Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall

by Will Chancellor

Genres: Coming of Age; Literary Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

A beautiful and compulsively readable literary debut that introduces Owen Burr—an Olympian whose dreams of greatness are dashed and then transformed by an epic journey—and his father, Professor Joseph Burr, who must travel the world to find his son.  After his athletic career ends abruptly, Owen flees the country to become an artist. He lands in Berlin where he meets a group of art monsters living in the Teutonic equivalent of Warhol’s Factory. After his son’s abrupt disappearance, Burr dusts off his more speculative ideas in a last-ditch effort to command both Owen’s and the world's attention.   A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall offers a persuasive vision of faith, ambition, art, family, and the myths we write for ourselves. 

 

 

Release date: July 7, 2015

Publisher: Harper

Print pages: 400

Sample

ONETHE RUPTURED GLOBE

—I’m gonna close with a quote from Dr. Johnson: “The certainty that life cannot be long, and the probability that it will be much shorter than nature allows, ought to awaken every man to the active prosecution of whatever he is desirous to perform. It is true that no diligence can ascertain success; death may intercept the swiftest career; but he who is cut off in the execution of an honest undertaking has at least the honour of falling in his rank, and has fought the battle, though he missed the victory.”

The whole idea of a pregame speech seemed kind of meaty for a water polo team. Looking to an Enlightenment figure for a battle cry? Questionable to quite questionable.

The underclassmen missed the quote, thinking every word was Owen’s. To them, he was indestructible and elect, Athens-bound, senior, and capable of saying such things. They knew the Owen profiled on websites, had read his capsule summary in magazines during the run-up to Sydney, and thought he’d competed like a veteran, not a teenager, in those two minutes he churned Olympic water.

To the players who had been around Owen longest, to those who had faced him in the pools of Burbank, Woodland Hills, Riverside, and Van Nuys, to those who also made the Under-16 National Team and bunked with him in dorms all over the Eastern Bloc, to those who had grown up under constant pressure to perform and knew the inner walls of an Olympic pipeline—which is to say, to those who knew him best—he was inscrutable, aloof, and mystic, which was why he was a co-captain, and why his choice of source material wasn’t all that surprising.

Never before in his collegiate career had he given a speech or had more than a few words for a teammate. This three-minute meander, his coach’s idea, had cost him last night’s sleep and made him skittish. His co-captain was just about to start a round of pity claps when Owen added one last salvo, one last farewell to college sports:

—Fuck Dr. Johnson. This is my last Big Splash, and this is a victory none of us is gonna fucking miss.

At Owen’s profanity, each player stopped stretching his shoulders, flapping his arms, twisting his neck, and fell silent. It took a moment, but Owen’s words began to register on their faces. The freshmen, whose college personalities were only a few months old, caught the mood and began shoving each other, moshing around the locker room until the trainers had to intervene. The melee grew so loud that the fans outside grew quiet. Now Owen’s co-captain brought everyone down to a hush and then asked in his most resonant growl:

—Whooose House?

The team cinched their robes, knotted their cardinal-red caps, and exited with their hands held high, applauding the spill of fans on the bright green slope. Blankets, quilts, and towels covered the damp grass from poolside to chain-link fence. Half the crowd was solid red, the other blue and gold. Students’ biology textbooks were closed, highlighters marking places. Most fans were standing. Someone even had a sign: a woodcut print of the Stanford head coach over the single word OBEY.

While a warbled karaoke version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” played from the blown-out stadium speakers, Owen pulled at his lapels, studying them. He turned to his co-captain.

—I’ve felt like an asshole in this thing all season.

The terry-cloth bathrobes were a remnant of days before the advent of wrap-foil blankets and heated benches. The robes were simple, and they worked. This year, however, a sophomore from Orange County, the unofficial social chair, had ordered something the team hoped would come across as ironic but feared would be read as vulgar. When the players unboxed the updated game robes, cardinal velour with satin trim, the manager asked everyone to check the jetted pockets for Hugh Hefner’s missing pipe.

In robes loosely belted, Owen and his co-captain took one step forward and waved. They stepped back from the applause.

—Everyone feels like an asshole in these things. But give him some credit. He managed to make guys more comfortable wearing Speedos than robes.

After the home team was announced, it looked as if the crowd might scatter and recline on the grass on this bright November morning, open textbooks, check phones, remember that water polo is a minor sport with minor implications. Before this could happen, an engineering student pulled the starter cord to a gas-powered blender and twisted the throttle to a roar. Students turned in alarm, then laughed, then sidled up for drinks. On the other side of the fence, a fan in board shorts and a bright red cape, wearing a cut-up Mikasa ball as a hat, sprinted into the stadium and started a cheer of “Go! Big! Red!” that lasted until tip-off.

High-knee jumps and an effort to land with menace. Each player cleared the lane line feet first, resurfaced, and took a few strokes of butterfly before slapping the water.

Seven on each side swam to their end and rested their necks on the lane line, treading water until the whistle blast.

Stanford won the sprint.

The first trip down the pool, Owen was met on the perimeter but backed down

his man until he had established position in the hole. He squared up to the wing, fought off a foul to take a wet ball, and swept a shot to the far-side net before the wing defender could collapse.

Half of the arms in the crowd went straight into the air. A Cardinal roar swept across El Camino and echoed to the Bay.

Stanford’s second possession was more turbulent than the first. Water boiled in front of the goal as players drove at each other, shoulder to chest. The hole defender chinned Owen’s neck with his Balkan stubble, then a cheap elbow to the base of the skull. He gripped down on Owen’s suit and was called for a foul, but not an exclusion. Owen kicked the ball out to the driver, who one-timed it right back at Owen’s chest. For a full second the ball bobbed a little more than an arm’s length from Owen. Hard step-out, creating space. Ball cupped against his forearm in a backhand coil. Now the defender was trying to get called for a foul, elbow points two pestles mashing down trapezius. Owen shrugged off the defender’s weight and arched back his neck, face to the sky. The guard slapped and clawed. He was lower in the water and beat. Sprawled and tackling, now pulling at Owen’s shoulder. The goalie barking two other defenders to the hole. Owen rose high, elevating to the hip, wound tight as a discus thrower, a galvanized chain ready to loose the shot that made every goalie duck. He led with his chin, whipped his head—

Red water. Blue caps. Bodies.

Then all went white.

The clinic’s parking lot, intercut with clean arcs both yellow and white, both solid and dashed, belonged to a tarmac and not to this private facility that saw no more than a dozen patients at any time.

Professor Burr had parked his white Volvo in the shade of a ponderosa where he periodically glanced up from his book review to scan the clinic entrance and sip coffee from his aluminum thermos. He had been debating going inside, contrary to his son’s instructions, for the past half hour and had finally decided he couldn’t sit here any longer when he caught sight of Owen, knees near his chin, being wheeled through the parting glass doors. Wheelchairs aren’t designed for people that tall, Burr thought. Owen leapt from the chair, quick to show everyone that wheeling him to the entrance had been a ludicrous formality.

Owen had two walks: a confident kicking gallop bridging meters with each stride, and a flip-flop shuffle that whittled down his great height until he was almost merely tall. Walking out of a hospital called for his full-heighted stride. And he strode to his father’s car kicking pity, paperwork, and whatever else floated in the salt-stained air to the aether.

