bearing gifts like contemporary Wise Men (Dad, mistaken for a Christ Child), cornbread, muffins and straw dolls with wincing faces (as if they’d all just eaten a Sour Patch Kid), their gold, frankincense and myrrh? How many hours had Natalie Simms slaved constructing the birdhouse out of popsicle sticks?

The blue Volvo cruised down the driveway at a quarter to twelve. I heard him unlock the front door.