A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (37 page)

—Thank you for joining us.

The LED lights behind him cycled from blue to red. The background was a smear of light on an aluminum screen, like a very drunk man walking through rainy night traffic. The handful of television appearances he'd previously made had been staged with either a solid black background or wingback chairs.
Zeitgeist
's drunken-stagger backdrop, however, made this seem like news, made him seem like a man who could make news.

—Professor Burr, we've read today's papers. What's your account of what happened last night in Athens? What level of responsibility do you believe you had in the riots?

Okay. So this wasn't news per se, more editorial. That probably meant they would let him talk. The producer had said it was a fifteen-minute segment.

—First, let me contextualize the problem. My son . . . I have a picture here. Can we get a close-up of this?

No one answered him. The young man next to the young man with headphones began slicing the air with both hands. He put the photo in front of his face so that they couldn't crop it out. The cameraman obliged and zoomed in on the photo. He could hear the cannon-size lens recalibrating and wondered how those digital whirs could be inaudible to a viewer. When he saw the photo on the monitor, he counted to three and then put it back in his pocket.

—My son would have been competing in Athens in water polo. Which was the context for that particular venue. There was no premeditated attempt to speak out against the Olympics. As a classicist I have my qualms about the particularities of the resurrection of the ancient games, but these are far more picayune than a systematic critique. I hope that any viewer who has information about the whereabouts of my son will make every effort to contact me at Joseph-dot-Burr-at-Mission-University, one word, dot-e-d-u.

The translator was speaking rapidly in his right ear. He wasn't sure if his e-mail address had gotten through; it didn't appear in the subtitles on the screen. He put his finger to the earpiece, prompting another round of waving and flapping from the assistant.

—You say this was not premeditated, yet you flew to Athens and delivered a speech advocating a violent response to state hegemony. We have obtained video of the talk. Please, if you would watch and then comment.

The man lecturing at the Herod Atticus seemed far younger than the version of himself he'd seen in the mirror that morning. What's more, this Burr was yelling:

“What is fire? Fire is not a thing. It's a process. Fire is the process of combustion. Fire is the arrow in an equation, it is the
yields
on the way from this to that. Be the arrow. Be fire. Burn everything to the ground.”

—I'm not sure that came through. It's joseph-dot-burr, two Rs, at Mission University, one word, dot e-d-u. I'm not sure that capitalization matters with these things, but try all lowercase.

—Can you answer the question, please?

—I hope your viewers realize this is grossly out of context. I was speaking about liminality—Liminalism rather. Which is my belief that we must reject object permanence and adopt a more relational definition of consciousness.

The host's silence invited him to continue.

—The Mission University seal that you showed at the beginning of the broadcast bears Kant's Enlightenment principle,
Sapere aude
, “Dare to know.”
Aufklärung
as
Ausgang
. Kant's idea is that Enlightenment is a departure from the familiar, from home.

He wavered, suddenly thinking of the more excusable alternative that Owen ran away to seek enlightenment—not in a hippie sort of way, but in a rigorous way. The host was still looking at the disembodied TV screen Burr.

—The idea is Enlightenment as an exit from received wisdom. For Kant, exit from intellectual tyranny was the only goal. What I believe he missed, and this is crucial, is that overconcern with the exit misses the entire point of the Process. We have called for a change, as if change is a thing that we can possess. Again, I'm advocating that we reject
things
and focus on the
relations
between things. At the heart of the Olympics is the perfect metaphor: intersecting rings—an image that the founder of the Games lifted from Carl Jung, by the way; but more importantly, the intersecting Olympic rings are tattooed on the inner left arm of my son, Owen Burr. When I first saw it, I was horrified, but now—

—Professor. You're avoiding the question. Psychology and intellectualism aside, you admit to wanting to tear down the Olympic Games. How does capitalism play into this? Do you consider yourself an anarchist, socialist, or terrorist?

—No. None of these. Terrorist? Heavens, no! My only concern with capitalism is its inherent bias toward idolatry, because you can sell idols. Far more money is spent advertising
things
than advertising services. The very notion of advertising a service summons lascivious connotations. Liminalism is politically neutral. Liminalism merely suggests that objects take a backseat to relationships.

—No one would consider throwing Molotov cocktails at the walls of the Parthenon to be a mere suggestion, Professor. No one would consider riots that left dozens wounded, millions inconvenienced, and storefront windows shattered to be a mere suggestion.

This was the sound of the other shoe dropping.
Zeitgeist
was clearly a liberal show for a progressive audience, or they wouldn't have let him talk for so long, but even they were castigating him. She was accusing him of being a terrorist.

—A young man in black put a flaming bomb in my hands. I tried to blow it out, but it relit like a trick birthday candle—I'm not sure if that reference is going to translate, but nonetheless. At that point I had three choices: one, let the ordnance explode in my face; two, throw it
into
the audience and take cover; three, throw it
away from
the audience. I chose option three. I'm not sure how familiar your viewers are with the Odeon of Herodes Atticus—can we pull up that image again?—but there are empty windows in the
skene
. I'm not the athlete my son is—again, if you have any information on Owen Burr, that's [email protected]. I have no experience with these things. The Molotov cocktail hit the
skene
of the Odeon, hundreds of yards from the actual Parthenon, mind you, because I was trying to save people. Lastly, the injunction to see beyond binary relations is hardly the kind of thing that provokes a citywide riot. I urge an inquest into why riot police were assembled at the Parthenon
before
the demonstrators marched.

—Is that the line of defense you expect to take with the US State Department?

It finally struck him that what he had done, he had done as a person, not as a persona. His life really had changed. There was no mask to remove. This was his face, cartoonish as it might be.

—I wasn't aware that I needed to defend myself to the US State Department.

—So you remain unapologetic about the havoc you created in Greece?

