—He didn’t do it. I did it. How can I be even remotely fine?
—It’s gonna be all right.
—No, it’s not.
Burr spoke in a low, even voice:
—If they pressed charges, Kurt and Altberg would have to answer kidnapping charges of their own. There’s also international jurisdiction involved, since this whole work was a process initiated in Berlin and executed through Basel, also encompassing the entirety of your flight to Iceland, I suppose. You running away and disappearing made the piece even more valuable. The actual event will get buried and forgotten, in the name of art—or commerce. You made Kurt a very rich man.
—I don’t care about that. I doubt he does either.
—He sold one sculpture for twelve million dollars. You got nothing. In a sense, that’s the settlement. Kurt even titled it Settlement. No one is after you. They’re after me.
—What? Why?
—I burned down the Parthenon trying to find you.
—The Parthenon? In Athens?
—On the Acropolis. Athene’s high-built hill itself. I threw a Molotov cocktail at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus.
—Why in the hell would you do that?
—It was the only choice. I was in Athens because that was all I had to go on. Since you’ve left I’ve, well, I’ve made quite a name for myself among activists.
—I leave for six months, and you become an anarchist?
—More or less. But we can talk about that later. You’re alive! Not only alive, doing well. You don’t know.
Burr was now whispering, exhausted, repeating “You don’t know.”
—We should rest. The only thing we need to do is keep quiet and still. You did a great job of disguising the cave.
—Rest.
Father and son woke to a dense fog misting into the cave.
—I don’t suppose you have a hot shower back there?
—Sure. Just push that rock on the left and the secret entrance opens.
—Aren’t there hot springs?
—Not in this part of Iceland. Those are all in the nameless places near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
—I hiked through it! Just last week.
—You flew into Reykjavik?
—I think it was my last international flight.
—Because of the anarchism?
—I think they’re calling it terrorism. Jean Baudrillard says they’ll throw me in Guantanamo if they find me.
—What?
—He may have been kidding. He’s a friend. We spoke together in Athens. During the Olympics. Before the riots. Well, I think the State Department is now calling them my riots. Hence Guantanamo.
—You’re not kidding.
—No.
—Jesus, Dad. Seriously?
—I’m afraid—No. That’s not true. I’m not afraid at all. I’m perfectly content to stay right here. The only trace I left was a flight record. And a few people have seen me in the north. I stopped at a croft, looking for you. But when’s the last time you saw someone in this valley? I’m guessing I could live out the rest of my life and no one would make it up here.
Owen peeked out from under the tarp to see if he could spot any more helicopters.
—I met your girlfriend in Berlin.
Owen rubbed his brow and blinked.
—Dad, I’m a little weak. You’ve got to keep things slow.
—No rush. I’ll unpack.
Burr unloaded all eighty-five liters on the floor opposite the bench. A white canister filled with at least ten gallons of water dwarfed Burr’s two aluminum water bottles. Burr washed the grit from his hands and face.
—How did you carry that jug up here?
—I nearly fell when I tried to carry it all at once. Now I add to it a few liters at a time. What do you mean, you met my girlfriend? Stevie?
Burr unzipped the lid extender of his pack and handed a silver flask of whisky over his head.
—One and the same. At the Pergamon Altar. I’ve never met anyone like her.
—If what you said about Kurt’s true, I’m going back to Berlin for her.
—You’ll have to hurry.
Owen looked quizzically at his father.
—If Gaskin kept his word, she should already be at our place. Possibly even taking classes.
—He admitted her to Mission?
—As you get older, you lose the wonder of youth. And when you find even a flicker of that old light, you’re very nearly brought to tears—not by the beauty of what you see, it’s more selfish than that, but by the fact that you can still see beauty. You aren’t this rheumy broken thing. You have the capacity for wonder and beauty and light and are not yet dead. Gerry heard that in my voice. He’s heard it before. You try not to press a friend, because then it gets weepy real quick, but you hear it in his voice and you nod and you realize that we are all these perfect broken things, holding a thimbleful of light.
