A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (6 page)

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
.

Burr's hands were loose on the wheel as he wound through the Central Coast on Highway 1. To his right, purple floating in the air like a dandelion's parachute seeds. To his left, white foam underlit with the pink and green of the flame in a votive candle. Almost warm against the black slabs. Twilight, urchin purple, gloaming life to his nail beds and making his hands a moment young.

B
urr's first work, his thesis work, was long on conjecture and short on scholarship. At twenty-four he found something wondrous in analyzing the cult of Hekate and the stelae of Hermes. They were slippery twilight gods, Hermes and Hekate. Bringing their lens to the modern world cast warped, original aberrations. The work began with his translation of Hesiod. Several insights came to him during his reading: phenomena are more often than not both true and false; twilight, “two lights,” needs both sunlight and moonlight to exist—it is precisely the time when there is both day and night. In this twilit space, paradoxes present no problems. An adjunct in the Germanic Languages Department learned of Burr's newfound mysticism and pointed him to the Old Norse rune Dagaz,

Once he had a symbol to write in his margins, Burr began seeing these liminal spaces everywhere: a cave both inside and outside; the shore both land and sea; the present a twilight of past and future; love, like any transitive verb, an intermingling of two things formerly alone; life, a blur of birth and death—birth and death being the only two moments of life in which we don't exist.

Caroline Dennison had been looking up from her reading every few minutes to watch him scribble and sweep back his hair. Burr trying to get down on a legal pad the flood of insights, thinking himself a little dangerous, even though he was translating Greek. He upset his coffee as he turned the yellow page, and she stifled a laugh at the clatter. He put down his pen and stood.

Caroline blew on her tea and pretended to be flattered when he called her
kallisphuros
, she of the lovely ankles. The line worked well enough to earn him a seat at her table. She looked down before meeting his eyes, like a diver taking a deep breath.

The world stabilized on their parallel that afternoon. While everything else drifted into blur, the clarity between their eyes remained perfect. At some point she must have stood and left, because at some point she wasn't there. There was neither betwixt nor between with Caroline. She was there. She was not. And because his mind refused to process anything purely binary, he looked like a lost boy to the café staff who told him they were closed and it was time to go. He tried to remember her gait, but could only imagine her gliding. He tried to remember how she left. But when exactly does day leave us in night?

The next morning, Burr was at the café thirty minutes before they opened. After a bagel and three coffees, he decided that he would not be leading a study section and kept his table free all afternoon. By three, she returned. They talked about the courage of the ancients to trust that the sun would continue to rise. He said he was not a man of faith and would need her phone number.

When the summer sun brought an archipelago of freckles to her nose and cheek, he named them the Caroline Islands and committed each one to memory: Ulithi, Tonoas, Oroluk, Pohnpei . . .

He thought he could make her fit into his view of the world. But within a week of living together she had become the map, rather than something mappable. He dotted every coordinate into the aqua field of Caroline. They folded up together, perfectly aligned and protected, burying their world from the light of others. And just as an open map's twenty-four folds can seem impossible to unpuzzle and neatly pack away, their convergences were inscrutable, leaving others to trust blindly that the relationship worked.

They blazed through the reception halls of deans and department heads. Young and old faculty alike buzzed around them wherever they mingled—not because she was the only Oxbridge grad in the room, not because this young couple radiated love, not because her father was the university president, but because wherever they went they carried with them a world.

For two years they ate little more than canapés. Most of the reception room guests began conversations with, “I have something to confess,” which was never an indication of being in that person's confidence, but did make them feel like junior clergy. The phrase became a punchline between Burr and Caroline. By the next spring, the sum of all these confidences made Burr's academic advancement inevitable—she would have been climbing the rungs ahead of him, but had put continental philosophy on hold to learn how to paint.

His work was inspired, but the search for relevant texts was proving to be fruitless. In all of recorded history, only two partial inscriptions supported his reading of Heraclitus and the Eleatics.

Rather than switch to anthropology or wait on the archaeologists to dig up something to analyze, he grew increasingly creative with his source material until his work hit almost New Age levels of
mysto
. Fellow department members, nonplussed at the camaraderie between Burr and Mission University's elect, thought he was on drugs—and probably supplying them to senior faculty.

A new continent began to emerge in 1982. It was unexpected but welcome, like a new Hawaiian island. As this landmass burped from the deep, they traded booze and fritters for macrobiotic staples. They danced through their junior apartment as her belly grew. He sang the only song about Odysseus he knew, “Beyond the Sea,” with a real longing for her, even though she was still there. She wove through the second verse like Penelope, thinking of the globe-trotting that would accompany his unfinished, but surely forthcoming, book
Liminality
. Whenever he translated the song into Greek—
. . . —which repeatedly failed to impress her, she countered with Charles Trenet's original, “La Mer.” Violins and harps and floating, until the instruments fell.

