Special Topics in Calamity Physics (37 page)

"Dad-"

He shook his head. "I've accepted a position at the University of Wyoming for next term. A town called Fort Peck. One of the best salaries I've seen in years. After your final exams next week, we'll orchestrate the move. You can call Harvard Admissions on Monday and notify them of the change of address."

"What?"

"You heard me quite well." "Y-you can't do this." It came out a shrill, quivering whine. And it's embarrassing to admit, but I was trying not to cry. "And that is precisely my point. If we'd had this conversation a mere three or four months ago you would have recognized this as an opportunity to
quote
Hamlet.
'O! that this too too solid flesh would melt / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew.' No, this town seems to have affected you like television on Americans. It's turned you into a side order of sauerkraut."

"I won't go."

Thoughtfully, he twisted the cap on his ink pen. "My dear, I understand in full the melodrama that is about to transpire. After you inform me you're running away to go live at the Dairy Queen, you'll go to your room, sob into your pillow that
lahf ain't fair,
throw things —I suggest socks; we're renting— tomorrow you'll refuse to speak to me, a week from today you'll have fallen into a pattern of one-word replies and amongst your Peter Pan
playas
you'll refer to me as the Red Mafia, one whose life's sole intent is to reduce to rubble your every chance at happiness. This pattern of behavior will doubtlessly continue until we
blow this here town,
and after three days in Fort Peck, you'll be speaking again, albeit between eye rolls and grimaces. And in a year, you'll thank me. Tell me it was the best thing I ever did. I thought by having you read
The Annals of Time
we'd circumvented such sludge.
Scio me nihil scire.
But if you still insist on putting both of us through this tedium, I suggest you get the ball rolling. I have a lecture to write on the Cold War and fourteen research papers to grade, each penned by a student with no concept of irony."

He sat there, his face burnt-tan and brutal in the gold lamplight, supremely arrogant and unapologetic (see "Picasso enjoying the fine weather in the South of France,"
Respecting the Devil,
Hearst, 1984, p. 210). He was waiting for me to retire, retreat, as if I was one of his limp-jawed students who'd shown up during Office Hours, interrupting his research to pose some crackpot question about right and wrong.

I wanted to
kill
him. I wanted to take a fire poker to his too, too solid flesh (anything hard and pointy would do) so his hard-bitten face would deform in fear and out of his mouth, not that perfect piano sonata of words, but a strangled, soul-ripped
Ahhhhhhhhhl,
the kind of sob one hears reverberating through damp chronicles of medieval torture and the Old Testament. Hot tears had begun their exodus, making their slow, stupid way down my face.

"I—I'm not leaving," I said again.
"You
go. Go back to the Congo."

He gave no indication he'd even heard me, because his cherished lecture on the ABCs of Reaganism had already snagged his attention. His head was down, glasses returned to the end of his nose, an implacable smile. I tried to think of something to say, something huge and thrilling—a hypothesis of some kind, an obscure quotation that would knock him off his seat, turn his eyes to quarters. But as so often happens when one is thinking and feeling in the commotion of the present moment, I couldn't think of a thing. All I could do was stand with my arms at my sides, arms that felt like chicken wings.

The next few moments transpired in a detached haze. I felt the same sensation convicted murderers saturated in inmate orange describe in detail when asked by a keen news reporter wearing crummy bronze makeup how he/she, so seemingly
average
a human being, came to brutally wring the life out of a certain harmless person. Such offenders speak, a little dizzily, of the lonely clarity that settled over them on that fateful day, light as a swooping cotton sheet, an awake anesthesia that permitted them for the first time in their quiet lives, to ignore Prudence and Discretion, to give Good Sense the cold shoulder, to snub Self-Preservation and look right through Second Thoughts.

I walked out of the library, down the hall. I stepped outside, closing the front door behind me as softly as I could, so the Prince of Darkness didn't hear. I stood for two or three minutes on the steps, staring at the barebones trees, the strict light from the windows quilting the lawn.

