Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Without the disturbing incident of this chapter, I’d never have taken on the task of writing this story. I’d have nothing to write. Life in Stockton would have continued exactly as it was, as placid and primly self-contained as Switzerland, and any strange incidents — Cottonwood, Smoke Harvey’s death, that strange conversation with Hannah prior to Christmas Break — might be regarded as unusual, certainly, but in the end, nothing that couldn’t be dully reviewed and accounted for by Hindsight, forever unsurprised and shortsighted.

I cannot help but anticipate a little, run on ahead (much in the manner of Violet Martinez in the Great Smoky Mountains), and so, given this lapse in patience, I will only hopscotch through the two months between Eva’s destruction of my mother’s butterflies and moths and the camping trip, which Hannah, in spite of our patent lack of enthusiasm (“Won’t do it, couldn’t pay me,” pledged Jade), maintained was scheduled for the weekend of March 26, the beginning of Spring Break.

“Make sure you bring hiking shoes,” she said.

St. Gallway doggedly marched on (see Chapter 9, “The Battle of Stalingrad,” The Great Patriotic War , Stepnovich, 1989). With the exception of Hannah, most teachers had returned from Christmas vacation cheerfully unchanged, apart from small, pleasant enhancements to their appearance: a new red Navajo sweater (Mr. Archer), shiny new shoes (Mr. Moats), a new boysenberry rinse that turned hair into something that had to be consciously matched, like paisley (Ms. Gershon). These distracting details caused one to daydream in class about who had given Mr. Archer that sweater, or how Mr. Moats must be insecure about his height because all of his shoes possessed soles thick as sticks of butter, or the exact look on Ms. Gershon’s face when her hairdresser removed the towel from her head and said, “Don’t worry. The plum tones just look extreme now because it’s wet.”

St. Gallway students were also the same, rodentlike in their ability to carry on foraging, storing, burrowing and eating a huge amount of plant food in spite of humiliating national scandals and harrowing world events. (“This is a critical time in our nation’s history,” Ms. Sturds was always informing us during Morning Announcements. “Let’s make sure we look back in twenty years and feel proud. Read the newspaper. Take sides. Have an opinion.”) Student Council President Maxwell Stuart unveiled elaborate plans for a Spring Term Barbecue Hoedown, complete with square dancing, bluegrass band and Faculty Scarecrow Contest; Mr. Carlos Sandborn of AP World History stopped using gel in his hair (it no longer looked wet, as if it’d been swimming laps, but windblown, as if it’d been doing figure-eights in a propeller plane) and Mr. Frank Fletcher, crossword maharishi and monitor of second period Study Hall, was in the throes of a divorce; his wife, Evelyn, had apparently made him move out (though whether the deep circles under his eyes were due to the divorce or crosswords, no one knew), citing Irreconcilable Differences.

“I guess when they were doing the nasty on Christmas Eve, Mr. Fletcher shouted out, ‘Oh, Eleven Down!’ not ‘Evelyn, Down!’ That was the last straw,” said Dee.

I saw Zach all the time in Physics, but apart from a handful of hellos, we didn’t speak. He never materialized at my locker anymore. Once, during the Dynamics Lab, we found ourselves at the back of the room together and just as I looked up from my notebook to smile at him, he bumped into the corner of one of the lab tables and spontaneously dropped what he was carrying, a ring stand and a set of known masses. But even as he picked up the equipment, he didn’t say anything, only returned swiftly to the front of the room (and his lab partner, Krista Jibsen) with an official spokesperson look on his face. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

Clumsy, too, were the occasions I passed Eva Brewster in the hallway. We both pretended to be suffering from the effects of Walking and Thinking an Elaborate Thought at the Same Time (Einstein suffered from it, Darwin, de Sade too), and hence the person suffered from an obliviousness toward his/her immediate surroundings that approached that of a temporary blackout or complete loss of consciousness (this, though as we slipped past each other, our eyes fell like curtains when a hooker strolls through a prairie town searching for accommodation). I felt as if I were now privy to a dark, grisly secret about Eva (in certain rare instances, she transformed into a werewolf) and she begrudged me for knowing it. At the same time, as she marched down the hall with an absorbed expression, a hint of lemony perfume, as if she’d spritzed herself with a cleaner for kitchen countertops, I swore I detected in the hunch of her beige sweater, in the angle of her meaty neck, that she was sorry and she’d take it all back if she could. Even if she didn’t have the guts to say it to me outright (so few people had the guts to really say things), it made me feel less anxious, as if I understood her a little.

Ms. Brewster’s rampage did have some constructive effects, as all disasters and tragedies do (see The Dresden Upshot , Trask, 2002). Dad, still guilty about Kitty, had adopted a permanently contrite manner, which I found refreshing. The day we returned from Paris, I’d learned I’d been admitted to Harvard, and we finally celebrated this milestone on a blustery Friday evening in early March. Dad donned his Brooks Brothers, French-cuffed dress shirt, his gold GUM cufflinks; I, a gum-green dress from Au Printemps. Dad chose the four-star restaurant purely on the basis of its name: Quixote.

The dinner was unforgettable for many reasons, one of them being that Dad, in an uncharacteristic display of self-command, paid no attention at all to our gorgeous waitress with the voluptuous body of a swan-necked flask and an astoundingly cleft chin. Her coffee-colored eyes trespassed all over Dad when she took our order and again when she asked Dad if he wanted fresh pepper (“ Had enough [pepper]?” she inquired breathily). Yet Dad willfully remained indifferent to this intrusion, and so, somewhat dejectedly, her eyes went back the way they came (“Dessert menu,” she announced grimly by the end of the meal).

“To my daughter,” Dad said grandly, clinking his wineglass on the rim of my Coke. A middle-aged woman at the table next to us with heavy hardware jewelry and a thickset husband (whom she seemed anxious to unload like armfuls of shopping bags) beamed at us for the thirtieth time (Dad, a stirring example of Paternity: handsome, devoted, wearing tweed). “May your studies continue to the end of your days,” he said. “May you walk a lighted path. May you fight for truth — your truth, not someone else’s — and may you understand, above all things, that you are the most important concept, theory and philosophy I have ever known.”

The woman was practically blown off her seat by Dad’s eloquence. I thought he was paraphrasing an Irish drinking toast, but later I did check Killing’s Beyond Words (1999) and couldn’t find it. It was Dad.

On Friday, March 26, with the same innocence of the Trojans as they gathered around the strange wooden horse standing at the gate to their city in order to marvel at its craftsmanship, Hannah drove our yellow Rent-Me truck into the dirt lot of Sunset Views Encampment and parked in Space 52. The lot was empty, with the exception of a swayback blue Pontiac parked in front of the cabin (a wooden sign slapped crookedly over the door like a Band-Aid: MAIN) and a rusty towable trailer (“Lonesome Dreams”) chucked under an evangelist oak tree. (It was in the midst of some violent enlightenment, branches stretched heavenward as if to grab hold of His feet.) A white sky ironed, starched, folded itself primly behind the rolling mountains. Garbage floated across the lot, cryptic messages in bottles: Santa Fe Ranch Lay’s potato chips, Thomas’ English Muffins, a frayed purple ribbon. Sometime in the last week or so, it had sleeted cigarette butts.