Before Tony exits stage right, he graces us with his terrific “Say good night to the bad guy” monologue. His last line is the one I want to focus on: “Me, I always tell the truth, even when I lie.” No one in the restaurant laughs, which suggests an underlying truth to what should be a punch line. A liminal being, like Tony, inhabits the mood of paradox. The Left must conquer its fear of opposition, its preprogrammed bias in favor of logical exclusion.
What do I mean? Guilt requires exclusion rather than inclusion. I cannot be guilty vis-à-vis someone who is included in “me.” Exclusion is a fallacy. Exclusion was created by that line of humanity who would go on to found country clubs.
But wait, it gets worse. Our very notions of logic require exclusivity. Fundamental to mathematics, science, reason itself, are two notions: the law of noncontradiction and the law of the excluded middle. These laws prohibit us from ever understanding paradox, infinity, the Möbius strip, and Liminalism.
Liminalism is my claim that every person should reject the binary and inhabit the twilit space. We must believe in new gods, even though they don’t exist. This is the aforementioned step two. After guilt and innocence have been exchanged for shame and glory, we have to spin that coin. It’s not going to be easy.
Why must we fight? Because our digital age is not just wrong, it is exactly wrong. Our entire world is becoming a string of 1s and 0s. There are no fractions, no irrational numbers, in coding. This is a serious problem. Math is going to have to be scrapped. I hear some cheers on that one. Math: start over! It’s more serious than just allowing our math to comprehend contradiction. Our math needs to be built from contradiction. This is the hard work that your generation will have to do. Rather than accommodating answers that are both true and false, our math must be rebuilt on the premise that everything is both true and false. Except for the curious fact that the previous statement is both true and false.
Did I lose you in the paradox? No? Your silence just means you are in the Stimmung? Good. This is where we really live. One vast threshold, neither in nor out of the room.
I am describing a space. Tonight, here in the theater, the Odeon, are we inside or outside? Some might look up at the stars, see the lights of the news crews around the Olympic center, smell the lean air from a hot day, and tell themselves we are in the outside. Others might see the enclosure itself as a ring of inclusion. They might think we are all sitting in mutual admiration at our progressive—yet nuanced—liberal view of the modern age and therefore an inside community.
Both are wrong. The Odeon is a Möbius strip.
These problems aren’t a remainder that we must ferret out of an otherwise well-functioning system. The remainder is the system.
Rather than wander a thousand plateaus, we should return to the cave. Everything liminal must be inhabited, and every habitation must be liminal. The twentieth century was ruled by the subliminal. This century will be devoted to the liminal. So what is liminal?
The present is an intersection of the past and the future. Sex is an intersection of two people. Riot, protest, conflict, these are all liminal intersections. We must always riot. We must always rebel. Heraclitus reminds us: “From discord comes the only harmony.” This is the playful spirit of liminal action that you must exhibit if you ever wish to break the oppressive dialectic before you. The dancing protestors have it right. “To be in agreement is to disagree.” That’s not me; that’s Heraclitus.
We must not treat contradiction as a fly in the ointment. It is not the exception; it is the rule.
There is a reason Heraclitus thought the entire world was fire. What is fire? Fire is not a thing. It’s a process. Fire is the process of combustion. Fire is the arrow in an equation, it is the yields on the way from this to that. Be the arrow. Be fire. Burn everything to the ground.
Otherwise you’re just going to be disappointed that you weren’t able to go from A to B. You must become that arrow. Activism must be defined by action.
If we take truth in politics to be justice and falsity to be injustice, then we must reformulate our disappointment. Everyone here tonight is, I’m guessing, adamant about the ubiquity of injustice. I’m here to tell you to give it up. There is no justice. Political life is true and false, just and unjust. In order to live a meaningful political life, surrender the hope of justice. The best this hypermodern world offers is bovine innocence. Instead I ask you to revolt. I ask you to turn away from the hegemonic order and claim a glorious alternative. True freedom. Violent freedom. The freedom of twilight . . .
