Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,5

visiting professorship.

"There is nothing more arresting than a disciplined course of instruction," he said abruptly.

I must have rolled my eyes or grimaced, because he shook his head, stood up and shoved the thing—an impressive two inches thick—into my hands.

"I'm serious. Is there anything more glorious than a professor? Forget about his molding the minds, the future of a nation—a dubious assertion; there's little you can do when they tend to emerge from the womb predestined for Grand Theft Auto Vice City. No. What I mean is, a professor is the only person on earth with the power to put a veritable frame around life —not the whole thing, God no—simply a fragment of it, a small wedge. He organizes the unorganizable. Nimbly partitions it into modern and postmodern, renaissance, baroque, primitivism, imperialism and so on. Splice that up with Research Papers, Vacation, Midterms. All that order—simply divine. The symmetry of a semester course. Consider the words themselves: the seminar, the tutorial, the advanced whatever workshop accessible only to seniors, to graduate fellows, to doctoral candidates, the practicum—what a marvelous word: practicuml You think me crazy. Consider a Kandinsky. Utterly muddled, put a frame around it, voilà—looks rather quaint above the fireplace. And so it is with the curriculum. That celestial, sweet set of instructions, culminating in the scary wonder of the Final Exam. And what is the Final Exam? A test of one's deepest understanding of giant concepts. No wonder so many adults long to return to university, to all those deadlines— ahhh, that structure! Scaffolding to which we may cling! Even if it is arbitrary, without it, we're lost, wholly incapable of separating the Romantic from the Victorian in our sad, bewildering lives . . ."

I told Dad he'd lost his mind. He laughed.

"One day you'll see," he said with a wink. "And remember. Always have everything you say exquisitely annotated, and, where possible, provide staggering Visual Aids, because, trust me, there will always be some clown sitting in the back—somewhere by the radiator—who will raise his fat, flipperlike hand and complain, 'No, no, you've got it all wrong.' "

I swallowed, staring down at the blank page. I triple-lutzed the ink pen in my fingers, my gaze falling out the window where, down in Harvard Yard, solemn students, winter scarves wrapped tightly around their necks, hurried down the paths and across the grass. " 'I sing of arms and of the man, fated to be an exile,' " Zolo had sung only a few weeks ago, bizarrely tapping his foot on every other word so the cuffs of his plaid pants raised and you caught an unwelcome glimpse of his toothpick ankles and dainty white socks. I took a deep breath. At the top of the page, I wrote in my neatest handwriting, "Curriculum," and then, "Required Reading."

That was always how Dad began.

Part One

I

Othello

Before I tell you about Hannah Schneider's death, I'll tell you about my mother's.

At 3:10 P.M. on September 17, 1992, two days before she was to pick up the new blue Volvo station wagon at Dean King's Volvo and Infiniti dealership in Oxford, my mother, Natasha Alicia Bridges van Meer, driving her white Plymouth Horizon (the car Dad had nicknamed Certain Death) crashed through a guardrail along Mississippi State Highway 7 and hit a wall of trees.

She was killed instantly. I would've been killed instantly too if Dad had not, by that strange, oily hand of Fate, telephoned my mother around lunch to tell her that she didn't need to pick me up from Calhoun Elementary as she always did. Dad had decided to blow off the kids who always hung around after his Political Science 400a: Conflict Resolution class to pose ill-considered questions. He'd pick me up from Ms. Jetty's kindergarten and we'd spend the rest of the day at the Mississippi Wildlife Conservatory Project in Water Valley.

While Dad and I learned that Mississippi had one of the best deer management programs in the country with a population of 1.75 million white-tailed deer (surpassed only by Texas), rescue crews were trying to extricate my mother's body from the totaled car with the Jaws of Life.

Dad, on Mom: "Your mother was anarabesque."

Dad was fond of using ballet terms to describe her (other favorites include attitude, ciseaux and balancé), in part because she trained as a girl for seven years at the famed Larson Ballet Conservatory in New York (quitting, per her parents wishes, to attend The Ivy School on East 81st Street) but also because she