Even though the entire left side of his head was bandaged, Owen shone that morning, and his father was a few seconds stunned. The door lock rattled and spun as his father leaned over to let him in. After Owen slid into the cracked leather seat, he failed repeatedly to mate the buckle and clasp. When he lost his left eye, he’d lost his depth perception. Each clash of metal with plastic grew louder than the one before. His father’s hand hovered, almost helping, but wavered as if it would be batted away. Owen jabbed the buckle home at last with a sharp snap.

He heard his father’s mouth open. Close. Open. He heard him chewing on the words that another man might have spoken outright. Words rarely passed the barrier of his father’s teeth without coaxing.

Professor Burr tasted the air a few times with a dry tongue. He never could summon those paternal banalities that sports dads spit out like sunflower seeds.

Burr fiddled with the Volvo’s gearshift as they waited for a stoplight. He jerked the knob from first to neutral and back again, all the while wanting to place his hand on Owen’s knee and say fatherly things about how he was going to be fine, how he needed to be extra careful with his good eye. Instead he bit his lip and fiddled with the gearshift again. Fatherhood requires too much authority. How do you

 comfort a statue?

A driver in front of them was slow off the line, distracted. Burr only moved one car forward, missing the protected turn. He took one deep breath.

—So I gave my talk in English, actually. Italians value fluency much more than effort, you know. Even in a place like Padua you’re better off briefly apologizing for your lack of culture and getting on with it.

With the barrier broken, the words undammed, Owen eased back in the seat and closed his eye. They talked about Galileo and were nearly home when Burr asked his first topical question.

—Did any of your squad drop by?

—The team came while I was still in surgery. They had to drive back to Palo Alto.

—Why didn’t they just take you to the university hospital?

—The surgeon has his own clinic, so he doesn’t have to deal with anyone.

—It really doesn’t look bad.

—It looks like . . . nothing.

—I suppose that’s right.

They sat in silence from the last note of Burr’s hmph until the rubber squeak of the tires turning on the concrete driveway. The garage door was open. The garage door was always open.

When Owen’s father still believed in his dissertation, recent academic trends being no more than a rehabilitation of Parmenides, he had taken their front door off its hinges so their house would be open at all times. It vexed him that the Home, protective only by its closure to the outside world and useful only in its open inhabitable space, denied its humble origins in the Cave—a cave being proof that one could live both inside and outside, that one could exist in a sustained liminal state. The upshot of all this theory was that Owen had lacked a front door from 1992 to 1993. And even in coastal California that meant that small rodents, enterprising birds, and all manner of bugs eventually made their way inside. This was Professor Burr’s open-door policy—a policy a colleague in the Classics Department had mocked by bringing over a fluorescent orange sign reading OPEN HOUSE. The sign was now sun-bleached, but still staked into the lawn. When one of Owen’s friends suggested they just remove the garage door, Owen was relieved. He was tired of hearing about dichotomies as false consciousness, but he was more tired of squirrels at his feet during breakfast.

This was the house—or theoretically cave, since the garage door had never been replaced—that they pulled up to. It technically belonged to the university, but belonged to the Burrs in practice. Owen’s mother had been the only daughter of a pivotal university president. To commemorate them both, the trustees voted for the house to stay in the family, even though Owen’s parents never married, choosing to remain in the liminal state of engagement. It was two storeys, mossed, fenced by giant eucalyptus trees, and far more accommodating than the homes of other tenured faculty.

Owen picked up the plastic-wrapped newspaper at the front curb. The morning’s glare knocked him off the long stone walk and into the lawn. A few firm steps righted him. He ducked in the front door.

This Japanese modernist home was the storehouse of Owen’s memories. And just like a memory, the home was built for a century of patinated glow before a slow dissolve back into the ground. There could have been sliding paper doors, but there weren’t. There could have been a wooden outhouse, but there wasn’t. Instead, there were two downstairs bathrooms with a tremendously unhygienic library of university journals, a year’s worth of folded New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the final issues of Antaeus, and quite a few volumes from a German classics encyclopedia. Owen and his father reshelved what was valuable and discarded the rest of the musty collection every few years when someone came by to photograph the interior for books with titles like Holistic Architectural Design or Sacred Geometry in Mid-Century California Homes. The house’s spiral footprint was roughly nautiloid and the windows followed the golden ratio. Though the proportions were golden, the

windows were small. The house was dark most of the day, shafts of light here and there. A ramp of sunlight, almost solid enough to bear weight, beamed on the stairway when they walked in.

—How about some soup? You should eat with those pills.

Owen clutched the wooden rail and climbed the stairs. He dropped his duffel at the foot of his bed.

This bed, this pillowless bed, the one bed in the world built specifically to accommodate Owen’s great height, had ended up being too short. His ankles spilled past the end. He pulled at the mattress with his heels, looking to his feet and waiting for Procrustes to lop away the remainder. Tendons. The stretching soul . . . psukhe . . . The word drifted away, bounding down the halls . . . and Owen was asleep.

A tug on his toe brought Owen back.

—I thought it better to let you sleep. How are you feeling?

Owen sat up. His father was at the foot of the bed, flipping through an illustrated book.

—They recommended this in your discharge packet. It looks pretty worthless.

Burr showed the laminated cover. Owen read it aloud.

—Coping with Changes in Sight.

—By Dr. Thomas Friedlan . . . MD.

—I haven’t read in a week. I’m not going to start with that.

—Did they give you a paper at least?

—USA Today.

—I’m sorry.

The first unqualified apology he could remember from his father, ever, and the man was talking about a newspaper.

Burr unpalmed two pills: a painkiller and an antibiotic. Owen took the glass of milk, swallowed both pills, and wondered if painkiller was an oxymoron. Burr made prayer hands and drummed his lower lip. Owen tried to break the trance.

—I found something in Johnson when I was looking for a quote for my pregame speech—

—“The life that is devoted to knowledge passes silently away . . .

This was Burr’s Faculty Dinner Toast. In dining halls, he stood and clinked his glass, certain that the words would edify and failing to notice that his colleagues, who had heard this before, were thumbing the hem of the tablecloth, wondering why they hadn’t taken that job at Goldman.

—. . . wanders about the world without pomp or terror, and is neither known nor valued but by men like himself.”

—That’s everybody’s problem, not just scholars. I found this place where Johnson says every man wastes half his life displaying talents he doesn’t possess.

—Remember, Johnson’s aphorisms are too true to dismiss as mere entertainment.

—That’s what I’m saying. Which half of my life am I about to waste? Which talents do I not really possess?

—Luckily, you can do anything.

Owen looked for a concrete answer in this reply.

—That doesn’t help. Which half of my life will I waste? Would I have wasted?

His father moved from the foot of the bed to the desk chair.

—Well, I suppose anyone who plunks down his chips and makes a commitment will have at least half a life—which is more than most. It will sort itself out. Johnson speaks to his dried-up ambition as a poet. But had he devoted his light to poetry, the world would have been robbed of its greatest critic.

—I’m giving back my scholarship.

—Getting injured wasn't

your fault. It was in the line of duty, as they say.

—I’m giving back my scholarship and stopping out.

Owen watched his father decode Stanford’s euphemism for student sabbaticals. Burr looked as if someone had taken something from inside him. As if he were now missing some hitherto unnamed organ that was nonetheless essential.

—What are you going to do?

—Art.

