Special Topics in Calamity Physics (77 page)

He looked at me as I slept, memorizing my face as if it was a passage of an extraordinary book he'd come across, the crux of which he wished to commit to memory in the off chance he found use for it during an exchange with a Dean.

Or else, staring at me—and I like to think this was the case —Dad came undone. No book tells one how to look at one's child one is leaving forever and will never see again (unless it's clandestinely, after thirty-five, forty years, and only then from a great distance, through binoculars, a telephoto lens or an $89.99 satellite photo). One probably gets close and tries to determine the exact degree of the nose from the face. One counts freckles, the ones never noticed before. And one also counts the faint creases in the eyelids, in the forehead, too. One watches the breathing, the peaceful smile —or, in the absence of such a smile, one willfully ignores the gaping, wheezing mouth, in order to make the memory polite. One probably gets a little carried away, too, introducing a little moonlight to silver the face, covering up those dark circles under the eyes, sound-looping adorable insects—better still, a gorgeous night bird—to lessen the cold, cell silence of the room.

Dad closed his eyes to make sure he knew it by heart (forty-degrees, sixteen, three, one, a sea way of breathing, peaceful smile, silvery eyes, enthusiastic nightingale). He pushed the comforter close to my check, kissed me on the forehead.

"You'll be fine, sweet. You really will."

He slipped from my room, downstairs, and outside to the taxi.

"Mr. Ray?" asked the driver.

"Dr.
Ray," Dad said.

And just like that—he was gone.

35

Th
e Secret Garden

T
he days shuffled by like bland schoolgirls. I didn't notice their individual faces, only their basic uniform: day and night, day and night. I had no patience for showers or balanced meals. I did a lot of lying on floors—childish certainly, but when one can lie on floors without anyone seeing one, trust me, one will lie on a floor. I discovered, too, the fleeting yet discernable joy of biting into a Whitman's chocolate and throwing the remaining half behind the sofa in the library. I could read, read, read until my eyes burned and the words floated like noodles in soup.

I ditched school like a boy with rusty breath and glue-stick palms. Instead, I took up with
Don Quixote
(Cervantes, 1605) —one would think I'd have driven to Videomecca and rented porn, at the very least
Wild Orchid
with Mickey Rourke, but alas, no—then some steamy paperback I'd kept hidden from Dad for years called
Speak Not,
My
Love
(Esther, 1992).

I thought about Death —not suicide, nothing that histrionic—more a begrudged acknowledgment, as if I'd snubbed Death for years, and now, having no one else, I had no choice but to exchange pleasantries with him. I thought about Evita, Havermeyer, Moats, Dee and Dum forming a nighttime Search Party, wielding torches, lanterns, pitchforks, clubs (as bigoted townspeople did when hunting a monster), discovering my wasted body slung over the kitchen table, arms limp at my sides, my head facedown in the crotch of Chekhov's
The Cherry Orchard
(1903).

Even when I tried to collect myself, pull myself together as Molly Brown had done in that
Titanic
lifeboat, or even find a productive hobby like the Birdman of Alcatraz, I failed. I thought
Future.
I saw
Black Hole.
I was spaghettified. I didn't have a friend, driver's license or survival instinct to my name. I didn't even have one of those Savings Accounts set up by a conscientious parent so their kid could learn Money. I was a minor, too, would remain so for another year. (My birthday was June 18.) I had no desire to end up in a Foster Home, the Castle in the Sky of which was to be supervised by a pair of retirees named Bill and Bertha, who wielded their Bibles like handguns, asked me call them "Mamaw" and "Papaw," and got tickled pink every time they stuffed me, their brand new turkey, with all the fixins (biscuits, poke salad and possum pie).

Seven days after Dad left, the phone began to ring. I didn't answer it, though I remained poised by the answering machine, my heart banging in my chest, in case it was he. "Gareth, you're causing quite a stir around here," said Professor Mike Devlin. "I'm wondering where you are."

