Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,7

accent too. Geneva complained that every time she heard me she thought of Dachau. I tried to curb it, an effort that brought me to the squeaky clean accent I have today. Ah, well," Dad sighed and waved in the air, his gesture of When All's Said and Done. "I suppose they didn't think I was good enough. They had plans to marry her off to one of those pretty boys with hair mannerisms and a preponderance of real estate, someone who hadn't seen the world, or if he had, only through the windows of a Presidential Suite at the Ritz. They didn't understand her."

And so my mother, "tying her duty, beauty, wit and fortunes / In an extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere," fell for Dad's tales of flood and field. They were married at a registrar in Pitts, New Jersey, with two witnesses recruited from a highway Huddle House: one, a truck driver; the other, a waitress named Peaches who hadn't slept in four days and yawned thirty-two times (Dad counted) during the exchange of vows. Around this time Dad had been having disagreements with the conservative head of the Political Science Department at Columbia, culminating in a major blowout over an article Dad published in The Federal Journal of Foreign Affairs entitled "Steel-Toe Stilettos: The Designer Fashions of American Foreign Aid" (Vol. 45, No. 2,1987). He quit mid-semester. They moved to Oxford, Mississippi. Dad took a position teaching Conflict Resolution in the Third World at Ole Miss, while my mother worked for the Red Cross and began to catch butterflies.

I was born five months later. My mother decided to call me Blue, because for her first year of Lepidoptera study with the Southern Belles' Association of Butterflies, with its Tuesday night meetings at the First Baptist Church (lectures included "Habitat, Conservation and Hindwing Coupling," as well as "Attractive Showcase Display"), the Cassius Blue was the only butterfly Natasha could catch (see "Leptotescassius" Butterfly Dictionary, Meld, 2001 éd.). She tried different nets (canvas, muslin, mesh), perfumes (honeysuckle, patchouli), the various stalking techniques (upwind, downwind, crosswind) and the many netting swings (the Swoop, the Shorthanded Jackknife, the Lowsell-Pit Maneuver). Beatrice "Bee" Lowsell, President of SBAB, even met privately with Natasha on Sunday afternoons to coach her on Modes of the Butterfly Chase (the Zigzag, the Indirect Pursuit, the Speedy Snag, the Recovery) as well as the Art of Hiding One's Shadow. Nothing worked. The Shy Yellow, the White Admiral, the Viceroy were repelled from my mother's net like two same-sided magnets.

"Your mother decided it was a sign, so she decided to adore only catching Cassius Blues. She'd come home with about fifty of them every time she went into the fields and managed to become quite an expert on them. Sir Charles Erwin, Principal Lepidoptera Survival Specialist at the Surrey Museum of Insects in England, a man who evidently had appeared not once but four times on Bug Watch on the BBC, he actually phoned your mother to discuss Leptotes cassius feeding patterns on matured flowers of the lima bean."

Whenever I voiced a particular hatred of my name, Dad always said the same thing: "You should be happy she wasn't always catching the Swamp Metalmark or the Scarce Silver-spotted Flambeau."

The Lafayette County Police told Dad Natasha had apparently fallen asleep at the wheel in broad daylight, and Dad admitted that, four or five months prior to the accident, Natasha had been known to work through the night on her butterflies. She'd fallen asleep in the oddest of places: cooking Dad Irish oatmeal at the stove, on the examination table as Dr. Moffet listened to her heart, even while riding the escalator between the first and second floors of Ridgeland Mall.

"I told her not to work so hard on the bugs," Dad said. "After all, they were only a hobby. But she insisted on working through the night on those display cases, and she could be very bullheaded. When she had an idea, when she believed something, she wouldn't let go of it. And still—she was as fragile as her own butterflies, an artist who feels things deeply. To be sensitive is fine, but it makes day-to-day living—life —rather painful, I'd imagine. I used to joke that when someone cut down a tree in the Brazilian Amazon, or stepped on a fire ant, or when a sparrow flew smack into a sliding glass door, it hurt her."

If it weren't for Dad's anecdotes and observations (his pas de