A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall

by Will Chancellor

  Without the rugs, wood polish, and white linen, the president’s residence would have resembled an exclusive fraternity house at a university in the south. Every stick of furniture was Mission: drum-tight leather, heavy oak planed by thick hands.

  People nodded, but kept their distance, presumably because of Berlin. And Basel. It would have been worse had he worn the jacket.

  A crystal rocks glass rested on the arm of an adjacent chair. Owen watched a cold droplet roll over the glass’s pineapple cuts, snailing ever closer to the polished grain. Over the din, he heard the ice snap and resettle. He heard the wood creak at the cold warping of the drink. He took the glass. The professor sitting next to him turned:

  —I believe that’s mine, dear boy.

  Owen handed it back. Without taking a sip, the professor replaced the drink on the wooden arm, chaining the waterstain with a second ring.

  President Gaskin had been watching. He approached:

  —Owen, I see you’ve met Professor George Hill.

  Owen stood. Gaskin shook his hand firmly and clapped his arm a few times.

  —Professor Hill is currently advising your better half on her independent study.

  She stood on the far side of the room under crystal pendants, two champagne glasses in her hands fizzing the incandescence and burning down like sparklers.

  Hill spoke to Gaskin, but for Owen’s benefit:

  —Ms. Schneider is a gifted reader and picks up subtle rhythms of the texts that other students miss. The department would be lucky to retain her.

  —I couldn’t agree more. If you’ll excuse us a moment.

  At six-eight with an eyepatch, he didn’t need to raise his hand to get his date’s attention—standing gave them a private line of sight. But when he stood, he also raised his hand, and in the course of doing so, stopped conversation. The entire reception watched Owen follow Gaskin to the adjoining study.

  Hundreds of volumes of poetry lined the shelves. This was very different from his father’s version of Gaskin, the same president who was now pinching silver tongs and talking about the special whisky they would soon be tasting.

  —Are these books yours, or Mrs. Gaskin’s?

  —When your father and I were younger, we had fierce debates at the Tilted Wig about Paul Celan and Georg Trakl. Your mother could recite poetry by the yard. She was friends with my first wife, but that’s not why we met. I’m not sure your father ever knew this, but our friendship wasn’t coincidental.

  Gaskin now had Owen’s attention.

  —No. Not a coincidence at all. The academy stands on two pillars: theory and fundraising. Even as a grad student, I bristled at the word thesis. I was never going to come up with a theory—I’m too allergic to paradox. I did Frost, not the dark Frost of Brodsky, mind you; I read the apple orchard Frost, the walking for a think Frost. My Whitman was asexual, which is to say doomed. I latched onto the brightest star I could find, your father, and confirmed my private suspicions that I was no theorist.

  —But you’re here.

  —But I’m here. Which speaks to the power of ambition meeting self-awareness. Unlike the legions of unsuccessful academics, I knew who I was and found another way to make myself indispensible. So I campaigned for a seat on the faculty senate and spent my day trading faculty grievances for favors. The provost was impressed enough to appoint me his special assistant. I played golf with the pioneers of Silicon Valley and squash with fund managers. When time came for a change, the Board of Trustees, maybe for the first time, saw someone who understood the business of education. For all your father’s lecturing on know thyself, I think he’s just recently learned his value. Which is to say, there are two ways you can continue living the academic life, but you have to know what value you bring to Mission.

  Gaskin offered Owen a Scotch. Owen set down his wine and took it, uncertain what Gaskin was implying. He faced the problem:

  —How bad’s the fallout from Athens?

  —Fallout? You mean windfall. I’m hearing from college counselors all over this great land that Mission University is the new Berkeley. That’s because of your father. Now we have an edge. Only our name can hold us back. It sounds religious; there’s no escaping that. I tell you this in confidence, but this year I’m going to put it to the trustees that we change the name to Big Sur. It has a valence to it, no?

  —Big Sur is better.

  —“Where did you do your undergrad?” “Big Sur.” Much better. It’s less . . .

  —Normative.

  —I was going to say snotty, but yes.

  They drank. Owen smacked his lips and nodded in appreciation of the drink. Both men waited to draw serious remarks. Gaskin won:

  —Could you see yourself as an associate professor at Big Sur?

