A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (18 page)

He took the itinerary from the folder and placed it on the president's desk.

—Art galleries in London? A stadium in Spain? This is great news, my friend. You're definitely not going to have a problem getting this sabbatical past the provost's office. You represent a clear value to the university. These stadium talks may well be the most significant academic development of the fall semester. The alumni magazine hasn't gone to press yet; we should be able to get you on next month's cover. Or should we wait? Either way, you have my full support for sabbatical leave.

—Well, there's more to it than that. As you may remember, I took leave three years ago to finish my book.

The president looked at the shelf behind him and then looked over the other shoulder. Neither finding the book, nor recalling so much as the title, he responded:

—Fine piece of scholarship. Testament to the university. People will be reading that book for the next hundred years. But forget all that, Joe. Our course catalogue for fall is already printed, but we need to get you in the Philosophy Department as soon as possible.

—I'm a classicist, Gerard. This isn't some hobby I can just drop. I've built my life around my work, and if that work is not appreciated, then I can—

—Jesus, Joe. Slow down. No one is suggesting you abandon your career. I'm just saying you need to augment it. Like it or not, classics is dead.

—That's neither fair nor funny.

—The storm's coming, Joe. Whether you like it or not. You have what, twenty-five seniors majoring in classics? There are three times as many Portuguese majors. Portuguese, Joe. Granted, they all figured out early on that there hasn't been a grade lower than a B in that department in a decade. But, hey, I applaud that sort of initiative. They found a way to become the third biggest language department at the university. Keep the customer satisfied,
ibid
. Find a way to attract more students, or your department will be absorbed by History in the next four years.

—Technically this new work is theory, not philosophy.

President Gaskin looked close to throwing the paperweight he had been gripping through the bay windows overlooking the quad. Then he saw that Burr wasn't being his usual pedantic self; he was smiling.

—Look at you. Hmph. Mission University may be yours in a few years' time. But while it's still mine, let's have a glass of the 18-year. Neat's fine?

—Please.

—You'll have to accept half pay unless you want me to start a war with the provost.

—I'm sorry, but I can't. Owen forfeited his scholarship in light of his recent injury. He's two quarters shy of his diploma, and it's too late to apply for loans.

—How about we make up the difference by paying you to lodge visiting scholars, of which I'm sure there will be none? Classes start next Wednesday—can you find a replacement?

—Already done.

The president looked at the itinerary again.

—Jesus! You're speaking in Athens in four days.

—Nothing has been confirmed yet.

—Should I know who this Baudrillard guy is?

—Oh yes. He's a very big deal.

—Do you have anything to promote other than yourself and the university?

—No.

—This could be big, Joe. I'll authorize the leave under the auspices of serving as a university liaison to the Olympics. We have a young man on the kayak team, and it's not entirely far-fetched to think that you and Owen would be well suited to the role of ambassadors. I assume Owen is going with you. You'll barely get there for the closing ceremony, but I'm sure I can make something up. It would be a great help if you could get back here before midterms—or at least Thanksgiving.

—I'll see what I can do.

President Gaskin refilled Burr's drink and handed him a picture frame so that he could grab a cigar to chew on.

Before he'd had time to finish his drink, Burr was shooed out of the office because of a pressing call from the athletics director. Mission University, he learned, was in the running for a top basketball prospect.

At first Burr was relieved to be dismissed from the principal's office. Then he grew indignant, refusing to accept that he was less important to the university's future than a sixteen-year-old phenom. Burr clacked his heels as loud as they could clack down the sandstone archway from the president's office to the humanities library.

Gaskin would never have pressed him on it, but he hadn't the foggiest what Baudrillard had written. Had he actually written anything, or was he just a figurehead? After the computer terminal confirmed that, yes, he had published a dozen books in the three years it took Burr to write
Hapax
, Burr grabbed the stub of a wooden pencil and wrote Baudrillard's name on the Author line of several call slips.

