A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall

by Will Chancellor

  Owen of outlier height, six years old, white-blond hair he certainly didn’t inherit from his father, behind a kickboard and toy boat, scissor-kicking his mom’s old swim fins due west. Beyond where the sun sets. To Caroline.

  How many minutes wasted from when Burr first looked up and thought Owen was swimming out too far until even the thought of action arose? Yes, I should definitely do something. I should do something before things get out of hand. How much idle contemplation as the word riptide became real. Finally, Help? Then choking out, help! Finding knees strong enough to stand and stumble for the water. Now yelling, Help!

  Burr wasn’t the first, not even the fifth, to respond. Those minutes of failing might still be won back. But the sting of that engine, a hornet fighting the wind that blows it out to sea, would always remain. On most days the wasping stayed in the background, but on some days the wasp dove straight for Burr’s ear and he could hardly look at his son. Hard to bear, and harder to be rid of.

  Wall of memory. Wave rising on the skin of the sea; misting away as it gathers and towers down; surging up-shore until it cuffs your waiting wrists with foam. Water slips through scooped fingers, no matter how tight you bowl them; first it’s droplets, then it’s driplets, then only whorls of brine in your fingertips and salt chains in the lines of your palm. When attention returns, saturating a memory that was finally dry and salting away, what then?

  Swim for that floating remote control while your son drifts out to sea, because this gift was a quarter of your paycheck and who knows if you can replace that joystick without buying a whole new boat. Drift down the beach, showing no more concern than the rest of the Sunday crowd, biting your lip rather than answering anyone’s question: Where are the boy’s parents? If you weren’t holding that neon-orange remote control, no one would be staring. Drop it. Pick it up. Yell to your bobbing son with the crowd . . . Pass the yells, the brave yells, on to others.

  They have it under control.

  There he is.

  Then, get ready. This is the best part. Cave to the underemployed twenty-something sirs on the skiff. Wrench your hands in supplication even before they return your son to the shore. Volunteer your failings as a father, a single father. Nod and apologize to someone no older than one of your students as they hand you Caroline’s old fins.

  But Owen came back smiling. Boat and board in one hand, high fives for all the lifeguards. He marched through ovation, a son returned.

  But not returned by you.

  He didn’t want to read the Odyssey that night. He grabbed an illustrated Iliad and announced that he was no longer a kid. From now on he would read by himself.

  It took Burr a week to realize that reading had been the last thing they had left.

  Professor Burr asked a grad student to deliver the lecture on the katabasis and left campus early to take Owen to the beach. Owen had been sleeping off the trauma of his final procedure with the surgeon when Burr drove off for his morning seminar. By now, he would be awake and feeling restless. Burr hoped the trip to Zuma would show him that no one wanted to keep him packed away. He could even stop out if he wanted. If things went well, they could hash out a plan for 2004 and have him back at Stanford next year.

  Burr opened the door and called for Owen.

  Silence.

  Empty. A tumbleweed word, rolling, thirsty, thorned. Empty. And whenever empty, also alone. These words snagged Burr as he gripped the kitchen counter and read Owen’s Post-it farewell. He peeled off the note and thumbed through the rest of the yellow pad in search of the real note, the reluctant good-bye from his son that must be here somewhere.

  He called upstairs again. The gravity of the house had changed, as if he’d come home to find half of his possessions packed up and moved away. He scanned the living room, taking inventory of chairs and lamps as if he’d been robbed. Had to remind himself that each bare patch of wall had always been empty, never held a mirror, never held a painting. Some emptiness was always there.

  Burr stumbled over a stack of books on the floor of his study. Spines bruised and hyperextended, dust covers unflapped and tore as the column crumbled and Burr took a slipping step over the rubble. With a thick thumb he undented the corners, rejacketed the hardbacks and replaced them on the shelf, leaving a two-book gap where his Loeb Odyssey should have been, which was fine, but he could have asked.

