A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (25 page)

—It might not be a problem. You won't come into the story until morning. The first wave of media is always effect with no cause. It creates mystery. It enhances viewership. Tonight will be the spectacle. It should be a few days before they put you on the no-fly list. But we should hurry.

They found a trail on Filopappou Hill and eventually connected with a major road, where Baudrillard flagged down a taxi. Burr gave the directions to their hotel. Baudrillard corrected him and said they had to go to the airport.

—Do you have your passport with you?

—At all times. But we have time for me to get my laptop. The clothes I don't need, but I need my laptop. Getting to the airport now doesn't make the plane leave any sooner.

—Something smells wrong about this. You may be in trouble. I may be in trouble.

The driver began eyeing them in the rearview mirror.

—Those protestors outside the Odeon. They weren't sent by George.

—Who's George?

—George Spiros, who is so fond of calling us by our first names. No. George didn't send them. That was strictly political. I'm just trying to think of how Spadzos or someone higher up would benefit from a riot. One thing's certain, the staid Professor Burr is no more.

—What happened to my two or three days before the story broke?

—That's theory, not practice. So far as I can tell, this is a game of fish. We are the small fish. Spiros is a small fish. Spadzos is the big fish who used us to attract attention to the incumbent mayor's hyperconservativism, but there is some bigger fish, some bartender-of-Molotov-cocktails fish, who wanted Spadzos to look as if he would destroy the city, the economy.

—Why?

—For attention. For a story. It may have been the president showing he could quell dissent. Here that's the number-one qualification for the job. To be honest, I don't care. Whoever is behind those shields is going to look like a hero, and he has no reason to help us.

Burr looked out the window. Then he looked out the rear window.

—Is this going to follow me around forever?

—So much for that Nobel. There are consequences to all of this. It's no Bastille, but it's enough to get branded a terrorist, given everything. And like any revolutionary, terrorist, or visionary, you'll have to live with being a metonym. Let's hope that the protests end tonight. I'm guessing that the deck is rigged for that to happen. If not, maybe we can lecture together in Guantanamo.

—I'm deeply, deeply sorry if I've damaged your career. You've been a more luminous guide than I could have ever hoped for.

—Athens is on you, Joe Burr. I'm just a footnote. If you're ever in Paris, look me up here.

Baudrillard wrote an address in a notebook and tore out the page.

—Are you going straight to Paris?

—Absolutely.

—I'd love to write you an inscription in
Hapax
, but I just realized you must have left it in the hotel.

—Honestly, I was always going to leave it in the hotel. And you must too.

Burr's hand hovered for an instant. He patted Jean on the knee three times, exited at the
Interflug
ticket counter, and said:

—Thank you. Athens is finally real.

—Can you read that top letter for me?

Owen blinked several times and focused on the E of the eye chart, sharpening the serifs. Then he fumbled a hand to his eye patch, but found a gauze bandage instead. The bed was broken and small. IV taped to the fold of his arm, saline bag on a rack. He looked around to a roomful of whitecoats, all with pens waiting for his reply.

Now the woman asked him in German he only half comprehended:

—Können Sie mir den ____________ auf der Tafel vorlesen?

He was in Berlin. He remembered Berlin. But his throat caught at the déjà vu. These were the tests that followed his injury, before the enucleation, testing the eye that only caught light: Close your right eye, please. Can you read any of the letters? Even the top one? Which way is my hand moving? How about now? Tell me when the penlight is on. How about now? Is it on or off now?

Then they asked him in French that ended in garbles:

—Pouvez vous lire la première lettre ______?

He was totally fucked if his right eye was damaged. He turned away from the chart to catch the window blinds trembling with the summer breeze. Beyond the window, flagstone wedges that reminded him of buildings in the Quad. But he was far from California, or they wouldn't waste time with other languages—maybe Spanish. He looked at the acoustic ceiling tiles and froze the scattered ants in place. He counted.

—What's your name?

He could see just fine from his right eye.