Owen had no idea where that came from, nor why it appeared as upper case: Art. He was a dilettante at best, someone who’d taken a few years of drawing. Sketches of classmates littered the margins of his high school notes. His drawings looked real enough, but the art teachers never said he had talent. They picked their words carefully to encourage students like him, but not too much. Owen had no claim to the clutch of students who’d pledged their lives to art before adolescence. Still. If he wanted to do something significant before he turned thirty, it was art, music, or sports—and he’d never learned an instrument. He recognized this immediately for what it was: grasping at straws so his hands wouldn’t be empty. And his expression betrayed vague ambitions, emboldening his father.

—That’s not how art works, I’m afraid. You don’t just declare yourself an artist at twenty-one.

—I’m going to be an Artist.

—And I’m going to be an astronaut!

—If I devote the next twenty years to studying art . . . I’ve got to know which is the wasted half, and right now that means plunking down my chips for art.

—That’s not an option. You’ll only have a few months to go from the time your prosthesis is ready until commencement.

—I’m sure as hell not going to have a glass eye.

—The medical literature says the best ocular prostheses are acrylic.

—I’m not getting an artificial eye.

—Well, what? You’re just going to wear an eye patch forever?

—Yes.

—We can talk about it while you recover.

—There’s nothing to talk about. Have you ever seen someone with a fake eye? It’s uncanny. People can’t help but examine. The best-case scenario is no one noticing. Which is another way of saying that I would be lying to everyone. No. I had an eye. Now I have an eye patch.

—It’s just so . . . I don’t know . . . cartoonish.

—James Joyce wore an eye patch.

—Not by choice! These options weren’t available to him.

—I can’t do anything about that. And you’re not helping.

—If nothing else, you’ll need a prosthesis to get back in the water. I’m sure Coach RudiĆ will want you to train your replacement in Colorado Springs and travel with the team to Athens. Who knows, you may even be able to contribute in certain situations.

—Like total darkness? In-the-land-of-the-blind type of thing? I’d just be a distraction. You know what they call a particularly effective distraction?

—What?

—A mascot.

Owen’s father withered. He had no response. He looked at his feet.

—I have no idea about your

 sport. All I know is that you can do anything.

—Except art.

—That’s not fair. I just mean that if anyone can overcome this much adversity . . .

—This is not a comeback story, Dad. And I refuse to become an ex-athlete, especially at twenty-one. I’m not going to sit on a bench in street clothes, turn and wave graciously to a crowd shaking their heads at what a pity this all is. I’m traveling with whatever’s left of the insurance money.

—What insurance money? Your grandfather’s estate is all tied up in maintenance on this house, and there’s not more than a thousand dollars left from the other settlement.

—I’ll work abroad and come back for the rest of my senior year later—several years later, if they let me.

—They won’t.

—Then I’ll have to adapt.

—Adapt? You have no idea what kind of world it is out there. The barbarians are at the gates! You’re talking about serious engagement with the real world, but unfortunately you carry an academic’s passport. Have you been in the company of Vandals? You can visit, but to think you can adapt is just too . . . Lamarckian.

—Well, I guess we’ll see if I can really do anything.

Owen turned on the bathroom light. Pale blue chlorine—once from his pores, now from bleach on the tile—flared his nostrils. He gripped the cold slab counter, thick enough for a real grip, and faced the mirror. After a few confidence breaths, the same breaths he took each morning before leaping through the morning steam and crashing into the practice pool elbows-first, Owen unhooked the metal clips and unrolled the bandage around his head. The gauze pad over his left eye was a washed pink, brick red at the edges; Owen picked at the bottom, using his thumbnail as a trowel.

He braced for the tug of coagulated blood, but at his first prod the pad fell limply into the sink. Instead of a black crusted mess, Owen found a little yellow, a little blue, and a drooping—as if too much eyelid had grown in his sleep. Without thinking, he closed his right eye to compare. He would never see his right eyelid again.

That was something.

The water scalded Owen’s hands. He clutched his fists, fanning out the burn. Then cold. He tilted his head and took in a side-mouthful of water, washing a Vicodin into the walls of a throat stripped raw by intubation. He set one bottle and one tube by the sink, unthreaded the cap of the bottle, and shot a saline spray into his left upper lid. It surprised more than hurt, like the puff of a glaucoma test. He put the bottle aside and uncapped the antibiotic gel. Holding his eyelids apart, Owen found something softer than he had expected. Muscle and vasculature leapt forward to fill the vacuum, heaping pillow-flesh hiding sutures that were never going to heal.

Fuck.

In pre-op the surgeon had explained that if his eye didn’t improve, they would be attaching the ocular muscles to a Ping-Pong ball—not “something the size of a Ping-Pong ball.” Was the surgeon serious? Owen had been too drugged to ask. Now he unspooled a ribbon of gel into his lower lid, fluttering his eye instinctively and looking away too fast. A jolt rang the center of his skull, and a world-altering headache was born. Each peal of the bell tightened his temples but made everything else expand. How had people done this before painkillers? Maybe they hadn’t. If they hadn’t, maybe he shouldn’t.

He dug through his water polo bag for an eye patch. The elastic band bit into his brow. Stretching it did nothing.

Owen crumbled onto his bed like a tower toppled by ropes and horses. He shaded his eye with his arm. It had been three years, but Owen still saw the ink from his tattoo bleeding and leaving five interlocking rings on his forehead: red, green, black, yellow, blue. Fucking tattoo. Owen read a few lines of Burton. His saccade was off. The gears ground every time he came to the end of a line, jarring, like hitting the right margin on a typewriter during a breathless thought. He took another painkiller before drifting off with the book open on his chest. He woke. Nothing. Read the same sentences again, put the book on the nightstand, and fell out for days.

***

Three months passed with no improvement in Owen’s vision. On the few occasions he tested it, his eye, if you could still call it that, took a soft impression of light. He was aware of light, as a magnet is aware when the wrong pole enters its field. He turned from the sun with the same gentle but steady repulsion. Burr agreed at last that it was time to move on, and drove him to the clinic for the final outpatient procedure.

Four days after his second surgery, in his undersize bed, Owen woke with resolve. He glanced to his clock, hoping for a single digit. A six, an eight, even 9:59 would do. One. The wrong single digit. But it explained the light. Thin winter blue through empty air, not even a dust mote dancing. Or possibly it was just because he needed his left eye to get the oblique angle. He slowly rotated his head, rolling into the thick of a radiating headache. He swallowed a painkiller and went outside for air.

All it took was a nudge of the aluminum frame to open the screen door, stained with salt-wind and hinge-sprung. The sharp dry squeak, a call to the gulls. An onshore breeze held the door closed after Owen passed through.

If he would be going anywhere, this sand would have to go with him.

Owen staggered down the cliff behind his house and over the shale, pooled by the low tide. He crabbed along the rocks until he found his familiar ledge. Leaving his sandals behind, he leapt to the wet sand.

Large dark grains, lifted and crushed by winter’s northern swell, swallowed his toes. At the tidemark Owen poured a cupped hand of ocean onto his brittle yellow hair. A kayaker in the kelp forest, beyond masses of water crumbling at the point, waved a yellow paddle. Owen filled an empty mason jar with dark pumice sand.

And pumice from the shore, the dry porous stone of the sea.

