Special Topics in Calamity Physics (36 page)

Whatever it was, it wasn't until Jade and I crept our way outside, sneaking past the cafeteria, still lit but silent (a few teachers lingered on the patio, including Ms. Thermopolis, a dying ember by the wooden doors), hightailing it out of St. Gallway in the Mercedes without encountering Eva Brewster, roaring down Pike Avenue past Jiffy's Eatery, Dollar Depot, Dippity's, Le Salon Esthétique—when I realized I'd forgotten to return the
Blackbird
book to Hannah's desk. I was actually still holding it and in my haste, confusion, the darkness, only dimly aware I'd been doing so.

"How come you still have that book?" Jade demanded as we swung into a Burger King drive-thru. "She's going to know it's gone. Hope she doesn't dust for fingerprints —hey, what do you want to eat? Hurry and decide. I'm starved."

We ate Whoppers drenched in the acid light of the parking lot, barely speaking. I suppose Jade was one of those people who flung handfuls of wild accusations into the air, smiling as they rained on everyone's head, and then the festivities were over and she went home. She looked contented, refreshed even, as she jostled fries into her mouth, waved at some scab making his way to his pick-up balancing a tray of Cokes in his arms, and yet, deep in my chest, unavoidable as the sound of your heart when you stopped to hear it beating, I felt, as deadbeat gumshoe Peter Aekman (who had a weakness for the chalk-tube and flutes of skee) said at the end of
Wrong Twist
(Chide, 1954), "like the bean-schnozzle been jammed far up my lousy, threatening to sneeze metal." I stared at the wrinkled cover of that book, where, despite the faded ink, the creases, the man's black eyes rose off the page.

"So these are the eyes of the Devil," Dad remarked thoughtfully once, picking up and scrutinizing his own copy. "He looks out and sees you — doesn't he?"

There was an anecdote Dad recounted like clockwork whenever he had a colleague over for dinner. Having a guest was rare, occurring only once every two or three towns in which we lived. Customarily, Dad found it difficult to withstand the echoing howls of his associates at Hattiesburg College of Arts and Science, the displays of chest-beating rampant among his Cheswick College cronies or professors at the University of Oklahoma at Flitch, eternally absorbed with feeding, grooming and being territorial to the exclusion of all else. (Dad regarded silverbacks—professors over sixty-five who had tenure, dandruff, rubbery shoes and quadrangle glasses that bugified their eyes—with particular disdain.)

Once in a while, however, under the wild oak trees, Dad bumped into his own kind (if not his exact subspecies or species, at least the same genus), a compatriot who'd made his way down from the foliage and learned to walk on two feet.

Naturally, this person never was as sophisticated an academic as Dad, nor as handsome. (The man was almost always saddled with a flattish face, an extensive, slanted forehead and an awning brow.) But Dad would cheerfully extend a Van Meer dinner invitation to this uncommonly advanced lecturer; and on a quiet Saturday or Sunday night, big, fig-eyed Professor of Linguistics Mark Hill would turn up, with his hands enduringly tucked into the patch pockets of his shapeless dinner jacket, or Associate Professor of English Lee Sanjay Song, with his quince-and-cream complexion and teeth in a traffic jam, and somewhere between the spaghetti and the tiramisu Dad treated him to the story of Tobias Jones the Damned.

It was a straightforward tale about a nervous, pale-skinned chap Dad encountered in Havana working at OPAI
(Organization Panamaricana de la Ayuda International)
during the hot rum-soaked summer of 1983, a British kid from Yorkshire who, in the span of a single luckless week in August, lost his passport, wallet, wife, right leg and dignity—in that order. (Every now and then, to illicit even more extreme cries of amazement from his audience, Dad reduced the tragedy to a neat span of twenty-four hours.)

Never one for paying attention to physical details, Dad was disappointingly hazy on what the face of the Exceedingly Ill-fated looked like, but I was able to discern, out of Dad's poorly lit verbal portrait, a tall, pale man with stalk-like legs (after he was hit by the Packard, leg), maize-colored hair, a clammy gold pocket watch repeatedly removed from his breast pocket and blinked at disbelievingly, a propensity for sighing, for cufflinks, for lingering too long in front of the chrome metal fan (the only one in the room) and for spilling café con leche on his trousers.

Dad's dinner guest listened in rapt attention as Dad narrated the beginning of the ill-starred week, which found Tobias showing off his new fiesta linen shirt to his co-workers at OPAI while a pack of
gente de guarandabia
ransacked his bungalow back at Comodoro Neptuno, all the way to the tale's miserable end, a mere seven days later, with Tobias prostrate in his lumpy bed at
el hospital, Julio Trigo
missing a right leg and recuperating from an attempted suicide (fortunately, the attending nurse had been able to pry him off the window ledge).