Just as the crowd had finally started to nod, to laugh at the right places, to whoop, Burr caught sight of a young man in black slowly making his way down the center aisle. At first Burr thought the young man was carrying a lighter. The flame flickered on the faces of the crowd. Burr waited for others to raise their own lighters, in some sort of Eric Clapton concert moment, but it didn’t happen. He noticed that this was a new twilight. The intersection of the electrical and the analog. Modern man’s floodlights and ancient man’s torch.
Then it became clear that the flame was too large to be a lighter. This was an actual torch. As the young man reached eye level, still about thirty rows up, he broke into a trot. Burr watched silently as the torch came closer and closer.
The young man was running now, sure that if he didn’t move fast, someone was going to tackle him from behind.
The crowd watched expectantly, still not sure that this wasn’t a scripted spectacle. There were no whistles. No walkie-talkies. No one at the entrance yelling Stop!
The young man leapt to the stage and stood, panting, at Burr’s side. He was far more nervous than Burr, which made Burr far more nervous in turn.
A liquor bottle, burning slow blue from its cotton wick, passed from the young man to Burr. Flashes from here and there in the crowd. A young woman saw the bottle and yelled Whoa!
The young man wiped his sweating brow, saying Go ahead with a series of quick nods.
Burr leaned far back from the bottle. He leaned in and blew out the wick, which lit back up at once like a trick birthday candle. Now the flame was higher and running faster toward the fuel. The crowd began to recede. A flash of fire, green glass trembling about to explode.
Burr straightened his inquisitive cocked head, looked once more to the crowd, and lobbed the bottle toward the three-storey backdrop of the theater. It flew end over end, whistling and chopping the night air with each turn. Burr prayed it would pass straight through one of the arched windows, any one of the windows.
Glass shattered against the marble wall of the ancient facade. The gasoline spit a fireball toward the crowd. A wave of hot air swept past Burr’s face. The crowd gasped. Horrified, Burr looked to one wing of the stage for support and found no one. He looked to the other side and found Baudrillard closing in on the podium like Diomedes, possessed by a will to challenge whatever he would find, be it god or man. He walked with a familiar firm stride. Owen’s stride. Long-legged, commanding total attention, with each footfall came purpose. He made his way to the rostrum, blue flames backlighting his wispy white hair.
Silence. The crowd watched the spitting blue fire in total absorption.
Baudrillard pressed the cleft of his chin into the microphone. With an arm around Burr, he addressed the stunned crowd.
—My remarks tonight will be brief: Go!
The crowd was still in shock. Baudrillard shooed them with both hands:
—Vite! Vite! Vite!
The young torchbearer, still at Burr and Baudrillard’s side, jumped up and down and shouted to the crowd. Baudrillard took him firmly by the triceps:
—That was not your decision to make. Run!
The crowd glommed in the walkway of the top row like thick-flowing lava. Every second someone burbled up over the stone wall, popping over the rail and landing on the gravel of the southern slope of the Acropolis, headed for the Parthenon itself. Here the crowd met a cordon of visor-helmeted police, billy clubs in one hand, clear plastic shiel
ds in another, and heavily padded men who loaded their blunderbusses with tear gas canisters.
The police began thumping their shields with their black clubs.
Burr was on the side of the sackers. Burr was on the side of the Vandals. He was, for the first time, on the other side of the shield. Each beat of the fifty-police-shield drum brought more terror, more dread.
He had turned his audience into protestors, and now they were in danger of becoming protestors who violently clashed with police, which few of them had signed up for. These were grad students, mainly, who wanted to support a riot in the article-writing third wave, not the armed conflict front line. Half of them looked like they’d come here on dates. They began to withdraw down the slope.
But someone had called in the ringers. Outside the stadium, busloads of shin-guarded, gas-mask-wearing protestors carrying rocks instead of signs jeered at anyone who retreated and vowed that they would overtake the Parthenon, which had been taken over by NBC.
