A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (36 page)

—Are you sure? Shouldn't the two books stay together?

—Actually not at all. His whole thing is called liminality, the space between.

—Like laminalism.

—I don't think either one of us wants to get into that.

—Well. Thank you. And thank your father for me when you eventually get back to California. Now let's listen to this record. I'm curious to hear anyone's all-time favorite album, let alone yours.

Stevie sat on the edge of the bed, facing the speakers. Owen sat by her side with his arm around her waist. Her skin was orchid in the late afternoon light, light blue veins visible under the glowing. She ran her thumb over the mounts of his palm. Thick clouds rolled in. They smelled the storm through the glass, or they imagined they did.

Owen had listened to the album five times through already. He knew what was coming: right now they were purring to “I Hope I Don't Fall in Love with You,” but two songs from now “Old Shoes” was going to play, and there was no hope of that going over well. He tried to distract her by running his fingers through her hair, cupping the tops of her ears with his palm, and feathering the base of her neck.

The first verse rolled by without Stevie seeming to hear. He tried praising her beauty in German to distract her from the song's words.

She pushed him back hard, clawing his chest.

—“I can see by your eyes, it's time now to go? So I'll leave you to cry in the rain?”

—I think he's—

—“Though I held in my hand the key to all joy, honey my heart was not born to be tamed?”

—That's not what I'm saying at all. Bad Tom. That's so sophomoric, ‘I'm a free spirit. I'm a wild horse that can't be tamed.' Uh-uh. Nope. That's not what I'm saying at all.

—You're ruining the record. Not to mention totally killing the mood.

—I'll be quiet now.

They listened to the next songs. When “Rosie” finished, Stevie spoke:

—I understand the distinction between a speaker and an author. I've spent plenty of time in the performativity literature. But I can't help but want more . . . loyalty. He follows a heart-wrencher about one girl, Martha, with a song about a completely different girl, Rosie. And if this came out in 1973 he must have been about our age, so it's not like he's looking back on a lifetime of heartbreak.

—There you're wrong. Losing someone at any age can easily mean a lifetime of heartbreak.

—You still didn't tell me why you chose it—and I'm hoping here for a specific answer, not something vague about the stars and the moon.

—There are about five thousand CDs in my house. All jazz. All my dad's except the dozen or so I listen to when the team has to take a bus to SoCal or Arizona. I listen to Bad Religion, Social Distortion . . .

—Love Social Distortion.

—Well, I didn't think you would. Anyway. I have a few dozen CDs, another dozen mix CDs, but the albums I listen to the most are the nineteen vinyl records that my mom left me.

Stevie had guessed.

—Her favorite album was
Astral Weeks
. I was going to give that to you, but felt like it wasn't mine to give. She had
Closing Time
. I'm not sure that she listened to it much. It stuck out because the rest of her music is fairly . . . astral. For a long time I thought it was left there for me. Maybe that this was a window to the men on her side, her father, her grandfather, people I would never know. Now it's clear that she bought this record for us.

—I'm going to get us some wine. This is a red wine record. I'll be back.

—I'm not going anywhere. By the way, you're Martha. And I'm trying hard to avoid a life where I have to make that phone call.

Owen listened to the album another time through. It seemed right to give it to her, and to give her his favorite song. He was going to have to destroy two records: the one playing in the Discman and his mom's vinyl copy at home—assuming he ever made it home. He listened to “Martha” on repeat until Stevie came back, at least ten listens later.

She filled their water glasses. Owen gulped the glass down and then filled another.

—I hope you don't do this game with other guys.

—This isn't a thing. This is between us.

Anytime she said “us” he was ready to tell her that he loved her.

—I know the circumstances were a little rough. But have you had a good time on the boat so far?

Anything remotely positive, and his response was, I love you.

—It's been okay.

Owen dropped. He could see his jaw dropping with the inevitability of a spoon's handle tracing the inner rim of a bowl and then falling into the soup. He had nothing. He couldn't leave. He took a few steps and looked out their Window to the Rhine.

—If this is okay, I'd love to see what matters.

—You matter. But I matter too. And I'm not about to give up my life for an American who's about to . . . about to what? Have you thought out anything, other than not going back to Berlin, ever?

—You heard something when you were on deck.

—The only thing I ever hear is footsteps. And I hear them all the time now. I start to sweat every time I hear boots on the stairs. I don't know how you stay down here all day.

—Boots mean people. And if those people open the door, it means this is over. And fine. I can deal with this being everything it is. I can deal with it being over. People I can deal with. It's the papers that make me sweat.

—Yeah. You're a real people person.

He had enough presence to laugh at himself. And enough sense to lie to himself and believe that everything was going to work out.

S
tevie tracked down the concierge and got him into the cabin after they had docked in Dusseldorf and the last tourist had disembarked. Mingus took him aback. He looked at the offending speakers until Stevie hit stop on the Discman.

—Owen, this is Paul. He thinks he might be able to help.

—That depends on what you need. First off, will you state officially that you are part of no police organization, no governmental organization, and that you are not entrapping me in any kind of illegal activity?

—I'm not a cop. She's not a cop. And as far as we know, nothing about this is illegal. This is just a hypothetical conversation.

Owen's tone was too aggressive. Paul was already taking slow steps to the door.

—What Owen means to say is, for purely research purposes, what would happen, hypothetically, if there was a person who needed to disappear somewhere between here and Amsterdam?

—Clarify what you mean by
disappear
, or this conversation is over.

Owen spoke.

—I need to disappear because of something in Basel.

—I'm going to need two hundred euros to even continue listening to this.

Stevie peeled out four hundred euro notes.

—So, let me get this straight: hypothetically, someone needs to be unfound.