He was used to finding Athene here. Ah-tee-nay, as Owen pronounced it, to his father’s chagrin. She was always around these rocks. Whenever he jumped from the rocks into the cold Pacific, he resurfaced to find her waiting. When she was present, Owen remained submerged to the neck, gripping the rocks to resist the current. She advanced his thoughts farther and along routes that he would not otherwise think of exploring. Dispersed colors condensed until everything cast a shadow of ultramarine. When she was present, everything peripheral vanished. She absorbed it all into her hyperchromatic blue.

That one shade was the text of his private religion. First he saw the color and then he gave it a face and a name. But it was the color that mattered. He met the color here, and it stayed with him for days.

It took Owen years to realize that this belief invited ridicule. In his household, the name Athena, the name Zeus, the name Apollo, were far more common than the name God. When he was very young, his religion had just been a way of matching strange colors to all the stuff his dad was going on and on about. At seven, he thought the gods were something his peers knew existed—because they too knew the names—but couldn’t comprehend, like algebra. At ten, he conceded that faith in the Greek gods would be preposterous, but faith was never the issue. His religion was inductive, grounded exclusively in colors he routinely saw, all with very consistent frequencies. At thirteen, he had faith that the rest of the ancient gods existed, even though he had only seen four. And, yes, he knew he was ridiculous to believe in gods who were extinct.

Respecting his absurd belief was too much to ask of both his peers and their parents. Adults who caught a whiff of Owen’s strange private world thought him fair game because of all his natural advantages. They joked in carpools. They joked in the stands. When his homeroom teacher presented his father with the brewing scandal of Owen qua pagan at third-grade parent-teacher conferences, Burr’s only response was “Of course he’s being ironical. I think we should applaud his sense of humor and knowledge of history.” Owen would never volunteer his idiosyncratic faith to his father, and Burr never raised the issue. Their conversations were limited to calligraphy, Latin, and the injunction to “be a leader, not a follower.”

Still. There was a moment every few days when the light would change, and Owen felt the presence of divinity. Most of his days were steeped in one of these hues, the shades that shouted for a name.

As far as pantheons go, the gods in Owen’s world remained surprisingly few. His palette held four distinct colors—each unique to a divinity, never blended, never diluted, never confused. He experienced one of four precise chromatic shifts. Each bias would last for days. After a decade of collecting paint cards from Home Depot, memorizing a hefty portion of the Pantone scale, writing to everyone from entomologists to geologists to a pen pal in Uttar Pradesh, he had found the conventional, albeit esoteric, names for these colors: peridot, gamboge, carmine, and ultramarine.

But even after that exhaustive chase, the names he’d invented for the colors were the ones he trusted. And ultramarine was Athene.

Athene had watched over his mother, more or less approved of his father, and was the blue mist that surrounded and protected Owen. Before the accident, she raised him above every decision, giving him a privileged topsight.

Now he couldn’t see beyond immediate impediments, and every decision dwarfed him. This nameless world was colorless, collapsed.

The old colors had stained him for days. Nothing could wash one away; it reflected deep into the empty space of his cells. He likened it to a suntan: the light came in, and his body responded. But he kept the experience to himself as long as he could. At age eight he’d watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and learned that words can only hurt you when someone’s questioning your mental health.

It’s tempting to say that Owen was an empty vessel waiting for whatever he chose to call divinity to fill him with heightened thoughts. But no. Light has no volume, and he was

 no vessel. He was not filled. Light can exert pressure, however. It can lift. And in these washed moments, Owen was lifted to a different height. His body was strengthened, engrafted new. His hands stronger and wiser, his vision clearer.

Christmas 1992 he told his father about it. And that’s when the psychoanalysis started.

Owen’s first therapist was Lacanian. Why Lacanian? His father called psychotherapy “palliative care in drag,” but thought there was real value in learning about Jacques Lacan, the subject of half the dissertations being defended at Mission University. When Burr examined his darker motives, he feared that he was using his son to take lecture notes.

They had trouble locating a Lacanian analyst at all, then trouble finding one willing to take on a preadolescent. Santa Cruz had the man for the job.

In his first session, Owen told his therapist about one of the Gods.

—A flash of peridot at sunset means that Hermes is there. The other colors happen gradually, like the shadow on a sundial. Hermes is like a bomb blast that happens so quickly the walls bend like saw blades and snap back with a warbling like this: wa wa wa waaah.

—What color is peridot exactly?

—It’s exactly peridot. That’s the whole point. It’s a grassy green. Peridot.

—Continue.

—The peridot days are like sculpture or buildings. Like when I see a building in an architecture book, I can put thoughts inside my mental map of the building. Everything fits. But I’m not sure what fits with what; whether the idea comes first or the building. I just sort of let it happen.

—Do you know what a metaphor is?

Owen couldn’t brook condescension even when he didn’t know the answer. He was silent, snarling in the way that only a ten-year-old can snarl.

—Are you using the peridot as a metaphor for your feelings?

—No.

—Would you say you are perturbed during these peridot days?

—No. Everything falls into place. It settles. I’m not perturbed.

—Is today one of the peridot days?

—Yes.

—Does this remit? I mean, do you ever have days or parts of days that are not peridot?

—There are other colors too. But once the color starts, it stays that way for a few days.

—What stays that way?

—Everything shifts slightly.

—Do you want to draw this for me? I have several green markers. I’m not sure if peridot is in there. But you can probably make do.

Owen couldn’t hide his reaction to the therapist’s condescension. He might only be ten, but he knew what remit meant, and he didn’t want to draw.

—I’m going to wait out front for my dad.

—It’s that I’m treating you like a child, isn’t it? I invite all my patients to draw, to play, to explore. Your Hermes is fascinating. Let’s follow him and see where he goes.

Owen went out the front door and waited in the sun.

Professor Burr revealed to Owen several years later that this first therapist considered Owen actively psychotic and wrote out a prescription for chlorpromazine. He thought Owen was in severe danger of becoming “stuck there,” and advised a medicated future in order to manage these delusions.

That single experience was enough psychiatry for the Burrs. Mission School District, however, insisted that Owen continue to seek professional help. They recommended a psychologist of mixed lineage who was loosely Adlerian. He had succeeded with several troubled children. Because the phrase troubled child had enough potency to pluck a talented athlete from the Olympic Development Program, Owen agreed to a full year of sessions.

The first three months were a standoff. The therapist didn’t hide the fact that he viewed

religiosity—any religiosity, much less idiopathic religiosity—as neurosis. He told Owen that Hermes, a name appearing over and over in the previous analyst’s patient notes, was certainly an attempt to rationalize the absence of his mother—which certainly wasn’t his fault.

Every session was the same: “Talk to me about your mother. Do you feel her death was in any way your fault? What do you associate with mothers? What do you associate with women? Do you know what labor is?” Throughout therapy, Owen refused to say a word.

On the day he knew would be his last session, as a Parthian shot, Owen told the therapist about the gamboge days, the days of Apollo. How time slowed, nearly stopped, and allowed him to realize his visions. How the color pulled ideas together in a thick resinous current. How he shot far ahead and found the mark.

The Adlerian refused to let go of the idea that Owen was being metaphorical. The therapist wouldn’t even go so far as to call gamboge a mistaken belief. Owen couldn’t get into his story without the therapist insisting that they talk about his relationship to his mother and father. That conversation wasn’t going to happen. After ten minutes of Owen refusing to answer direct questions, the therapist offered an astute analysis of the impasse.

