A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (13 page)

—Well, then, you'd have to take mine. Owen Schneider would be trading up. How did Gunbys and Burrs ever come to be?

Owen didn't hear the last question. Like the silk seeds floating down from trees he couldn't name and twisting in the wind, his mind floated here and there from shade to shaft of light. He repeated Stevie's words back to himself, rewinding the words that gusted him apart and fixing the way she touched her lips before she spoke.

Her right hand was at her side, hanging heavy with fingers spaced unnaturally, as if she were forcing her hand to wait there instead of retreating to her rear pocket. Owen took her hand and raised it to his lips, meeting her eye with a look that could bear weight. She didn't smile until the instant his lips peeled from the hollow of her first two knuckles.

And then she laughed wildly. Stevie apparently had an entire quiver of disarming smiles and drew three different smiles in rapid succession.

—You look like you'll survive. I've got to get back. It's almost noon, and I work at seven.

He walked with her to the tram stop, holding her hand until her car arrived. She looked back just before the door closed, smiling with lips turned inward and shaking her head.

Owen's first stop was an art supply store for a rapidograph, micron pens, and a box of twenty overhead transparencies. Even though he had come up with the idea in the moment, Owen had a long history with overhead projectors. His father had brought home a machine built with the ergonomics of a Soviet tank. Burr's idea was to use the overhead to teach his eight-year-old son Plato's Allegory of the Cave that summer. Burr imagined this as a lecture series that would draw all the young people of the neighborhood, and maybe even a few adults. Needless to say, his vision for the summer of 1990 was misguided. But the projector stayed in the garage, and Owen spent hours every day drawing on the transparencies and making shadow puppets while his father organized notecards for an unwritten chapter on the liminal in Socrates.

Near the bigger water tower in Prenzlauer Berg, Owen found a library with a functioning overhead. A librarian took his passport as collateral and said he could use the conference room for the next ninety minutes. On the white concrete wall, Owen taped a tourist map of East Berlin spanning the corner of Mitte where they'd met to Stevie's tram stop in Friedrichshain. As soon as the projector was switched on, he knew that the orientation of an overhead didn't match what he wanted to do. He found a paper trimmer and dropped the blade, squaring the transparency. Glancing from transparency to map, he dotted twelve points to mark where he would draw in the memories he had from their morning.

When he had finished his micron etchings, using all six of the colors that came in the pack so that his drawings bloomed, he looked back on his work: jungle-green climbing out of the parks, geometrical abstractions, each a memory of her from a different vantage, drawn in cornflower blue and babbling from fountains, and each apricot lane they walked graffitied with little totems. He removed the map and examined them against a white wall. He knew at once how he would present the piece: a sealed envelope with the transparency inside would be sitting on a plain café table; beside it, an overhead projector would illuminate flat sheets of falling water. The map itself was not his creation and shouldn't be a material in the piece. He could work with vintage maps, the contour lines and colors of relief seemed to approximate memory. But they were too static. He needed something to fall. And the tokens of memory—always sealed in that envelope—would leap like dust motes in a sunbeam.

The only thing missing was the color of the world. Once the Gods' colors came back, he would have different sets of transparencies for different days. He could easily imagine the entire morning with Stevie in peridot or gamboge, but it hadn't been that way. It had been flat light. And, for now, the transparencies would have to be clear.

Owen thanked the librarian who had let him work in the reading room. Transparency in hand, now in a sealed manila envelope, he showed up at the bar where he had met Stevie. He was redirected to a nearby hotel and left the sealed envelope at the front desk,
STEVIE SCHNEIDER
written in all caps on stationery clipped to the envelope and the map.

H
e would have to clean the floor to have a place to lie down. Owen walked upstairs to see if Kurt had a vacuum. He stopped a few steps from the threshold of Kurt's floor when he heard laughing and morning yawns, though it was nearly four in the afternoon. Kurt spoke clearly:

—I like my body so much more when it is with your bodies. It is quite a new and beautiful thing.