"What on earth have you
done
with yourself? Now they say you're not coming back," said Dr. Elijah Masters, Chairman of the English Department and Harvard Alumni Interviewer. "I'll be sorely disappointed if that is the case. As you know, we have an unfinished chess game and I'm beating you to a pulp. I'd hate to think you've disappeared simply so I have to forgo the pleasure of telling you, 'Checkmate.' "

"Dr. Van Meer, you must call the office as soon as possible. Again, your daughter Blue has not appeared in class all week now. I hope you're aware that if she does not begin to make up some of the work, the idea of her graduating on time will be more and more— "

"Dr. Van Meer, this is Jenny Murdoch who sits on the front row of your Patterns of Democracy and Social Structure seminar? I was wondering if Solomon is now going to be in charge of our research papers, because he's like, totally giving us new parameters. He says it only has to be seven to ten pages. But
you
wrote on the syllabus twenty to twenty-five, so everyone's totally baffled. Some clarification would be much appreciated. I also wrote you an e-mail."

"Please call me as soon as possible at my home or office, Gareth," said Dean Kushner.

I'd told Dad's assistant, Barbara, that I'd written down the incorrect contact number for Dad at the conference and asked her to let me know as soon as she heard from him. She hadn't called however, so I called her.

"We still haven't heard," she said. "Dean Kushner's having a heart attack. Solomon Freeman is going to have to take over his classes for finals. Where
is
he?"

"He had to go to Europe," I said. "His mother had a heart attack."

"Ohhh," said Barbara. "I'm sorry. Is she going to be all right?"

"No."

"Gosh. That's so sad. But then why hasn't he — ?"

I hung up.

I wondered if my steady stupor, my inertia, marked the onset of madness. Only a week ago I'd believed madness to be a far-fetched idea, but now I recalled a handful of occasions when Dad and I encountered a woman muttering expletives as if she was sneezing. I wondered how she'd become that way, if it was a debutante's dreamy descent down a grand flight of stairs or else a sudden misfire in the brain, its effects immediate, like a snakebite. Her complexion was red like raw dishwasher hands and the soles of her feet were black, as if she'd meticulously dipped them in tar. As Dad and I passed her, I held my breath, squeezed his hand. He'd squeeze back—our tacit agreement he'd
never
allow me to wander the streets with my hair like a bird's nest, my overalls marred with urine and dirt.

Now I could, with no trouble at all, wander the streets with hair like a bird's nest in overalls of urine and dirt. The That's-Ridiculous, the Don't-Be-Absurd had happened. I'd be selling my body for a frozen Lender's bagel. Obviously, I'd been wrong all along about madness. It could happen to anyone.

For those who are
Marat/Sade
aficionados, I must deliver bad news. The shelf life of a depressed torpor for any otherwise healthy individual is ten, eleven, at the most, twelve days. After that, the mind can't help but notice such a disposition is as much use as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest, and that, if one didn't stop bouncing around like a big girl's blouse, Pimms and strawberries, Bob's your uncle and God save the bloody Queen, one just might not make it (see
Go See a Man About a Dog: Beloved Englishisms,
Lewis, 2001).

I didn't go mad. I got mad (see "Peter Finch,"
Network).
Rage, not Abe Lincoln, is the Great Emancipator. It wasn't long before I was tearing through 24 Armor Street, not limp and lost, but throwing shirts and June Bug needlepoints and library books and cardboard moving boxes marked THIS END UP like Jay Gatsby on a rampage, searching for something—even if it was something minor—to give me proof of where he'd gone and why. Not that I let myself hope I'd discover a Rosetta Stone, a twenty-page confession thoughtfully tucked into my pillowcase, between mattresses, in the icebox:
"Sweet. So now you know
.I am sorry, my little cloud. But allow me to explain. Why don't we start with Mississippi
..." It wasn't likely. As Mrs. McGillicrest, that penguin-bodied shrew from Alexandria Day informed our class, so triumphantly: "A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements."

