A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall

by Will Chancellor

  The iron air descends, and the player’s blood darkens. The heavier carmine air forces the inspired to breathe deeply through the diaphragm. Here. Well, you can’t see that. But the player breathes from the diaphragm. His back is wider than the other athletes’ backs. His eyes, this is the most important thing, are whiter than the other players’ eyes. These are the all-white eyes you see in ancient sculpture. The player breathes in the carmine, and the cornea overtakes the iris and the eyes assume a fearsome whiteness. The artists knew this. It’s the nonbelievers who said the eyes were painted.

  I first saw these white eyes in 2000, at the Summer Olympics in Sydney.

  I was sitting second from the end of the bench in the Team USA bathrobe. The inside of my left arm still itched from the Olympic ring tattoo I’d gotten after the opening ceremony—most of the athletes get their rings after the Games are over, but I wasn’t going to play anyway.

  Wolf’s the reason this whole thing happened. He helped me get a scholarship here and helped me get a spot on the national team roster. So I was watching Wolf’s game on the perimeter instead of studying how the Hungarian defense was collapsing on the hole. If Coach called my name, it would be me struggling to create enough space in the hole for a kick-out pass or a half-assed shot. But watching hole play against the Hungarians is like watching a bird with a broken wing try to fly. Each possession, our guy jerked his neck back to create space and elevate, only to have his efforts stuffed and his head submerged to the chin.

  Water only churns like that when something is dying. Wolf’s matchup was another matter altogether. He beat his defender twice in consecutive trips down the pool, first turning him and nearly walking the ball in, then swimming straight over the top of his man. Wolf batted away the desperate grip at his suit, dug two deep paddles, scissored high in the water, and ripped a shot off the upper right corner of the goal for a bar-in. The Hungarian coach saw our guy doing to his team what they do to the rest of the world. He wasted no time replacing the field player with someone who wouldn’t have the same problem.

  Uroš—I’ll keep his last name off the record, but you shouldn’t have a hard time looking him up—has a rosary beads tattoo, amber eyes, a thick mat of chest hair, and a fuck-off gut. He’s the only player on either roster who isn’t in shape. He calls his gut his “deep taper.” Other than that one joke, which only swimmers would get, Uroš has little sense of humor. He has the sort of languid violent look that comes from prison. And Uroš did come close to getting locked up after a Greek player, his opposite, was stabbed during an international game, and a glass shiv was subsequently found on the bottom of the pool. But nothing was proven. And he was only twelve at the time. Uroš now looks so bored with violence that players, coaches, fans, psychologists wonder why he doesn’t embrace different aspects of the game, like passing or even shooting. His shoulder was in shreds and he couldn’t shoot for shit, but he would tear off a player’s junk for even thinking of swimming over the top of him. His ten years on the national team are most notable for a host of atrocities committed above and beneath the water. Nice guy.

  Uroš crashed into the pool and surfaced an inch from Wolf’s face. Not nice. Wolf drove the heel of his hand into Uroš’s chest then pulled out a patch of hair. Uroš smiled and threw his hands up to show the ref that, yes, the water was turbulent, but he wasn’t the one fouling. Of course, as he raised his hands he caught Wolf with an elbow to the chin. Wolf pretended to make a break for the goal at the whistle. With Wolf’s hard crossover stroke came a right elbow to Uroš’s teeth. The double whistles meant Wolf would have to wait out twenty seconds, or the possession, from the exclusion area. Rather than flopping around after the ejection and skulling the water, Wolf sprinted to the other side of the lane line and treaded high with his palms in a Gable grip.

  I could see Wolf’s eyes getting whiter and whiter the deeper he breathed the carmine air above him.

  Twenty seconds passed. Wolf sprinted back into the field of play just in time for Uroš to rip a shot three feet over the top bar in front of Wolf’s outstretched arms. Tough to know if Uroš shot only so he could swing his arm or if he really was trying to score. But this much is certain: on his follow-through, Uroš tore a bandolier of flesh from Wolf’s chest, leaving claw marks from shoulder to hip. Wolf smiled.

