And then in three days, Burr was no longer news.
On the blank side of an activities calendar, Owen wrote a letter to his father transcribing the paragraphs and phrases that he thought would elicit a chuckle or a beam of pride. He quickly ran out of room on the first sheet and grabbed three more from the counter. Owen could find no evidence of an exhaustive manhunt; it appeared Burr had been a punch line for a few days, then an afterthought. But amid the late-night jokes, there was the rather serious consequence of being on the terrorist watchlist. Owen found no confirmation that his dad was on the no-fly list, a much more exclusive database. But he did read that Senator Ted Kennedy had apparently been added to the list in August, right around the time of Athens. By page four of his letter, staring at a dozen bricks of vitriolic block quotes Owen had copied out by hand, he realized his father was better off in this frond of the world, in the shadow of a great rock, fighting the barbarian hordes from his cave.
He read about the famous Icelanders, the man and his daughter who fought off a bear, and realized they were his best shot at finding his father an ally.
After getting a jump start for his dad’s Ford Escort, Owen drove to the Sigurðsson homestead to ask the father and daughter for a favor. He waited half an hour to get an audience with the father; the daughter shuttled from call to call in the other room. Ástríður, and to a lesser extent Ólafur, were national heroes. It was just a matter of time before she got a postage stamp. Her dad might even get one too.
Every news crew in Iceland had managed to make it to the Sigurðssons’ corner of Tröllaskagi. After a week, the international press got wind of the story and sent field agents from London. These were the journalists who passed while he waited on the front porch, leaning on the rail where Ástríður had rested her gun. The family had seen all manner of foreigner in the past two weeks, but no one like Owen. And never had they expected anyone to ask for more than an autograph. Owen explained the situation.
—I’m the guy who was inspired by your story and is here to ask you to do something you don’t want to do.
Owen waited for a reaction. No smile. No sign the father even understood. Then the man took a chair.
—Go ahead. You’re off to a great start. Don’t let me stop you.
—Do you mind if I sit?
The man said nothing. Owen sat.
—I suppose the worst thing a child can do to his father is run away without a word. Either that, or spend years making his father feel irrelevant. I did both. And my father, Professor Joseph Burr, did what he had to do to bring me back to the fold.
—What do you want, man?
—My father was speaking to a large crowd in Athens when a protestor stormed the stage with a Molotov cocktail. In an attempt to protect the crowd, he threw the bottle away. But it exploded. And chaos erupted. And he became a political pawn. The conservatives made him into an outlaw.
—I’m indifferent to politics.
—So is he. He is a world-class scholar and a kind-hearted man. He can teach English, Latin, and Greek. It’s probably best to keep him away from philosophy.
—In exchange for what?
—A story. In a few months, I want you to say you saw him take a rowboat out into the fjord and get swept away.
—So your father is a fugitive, living where?
—In a cave just on the other side of this mountain.
—And you want me to say I saw him drown.
—I don’t want to undercut your heroism. If you saw him drown, people might ask why you didn’t try to save him. I’m thinking something like, you met this odd fellow named Joseph Burr sometime in September. In October, on the other side of the country in Egilsstadir, a friend of yours saw the same man pushing a rowboat into the fjord.
—My friend told him a storm was coming, but he went anyway.
—Perfect.
—Understand, your father really will die if he tries to last out winter in a small cave. There’s no fuel for fire.
—That’s an interesting point. And I’m sure it would be much easier to have your daughter’s tutor living in the house, or even in the barn, provided it’s warm.
—Ah. Jesus. Does he bring any real skills with him? Do you have a picture of the man?
Owen set a printout of the New York Times article on the dining table. This was the only one to include favorable quotes from his former students. Ólafur leaned forward and scanned the piece.
—But will he be eager to clean sheep all winter? Does he have the hands for it?
—Are you kidding? He’ll get giddy at the thought of checking that box on the US Immigration form that asks “Have you handled livestock recently?”
—So he will be returning to America eventually.
—That depends on who wins in November. Honestly, I have no idea when he’s going to be able to return to the States, if ever. I need to talk to a good lawyer. I’m not sure he’s actually guilty of anything.
—And if he can’t go back?
—I suppose he will keep living in the cave and come back down every winter that you’ll have him to help you on the farm and teach your daughter. At least for a few years, until things calm down. I’ll be here every year in early September. I’m hoping that by this time next year I have a check for an advance on one of his books.
—He would be content to live in a cave for eight months a year?
Owen thought of mentioning their missing garage door in California, but decided to let it go.
—My dad’s an outdoorsman. He loves camping. And the valleys of Tröllaskagi are the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.
—When does this need to happen?
—If you are willing to help, I’ll leave a small package poste restante with the post office in Dalvík; inside will be a map and your contact information. He should be hiking down in a month. After he finds the message, I’d guess it’ll be a few days before he makes it here. He thinks all those helicopters were after him and not the bear, so he’ll be taking his time to get my package. You know the timeline better than me. If a cold front comes in, you might want to tell him to get the hell out of here.
—Why us?