—Permanently unfound.

—Permanently unfound? That's a very difficult proposition. I want to help with your research, but I'm afraid no one can be permanently unfound.

—What's the best you've got?

—What Owen means to say is, hypothetically, what's the best solution you can come up with for a not-real-world plan for getting a person away from the authorities—let's just say any authorities?

—Well, we're headed north, which is the dead wrong direction. This hypothetical person would want to go to an expat community in North Africa or even Ukraine. The farther north we go, the worse things get for this hypothetical person.

He now turned to Owen.

—This hypothetical person is on this ship, or one very similar to it?

—Let's assume this hypothetical person is in this very room.

—Let's not. Look, you've got nothing but B plans, my friend. The next best bet to going south is going very far north. Our next port is Nijmegen. Several container ships leave Rotterdam for Iceland every day. Shipping has become much more automated since these container ships were built, which means there's not much crew and bunks are usually available for the right price. If this hypothetical person had the right amount of money, someone like me could hypothetically broker passage on said container ship tomorrow, day after tomorrow at the latest, and in a few months the person would wake up in port in Iceland.

—How much money would this take?

—Someone like me could get it done for three thousand euro. Cash.

Owen looked at Stevie. He had no more than a hundred and twenty in his jacket pocket.

—Thank you for your consultation. You're quite sure of that figure?

—Quite.

—Less the four hundred I already gave you.

Paul sized them up, then shook Stevie's hand.

Owen grabbed the bottle and poured wine into a third water glass.

—Thank you. But I can't drink red wine. Stains the teeth. My predecessor was not as careful. Know that. I am extremely careful. When I come down here tomorrow at 13:00, after we've docked in Nijmegen, I'll need both of your passport numbers. If there are no other hypothetical matters to attend to, I need to return to the foredeck.

Stevie stood and opened the door.

—Thank you, Paul. It's the little things that make a Valhalla Cruise.

Owen shook his hand.

—Your hypothetical fugitive thanks you for your advice. We'll see if it's practical.

Paul buttoned his coat and softly closed the door behind him.

Owen looked to Stevie.

—Well?

—Well. He didn't say anything about the music. And I guess we have to get through three albums now.

Stevie unbundled the plastic bag stuffed in the nightstand and fanned the remaining albums on the bedspread.

—I'm going to the ATM. Maybe even ATMs. I have the second half of next year's tuition left. I'm assuming you don't have anything?

—I have a few hundred.

—How few?

Owen counted out 110 euros.

—You're in charge of the music. I'm going to get you to Iceland.

The producers had chosen Burr's favorite of Mission University's three emblems. This was the diploma seal: maize and lapis lazuli, an open book because that was the custom,
SAPERE AUDE
on an unfurled scroll with stars at either end. And a torch behind the book. God help him if the producers chose to use the scholar's torch as a segue to scenes of Athens on fire. Sawing violins would be bad. Plucked violins would be bad. Drums would be worse. Punk guitar would mean he was putting his head in the stocks.

On the monitor, the seal dissolved into stills of protestors lobbing rocks at police. The journalist spoke in what Burr imagined was a neutral to sympathetic tone—her tone was certainly more lilting than most of the German he had heard. Inquisitive piano, imitation Philip Glass, underscored her rhetorical questions.

The lack of computer-animated graphics and the host's measured tone brought some comfort to Burr.

With nothing but two-month-old facts and figures from the four hospitals that had helped Owen recover from his meningitis and a stack of printed-out Netscape search results of Owen in cardinal red, Owen at the Sydney Olympics, the random noise of Abu Ghraib photographs, Burr had placed pay-phone calls to every major news outlet in Germany. Left, right, populist, it made no difference. All he needed was an audience.

The producers of
Zeitgeist
were the first to take him seriously. He wasn't even sure which network this show was on, but he was told it wasn't cable. He had no idea how they would handle him or his story. It was worth a lashing from a conservative pundit as long as Owen, or someone who knew anything about Owen, was watching the show.

On the monitor, Burr watched the anchorwoman pace from one stage of the studio to another. She would soon be interviewing him “via satellite,” even though they were two walls and two hundred feet from one another—for his protection or theirs? When they walked him through the studio, he noticed that there was not a single chair, which meant this was probably how they handled live guests. Makeup mopped his head and grips swung lights to play with the shadows. The audio engineers tested the earpiece that would translate the host's German to his barbarian ears. They dialed in the sensitivity of his lapel mic. He had been waiting at the studio for three hours and couldn't decide why only now, five minutes before he was due on air, they'd decided to mic him up and camouflage his haggardness with sprays and dabs. Perhaps they wanted him to appear as if he were in a hurry. On the run, as it were. Perhaps these lights are just too hot to stand for more than twenty minutes. He was sweating through his shirt.

The screen now showed a photo of him at the Herod Atticus with both arms aloft, as if inciting the crowd to rise. He looked like a televangelist, possessed and sweating.

Makeup dabbed him off one more time. He checked his pocket for the high school photo of Owen he usually kept in his wallet. He ran his thumb over the matte print and then put it away like a rosary. The host would be interviewing him in German, but an intern would translate his feed to English. The video of Athens ended with him throwing the bottle. He was clearly throwing it away from the crowd, but the angle suggested he was throwing it at the Herod Atticus. How could they not include the crowd? At the same time, no one could deny that the man in the photo, clearly not the real him, looked quite capable—capable of anything. Did that mean that the real him was incapable or that he had become this capable, dangerous man? He hated both alternatives.

She now talked to a floating screen of his head, suspended at eye level between a pillar and a red curtain that matched her dress. She was looking at her notepad. The monitor cut to a shot of him, blinking.

—Professor Burr, welcome.

—Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me on.