—I just want to find my son. Again, if anyone has any information about the whereabouts . . .

They cut away from him mid-sentence. Without a mic there was little point in him sitting there. He started to get up, but the assistant asked him to please sit down. He stood up anyway and handed back the earpiece. They untangled the cords from his chest. Burr spoke to the head of production, who was now there to escort him out of the studio:

—Well, that went well.

B
urr's plan now was to wait in front of an anonymous computer for the messages to come in. He entered his first cybercafé and sat before a monstrous black computer with an aggressively sloped keyboard. The boy next to him was playing a shoot-'em-up game and chatting to a friend on his headset. He didn't appear to recognize Burr from the news, but one couldn't be too sure. Burr casually read an article about Athens in the
Times
, but then read about the Olympics results.

Before the interview, Burr's in-box had held a smattering of e-mails expressing puzzlement and hate mail from the more conservative members of the classical community. Following the
Zeitgeist
interview, he discovered negative response bias. All he appeared to have done was invite people to wish horrible things for his son or spitefully bait him with disinformation. Every one of these malicious messages, subject heading
CRUCIAL INFORMATION ABOUT OWEN BURR'S WHEREABOUTS
, brought fifteen seconds of hope. Then minutes of humiliation until he opened the next message. Hundreds of people hated him enough to write, meaning many people must have seen the program.

Only one of these messages appeared genuine. The young woman, or person using a young woman's e-mail account, mentioned that Owen always carried a Loeb
Odyssey
. Her words were “little green book.” She claimed to know where Owen was and recommended that, before they met, he should research Kurt Wagener's artwork at Art 35 Basel.

He searched.

Good God! He hoped this was all photoshopped.

The first page of image results showed Owen choking this poor young man. This young man in a wheelchair? There must be some mistake. It must be photoshopped.

The second page of results had a few new images. Owen was in some dungeon with a potato sack over his head and wires running from his fingers. These were clearly restaging that despicable prison torture. Every picture he saw was a grotesque trophy shot where Owen was the lifeless flesh held up in service of someone else's vanity. And then it clicked that the “someone else” was Kurt Wagener himself, which brought a heretofore unknown level of cognitive dissonance. Vigilantism was far too barbaric, but, but dammit! The photographs were smut. They were undeniably cruel, and Owen's response had been cruel—he learned that Owen had choked the artist unconscious and left him paralyzed in the process. Burr's immediate thought was that no one had the right to do this to another human, and if Owen didn't finish the job, he'd hunt this Kurt down and finish the job himself. His second thought was that this was far more humiliating than he could bear: the photos were humiliating, their exhibition even more humiliating, and Owen's response, his own response, was humiliating in a way that he simply lacked the language to describe. And lying in wait on the other side of this incomprehensibility was the additional humiliation that the artist had treated the whole spectacle as some kind of joke, as some kind of trap, and had planned on Owen coming to Basel to confront him.

Burr wasn't alone in lacking the wherewithal to process this event. The art community seemed equally divided about whether this was genius or psychopathy. Basel had drawn a line in the sand. Younger critics eagerly hopped over to the side of violence. Some argued that Kurt should not be prosecuted because he was making art, whereas Owen was nothing but a criminal. Others claimed that Kurt should be prosecuted for kidnapping because his performance was kitsch, and Owen should be pardoned because he transformed kitsch into art. One reviewer called Owen an important artist. Burr felt ill.

The art market had voted with the biggest sale for a contemporary photograph on record. Over a million dollars paid for torture and Owen's violent response to torture. What barbaric world was he living in, where these events were not only valued but glorified? What barbaric world would allow the original event to happen? This was not the world he would have built for his son.

She shouldn't have told him about Basel. It would have been better had she just mentioned the Loeb. He wasn't capable of these things. He was a man who belonged in an office with comprehensive health insurance. He was a man whose chief provocation was to unveil the soul of ancient words.

He was. But the man they showed on
Zeitgeist
, thumping his hand on the side of the rostrum, wide-eyed with powerful hands—the Burr who would turn Athens into a signal fire—that man would relish confronting her. That man was capable of walking from this wreckage. That man was capable of finding his son.

That man was also clever enough to think that this might be an ambush, and suggested meeting this young woman, Brigitte, in a public place. She offered the name of a wine bar in East Berlin that Owen had supposedly frequented.

They had some tempting scheme for selling wine, but he needed to be ice-vein sober. Coffee mug before him, Burr let the steam moisten his eyelids. He warmed his hands and wondered where Owen would have sat. Burr had chosen a seat at the farmhouse table because most of the upholstered furniture looked flea-infested. It didn't seem to bother all of the students who drank here. They all frowned and slunk away, opting for any disintegrating couch in a far-flung corner. He had apparently come on some sort of knitting day. Several acrylic needles clacked against the tables as the front door opened and closed. A wash of whispers followed the tall blondish redhead approaching his table.

She was aggressively attractive and surely on magazine covers or television. Everything about her beauty—her height, her angular face, accentuated by what had to be professional makeup—confused him, embarrassed him. It was as if the valet had mistaken his Volvo for a red sports car. How many engineers did it take to send a woman like this into the world? Dozens?

—Brigitte Hessen. I'm the one who wrote to you yesterday evening. Director of Timmons Projects. Intimate friend of your son's. Your son Owen. Professor Burr?

—What do you have for me? The hospital only had records to the second of June. Is Owen still in Berlin?

—It's a pleasure to meet you.

—Skip it.

Brigitte mumbled into her exhaled smoke. He didn't catch what she said. Either German or Dutch. He caught “Americans.” She turned to face him.

—My lawyer has advised me that there are certain things I'm at liberty to say and certain things I, unfortunately, cannot say.

—Let me start over. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Where's my son?