  After surrendering to the scooped-out mitt of his leather chair, Burr toggled through a twelve-disc carousel. He gritted his teeth and pressed the small remote. Each CD sounded hollow. Bill Evans, Getz/Gilberto, Miles, Mingus, Weather Report, Brubeck. All empty.

  He thumped his knee with a rolled-up magazine. Then back to the Post-it stuck to his left index finger:

  DAD,

  I’m going to Europe to find out which half of my life I’m about to waste. After I figure this out, we can talk about graduating.

  ~Owen

  He peeled the note and pressed it into the molding of the doorframe, above pencil marks of Owen’s height, taller than his father at eleven, six-foot-eight at age fifteen, but still standing on tiptoes, trying to get that extra quarter inch.

  Raising Owen had taught Burr the beauty of being marginal. The vain side of any father wants to be Atticus Finch, but what could be worse for a boy than a father impossible to outgrow? Better to let your son know he’s the center of your life and you are one of many moons. But this wasn’t that. This was Owen telling him he was irrelevant. And, when he was honest with himself, it pissed him off.

  The Volvo ground into gear and skidded into the street. The Burrs lived exactly halfway between the airports, but always flew from LAX. He figured today would be no different. But there was no point to any of this if he couldn’t beat the pretraffic traffic and clear Ventura in the next half hour.

  He rolled through a red light. In front of his neighbors and with kids walking home from school, Burr ran a red light and then another. Not orangish-red. Burr ran through lamps minutes hot. He glanced at the windshield and read his inspection sticker in reverse. It had lapsed in late ’03. He almost wanted an officer to lead him away in handcuffs, just for the moment of concern when a door would be opened for him and he’d be pushed in the back with a “Watch your head.”

  Traffic hit long before Ventura, shattering the glassy calm of Rincon and Solimar. He was caught in a static mass and had to suffer the sight of frontage-road drivers whizzing away north and south, making him another nameless roof on Highway 101, a die-cast toy for the news helicopters to beam. He peeked over his shoulder to see if there was any way he could get right and roll down the embankment to the frontage road. A highway patrol car was parked half a mile ahead, blocking his escape.

  Cars continued to rush by on the one-lane road to his left and Harbor Boulevard to his right. He was stuck. The empty space at the middle of two lines; the trapped zero in the 101.

  By Ventura proper, people were thumbing silver buttons and sliding transmissions to neutral or even park. He fiddled with the gearshift and looked at the analog clock on his rubber dashboard, then at the yellow arrow of In-N-Out, pointing away from the highway to a trafficless side street where families shared French fries on concrete tables.

  Traffic crumpled behind him. Burr found second gear, only to round a curve and discover thousands of red taillights. Several of his fellow motorists had given up: one leaned against the window and grinned into her cell phone; one propped a paperback on the steering wheel; one yelled at his windshield and thrust a finger at the dark-tinted windows of a pickup truck rattling license plate frames with its bass. Burr, pinned against cement sclerosis, could do nothing but redden the shadow of the overpass.

  The cloverleaf, a maze of misdirection, spun traffic to all four compass points—but not the fifth, the omphalos, the only defined point of a compass, the director of direction.

  He tried the radio. NPR helped. But then they started asking for money, not understanding that even though he had tenure, he had no savings account. He squirmed.

/>   He depressed the clutch for second, then the brake lights washed back over him and he came to a full stop. A gash of metal, which he took to be a discarded fender, rocked with the wind, tickling the cement barrier and catching the setting sun. Fire, the process we mistake for a thing. Traffic, the thing we mistake for a process.

  He lurched in his lane then aimed straight for the front tire of a bumper-hugging Infinity. The driver clucked his pointer finger. At that moment, Burr’s Volvo could have been a tanker. Burr was moving right. And then right and right again, over the rumble strip, straddling highway buttons and whistling the raked asphalt.

  Down the spiral ramp he drove. Thrown from the great clog and breezing past telephone poles and cypress-tree fences, green lights yellowing in his wake. Only when he was nearing Highway 1 on the two-lane road through the canyons did he realize that this was the pass for Point Dume, for Zuma.

