Special Topics in Calamity Physics Read online

  Cover

  Copyright page

  Core Curriculum (Required Reading)

  Introduction

  Part 1

  Chapter #1: OTHELLO, William Shakespeare

  Chapter #2: A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, James Joyce

  Chapter #3: WUTHERING HEIGHTS, Emily Brontë

  Chapter #4: THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES, Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Chapter #5: THE WOMAN IN WHITE, Wilkie Collins

  Chapter #6: BRAVE NEW WORLD, Aldous Huxley

  Chapter #7: LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

  Chapter #8: MADAME BOVARY, Gustave Flaubert

  Chapter #9: PYGMALION, George Bernard Shaw

  Chapter #10: THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES, Agatha Christie

  Part 2

  Chapter #11: MOBY-DICK, Herman Melville

  Chapter #12: A MOVEABLE FEAST, Ernest Hemingway

  Chapter #13: WOMEN IN LOVE, D. H. Lawrence

  Chapter #14: "THE HOUSEBREAKER OF SHADY HILL," John Cheever

  Chapter #15: SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, Tennessee Williams

  Chapter #16: LAUGHTER IN THE DARK, Vladimir Nabokov

  Chapter #17: THE SLEEPING BEAUTY AND OTHER FAIRY TALES, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

  Chapter #18: A ROOM WITH A VIEW, E. M. Forster

  Part 3

  Chapter #19: HOWL AND OTHER POEMS, Allen Ginsberg

  Chapter #20: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, William Shakespeare

  Chapter #21: DELIVERANCE, James Dickey

  Chapter #22: HEART OF DARKNESS, Joseph Conrad

  Chapter #23: ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, Ken Kesey

  Chapter #24: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, Gabriel García Márquez

  Chapter #25: BLEAK HOUSE, Charles Dickens

  Chapter #26: THE BIG SLEEP, Raymond Chandler

  Chapter #27: JUSTINE, Marquis de Sade

  Chapter #28: QUER PASTICCIACCIO BRUTTO DE VIA MERULANA, Carlo Emilio Gadda

  Chapter #29: THINGS FALL APART, Chinua Achebe

  Chapter #30: THE NOCTURNAL CONSPIRACY, Smoke Wyannoch Harvey

  Chapter #31: CHE GUEVARA TALKS TO YOUNG PEOPLE, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna

  Chapter #32: "GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE," Flannery O'Connor

  Chapter #33: THE TRIAL, Franz Kafka

  Chapter #34: PARADISE LOST, John Milton

  Chapter #35: THE SECRET GARDEN, Frances Hodgson Burnett

  Chapter #36: METAMORPHOSES, Ovid

  Final Exam

  Acknowledgments

  SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS

  a novel...

  Blue van Meer: a brainy, deadpan, and preternaturally erudite girl who, after traveling from one remote academic outpost to another with her professor father (see "Gareth van Meer"), has a head crammed full of literary, philosophical, and scientific knowledge. (She is also a film buff and can recite pi out to sixty-five decimal places.) When she is sixteen, due to certain nuclear events, her previously dull life is forever transformed.

  The Flying Demoiselle: an archaic means of hanging someone, popular in the American South between 1829-1860. It is also, in all likelihood, how Hannah Schneider died.

  Gareth Van Meer: a handsome yet maddening man prone to aphorisms, meteoric affairs, (see "June bugs"), and high-end bourbon.

  June bugs: single women aged 35-45 who, for reasons unclear to Blue, cling to her father like lint balls to wool pants.

  Lion sex: something that happens in Room 222 of the Dynasty Motel.

  Valerio: a clue.

  MARISHA PESSI

  grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and now lives in New York City. This is her first novel.

  www.marishapessl.com

  Jacket design: Paul Buckley Back jacket photograph © Adalberto Rios Szalay/ Sexto Sol/Getty Images

  VIKING

  A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York. N.Y. 10014 www.penguin.com

  I Printed in U.S.A.

  VIKING

  VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pry Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pry) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England

  First published in 2006 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  10 9 8 7

  Copyright © Marisha Pessl, 2006 All rights reserved

  Illustrations by the author

  Publisher's Note This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Pessl, Marisha. Special topics in calamity physics / Marisha Pessl.

  p. cm. ISBN 0670-03777-X

  1. Young women—Fiction. I. Title. PS3616.E825S67 2006 813'.6—dc22 2005058474

  Printed in the United States of America Set in Electra LH with Omatic Designed by Daniel Lagin

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

  ForAnne and Nie

  Core Curriculum (Required Reading

  INTRODUCTION 5

  PART 1 13

  Chapter #1: OTHELLO, William Shakespeare 15

  Chapter #2: A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, James Joyce 22

  Chapter #3: WUTHERING HEIGHTS, Emily Brontë 35

  Chapter #4: THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES,

  Nathaniel Hawthorne 45

  Chapter #5: THE WOMAN IN WHITE, Wilkie Collins 54

  Chapter #6: BRAVE NEW WORLD, Aldous Huxley 61

  Chapter #7: LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos 73

  Chapter #8: MADAME BOVARY, Gustave Flaubert 83

  Chapter #9: PYGMALION, George Bernard Shaw 108

  Chapter #10: THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES,

  Agatha Christie 131

  CORE CURRICULUM (REQUIRED READING)

  PART 2 147

  Chapter #11: MOBY-DICK, Herman Melville 149

  Chapter #12: A MOVEABLE FEAST, Ernest Hemingway 171

  Chapter #13: WOMEN IN LOVE, D. H. Lawrence 193

  Chapter #14: "THE HOUSEBREAKER OF SHADY HILL," John Cheever 211

  Chapter #15: SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, Tennessee Williams 230