—I ask you about your parents and you stonewall me. Instead you talk about gods as if they’re real. Maybe you’re putting me on. Either way, it’s not a problem. I think you’re a really interesting young man, Owen. What you need, and what I’m going to tell your father that you need, is a good Jungian.

They never found the Jungian, which, as Owen would later reflect, was probably a shame. And thus ended Owen’s brief experience with psychotherapy. His father convinced a colleague in the Psych Department to sign any paperwork from the school district. A taboo concerning psychology fell over the Burr house.

As a sophomore at Stanford, Owen broke the taboo by registering for Professor Philip Zimbardo’s survey course. To pass, each student was required to participate in fifteen hours of grad student experimentation. The sign-up form for paranormal psychology was at the top of the bulletin board in the hallway outside the auditorium. He scheduled himself for the maximum of three hours. It was just enough time for him to tell the story of Ares.

The psych grad students, in part due to the pioneering work of Zimbardo, typically designed observational experiments that posed little risk of warping the precious minds of their subjects. Gone were the days of getting psych credit for MKUltra projects at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. Gone were the days of Ken Kesey and Perry Lane. These were the days of a microphone, a tape recorder, and the invitation to tell your story. Owen pulled up a chair in the windowless room and hit record.

“Ares is the heaviest of the Gods to bear. His color is carmine. The word itself is as violent and beautiful as days under this influence. It comes on slowly, like mist filling a thimble. The effect lasts only a few hours, whereas the other light lasts for days. Ares only comes for big games—and at the higher levels, he comes for other people too.

The iron air descends, and the player’s blood darkens. The heavier carmine air forces the inspired to breathe deeply through the diaphragm. Here. Well, you can’t see that. But the player breathes from the diaphragm. His back is wider than the other athletes’ backs. His eyes, this is the most important thing, are whiter than the other players’ eyes. These are the all-white eyes you see in ancient sculpture. The player breathes in the carmine, and the cornea overtakes the iris and the eyes assume a fearsome whiteness. The artists knew this. It’s the nonbelievers who said the eyes were painted.

I first saw these white eyes in 2000, at the Summer Olympics in Sydney.

I was sitting second from the end of the bench in the Team USA bathrobe. The inside of my left arm still itched from the Olympic ring tattoo I’d gotten after the opening ceremony—most of the athletes get their rings after the Games are over, but I wasn't

going to play anyway.

Wolf’s the reason this whole thing happened. He helped me get a scholarship here and helped me get a spot on the national team roster. So I was watching Wolf’s game on the perimeter instead of studying how the Hungarian defense was collapsing on the hole. If Coach called my name, it would be me struggling to create enough space in the hole for a kick-out pass or a half-assed shot. But watching hole play against the Hungarians is like watching a bird with a broken wing try to fly. Each possession, our guy jerked his neck back to create space and elevate, only to have his efforts stuffed and his head submerged to the chin.

Water only churns like that when something is dying. Wolf’s matchup was another matter altogether. He beat his defender twice in consecutive trips down the pool, first turning him and nearly walking the ball in, then swimming straight over the top of his man. Wolf batted away the desperate grip at his suit, dug two deep paddles, scissored high in the water, and ripped a shot off the upper right corner of the goal for a bar-in. The Hungarian coach saw our guy doing to his team what they do to the rest of the world. He wasted no time replacing the field player with someone who wouldn’t have the same problem.

Uroš—I’ll keep his last name off the record, but you shouldn’t have a hard time looking him up—has a rosary beads tattoo, amber eyes, a thick mat of chest hair, and a fuck-off gut. He’s the only player on either roster who isn’t in shape. He calls his gut his “deep taper.” Other than that one joke, which only swimmers would get, Uroš has little sense of humor. He has the sort of languid violent look that comes from prison. And Uroš did come close to getting locked up after a Greek player, his opposite, was stabbed during an international game, and a glass shiv was subsequently found on the bottom of the pool. But nothing was proven. And he was only twelve at the time. Uroš now looks so bored with violence that players, coaches, fans, psychologists wonder why he doesn’t embrace different aspects of the game, like passing or even shooting. His shoulder was in shreds and he couldn’t shoot for shit, but he would tear off a player’s junk for even thinking of swimming over the top of him. His ten years on the national team are most notable for a host of atrocities committed above and beneath the water. Nice guy.

Uroš crashed into the pool and surfaced an inch from Wolf’s face. Not nice. Wolf drove the heel of his hand into Uroš’s chest then pulled out a patch of hair. Uroš smiled and threw his hands up to show the ref that, yes, the water was turbulent, but he wasn’t the one fouling. Of course, as he raised his hands he caught Wolf with an elbow to the chin. Wolf pretended to make a break for the goal at the whistle. With Wolf’s hard crossover stroke came a right elbow to Uroš’s teeth. The double whistles meant Wolf would have to wait out twenty seconds, or the possession, from the exclusion area. Rather than flopping around after the ejection and skulling the water, Wolf sprinted to the other side of the lane line and treaded high with his palms in a Gable grip.

I could see Wolf’s eyes getting whiter and whiter the deeper he breathed the carmine air above him.

Twenty seconds passed. Wolf sprinted back into the field of play just in time for Uroš to rip a shot three feet over the top bar in front of Wolf’s outstretched arms. Tough to know if Uroš shot only so he could swing his arm or if he really was trying to score. But this much is certain: on his follow-through, Uroš tore a bandolier of flesh from Wolf’s chest, leaving claw marks from shoulder to hip. Wolf smiled.

Coach RudiĆ called a time-out and I dove in to pull Wolf back to our side. They both looked at me. Their eyes had grown completely white. And their faces were a perfect calm. I had seen the carmine before, in games, but I had never breathed that deeply. That was the end of aggression. Wolf held my gaze as the color bled back

 into his irises. He put a finger to his lips, dropped to the pool floor, and swam to our side underwater with three giant pulls.

We’ve never talked about it. It’s one of those things. Paranormal.

That was my experience with the paranormal. My name is Owen Burr. [email protected]. Psych 1. Ted Lin’s section.”

Owen wasn’t positive that anyone ever listened to that tape. No one called for a follow-up MRI. Maybe the cassette was buried in a steel filing cabinet in the basement of Jordan Hall. Maybe they were interested in stories of ghosts, not Gods.

And the pumice from the shore. No God today to see him off. There was no iron air, no bending, no monochrome. Just memories in the aether. So Owen returned home. Once back inside, he added a few slugs of olive oil to his jar and stirred the sand with a knife.

Upstairs, Owen emptied his game bag quickly, throwing chewed-up suits in one pile and mildewed shirts in another. Goggles yellow. Goggles blue. He gripped the signed game ball his coach had brought to the hospital; he spun it in his palm and read his teammates’ well wishes, then placed it on a shelf. Scores of molded trophy-men, split at the center with a golden plastic scar, kept the ball from rolling away. Behind the trophies, a graphite sketch on a sheet of hundred-pound paper. Owen pulled it over the trophy men. This was the pride of his AP Art portfolio. It looked exactly like a polar bear. Still, Mr. Estrada had made a point of not telling Owen’s half of the class that they had a duty to follow their passion, wherever it might lead them. Instead, he gave them all A’s and said they were excellent people.

