A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (45 page)

—You could
never
disappoint me.

—That's what I mean.

—You've never failed at anything. Whereas I've been a disappointment to us both. And to the memory of your mother.

Owen tried to dismiss the thought. Burr put on his faux severe paternal face:

—Don't interrupt. Hear me out. I'm willing to face the bad decisions I've made as a father because, at the end of the day, I got Stevie to California. That seemed right.

—It was.

The report of four gunshots cut short Owen's question. Five, six, seven more shots. Owen spoke:

—It sounds like a firing squad. But those shots don't sound close.

—Close enough.

—Close enough. Look, we'll both stay in the cave until things calm down out there. Let's hope this fog lasts. Although it means we need to be more quiet. As long as the helicopters don't see us wandering around, we should be fine. I'll hike down to Dalvík and figure out what's going on, maybe also clear up the whole Odin thing.

They passed the flask back and forth while Burr described scaling down a cliff and how he nearly died. Owen laughed with his dad until he saw that a couple of the scrapes were pretty bad. Burr raised his eyebrows and trickled whisky on his palm, even though he had hand sanitizer in his first aid kit. Owen winced, then drank.

—Do you remember that time you fell in a great ravine in Iceland, never to be heard from again, the anarchist professor from California, on the run from the law, lost to the world forever?

They were both glowing from the Scotch. Burr had to echo his son's words before he caught the meaning.

—Aha! Actually, now that I think about it, I remember dying at sea.

—It was a cold day in what, November?

—I think it was October.

—That's right. It was October. You had taken a little skiff out by yourself down the fjord and into the Greenland Sea.

—Then my boat capsized.

—That's right. And you were swept away in the freezing water.

—A horrible death.

—No one would wish that on anyone, not even an international terrorist.

—No. They'd wish worse on an international terrorist.

Owen laughed. His father continued:

—But the people on the shore saw my face. And it was calm. And if that's how the international terrorist met his end, no one will be able to object that it wasn't justice served.

—Amen.

They drank more Scotch.

—Real history now: Do you remember when you were five years old and ran away, swam away, at Point Dume?

—I remember thinking that I was fine the whole time and I couldn't understand why you were making such a big deal about it.

—Well. It was the second worst moment of my life. A son has a right to expect his father to be there for him. I should have outswum the lifeguards.

—I was fine. I was always fine.

—I just mean to say . . . if you do end up scattering my ashes, real or staged, I want them to drown in the water off Point Dume, and let the fathoms have the memory of the one time I wasn't there for you.

—The
one
time?

—Ach! You're impossible. Hand me that Scotch.

O
ver the next week, helicopters swarmed the maze of Tröllaskagi, proving to both father and son that Burr was a wanted man; proving that the investiture of world interest in Joseph Burr was so great that tireless aviators would stare down rain and gusting winds for a glimpse; proving that the striking stipple portrait in the the
Wall Street Journal
, the crown jewel Burr eventually handed off to Owen for safekeeping, was an etching in history and not an error to be retracted. Beset from above, Burr would need to remain in this cave for at least a month before he could return to the lowland coast and join the outlaws of northern Iceland in braving the winter.

On the morning of Owen's departure, they ate boil-in-bag stroganoff and taco chili noodles and finalized the plan for Burr's disappearance from human ken.

—We may not have to stage anything if you don't cut back on the meals, Dad. These things have sodium levels off the charts and about a thousand calories a bag. They're assuming that you are exerting yourself severely, not sitting around all day outlining a manifesto.

—It takes serious effort to maintain body temperature at this latitude. What is the equation, one calorie heats one gram of water by one degree? Your math is far better than mine, but I certainly weigh more than a thousand grams, and I'm positive that it hasn't topped eight degrees centigrade in the past week.

—That's not how it works. Look at your gut. You're the first hiker in history to gain twenty pounds in two weeks.

—I appreciate your concern.

—I'm serious. I'm going to tell whoever agrees to come for you to bring shock paddles.

—Would you suggest we eat more of those expired energy bars?

The bars were a disaster. The Burrs' ideological support of Leave No Trace camping, coupled with helicopters shuffling the sky as compulsively as a convict with a deck of playing cards, meant digestive issues were no joke.

—No more bars. Ever. But you need to get some fish or something without so much salt in it. Seriously.

—They eat whale here. Do you think my diet is going to improve in the winter?

—It has to. You can't eat these boil-in-bags forever. And I don't think that's true about the whales. Regardless. I'll find someone to come up here and signal to you. If nobody comes, go to the post office in Dalvík—I'll leave a package for you with instructions. But listen, you have to come down for winter. Seriously.

—I have a lot of writing to do—
Liminalism and Seinfeld
will make a killing. I mean, the Kramer chapter alone—

—But you're staying on a farm through winter?

—Do you think I want to freeze to death?

—I'm worried you're going to get some poor landowner killed when he has to hike all the way up here to rescue you. Or when they raid his croft and find your anarchist cookbook.

—Find someone with a large fireplace and a whisky still.

—And a hot tub. I got it.

—You'll be back here, when, next fall?

—I'll be back here every year. Two weeks before classes start at Mission.

The Burrs parted with a back-clapping, neck-pulling, head-shaking embrace.

N
o more bullets cracked the valley after the first day's salvo. For over a week the helicopters had chugged through their conversations, scrambling clear words to turbulent noise knuckled into the cave's back wall. They'd chopped up the streams and vacuumed the mountainsides until five days ago, but found nothing. From any elevated angle, the Burrs' cave was invisible. Only by hiking in would someone discover their camp. It was too late in the year for hikers and too early for skiers, which gave Burr an undisturbed month before he would come down from the highlands.