Owen nodded. They drank. Owen smiled.
—Or a Molotov cocktail.
Burr coughed.
—That actually happened. This guy comes running down the center aisle . . . Wait, let me back up. I’m giving a talk on Liminalism in Scarface—
—When did you get an ism?
—Baudrillard gave it to me. So Baudrillard’s backstage. I’m at the Herodes Atticus at twilight, giving a talk on Scarface.
—Scarface?
—I don’t know. It was on the TV at the hotel. I’m talking about how Tony Montana is great. How we need to refuse constraints of the binary. How anticapitalism is doomed so long as it remains nonliminal. The crowd is finally starting to laugh at my jokes and whoop and cheer and just be young, you know, have fun on this beautiful night in Athens. Everyone is feeling alive, maybe even a touch of wonder, definitely a sense of self-satisfaction veering on smugness because they’re listening to an academic talk about Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction when there are blue funnel glasses and sports just a stone’s throw away. And then this guy in a black shirt and a mask comes running down the center aisle with a Molotov cocktail in his hands. He’s not in a particular hurry, considering he’s holding a bomb. He just sort of stands there, like he’s delivering a pizza. Torchlight is flickering off the crowd. This thing’s going to explode and take out the first three rows of my wonderful laughing crowd, so I throw it as far away from them as I can.
—Into the walls of the Odeon?
—I was hoping it would make it through one of those arched windows behind the stage, you know what I’m talking about?
—Yeah, I know those windows. But it didn’t?
—Not so lucky. It explodes on the side of the wall. Glass shards, flame spittle, people screaming—everyone’s fine, but the people who aren’t sitting there totally stunned are vaulting over the top row and running up the slope of the Acropolis. And I’m more than a bit flustered. Then I see Baudrillard striding over to the podium, like he’s going to calm everyone down. He adjusts the microphone, everyone is totally silent at this point, and he lifts his arms and says: “Go,” like Moses or something. So everyone runs toward the lights of the Parthenon, but the Greek riot police are waiting. They’re wearing gas masks with respirators and thumping their shields with truncheons.
Spittle, respirators, truncheons. Owen realized that all of his words, all of his sounds, came from his father.
—Someone throws a jag of rock, and you hear it thump off the shield. The police fire off tear gas. Missiles launch, and they start swinging clubs at the students clinging to their jackboots. I don’t know. I’ve seen pictures since then, and I can’t remember what I actually saw. Baudrillard and I ran down the southern slope and booked it for the airport. And that’s how I got to Berlin.
—Where you found Stevie?
—I went on a talk show to send up a flare.
—Athens wasn’t enough of a flare?
—You know, all of this could have been avoided if you would have just answered your fucking e-mail.
—I was indisposed
. I’m sorry.
—Before then. I mean before then.
—I didn’t have anything to tell you. I mean, what was I going to write? “Hey Dad, everything’s great. I’m really making a difference in the world. Think this art thing is going to take.” You realize you’re impossible to disappoint.
—You could never disappoint me.
—That’s what I mean.
—You’ve never failed at anything. Whereas I’ve been a disappointment to us both. And to the memory of your mother.
Owen tried to dismiss the thought. Burr put on his faux severe paternal face:
—Don’t interrupt. Hear me out. I’m willing to face the bad decisions I’ve made as a father because, at the end of the day, I got Stevie to California. That seemed right.
—It was.
The report of four gunshots cut short Owen’s question. Five, six, seven more shots. Owen spoke:
—It sounds like a firing squad. But those shots don’t sound close.
—Close enough.
—Close enough. Look, we’ll both stay in the cave until things calm down out there. Let’s hope this fog lasts. Although it means we need to be more quiet. As long as the helicopters don’t see us wandering around, we should be fine. I’ll hike down to Dalvík and figure out what’s going on, maybe also clear up the whole Odin thing.