  Owen coughed, whisky fumes laughing out his nose.

  —I don’t even have a degree.

  —Three and a half years at Stanford . . .

  —Three and a third.

  —You have real-world experience as a contemporary artist. That’s who kids want to listen to. That’s the lecture alumni want to attend when they come back for homecoming. It sends a message. You send a message. And your connections will be a boon to fundraising if we build a museum of contemporary art.

  —You’ve read the wrong CV. I’m no artist.

  —And your legacy extends back to the richest days of Mission University. A clutch of professors like you will make Big Sur the most exciting school in the country.

  —I appreciate the compliment, but I can’t be a professor; I have nothing to profess. Especially about art.

  Silence indicated Gaskin’s displeasure at being handed back a gift.

  Owen crunched ice. Owen guessed that if this silence lasted another moment, he was going to hear that his ninety-nine-year lease was less than iron-clad. He had an idea:

  —You’re focusing too much on my first name and not enough on my last. There’s no one with a better grasp of Liminalism than me. My dad left behind one big manuscript, which I could edit in a year. You’re going to have an influx of students looking for progressive theory and, no offense to anyone out there in the parlor, but it looks like you’re lacking in that department.

  They met eyes and sealed the proposal with a toast.

  —We’ll try to get you a course for the spring semester. Start putting together a lesson plan that I can show to the provost.

  Gaskin rose. Gripping the door handle he asked a final question.

  —You never told me. How the hell did he find you?

  —By looking in every cave.

  Gaskin looked puzzled, giving Owen an opening.

  —Actually, do you mind if we have another? I have some bad news about my father, which shouldn’t hurt our plans.

  Gaskin tilted his head. He refilled Owen’s glass, then his own. He sat on the bench in front of the casement window, crossing his legs and enjoying his role as spectator. Owen smiled then assumed faux solemnity.

  —I’m afraid my father is going to meet a dreadful end next month.

  Owen pinched his lips with another drink of scotch and shook his head.

  Gaskin grinned.

  —Oh really. How will this transpire?

  —The Greenland Sea is vast, cold, and capable of capsizing any small craft on any given day.

  —Why on earth would Joe be rowing a boat in the Arctic?

  —Hunger. He was on the run. Had no money, I’m afraid. He had the idea he would catch a fish—two rural Icelanders will see him sneak into a rowboat with fishing gear. They’ll say they saw the boat flip over, just on the other side of the fjord—too far for them to reach him in time. The boat was sucked up in the foaming cold then dashed down by a frozen slab . . .

  —Okay. I get it. And when exactly is this going to go down?

  —It should happen within the month. At that point, we negotiate the sale of a manuscript he left behind.

  —The manuscript you’re talking about is real?

  —He left behin
d several. I’m going to be editing all winter to piece it all together, but he’s been writing about this stuff since before I was born. He’s writing his magnum opus as we speak.

  —You’re going to need to hold off on your negotiations for at least a year. The university will recognize the tragedy at once. We will help the authorities in whatever way we can. On your end, you’ll hold out hope that your father is still alive. As far as you’re concerned, he’s a missing person and you would never look for a payout from the insurance company. You can get away with just about anything in this world until it costs people money. So. No insurance claim. I know the attorney who can handle this.

  —We’ll keep it small. He wants the ceremony at Point Dume.

  Owen caught sight of Stevie through the glass door. She raised her eyebrows. Gaskin saw how eager Owen was to get back to her side.

  —Shall we join the others, Professor Burr?

  Burr stood in longjohns and camp shoes, rubbing his arms and yawning out steam. He grabbed the keystone of the cave, stretched his back, and then looked down on the full sea. The cave faced northwest. He could almost see Greenland. He imagined his stare wrapping around the world a few times until it settled upon his son and Stevie in Big Sur. A light fan of arctic air rose up. He caught his foot to stretch his swollen knees. His hands still smelled of menthol and his Achilles burned from the camphor balm he knuckled into his frayed tendons first thing after waking. His beard was scratchy, his shoulders a knotted cordage, each day brought rain, but here he breathed down all the way to his pelvic floor and exhaled all the waste that had accumulated in his fifty years of sedentary life. He could feel all the cowardice he had crammed down under his diaphragm now lift to the thin air until his body was weightless and empty, his chest open, the best definition he had of what it meant to be a brave man.

