Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“Sweet, come down at once! You’ll laugh your eyes out!”

(Laughing one’s eyes out was a particularly irritating Dadism, as was crying until the bulls come home and being the pear of one’s eye.)

“Turns out little Arnie Sanderson couldn’t hold his liquor! He fell down, I swear to you, fell down in the restaurant on his way to the men’s room. I had to drive the thug home, to his Calcutta-inspired university housing. A terrifying place — tatty carpeting, a stench of curdled milk, graduate fellows wandering the halls with feet that appeared to support more exotic life forms than the Galápagos Islands. I had to carry him up the stairs. Three flights! Do you remember Teacher’s Pet , that rather delightful film starring Gable and Doris we watched — where was it? Missouri? Well, I lived it this evening, only without the perky blonde. I believe I deserve a drink.”

He was silent.

“Have you gone to bed?”

Dad dashed up the stairs, knocked lightly, pushed open the door. He was still wearing his coat. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, staring at the wall with my arms crossed.

“What’s happened?” he asked.

When I told him (doing my best to keep my manner like that of the Loosened Steel Girder, dangerous and unforgiving) Dad turned into one of those things twirling outside of vintage barber shops: he went red when he saw the red splotch on my face, white when I escorted him downstairs and expertly reenacted the scene (including snippets of actual dialogue, the exact position in which I was ruthlessly chucked to the ground and Eva’s revelation that Dad was “a small” ), and upstairs again, when I showed him the box full of butterfly and moth remains, red again.

“If I’d known such a thing was possible,” Dad said, “that she could became a Scylla— worse than a Charybdis in my book — I’d have murdered that nut.” He pressed the washcloth full of ice to my cheek. “I must think what measures to take.”

“How’d you meet her?” I asked gloomily, without looking at him.

“Of course, I’ve heard stories of this nature from colleagues, seen the movies, Fatal Attraction being the gold stand—”

“How, Dad?” I screamed.

He was taken aback by my voice, but rather than getting angry, he only lifted the ice, and frowning in grave concern (his impression of the nurse in For Whom the Bell Tolls ), touched my cheek with the back of his fingers.

“How did I — let’s see if, what was it — late September,” he said, clearing his throat. “I made that second trip to your school to discuss your class ranking. Remember? I found myself lost. That officer in charge, that off-the-wall Ronin-Smith — she told me to meet her in a different room because her office was being repainted. But she gave me the wrong location, and thus I made an imbecile of myself knocking on Hanover 316 and encountered an unpleasantly bearded History professor attempting to clarify — rather unsuccessfully, I gathered from the benumbed expressions of his class — the Hows and Whys of the Industrial Age. I stopped by the main office to inquire after the correct location and encountered the manic Miss Brewster.”

“And it was love at first sight.”

Dad gazed at the box of remains on the floor. “To think all this might have been avoided if that goat had simply told me Barrow 316.”

“It isn’t funny.”

He shook his head. “It was wrong not to tell you. I apologize. But I was uncomfortable with it, my”—he held his breath in discomfort—“ connection with someone from your school. I certainly didn’t mean for it to escalate as it did. In the beginning, it all seemed rather harmless.”

“That’s what the Germans said when they lost World War II.”

“I take full responsibility. I was an ass.”

“A liar. A cheat. She called you a liar. And she was right—”

“Yes.”

“—you lie about anything and everything. Even, ‘Nice to see you.’”

He didn’t respond to this, only sighed.

I crossed my arms, still glowering at the wall, but I didn’t move my head away when he pressed the cold washcloth to my cheek again.

“As I see it,” he said, “I’ll have to call the police. That, or the more appealing option. Going to her house with an illegally obtained firearm.”

“You can’t call the police. You can’t do anything.”

He looked at me. “But I thought you’d want that beast behind bars.”

“She’s just a normal woman, Dad. And you didn’t treat her with respect. Why didn’t you return her phone calls?”

“I suppose I didn’t feel much like talking.”

“Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world. Haven’t you read Hit and Run: Crisis in Singlehood America ?”

“I don’t believe I have—”

“The least you can do now is leave her alone.”

He was about to add something, but stopped himself.

“Who’d you send the flowers to anyway?” I asked.

“Hmm?”

“Those flowers she was talking about—”

“Janet Finnsbroke. One of the administrators in the department who dates back to the Paleozoic Period. Her fiftieth wedding anniversary. I thought it’d be nice—” Dad caught my eye “—no, I most certainly am not in love with her. For Pete’s sake.”

I pretended not to notice, but Dad looked sort of deflated there on the edge of my bed. A lost, even humbled look was wandering around his face (quite surprised to be there). Seeing him like this, so un-Dad, made me feel sorry for him — though I didn’t let on. His befuddled expression reminded me of those unflattering photographs of presidents The New York Times and other newspapers adored sticking on their front page in order to show the world how the Great Leader looked between the staged waves, the scripted sound-bites, the rehearsed handshakes — not staunch and stately, not even steady, but frail and foolish. And though these candid photographs were amusing, when you actually thought about it, the underlying implication of such a photograph was scary, for they hinted how delicate the balance of our lives, how tenuous our calm little existences, if this was the man in charge.

And so, I come to the perilous part of my story.

If this narrative were a quotidian account of the history of Russia, this chapter would be a proletarian’s account of the Great October Soviet Socialist Revolution of 1917, if a history of France, the beheading of Marie Antoinette, if a chronicle of America, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth.

“All worthwhile tales possess some element of violence,” Dad said. “If you don’t believe me, simply reflect for a moment on the utter horror of having something threatening lurking outside your front door, hearing it huff and puff and then, cruelly, callously, blowing your house down. It’s as horrifying as any story on CNN. And yet where would the ‘Three Little Pigs’ be without such brutality? No one would have heard of them, for happiness and placidity are not worth recounting by the fire, nor, for that matter, reporting by a news anchor wearing pancake makeup and more shimmer on her eyelids than a peacock feather.”

Not that I am trying to imply my story can hold a candle to complex world histories (each one worth over one thousand pages of fine print) or three-hundred-year-old fables. Yet one can’t help but notice that violence, although officially abhorred in modern Western and Eastern cultures (only officially, for no culture, modern or otherwise, hesitates using it for the pursuit of their own interests), is unavoidable if there is to be change.