A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall

by Will Chancellor

  A new continent began to emerge in 1982. It was unexpected but welcome, like a new Hawaiian island. As this landmass burped from the deep, they traded booze and fritters for macrobiotic staples. They danced through their junior apartment as her belly grew. He sang the only song about Odysseus he knew, “Beyond the Sea,” with a real longing for her, even though she was still there. She wove through the second verse like Penelope, thinking of the globe-trotting that would accompany his unfinished, but surely forthcoming, book Liminality. Whenever he translated the song into Greek— . . . —which repeatedly failed to impress her, she countered with Charles Trenet’s original, “La Mer.” Violins and harps and floating, until the instruments fell.

  The map hissed orange and began to singe. It was easy for Burr to dismiss the dark edges as something fundamentally unrelated to a fire, something reversible that he could fan away, clap out, or smother, something they could fix together, until the edges crackled in flame.

  On August 21, 1982, their map was lost in fire.

  And there’s not much to say about what happened next.

  Islands became ashes.

  Owen took a life before he took a breath.

  He very nearly took two lives. His father bobbed between drowning and drowned. Their map was the Logos that held his world from flying apart. When it burned, every thought broke to atoms and jittered into the sky.

  What was left of Burr was driftwood, silvered still, empty. Each morning saw a lifeless husk wash up on the floor near his bed. He rolled against the jagged bed frame, rolled back until his head wedged against the nightstand and his body curled up fetal. Lifted up, dashed down, bobbing and unable to decide if it was yet time to sink. There is nothing more heroic than the glowing eyes of a vibrant soul inside a body that has given up, the marathon runner who crawls the final mile. Burr was the opposite: dead eyes in a capable body, or a body formerly capable and rapidly depleting. Water was too sweet to drink; lips to throat to lungs parched and cracked. Even when inhaling, his chest seemed to cave in. When he tasted anything, it was ash.

  He surfaced briefly to change a diaper, warm a bottle, drink a bottle. He hung a mobile over Owen’s crib. He called it a marionette, but it was really a Christmas ornament on a string. Burr duct-taped it to the ceiling, but every week it fell, strings dropped and tangled in the bends of the marionette’s knees. In dreams, Burr looked around and found knots and snags in his own joints, tripping up each step, each step a taut and tangled fall. Waking, he couldn’t even look his newborn son in the eyes for fear of being pulled out of his loss. Her loss.

  He initially refused help. Threw both telephones in wicker wastebaskets because recounting what had happened once, just once, shattered a day, and there were at least fifty people who needed to be kept in the loop. An elderly neighbor, widow of a cosmologist, came through the garage door and announced that she was taking over. Owen’s eyes widened when he saw her, and his screaming stopped.

  By the time Burr returned to work, the academic articles written the prior year were just hitting the press. He was taken to task in journals for his prior gambols and given a wide berth in a basement office where he could read the scorching reviews of “Classical Liminality,” the paper he had naively supposed would be the first chapter of his groundbreaking book, with amusement and whisky. He marveled at how far over his head the critics were aiming. He was sprawled on the floor while scholars shot at ten-foot phantoms. Had the mandarins only known how much pride they gave him by caring, something he had long since stopped doing, they might have dismissed him in a word.

  Years passed with fewer and fewer offers to go out for a drink. And then strong encouragement from his mentors to do anything other than drink. His last remaining drinking companion was Bill Dennison, Caroline’s father, who was in the process of being managed out of his role as president by the trustees.

  In her life, Bill had been bronze and absent. With Caroline’s death, Bill’s gaze dropped a few degrees every day. During their bourbon-soaked afternoons, he kept his chin to his chest as if he were trying to prevent someone from choking him. When Burr looked closely, he could see a fist knuckling at the man’s wattles, a phantom hand prying up that once-proud chin.

  President Bill Dennison quickly grew old, pale, and clatty. He said his office was the only place he still felt free because it was a place he knew was about to be taken away. His hands, always curled in near fists, shook with fear and with pride, like a child holding a cicada. He looked Burr squarely in the eye for the first time in their relationship. And when he did, Bill found a man on his level.