  Coach Rudić called a time-out and I dove in to pull Wolf back to our side. They both looked at me. Their eyes had grown completely white. And their faces were a perfect calm. I had seen the carmine before, in games, but I had never breathed that deeply. That was the end of aggression. Wolf held my gaze as the color bled back into his irises. He put a finger to his lips, dropped to the pool floor, and swam to our side underwater with three giant pulls.

  We’ve never talked about it. It’s one of those things. Paranormal.

  That was my experience with the paranormal. My name is Owen Burr. oburr@stanford.edu. Psych 1. Ted Lin’s section.”

  Owen wasn’t positive that anyone ever listened to that tape. No one called for a follow-up MRI. Maybe the cassette was buried in a steel filing cabinet in the basement of Jordan Hall. Maybe they were interested in stories of ghosts, not Gods.

  And the pumice from the shore. No God today to see him off. There was no iron air, no bending, no monochrome. Just memories in the aether. So Owen returned home. Once back inside, he added a few slugs of olive oil to his jar and stirred the sand with a knife.

  Upstairs, Owen emptied his game bag quickly, throwing chewed-up suits in one pile and mildewed shirts in another. Goggles yellow. Goggles blue. He gripped the signed game ball his coach had brought to the hospital; he spun it in his palm and read his teammates’ well wishes, then placed it on a shelf. Scores of molded trophy-men, split at the center with a golden plastic scar, kept the ball from rolling away. Behind the trophies, a graphite sketch on a sheet of hundred-pound paper. Owen pulled it over the trophy men. This was the pride of his AP Art portfolio. It looked exactly like a polar bear. Still, Mr. Estrada had made a point of not telling Owen’s half of the class that they had a duty to follow their passion, wherever it might lead them. Instead, he gave them all A’s and said they were excellent people.

  Owen packed bars of soap into the corner of his bag, housed the mason jar between black and white T-shirts, and slipped his passport into the breast pocket of his suit. Corduroy, the caned cloth, wide-wale, durus, but tailored because his dimensions couldn’t be found on a rack. Owen wore a light blue shirt that could go well over a week without showing it. After adding a black roll-neck sweater, he still had room for books.

  The holes Owen left in his father’s bookshelf were more alarming than missing teeth. He excised books with a matter-of-fact cruelty. His father would instantly name the lacunae: Mayakovsky, Auden, Wordsworth, Hölderlin, Hollander, Yeats, Milton, H.D., Cavafy, and Sappho for an even ten.

  Owen shouldered his sixty-pound bag and walked to the door. Poetry’s density of thought made it good travel reading. These ten volumes should last him a year. But as his hair tickled the doorframe, he changed his mind. Owen took out the books he had gathered, set them on the floor, grabbed a pair of green volumes from the center of the bookshelf, and then waited—as if he had unstoppered the universe and the house itself would suck into that two-book gap.

  But he heard nothing. He stood outside, his father’s Loebs in hand, thinking that some Rube Goldberg had been set in motion once the two volumes of the Odyssey left the shelf. Perhaps the axe was swinging, he just couldn’t see it. Half the world he couldn’t see. For our mind’s eye sees sharply when our bodily eye withers away: Tum sane mentis oculus . . .

  The town car cut short his reverie. He directed the driver to the Amtrak station, looking all the while for his father’s Volvo driving the other direction.

  Dripping, steaming, hissing, the Southwest Chief waited for Owen and other passengers ringed around him to stomp up the rubber steps and begin the two-thousand-mile climb to Chicago. Right now Owen needed distance from the sinking California su
n. And though the Chief’s hisses and drips appeared to hold his attention, and though his gaze never wandered from the coach door where the porter leaned, pedestal in hand, and though it looked as if Owen was studying the train, in truth his attention was directed behind him. Owen sifted through each murmur of the crowd at his back: a father explaining to his son that height wasn’t enough, you needed depth perception to play basketball; an old woman to his left saying, “That’s a real shame”; a few approaches, but the tread was a shuffle, a stutter. Owen felt the glances, the lazy stares, but there were none of his father’s steps: no sloshing middle-aged exertion; no stumbling thunder; no father intent on stopping a son.