Owen packed bars of soap into the corner of his bag, housed the mason jar between black and white T-shirts, and slipped his passport into the breast pocket of his suit. Corduroy, the caned cloth, wide-wale, durus, but tailored because his dimensions couldn’t be found on a rack. Owen wore a light blue shirt that could go well over a week without showing it. After adding a black roll-neck sweater, he still had room for books.

The holes Owen left in his father’s bookshelf were more alarming than missing teeth. He excised books with a matter-of-fact cruelty. His father would instantly name the lacunae: Mayakovsky, Auden, Wordsworth, Hölderlin, Hollander, Yeats, Milton, H.D., Cavafy, and Sappho for an even ten.

Owen shouldered his sixty-pound bag and walked to the door. Poetry’s density of thought made it good travel reading. These ten volumes should last him a year. But as his hair tickled the doorframe, he changed his mind. Owen took out the books he had gathered, set them on the floor, grabbed a pair of green volumes from the center of the bookshelf, and then waited—as if he had unstoppered the universe and the house itself would suck into that two-book gap.

But he heard nothing. He stood outside, his father’s Loebs in hand, thinking that some Rube Goldberg had been set in motion once the two volumes of the Odyssey left the shelf. Perhaps the axe was swinging, he just couldn’t see it. Half the world he couldn’t see. For our mind’s eye sees sharply when our bodily eye withers away: Tum sane mentis oculus . . .

The town car cut short his reverie. He directed the driver to the Amtrak station, looking all the while for his father’s Volvo driving the other direction.

Dripping, steaming, hissing, the Southwest Chief waited for Owen and other passengers ringed around him to stomp up the rubber steps and begin the two-thousand-mile climb to Chicago. Right now Owen needed distance from the sinking California sun. And though the Chief’s hisses and drips appeared to hold his attention, and though his gaze never wandered from the coach door where the porter leaned, pedestal in hand, and though it looked as if Owen was studying the train, in truth his attention was directed behind him. Owen sifted through each murmur of the crowd at his back: a father explaining to his son that height wasn’t enough, you needed depth perception to play basketball; an old woman to his left saying, “That’s a real shame”; a few approaches, but the tread

was a shuffle, a stutter. Owen felt the glances, the lazy stares, but there were none of his father’s steps: no sloshing middle-aged exertion; no stumbling thunder; no father intent on stopping a son.

The porter climbed down at last and set his step stool at Owen’s feet. And so Owen was the first up those rubber steps, heeling deeper all the gravel bits embedded in the furrows, until he settled in the farthest aisle in a seat that amazingly had more than enough leg room. He could even recline before his knees hit the seat in front.

With his duffel at his side, Owen sat and waited for his father to come running down the asphalt. The potpourri powder sprinkled onto carpet seats and vacuumed into the trapped air had already risen through Owen’s nose and blossomed, swelling his temple until the veins were finger-wide. Dry color in the car, chalk flowers and migraine rising. Leaning his head on the cool window helped. He could use a rainstorm, but outside was bright and glareful. Other passengers slanted closer to him, but never fell in his row. Owen took a painkiller and looked through the scarred acrylic window at California slipping away.

The train skirted the Los Angeles River, glided past culverts and concrete banks, and counted Owen to sleep with a thousand rolling clacks of distance. He woke to unbalanced washing machine rumble and fell back asleep in the comfort of being inside a train whistling in the night. He woke to the psoph of air between car and rail. He swallowed another painkiller and passed out until they were on the other side of Victorville in the Mojave Desert.

Of course you just say I’m going to be an artist.

This forty-hour train ride from Los Angeles to Chicago was supposed to be a somber meditation on the life-altering decision before him: fly to Berlin with severely limited funds and only a vague plan to establish himself as an artist, or . . . or what? There was no Plan B, which had to be the first step in making it as an artist. The second step, if every photograph of a painter he had ever seen was accurate, was smoking. That was going to take resolution.

Rather than answer the truly difficult questions that his choice of a life in art presented, Owen chose to read Homer on Vicodin—a pretty good way to limit encounters with the waking world to five-minute intervals. He slept through the majestic countryside, thinking his pilgrimage would have been more complete had he just started walking for Chicago. He woke for five minutes every hour for the second day. Near Topeka, Kansas, he stumbled to the dining car and washed another painkiller down with a gin and tonic.

His head was draped in purple polyester curtains, mouth agape on the rubber window seal, hands still marking an early page in that little green book, when the conductor woke him at Chicago Union Station.

—Time to go, son.

Owen guided himself down the aisle from chrome rail to chrome rail until he was alone in the depot. He walked through spheres of blurred March lights until he found the escalator to the station. Inside, he wandered around to make sure there wasn’t another plan. Not finding one, he boarded a train to O’Hare. At the United ticket counter, he redeemed an old $500 seat-bump voucher, charged the balance, and booked a seat on the 10:00 p.m. to Berlin. Wedged into his seat, everything stored overhead except his two remaining Vicodin and the first volume of the Odyssey, Owen popped the lapels of his corduroy coat and tried to fold in on himself. He’d trade anything, even the remaining Vicodin, just to disappear in that damned cardinal robe.

 

TWONO MORE LIFEGUARDS

The Argos, his first remote-controlled boat, buzzed into the concavity of a kickboard, bumping it through the Mission diving well, nudging it under the shadows of concrete slabs, five, seven, ten meters high, while divers waited in the bright sun, wicking their arms with aqua shammies, yoking their necks, and stretching on the platforms above until the white-haired boy piloted boat and board away.

And Owen, eyes full of chemicals, explaining on the drive home that he needed two boats to pull the kickboard through the aerated diving well, the roiling deep he and his father called Charybdis. He thought that if the boats could make it across that cauldron without sinking, they could surely cross the entire Pacific and make it to her island.

The second RC boat, the Mentor, had been for his first report card, not the swim meet. No. It was for the swim meet. Already bored with the six-and-under thrash across the deep end, Owen begged the coach to let him swim up an age division. He won the race, a full lap, by body lengths.

A week later Owen coupled both boats to his boogie board and steered for the white water of the diving well, water sparging to cushion thirty-foot falls, compressors birthing cloudheads that plumed from the bottom of the pool and misted into the thin blue sky.

Owen dug up an antique ring buoy from the supply closet and set it on his foam board. Then he rolled out a medicine ball that weighed about as much as he did and balanced it in the ring. By now, Owen’s machinations were far more interesting than the review Burr had brought to the pool.

The divers shut off the bubbler to practice entries on smoother water. Jet spray riffled the surface, breaking the reflection so they could spot the water precisely and enter with a rip. As the divers held chrome rails and dialed in tension with their feet on large white cogs, Owen sat on the padded lip of the pool, running more engine tests and breaking the quiet rhythm of their approach. Bound—bzzz—rebound, then the warble and clatter of lumber tossed from the bed of a truck.

Charybdis returned. It was the women’s turn to practice new dives. Early in the season, when they were still setting their programs, they kept the stakes low by bubble-wrapping their misses with the upwelling air. Owen focused on the turbulence. He sat behind a veil of thunder and burbling, like sitting in the cave behind a waterfall.

The senior in Burr’s Homer seminar stopped mid-stair to talk with her coach. High-cut suit and hair glinting like a swirled gallon of gold-flecked paint. She noticed Owen’s fascination with the boats, how he smoothed the cordage and pulled as tight as he could. She clapped a few times and yelled down, “Let’s go, Owen!” whooping until he blushed.

