Will Chancellor - A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall

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 behind 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.

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.