I began to run. It was awkward at first in Jefferson's high heels, so I took them off, flung them over my shoulder. I hurried down the driveway and then down the street, past the empty cars and the flower beds cruddy with pinecones and dead flower stalks, past the potholes and mailboxes and the fallen branches grasping the street and the greenish puddles of light leaking from the streetlights.

Our house, 24 Armor Street, was buried in a densely forested section of Stockton known as Maple Grove. Though it wasn't one of those Orwellian gated communities like Pearl Estates (where we lived in Flitch) with identical white houses lined up like post-orthodontics teeth and the entry gate an aging actress (shrill, rusty, temperamental), Maple Grove still boasted its own exclusive Town Hall, Police Force, Zip Code and its own Unfriendly Welcome Sign ("You are now entering the Township of Maple Grove, an elegant and private residential community").

The fastest way out of the Grove was to cut directly south off our street, head into the woods and skulk through some twenty-two elegant and private backyards. I carefully made my way, hiccupping and crying at the same time, the houses noiseless and sedate, slumped against the smooth lawns like dozing elephants on ice rinks. I crawled through a barricade of blue spruce, scrambled through a reef of pines, shimmied down a hill, until I was unceremoniously emptied out, like water from a gutter, onto Orlando Avenue, Stockton's answer to the Sunset Strip.

I was without plan, plum out of ideas, at a loss. Even within fifteen minutes of running away from home, unmooring oneself from one's parent, one was struck by the vastness of things, the typhoon ferocity of the world, the frailty of one's boat. Without thinking, I hurried across the street to the BP gas station and pushed open the door to the Food Mart. It dinged a pleasant hello. The kid always working, Larson, was incarcerated in the front in his bulletproof holding pen, talking to one of his girlfriends dangling in front of his window like an air freshener. I ducked into the nearest aisle.

Well, it just so happened Hello, My Name Is LARSON was a kid Dad took to like a Surinam Cockroach to bat droppings. He was one of those unsinkable eighteen-year-olds, with a Hardy Boy face no one had anymore, all freckles and gee-whiz grin, thick brown hair that grew around his face like an urn plant and a lanky body in constant motion as if he was being operated by a ventriloquist on speed (see Chapter 2, "Charlie McCarthy,"
The Puppets That Changed Our Lives,
Mesh, 1958). Dad found Larson
wondrous.
And that was the thing with Dad: he'd teach Modes of Mediation to a thousand John Dorys he was barely able to stomach, and then he'd pay a kid for berry-flavored Turns and fall head over heels, declaring him a veritable dolphin who'd spiral through the air when you whistled. "Now
that's
a promising young man," said Dad. "I'd exchange every Happy, Sleepy and Doc to teach
him.
He has spark. You don't find that often."

"If it ain't the girl with the dad," announced the store intercom. "Innit past yer bedtime?"

Doused in the dead light of the Food Mart, I felt absurd. My feet hurt, I was wearing an overcooked marshmallow and my face (I could see it plainly in the reflective shelving) was decaying by the minute into an unstable mess of crusty tears and bad makeup (see "Radon-221,"
Questions of Radioactivity,
Johnson, 1981, p. 120). I was also festooned with one billion pine needles.

"Come on over here and say hello! Whatcha doin' out so late?"

Reluctantly, I made my way to the cashier window. Larson was wearing jeans and a red T-shirt that read MEAN REDS, and he was grinning. And that was the thing with Larson; he was one of those people who grinned all the time. He had ticklish eyes too, which had to explain the multitude of nutty-eyed peanut-butter parfaits thawing all over his Food Mart on any given night. Even when you were standing in front of his window innocuously paying for gas, his eyes, the clear-cut color of milk chocolate or mud, had a way of oozing all over you, so you couldn't help but have a feeling he was seeing something private about you—you stark naked, for example, or you saying humiliating things in your sleep, or worst of all, you in your favorite dumb fantasy, in which you walked a red carpet and wore a long beaded gown everyone took great pains not to step on.

"Lemme guess," he said. "Boyfriend trouble."