—You’re the only people I can think of whose word would never be questioned. If you, or one of your friends, saw Joseph Burr climb into a boat, then Joseph Burr climbed into a boat. You’re heroes. And you’re a family. You know the absurdities that come with the territory.
Ástríður had been on a phone call with the BBC. She paused halfway down the staircase, surprised to find a giant in her living room.
—Who’s this?
—The son of your new tutor. He’s just leaving.
Owen asked a final favor of them both:
—Oh, and if it comes up, don’t tell him the helicopters were for the bear. Let him have his Saga.
Later that night, parked on the shoulder of the Ring Road with his hazards blinking, flopping back and forth in the reclined passenger seat and waking every hour to turn the heater on high, Owen thought of blackout curtains, a bed that was almost long enough, and a hot cup of coffee. He should have learned by now to avoid exhausting himself, but his thoughts were tumbling to California and Stevie. After a few hours he rejoined the desolate road.
He drove into Reykjavik at dawn and waited in the mechanic’s parking lot, tracing H’s with the gearshift until the shop opened. Owen hoped to get enough for a plane ticket. Lacking leverage, he was given enough for a bus ticket to Keflavik Airport, a few meals, and a few magazines. He took it.
A sales agent for Iceland Air patiently secured authorization for the one-way fare to SFO from President Gaskin’s office. Owen felt like a recruited athlete when she added that the university would have someone waiting on him when he landed.
White sandals dangled between her fingers, sleeves of the oatmeal sweater she found in his dresser curling away from the blue finch-feet of her inner wrist, the wrist he kissed before he left. Before he had to leave. The sea, a fluted column rolling to her feet.<
br />
She wasn’t exactly disappointed, but she had been so sure that the sand would be white and smooth as a shell’s interior or, if not white, starfish orange. Instead the beach was dark enough to camouflage the hauled-out seals and pooled with cold lakes mirroring the clouds. She swam only once, as Gaskin had predicted, and now felt daring when the water lapped over her bare ankles.
A shared delusion made this California. It was no warmer than Berlin. Here the wind rose with purpose, capable of eroding a cliff, content with shivering a pool. And yet the people here wore shorts. Tenured professors wore shorts to lecture—not many, but some, and some was something. She followed their lead. Despite the cold, the sun had etched in flip-flop tan lines, a white gull drawn on the top of each foot.
Her introduction to Mission could have been more graceful. On her first day, in a hemisphere of grad students, she offhandedly remarked that the quality of the prose in Phenomenology of the Spirit was no better in the original German, but still wasn’t as mind-numbing as deejaying five nights a week. She was just angling her plumage in the sun, but they heard deejay and her comment met with silence. No one heard the gratitude. She wanted to add that she loved it here in the cloisters, but just walked away. And from that moment on, most of her program labeled her conceited and potentially a weak scholar; a handful of guys referred to her as Deejay Stevie. She tried to be good humored about the sobriquet. Word must have reached the professors because they began squinting whenever she spoke up in seminars. Given time, the work would win out.
Kelp bulbs at her toes. She picked her steps carefully, thinking she might have heard somewhere that kelp is poisonous. She stretched her neck until her shadow darkened the lace ribbon of a surging wave. She imagined him doing something virile, scooping up the ocean and gargling the sea.
The horizon was navy corduroy, a steady swell of waves holding more and more of their breath. She set her sandals on the black rocks. The rocks were a paradise for the shore crabs dodging barnacles and darting through the glistens. She curled her toes and whisked her feet a few times in a cold pool on the rock, then stepped into her sandals and climbed up the cliff to the house.
The screen door squawked on its rusted hinges. She wiped her feet on the bristle mat then dipped them in the blue plastic bowl of warm water she’d filled earlier. Inside, shadows from the blinds plaited the floor slats. The house was warmer than when she left it. Beams of light pulled to unfinished wooden trim, bent as if by magnets.
Her doubts, she was okay with. But she hoped he left his doubts in Basel. She felt like a little girl waiting for a total eclipse, holding her little pinhole device—not sure how the contraption was supposed to work, but trusting that it would.
She sat on the tatami mats in the den combing the frays, watching rushes catch sun. In slants of light, rare colors visible: soap-bubble green and cyan. His Post-it note, which she peeled from the pencil-marked doorframe of the study and stuck to the forehead of her collected Auden, now curled up into the light from the arm of the sofa. The note had been a surprise, a reminder that she wasn’t the first person he’d left.
But today he was coming home.
He looked for her as soon as he was in the terminal. If anyone would know to ask for a gate pass, it was her, which meant she had something else planned. On the other side of customs, baggage claim, and security, he scanned the crowd. She wasn’t there. But still he smiled. He had always wanted to clear customs and see a driver holding a card with his name. There it was: OWEN BURR. The driver, wearing gloves and a cap, was initially taken aback by Owen’s height. Closer, he thought the young man was more skeletal than advertised and had trouble believing that his passenger arrived with no luggage, just a white plastic sack.