  He had stayed away for fifteen years, knowing that what he found would be bolted in tighter than the yellow bollards of the car park. Now he parked, fender inches from the trailhead.

  He unlaced his boots, kicked off his socks, and walked tenderly over loose gravel to the sand below. His feet were pale, frozen, senseless things that molded to the rock bits. The beach was deserted except for a lineup of surfers.

  The ocean breathed up and sneezed down on the shore. Windswept sand soon anchored the cuffs of his trousers. He looked at the sky, a washed peach smear where the sun snuffed into the thick. A steady salt-wind carried him back to the safety of his car.

  He sat on the hood of the Volvo, tired arches of his pale feet on the hard plastic bumper. A young woman knocking water from her ear recognized him from campus and nodded. She had one of the few spaces. She asked him how he’d ended up at a trailhead two and a half hours from Mission.

  —Bested by traffic, I’m afraid. I was headed to LAX. If there’s any way I could borrow your phone, I might be able to justify this excursus as a shortcut.

  She coiled the leash around the tail fins of her surfboard and handed Burr a phone.

  He called LAX Terminal Services and pawed through an automated directory while she folded her wetsuit, snapped it into a Rubbermaid bin, and poured a plastic jug of water over her head.

  Burr repeatedly apologized for eating up her minutes. An agent finally told him that without a court order, there was no way to access the manifests of every flight out of LAX with connections to Europe.

  Thanks for that, Owen. No flight number. No airline. Not even the qualifier mainland. Just Europe.

  Burr thanked the student profusely and gave her twenty dollars for the minutes, striving to make the gesture appear breezy and avuncular rather than—what’s the term—sketchy.

  —Wait. Here. I want you to have this.

  That doesn’t sound any better.

  Burr opened his trunk and grabbed a book from the two dozen in a cardboard box. She held it with the hem of her beach towel, looked at her friends lashing the boards on the roof rack, and thanked him with a squint that asked if this was going to be on the final.

  As they drove away, Burr watched planes rattle the skies westward, then loop around and trace the shore. He wondered if he was supposed to infer some hidden meaning in “Europe.” When Owen was eight, Burr had sent him a postcard from Stonehenge reading “The World’s Meeting Spot”—but the chances of Owen recalling that were slim.

  Before sunset, Burr wound back to Mission along Highway 1. The narrow meander to Big Sur took lives every year, so he never chanced it after dark. The mountains were just as deadly as the cliffs. Two copies of his book slid across the backseat. On sharp turns he heard the box shift in the trunk.

  Three years ago Burr had finished his grand dictionary of hapax legomena, words occurring only once in the written record of an ancient language. The professor assured his university press that the standard library-bound hardcover run of a thousand copies would be woefully insufficient. They bought his pitch and doubled the run to two thousand, assuring him the book would be everywhere. And everywhere it was.

  The first sign should have been when they failed to get a blurb from any scholar of note or so much as a response from the generalists. Burr averted his eyes when he passed a copse of trees, seeing the forests that died for a book that would most likely be pulped. He deluded himself that a future archaeologist would confuse Hapax for a holy relic: so sacred was the Book of Burr that all discovered copies were untouched, immaculate. The epitaph would read, “Hapax: Everywhere, and Everywhere Pristine.” Copies of the yellow book lined two rows of his office bookshelves, giving a false impression that he was up on modern design. These weren’t the free author’s copies; these were personal online purchases he’d hoped would generate some momentum. A grad student, candid from boilermakers, described how a hundred copies of Hapax were bricked together in the bowels of the university bookstore to form the Igloo of Burr. Here the employees got high and invented stories of narwhals and sled dogs. When he heard this, Burr laughed until he cried; thus far, this was the only application of his summa philologica.

  Burr’s hands were loose on the wheel as he wound through the Central Coast on Highway 1. To his right, purple floating in the air like a dandelion’s parachute seeds. To his left, white foam underlit with the pink and green of the flame in a votive candle. Almost warm against the black slabs. Twilight, urchin purple, gloaming life to his nail beds and making his hands a moment young.