The sky, stratospheric blue with wisps of cirrus in aurora-like sweeps. Owen, crabbing along the scree and hopping over river stones whenever the notion struck him. A month ago, he would have seen wet feet as life-threatening. Now he was two hours from Dalvík and could afford to be a touch careless. Four empty CD cases rattled in his bag with every step. He tried to hear the music, but didn't know it well enough. He dipped cupped hands into the stream, slurped like a child, and looked upward to the curl of the clouds and the tuning of the sky.

Owen entered Dalvík weightless. Long grass scrubbed the grit from his gaiters as he descended from the higher country to the acreage just south of the town. A light snow beaded his long hair and hung in his brow. The first building he saw was an outdoor swim complex, complete with two-storey curlicue waterslide. He walked the perimeter, realizing his dad was right about the hot springs. Steam twisted from pool to air like soft-serve ice cream. He smiled through the front door and was able to find a suit and swim cap in lost-and-found.

He soaked for hours in the ceramic-tiled hotpot, listening to everyone abuzz with the latest about the little farm girl who shot the bear and saved her father's life. Round after round of women soft scissor-kicking from the hot tub steps, squatting to their chins with arms outstretched and hands in salute, repeated the tale, each adding a new twist, but all marveling at the poise of Iceland's endangered heroes.

A polar bear had been lumbering mere miles from his camp. He asked if there was still any danger. The villagers told him it was a rare enough occurrence that he needn't worry: a group of six local hunters, all of whom they named and counted on fingers, had shot and killed the bear. The helicopter sorties had been a precaution against more bears. The old women lunging in bathing caps clucked their tongues at the extravagance; the grey-chested man chewed his cigar and never stopped sizing up Owen.

Toweled off, wrapped in a robe, Owen sat in front of a computer in the swim facility's solarium. It took him less than a minute to discover that animals were not the greatest threat to his father's welfare.

Athens was no exaggeration. This had all happened. The conservative media compared his father to a drunk vagrant raving in a park, which didn't seem to undercut their other message that Burr was a fearsome terrorist who must be brought to justice.

Owen winced at the world he would have to rejoin. The world of opinion-poll decisions and parceled attention. The binary world where you're either with us or against us. The world where men of nuance are neither known nor respected, wandering the world until they retreat to the maw of a mountain.

No one reproduced the text of the speech. Thousands of photos of the spectacle, but not one word of the speech. Owen thought of his father's pride at the hedcut portrait and the
New Yorker
caricature, which Burr kept in a zipped pocket of his down vest, and decided to let his father have his infamy. He let him have his helicopter chase.

Owen found the breathless dispatches from Athens and the sober op-eds in the international press. His father had made the front page of the
Times
international news section. They called Burr a provocateur. One of the
Economist
's anonymous writers alighted upon the word
firebrand
, and from that day on, the stories echoed or permuted the epithet: the firebrand professor, the firebug professor, Professor Fireburr. In an article entitled “The Wannabe Socrates,” the
Post
gleefully reported Burr's addition to the National Security Threat List. The
International Herald Tribune
said his dad might be an election issue.

And then in three days, Burr was no longer news.

On the blank side of an activities calendar, Owen wrote a letter to his father transcribing the paragraphs and phrases that he thought would elicit a chuckle or a beam of pride. He quickly ran out of room on the first sheet and grabbed three more from the counter. Owen could find no evidence of an exhaustive manhunt; it appeared Burr had been a punch line for a few days, then an afterthought. But amid the late-night jokes, there was the rather serious consequence of being on the terrorist watchlist. Owen found no confirmation that his dad was on the no-fly list, a much more exclusive database. But he did read that Senator Ted Kennedy had apparently been added to the list in August, right around the time of Athens. By page four of his letter, staring at a dozen bricks of vitriolic block quotes Owen had copied out by hand, he realized his father was better off in this frond of the world, in the shadow of a great rock, fighting the barbarian hordes from his cave.

He read about the famous Icelanders, the man and his daughter who fought off a bear, and realized they were his best shot at finding his father an ally.

After getting a jump start for his dad's Ford Escort, Owen drove to the Sigurðsson homestead to ask the father and daughter for a favor. He waited half an hour to get an audience with the father; the daughter shuttled from call to call in the other room. Ástríður, and to a lesser extent Ólafur, were national heroes. It was just a matter of time before she got a postage stamp. Her dad might even get one too.

Every news crew in Iceland had managed to make it to the Sigurðssons' corner of Tröllaskagi. After a week, the international press got wind of the story and sent field agents from London. These were the journalists who passed while he waited on the front porch, leaning on the rail where Ástríður had rested her gun. The family had seen all manner of foreigner in the past two weeks, but no one like Owen. And never had they expected anyone to ask for more than an autograph. Owen explained the situation.

—I'm the guy who was inspired by your story and is here to ask you to do something you don't want to do.

Owen waited for a reaction. No smile. No sign the father even understood. Then the man took a chair.

—Go ahead. You're off to a great start. Don't let me stop you.

—Do you mind if I sit?

The man said nothing. Owen sat.

—I suppose the worst thing a child can do to his father is run away without a word. Either that, or spend years making his father feel irrelevant. I did both. And my father, Professor Joseph Burr, did what he had to do to bring me back to the fold.

—What do you want, man?

—My father was speaking to a large crowd in Athens when a protestor stormed the stage with a Molotov cocktail. In an attempt to protect the crowd, he threw the bottle away. But it exploded. And chaos erupted. And he became a political pawn. The conservatives made him into an outlaw.

—I'm indifferent to politics.

—So is he. He is a world-class scholar and a kind-hearted man. He can teach English, Latin, and Greek. It's probably best to keep him away from philosophy.

—In exchange for what?

—A story. In a few months, I want you to say you saw him take a rowboat out into the fjord and get swept away.

—So your father is a fugitive, living where?