The librarian returned with
Simulacrum and Simulation
crowning a two-foot stack of hardcovers. Burr could feel eyes on him. Turning, he found one of his most talented students of the past few years, who had, regrettably, veered toward Sanskrit and chosen a different adviser. The student wasn't hiding his inspection of the titles. Burr coughed.

—Have to reread some of these French thinkers to stay in shape, you know.

—I know what you mean. You have to constantly refresh to keep Badiou distinct from Bourdieu, Bataille from Baudrillard from Barthes from Blanchot. To be fair, it seems like Baudrillard confuses himself with Bataille, and Blanchot. But Bataille exudes a primality, “a communion with the spirit of language” as you once said in lecture, that makes me think he read his Greek.

Burr was drowning. At first he was thrilled to think of himself in that tangle of B's. But there was a name in there that he hadn't heard since grad school. He began to sweat. The poor lighting of the atrium hid his discomfort. The student stood by silently, waiting to record whatever Burr said. He had to say something.

—To be sure. The Gauls' historical role has been to remind the Germanic hordes of one thing: the lyre is every bit as primitive as the drum.

—Peace is just as primal as violence?

—I couldn't have said it better myself.

Face saved, he noted that it was quite late and walked briskly to the door. With a student like that, you have to keep conversation as pithy as possible.

The US water polo match began in an hour, and it just so happened he was desperately in need of a drink. He drove home and then walked to his local.

T
he Tilted Wig had screened every minute of the Olympics. The Wig wasn't a bar with TV screens at the everglowing ready. It was a thick-lacquered place for conversation whose owner cared enough to hang his collection of maritime lanterns and light them every night. During the day, the head of your pint could be cobalt blue, cranberry red, or topaz, depending on which glaze of the stained glass window the sun was shining through.

In the month leading up to the Games, Burr had reiterated to Sonny, the bartender/proprietor, that they would need a television these last weeks of August. It was like a doctor telling a patient that he needs to start smoking; the message was jarring enough to get Sonny's attention. Sonny ran his bar on a cash-only basis and used a brass till, even though he had to thump the side every time he wanted it to open. He'd rather burn down the bar than mount a flat-screen TV, but a projector seemed innocuous enough. Sonny's big summer project had been mounting a projector to the ceiling and then camouflaging the box and wires with metallic paint.

On August 13, 2004, Sonny and Burr clinked pint glasses to a parade of Olympians waving mini flags and summer hats on the back wall of the Wig. Burr squinted and pointed to the projection as the US delegation marched toward the dartboards, but never convinced himself that it was Owen in the infield, watching fireworks bloom behind the Olympic flame.

Since the opening ceremony, Burr had held vigil every afternoon. He sat close to the wall-projected image, hoping to catch sight of Owen in the crowd or in street clothes at the end of the bench. He explained to Sonny that although the commentary was grating, the announcers were likely to mention Owen's absence and possibly reveal a helpful tidbit as to his whereabouts. Sonny agreed to shout down his midday patrons, but only during water polo games.

The audio was on when Burr walked through the door.

Sonny began pouring a pint.

—Hear anything today?

—Had a baby shower in here for lunch. They didn't seem to mind looking closely at a screen of young guys in Speedos. I offered them a round if they found Owen. No luck.

Burr watched his first Guinness settle.

—Could I trouble you for a shot of Bloody Mary mix?

Sonny knew that order was coming. Rather than shake his head, he just pretended to forget and made Burr order it every time.

—In the highly unlikely event that a man named Gerard Gaskin ever makes it in here, I'd appreciate it if you would keep Owen's uncertain whereabouts under your hat. I kind of implied that he was back at Stanford.

—Gaskin comes here on Tuesdays. He'd say it's on account of the Uilleann pipe players, but he's not Irish and they've usually packed up by the time he arrives. Could have something to do with the Greek girls ordering Cosmopolitans.

—Bill Dennison banned them from campus.

—Greeks or Cosmos?

