A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (12 page)

—I'll walk him home. We need food.

Zero parts daunted in whatever drugs the artists were on. They blew through anyone not arrowed the same way and rolled east down the Spree. Owen and Stevie waved them away.

O
wen would later think that Flaubert had it backward; there is always exactly one incorrect thing a person can say at any moment. These exactly wrong words are every bit as potent as
les mots justes
, but they are even more elusive. More of these mistakes, and life would cease to be livable—not from the paralysis of shame but from the force of necessity. Born as a blunder, one of these cosmic mistakes soon becomes a polestar that pulls a young man north rather than south, east and not west. In East Berlin, Owen's morning star was rising.

Oncoming legions of tourists, parents, and morning shoppers kicked away his memories of the Pedicabo as if they were a mess of dead balloons on the sidewalk. Owen needed to walk in a straight line and attract as few stares as possible. Stevie pulled his elbow to steer him past strollers.

—What are you seeing?

—The morning march of respectability.

—Then you're not hallucinating.

—All the lights look neon. Stoplights. They're all on the brink of exploding. It's like the light doesn't want to be bulbed in. And those little green pedestrian crossing signals are insane.

They had walked from the LED pedestrian figures of West Berlin to the homburg-hatted little green traffic men,
Ampelmännchen
, of East Berlin, which made him feel more at home. He focused subtleties of light and change and movement, but could barely put one foot in front of the other. A man curled in front of a cardboard sign pointed and, recognizing Owen's state, howled. Stevie pulled Owen into a café attached to a theater.

Owen creaked the vinyl seat, repositioning himself in the booth to hide his injury and offer Stevie the best profile he had left: lantern jaw clenched tighter than normal, strong forehead belted by a cheap elastic strap, his maternal nose blotched from a hard twenty-four hours. His pupil had swollen from the drugs and overtaken most of his iris, leaving Stevie to stare at the corona of an eclipsed blue sun.

The waiter knew her and asked her if she wanted the cold pasta. She did. And if she wanted a coffee. She did. And if this gentleman was bothering her. He wasn't. Yet.

When their food came, Stevie salted her pasta. Owen dashed the greenest olive oil he'd ever seen over his moons of mozzarella. Since her breakfast companion looked as if he was imitating Pollock, Stevie, with mock fascination, studied the trident-wielding cartoon on the salt canister's aqua label.

—This representation is
fascinating
! Look at this. What
genius
!

Owen paused, glanced up, then found the rarest of words, the exactly wrong thing to say:

—I don't think it's very accurate.

—Accurate? It's a cartoon of a god.

—I always figured Poseidon would look like me.

Stevie sniffed and cleared her face of shock with a hard blink. She smirked, genuinely amused and inviting Owen to dig a deeper hole.

Owen obliged:

—I mean, he should be wiry, like me, not muscle-bound and swollen—assuming he's embodied at all, and not a color field like the rest of them.

Owen felt the floodgates open. His cheeks flared with thin blood. He shared his world with no one, and what he was saying would never make sense to Stevie. He had hoped his words would illuminate like a full moon rippling Morse code over a choppy sea, beautiful if not discernible. Instead, everything slapped the surface of the morning like a missed dive.

Stevie sipped her coffee, then spoke:

—I'm trying to figure out which is more absurd: to say that you look like a god or to say that a god looks like you. At least with Kurt you get what you see. Sure, he's a megalomaniac, but megalomaniacs are nothing if not predictable.

Owen slowly skimmed the crema of his Americano, holding the little spoon upright and watching drips of liquid rust. He looked up.

—I'm as embarrassed about that as you are.

—Kristeva should write a book about you.

—Who's Kristeva?

—She's a theorist. I took a year off to save money and get some perspective—well, that was the thought at least—I'm going back to finish in the fall. I'm using Kristeva, although that phrase is problematic, in my thesis on communication within the symbolic order—I wanted to focus on Susanne Kappeler, but she's hardly a household name. It's the type of theory that Kurt and those guys use, not a problematic word in this context, to sell a few spray-painted words—doesn't really matter which ones—for half a million dollars, or a guitar string in a vitrine for one-point-two million.

—Philosophy sells art?

—People sell art. But all of the galleries hire someone like Brigitte to explain theory to collectors. And if explaining those cool steel trees Roxy Paine is making with the Deleuzian rhizome brings in a few more million, why not?

Owen laughed.

—You realize I didn't get any of those references.

She craned her neck to look at Owen's bad side.

—Just some badges of my intelligence. It looks like we're doing the same thing: hiding all the stuff the other person really wants to see.

Owen faced her. She bit her lower lip and took a second espresso from the waiter.

—Why are you with Kurt and those guys? They don't seem like your crowd.

—Because I could only be interested in sports?

—No. Because you don't even have a tattoo. Hal said you were an artist. But he didn't say what kind of art you do.

—Don't be so sure about the tattoo. And I'm working on a conceptual art piece at the moment.

Owen was no more conceptual artist than bullfighter. But after his earlier gaffe, his mind had entered a trance where any words could spill out. He knew he had added another tree ring, another regrettable phrase that would outline a year, another idiocy that would condense and define him. He saw himself in cross section:

           
AGE NINE
. “I could start at tight end for half the teams in the NFL”—that one hazed him out of football;

           
AGE TEN
. “I'm not saying I didn't get to second base with Ms. Bouchard”—masterful logic;

           
AGE ELEVEN
. “The Gods say I'm going to win eight gold medals”—hubris and first shoulder injury;

           
AGE TWELVE
. “She's blond, so she has a see-through vagina”—he clearly hadn't logged enough time on the Internet, something that would change for his generation in the next year.

