Special Topics in Calamity Physics Read Online Free PDF Page A

restrained without my mother, as if awaiting her return so it could feel comfortable to croak and groan again, allow the wooden floors to grimace under our hurried feet, let the screen door spank the door frame 2.25 times with every opening, consent to the curtain rods belching when an uncouth breeze barged through a window. The house simply refused to complain without her, and so until Dad and I packed up and left Oxford in 1993, it remained trapped in the ashamed, tight-lipped deportment required for Reverend Monty Howard's dull sermons at the New Presbyterian Church, where Dad dropped me every Sunday morning while he waited in the parking lot of the McDonald's across the street, eating hash-browns and reading The New Republic.
    However not really remembered, you might imagine how a day like September 17, 1992, could float around in one's mind when a particular teacher couldn't remember one's name and finally called one "Green." I thought of September 17 at Poe-Richards Elementary, when I'd snuck into the murky stacks of the library to eat my lunch and read War and Peace (Tolstoy, 1865-69) or when Dad and I were driving a highway at night, and he'd lapsed into such strict silence, his profile looked carved on a totem pole. I'd stare out the window, at that black doily silhouette of passing trees, and experience an attack of the What Ifs. What If Dad hadn't picked me up from school and she'd come to get me and, knowing I was in the backseat, made particular effort not to fall asleep —unrolling the window so her glossy hair flew all over the place (exposing her entire right ear), singing along with one of her favorite songs on the radio, "Revolution" by the Beatles? Or What If she hadn't been asleep? What If she'd deliberately veered to the right at 80 mph crashing through the guardrail, colliding, head-on, with the wall of tulip poplar trees nine meters from the shoulder of the highway?
    Dad didn't like to talk about that.
    "That very morning your mother had talked to me of plans to enroll in a night class, Intro to Moths of North America, so rid yourself of such dour thoughts. Natasha was the victim of one too many butterfly nights." Dad gazed at the floor. "A sort of moth moon madness," he added quietly.
    He smiled then and looked back at me, where I was standing in the door, but his eyes were heavy, as if it required strength to hold them to my face. "We'll leave it at that," he said.
     
    II

    A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

    Due to the surprisingly high sales of The Powers That Be (compared to the other page-turners published by Harvard University Press that year, including Currency Abroad [Toney, 1987] and FDR and His Big Deal: A New Look at the First 100 Days [Robbe, 1987]), his impeccable twelve-page curriculum vitae, the frequent appearance of his essays in such respected, highly specialized (yet little-read) journals as International Affairs and American Policies and Daniel Hewitt's Federal Forum (not to mention a nomination in 1990 for the heralded Johann D. Stuart Prize for American Political Science Scholarship), Dad had managed to make enough of a name for himself to be a perennial visiting lecturer at political science departments across the country.
    Mind you, Dad no longer wooed top-tiered universities for their esteemed multinamed teaching positions: the Eliza Grey Peastone-Parkinson Professor of Government at Princeton, the Louisa May Holmo-Gilsendanner Professor of International Politics at MIT. (I assumed, given the extreme competition, these institutions weren't mourning Dad's absence from their "tight-knit circle of incest"—what he called highbrow academia.)
    No, Dad was now interested in bringing his erudition, international fieldwork experience and research to the bottom tiers ("bottom-feeders" he called them in a Bourbon Mood), the schools no one had ever heard of, sometimes not even the students enrolled in them: the Cheswick Colleges, the Dodson-Miner Colleges, the Hattiesburg Colleges