Will Chancellor - A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall

Traffic crumpled behind him. Burr found second gear, only to round a curve and discover thousands of red taillights. Several of his fellow motorists had given up: one leaned against the window and grinned into her cell phone; one propped a paperback on the steering wheel; one yelled at his windshield and thrust a finger at the dark-tinted windows of a pickup truck rattling license plate frames with its bass. Burr, pinned against cement sclerosis, could do nothing but redden the shadow of the overpass.

The cloverleaf, a maze of misdirection, spun traffic to all four compass points — but not the fifth, the omphalos, the only defined point of a compass, the director of direction.

He tried the radio. NPR helped. But then they started asking for money, not understanding that even though he had tenure, he had no savings account. He squirmed.

He depressed the clutch for second, then the brake lights washed back over him and he came to a full stop. A gash of metal, which he took to be a discarded fender, rocked with the wind, tickling the cement barrier and catching the setting sun. Fire, the process we mistake for a thing. Traffic, the thing we mistake for a process .

He lurched in his lane then aimed straight for the front tire of a bumper-hugging Infinity. The driver clucked his pointer finger. At that moment, Burr’s Volvo could have been a tanker. Burr was moving right. And then right and right again, over the rumble strip, straddling highway buttons and whistling the raked asphalt.

Down the spiral ramp he drove. Thrown from the great clog and breezing past telephone poles and cypress-tree fences, green lights yellowing in his wake. Only when he was nearing Highway 1 on the two-lane road through the canyons did he realize that this was the pass for Point Dume, for Zuma.

He had stayed away for fifteen years, knowing that what he found would be bolted in tighter than the yellow bollards of the car park. Now he parked, fender inches from the trailhead.

He unlaced his boots, kicked off his socks, and walked tenderly over loose gravel to the sand below. His feet were pale, frozen, senseless things that molded to the rock bits. The beach was deserted except for a lineup of surfers.

The ocean breathed up and sneezed down on the shore. Windswept sand soon anchored the cuffs of his trousers. He looked at the sky, a washed peach smear where the sun snuffed into the thick. A steady salt-wind carried him back to the safety of his car.

He sat on the hood of the Volvo, tired arches of his pale feet on the hard plastic bumper. A young woman knocking water from her ear recognized him from campus and nodded. She had one of the few spaces. She asked him how he’d ended up at a trailhead two and a half hours from Mission.

— Bested by traffic, I’m afraid. I was headed to LAX. If there’s any way I could borrow your phone, I might be able to justify this excursus as a shortcut.

She coiled the leash around the tail fins of her surfboard and handed Burr a phone.

He called LAX Terminal Services and pawed through an automated directory while she folded her wetsuit, snapped it into a Rubbermaid bin, and poured a plastic jug of water over her head.

Burr repeatedly apologized for eating up her minutes. An agent finally told him that without a court order, there was no way to access the manifests of every flight out of LAX with connections to Europe.

Thanks for that, Owen. No flight number. No airline. Not even the qualifier mainland . Just Europe .

Burr thanked the student profusely and gave her twenty dollars for the minutes, striving to make the gesture appear breezy and avuncular rather than — what’s the term — sketchy.

— Wait. Here. I want you to have this.

That doesn’t sound any better .

Burr opened his trunk and grabbed a book from the two dozen in a cardboard box. She held it with the hem of her beach towel, looked at her friends lashing the boards on the roof rack, and thanked him with a squint that asked if this was going to be on the final.

As they drove away, Burr watched planes rattle the skies westward, then loop around and trace the shore. He wondered if he was supposed to infer some hidden meaning in “Europe.” When Owen was eight, Burr had sent him a postcard from Stonehenge reading “The World’s Meeting Spot”—but the chances of Owen recalling that were slim.

Before sunset, Burr wound back to Mission along Highway 1. The narrow meander to Big Sur took lives every year, so he never chanced it after dark. The mountains were just as deadly as the cliffs. Two copies of his book slid across the backseat. On sharp turns he heard the box shift in the trunk.

Three years ago Burr had finished his grand dictionary of hapax legomena , words occurring only once in the written record of an ancient language. The professor assured his university press that the standard library-bound hardcover run of a thousand copies would be woefully insufficient. They bought his pitch and doubled the run to two thousand, assuring him the book would be everywhere. And everywhere it was.

The first sign should have been when they failed to get a blurb from any scholar of note or so much as a response from the generalists. Burr averted his eyes when he passed a copse of trees, seeing the forests that died for a book that would most likely be pulped. He deluded himself that a future archaeologist would confuse Hapax for a holy relic: so sacred was the Book of Burr that all discovered copies were untouched, immaculate. The epitaph would read, “ Hapax : Everywhere, and Everywhere Pristine.” Copies of the yellow book lined two rows of his office bookshelves, giving a false impression that he was up on modern design. These weren’t the free author’s copies; these were personal online purchases he’d hoped would generate some momentum. A grad student, candid from boilermakers, described how a hundred copies of Hapax were bricked together in the bowels of the university bookstore to form the Igloo of Burr. Here the employees got high and invented stories of narwhals and sled dogs. When he heard this, Burr laughed until he cried; thus far, this was the only application of his summa philologica .

Burr’s hands were loose on the wheel as he wound through the Central Coast on Highway 1. To his right, purple floating in the air like a dandelion’s parachute seeds. To his left, white foam underlit with the pink and green of the flame in a votive candle. Almost warm against the black slabs. Twilight, urchin purple, gloaming life to his nail beds and making his hands a moment young.

Burr’s first work, his thesis work, was long on conjecture and short on scholarship. At twenty-four he found something wondrous in analyzing the cult of Hekate and the stelae of Hermes. They were slippery twilight gods, Hermes and Hekate. Bringing their lens to the modern world cast warped, original aberrations. The work began with his translation of Hesiod. Several insights came to him during his reading: phenomena are more often than not both true and false; twilight, “two lights,” needs both sunlight and moonlight to exist — it is precisely the time when there is both day and night. In this twilit space, paradoxes present no problems. An adjunct in the Germanic Languages Department learned of Burr’s newfound mysticism and pointed him to the Old Norse rune Dagaz,

Once he had a symbol to write in his margins, Burr began seeing these liminal spaces everywhere: a cave both inside and outside; the shore both land and sea; the present a twilight of past and future; love, like any transitive verb, an intermingling of two things formerly alone; life, a blur of birth and death — birth and death being the only two moments of life in which we don’t exist.