  Chapter #16: LAUGHTER IN THE DARK, Vladimir Nabokov 242

  Chapter #17: THE SLEEPING BEAUTY AND OT
HER FAIRY TALES, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch 254

  Chapter #18: A ROOM WITH A VIEW, E. M. Forster 262

  PART 3 277

  Chapter #19: HOWL AND OTHER POEMS, Allen Ginsberg 279

  Chapter #20: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, William Shakespeare 293

  Chapter #21: DELIVERANCE, James Dickey 311

  Chapter #22: HEART OF DARKNESS, Joseph Conrad 328

  Chapter #23: ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, Ken Kesey 337

  Chapter #24: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, Gabriel García Márquez 346

  Chapter #25: BLEAK HOUSE, Charles Dickens 361

  Chapter #26: THE BIG SLEEP, Raymond Chandler 375

  Chapter #27: JUSTINE, Marquis de Sade 385

  Chapter #28: QUER PASTICCIACCIO BRUTTO DEVIA MERULANA,

  Carlo Emilio Gadda 403 Chapter #29: THINGS FALL APART, Chinua Achebe 413

  CORE CURRICULUM (REQUIRED READING) 3

  Chapter #30: THE NOCTURNAL CONSPIRACY, Smoke Wyannoch Harvey 426

  Chapter #31: CHE GUEVARA TALKS TO YOUNG PEOPLE, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna 436

  Chapter #32: "GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE," Flannery O'Connor 457

  Chapter #33: THE TRIAL, Franz Kafka 460

  Chapter #34: PARADISE LOST, John Milton 471

  Chapter #35: THE SECRET GARDEN, Frances Hodgson Burnett 479

  Chapter #36: METAMORPHOSES, Ovid 495

  FINAL EXAM 509

  Introduction

  I had 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 Bond—you 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 began—with a wheeze."

  Given such rigid parameters, I always assumed I wouldn't 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 don't know what kind of fields—any kind that were gold and frothy) and, with any luck, a small triumph of science or philosophy to my name. And yet the decision —no, the grave necessity—to take pen to paper and write about my childhood—most critically, the year it unstitched like a snagged sweater—came much sooner than I ever imagined.

  It began with simple sleeplessness. It had been almost a year since I'd found Hannah dead, and I thought I'd managed to erase all traces of that night within myself, much in the way Henry Higgins with his relentless elocution exercises had scrubbed away Eliza's 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. I'd 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 tongue — bloated, the cherry pink of a kitchen sponge —slumped 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, they'd 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 shoelaces—an entire treatise could be written on those shoelaces—they 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 I'd 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 philosophy's but I wasn't invited because I was considered more than a little "bleak" in demeanor: "Especially in the morning when you're 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 Tiffany's, unlike the other girls sitting on pillows chain-smoking with tears in their eyes, I actually found myself hoping Holly didn't 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 Bethany's sighs.)

  And that wasn't 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 Stein's 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-gurg/i-tion?' "

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

  "Can anyone tell me what Gertrude meant by such a statement? Blue? No? Could you stay with us please? What about you, Shilla?" "It's obvious. She was talking about the insufferable vacuity of subsistence."

  "Very good."

  It appeared, in spite of my concerted efforts to the contrary (I wore fuzzy sweaters in yellow and pink, fixed my hair into what I considered a very upbeat ponytail), I had started to twist into that very something I'd been afraid of, ever since all of it had happened. I was becoming Wooden and Warped (mere rest stops on the highway to Hopping Mad), the kind of person who, in middle age, winced at children, or deliberately raced into a dense flock of pigeons minding their own business as they pecked at crumbs. Certainly, I'd always felt chills tiptoeing down my spine when I came across an eerily resonant newspaper headline or advertisement: "Steel Magnate Sudden Death at 50, Cardiac Arrest," "CAMPING EQUIPMENT LIQUIDATION SALE." But I always told myself that everyone —at least everyone fascinating—had a few scars. And scars didn't necessarily mean one couldn't be, say, more Katharine Hepburn than Captain Queeg when it came to overall outlook and demeanor, a little more Sandra Dee than Scrooge.

  My gradual decent into grimdom might have continued unabated, had it not been for a certain startling phone call one cold March afternoon. It was almost a year to the day after Hannah died.

  "You' said Soo-Jin, barely turning from Diagram 2114.74 "Amino Acids and Peptides" to hand me the phone.

  "Hello?"

 
"Hi. It's me. Your past."

  I couldn't breathe. It was unmistakable—her low voice of sex and highways, equal parts Marilyn and Charles Kuralt, but it had changed. If once it had been sugared and crackly, now it was porridged, grueled.

  "Don't worry/' Jade said. "I'm not catching up with you." She laughed, a short, Ha laugh, like a foot kicking a rock. "I no longer smoke," she announced, obviously quite proud of herself, and then she went on to explain that after St. Gallway she hadn't made it to college. Instead, due to her "troubles" she'd voluntarily admitted herself to a "Narnia kind of place" where people talked about their feelings and learned to watercolor fruit. Jade hinted excitedly that a "really huge rock star" had been in residence on her floor, the comparatively well-adjusted third floor ("not as suicidal as the fourth or as manic as the second") and they'd become "close," but to reveal his name would be to forsake everything she'd learned during her ten-month "growth period" at Heathridge Park. (Jade now, I realized, saw herself as some sort of herbaceous vine or creeper.) One of the parameters of her "graduation," she explained (she used this word, probably because it was preferable to "release") was that she tie up Loose Ends.