  Burr’s first work, his thesis work, was long on conjecture and short on scholarship. At twenty-four he found something wondrous in analyzing the cult of Hekate and the stelae of Hermes. They were slippery twilight gods, Hermes and Hekate. Bringing their lens to the modern world cast warped, original aberrations. The work began with his translation of Hesiod. Several insights came to him during his reading: phenomena are more often than not both true and false; twilight, “two lights,” needs both sunlight and moonlight to exist—it is precisely the time when there is both day and night. In this twilit space, paradoxes present no problems. An adjunct in the Germanic Languages Department learned of Burr’s newfound mysticism and pointed him to the Old Norse rune Dagaz,

  Once he had a symbol to write in his margins, Burr began seeing these liminal spaces everywhere: a cave both inside and outside; the shore both land and sea; the present a twilight of past and future; love, like any transitive verb, an intermingling of two things formerly alone; life, a blur of birth and death—birth and death being the only two moments of life in which we don’t exist.

  Caroline Dennison had been looking up from her reading every few minutes to watch him scribble and sweep back his hair. Burr trying to get down on a legal pad the flood of insights, thinking himself a little dangerous, even though he was translating Greek. He upset his coffee as he turned the yellow page, and she stifled a laugh at the clatter. He put down his pen and stood.

  Caroline blew on her tea and pretended to be flattered when he called her kallisphuros, she of the lovely ankles. The line worked well enough to earn him a seat at her table. She looked down before meeting his eyes, like a diver taking a deep breath.

  The world stabilized on their parallel that afternoon. While everything else drifted into blur, the clarity between their eyes remained perfect. At some point she must have stood and left, because at some point she wasn’t there. There was neither betwixt nor between with Caroline. She was there. She was not. And because his mind refused to process anything purely binary, he looked like a lost boy to the café staff who told him they were closed and it was time to go. He tried to remember her gait, but could only imagine her gliding. He tried to remember how she left. But when exactly does day leave us in night?

  The next morning, Burr was at the café thirty minutes before they opened. After a bagel and three coffees, he decided that he would not be leading a study section and kept his table free all afternoon. By three, she returned. They talked about the courage of the ancients to trust that the sun would continue to rise. He said he was not a man of fait
h and would need her phone number.

  When the summer sun brought an archipelago of freckles to her nose and cheek, he named them the Caroline Islands and committed each one to memory: Ulithi, Tonoas, Oroluk, Pohnpei . . .

  He thought he could make her fit into his view of the world. But within a week of living together she had become the map, rather than something mappable. He dotted every coordinate into the aqua field of Caroline. They folded up together, perfectly aligned and protected, burying their world from the light of others. And just as an open map’s twenty-four folds can seem impossible to unpuzzle and neatly pack away, their convergences were inscrutable, leaving others to trust blindly that the relationship worked.

  They blazed through the reception halls of deans and department heads. Young and old faculty alike buzzed around them wherever they mingled—not because she was the only Oxbridge grad in the room, not because this young couple radiated love, not because her father was the university president, but because wherever they went they carried with them a world.

  For two years they ate little more than canapés. Most of the reception room guests began conversations with, “I have something to confess,” which was never an indication of being in that person’s confidence, but did make them feel like junior clergy. The phrase became a punchline between Burr and Caroline. By the next spring, the sum of all these confidences made Burr’s academic advancement inevitable—she would have been climbing the rungs ahead of him, but had put continental philosophy on hold to learn how to paint.

  His work was inspired, but the search for relevant texts was proving to be fruitless. In all of recorded history, only two partial inscriptions supported his reading of Heraclitus and the Eleatics.

  Rather than switch to anthropology or wait on the archaeologists to dig up something to analyze, he grew increasingly creative with his source material until his work hit almost New Age levels of mysto. Fellow department members, nonplussed at the camaraderie between Burr and Mission University’s elect, thought he was on drugs—and probably supplying them to senior faculty.