  Owen eventually did take two lives: his mother’s and his only surviving grandparent’s. In hindsight, Bill had given a few months’ notice, but he never said anything specifically about his plan.

  Mountains take. Cliffs take. Dennison’s car was found off Highway 1 by a team of rescue divers a month to the day after his last drink with Burr. He left behind a letter on his desk stressing to the trustees that Burr, nepotism aside, was his natural successor.

  Once Burr caught wind of his father-in-law’s last request, he asked to be removed from consideration. Burr suggested his best friend and fellow young luminary Gerard Gaskin for the post. The board, who’d had Gaskin, MBA holder and faculty senator, in mind all along, congratulated themselves on an amicable transference of power. The trustees extended a ninety-nine-year lease to Burr on his father-in-law’s residence, thinking that it would be fitting that Owen grow up in the home his grandfather had a hand in constructing.

  With Bill’s death came the realization that Owen would have no one else’s account of Caroline. The portrait that would hang in Owen’s mind would have to be painted by Burr’s shaking, foolish hand. He would have to sing the lullabies, her songs, even though he couldn’t force out a note.

  Burr spent his first month in their new house scavenging for photos, dangling Bill’s books by the spine in case a portrait of Caroline was marking a page, then dropping them to the floor. Caroline was only smiling in two pictures—crushing, because she had dozens of smiles that would now fade and disappear, impossible for him to recover and for his son to learn.

  Burr’s academic career had run aground. He was called before a committee tasked with managing the transition of administrations, certain he would be negotiating severance and extended benefits for Owen.

  Rather than talk about his drinking or read disgruntled letters from his seminar students, they framed the meeting as early tenure review. Later he would realize that no one had any intention of promoting him to associate; tenure review was merely a polite pretext for them to illustrate his downfall. In the words of the provost, “Institutions cannot invest in speculation.” They said his thinking was undisciplined, code for not publishing in peer-reviewed journals. They said the liminality work lacked focus. He blurted out, “That’s the point!” Which was when they suggested he stop drinking with the adjuncts in the Poetry Department.

  He was given three years to shape up. Burr surprised himself at how industrious he became following their censure. During his three-year probation he trotted out significant textual analysis in the biggest journals—the Journal of Hellenic Studies, Classical Quarterly, Hermes, Classical Philology, and the American Journal of Philology—thereby moving from the fringes of classics to the center. Joseph Burr was now the authority on Homer’s use of the aorist middle, which is to say, as mainstream as classics professors come.

  The black carry-on he wheeled into his next committee hearing buckled under the weight of peer-review journals. He stacked them high in three ecru columns and then sat with his hands folded before him, conscious of looking a bit too much like the chip leader in a poker game. The university didn’t mind the swagger; it was publish or perish, and he had published. On the day he was promoted to associate professor, he had a following of eager grad students compiling several words per day for the ill-fated Hapax. Gone were the days of even the slightest excursus. He was scrubbed of liminality and academically sober. />
  But the drinking still came in waves. Burr waited at a neighborhood stoplight, looking at the passenger seat, tracked back to fit Owen’s knees and reclined to make room for his head. He wondered how many months would pass until someone else would adjust it back. After today, no one could blame him for needing a drink. Once the Volvo was docked in his garage, dripping oil on the concrete slab and panting, Burr shuffled to his local.

  He wrote on napkins while boisterous kissers and fancy handshakers bubbled around and jostled his bent elbow:

  Our ground is birth. Our death is sea. Two things our mind will never know, birth and death, things that are uniquely ours yet things we never have, things we are not there to inhabit, define the mind before we are given the chance. This curling throw, ripped back at once. We are the liminal. We are the wash. But he. His birth set stakes, two stakes, birth and different death implied. Always tightroping those two spikes in the ground. He jumped. And when he landed, it’s no wonder he ran.