The map hissed orange and began to singe. It was easy for Burr to dismiss the dark edges as something fundamentally unrelated to a fire, something reversible that he could fan away, clap out, or smother, something they could fix together, until the edges crackled in flame.

On August 21, 1982, their map was lost in fire.

And there's not much to say about what happened next.

Islands became ashes.

Owen took a life before he took a breath.

He very nearly took two lives. His father bobbed between drowning and drowned. Their map was the Logos that held his world from flying apart. When it burned, every thought broke to atoms and jittered into the sky.

What was left of Burr was driftwood, silvered still, empty. Each morning saw a lifeless husk wash up on the floor near his bed. He rolled against the jagged bed frame, rolled back until his head wedged against the nightstand and his body curled up fetal. Lifted up, dashed down, bobbing and unable to decide if it was yet time to sink. There is nothing more heroic than the glowing eyes of a vibrant soul inside a body that has given up, the marathon runner who crawls the final mile. Burr was the opposite: dead eyes in a capable body, or a body formerly capable and rapidly depleting. Water was too sweet to drink; lips to throat to lungs parched and cracked. Even when inhaling, his chest seemed to cave in. When he tasted anything, it was ash.

He surfaced briefly to change a diaper, warm a bottle, drink a bottle. He hung a mobile over Owen's crib. He called it a marionette, but it was really a Christmas ornament on a string. Burr duct-taped it to the ceiling, but every week it fell, strings dropped and tangled in the bends of the marionette's knees. In dreams, Burr looked around and found knots and snags in his own joints, tripping up each step, each step a taut and tangled fall. Waking, he couldn't even look his newborn son in the eyes for fear of being pulled out of his loss. Her loss.

He initially refused help. Threw both telephones in wicker wastebaskets because recounting what had happened once, just once, shattered a day, and there were at least fifty people who needed to be kept in the loop. An elderly neighbor, widow of a cosmologist, came through the garage door and announced that she was taking over. Owen's eyes widened when he saw her, and his screaming stopped.

By the time Burr returned to work, the academic articles written the prior year were just hitting the press. He was taken to task in journals for his prior gambols and given a wide berth in a basement office where he could read the scorching reviews of “Classical Liminality,” the paper he had naively supposed would be the first chapter of his groundbreaking book, with amusement and whisky. He marveled at how far over his head the critics were aiming. He was sprawled on the floor while scholars shot at ten-foot phantoms. Had the mandarins only known how much pride they gave him by caring, something he had long since stopped doing, they might have dismissed him in a word.

Years passed with fewer and fewer offers to go out for a drink. And then strong encouragement from his mentors to do anything other than drink. His last remaining drinking companion was Bill Dennison, Caroline's father, who was in the process of being managed out of his role as president by the trustees.

In her life, Bill had been bronze and absent. With Caroline's death, Bill's gaze dropped a few degrees every day. During their bourbon-soaked afternoons, he kept his chin to his chest as if he were trying to prevent someone from choking him. When Burr looked closely, he could see a fist knuckling at the man's wattles, a phantom hand prying up that once-proud chin.

President Bill Dennison quickly grew old, pale, and clatty. He said his office was the only place he still felt free because it was a place he
knew
was about to be taken away. His hands, always curled in near fists, shook with fear and with pride, like a child holding a cicada. He looked Burr squarely in the eye for the first time in their relationship. And when he did, Bill found a man on his level.

Owen eventually did take two lives: his mother's and his only surviving grandparent's. In hindsight, Bill had given a few months' notice, but he never said anything specifically about his plan.

Mountains take. Cliffs take. Dennison's car was found off Highway 1 by a team of rescue divers a month to the day after his last drink with Burr. He left behind a letter on his desk stressing to the trustees that Burr, nepotism aside, was his natural successor.

Once Burr caught wind of his father-in-law's last request, he asked to be removed from consideration. Burr suggested his best friend and fellow young luminary Gerard Gaskin for the post. The board, who'd had Gaskin, MBA holder and faculty senator, in mind all along, congratulated themselves on an amicable transference of power. The trustees extended a ninety-nine-year lease to Burr on his father-in-law's residence, thinking that it would be fitting that Owen grow up in the home his grandfather had a hand in constructing.

With Bill's death came the realization that Owen would have no one else's account of Caroline. The portrait that would hang in Owen's mind would have to be painted by Burr's shaking, foolish hand. He would have to sing the lullabies, her songs, even though he couldn't force out a note.