Owen swung the sack into the backseat of the towncar, four jewel cases rattling and the November issue of SURFER magazine sliding free, and stretched out on the black leather seats. He kicked off his shoes and rubbed his arches on the carpeted center hump. The driver had taken off his hat. He looked at Owen in the mirror.
—You have enough room back there, man? I’m guessing those long-haul flights are hard on the knees.
Owen agreed.
—You came in from Iceland?
—I did.
—Short vacation?
—I’ve been in Europe awhile.
—I did a Europe trip when I was your age. Hostels. Foreign girls. Rome. Did you make it to Rome?
—Almost made it to Athens.
He dangled the city’s name in front of the driver to see if it would get a response. Nothing. Apparently his dad wasn’t an election issue after all.
He lowered the window and let the salt-stained wind sculpt his fingers. The sun warmed his cheek and the back of his hand. Like a magician dancing a coin over his knuckles, he played with the different weight of the California air, trying to have faith that she would be there and that this was right. But he had been losing memories of her like a tree losing its leaves—he was a little colder, less capable of transforming air by fixing the sky, less green against the clouds.
They pulled up to the Burrs’ house. His hands were sweating. He thought of asking the driver to honk a few times, but decided to walk around to the garage.
Earlier in the week had been perfect: rain running down the wooden eaves and crinkling off the stepping stones, every hundredth drop heavy and snapping with the suddenness of a plastic bottle refinding its form. She initially thought the sharplined eaves and the total absence of curvature inside the house would fence her rounded thoughts, wasting space, like a circle inscribed in a rectangle. Instead, she imagined the house harnessing the flood outside. The lines became chutes for rain to weave back and forth. Every bookshelf a channel where water rushed, then dropped a level, then rushed back the other direction. She still saw the run of flumes and the home now had the humid quiet of a forgotten garden. Today’s shadows were dry. She looked at the light fringes of her outstretched hand, the penumbra a memory of touch.
She thought she would wait for Owen in the master bed, maybe at the top of the stairs, make him open a few doors and call her name. Her deliberations vanished when she heard the car idling outside. She walked downstairs to the front door then saw him heading around to the garage and was there to meet him in the laundry room when he opened the door.
She had a few wry comments ready for this moment, but when she saw him her arms simply shot around his neck.
Joined lips joined laughs and they wove away.
He was worried that his return would mean gluing the leaves back on branches, his trembling fingers guessing at depth, holding each memory in place until it dried and was reattached. Instead, everything shot back at once, a live crown of memories: the shadow of her pulled-back hair just behind her ear, her almost hidden smile when she was being serious, the insistence this was serious whenever she laughed, her searching timbre, the skipped beat of each quick reply, skimming fingertips on his collarbone before she collapsed at his side, her breath against his eye, the voltage of her softness, the first beads high on her forehead, her hair falling over her left shoulder every time she let it down, her chin to her chest and her hair as a veil, first her veil then covering them both, curling then stretching awake with arms over her head in a dive, ordinary smells like soap and skin, the trust in her eyes and how she smiled when she watched it make him buckle, her warmth to his touch, clasped hands unclasping and rippling wrist and arm, the windmills of Nijmegen, Netherlands, the city where they parted.
The memory of their meeting, drawn on a transparency and sealed in a manila envelope, waited on the nightstand. Three corners with molar bites of travel, one corner beaked up like a paper swan.
She saw him looking.
—We could open it. And retrace Berlin. I found the projector in the garage and it works. But the Gaskins have planned a homecoming reception. And he’s been implying that he has news.
Owen was too indebted to protest. She traced his rack-ribbed chest. He imagined her hearing xylophone n
otes, sometimes singular, sometimes paired, as the mallets of her first two fingers percussed his side. She listened, a finger suspended for a second then finding the next rib. He sat up, resolved:
—We’ll eat, shake some hands, then come right back here.
Despite his resolution, it was dark before they began getting ready. He opened the window. Night lacquered black and a rustle of the trees. He imagined how their room looked to someone walking by: amber proving out against the dark, a warm glow from the petal-thin panels in the wall. The white noise of night was cut by distant car horns and a radio, faint enough to be deck music from a ship anchored at sea.
The occasion called for a jacket, but he only had one, corduroy, and since he had nearly transformed it into a murder weapon, he dressed down in a barn jacket left in his closet since high school. She dressed up in a sleeveless emerald dress. She took her leather jacket from the counter and squeezed his hand.
He led her through his shortcut to campus. Quiet stars and the still of expectation. The eucalyptus branches heavy with evening dew, their feet shuffling woodchips, braiding eights in the silver grass, and edging hillocks from the first mulch of fall. She walked up the cement balance beam of a culvert, climbing just inches above him, as she had been when they met.
The porch light spread into the salt-stained air. A crowd was shaking hands at the threshold, lumbering indoors like a creature eager for domestication.
They waited, enjoying the moment before they were discovered.
The porch light haloed a shuffling couple in hats. When Mrs. Gaskin opened the door to receive them, she spotted Owen and Stevie. She took Stevie by the hand and introduced her to friends, leaving Owen to grab a glass of wine and settle on the couch.
A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall Page 34