"Oh. I, uh, had a fight with my dad." I sounded like scrunched aluminum foil. "Yeah? Saw him the other day. Came by with his girlfriend." "They broke up." He nodded. "Hey, Diamanta, go get her a Slurpee." "Whut," said Diamanta, making a sour face. "Seventy-ounce. Any flavor. On me." Diamanta, in glittery pink shirt and sparkly jean miniskirt, was Pixy-stick skinny and had that wan, white parchment skin through which, in harsher lights, you could glimpse thin blue veins swimming through her arms and legs. Scowling at me, she removed her black platform boot from the bottom of the greeting card stand, turned and twinkled down the aisle.

"Sure," Larson said, shaking his head. "Old mans. They can be tough. When I was fourteen my pops cleared out. Left me nothin' but work boots and his subscription to
People
magazine, I kid you not. Two years? Did nothin' but glance over my shoulder, look for him every place. Think I'd see him 'cross the street. Passin' by on a bus. An I'd tail the bus one enda town to the other, thinkin' it was
him,
waitin', waitin' like a crazy man, just for him to get out at the stop. Only when he got out, it was someone else's old man. Wudn't mine. Things turned out, though, what he did? Best thing ever happened to me. Wanta know why?"

I nodded.

He leaned down, hitching his elbows on the counter.

"Cuza him I kin play King Layer."

"What flavor?" yelled Diamanta by the Slurpee machine.

"What flavor?" asked Larson. Without blinking, he recounted the names like an auctioneer overseeing a livestock sale. "Rootbeer, Blue Bubbagum,

7-Up, 7-Up
Tropicale,
Grapermelon, Crystallat, 'Nana Split, Code Red, Live-War-"

"Rootbeer is fine. Thanks."

"Lady without shoes would like Rootbeer," he said into the intercom.

"King what did you say?" I asked.

He grinned, revealing two severely crooked front teeth, one peeking out from behind the other as if it had stage fright.

"Layer. Shakespeare personage. Contrary to popular belief, person needs heartbreak an' betrayal. Else you got no stayin' power. Can't play a lead for five whole acts. Can't play two performances inna day. Can't fashion a character arch from Point A ta Point G. Can't get through the denewment, create a convincin' through line—all that stuff. See whut I'm sayin'? Person's
gotta
get banged up. Gotta get jerked around, lived in. So he's got somethin' to use, see. Hurts like hell. Sure. Feels bad. Not sure you wanna go on. But that gives way to what they commonly call emotive re-zone-ance. An emotive rezonance makes it impossible fer people to take their eyes offa you, when yer onstage. Ever turned round in a good movie and seen the faces? Pretty intense. Diamanta?"

"Ain't coming out right," she cried.

"Turn off the machine, put it back on and try again."

"Where's the switch at?"

"On the side. Red."

"Looks all nasty," she said.

I stared up at him. Dad was right. There
was
something riveting about the kid. It was his outdated earnestness, the way his eyebrows did the polka when he talked and his mountain accent, which made the words jut out like pointy, slippery rocks on which he might get hurt. It was also the thousands of copper freckles dusting him head to toe as if he'd been dipped in glue, then in fine, penny-iridescent confetti.

"See," he said, leaning in and widening his eyes, "ya ain't felt pain, you kin only play yerself. And that ain't gonna move people. Maybe yer good for toothpaste, hemorrhoid commercials and such. But that's it. You'll never be a legend in yer own time. Ain't that what ya wanna be?"

Diamanta shoved the gigantic Slurpee into my hands and resumed her droop by the greeting cards. "Now," Larson said, slapping his hands together, "ya got to tell us what yer name is." "Blue."

"Got to tell us.
Blue.
Came to my doorstep tonight in yer hour
a
need.

Whud we do now?" I looked from Larson to Diamanta, back to Larson again. "What do you mean?" I asked. He shrugged. "Ya turned up here ona dark stormy night. At"—he

glanced at his watch —"2:06." He peered at my feet and nodded. "No shoes.

Swut they call dramatic action. Swut happens in the beginnin' of a scene." He stared at me, his face grave as any photo of Sun Yat-sen. "Gotta tell us if we're in a comedy or a mellow drama or a whodidit or what they call a theater of the absurd. Ya just can't leave us standin' on stage with no dialogue."