"And we never knew what happened to him," Dad said in closing with a thoughtful sip of wine. Professor of Psychology Alfonso Rigollo stared dolefully at the edge of the dinner table. And after he muttered, "Shit," or "Tough luck," Dad and he would discuss predestination, or the waywardness of a woman's love, or how Tobias might've had a chance for canonization if he hadn't tried to kill himself and had stood for something. (According to Dad, Tobias had definitely performed one of the three miracles required for sainthood: back in 1979 he'd somehow convinced the ocean-eyed Adalia to marry him.)

Within twenty minutes, though, Dad would twist the conversation around to the
real
reason he'd brought up Tobias Jones in the first place, to detail one of his favorite theories, "The Theory of Determination," because his final position (related with the intensity of Christopher Plummer murmuring, "The rest is silence.") was that Tobias was not, as it might appear, a defenseless victim of fate, but a victim of himself, of his own "sallow head."

"And thus we are faced with the simple question," said Dad. "Is man's destiny determined by the vicissitudes of environment or free will? I argue that it is free will, because what we think, what we dwell upon in our heads, whether it be fears or dreams, has a direct effect upon the physical world. The more you think about your downfall, your ruin, the greater the likelihood that it will occur. And conversely, the more one thinks of victory, the more likely one will achieve it."

Dad always paused here for dramatic effect, staring across the room at the trite little daisy landscape hanging on the wall, or the pattern of horse heads and riding crops running up and down the faded dining room wallpaper. Dad adored all Suspensions and Silences, so he could feel everyone's eyes madly running all over his face like Mongol armies in 1215 sacking Beijing.

"Obviously," he continued with a slow smile, "it's a concept that has been bastardized of late in Western Culture, associated with the runny-nosed Why-Nots and How-Comes of self-help and PBS marathons that drone on into the wee hours, begging you to pledge money and in return, receive forty-two hours of meditation tapes one can chant to when one is mired in traffic. Yet visualization is a concept that was once considered not so frothy, dating back to the founding of the Buddhist Mauryan Empire, around 320 B.c. History's great leaders understood it. Niccolo Machiavelli tipped Lorenzo de Medici off to it, though he called it 'prowess' and 'foresight.' Julius Caesar understood it—he saw himself conquering Gaul decades before he actually did so. Who else? Hadrian, Da Vinci certainly, another great man, Ernest Shackleton —oh, and Miyamoto Musashi. Take a look at his
The Book of Five Rings.
Members of
Nachtlich,
The Nightwatchmen, also followed it, of course. Even America's most dashing leading man, the circus-educated Archibald Leach, understood it. He is quoted, in that funny little book we have, what is it, the — "

"Talk of the Town: Hollywood Heroes Have Their Moment,"
I chirped.

"Yes. He said, 'I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until I became that person. Or he became me.' In the end, a man turns into what he thinks he is, however large or small. It is the reason why certain people are prone to colds and catastrophe. And why others can dance on water."

Dad obviously thought he was one of the ones who could dance on water, because for the next hour or so, he went on to discuss his premise in meticulous detail—the necessity of discipline and reputation, the curbing of emotion and feeling, modes for quietly implementing change. (I'd sat in the wings during so many performances, I was a natural choice for the understudy, though Dad never missed a show.) Although Dad's concert was filled with sweetness and light, none of his melodies were all that ground-breaking. He was pretty much summarizing the French ghostwritten
La Grimace,
a funny little book on power published in 1824. His other ideas were cherry-picked from H. H. Hill's
Napoleons Progress
(1908),
Beyond Good and Evil
(Nietzsche, 1886),
The Prince
(Machiavelli, 1515),
History Is Power
(Hermin-Lewishon, 1990), obscure works like Aashir Alhayed's
The Instigations of a Dystopia
(1973) and
The Con Game
(1989) by Hank Powers. He even referenced a few folktales by Aesop and La Fontaine.

Our dinner guest was nothing more than a cavity of reverential silence by the time I served coffee. His mouth was always open. His eyes resembled harvest moons. (If it'd been 1400 B.C. there was a chance he'd have crowned Dad leader of the Israelites and asked him to lead the way to the Promised Land.)

"Thank you, Dr. Van Meer," he said as he was leaving, vigorously shaking Dad's hand. "It's been a-a pleasure. Everything you talked about—it-it was informative. I'm honored." He turned to me, blinking in surprise, as if he was seeing me for the first time all evening. "It was a privilege to meet you as well. I look forward to seeing you again."