E. E. Cummings
.

Then more shufflings and puffings of the down comforter. The two girls purred at Kurt's genius.

Owen walked back to his room. The sunlit tarp created a heaving of stained glass on the walls and floor. He swept the floor with a stiff piece of cardboard. While plowing the powder and cigarettes to the wall, Owen uncovered the blue lines of painter's tape marking off the floor. He contorted the yellow frame of the light to get it out into the hall. He had cleared the room of everything but the materials—sawhorses held a few pine planks, a bale of cotton-candy insulation, slabs of drywall, and a table saw. A staple gun, drill, level, putty knife, some sort of eggbeater, and cords of all colors spilled from a milk crate.

Evidently Kurt wanted to build a partition. Owen arranged the wood on the ground and began the framing. Then he decided the hammering would annoy Kurt and the girls and that he'd be better off sleeping anyway.

As he was clearing a place, he remembered the poem:
i like my body when it is with your / body. It is so quite new a thing. / Muscles better and nerves more
. Fuck it. Let Kurt have it. Anyway, it's plagiarism by anticipation. The poem was always Kurt's. The story is incomplete without partial paralysis and could only be spoken, really spoken, from a wheelchair.

He heard someone behind him:

—What are you doing? Leave that shit alone.

—I thought you wanted me to build a wall.

—I've hired a contractor.

—To build what?

—I'm not sure what it's going to be yet. It'll be big, though.

—You guys just got back?

Kurt ignored the question.

—The girls were asking me how you did that to your eye.

—Playing.

—Playing what?

—Water polo.

Kurt lit a cigarette. Now it was Owen's turn:

—How'd you do that to your legs?

Kurt laughed for the first time.

—Saskia's gonna stay and help me with something. Can you walk Brigitte to the U-Bahn?

Owen agreed.

Kurt wheeled out of the entryway.

T
he sun was already lost behind the old oaks to the west. Owen wondered how the whole artist routine worked. Did they go to sleep now? Take more drugs?

He had imagined the crisp air and the walk would help. So far that hadn't proved true. The people whirred by before he could process their faces. They were drawn blank, like the background of a dream.

Brigitte was after-school-special coked to the gills and had been pointing out multinational corporations going up in East Berlin as an indictment of all things American. He tried to steer the conversation to art.

—So how did you meet Kurt?

—It was at his Too Loud concert. A friend told me that one of the most important young artists in Europe was giving a concert, and I was naive enough to expect that there would be music. So I showed up with a couple girls.

They waited to cross Danzigstrasse. Brigitte texted a friend, laughed, then asked what she had been saying.

—You were talking earlier about Kurt playing a concert without music.

Brigitte took a seat on a bench and lit a cigarette. She looked around and then at Owen, as if explaining art to him were a favor.

—If music becomes so loud that it ceases to communicate, then it can become sublime.

Owen massaged his temples.

—If we take music, and more generally art, to be a sign system, then we must admit there is an ideal volume to communicate the message. Volume may be subjective at a certain level—people's ears are variously damaged, people listen for different things, whatever—but there is also an undeniable level of objectivity. Typically, the only objective sound we confront is silence—the bright line of zero decibels. John Cage knew this, and his composition
4'33"
was the most significant performance in twentieth-century music. Until Kurt Wagener, the world only knew silence. In Kurt's international debut, he gave the world something it had never known: the opposite of silence.

—Noise?

—Kurt realized that if you turn things up loud enough, every listener will agree that the music is simply too loud to be comprehended. No one's eardrums can process anything over a hundred and fifty decibels. Play something that loud and there's no difference between one note and a thousand notes. Kurt played at two hundred decibels. At that volume it's not even considered sound, it's a shock wave.

—Let me get this straight. Kurt blew out a bunch of people's eardrums, and this was what made his career.

—No. Kurt cleared out the gallery. He played with earplugs under industrial-strength earphones while everyone watched on a projection of a closed-circuit video.

—So it was like an if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest kind of thing.