  The porter climbed down at last and set his step stool at Owen’s feet. And so Owen was the first up those rubber steps, heeling deeper all the gravel bits embedded in the furrows, until he settled in the farthest aisle in a seat that amazingly had more than enough leg room. He could even recline before his knees hit the seat in front.

  With his duffel at his side, Owen sat and waited for his father to come running down the asphalt. The potpourri powder sprinkled onto carpet seats and vacuumed into the trapped air had already risen through Owen’s nose and blossomed, swelling his temple until the veins were finger-wide. Dry color in the car, chalk flowers and migraine rising. Leaning his head on the cool window helped. He could use a rainstorm, but outside was bright and glareful. Other passengers slanted closer to him, but never fell in his row. Owen took a painkiller and looked through the scarred acrylic window at California slipping away.

  The train skirted the Los Angeles River, glided past culverts and concrete banks, and counted Owen to sleep with a thousand rolling clacks of distance. He woke to unbalanced washing machine rumble and fell back asleep in the comfort of being inside a train whistling in the night. He woke to the psoph of air between car and rail. He swallowed another painkiller and passed out until they were on the other side of Victorville in the Mojave Desert.

  Of course you just say I’m going to be an artist.

  This forty-hour train ride from Los Angeles to Chicago was supposed to be a somber meditation on the life-altering decision before him: fly to Berlin with severely limited funds and only a vague plan to establish himself as an artist, or . . . or what? There was no Plan B, which had to be the first step in making it as an artist. The second step, if every photograph of a painter he had ever seen was accurate, was smoking. That was going to take resolution.

  Rather than answer the truly difficult questions that his choice of a life in art presented, Owen chose to read Homer on Vicodin—a pretty good way to limit encounters with the waking world to five-minute intervals. He slept through the majestic countryside, thinking his pilgrimage would have been more complete had he just started walking for Chicago. He woke for five minutes every hour for the second day. Near Topeka, Kansas, he stumbled to the dining car and washed another painkiller down with a gin and tonic.

  His head was draped in purple polyester curtains, mouth agape on the rubber window seal, hands still marking an early page in that little green book, when the conductor woke him at Chicago Union Station.

  —Time to go, son.

  Owen guided himself down the aisle from chrome rail to chrome rail until he was alone in the depot. He walked through spheres of blurred March lights until he found the escalator to the station. Inside, he wandered around to make sure there wasn’t another plan. Not finding one, he boarded a train to O’Hare. At the United ticket counter, he redeemed an old $500 seat-bump voucher, charged the balance, and booked a seat on the 10:00 p.m. to Berlin. Wedged into his seat, everything stored overhead except his two remaining Vicodin and the first volume of the Odyssey, Owen popped the lapels of his corduroy coat and tried to fold in on himself. He’d trade anything, even the remaining Vicodin, just to disappear in that damned cardinal robe.

  TWO

  NO MORE LIFEGUARDS

  The Argos, his first remote-controlled boat, buzzed into the concavity of a kickboard, bumping it through the Mission diving well, nudging it under the shadows of concrete slabs, five, seven, ten meters high, while divers waited in the bright sun, wicking their arms with aqua shammies, yoking their necks, and stretching on the platforms above until the white-haired boy piloted boat and board away.

  And Owen, eyes full of chemicals, explaining on the drive home that he needed two boats to pull the kickboard through the aerated diving well, the roiling deep he and his father called Charybdis. He thought that if the boats could make it across that cauldron without sinking, they could surely cross the entire Pacific and make it to her island.

  The second RC boat, the Mentor, had been for his first report card, not the swim meet. No. It was for the swim meet. Already bored with the six-and-under thrash across the deep end, Owen begged the coach to let him swim up an age division. He won the race, a full lap, by body lengths.

  A week later Owen coupled both boats to his boogie board and steered for the white water of the diving well, water sparging to cushion thirty-foot falls, compressors birthing cloudheads that plumed from the bottom of the pool and misted into the thin blue sky.

  Owen dug up an antique ring buoy from the supply closet and set it on his foam board. Then he rolled out a medicine ball that weighed about as much as he did and balanced it in the ring. By now, Owen’s machinations were far more interesting than the review Burr had brought to the pool.