Leash woven between the catamaran hulls, Owen set the board and boats in the pool. He stacked the two remotes back to back in his hands, turning the bottom joystick in the opposite direction from the top. At first, he was able to pull everything—kickboard, buoy, and medicine ball. But once the boats hit the blister’s edge, the rig pitched, sputtered, and drowned.

The team groaned with Burr. But Owen was undaunted.

He spent the next hour yoking the boats like plow oxen, then linking them to the board. But it did nothing. Side by side they stalled. Burr tried to help. Owen glared.

—I’ll get it, Owen snapped.

Owen, a four-foot Ajax. That was the moment Burr understood heroic stubbornness, the Sophoclean refusal to relent, as something real rather than rhetorical, something Owen had inherited from his mother’s side of the family.

Still. Owen never managed to drag the medicine ball more than a few feet. He sat on a towel in the passenger seat, totally shattered that his plan had failed. Burr tried to bring him back through bribery.

—Is there anything you’d like for your birthday?

—A remote-controlled boat.

—You already have the Argos and the Mentor.

—Not a toy boat. I need a stronger one, a real one.

—You mean an RC yacht? Those don’t come cheap.

—It would be a present from you and Mom.

Before the afternoon was up, Owen was unboxing the ship, christened Zebulon, and Burr was left to wonder why two pounds of molded plastic needed eight D-cell batteries in its hull.

The night of Owen’s sixth birthday, they were reading a condensed edition of the Odyssey.

—Where exactly did Mom go? Owen asked.

The picture on his nightstand was her new-discovery smile.

—Beyond the setting sun.

The phrase was imprecise, but it sounded fatherly—a pipe-smoking answer, his best Gregory Peck.

—The sun sets in different places, though. That’s why we have time zones.

—No. It’s always in the

west. And your mother is waiting for us beyond the west.

Burr let the words linger and hoped they’d gather weight in the silence.

They were Division III, but Mission University’s diving team took their practices seriously and quickly grew tired of their unofficial mascot zipping his boat over aerated water while they summoned enough confidence to turn a handstand into a back double. Owen’s first boats, the smaller boats, were cute peripheral distractions that cut the tension of divers pushing the limits of their abilities. Zebulon, however, was louder than the bubbler and made it to the center of the plume, right under the ten-meter platform. After a freshman landed on Owen’s kickboard and sprained her wrist, the head coach asked father and son to take their afternoons to the beach.

First Pfeiffer Beach, then Sand Dollar Beach, then the coves of Point Lobos, but there were never any other kids. The drive was the most enjoyable part of their beach trips, so they soon ventured farther afield to Zuma Beach and Point Dume. Burr only owned one pair of shorts, orange-sherbet corduroy, and wore them on their monthly outings to Zuma. Legs strong and tan, not yet varicosed and dead-fish blue. He sat on the southern outcrop in the shadow of rock climbers, correcting papers while Owen swam past the basking crowd. He was reviewing a dissertation on Nonnos the day Owen’s rude engine cut the chatters.

While Burr edited from the rocks, Owen coiled the rubber leash around Zebulon’s twin hulls, coupling boogie board and battery-devouring boat with a Velcro wrist bracelet.

Owen of outlier height, six years old, white-blond hair he certainly didn’t inherit from his father, behind a kickboard and toy boat, scissor-kicking his mom’s old swim fins due west. Beyond where the sun sets. To Caroline.

How many minutes wasted from when Burr first looked up and thought Owen was swimming out too far until even the thought of action arose? Yes, I should definitely do something. I should do something before things get out of hand. How much idle contemplation as the word riptide became real. Finally, Help? Then choking out, help! Finding knees strong enough to stand and stumble for the water. Now yelling, Help!

Burr wasn’t the first, not even the fifth, to respond. Those minutes of failing might still be won back. But the sting of that engine, a hornet fighting the wind that blows it out to sea, would always remain. On most days the wasping stayed in the background, but on some days the wasp dove straight for Burr’s ear and he could hardly look at his son. Hard to bear, and harder to be rid of.

Wall of memory. Wave rising on the skin of the sea; misting away as it gathers and towers down; surging up-shore until it cuffs your waiting wrists with foam. Water slips through scooped fingers, no matter how tight you bowl them; first it’s droplets, then it’s driplets, then only whorls of brine in your fingertips and salt chains in the lines of your palm. When attention returns, saturating a memory that was finally dry and salting away, what then?

Swim for that floating remote control while your son drifts out to sea, because this gift was a quarter of your paycheck and who knows if you can replace that joystick without buying a whole new boat. Drift down the beach, showing no more concern than the rest of the Sunday crowd, biting your lip rather than answering anyone’s question: Where are the boy’s parents? If you weren’t holding that neon-orange remote control, no one would be staring. Drop it. Pick it up. Yell to your bobbing son with the crowd . . . Pass the yells, the brave yells, on to others.

They have it under control.

There he is.

Then, get ready. This is the best part. Cave to the underemployed twenty-something sirs on the skiff. Wrench your hands in supplication even before they return your son to the shore. Volunteer your failings as a father, a single father. Nod and apologize to someone no older than one of your students as they hand you Caroline’s old fins.

But Owen came back smiling

Boat and board in one hand, high fives for all the lifeguards. He marched through ovation, a son returned.

But not returned by you.

He didn’t want to read the Odyssey that night. He grabbed an illustrated Iliad and announced that he was no longer a kid. From now on he would read by himself.

It took Burr a week to realize that reading had been the last thing they had left.

Professor Burr asked a grad student to deliver the lecture on the katabasis and left campus early to take Owen to the beach. Owen had been sleeping off the trauma of his final procedure with the surgeon when Burr drove off for his morning seminar. By now, he would be awake and feeling restless. Burr hoped the trip to Zuma would show him that no one wanted to keep him packed away. He could even stop out if he wanted. If things went well, they could hash out a plan for 2004 and have him back at Stanford next year.

Burr opened the door and called for Owen.

Silence.

Empty. A tumbleweed word, rolling, thirsty, thorned. Empty. And whenever empty, also alone. These words snagged Burr as he gripped the kitchen counter and read Owen’s Post-it farewell. He peeled off the note and thumbed through the rest of the yellow pad in search of the real note, the reluctant good-bye from his son that must be here somewhere.

He called upstairs again. The gravity of the house had changed, as if he’d come home to find half of his possessions packed up and moved away. He scanned the living room, taking inventory of chairs and lamps as if he’d been robbed. Had to remind himself that each bare patch of wall had always been empty, never held a mirror, never held a painting. Some emptiness was always there.

Burr stumbled over a stack of books on the floor of his study. Spines bruised and hyperextended, dust covers unflapped and tore as the column crumbled and Burr took a slipping step over the rubble. With a thick thumb he undented the corners, rejacketed the hardbacks and replaced them on the shelf, leaving a two-book gap where his Loeb Odyssey should have been, which was fine, but he could have asked.

After surrendering to the scooped-out mitt of his leather chair, Burr toggled through a twelve-disc carousel. He gritted his teeth and pressed the small remote. Each CD sounded hollow. Bill Evans, Getz/Gilberto, Miles, Mingus, Weather Report, Brubeck. All empty.