—No. Kurt transcended a threshold volume where nothing is understandable in order to break the Lacanian reflex system with the Other. He raised historic questions: Where is the artist's agency in this performance? Should Kurt be playing this song to begin with, given the fact that he admittedly doesn't know how to play guitar?

—He has a Bösendorfer. He must play piano.

—You never studied art, did you?

—Do you like his painting?

—Painting? He's not a painter. He is a major young artist. I would have thought that even Americans would know him. I mean, you obviously read. He directed a video for Duran Duran. He's been on the cover of every culture magazine in the world. He is major.

—Do you work in art?

—I've been director at Timmons Projects for the last two years.

—And you show Kurt's work?

—I wish. I'm trying. You don't understand. He is major.

And with those words Brigitte entered the U-Bahn.

O
n his way back from the station, Owen found Kurt on the south side of Danzigstrasse, smoking either a hand-rolled cigarette or a joint.

Owen crossed the street.

Joint.

—Come with me. I need your help.

Owen thought of protesting that he hadn't slept in days. That he had just ingested his first psychoactive substance and was still shattered. But there was no way he would find sympathy in Kurt by complaining about something as banal as total exhaustion.

—You look run-down. Do you need something?

—I'll survive.

—Whatever. We have to swing by my old gallery real quick.

Kurt, now in his white undershirt, admired his triceps as he dipped the push rims of his chair from twelve o'clock to five o'clock. Owen followed him to the heart of Mitte. Suddenly Kurt stopped.

—Push me in. We're going to that black glass building on the left.

A brushed-steel sign jutted out from the black marble and glass facade, laser-etched:
TODD ZEALE GALLERY
.

Kurt flicked his cigarette to the street.

—Actually. When we walk in we should both be smoking.

Kurt lit two Parliaments and handed one up to Owen. Owen left it dangling from his lip, burning his nose and making his eye water.

Kurt hit the brakes, and Owen lurched forward.

—Just open the door. I'll do the rest.

Kurt spotted the security camera and bared his teeth.

He crashed through the door, hammering down on the tires and wrenching control from Owen's grip, headed straight for a white pedestal in the center of the gallery which held a brass head under acrylic glass. He slapped the heels of his palms at the rims of his wheels, going faster and faster until, just before impact, he shifted left and hooked the hand rim of the left wheel. Kurt and chair turned violently to the left, losing traction and skidding into the plinth with enough force to rock it back and unseat the sculpture from its stand. Both sculpture and pedestal teetered back toward Kurt, at which point he swiped the plinth to the ground.

The disembodied brass head fell nose-first onto the cement floor. The warbled clang meant damage.

—Oh dear God, what have you done?

The gallerist, Todd Zeale, came running at Kurt as if he were going to hug him and grieve rather than accost him. Kurt changed his vector and wheeled into the middle of some fluorescent orange yarn that had been knitted into a large net. The web entangled Kurt far more than he had intended. He ripped at the junctions, and the screws, blue plastic anchors and all, came unseated from the drywall. He held on to one knot, ringing it furiously back and forth like a madman at the clapper of the town bell. Kurt tore the yarn-art piece from three of its four moorings. One strand of the now frumpy piece clung to the spokes of Kurt's wheelchair and followed him through the room as he headed straight for a wall-size canvas of interlooping red and blue paint that looked like a close-up of chromatin.

—This is an interactive piece, right, Todd?

Todd walked briskly to Kurt's side, trying to reason with him:

—Why did you come here? If you wanted to destroy something, you should have gone to the satellite gallery in Charlottenburg. If you don't stop at once, I am going to seriously freak out.

Kurt couldn't quite reach high enough to tip the canvas from its attachments. He hopped in his chair to push as high as possible, but couldn't dismount the work. He tugged down three times until the wooden stretcher bars finally cracked and the painting caved in on itself. Kurt surveyed the piece, now crumpled on the floor like a car that had just collided with a telephone pole, and looked genuinely pleased.