Now another doctor leaned in.

—Where are you staying? Where are you from?

He ran his thumb over the chrome bed rail and said nothing. Eventually they left and let him sleep.

H
e woke to nurses smoothing him like a crumpled piece of paper, certain that if they ironed him out, they would find something legible amid the folds and creases.

He refused to answer the questions in German, English, or any of the other languages they tried, partly because he was unsure of his footing, partly for fear of being hit with a six-figure bill. He smiled slightly when the hospital interpreter tried sign language, appreciating the exhaustiveness of their effort.

In fact, Owen had learned enough German in his time in Berlin to know it was no good that he kept hearing the word
sterben. An einer Überdosis sterben
, “overdose death,” a poetic pairing of words that kept him occupied for an otherwise uneventful day;
vor Entkräftung sterben
, to die of exhaustion. He nodded ever so slightly at the prognosis, which an Eastern European intern duly noted:
Er wird leider sterben
, “I'm afraid he'll die”; and the coup de grace,
Er hatte sterben können
, “He could have already died.”

During the night, he overheard their diagnosis: “Idiopathic aphasia resulting from acute bacterial meningitis.” It wasn't that his German was prodigious, it was that all the words were cognates. The only two he wasn't quite sure of,
idiopathic aphasia
, spiraled down in his head, hypnotizing him.

On his first day of full consciousness, after the cabal of rounding physicians passed, an intern explained in English that his new placeholder name, Max Mustermann, meant “specimen,” and that the attending physician would continue to encourage everyone to treat him as such until he helped them out with his name and history.

He remembered the flashes, the lights, sweat, women, shaking pain. And he suddenly liked being Mustermann. At least he'd found a name for himself. Better than retrieving his vandalized name and soiled image. Thinking again of Kurt's staged shots, which were probably headed to Basel right now, Owen shook. Even the wallet-size school photos they had to take in middle school were a nightmare. Tilting his head not like this, like this, enduring the photographer's smoke-stained fingers lifting his chin, waiting for the flash and refusing to smile with his teeth. It was a horror show every year. But that was now nothing. The thought of Kurt explicitly manipulating his image to shock and someone else mounting that picture on a gallery wall right now, as he lay here in a hospital bed, made Owen's hands quake.

Brief distinct memories of his exploitation rolled against each other like marbles in a pouch, each glass sphere abrading its neighbors with a grind and a gnash. He bristled at the sound. The fat marble in the pouch had an inset photo of Owen standing on an immense wooden spool, toes curled over the wooden lip, only the balls of his feet keeping him from falling forward. He saw his hands before him, bound in rope with novice knots that he should have been able to untie. Then plastic ties that sliced his wrists when he resisted.

The doctors had noticed the bruising when Owen was admitted, but stabilizing him took precedence over criminal speculation. Once he was stabilized and still nonresponsive, a neurologist intervened. He knocked out the bowl of his calabash pipe and decided to start with the bruises on the patient's wrists:

—Those ligature marks are from police-issued restraints. Notice the depth of bruising over the capitate bone and the distal spread of the contusion. Other restraining devices will cause scaphoid fracture before you see that. Irene, notify the police. We've got a fugitive.

Check, please. Tonight would have to be the last night of his stay. The greater part of him wanted surrender, a room full of MDs and cops all jotting down his story and shaking sympathetic heads. But a small part of him knew that he was going to do something horrible. And it was easier to do that with anonymity. The police wouldn't be satisfied with Owen qua Mustermann for very long, which meant he needed them as far away as possible. He hoped the appointed informant, Irene, was the Eastern European intern who had come by after rounds to see if there was any improvement. As for the handcuffs, Owen didn't remember any. But the doctor was persuasive.

