A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall

by Will Chancellor

  She filled their water glasses. Owen gulped the glass down and then filled another.

  —I hope you don’t do this game with other guys.

  —This isn’t a thing. This is between us.

  Anytime she said “us” he was ready to tell her that he loved her.

  —I know the circumstances were a little rough. But have you had a good time on the boat so far?

  Anything remotely positive, and his response was, I love you.

  —It’s been okay.

  Owen dropped. He could see his jaw dropping with the inevitability of a spoon’s handle tracing the inner rim of a bowl and then falling into the soup. He had nothing. He couldn’t leave. He took a few steps and looked out their Window to the Rhine.

  —If this is okay, I’d love to see what matters.

  —You matter. But I matter too. And I’m not about to give up my life for an American who’s about to . . . about to what? Have you thought out anything, other than not going back to Berlin, ever?

  —You heard something when you were on deck.

  —The only thing I ever hear is footsteps. And I hear them all the time now. I start to sweat every time I hear boots on the stairs. I don’t know how you stay down here all day.

  —Boots mean people. And if those people open the door, it means this is over. And fine. I can deal with this being everything it is. I can deal with it being over. People I can deal with. It’s the papers that make me sweat.

  —Yeah. You’re a real people person.

  He had enough presence to laugh at himself. And enough sense to lie to himself and believe that everything was going to work out.

  Stevie tracked down the concierge and got him into the cabin after they had docked in Dusseldorf and the last tourist had disembarked. Mingus took him aback. He looked at the offending speakers until Stevie hit stop on the Discman.

  —Owen, this is Paul. He thinks he might be able to help.

  —That depends on what you need. First off, will you state officially that you are part of no police organization, no governmental organization, and that you are not entrapping me in any kind of illegal activity?

  —I’m not a cop. She’s not a cop. And as far as we know, nothing about this is illegal. This is just a hypothetical conversation.

  Owen’s tone was too aggressive. Paul was already taking slow steps to the door.

  —What Owen means to say is, for purely research purposes, what would happen, hypothetically, if there was a person who needed to disappear somewhere between here and Amsterdam?

  —Clarify what you mean by disappear, or this conversation is over.

  Owen spoke.

  —I need to disappear because of something in Basel.

  —I’m going to need two hundred euros to even continue listening to this.

  Stevie peeled out four hundred euro notes.

  —So, let me get this straight: hypothetically, someone needs to be unfound.

  —Permanently unfound.

  —Permanently unfound? That’s a very difficult proposition. I want to help with your research, but I’m afraid no one can be permanently unfound.

  —What’s the best you’ve got?

  —What Owen means to say is, hypothetically, what’s the best solution you can come up with for a not-real-world plan for getting a person away from the authorities—let’s just say any authorities?

  —Well, we’re headed north, which is the dead wrong direction. This hypothetical person would want to go to an expat community in North Africa or even Ukraine. The farther north we go, the worse things get for this hypothetical person.

  He now turned to Owen.

  —This hypothetical person is on this ship, or one very similar to it?

  —Let’s assume this hypothetical person is in this very room.

  —Let’s not. Look, you’ve got nothing but B plans, my friend. The next best bet to going south is going very far north. Our next port is Nijmegen. Several container ships leave Rotterdam for Iceland every day. Shipping has become much more automated since these container ships were built, which means there’s not much crew and bunks are usually available for the right price. If this hypothetical person had the right amount of money, someone like me could hypothetically broker passage on said container ship tomorrow, day after tomorrow at the latest, and in a few months the person would wake up in port in Iceland.

  —How much money would this take?

  —Someone like me could get it done for three thousand euro. Cash.

  Owen looked at Stevie. He had no more than a hundred and twenty in his jacket pocket.

  —Thank you for your consultation. You’re quite sure of that figure?

  —Quite.

  —Less the four hundred I already gave you.

  Paul sized them up, then shook Stevie’s hand.

  Owen grabbed the bottle and poured wine into a third water glass.

  —Thank you. But I can’t drink red wine. Stains the teeth. My predecessor was not as careful. Know that. I am extremely careful. When I come down here tomorrow at 13:00, after we’ve docked in Nijmegen, I’ll need both of your passport numbers. If there are no other hypothetical matters to attend to, I need to return to the foredeck.

  Stevie stood and opened the door.

  —Thank you, Paul. It’s the little things that make a Valhalla Cruise.

  Owen shook his hand.

  —Your hypothetical fugitive thanks you for your advice. We’ll see if it’s practical.

  Paul buttoned his coat and softly closed the door behind him.

  Owen looked to Stevie.

  —Well?

  —Well. He didn’t say anything about the music. And I guess we have to get through three albums now.

  Stevie unbundled the plastic bag stuffed in the nightstand and fanned the remaining albums on the bedspread.

  —I’m going to the ATM. Maybe even ATMs. I have the second half of next year’s tuition left. I’m assuming you don’t have anything?

  —I have a few hundred.

  —How few?

  Owen counted out 110 euros.

  —You’re in charge of the music. I’m going to get you to Iceland.