  He distilled each day’s best thought or experience until it was no more than a cliché: while watching gulls circle the sky, he missed a step and slipped in a hummock field—head in the clouds; his desiccated hands now cracked in tire treads—you are what you eat; ebullient at the realization that he was finally making no claim to originality—nothing’s new under the sun.

  He decided he would dictate the status of his own freedom. Sunrise started calling him to the basalt beach a few miles away. And each morning on the black shore, grinding his way over egg-shaped stones, he swung his trekking poles overhead in great aluminum loops to keep the arctic terns from diving at his head. He walked over stones in a riffle of tide and a roil of squawks, untouched by talons and tracing bracelets over the dark earth with his poles. From above, he was one man with a revolving ensemble of birds, one man conducting the sky.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Eric Groff was the most talented of all of us. He invited me up to Montana and listened patiently to my early ravings about this book. He was the first person to take me seriously as a writer and told me to emphasize the undeveloped character of the father—which ended up being the key to the story. Eric was a brilliant reader, writer, and person. I’ve never met anyone as vital. He inspired his friends and his students to live bigger. I picture him with his massive arms crossed, red goatee jawing the sky, laughing that those typewritten rambles amounted to this. Thank you, Eric. Man, you’re missed.

  There’s no way this book would exist in any form without Kevin Jaszek. As a reader, he’s both brilliant and savage. As a friend, he kept me sane and focused on the book. Thank you for having the patience to suffer me—who knew how much trouble could come from a game of hangman? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

  Thank you to my daughter, Vivian, born with a fierce love of yellow, for teaching me to see the world in new, brighter ways. I hope you always carry with you a world steeped in color, wonder, and hilarity. All my love.

  Thank you to my parents and my family for unwavering, unconditional—and totally unwarranted—trust and support.

  Thank you to Jonathan Burnham and Michael Signorelli for the rare gamble they took on me and on this book. And to Barry Harbaugh for really loving books.

  This novel took a long time to write. I’ve leaned so heavily on my friends that Brave Man should really be published as three pages of story and three hundred ninety-seven pages detailing all of the amazing things the following people have done. I am forever indebted to:

  Erwin Cook. Jon Jackson. Billy Hart. Noah Lit. Jenny and Tom Terbell. Damian Loeb. Daniel Subkoff. James Fuentes. Alex Adler. Viktor Timofeev. Chris Arp. Miranda Ottewell. Ben Okaty. Paul Lynch. Dina Pugh. Brian Heifferon. Paolo Resmini. Kevin Shaffer. Alex Auritt. Brendan Jones. Atisha Paulson. Thomas McEvilley. Tim Carey. Chien Si Harriman. Dez Croan. Maria Wade. Casey McMahon. Alaska McFadden. Louis Epstein. Akiva Elstein. Lindsay Welsch. Aaron Zubaty. Igor Ramírez. Marcello Pisu. Peter Murphy. Matt Bardin. Michael Englander. Marc Englander. Matt Abramcyk. Jared Kushner. Rune Hedeman. Josh Cody. Barry Crooks. Chris Kartalia. Jackson Wagener. Jay Wagener. Chad Schafer. Steffen Angstmann. Kyra Barry. James Killough. Bill Beslow. Gianfranco Galluzzo. Stanley Bard. John Kule. Jon Jonisch. Van Rainy Hecht-Nelson. Drew Machat. Borut Grgic. Chris Stein. Matt Witte. Kate D’Esmond. Gabe Saporta. Tom Russotti. Russell Kerr. Josh Griffiths. Marek Berry. Josh Wyrtzen. Armin Rosencranz.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  WILL CHANCELLOR lives in New York City. This is his first book.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  COPYRIGHT

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  A BRAVE MAN SEVEN STOREYS TALL. Copyright © 2014 by Will Chancellor. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  EPub Edition May 2014 ISBN 9780062280015

  ISBN 978-0-06-228000-8

  14 15 16 17 18 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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