Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,71

—"Drive home safely!"—but something in the timbre of her voice, that certain campfire quality, was gone. As Jade and I drove down the driveway, I looked back and saw her still standing on the porch, watching us, her green blouse in the gold light shivering like a swimming pool.

"I feel sick," I said.

Jade nodded. "Utterly wretched."

"Wonder if she'll forgive him."

"Of course she will. She knows him like the back of her hand. Nigel was born without the feeling gene. Other people have no appendix, not enough white blood cells. He doesn't have enough feeling. I guess they did a scan of his brain when he was kid and where other people have emotion, he has a vacuum of total space, poor kid. And he's gay, too. And sure, everyone's open-minded and accepting—all that jazz—but it still can't be easy in high school."

"He's gay?" I asked in amazement.

"Earth to Retch? Hello?" She looked at me as if I were a snag in tights. "You know, sometimes I wonder if you're all there, if you know what I mean. Have you ever gone to a doctor to make sure you have all your furniture upstairs? Because I have serious doubts about it, Gag. I really do."

Such things as anguish, woe, affliction, guilt, feelings of awfulness and utter wretchedness, the bread and butter of Days of Yore and Russians, sadly have very little staying power in these lickety-split Modern Times.

One has only to consult the 2002 edition of R. Stanbury's Illuminating Statistics and Cross-Century Comparisons, under "Grieving," to learn that the very idea of being Broken-hearted, Wretched, Desolate and Despairing is a thing of the past, soon to take on the amusing novelty of such archaic things as the Jalopy, the Jitterbug and Jams. The average American widower in 1802 waited an average of 18.9 years before remarrying, while in 2001 he holds out for an average 8.24 months. (In the "By State" snapshot, you will see in California he holds out for a horrifying 3.6 months.)

Of course, Dad made it his business to rage against this "cultural anesthetizing," this "ironing out of deep human sentiment, leaving only a flat, unwrinkled vacuity," and thus he'd deliberately raised me to be an insightful, sensitive sort of person, someone aware, beneath even the most tedious surfaces, of good, evil and the smoky shades in between. He made sure I took the time between Muders, Ohio, and Paducah, Washington, to commit to memory not one or two, but all of Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience," and thus I couldn't look at a fly buzzing around a hamburger without fretting, "Am not I / A fly like thee? / Or art not thou / A man like me?"

When I was with the Bluebloods though, it was easy to pretend I hadn't committed anything to memory except the lyrics of a thousand corn syrup R&B songs, that I'd never heard of anyone named Blake except that junior who always had his hands in his pockets and looked like he wanted to hit someone, that I could simply notice a fly and not think anything but shrill girlish expressions (Ew). Naturally, if Dad knew about my attitude, he would've called it "stomach-turning conformity," maybe even "a disgrace to the Van Meers." (It often slipped his mind he was an orphan.) Yet I saw it as thrilling, Romantic, if I allowed the current to take me along the "willowy hills and fields," or wherever it wanted, regardless of the consequences (see "The Lady of Shalott," Tennyson, 1842).

This was why I had no objections the following slattern Saturday night, November 22, when Jade made an entrance in the Purple Room wearing a black wig and a billowing white pantsuit. Colossal shoulder pads jutted off of her like the White Cliffs of Dover and she'd drawn duomo eyebrows over her eyes with what appeared to be a burnt sienna Crayola crayon.

"Guess who I am."

Charles turned to survey her. "Dame Edna."

" 'I never go out unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. You want The Girl Next Door? Go next door.' " She threw her head back and villain-laughed, falling onto the leather couch, and putting her feet with their big, dinghy-like, black pumps in the air. "Guess where I'm headed."

"Hell," said Charles.

She rolled over, sitting up. A clump of wig stuck to her lipstick.

"The Burns County Animal Shelter cordially invites you to our annual—"

"Not a chance."

"—charity soiray—"

"We can't."

"-RSVP-"

"Absolutely not."

"Rowdy sex very possible."

"No."

"I'll go," said Leulah.

In the end, we couldn't