A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (7 page)

Burr spent his first month in their new house scavenging for photos, dangling Bill's books by the spine in case a portrait of Caroline was marking a page, then dropping them to the floor. Caroline was only smiling in two pictures—crushing, because she had dozens of smiles that would now fade and disappear, impossible for him to recover and for his son to learn.

Burr's academic career had run aground. He was called before a committee tasked with managing the transition of administrations, certain he would be negotiating severance and extended benefits for Owen.

Rather than talk about his drinking or read disgruntled letters from his seminar students, they framed the meeting as early tenure review. Later he would realize that no one had any intention of promoting him to associate; tenure review was merely a polite pretext for them to illustrate his downfall. In the words of the provost, “Institutions cannot invest in speculation.” They said his thinking was undisciplined, code for not publishing in peer-reviewed journals. They said the liminality work lacked focus. He blurted out, “That's the point!” Which was when they suggested he stop drinking with the adjuncts in the Poetry Department.

He was given three years to shape up. Burr surprised himself at how industrious he became following their censure. During his three-year probation he trotted out significant textual analysis in the biggest journals—the
Journal of Hellenic Studies, Classical Quarterly, Hermes, Classical Philology
, and the
American Journal of Philology—
thereby moving from the fringes of classics to the center. Joseph Burr was now the authority on Homer's use of the aorist middle, which is to say, as mainstream as classics professors come.

The black carry-on he wheeled into his next committee hearing buckled under the weight of peer-review journals. He stacked them high in three ecru columns and then sat with his hands folded before him, conscious of looking a bit too much like the chip leader in a poker game. The university didn't mind the swagger; it was publish or perish, and he had published. On the day he was promoted to associate professor, he had a following of eager grad students compiling several words per day for the ill-fated
Hapax
. Gone were the days of even the slightest excursus. He was scrubbed of liminality and academically sober.

B
ut the drinking still came in waves. Burr waited at a neighborhood stoplight, looking at the passenger seat, tracked back to fit Owen's knees and reclined to make room for his head. He wondered how many months would pass until someone else would adjust it back. After today, no one could blame him for needing a drink. Once the Volvo was docked in his garage, dripping oil on the concrete slab and panting, Burr shuffled to his local.

He wrote on napkins while boisterous kissers and fancy handshakers bubbled around and jostled his bent elbow:

           
Our ground is birth. Our death is sea. Two things our mind will never know, birth and death, things that are uniquely ours yet things we never have, things we are not there to inhabit, define the mind before we are given the chance. This curling throw, ripped back at once. We are the liminal. We are the wash. But he. His birth set stakes, two stakes, birth and different death implied. Always tightroping those two spikes in the ground. He jumped. And when he landed, it's no wonder he ran
.

Through a wet March, Owen breezed across Berlin on his hostel's beach cruiser, pedaling the one-speed bike with firm unhurried strokes, leaning into turns and sidewinding from Ostkreuz to Charlottenburg. Over the rain-slicked roads of the Tiergarten park, asphalt dolphin-smooth, he skimmed quarter miles of cosines with broad sweeps from curb to curb.

Each morning at the Tiergarten he joined images, paired words, and left with something glazed and sharp, more pottery shard than poem. With a handful of shards he pieced a bright mosaic of memories against the grey Berlin sky: lurid storefronts splashed with ancient yellow; Helvetica shouts in stoplight red; stockinged women stenciled to walls in dripping royal blue; canary-yellow bugle calls of the Postbank; kiosk green and construction orange on every corner; a full spectrum of brick from red to brown; Army-Navy stores spilling seaweed wares to the curb; consignment shop employees with purple-red bob cuts sitting on molded plastic chairs; the plumes of squinting smokers; the expired green of shutters climbing to roofs and tiling the sky.

