Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

Author:Marisha Pessl
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Nightmare
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2006-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

On the windy afternoon of the 26, we said good-bye to the Ritz and took our suitcases across the city to Baba au Rhum’s five-bedroom apartment, occupying the top two floors of a seventeenth-century stone building on Île St. Louis.

“Not bad, hmmm?” said Servo. “Yes, the girls enjoyed this old shed growing up. All their French friends wanted to come over every weekend, couldn’t get rid of them. How do you like Paris, mmm?”

“It’s extr—”

“Elektra does not like Paris. Prefers Monte Carlo. I agree. Tourists make life difficult for us true Parisians, and Monte’s a theme park you can’t enter unless you have, what, Soc—one, two million? Been on the phone with Elektra all morning. Calls me up. ‘Daddy,’ she says, ‘Daddy, they want me for the embassy.’ Salary they offered her, I fall off my chair. Barely nineteen, skipped three grades. They adore her at Yale. Psyche too. She just started as a freshman. And they still want her for all the modeling, did top modeling in the summers. Made enough to buy all of Manhattan, and what is his name with the underwear, Calvin Klein. He fell madly in love with her. Nine years old, she was writing like Balzac. Her teachers would cry when they read her work, they were always telling me she’s a poet. And poets are born, you see, they’re not made. Only one comes along in a single, what do they say? Mmm? A single century.”

Dr. Michael Servo Kouropoulos was a severely tanned Greek man of many opinions, tales and chins. He was overweight, in his mid-to late sixties with white sheep’s hair and dull brown dice eyes that never stopped rolling around a room. He sweated, suffered from the strange tic of slapping then rubbing in circular motions his own chest, threaded each of his sentences together with a belly-deep “mmm” and treated idle conversations that had nothing to do with his family as if they were termite-infested houses in dire need of being exterminated with another story about Elektra or Psyche. He moved speedily, in spite of the limp that warped his walk and the wooden cane that, after he propped it against some counter while ordering un pain au chocolat, came clattering noisily to the floor, sometimes hitting people on the shin or foot (“Mmmm? Oh, dear, excusez-moi.”).

“He always hobbled,” Dad said. “Even when we were at Harvard.”

As it turned out, too, he was severely averse to having his picture taken. The first time I removed my disposable camera from my backpack, Dr. Kouropoulos put his hand over his face and refused to remove it. “Mmmm, no, I don’t photograph well.” The second time, he disappeared for ten minutes in the Men’s Room. “Excuse me, hate, hate to break up the photo op, but, nature. She’s calling.” The third time, he threw out that shopworn detail people loved to repeat about the Masai people, thereby drawing attention to their sensitivity and savoir faire when it came to primitive cultures: “They say it steals the soul.

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