           
AGE THIRTEEN
. “I was already admitted to Oxford”—why would he lie to a pen pal?

           
AGE FOURTEEN
. “I'm an expert on jazz”—of course Owen said that, because this was his first black friend;

           
AGE FIFTEEN
. “Drugs don't work on me. I'm too tall”—because she was very into the Beatles and wanted him to smoke pot;

           
AGE SIXTEEN
. “I've memorized every star in the sky”—he knew Orion;

           
AGE SEVENTEEN
. “Prowst”;

           
AGE EIGHTEEN
. “You should let me teach Homer”—probably the first time the dean of liberal arts had heard that from an underclassman;

           
AGE NINETEEN
. “I've just learned how to have tantric orgasms”—right before he quickly lost his virginity;

           
AGE TWENTY
. “I'm being actively recruited by the CIA”—it was the post–9/11 world, she was moderately impressed;

           
AGE TWENTY-ONE
. “I always thought Poseidon would look like me.”

Tree rings were supposed to get farther apart as time passed. His looked pretty closely bunched at the moment. Twenty-one, and his first double ring: “I'm working on a conceptual art piece.”

Lies, they were basically lies of one sort or another, but these particular lies cut channels in a mind, rivulets for all subsequent thoughts to run through, eroding as they grow wide and deep.

Stevie looked at Owen as if she were hunting for jewelry at a thrift shop, assured that if she found anything that looked like it had real value, upon further inspection it would prove to be fake. But that didn't lessen the fun.

—Do you want a drink?

Stevie waved him off and lit a cigarette.

—Do you remember the first time we met? Owen asked.

Stevie let the smoke curl up to the wings of her nose then sucked it down with a sharp breath. She decided to play along with Owen's game of mingling future and past, even though he was clearly edging off the hot seat. She launched the first volley:

—I had a pasta lunch, and you said ridiculous shit over coffee. You told me you were an artist right after you told me you were a god.

—A conceptual artist, Owen corrected.

—And then you described the big piece you just finished. What was it called?

—It was part of the Laminalism series.

—What was that again?

—You had just finished DJing and were explaining some philosopher to me. Who was it again?

—Nope. You don't get off that easy. You described the piece so well I could see it like it was here on the table. How did it go again?

—The art was your hair tangling in my beard. But I made up something to impress you.

—I'm going to the ladies'. Surprise me when I get back.

Owen drank half of his beer when she left, the other half when she returned. He began:

—So the piece was a sealed manila envelope. Inside was a transparency with these micron-thick etchings, sharp like a woodcut, that marked a day's memories. But you couldn't see them. You had to trust that the memory was in the envelope. As soon as you opened it, the work was forever altered. But if someone wanted to, they could open the envelope, put it on an overhead projector, overlay the memories onto a map of the city—Berlin, in this case—and see exactly where the memories were formed.

—How would someone know when it's in focus? The distance would matter.

—Well, I haven't actually made this, but I plan to.

—Let's talk about the other pieces in the series that you actually did make.

—I haven't made any yet.

—You have a name for an art movement before you've made any actual art?

—It's Laminalism.

—I think you're going to fit in here just fine.

—But I am going to make one. Several.

—When?

—How about now. This will be the first spot on the map. Let's go wander.

—I've got places to go.

—Lead the way.

Stevie stubbed out her cigarette, and they closed their tab.

Owen had walked past the brick walls of the cemetery hundreds of times but never entered the gates. The greens were glowing in the shade, trying to catch morning light dripping through the canopy. Stevie watched him disappear with a few steps, then followed and caught sight of Owen studying the moss of a gravestone, thin-rooted as a front tooth. Stevie ticked her incisors and raised her eyebrows at the prospect of wandering a cemetery:

—Are you serious? Fine. Keats and Yeats are on your side.

—They were both buried in Berlin?

—No. It's from a song.

Stevie opened her mouth to call Owen a tourist and then found herself laughing at his puppy enthusiasm.

—Why are we here again?

—The best way to remember something new is to peg it to a fixed object in space. So we need to find a statue or crypt or something we are never going to forget and then link the memory to the place.

—Link what memory?

—That's up to you. We've created a place where you can put anything.

—And then you draw it on the transparency?

—Exactly.

—But what do you draw?

—That's the art of memory.

They passed the Doric columns of the Pintsch family memorial, the Zeitler mausoleum, whose font and verbosity called to mind a nineteenth-century German newspaper headline—S
ELIG SIND DIE
T
ODTEN
, “Blessed Are the Dead”—and twin evergreens angling forward a gravestone. Any of these might have been a suitable place for him to take her hand and bring it to his lips, a few fine hairs rising as he met her eye with a look that she might remember, but the lump in his throat was still there.

Stevie raced ahead and stopped in front of a sandaled goddess, obsidian and gold, embracing an urn. The pedestal read “EC and Sally Kleinsteuber.” She was from London, younger, and born a Gunby. Stevie asked Owen his surname. She laughed at Burr.