—He sent an editorial to the
Times
titled “Barbarians in the Gates.” Then he revoked charters. When he discovered that he couldn't actually do that, he banned school parties in bars.

—I remember. Those were lean years. Nearly put me out of business.

—Might have had more to do with the state of your restroom.

—Actually it was mostly your bar tab.

That landed harder than Sonny had intended. The year after Caroline, Burr had indeed run up a grisly bar tab, one beer and one whisky at a time, that they had to work out. Burr motioned to the sports and grabbed his two glasses.

His standard snug was a mahogany-stained booth at the back of the bar, where he drank his Guinness and sipped his Bloody Mary mix from a double shot glass. Caroline's only gripes had been about his sodium intake and his drinking. Thankfully she wasn't around to see the hypertensive man he had become. In youth, when his metabolism was too high to get hangovers, he drank cheap red wine and port. His head hurt just thinking about all those empty bottles and full ashtrays.

They came here in the days before the Wig was a stop on the bachelorette party circuit. Back then it was peanuts on the floor and everyone shocked that a young blonde touched by the gods themselves would be in this of all places and with him of all men. He was always stunned too, but pretended not to be. These days he took care even to unwrap her memory, as if his hands might slip and change her eyes from green to brown, as if she might fly straight from his chest and dissolve into impossibility.

—What is that?! he yelled at the screen.

After ten years of watching this sport he still had no idea what constituted a minor foul versus an exclusion. Regardless, it was a good excuse to yell. More significant for him was the term
exclusion
, which called to mind his liminal critique of the law of the excluded middle—a critique even he was tired of resurrecting. But this was precisely the sort of content that his lay audience would require: the fundamental laws of rationality are wrong—or at least this one is. He went back to the bar for another pint. And a shot. And a pint.

—Sonny, if I'm standing in a doorway, am I in the room or out of the room?

—If you're standing in the doorway, I'd say you're in the way.

—There's something to that. It is a way. A process. A noun of verbs. I would be standing in a Process that people mistake for a Thing. And you know the secret? Everything is a process. That beer is not a thing, even though it appears on my tab as an item. It's a service.

—Preaching to the choir. I've poured enough Guinness to know it's a process.

Sonny paused. Then looked Burr square in the eye.

—Joe, you're talking like someone who's about to make a sharp turn.

—Just got the okay from Gaskin to take off on a European lecture tour. He thinks it's going to be big. I'm just hoping it will be big enough to show up on Owen's radar.

—Settling up before you emigrate?

The professor walked quickly to the screen, thinking he'd caught sight of Owen on the far end of the bench. The young man wasn't wearing a robe—none of them were—which meant he'd need to pack for warmer weather than the paper had led him to believe. He was convinced that the athlete sitting in the corner of the frame was Owen—or at least had the exact same physique. He stood, squinted, walked in a few steps, before realizing that this player had a rounder face. And he wasn't wearing an eye patch.

At that point he began moderating his drinking a bit. The commentator became very animated at the word
brutality
. Burr gave in to the tenor of his afternoon and began repeating the word with his Sean Connery accent:

—Brutality.

No one was around to laugh or give him a strange look.

Some of this commentator's language was quite colorful. And they'd taken care to place him with a good straight man.

—Now you just said Wigo bunnied the goalie. What do you mean, “bunny”?

—You'll see it on the replay here. Wolf with a great step-out gets out of the water to his suit and rips it right over the goalie's head. Between the bunny ears.

He had never heard Owen talk like that, and thought the announcer was exaggerating the argot for effect. The one thing that the players did yell incessantly was “Slough slough slough,” perhaps the most disagreeable word one can hear shouted a thousand times in an afternoon.

Burr closed his eyes and hoped the announcer would know to explain Owen's absence from the squad, perhaps by way of explaining their loss, and perhaps cue a crowd shot of his son. But no mention was made of Owen. They cut to field hockey, and he stood to leave.