  SIX

  PERFECT BROKEN THINGS

  The producers had chosen Burr’s favorite of Mission University’s three emblems. This was the diploma seal: maize and lapis lazuli, an open book because that was the custom, SAPERE AUDE on an unfurled scroll with stars at either end. And a torch behind the book. God help him if the producers chose to use the scholar’s torch as a segue to scenes of Athens on fire. Sawing violins would be bad. Plucked violins would be bad. Drums would be worse. Punk guitar would mean he was putting his head in the stocks.

  On the monitor, the seal dissolved into stills of protestors lobbing rocks at police. The journalist spoke in what Burr imagined was a neutral to sympathetic tone—her tone was certainly more lilting than most of the German he had heard. Inquisitive piano, imitation Philip Glass, underscored her rhetorical questions.

  The lack of computer-animated graphics and the host’s measured tone brought some comfort to Burr.

  With nothing but two-month-old facts and figures from the four hospitals that had helped Owen recover from his meningitis and a stack of printed-out Netscape search results of Owen in cardinal red, Owen at the Sydney Olympics, the random noise of Abu Ghraib photographs, Burr had placed pay-phone calls to every major news outlet in Germany. Left, right, populist, it made no difference. All he needed was an audience.

  The producers of Zeitgeist were the first to take him seriously. He wasn’t even sure which network this show was on, but he was told it wasn’t cable. He had no idea how they would handle him or his story. It was worth a lashing from a conservative pundit as long as Owen, or someone who knew anything about Owen, was watching the show.

  On the monitor, Burr watched the anchorwoman pace from one stage of the studio to another. She would soon be interviewing him “via satellite,” even though they were two walls and two hundred feet
from one another—for his protection or theirs? When they walked him through the studio, he noticed that there was not a single chair, which meant this was probably how they handled live guests. Makeup mopped his head and grips swung lights to play with the shadows. The audio engineers tested the earpiece that would translate the host’s German to his barbarian ears. They dialed in the sensitivity of his lapel mic. He had been waiting at the studio for three hours and couldn’t decide why only now, five minutes before he was due on air, they’d decided to mic him up and camouflage his haggardness with sprays and dabs. Perhaps they wanted him to appear as if he were in a hurry. On the run, as it were. Perhaps these lights are just too hot to stand for more than twenty minutes. He was sweating through his shirt.

  The screen now showed a photo of him at the Herod Atticus with both arms aloft, as if inciting the crowd to rise. He looked like a televangelist, possessed and sweating.

  Makeup dabbed him off one more time. He checked his pocket for the high school photo of Owen he usually kept in his wallet. He ran his thumb over the matte print and then put it away like a rosary. The host would be interviewing him in German, but an intern would translate his feed to English. The video of Athens ended with him throwing the bottle. He was clearly throwing it away from the crowd, but the angle suggested he was throwing it at the Herod Atticus. How could they not include the crowd? At the same time, no one could deny that the man in the photo, clearly not the real him, looked quite capable—capable of anything. Did that mean that the real him was incapable or that he had become this capable, dangerous man? He hated both alternatives.

  She now talked to a floating screen of his head, suspended at eye level between a pillar and a red curtain that matched her dress. She was looking at her notepad. The monitor cut to a shot of him, blinking.

  —Professor Burr, welcome.

  —Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me on.

  —Thank you for joining us.

  The LED lights behind him cycled from blue to red. The background was a smear of light on an aluminum screen, like a very drunk man walking through rainy night traffic. The handful of television appearances he’d previously made had been staged with either a solid black background or wingback chairs. Zeitgeist’s drunken-stagger backdrop, however, made this seem like news, made him seem like a man who could make news.

  —Professor Burr, we’ve read today’s papers. What’s your account of what happened last night in Athens? What level of responsibility do you believe you had in the riots?

  Okay. So this wasn’t news per se, more editorial. That probably meant they would let him talk. The producer had said it was a fifteen-minute segment.

  —First, let me contextualize the problem. My son . . . I have a picture here. Can we get a close-up of this?

  No one answered him. The young man next to the young man with headphones began slicing the air with both hands. He put the photo in front of his face so that they couldn’t crop it out. The cameraman obliged and zoomed in on the photo. He could hear the cannon-size lens recalibrating and wondered how those digital whirs could be inaudible to a viewer. When he saw the photo on the monitor, he counted to three and then put it back in his pocket.

  —My son would have been competing in Athens in water polo. Which was the context for that particular venue. There was no premeditated attempt to speak out against the Olympics. As a classicist I have my qualms about the particularities of the resurrection of the ancient games, but these are far more picayune than a systematic critique. I hope that any viewer who has information about the whereabouts of my son will make every effort to contact me at Joseph-dot-Burr-at-Mission-University, one word, dot-e-d-u.

  The translator was speaking rapidly in his right ear. He wasn’t sure if his e-mail address had gotten through; it didn’t appear in the subtitles on the screen. He put his finger to the earpiece, prompting another round of waving and flapping from the assistant.

  —You say this was not premeditated, yet you flew to Athens and delivered a speech advocating a violent response to state hegemony. We have obtained video of the talk. Please, if you would watch and then comment.

