Will Chancellor - A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall

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.