Baudrillard and Burr were watching all of this from the wings of the Odeon. Baudrillard watched the arc of the first shot from the crowd. Though the jagged white chunk of limestone was flying uphill, it had the damned inevitability of a flowerpot dropped from a high-rise window. Baudrillard clenched his teeth. The white rock thumped off a plastic police shield. It was the first answer to the billy-club drumming. The Acropolis was silent. He grabbed Burr’s shoulder.
—We need to get you out of here at once.
—We’re going to have to hike down. I know the way.
Looking back over his shoulder, Burr saw the police advancing down the hill, driving the crowd back toward the Odeon and away from the media tents, one of which was now smoking.
Baudrillard followed Burr through the main facade. Every available floodlight had been turned on, but they still had to pick their steps carefully down the slope of the Acropolis in the shadows of gnarled olive trees and over thorny clumps of acanthus. Though spines crept up his pant leg with each step, Burr slalomed from clump to clump to avoid sliding down the gravel slope.
They rested against a cypress tree. Baudrillard cleaned his glasses and gestured to the Parthenon. The familiar ecru columns against Athens’ clear black sky, the night Parthenon of millions of postcards, was smogged red and orange from tear gas meeting fire. Coughs and screams carried all the way down the rocky outcrop.
—I’ve seen more than my share of riled-up crowds, and I’ve heard speeches far more inflammatory than yours that didn’t end in this.
Burr was too stunned to speak. He had set fire to the Acropolis. He thought about Owen.
—They’re not going to let me on my flight.
—It might not be a problem. You won’t come into the story until morning. The first wave of media is always effect with no cause. It creates mystery. It enhances viewership. Tonight will be the spectacle. It should be a few days before they put you on the no-fly list. But we should hurry.
They found a trail on Filopappou Hill and eventually connected with a major road, where Baudrillard flagged down a taxi. Burr gave the directions to their hotel. Baudrillard corrected him and said they had to go to the airport.
—Do you have your passport with you?
—At all times. But we have time for me to get my laptop. The clothes I don’t need, but I need my laptop. Getting to the airport now doesn’t make the plane leave any sooner.
—Something smells wrong about this. You may be in trouble. I may be in trouble.
The driver began eyeing them in the rearview mirror.
—Those protestors outside the Odeon. They weren’t sent by George.
—Who’s George?
—George Spiros, who is so fond of calling us by our first names. No. George didn’t send them. That was strictly political. I’m just trying to think of how Spadzos or someone higher up would benefit from a riot. One thing’s certain, the staid Professor Burr is no more.
—What happened to my two or three days before the story broke?
—That’s theory, not practice. So far as I can tell, this is a game of fish. We are the small fish. Spiros is a small fish. Spadzos is the big fish who used us to attract attention to the incumbent mayor’s hyperconservativism, but there is some bigger fish, some bartender-of-Molotov-cocktails fish, who wanted Spadzos to look as if he would destroy the city, the economy.
—Why?
—For attention. For a story. It may have been the president showing he could quell dissent. Here that’s the number-one qualification for the job. To be honest, I don’t care. Whoever is behind those shields is going to look like a hero, and he has no reason to help us.
Burr looked out the window. Then he looked out the rear window.
—Is this going to follow me around forever?
—So much for that Nobel. There are consequences to all of this. It’s no Bastille, but it’s enough to get branded a terrorist, given everything. And like any revolutionary, terrorist, or visionary, you’ll have to live with being a metonym. Let’s hope that the protests end tonight. I’m guessing that the deck is rigged for that to happen. If not, maybe we can lecture together in Guantanamo.
—I’m deeply, deeply sorry if I’ve damaged your career. You’ve been a more luminous guide than I could have ever hoped for.
—Athens is on you, Joe Burr. I’m just a footnote. If you’re ever in Paris, look me up here.
Baudrillard wrote an address in a notebook and tore out the page.
—Are you going straight to Paris?
—Absolutely.
—I’d love to write you an inscription in Hapax, but I just realized you must have left it in the hotel.
—Honestly, I was always going to leave it in the hotel. And you must too.
Burr’s hand hovered for an instant. He patted Jean on the knee three times, exited at the Interflug ticket counter, and said:
—Thank you. Athens is finally real.