  THREE

  IT’S BERLIN, WE’RE ALL MONSTERS HERE

  Through a wet March, Owen breezed across Berlin on his hostel’s beach cruiser, pedaling the one-speed bike with firm unhurried strokes, leaning into turns and sidewinding from Ostkreuz to Charlottenburg. Over the rain-slicked roads of the Tiergarten park, asphalt dolphin-smooth, he skimmed quarter miles of cosines with broad sweeps from curb to curb.

  Each morning at the Tiergarten he joined images, paired words, and left with something glazed and sharp, more pottery shard than poem. With a handful of shards he pieced a bright mosaic of memories against the grey Berlin sky: lurid storefronts splashed with ancient yellow; Helvetica shouts in stoplight red; stockinged women stenciled to walls in dripping royal blue; canary-yellow bugle calls of the Postbank; kiosk green and construction orange on every corner; a full spectrum of brick from red to brown; Army-Navy stores spilling seaweed wares to the curb; consignment shop employees with purple-red bob cuts sitting on molded plastic chairs; the plumes of squinting smokers; the expired green of shutters climbing to roofs and tiling the sky.

  He was the metal comb, and Berlin was the music box—his fingers extended to plink each note of color and spin the day’s melody. Everything was becoming clear except his vision of himself as an artist. He wanted to play with memory and maps, but had no specific plan about integrating them into an artwork. In art libraries and bookstores he studied Richard Long and Hamish Fulton. He fasted for a week to afford a student membership at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum and spent entire afternoons in front of the Anselm Kiefers.

  One March day, in front of Kiefer’s enormous lead airplane The Angel of History (Poppy and Memory), a man with shoulder-length hair and a scholarly bent caught him jotting down an observation on Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, underneath a rough pencil sketch. Shy, suspicious, Owen folded from attention. But the man persisted.

  —People get too hung up on Kiefer’s scale and miss the mud, the materiality, the lead to silver to gold.

  —The thin blue of the lead and ash under these skylights, the filter is . . . familiar.

  —Are you a student or an artist?

  —I’m an artist.

  This was the first time Owen had declared it publicly. The real artists he knew in high school never felt the need to declare anything, they just acknowledged they were artists—the way someone else might say, “I’m adopted.” Embarrassed blood pooled up.

  —Are you with a gallery in Berlin?

  The blush ran across his cheek, almost to his nose, and his ears turned red.

  —You’re too young to be making work anyway. Once you put something into the world, you can never take it back. You’d have a hard time finding an artist who doesn’t want a pass on the first five years of his career.

  The slight tremble in the man’s paternalism made Owen suppose he was talking with a professor. This was the tone Owen usually tuned out. But what he was about to hear, in front of a creased felt blanket, beside a chair made of fat, was real, not academic, and struck him dumb.

  —This artist, Joseph Beuys, was in the Luftwaffe, you know. His plane was shot down over the Crimea in the thick of winter. He would have frozen to death had a group of Tartars not greased him up with lard and wrapped him in felt blankets. So it’s not as random as it might first appear that he makes a chair of fat or protects himself from a coyote, a totem of raw nature, with a felt blanket.

  —Protecting yourself from a coyote is art?

  —It is when you do it like a shaman. Beuys flew into New York in May of 1974. An ambulance met him at the airport and transported him directly to the René Block Gallery where he attempted to lift collective trauma by locking himself up with a wild coyote.

  —What was it called?

  —I Like America and America Likes Me.

  —Good title.

  —The materials are what you should be focusing on: felt blanket, shepherd’s staff, coyote, the Wall Street Journal spread out on the floor for it to piss on. There are only two questions for an artist: first, What do I exclude? A king is he who determines the state of exception. And every artist must be a king. The second question—How do I import the most meaning to what I include?—however, is why artists outlive kings. I wish contemporary artists focused more on achieving a sense of inevitability in their work, an elegance that borders on the mathematical. Blanket, staff, coyote. Beuys is Pythagoras, and everyone else is scribbling in sand.