The shock of Dad gone
(shock
didn't do it justice; it was astonishment, stunned, a bombshell—astunshelled), the fact he had blithely hoodwinked, bamboozled, conned (again, too tepid for my purposes —hoodzonked) me, me,
me,
his daughter, a person who, to quote Dr. Luke Ordinote, had "startling power and acumen," an individual who, to quote Hannah Schneider, did not "miss a thing," was so improbable, painful, impossible (impainible), I understood now Dad was nothing short of a madman, a genius and imposter, a cheat, a smoothie, the Most Sophisticated Sweet Talker Who Ever Lived.

Dad must be to secrets as Beethoven is to symphonies,
I chanted to myself. (It was the first of a series of stark statements I'd concoct in the ensuing week. When one has been hoodzonked, one's mind crashes, and when rebooted, reverts to unexpected, rudimentary formats, one of which was reminiscent of the mind-bending "Author Analogies" Dad devised as we toured the country.)

But Dad wasn't Beethoven. He wasn't even Brahms.

And Dad not being an unsurpassed maestro of mystery was regrettable, because infinitely more harrowing than being left with a series of obscure, incomprehensible Questions—which one can fill in at one's whim without fear of being graded—was having a few disquieting Answers.

My rampage through the house uncovered no evidence of note, only articles about civil unrest in West Africa and Peter Cower's
Inside Angola
(1980), which had fallen in the crevice between Dad's bed and bedside table (as nutritionless pieces of evidence as they come) and $3,000 in cash, crisply rolled up inside June Bug Penelope Slate's SPECIAL THOUGHTS ceramic mug kept on top of the refrigerator (Dad had purposefully left it for me, as the mug was usually reserved for loose change). Eleven days after he left, I wandered down to the road to collect the day's mail: a book of coupons, two clothing catalogues, a credit card application for Mr. Meery von Gare with 0% APR financing and a thick manila envelope addressed to Miss Blue van Meer, scrawled in majestic handwriting, the handwriting equivalent of trumpets and a stagecoach pulled by noble steeds.

Immediately, I ripped it open, pulling out the inch-thick stack of papers. Instead of a map of the South American White Slavery network with rescue instructions, or Dad's unilateral Declaration of Independence ("When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for a father to dissolve the paternal bands which have connected him to his daughter . . ."), I found a brief note on monogrammed stationery paper clipped to the front.

"You asked for these. I hope they help you/' Ada Harvey had written, then scrawled her loopy name beneath the knot of her initials.

Even though I'd hung up on her, hacked off her voice without a word of apology like a sushi chef chopping off eel heads, exactly as I'd asked, she'd sent me her father's research. As I raced back up the driveway and into the house with the papers, I found myself crying, weird condensation tears that spontaneously appeared on my face. I sat down at the kitchen table and carefully began to page through the stack.

Smoke Harvey had handwriting that was a distant cousin of Dad's, minuscule script blustered by a cruel northeasterly, THE NOCTURNAL CONSPIRACY, the man had written in caps in the top right corner of every page. The first few papers detailed the history The Nightwatchmen, the many names and apparent methodology (I wondered where he'd gotten his information, because he referenced neither Dad's article nor the Littleton book), followed by thirty pages or so on Gracey, most of it barely readable (Ada had used a photocopier that printed tire treads across the page): "Greek in origin,
not
Turkish," "Born February 12, 1944, in Athens, mother Greek, father American," "Reasons for radicalism unknown." I continued on. There were photocopies of old West Virginia and Texas newspaper articles detailing the two known bombings, "Senator Killed, Peace Freaks Suspected," "Oxico Bombing, 4 Killed, Nightwatchmen Sought," an article from
Life
magazine dated December 1978, "The End of Activism," about the dissolution of the Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society and other dissident political organizations, a few papers about COINTELPRO and other FBI maneuverings, a tiny California article, "Radical Sighted at Drugstore," and then, a newsletter. It was dated November 15,1987,
Daily Bulletin,
Houston Police Department, Confidential, For Police Use Only, WANTED BY LOCAL AND FEDERAL AUTHORITIES, Warrants on file at Harris County Sheriff Warrant Section, Bell 432-6329 —