FIVE
HIDE THE STARS, HIDE THE MOON, SOMETHING TERRIBLE IS GOING TO HAPPEN
—Can you read that top letter for me?
Owen blinked several times and focused on the E of the eye chart, sharpening the serifs. Then he fumbled a hand to his eye patch, but found a gauze bandage instead. The bed was broken and small. IV taped to the fold of his arm, saline bag on a rack. He looked around to a roomful of whitecoats, all with pens waiting for his reply.
Now the woman asked him in German he only half comprehended:
—Können Sie mir den ____________ auf der Tafel vorlesen?
He was in Berlin. He remembered Berlin. But his throat caught at the déjà vu. These were the tests that followed his injury, before the enucleation, testing the eye that only caught light: Close your right eye, please. Can you read any of the letters? Even the top one? Which way is my hand moving? How about now? Tell me when the penlight is on. How about now? Is it on or off now?
Then they asked him in French that ended in garbles:
—Pouvez vous lire la première lettre ______?
He was totally fucked if his right eye was damaged. He turned away from the chart to catch the window blinds trembling with the summer breeze. Beyond the window, flagstone wedges that reminded him of buildings in the Quad. But he was far from California, or they wouldn’t waste time with other languages—maybe Spanish. He looked at the acoustic ceiling tiles and froze the scattered ants in place. He counted.
—What’s your name?
He could see just fine from his right eye.
Now another doctor leaned in.
—Where are you staying? Where are you from?
He ran his thumb over the chrome bed rail and said nothing. Eventually they left and let him sleep.
He woke to nurses smoothing him like a crumpled piece of paper, certain that if they ironed him out, they would find something legible amid the folds and creases.
He refused to answer the questions in German, English, or any of the other languages they tried, partly because he was unsure of his footing, partly for fear of
being hit with a six-figure bill. He smiled slightly when the hospital interpreter tried sign language, appreciating the exhaustiveness of their effort.
In fact, Owen had learned enough German in his time in Berlin to know it was no good that he kept hearing the word sterben. An einer Überdosis sterben, “overdose death,” a poetic pairing of words that kept him occupied for an otherwise uneventful day; vor Entkräftung sterben, to die of exhaustion. He nodded ever so slightly at the prognosis, which an Eastern European intern duly noted: Er wird leider sterben, “I’m afraid he’ll die”; and the coup de grace, Er hatte sterben können, “He could have already died.”
During the night, he overheard their diagnosis: “Idiopathic aphasia resulting from acute bacterial meningitis.” It wasn’t that his German was prodigious, it was that all the words were cognates. The only two he wasn’t quite sure of, idiopathic aphasia, spiraled down in his head, hypnotizing him.
On his first day of full consciousness, after the cabal of rounding physicians passed, an intern explained in English that his new placeholder name, Max Mustermann, meant “specimen,” and that the attending physician would continue to encourage everyone to treat him as such until he helped them out with his name and history.
He remembered the flashes, the lights, sweat, women, shaking pain. And he suddenly liked being Mustermann. At least he’d found a name for himself. Better than retrieving his vandalized name and soiled image. Thinking again of Kurt’s staged shots, which were probably headed to Basel right now, Owen shook. Even the wallet-size school photos they had to take in middle school were a nightmare. Tilting his head not like this, like this, enduring the photographer’s smoke-stained fingers lifting his chin, waiting for the flash and refusing to smile with his teeth. It was a horror show every year. But that was now nothing. The thought of Kurt explicitly manipulating his image to shock and someone else mounting that picture on a gallery wall right now, as he lay here in a hospital bed, made Owen’s hands quake.
Brief distinct memories of his exploitation rolled against each other like marbles in a pouch, each glass sphere abrading its neighbors with a grind and a gnash. He bristled at the sound. The fat marble in the pouch had an inset photo of Owen standing on an immense wooden spool, toes curled over the wooden lip, only the balls of his feet keeping him from falling forward. He saw his hands before him, bound in rope with novice knots that he should have been able to untie. Then plastic ties that sliced his wrists when he resisted.
A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall Page 18