A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (17 page)

All of this appeared to be a secret from the classics community. Or perhaps it was just impolite to mention an open secret. Nevertheless, not one of these new enthusiasts had purchased a copy of
Hapax
—he had the two-figure royalty checks to prove it.

Since Owen's disappearance, the professor had penned a liminal interpretation of profit and loss for
Modern Socialism
and posted an alternative interpretation of Lacan in the
New Left Review
—which S_____ Ž_____ himself had almost praised in a letter to the editor:

           
Burr precisely inverts two of the three classical laws of thought. He annihilates both Aristotle's Law of Non-Contradiction and Law of the Excluded Middle. So far so good. He has read his Freud and sees the link between
superego
, here the Law of Non-Contradiction that seeks to suppress libidinal desires, and
id
, as the excluded middle child who longs to break free of his older sister's fascist constraints and free himself for one moment of
jouissance
. Burr fails radically, however, to account for the ontology of logic. No thanks, says Burr. I won't submit myself to analysis. It is precisely here, in Burr's denial of the
ego
, that the reader is most aroused. The implications of his work on Agamben are profound, but his handling of Hegel is infantile at best—and probably would be much worse were it longer. If we ignore a few systematic idiocies, we are left with a deeply insightful analysis. He is one of the few imbeciles to whom we should listen closely.

What business did Burr have appearing in print railing against the excesses of global capitalism? None. His stomach rumbled just thinking about his lack of qualification. But railing against capitalism was apparently a sine qua non for contemporary critical discourse, and pointing out the liminal in Marx and Lenin was certainly not as taxing as trying to fact-check 3,500 words and hieroglyphs in twenty dead languages for which there is only one record in all of history.
Fucking
Hapax.

These extracurricular articles started to generate a buzz in Europe. Now when he entered his name into Google, every link was to a leftist cabal. He didn't think he had broken any laws, but given the company he kept online, he wasn't sure. His in-box was cluttered with hundreds of speaking opportunities from student groups all over Europe.

Compiling a scholarly itinerary worthy of presenting to President Gaskin had taken two months of back-and-forth with universities and generated dozens of auto-reply e-mails that whomever he was trying to contact was on vacation until September.

Compiling an itinerary qua theorist had taken all of three hours. The crucial first step was getting to Athens.

“Athens” was a poor filter for Burr's in-box, but he could think of no alternative. He entered the term and narrowed it down to a few hundred messages. He began with a recent e-mail from a Greek activist group. He opened it with caution, sure that he had animated some god-awful virus that would result in the collapse of the entire Mission University computer network. After finding that the electronic infrastructure appeared to be intact, he had replied that he was considering the invitation to talk and included a link to Ž_______'s response in the
New Left Review
.

Burr had his response from the Greek activists within the hour. He would be opening for the theorist whose ideas had spawned a billion-dollar film franchise: Jean Baudrillard. Once he confirmed, they would begin printing the posters. Needless to say, he had never seen his name on a poster.

He
tsk-tsk
ed his imagination at once for reverting to Classical when the sign would be Modern. Nevertheless.

They offered him 500-point font and an opportunity to mingle with an icon. No airline ticket, but still. He added a few provisional speaking engagements to his itinerary—he would send off the e-mails later, on the off chance Owen wasn't in Athens—Prague, Budapest, Paris, Barcelona, London, and Tokyo.

Professor Burr unlaced his Alden boots and buffed them with the elbow of his corduroy coat. After relacing the boots, he smoothed his wavy hair, realizing he might have done that in the wrong order again. When he looked soberly at the two proposals, he realized the
Hapax
talks were blanks; they would never garner real attention. Only a bold talk would bring out Owen. He stuffed the dissident proposal into a manila folder and transferred the prudent course to the credenza.

This talk would be a flare fired into the night, which would surely cause Owen to seek him out or at least reply to any one of the weekly e-mails Burr had sent.

His heels clacked down the still-empty sandstone arches. He was a tenured professor; his heels should clack. Sure, Mission University was a few tiers from the top, but Gaskin was here too, and he always seemed pleased with himself. Burr removed his coat and switched the folder to his left hand, trying to stem the torrent of perspiration at the thought of his meeting. He was never sure if he was going to be meeting Gerry, his friend and former colleague, or Gerard, his employer. Whichever one he found in the office, there were going to be handshakes. President Gaskin had a politician's grip, which was hell on Burr's right hand, poorly healed from punching a wall in the fall of '82 and connecting with a wooden stud. There are two ways to hold anything: with an open hand or with a closed fist. He had no business making fists, it was Iliadic; he held things with open, Odyssean hands. The orthopedist, a George Hamilton doppelganger, had laughed at him, even though he was affiliated with the university and had to have heard about Caroline. “These hurt
them
,” he said, pointing to Burr's first two knuckles. “And these”—he pointed to the knuckles of Burr's ring finger and pinkie—“these hurt
you
. Don't hit any more walls, no matter what they say to provoke you.”

The door opened too quickly, and he stumbled into the president's office. After she recovered from the brief shock, the administrative aide offered him coffee and ducked in to see the president.

—He's on a call, but he said to show you in.

President Gaskin made a scene of trying to disengage from the phone as Professor Burr stood before a wingback chair. The bookshelf behind the president was the perfect resting place for
Hapax
. None of these books looked like they had ever been cracked. He could sneak fifty copies in here, and no one would be the wiser. A framed picture of President Gaskin and Clint Eastwood rested on top of a mahogany humidor so that it would have to be moved when Gaskin was entertaining a dignitary: “Do you like Cubans? Here, hold this.” On the ledge near Burr was a photograph of Bill Murray leaning heavily into a fairway wood and edging away from Gaskin's embrace.