He thumped his knee with a rolled-up magazine. Then back to the Post-it stuck to his left index finger:

DAD,

I’m going to Europe to find out which half of my life I’m about to waste. After I figure this out, we can talk about graduating.

~Owen

He peeled the note and pressed it into the molding of the doorframe, above pencil marks of Owen’s height, taller than his father at eleven, six-foot-eight at age fifteen, but still standing on tiptoes, trying to get that extra quarter inch.

Raising Owen had taught Burr the beauty of being marginal. The vain side of any father wants to be Atticus Finch, but what could be worse for a boy than a father impossible to outgrow? Better to let your son know he’s the center of your life and you are one of many moons. But this wasn’t that. This was Owen telling him he was irrelevant. And, when he was honest with himself, it pissed him off.

The Volvo ground into gear and skidded into the street. The Burrs lived exactly halfway between the airports, but always flew from LAX. He figured today would be no different. But there was no point to any of this if he couldn’t beat the pretraffic traffic

and clear Ventura in the next half hour.

He rolled through a red light. In front of his neighbors and with kids walking home from school, Burr ran a red light and then another. Not orangish-red. Burr ran through lamps minutes hot. He glanced at the windshield and read his inspection sticker in reverse. It had lapsed in late ’03. He almost wanted an officer to lead him away in handcuffs, just for the moment of concern when a door would be opened for him and he’d be pushed in the back with a “Watch your head.”

Traffic hit long before Ventura, shattering the glassy calm of Rincon and Solimar. He was caught in a static mass and had to suffer the sight of frontage-road drivers whizzing away north and south, making him another nameless roof on Highway 101, a die-cast toy for the news helicopters to beam. He peeked over his shoulder to see if there was any way he could get right and roll down the embankment to the frontage road. A highway patrol car was parked half a mile ahead, blocking his escape.

Cars continued to rush by on the one-lane road to his left and Harbor Boulevard to his right. He was stuck. The empty space at the middle of two lines; the trapped zero in the 101.

By Ventura proper, people were thumbing silver buttons and sliding transmissions to neutral or even park. He fiddled with the gearshift and looked at the analog clock on his rubber dashboard, then at the yellow arrow of In-N-Out, pointing away from the highway to a trafficless side street where families shared French fries on concrete tables.

Traffic crumpled behind him. Burr found second gear, only to round a curve and discover thousands of red taillights. Several of his fellow motorists had given up: one leaned against the window and grinned into her cell phone; one propped a paperback on the steering wheel; one yelled at his windshield and thrust a finger at the dark-tinted windows of a pickup truck rattling license plate frames with its bass. Burr, pinned against cement sclerosis, could do nothing but redden the shadow of the overpass.

The cloverleaf, a maze of misdirection, spun traffic to all four compass points—but not the fifth, the omphalos, the only defined point of a compass, the director of direction.

He tried the radio. NPR helped. But then they started asking for money, not understanding that even though he had tenure, he had no savings account. He squirmed.

He depressed the clutch for second, then the brake lights washed back over him and he came to a full stop. A gash of metal, which he took to be a discarded fender, rocked with the wind, tickling the cement barrier and catching the setting sun. Fire, the process we mistake for a thing. Traffic, the thing we mistake for a process.

He lurched in his lane then aimed straight for the front tire of a bumper-hugging Infinity. The driver clucked his pointer finger. At that moment, Burr’s Volvo could have been a tanker. Burr was moving right. And then right and right again, over the rumble strip, straddling highway buttons and whistling the raked asphalt.

Down the spiral ramp he drove. Thrown from the great clog and breezing past telephone poles and cypress-tree fences, green lights yellowing in his wake. Only when he was nearing Highway 1 on the two-lane road through the canyons did he realize that this was the pass for Point Dume, for Zuma.

He had stayed away for fifteen years, knowing that what he found would be bolted in tighter than the yellow bollards of the car park. Now he parked, fender inches from the trailhead.

He unlaced his boots, kicked off his socks, and walked tenderly over loose gravel to the sand below. His feet were pale, frozen, senseless things that molded to the rock bits. The beach was deserted except for a lineup of surfers.

The ocean breathed up and sneezed down on the shore. Windswept sand soon anchored the cuffs of his trousers. He looked at the sky, a washed peach smear where the sun snuffed into the thick. A steady salt-wind carried him back to the safety of his car

He sat on the hood of the Volvo, tired arches of his pale feet on the hard plastic bumper. A young woman knocking water from her ear recognized him from campus and nodded. She had one of the few spaces. She asked him how he’d ended up at a trailhead two and a half hours from Mission.

—Bested by traffic, I’m afraid. I was headed to LAX. If there’s any way I could borrow your phone, I might be able to justify this excursus as a shortcut.

She coiled the leash around the tail fins of her surfboard and handed Burr a phone.

He called LAX Terminal Services and pawed through an automated directory while she folded her wetsuit, snapped it into a Rubbermaid bin, and poured a plastic jug of water over her head.

Burr repeatedly apologized for eating up her minutes. An agent finally told him that without a court order, there was no way to access the manifests of every flight out of LAX with connections to Europe.

Thanks for that, Owen. No flight number. No airline. Not even the qualifier mainland. Just Europe.

Burr thanked the student profusely and gave her twenty dollars for the minutes, striving to make the gesture appear breezy and avuncular rather than—what’s the term—sketchy.

—Wait. Here. I want you to have this.

That doesn’t sound any better.

Burr opened his trunk and grabbed a book from the two dozen in a cardboard box. She held it with the hem of her beach towel, looked at her friends lashing the boards on the roof rack, and thanked him with a squint that asked if this was going to be on the final.

As they drove away, Burr watched planes rattle the skies westward, then loop around and trace the shore. He wondered if he was supposed to infer some hidden meaning in “Europe.” When Owen was eight, Burr had sent him a postcard from Stonehenge reading “The World’s Meeting Spot”—but the chances of Owen recalling that were slim.

Before sunset, Burr wound back to Mission along Highway 1. The narrow meander to Big Sur took lives every year, so he never chanced it after dark. The mountains were just as deadly as the cliffs. Two copies of his book slid across the backseat. On sharp turns he heard the box shift in the trunk.

Three years ago Burr had finished his grand dictionary of hapax legomena, words occurring only once in the written record of an ancient language. The professor assured his university press that the standard library-bound hardcover run of a thousand copies would be woefully insufficient. They bought his pitch and doubled the run to two thousand, assuring him the book would be everywhere. And everywhere it was.

The first sign should have been when they failed to get a blurb from any scholar of note or so much as a response from the generalists. Burr averted his eyes when he passed a copse of trees, seeing the forests that died for a book that would most likely be pulped. He deluded himself that a future archaeologist would confuse Hapax for a holy relic: so sacred was the Book of Burr that all discovered copies were untouched, immaculate. The epitaph would read, “Hapax: Everywhere, and Everywhere Pristine.” Copies of the yellow book lined two rows of his office bookshelves, giving a false impression that he was up on modern design. These weren’t the free author’s copies; these were personal online purchases he’d hoped would generate some momentum. A grad student, candid from boilermakers, described how a hundred copies of Hapax were bricked together in the bowels of the university bookstore to form the Igloo of Burr. Here the employees got high and invented stories of narwhals and sled dogs. When he heard this, Burr laughed until he cried; thus far, this was the only application of his summa philologica. ...