  The man lecturing at the Herod Atticus seemed far younger than the version of himself he’d seen in the mirror that morning. What’s more, this Burr was yelling:

  “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.”

  —I’m not sure that came through. It’s joseph-dot-burr, two Rs, at Mission University, one word, dot e-d-u. I’m not sure that capitalization matters with these things, but try all lowercase.

  —Can you answer the question, please?

  —I hope your viewers realize this is grossly out of context. I was speaking about liminality—Liminalism rather. Which is my belief that we must reject object permanence and adopt a more relational definition of consciousness.

  The host’s silence invited him to continue.

  —The Mission University seal that you showed at the beginning of the broadcast bears Kant’s Enlightenment principle, Sapere aude, “Dare to know.” Aufklärung as Ausgang. Kant’s idea is that Enlightenment is a departure from the familiar, from home.

  He wavered, suddenly thinking of the more excusable alternative that Owen ran away to seek enlightenment—not in a hippie sort of way, but in a rigorous way. The host was still looking at the disembodied TV screen Burr.

  —The idea is Enlightenment as an exit from received wisdom. For Kant, exit from intellectual tyranny was the only goal. What I believe he missed, and this is crucial, is that overconcern with the exit misses the entire point of the Process. We have called for a change, as if change is a thing that we can possess. Again, I’m advocating that we reject things and focus on the relations between things. At the heart of the Olympics is the perfect metaphor: intersecting rings—an image that the founder of the Games lifted from Carl Jung, by the way; but more importantly, the intersecting Olympic rings are tattooed on the inner left arm of my son, Owen Burr. When I first saw it, I was horrified, but now—

  —Professor. You’re avoiding the question. Psychology and intellectualism aside, you admit to wanting to tear down the Olympic Games. How does capitalism play into this? Do you consider yourself an anarchist, socialist, or terrorist?

  —No. None of these. Terrorist? Heavens, no! My only concern with capitalism is its inherent bias toward idolatry, because you can sell idols. Far more money is spent advertising things than advertising services. The very notion of advertising a service summons lascivious connotations. Liminalism is politically neutral. Liminalism merely suggests that objects take a backseat to relationships.

  —No one would consider throwing Molotov cocktails at the walls of the Parthenon to be a mere suggestion, Professor. No one would consider riots that left dozens wounded, millions inconvenienced, and storefront windows shattered to be a mere suggestion.

  This was the sound of the other shoe dropping. Zeitgeist was clearly a liberal show for a progressive audience, or they wouldn’t have let him talk for so long, but even they were castigating him. She was accusing him of being a terrorist.

  —A young man in black put a flaming bomb in my hands. I tried to blow it out, but it relit like a trick birthday candle—I’m not sure if that reference is going to translate, but nonetheless. At that point I had three choices: one, let the ordnance explode in my face; two, throw it into the audience and take cover; three, throw it away from the audience. I chose option three. I’m not sure how familiar your viewers are with the Odeon of Herodes Atticus—can we pull up that image again?—but there are empty windows in the skene. I’m not the athlete my son is—again, if you have any information on Owen Burr, that’s joseph.burr@missionuniversity.edu. I have no experience with these things. The Molotov cocktail hit the skene of the Odeon, hundreds of yards from the actual Parthenon, mind you, because I was trying to save people. Lastly,
the injunction to see beyond binary relations is hardly the kind of thing that provokes a citywide riot. I urge an inquest into why riot police were assembled at the Parthenon before the demonstrators marched.

  —Is that the line of defense you expect to take with the US State Department?

  It finally struck him that what he had done, he had done as a person, not as a persona. His life really had changed. There was no mask to remove. This was his face, cartoonish as it might be.

  —I wasn’t aware that I needed to defend myself to the US State Department.

  —So you remain unapologetic about the havoc you created in Greece?

  —I just want to find my son. Again, if anyone has any information about the whereabouts . . .

  They cut away from him mid-sentence. Without a mic there was little point in him sitting there. He started to get up, but the assistant asked him to please sit down. He stood up anyway and handed back the earpiece. They untangled the cords from his chest. Burr spoke to the head of production, who was now there to escort him out of the studio:

  —Well, that went well.

  Burr’s plan now was to wait in front of an anonymous computer for the messages to come in. He entered his first cybercafé and sat before a monstrous black computer with an aggressively sloped keyboard. The boy next to him was playing a shoot-’em-up game and chatting to a friend on his headset. He didn’t appear to recognize Burr from the news, but one couldn’t be too sure. Burr casually read an article about Athens in the Times, but then read about the Olympics results.

  Before the interview, Burr’s in-box had held a smattering of e-mails expressing puzzlement and hate mail from the more conservative members of the classical community. Following the Zeitgeist interview, he discovered negative response bias. All he appeared to have done was invite people to wish horrible things for his son or spitefully bait him with disinformation. Every one of these malicious messages, subject heading CRUCIAL INFORMATION ABOUT OWEN BURR’S WHEREABOUTS, brought fifteen seconds of hope. Then minutes of humiliation until he opened the next message. Hundreds of people hated him enough to write, meaning many people must have seen the program.