He was the metal comb, and Berlin was the music box—his fingers extended to plink each note of color and spin the day's melody. Everything was becoming clear except his vision of himself as an artist. He wanted to play with memory and maps, but had no specific plan about integrating them into an artwork. In art libraries and bookstores he studied Richard Long and Hamish Fulton. He fasted for a week to afford a student membership at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum and spent entire afternoons in front of the Anselm Kiefers.

One March day, in front of Kiefer's enormous lead airplane
The Angel of History (Poppy and Memory)
, a man with shoulder-length hair and a scholarly bent caught him jotting down an observation on Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, underneath a rough pencil sketch. Shy, suspicious, Owen folded from attention. But the man persisted.

—People get too hung up on Kiefer's scale and miss the mud, the materiality, the lead to silver to gold.

—The thin blue of the lead and ash under these skylights, the filter is . . . familiar.

—Are you a student or an artist?

—I'm an artist.

This was the first time Owen had declared it publicly. The real artists he knew in high school never felt the need to declare anything, they just acknowledged they were artists—the way someone else might say, “I'm adopted.” Embarrassed blood pooled up.

—Are you with a gallery in Berlin?

The blush ran across his cheek, almost to his nose, and his ears turned red.

—You're too young to be making work anyway. Once you put something into the world, you can never take it back. You'd have a hard time finding an artist who doesn't want a pass on the first five years of his career.

The slight tremble in the man's paternalism made Owen suppose he was talking with a professor. This was the tone Owen usually tuned out. But what he was about to hear, in front of a creased felt blanket, beside a chair made of fat, was real, not academic, and struck him dumb.

—This artist, Joseph Beuys, was in the Luftwaffe, you know. His plane was shot down over the Crimea in the thick of winter. He would have frozen to death had a group of Tartars not greased him up with lard and wrapped him in felt blankets. So it's not as random as it might first appear that he makes a chair of fat or protects himself from a coyote, a totem of raw nature, with a felt blanket.

—Protecting yourself from a coyote is art?

—It is when you do it like a shaman. Beuys flew into New York in May of 1974. An ambulance met him at the airport and transported him directly to the René Block Gallery where he attempted to lift collective trauma by locking himself up with a wild coyote.

—What was it called?

—
I Like America and America Likes Me
.

—Good title.

—The materials are what you should be focusing on: felt blanket, shepherd's staff, coyote, the
Wall Street Journal
spread out on the floor for it to piss on. There are only two questions for an artist: first, What do I exclude? A king is he who determines the state of exception. And every artist must be a king. The second question—How do I import the most meaning to what I include?—however, is why artists outlive kings. I wish contemporary artists focused more on achieving a sense of inevitability in their work, an elegance that borders on the mathematical. Blanket, staff, coyote. Beuys is Pythagoras, and everyone else is scribbling in sand.

After his discussion with this professor had percolated for a night, Owen saw the possibility of combining the two genres he was most interested in, Land Art and minimalism, into something he would call Laminalism. Thus far, Owen imagined his art pieces, laminates, would be an overlay of memories and moods onto landscape; he would light the world with the colors of the Gods and pin down his memories with minimalist shapes like rock cairns and runic tangles of twigs. He had a name for the work, but his new blend of art was still too inchoate and immaterial to justify fasting for studio space.

Still. In the distance he could see himself as a successful artist, selling Berlin to a young American romantic: “Here an artist can afford studio space and make a name for himself before he turns thirty.”

In the past two months he had overheard the same conversation dozens of times, in English, German, French, Danish, and Italian. People told him he was in the right place. Everyone here was jostling for a name. In that respect, Owen was common. He looked around at the turbid layer of young creatives floating above him. None of them had lost a name, which separated Owen, like sediment dropped out of suspension.

T
he Winerei, a wine bar near his hostel, served as library, living room, salon. Idiosyncrasy defined the bar in a way that reminded Owen of his childhood in a cave. Patrons borrowed glasses at the Winerei—technically nothing was bought or sold there, all payment was voluntary. For one euro, Owen was handed a glass and invited to fill it with any of the half dozen wines they chose to uncork that night. Before shambling off to his hostel, he dropped money, on his honor, into a glass jar. Owen, now broke, paid a rounded-down wholesale April estimate of his drinking, rather than the magnanimous estimates of March, and washed glasses when it got busy.