  The divers shut off the bubbler to practice entries on smoother water. Jet spray riffled the surface, breaking the reflection so they could spot the water precisely and enter with a rip. As the divers held chrome rails and dialed in tension with their feet on large white cogs, Owen sat on the padded lip of the pool, running more engine tests and breaking the quiet rhythm of their approach. Bound—bzzz—rebound, then the warble and clatter of lumber tossed from the bed of a truck.

  Charybdis returned. It was the women’s turn to practice new dives. Early in the season, when they were still setting their programs, they kept the stakes low by bubble-wrapping their misses with the upwelling air. Owen focused on the turbulence. He sat behind a veil of thunder and burbling, like sitting in the cave behind a waterfall.

  The senior in Burr’s Homer seminar stopped mid-stair to talk with her coach. High-cut suit and hair glinting like a swirled gallon of gold-flecked paint. She noticed Owen’s fascination with the boats, how he smoothed the cordage and pulled as tight as he could. She clapped a few times and yelled down, “Let’s go, Owen!” whooping until he blushed.

  Leash woven between the catamaran hulls, Owen set the board and boats in the pool. He stacked the two remotes back to back in his hands, turning the bottom joystick in the opposite direction from the top. At first, he was able to pull everything—kickboard, buoy, and medicine ball. But once the boats hit the blister’s edge, the rig pitched, sputtered, and drowned.

  The team groaned with Burr. But Owen was undaunted.

  He spent the next hour yoking the boats like plow oxen, then linking them to the board. But it did nothing. Side by side they stalled. Burr tried to help. Owen glared.

  —I’ll get it, Owen snapped.

  Owen, a four-foot Ajax. That was the moment Burr understood heroic stubbornness, the Sophoclean refusal to relent, as something real rather than rhetorical, something Owen had inherited from his mother’s side of the family.

  Still. Owen never managed to drag the medicine ball more than a few feet. He sat on a towel in the passenger seat, totally shattered that his plan had failed. Burr tried to bring him back through bribery.

  —Is there anything you’d like for your birthday?

  —A remote-controlled boat.

  —You already have the Argos and the Mentor.

  —Not a toy boat. I need a stronger one, a real one.

  —You mean an RC yacht? Those don’t come cheap.

  —It would be a present from you and Mom.

  Before the afternoon was up, Owen was unboxing the ship, christened Zebulon, and Burr was left to wonder why two pound
s of molded plastic needed eight D-cell batteries in its hull.

  The night of Owen’s sixth birthday, they were reading a condensed edition of the Odyssey.

  —Where exactly did Mom go? Owen asked.

  The picture on his nightstand was her new-discovery smile.

  —Beyond the setting sun.

  The phrase was imprecise, but it sounded fatherly—a pipe-smoking answer, his best Gregory Peck.

  —The sun sets in different places, though. That’s why we have time zones.

  —No. It’s always in the west. And your mother is waiting for us beyond the west.

  Burr let the words linger and hoped they’d gather weight in the silence.

  They were Division III, but Mission University’s diving team took their practices seriously and quickly grew tired of their unofficial mascot zipping his boat over aerated water while they summoned enough confidence to turn a handstand into a back double. Owen’s first boats, the smaller boats, were cute peripheral distractions that cut the tension of divers pushing the limits of their abilities. Zebulon, however, was louder than the bubbler and made it to the center of the plume, right under the ten-meter platform. After a freshman landed on Owen’s kickboard and sprained her wrist, the head coach asked father and son to take their afternoons to the beach.

  First Pfeiffer Beach, then Sand Dollar Beach, then the coves of Point Lobos, but there were never any other kids. The drive was the most enjoyable part of their beach trips, so they soon ventured farther afield to Zuma Beach and Point Dume. Burr only owned one pair of shorts, orange-sherbet corduroy, and wore them on their monthly outings to Zuma. Legs strong and tan, not yet varicosed and dead-fish blue. He sat on the southern outcrop in the shadow of rock climbers, correcting papers while Owen swam past the basking crowd. He was reviewing a dissertation on Nonnos the day Owen’s rude engine cut the chatters.

  While Burr edited from the rocks, Owen coiled the rubber leash around Zebulon’s twin hulls, coupling boogie board and battery-devouring boat with a Velcro wrist bracelet.