  After his discussion with this professor had percolated for a night, Owen saw the possibility of combining the two genres he was most interested in, Land Art and minimalism, into something he would call Laminalism. Thus far, Owen imagined his art pieces, laminates, would be an overlay of memories and moods onto landscape; he would light the world with the colors of the Gods and pin down his memories with minimalist shapes like rock cairns and runic tangles of twigs. He had a name for the work, but his new blend of art was still too inchoate and immaterial to justify fasting for studio space.

  Still. In the distance he could see himself as a successful artist, selling Berlin to a young American romantic: “Here an artist can afford studio space and make a name for himself before he turns thirty.”

  In the past two months he had overheard the same conversation dozens of times, in English, German, French, Danish, and Italian. People told him he was in the right place. Everyone here was jostling for a name. In that respect, Owen was common. He looked around at the turbid layer of young creatives floating above him. None of them had lost a name, which separated Owen, like sediment dropped out of suspension.

  The Winerei, a wine bar near his hostel, served as library, living room, salon. Idiosyncrasy defined the bar in a way that reminded Owen of his childhood in a cave. Patrons borrowed glasses at the Winerei—technically nothing was bought or sold there, all payment was voluntary. For one euro, Owen was handed a glass and invited to fill it with any of the half dozen wines they chose to uncork that night. Before shambling off to his hostel, he dropped money, on his honor, into a glass jar. Owen, now broke, paid a rounded-down wholesale April estimate of his drinking, rather than the magnanimous estimates of March, and washed glasses when it got busy.

  After a few drinks, the Winerei glowed cloudy pastis green and Owen became ensnared in the nets of candlelight bouncing off mantel mirrors and dispersing through the stems of all the playful glasses. Because the wine was free, glasses were handled with a light touch and gestures were wedding-reception wild, meaning there was always someone rubbing a paste of club soda and rock salt into the hem of her blouse. He had learned to wear a black shirt if he was going to stay past sundown.

  Locals had their own spots. His was a salmon-colored armchair with a great wound sliced through the seat, spilling dried yellow foam that broke off like lemon cake and clogged the wells of his corduroy pants. He sat in the disintegrating chair and read Homer, glancing up several times a page to watch passersby walk vintage bikes with a slow spoke rhythm through the first sun of spring or strut by with purposeful hips th
at made him blink hard and consider the possibility of discos.

  Early April, Owen was sitting in his crumbling chair, looking out the window of the Winerei with this very thought. He felt someone to his left, hovering at his blind side and eager to interrupt his reading. A stream of smoke fogged between his face and his book. He kept reading, but then a voice interrupted:

  —That’s not gonna work here.

  Owen raised an eyebrow, turned, and found legs braced in the chrome of a wheelchair, a wine bottle wedged in a crotch, and a bright blue flannel shirt unbuttoned aggressively. Beside the wheelchair, another young man swirled a glass and swept back the itch of hair at his forehead. Owen set his book on the table. Now the standing one spoke.

  —Between the two of us, we’ve tried just about every conceivable way of picking up girls in a bar. But sitting alone and pretending to read in what, Greek? That’s new.

  —Or really old.

  —Let’s get real. They have the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue here somewhere. I bet we can find it if we look.

  —My dad’s a professor, Owen responded. I grew up reading this kind of stuff.

  —Does it work?

  —Does what work?

  The young man in the wheelchair put a hand in front of his friend’s chest.

  —Hey. In all seriousness, tell me something.

  —What?

  —Where’s your parrot?

  The two young men laughed. Both leaned in too close. The standing one sloshed his glass with a toasting Arrr! The one in the wheelchair put his hand on Owen’s leg. Owen suspected they were high.

  Owen exhaled slowly and loudly.

  —Why does everyone go for the pirate joke? Hannibal the Great had an eye patch. Why not “Where’s your elephant?” I hear a bad pirate joke every day. You guys are better than that. Assholes.