Will Chancellor - A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall

Even though the entire left side of his head was bandaged, Owen shone that morning, and his father was a few seconds stunned. The door lock rattled and spun as his father leaned over to let him in. After Owen slid into the cracked leather seat, he failed repeatedly to mate the buckle and clasp. When he lost his left eye, he’d lost his depth perception. Each clash of metal with plastic grew louder than the one before. His father’s hand hovered, almost helping, but wavered as if it would be batted away. Owen jabbed the buckle home at last with a sharp snap.

He heard his father’s mouth open. Close. Open. He heard him chewing on the words that another man might have spoken outright. Words rarely passed the barrier of his father’s teeth without coaxing.

Professor Burr tasted the air a few times with a dry tongue. He never could summon those paternal banalities that sports dads spit out like sunflower seeds.

Burr fiddled with the Volvo’s gearshift as they waited for a stoplight. He jerked the knob from first to neutral and back again, all the while wanting to place his hand on Owen’s knee and say fatherly things about how he was going to be fine, how he needed to be extra careful with his good eye. Instead he bit his lip and fiddled with the gearshift again. Fatherhood requires too much authority. How do you comfort a statue?

A driver in front of them was slow off the line, distracted. Burr only moved one car forward, missing the protected turn. He took one deep breath.

— So I gave my talk in English, actually. Italians value fluency much more than effort, you know. Even in a place like Padua you’re better off briefly apologizing for your lack of culture and getting on with it.

With the barrier broken, the words undammed, Owen eased back in the seat and closed his eye. They talked about Galileo and were nearly home when Burr asked his first topical question.

— Did any of your squad drop by?

— The team came while I was still in surgery. They had to drive back to Palo Alto.

— Why didn’t they just take you to the university hospital?

— The surgeon has his own clinic, so he doesn’t have to deal with anyone.

— It really doesn’t look bad.

— It looks like… nothing.

— I suppose that’s right.

They sat in silence from the last note of Burr’s hmph until the rubber squeak of the tires turning on the concrete driveway. The garage door was open. The garage door was always open.

When Owen’s father still believed in his dissertation, recent academic trends being no more than a rehabilitation of Parmenides, he had taken their front door off its hinges so their house would be open at all times. It vexed him that the Home, protective only by its closure to the outside world and useful only in its open inhabitable space, denied its humble origins in the Cave — a cave being proof that one could live both inside and outside, that one could exist in a sustained liminal state. The upshot of all this theory was that Owen had lacked a front door from 1992 to 1993. And even in coastal California that meant that small rodents, enterprising birds, and all manner of bugs eventually made their way inside. This was Professor Burr’s open-door policy — a policy a colleague in the Classics Department had mocked by bringing over a fluorescent orange sign reading OPEN HOUSE. The sign was now sun-bleached, but still staked into the lawn. When one of Owen’s friends suggested they just remove the garage door, Owen was relieved. He was tired of hearing about dichotomies as false consciousness, but he was more tired of squirrels at his feet during breakfast.

This was the house — or theoretically cave, since the garage door had never been replaced — that they pulled up to. It technically belonged to the university, but belonged to the Burrs in practice. Owen’s mother had been the only daughter of a pivotal university president. To commemorate them both, the trustees voted for the house to stay in the family, even though Owen’s parents never married, choosing to remain in the liminal state of engagement. It was two storeys, mossed, fenced by giant eucalyptus trees, and far more accommodating than the homes of other tenured faculty.

Owen picked up the plastic-wrapped newspaper at the front curb. The morning’s glare knocked him off the long stone walk and into the lawn. A few firm steps righted him. He ducked in the front door.

This Japanese modernist home was the storehouse of Owen’s memories. And just like a memory, the home was built for a century of patinated glow before a slow dissolve back into the ground. There could have been sliding paper doors, but there weren’t. There could have been a wooden outhouse, but there wasn’t. Instead, there were two downstairs bathrooms with a tremendously unhygienic library of university journals, a year’s worth of folded New York Review of Books , the New Yorker , the final issues of Antaeus , and quite a few volumes from a German classics encyclopedia. Owen and his father reshelved what was valuable and discarded the rest of the musty collection every few years when someone came by to photograph the interior for books with titles like Holistic Architectural Design or Sacred Geometry in Mid-Century California Homes . The house’s spiral footprint was roughly nautiloid and the windows followed the golden ratio. Though the proportions were golden, the windows were small. The house was dark most of the day, shafts of light here and there. A ramp of sunlight, almost solid enough to bear weight, beamed on the stairway when they walked in.

— How about some soup? You should eat with those pills.

Owen clutched the wooden rail and climbed the stairs. He dropped his duffel at the foot of his bed.

This bed, this pillowless bed, the one bed in the world built specifically to accommodate Owen’s great height, had ended up being too short. His ankles spilled past the end. He pulled at the mattress with his heels, looking to his feet and waiting for Procrustes to lop away the remainder. Tendons. The stretching soul… psukhe… The word drifted away, bounding down the halls… and Owen was asleep.

Atug on his toe brought Owen back.

— I thought it better to let you sleep. How are you feeling?

Owen sat up. His father was at the foot of the bed, flipping through an illustrated book.

— They recommended this in your discharge packet. It looks pretty worthless.

Burr showed the laminated cover. Owen read it aloud.

— Coping with Changes in Sight .

— By Dr. Thomas Friedlan… MD.

— I haven’t read in a week. I’m not going to start with that.

— Did they give you a paper at least?

— USA Today .

— I’m sorry.

The first unqualified apology he could remember from his father, ever, and the man was talking about a newspaper.

Burr unpalmed two pills: a painkiller and an antibiotic. Owen took the glass of milk, swallowed both pills, and wondered if painkiller was an oxymoron. Burr made prayer hands and drummed his lower lip. Owen tried to break the trance.

— I found something in Johnson when I was looking for a quote for my pregame speech—

—“The life that is devoted to knowledge passes silently away…

This was Burr’s Faculty Dinner Toast. In dining halls, he stood and clinked his glass, certain that the words would edify and failing to notice that his colleagues, who had heard this before, were thumbing the hem of the tablecloth, wondering why they hadn’t taken that job at Goldman.

— … wanders about the world without pomp or terror, and is neither known nor valued but by men like himself.”

— That’s everybody’s problem, not just scholars. I found this place where Johnson says every man wastes half his life displaying talents he doesn’t possess.