I never did see him again, nor any of the others. For these colleagues, the Van Meer dinner invitation was like Birth, Death, the Senior Prom, a once in a lifetime event, and though there were enthusiastic promises of some future rendezvous shouted into the cricketed night as Teaching Assistant to Poetic and Narrative Forms dizzily lumbered to his car, in the ensuing weeks, Dad's kind always withdrew into the concrete corridors of the University of Oklahoma at Flitch or Petal or Jesulah or Roane, never to emerge again.

Once, I asked Dad why.

"I don't think the man's presence was titillating to the degree that I wish to put myself through a repeat performance. He was neither dope, money nor jiggy with it," he said, barely glancing up from Christopher Hare's
Social Instability and the Narcotics Trade
(2001).

I found myself thinking about the story of Tobias the Damned quite often, in particular, when Jade drove me home after the Christmas Cabaret. Whenever anything strange happened, even the most trivial of occurrences, I found myself sort of going back to him, secretly afraid with just a little heave-ho I might turn
into
him—by my own fear and nervousness, setting off some awful spiral of misfortune and misery, thereby severely disappointing Dad. It'd mean I'd missed every one of the principles of his beloved Determination Theory, with its extensive section on handling emergencies. ("There are very few men who have the shrewdness to think and feel beyond the commotion of the present moment.
Try,"
he commanded, recapitulating Carl von Clausewitz.)

As I walked up the lighted path to our porch, I could think of nothing I wanted to do more than forget Eva Brewster, Charles Manson, everything Jade had told me about Hannah, and simply disintegrate into bed, in the morning, maybe curl up next to Dad with
The Chronicle of Collectivism.
Maybe I'd even help him trek through a few student essays on future methods of war or have him read aloud
The Waste Land
(Eliot, 1922). Normally I couldn't stand it—he did it in a very grandiose way, channeling John Barry-more (see "Baron Felix von Geigern,"
Grand Hotel).
But now, it seemed like the perfect antidote to my gloom.

When I opened the front door and walked into the foyer, I noticed the lights were still on in the library. I quickly tucked the
Blackbird
book into my backpack, still slumped next to the stairs where I'd heaved it Friday afternoon, and hurried down the hall to find Dad. He was in his red leather armchair, a cup of Earl Gray tea on the table next to him, head bent over a legal pad, doubtlessly scribbling another lecture or an essay for
Federal Forum.
His illegible handwriting tangled down the page.

"Hi," I said.

He glanced up. "Know what time it is?" he asked pleasantly.

I shook my head as he checked his watch.

"One twenty-two," he said.

"Oh. I'm sorry. I— "

"Who was it that dropped you off?"

"Jade."

"And where is Joe Public?"

"He's—well, I’m not sure."

"And where is your coat?"

"Oh, I left it. I forgot it at the-"

"And what in God's name did you do to your
leg?"

I looked down. Blood had crusted around a cut on my shin, and my stockings had seized the opportunity to Go West, Young Man, ripping all the way up and around my leg, staking a claim somewhere in my shoe.

"I skinned it."

Dad slowly removed his reading glasses. He placed them delicately on the table next to him.

"We're through here/' he said.

"What?"

"Finito. Kaput. I've had enough of the deceit. I'll tolerate it no longer."

"What are you talking about?"

He stared at me, his face calm as the Dead Sea.

"Your fabricated Study Group," he said. "The flagrant bravado you've cultivated when it comes to lying, which, to be frank, is more than a little pedestrian in its execution. My dear,
Ulysses
is an implausible choice for a study group in a secondary institution, however academically progressive. I think you might have done better with Dickens." He shrugged. "Austen perhaps. But as you're standing there in stunned silence, I'll go on. The returning at all hours. The running around town like a hairless stray dog. The alcoholic binges, which, granted, I have no proof of, but can infer with little difficulty from the innumerable tales of America's wayward youths saturating the airwaves and those unattractive caves around your eyes. I have said little, every time you so eagerly ran out of that door resembling a Cocoa Puff, wearing what the freethinking world would unanimously identify as a piece of Kleenex, because I
assumed—
unwisely it seems—that given the advanced degree of your education, you'd eventually come to the realization at the end of this hootchy-cootchy-with-the-ho-dawgs game, that these
friends
of yours, these
puppy fats
with whom you choose to
pal around,
are a waste of time, their thoughts about themselves and the world, stale. Instead, you seem to be suffering from a severe case of blindness. And poor judgment. I have to step in for your sake."