They passed the flask back and forth while Burr described scaling down a cliff and how he nearly died. Owen laughed with his dad until he saw that a couple of the scrapes were pretty bad. Burr raised his eyebrows and trickled whisky on his palm, even though he had hand sanitizer in his first aid kit. Owen winced, then drank.
—Do you remember that time you fell in a great ravine in Iceland, never to be heard from again, the anarchist professor from California, on the run from the law, lost to the world forever?
They were both glowing from the Scotch. Burr had to echo his son’s words before he caught the meaning.
—Aha! Actually, now that I think about it, I remember dying at sea.
—It was a cold day in what, November?
—I think it was October.
—That’s right. It was October. You had taken a little skiff out by yourself down the fjord and into the Greenland Sea.
—Then my boat capsized.
—That’s right. And you were swept away in the freezing water.
—A horrible death.
—No one would wish that on anyone, not even an international terrorist.
—No. They’d wish worse on an international terrorist.
Owen laughed. His father continued:
—But the people on the shore saw my face. And it was calm. And if that’s how the international terrorist met his end, no one will be able to object that it wasn’t justice served.
—Amen.
They drank more Scotch.
—Real history now: Do you remember when you were five years old and ran away, swam away, at Point Dume?
—I remember thinking that I was fine the whole time and I couldn’t understand why you were making such a big deal about it.
—Well. It was the second worst moment of my life. A son has a right to expect his father to be there for him. I should have outswum the lifeguards.
—I was fine. I was always fine.
—I just mean to say . . . if you do end up scattering my ashes, real or staged, I want them to drown in the water off Point Dume, and let the fathoms have the memory of the one time I wasn’t there for you.
—The one time?
—Ach! You’re impossible. Hand me that Scotch.
Over the next week, helicopters swarmed the maze of Tröllaskagi, proving to both father and son that Burr was a wanted man; proving that the investiture of world interest in Joseph Burr was so great that tireless aviators would stare down rain and gusting winds for a glimpse; proving that the striking stipple portrait in the the Wall Street Journal, the crown jewel Burr eventually handed off to Owen for safekeeping, was an etching in history and not an error to be retracted. Beset from above, Burr would need to remain in this cave for at least a month before he could return to the lowland coast and join the outlaws of northern Iceland in braving the winter.
On the morning of Owen’s departure, they ate boil-in-bag stroganoff and taco chili noodles and finalized the plan for Burr’s disappearance from human ken.
—We may not have to stage anything if you don’t cut back on the meals, Dad. These things have sodium levels off the charts and about a thousand calories a bag. They’re assuming that you are exerting yourself severely, not sitting around all day outlining a manifesto.
—It takes serious effort to maintain body temperature at this latitude. What is the equation, one calorie heats one gram of water by one degree? Your math is far better than mine, but I certainly weigh more than a thousand grams, and I’m positive that it hasn’t topped eight degrees centigrade in the past week.
—That’s not how it works. Look at your gut. You’re the first hiker in history to gain twenty pounds in two weeks.
—I appreciate your concern.
—I’m serious. I’m going to tell whoever agrees to come for you to bring shock paddles.
—Would you suggest we eat more of those expired energy bars?
The bars were a disaster. The Burrs’ ideological support of Leave No Trace camping, coupled with helicopters shuffling the sky as compulsively as a convict with a deck of playing cards, meant digestive issues were no joke.
—No more bars. Ever. But you need to get some fish or something without so much salt in it. Seriously.
—They eat whale here. Do you think my diet is going to improve in the winter?
—It has to. You can’t eat these boil-in-bags forever. And I don’t think that’s true about the whales. Regardless. I’ll find someone to come up here and signal to you. If nobody comes, go to the post office in Dalvík—I’ll leave a package for you with instructions. But listen, you have to come down for winter. Seriously.
—I have a lot of writing to do—Liminalism and Seinfeld will make a killing. I mean, the Kramer chapter alone—
—But you’re staying on a farm through winter?
—Do you think I want to freeze to death?
