Will Chancellor - A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall

— Kurt was explaining that talent is bourgeois.

— No. Talent is a myth. I was explaining that no one makes it in art without a platform. You have to have a brand before you have skill. First presence, then an audience, then change your skill set if you’re still not selling.

Hal brought over a bottle of Jack and a cup of hot coffee. Owen put the coffee between his feet and took a shallow slug from the bottle. His stomach pulled. Now juggling, he drank the wine and then took a cigarette at Hal’s second offer.

It was the first smoke to ever pass the barrier of Owen’s teeth. His forehead beaded with cold sweat. He knew his lung capacity to the mL and his VO 2maxto three sig-figs, yet he smoked again. No one appeared to notice that he didn’t know how to inhale. He turned away and tried the sharp double-inhale that he knew was required. He coughed violently. Hal patted his back.

— Captain America!

Owen’s throat tightened. He undid another button of his shirt.

The one sitting on Kurt’s lap noticed that this was a new experience for Owen. She was layered in washed leather. Hal wore dark layers of hooded sweatshirt, track jacket, leatherish jacket. Kurt wore flannel. Owen smoothed his white shirt and tucked it into the corduroy pants that were falling off his hips. He would need to punch a new hole in his belt.

He drank his coffee and spoke halting German:

— I have been traveling from California to Berlin. I am grateful to have found a house.

Kurt laughed.

— Your German is so formal. Stick to English. But yeah, unpack your bag when we get back. I know what you’re thinking, Who goes out on a Friday? but the tourists should have cleared out by now.

— What is it, four a.m.?

— Almost six.

Owen looked at himself in a slept-in suit and everyone else in leather and plaid.

— Don’t worry, you can get in anywhere we go, even in a suit and penny loafers.

Hal was still silent, looking at Owen through the viewfinder of a double-grip digital camera. He didn’t take any pictures, just dialed the zoom lens in and out, inspecting Owen at different focal lengths, half-clicking the shutter until the camera confirmed focus with a beep. More voluble now that a camera mediated his view of the world, he asked:

— Is that eye patch for real? I mean, either way you look great.

— I was hopped up on painkillers all winter, so everything’s a little foggy. But I’m thinking the eye patch is real.

Kurt laughed and clapped Owen’s leg.

Hal asked if Owen had any more of the painkillers.

The girl on Kurt’s lap stood and stabbed out her cigarette:

— You should come out. Stevie always brings an interesting crowd.

Owen looked at both Kurt and Hal. Kurt had the final word:

— Brigitte’s right. But nothing interesting ever happens in a place with a door policy — well, unless Sven is working the door.

Owen had no idea who these people were, but tried to find an artistic response:

— I’m down for whatever.

— I like big fireworks first too, but you’ve got to work up to some of this shit. We’ll go to a bar, then Platte to see Stevie. You’ll like Stevie. She’s smart. But you’ll die if you go straight to Sven’s place.

Owen said he would just be a minute.

He walked back down the spiral ramp to his room. He fished the mason jar of sand and oil from his bag and walked up to Hal’s bathroom.

He turned the hot water tap and waited until the water steamed. He scooped a handful of sand from his jar, brought a cupped hand of water to his face, and kneaded his cheeks. His fascination with grit had started when an older teammate showed him the pregame trick of scraping his palms back and forth over the texturized gutter, or, if they were playing at a generic suburban pool, over the sandstone lip. His fresh skin gripped the ball better. While his competitors struggled to catch with their off hand or thrust the ball cross-face without losing control, Owen rose high with a lariat loop of tan arm and yellow ball, lassoing the entire game and launching it at the nylon net. From age six to twenty-one he scraped his palms clean and greeted the world with a fresh grip.

His coarse beard buried the grit. Until now he didn’t know he could grow one. Chlorine or bromine, depending on which pool he was practicing in at the time, had kept his body delphine, his hair brittle and bleached. Before, he’d scarcely had eyebrows. Now a proper unibrow bridged eye and eye patch, outsight and insight. Since he’d left California, his hair had grown dark. Monobrow . More and more of his cheek was lost each day to the barbarian beard.

Brigitte opened the bathroom door. She shut it behind her and held his gaze for a split second. Owen saw her reflection at his side and watched her heft the eye patch hanging from the faucet. She leaned into his hand and whispered into his ear:

— Don’t watch.

She took a diagonal step back and out of view. Owen turned to find her unzipping her black jeans slowly, teasing every tooth of the fly with little pops, like air ticked between tongue tip and palate. He pulled clean his eyelashes, put the eye patch back on, and clutched the counter.

She reached around him and turned on the tap, melting into his knuckles. Looping her arm in his, she dipped her fingertips in the warm water and smiled when she made eye contact in the mirror. She flicked her fingers once to dismiss the water beads.

He started to speak, but she interrupted on tipped toe with breath tingling the small hairs of his earlobe.

— You have great lips, but your beard will scratch me.

She ran her fingers over his cheek and then fastened her jeans and left.

Owen tugged on his chin and asked his reflection what the fuck that was. He looked up, breathed deeply, and ground a paste of grit between his two hands.

Owen rejoined the crowd. The first thing he saw was Brigitte. He knocked on the doorframe because he saw Kurt sniffing something off a plate. Owen figured out what he was walking into just as Kurt offered him a nearby set of keys.

— You said you guys never locked the door.

Everyone burst into laughter. Owen was confused until Hal dipped a key into a small baggie and offered Owen a channel full of cocaine.

He was surprised to see the real version of something that had been, until this point, a Hollywood prop. These people were so cavalier, carving lines with credit cards in a room anyone was welcome to stumble into. The only thing he knew about cocaine was that no one, save maybe drug lords, did it out in the open. Hal snorted the mound on the key’s tip. Kurt passed the plate. Owen declined:

— I’m still on antibiotics for my eye.

— This’ll make them work faster!

Kurt laughed and then pulled in with the jolt of a snake handler who’d just dodged a strike. When the bitterness registered on his face, he gritted his teeth and his smile dropped. He passed the plate to Brigitte. No keys for her; she nudged a bump into the recessed filter of her Parliament cigarette, snorted, then patted her nose as if she were putting the finishing touches on her makeup.

Out of the tower and into the Berlin night, Brigitte braided her arm in Owen’s and pulled down with a steady pressure that lifted her ever so slightly from the ground. Hal pushed Kurt’s wheelchair over worn grass and tried eagerly to fit his monologue into Kurt’s monologue. Pulling even with Owen and Brigitte, he finally got out what he had been trying to say for minutes:

— I had a thought last night of all these people, or maybe one person, a critic, writing a monograph on me or whatever. But the quote was: “He did nothing in his twenties, everything in his thirties, and everyone in his forties.” It’s a good line, right?