After a few drinks, the Winerei glowed cloudy pastis green and Owen became ensnared in the nets of candlelight bouncing off mantel mirrors and dispersing through the stems of all the playful glasses. Because the wine was free, glasses were handled with a light touch and gestures were wedding-reception wild, meaning there was always someone rubbing a paste of club soda and rock salt into the hem of her blouse. He had learned to wear a black shirt if he was going to stay past sundown.

Locals had their own spots. His was a salmon-colored armchair with a great wound sliced through the seat, spilling dried yellow foam that broke off like lemon cake and clogged the wells of his corduroy pants. He sat in the disintegrating chair and read Homer, glancing up several times a page to watch passersby walk vintage bikes with a slow spoke rhythm through the first sun of spring or strut by with purposeful hips that made him blink hard and consider the possibility of discos.

Early April, Owen was sitting in his crumbling chair, looking out the window of the Winerei with this very thought. He felt someone to his left, hovering at his blind side and eager to interrupt his reading. A stream of smoke fogged between his face and his book. He kept reading, but then a voice interrupted:

—That's not gonna work here.

Owen raised an eyebrow, turned, and found legs braced in the chrome of a wheelchair, a wine bottle wedged in a crotch, and a bright blue flannel shirt unbuttoned aggressively. Beside the wheelchair, another young man swirled a glass and swept back the itch of hair at his forehead. Owen set his book on the table. Now the standing one spoke.

—Between the two of us, we've tried just about every conceivable way of picking up girls in a bar. But sitting alone and pretending to read in what, Greek? That's new.

—Or
really
old.

—Let's get real. They have the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue here somewhere. I bet we can find it if we look.

—My dad's a professor, Owen responded. I grew up reading this kind of stuff.

—Does it work?

—Does what work?

The young man in the wheelchair put a hand in front of his friend's chest.

—Hey. In all seriousness, tell me something.

—What?

—Where's your parrot?

The two young men laughed. Both leaned in too close. The standing one sloshed his glass with a toasting
Arrr!
The one in the wheelchair put his hand on Owen's leg. Owen suspected they were high.

Owen exhaled slowly and loudly.

—Why does everyone go for the pirate joke? Hannibal the Great had an eye patch. Why not “Where's your elephant?” I hear a bad pirate joke every day. You guys are better than that. Assholes.

The guy in the wheelchair snapped back his hand.

—Testy!

They left Owen to scan his text and rub his temples. Over the course of the next week, they reappeared to deliver one-liners that made Owen think that his universe was both small and contracting.

Two weeks to the day after he called a disabled person an asshole, Owen saw the man's picture on the cover of
Die Welt
. He learned that he had been mocked by Kurt Wagener, a twenty-seven-year-old artist with work in the Pompidou and a forthcoming exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao.

A
pril 29, 2004. The Italian managing the hostel recognized Owen's patter down the stairs and slid his computer monitor to the far end of the desk to confront Owen with the shocking image popping up all over the Internet.

Owen caught sight of something gruesome and possibly pornographic in his periphery. He decided to walk past the clerk and not mention it.

—Hey! No no no. Take a good look at the screen.

A man in a hood balanced on a cardboard box. Rigid woven plastic rose to a sharp fin. A snarl of exposed wires ran from the ceiling to the fingers of his outstretched arms. A tasseled blanket around his shoulders looked like a cut-up prayer shawl. The scene was violently overstaged, offered up to the world with the admission
Hey, you're all behind the hood
. Owen chewed his cheek.

—Where is this from?

—Your prison. In Iraq.

—I'm Canadian.

—Don't lie to my face, man. I saw your passport.