—I’m worried you’re going to get some poor landowner killed when he has to hike all the way up here to rescue you. Or when they raid his croft and find your anarchist cookbook.
—Find someone with a large fireplace and a whisky still.
—And a hot tub. I got it.
—You’ll be back here, when, next fall?
—I’ll be back here every year. Two weeks before classes start at Mission.
The Burrs parted with a back-clapping, neck-pulling, head-shaking embrace.
No more bullets cracked the valley after the first day’s salvo. For over a week the helicopters had chugged through their conversations, scrambling clear words to turbulent noise knuckled into the cave’s back wall. They’d chopped up the streams and vacuumed the mountainsides until five days ago, but found nothing. From any elevated angle, the Burrs’ cave was invisible. Only by hiking in would someone discover their camp. It was too late in the year for hikers and too early for skiers, which gave Burr an undisturbed month before he would come down from the highlands.
The sky, stratospheric blue with wisps of cirrus in aurora-like sweeps. Owen, crabbing along the scree and hopping over river stones whenever the notion struck him. A month ago, he would have seen wet feet as life-threatening. Now he was two hours from Dalvík and could afford to be a touch careless. Four empty CD cases rattled in his bag with every step. He tried to hear the music, but didn’t know it well enough. He dipped cupped hands into the stream, slurped like a child, and looked upward to the curl of the clouds and the tuning of the sky.
Owen entered Dalvík weightless. Long grass scrubbed the grit from his gaiters as he descended from the higher country to the acreage just south of the town. A light snow beaded his long hair and hung in his brow. The first building he saw was an out
door swim complex, complete with two-storey curlicue waterslide. He walked the perimeter, realizing his dad was right about the hot springs. Steam twisted from pool to air like soft-serve ice cream. He smiled through the front door and was able to find a suit and swim cap in lost-and-found.
He soaked for hours in the ceramic-tiled hotpot, listening to everyone abuzz with the latest about the little farm girl who shot the bear and saved her father’s life. Round after round of women soft scissor-kicking from the hot tub steps, squatting to their chins with arms outstretched and hands in salute, repeated the tale, each adding a new twist, but all marveling at the poise of Iceland’s endangered heroes.
A polar bear had been lumbering mere miles from his camp. He asked if there was still any danger. The villagers told him it was a rare enough occurrence that he needn’t worry: a group of six local hunters, all of whom they named and counted on fingers, had shot and killed the bear. The helicopter sorties had been a precaution against more bears. The old women lunging in bathing caps clucked their tongues at the extravagance; the grey-chested man chewed his cigar and never stopped sizing up Owen.
Toweled off, wrapped in a robe, Owen sat in front of a computer in the swim facility’s solarium. It took him less than a minute to discover that animals were not the greatest threat to his father’s welfare.
Athens was no exaggeration. This had all happened. The conservative media compared his father to a drunk vagrant raving in a park, which didn’t seem to undercut their other message that Burr was a fearsome terrorist who must be brought to justice.
Owen winced at the world he would have to rejoin. The world of opinion-poll decisions and parceled attention. The binary world where you’re either with us or against us. The world where men of nuance are neither known nor respected, wandering the world until they retreat to the maw of a mountain.
No one reproduced the text of the speech. Thousands of photos of the spectacle, but not one word of the speech. Owen thought of his father’s pride at the hedcut portrait and the New Yorker caricature, which Burr kept in a zipped pocket of his down vest, and decided to let his father have his infamy. He let him have his helicopter chase.
Owen found the breathless dispatches from Athens and the sober op-eds in the international press. His father had made the front page of the Times international news section. They called Burr a provocateur. One of the Economist’s anonymous writers alighted upon the word firebrand, and from that day on, the stories echoed or permuted the epithet: the firebrand professor, the firebug professor, Professor Fireburr. In an article entitled “The Wannabe Socrates,” the Post gleefully reported Burr’s addition to the National Security Threat List. The International Herald Tribune said his dad might be an election issue.
A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall Page 33