The goldfish had been here during his father-in-law's administration. Ten years ago, he and Caroline's father would have been drinking rotgut whisky in silence and chain-smoking over the pedestal ashtray between the two chairs. Now the metal tray had been removed and the goldfish bowl fitted to the top of the pedestal. This goldfish bowl, certainly not the actual fish inside, was the third provision that Bill made before driving off that cliff. He wanted his grandson to be safe and had given Burr a job, a home, and a fish. There was some odd poetry to those three nouns that Burr could never get to the heart of. He thought about the words as the goldfish swam in and out of the sunken wreck on the gravel bottom. Plastic seaweed waved with an unseen current.

—Joe, how's Owen holding up? It's got to be tough on the kid to watch the team in Athens.

The president breathed through his teeth and shook his head as he settled in the opposite chair. He crushed Burr's hand and then threw himself into the wing of the wingback.

—I think he's doing what he wants to be doing.

—Bullshit. What kid doesn't want a gold medal? Like Knute Rockne said, “The next best thing to playing and winning is playing and losing.” Don't give me the speech about how the Olympics would be a distraction. It's a crock of shit, and you know it. But I do applaud your efforts to get him back on his horse. Maybe it's different at Stanford, but only twenty percent of our kids who take a semester off end up with a diploma. He's working hard to finish a triple major this fall, I'm sure. Or what, you've got him doing a coterm?

—I don't have that much pull with him, I'm afraid. I had to call the registrar to find out what he studies.

—I see. I see.

Gaskin scratched at the burgundy leather with a fingernail, legs still crossed at the knee.

—So what are we talking about?

Professor Burr sat on the edge of his chair with an elbow patch on each thigh. After a few false starts he managed to spit something out:

—You see . . .

He stammered, he sputtered, he froze—none of which upset Gaskin's crossed-leg recline. Burr could see the safety of his tenure rolled up with the rugs and carried out the front door by a team of movers. No, this was too great a chance to take with a twenty-five-year career.

—I'd like to take a few weeks to speak at a conference on the use and abuse of the schwa in Proto-Indo-European languages.

—Impossible. Next.

Burr clapped his hands together and gritted his teeth. He wanted to be looking out the window with gravitas, but he couldn't take his eyes from the picture of Bill Murray.

The president leaned forward to give his next question a conspiratorial air:

—Is there anything else we need to discuss? What's in the folder?

—I've taken a few liberties with my position at Mission University that will most likely be brought to your attention before long.

—Sounds serious. Are you cooking drugs or selling off ancient pottery? Neither? Then why the long face, my friend? Listen, I won't say this on the record, but as a tenured professor you're allowed to be in any sort of consensual relationship with an adult so long as no one gets his or her feelings hurt. When feelings get hurt, these kind of things inevitably go public, and then I am
forced
to do something. You know that I don't like being forced to do anything. Listen. Because what I'm going to tell you now, I tell you as a friend. There's only one rule: Keep whoever you're seeing
very
happy. Congratulations, by the way. It's been a while. Why don't the two of you swing by for dinner? It will put your mind at ease as well as . . . hers?

—It's nothing like that. I have compromised my standing in the classics community by seeking a more popular audience.

—Go on.

—I have this . . . growing following on these Internet message boards. Some of them espouse anarchy, nearly all of them are anticapitalist. Do you remember what happened when Noam Chomsky spoke three years ago? I'm no Chomsky, but I do get the sense that my extracurricular writing has outpaced my scholarship. I never planned for this to happen. But these things snowball.

Gaskin laughed.

—Tell me, Joe, what percentage of these invitations do you suppose make it directly to your personal e-mail account? How many thousands of petitions addressed to you do you think my office received in the past year? Can't guess? Neither can I. But I can tell you I got a professor in CS to fix my e-mail account so that every message with your name in it goes straight to my spam folder. And I still didn't think this was serious enough to have you sweating. You really imagined this was a secret?

—I suppose I thought you would have said something if you knew.

—What's there to say? Hell, there's a copy of the
New Left Review
article in here somewhere. That little shit from the Federalist Society brought it over and demanded your tenure be revoked. I'll tell you what I told him: there's nothing wrong with being popular. To be honest, Joe, I'm glad a professor finally got the memo. The trustees are berating me to get you guys on talk shows or CNN or something. Here's a phrase that will keep you up at night: post-tenure review. It's coming. I'm fighting for you guys, but it's coming. Look, Joe, my default assumption is that everyone here is a goddamn Marxist; that's the only explanation I've got as to why none of you realize that Mission is a business. If you ever figure that out, god help us all, I'll make you dean of faculty.

—Well, I don't know the first thing about business, so you're going to have to find another reason to promote me. I've tried speculation, which ended . . . poorly. I've tried pure scholarship, but you've already highlighted the limits of that approach. Maybe provocation is the way to get a bigger paycheck. Just this morning I received an invitation to speak with Jean Baudrillard in Athens.

—Fantastic! But all kidding aside, there's no way we can renegotiate your salary this year. The endowment hasn't recovered from its Pets.com position.

—Pets? No. Gerard, what I'm saying is that I can't keep turning down these speaking engagements. These are huge audiences, thousands. Here, have a look at this.