Owen could clearly remember his hands to his side with stereo wire strung around his finger, or was that the pulse monitor that had been on his index finger for the past week? He saw Hal shifting the spotlight from his dry and cracking lips to the tattoo on his left arm. Stripped bare, and without the heat of those lights on his core, he had started to freeze and spasm. Someone was working the surface of his bare hip with a fingernail, a sponge, a Brillo pad—most of the time his head was pried upward, and he couldn't see. Hal trying to make everyone laugh with exaggerated photographer patois: “Give it to me! Give it to me! Yes! Yes! Bring it! Yes!” It worked.

Everyone laughed.

Owen scraped his teeth over his tongue, a new tic born from days of having the fibers of a burlap sack stuck in his mouth. He still heard Kurt's whispers, constant and haunting. They were an ever-present wheeze: a pinched balloon slowly leaking poison deep inside his ear. How did Kurt hiss directly into his ear from a wheelchair? He saw Kurt hovering, stomping around the water tower, and grabbing the other models by the shoulders, blocking each scene with the exaggerated impatience of a director who's trying to impress his lead. Then sitting in his wheelchair as if it were a director's chair and ordering Hal to get the shot.

The past week of clinical enumerations of trauma added nothing to Owen's sense of injury. Words, even Latin words, could neither harm him nor heal him. For Owen, having Kurt's anodized metal I-bar wedged between his chin and his sternum was violation enough without adding the anatomical spells
mylohyoideus
and
sternocleidomastoid
. There are infinite ways to be unwell. He had experienced enough unwellness to know that was true. He was far more interested in finding the one way, the lighted way, to be well.

The insult to his body would heal. But the insult of something so banal, derivative, and plain fucking wrong as taking images of tortured people—Kurt and Hal were looking at photos on a laptop: wire, burlap sacks, stress positions, they had to be referencing Abu Ghraib—restaging a prison in your multimillion-dollar water tower loft, and thinking you're brilliant because you have an American prisoner this time, all of that was impossible to bear, something he would never be rid of. And not just any American, fucking him American. And the high pretension with which this Mickey Mouse bullshit was justified under the banner of Art. To almost die for fucking shock art? Are you serious?

What would he die for? Owen had never heard that the job of religion was to prepare him for death, so he'd never placed that onus on his Gods. Carmine, peridot, gamboge, ultramarine: Ares, Hermes, Apollo, and Athene. They were busy enough without his problems. All he had was
being
as a soap bubble: an iridescent wonder, holding so much but for such a short time, always one plink from nothingness, one plink from surrendering volume to the sky.

Just because he'd found a metaphor didn't mean he was comfortable with the idea.

A
t eight, pocket full of quarters, I wander away from a birthday party in an arcade. In the rush to choose a game, I land on something not particularly violent, not the newer games that other kids' parents write congressmen about. It's just a paperboy trying to deliver his papers—papers that are apparently so subversive that nonsubscribers throw cats at his bike and roll tires into his path. A pixelated ghetto blaster knocks my paperboy to the ground, which this algorithm deems a fatal blow
.

I've lost a life
.

The notion that I have three of them means that no one understands. My chest burns. I looked at a friend's screen just as a fighter jet explodes. To my right, a firebomb cracks on the red hair of a lance-waving knight, causing his animated peach skin to recede and reveal a rib cage as empty of life as a cow skull bleached by the desert sun
.

An angel rises from the heap and then vanishes in a puff of smoke
.

A panic, a hunger, a stab, something tearing at the contents of my chest, or as Dad calls it, the
phrenes.
I try to shunt the loss of volume. The stab doubles me over and sweeps me out of the room and then out the front door of the pizza parlor arcade
.

I wander for hours in a daze. A friend's mom finds me walking up a hill nearly a mile away—and this is the American suburbs, where the only pedestrians are vagrants, hobos as Dad calls them. The story gets around. And I officially become weird. The word hovers around every all-star team, every victory
.

So what's one more thunderclap to a boy raised in a lightning field?

O
wen kicked off the ankle socks the hospital had given him. Water polo had taught his toes prehensility. His toes needed to grasp. And nothing was more comforting for him than grasping an Achilles between his big toe and second toe, pulling just above a heel and pedaling down.