Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

D ad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.

Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, Che Guevara or Bond James Bondyou best spend your free time finger painting or playing shuffleboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with stiff hair and a mashed-potato way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it beganwith a wheeze.

Given such rigid parameters, I always assumed I wouldnt have my Magnificent Reason until I was at least seventy, with liver spots, rheumatism, wit as quick as a carving knife, a squat stucco house in Avignon (where I could be found eating 365 different cheeses), a lover twenty years my junior who worked in the fields (I dont know what kind of fieldsany kind that were gold and frothy) and, with any luck, a small triumph of science or philosophy to my name. And yet the decisionno, the grave necessityto take pen to paper and write about my childhoodmost critically, the year it unstitched like a snagged sweatercame much sooner than I ever imagined.

It began with simple sleeplessness. It had been almost a year since Id found Hannah dead, and I thought Id managed to erase all traces of that night within myself, much in the way Henry Higgins with his relentless elocution exercises had scrubbed away Elizas Cockney accent.

I was wrong.

By the end of January, I again found myself awake in the dead of night, the hall hushed, dark, spiky shadows crouching in the edges of the ceiling. I had nothing and no one to my name but a few fat, smug textbooks like Introduction to Astrophysics and sad, silent James Dean gazing down at me where he was trapped in black and white and taped to the back of our door. Id stare back at him through the smudged darkness, and see, in microscopic detail, Hannah Schneider.

She hung three feet above the ground by an orange electrical extension cord. Her tonguebloated, the cherry pink of a kitchen spongeslumped from her mouth. Her eyes looked like acorns, or dull pennies, or two black buttons off an overcoat kids might stick into the face of a snowman, and they saw nothing. Or else that was the problem, theyd seen everything ; J. B. Tower wrote that the moment before death is seeing everything that has ever existed all at once (though I wondered how he knew this, as he was in the prime of life when he wrote Mortality ). And her shoelacesan entire treatise could be written on those shoelacesthey were crimson, symmetrical, tied in perfect double knots.

Still, being an inveterate optimist (Van Meers are natural idealists and affirmative freethinkers, noted Dad) I hoped lurid wakefulness might be a phase Id quickly grow out of, a fad of some kind, like poodle skirts or having a pet rock, but then, one night early in February as I read The Aeneid , my roommate, Soo-Jin, mentioned without looking up from her Organic Chemistry textbook that some of the freshmen on our hall were planning to crash an off-campus party at some doctor of philosophys but I wasnt invited because I was considered more than a little bleak in demeanor: Especially in the morning when youre on your way to Intro to 60s Counterculture and the New Left. You look so like, afflicted.

This, of course, was only Soo-Jin talking (Soo-Jin whose face employed the same countenance for both Anger and Elation). I did my best to wave away this remark, as if it were nothing more than an unpleasant odor coming off a beaker or test tube, but then I did start to notice all kinds of unquestionably bleak things. For example, when Bethany brought people into her room for a Friday night Audrey Hepburn marathon, I was distinctly aware, at the end of Breakfast at Tiffanys , unlike the other girls sitting on pillows chain-smoking with tears in their eyes, I actually found myself hoping Holly didnt find Cat. No, if I was completely honest with myself, I realized I wanted Cat to stay lost and abandoned, mewing and shivering all by its Cat self in those splintery crates in that awful Tin Pan Alleyway, which from the rate of that Hollywood downpour would be submerged under the Pacific Ocean in less than an hour. (This I disguised, of course, smiling gaily when George Peppard feverishly grasped Audrey feverishly grasping Cat who no longer looked like a cat but a drowned squirrel. I believe I even uttered one of those girly, high-pitched Ewws, in perfect harmony with Bethanys sighs.)

And that wasnt the end of it. A couple of days later, I was in American Biography, led by our Teaching Assistant, Glenn Oakley, with his cornbread complexion and habit of swallowing right in the middle of a word. He was discussing Gertrude Steins deathbed.

So what is the answer, Gertrude? Glenn quoted in his pretentious whisper, his left hand up as if holding an invisible parasol, pinky outstretched. (He resembled Alice B. Toklas with that specter-mustache.) Well, Alice, what is the quest- gurgh -tion?"

I stifled a yawn, happened to glance down at my notebook and saw, in horror, Id absentmindedly been scribbling in strange loopy cursive a very disturbing word: good-bye. On its own it was breathy and harmless, sure, but Id happened to scrawl it like some heartbroken lunatic at least forty times down the entire margin of the pagea little bit on the preceding page too.