A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (9 page)

Hal and Kurt had both promised the door would be unlocked. It wasn't. Owen knew this was some elaborate prank and looked for a cameraman crouching in the bushes, waiting to spring out and yell “Gotcha.” He listened, but heard nothing. He looked up each of the trees equally spaced around the tower, giving the impression that the tower had been planted at the center of everything.

He turned the knob counterclockwise with more conviction. It clicked, but wouldn't open. The wood had swollen into the frame. He slammed his shoulder into the weathered door.

A splinter flew from the doorframe into a puddle on the cement floor. Owen looked up: a continuous spiral ramp ran to the top floor, over forty feet above. He recognized skateboard scars on the metal rails and wheel marks on the white walls, several sandpaper decks glittering in the dark. The walls appeared to expand and contract with a labored breathing sound. Before, this type of warbling had arrived with peridot, crisp and expansive. But this expansion was muggy brown, damp. Where exposed, the tower walls whorled with the sepia and char of scalded butter in a pan. The air was thick and matted, like hair dipped in a bucket.

He called for Kurt. He called for Hal. And when his voice echoed back, he carried his bag up the spiral to his floor. Here the breathing was louder. A cantilevered yellow lamp sat on the cigarette-carpeted floor. Owen fumbled around the light's cage for a toggle. He jiggled the industrial plug into the wall, and the light grew hot. Overbright heat wheeled him around to find the source of the broken breathing: blue polyethylene tarp, duct-taped to the window frame, inflated into the room like a whale's lung and then exhaled back into the night.

Poplar planks balanced on blue sawhorses. He repositioned the light and read the writing on one of the sawhorses' two long beams:
POLICE LINE — DO NOT CROSS
. An NYPD sticker on the cross brace. He wondered how many hundred dollars Kurt had spent importing these from New York. Rolls of black iron plumbing pipe of varying diameter and mating flanges of all shapes and sizes rested icily on the cement floor, waiting like wind chimes. One massive cardboard box, which could have once housed a refrigerator or coffin, had the absent gravity of emptiness and brought a sense of expectation rather than refuse.

Walking from the plaster-dust prefabrication of his own room, Owen inhaled the dampness of the water tower. As he climbed higher, he placed the smell: hollowed-out pumpkin and candle-burned lid. He imagined how the water tower jack-o'-lanterned the park and kept the stroller pushers away.

The ramp twisted up another floor into a room that must be Hal's. Kurt blurred over Hal's profession, but he had made it clear that Hal was at least one tier below him in the art world. Their respective floors reinforced the hierarchy. The room was clearly a photography studio. There were more traces of work than habitation. Owen counted nine makeshift ashtrays, ten if you included the floor. Loose-leaf tobacco covered every surface. Cotton stuffing wisped out of the futon mattress on the floor.

A wall-sized print of Kurt smoking in this window lorded over the room. The picture must have been taken before the accident because Kurt's left leg was bracing him into the narrow window frame with a rock climber's mastery of tension. Kurt hadn't specified how long he had been without the use of his legs, but he certainly implied that he was handicapped rather than injured, and had been for some time—a long enough time for this photograph to haunt the room and make the window empty rather than merely vacant. Now four camera bodies and a dozen lenses sat gathering dust where Kurt had once perched.

Thumbtacked Polaroids of hundreds of models, all wearing white tank tops, jeans, and presumably high heels, tiled a giant corkboard. Owen wanted to say this was the western wall, but he'd been spun around the spiral too many times to claim a sense of direction. It was like processing a palindrome, forward and backward at once:

IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI
.
We go into a spiral at night and are consumed by flames
.

He climbed the ramp to the third and final floor.

When the ramp leveled off, he was met by a scarred farmhouse table surrounded by a mishmash of twenty chairs, scattered at all angles as if a seated crowd had sprinted into the night. Past the dozens of half-finished wine bottles. Past the coffee cup ashtrays. Past dried-out lime wedges, empty bottles of stronger spirits, and fruit-flyed glasses. Past the residue of drugs, the residue of nights. Past it all was the wonder of what could be hidden if this much was left to be found.

On the opposite side of the room, a Bösendorfer upright stood against the curved wall, two of its corners badly chewed from repeated collisions with the brick. Instead of sheet music, Owen found $40 fashion magazines and a back issue of
Artforum
with Kurt Wagener in the sidebar. A trail of flannel shirts led to a blue plaid mattress and an oversize down comforter.

Owen thought of the pictures he'd just seen in Hal's black portfolio. He could only remember one: a shot from the deep recesses of an oak, captured with a fish-eye lens. The image teetered on the edge of parody, like most of the fish-eye photographs he'd seen. But it took him back to the veers and dives of suburban department stores. He remembered darting through the automatic doors and crawling into a circular rack of blazers or blouses. Not hiding from anyone, just hiding. Hardpan carpet and the acoustic tiles with the patterned dots. It took a while to realize “acoustic tiles” didn't mean a ceiling of speakers. Inscrutable as
OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR
. A phrase he'd ponder for twenty minutes, inside the ring of clothes. Until his dad grabbed a handful of hangers, screeching the chrome ring with “Where have you been?”—which made no sense, because they both knew that inside a ring of coats was precisely where he had been for the past half hour.

And now you are too tall to hide
.

And besides, there was no one here to hide from. The tower was empty. Only Owen and the blue tarp were breathing.

Owen dusted the floor and then curled up under the tufted piano bench for a nap. He read the small paragraph glued on the bench's underside explaining
Kunstfertigkeit
, the link between art and craftsmanship. The text looked a little warmer, a bit more red, than normal. One of his eyes saw the world with a slightly red tint, the other slightly blue. He used to toggle back and forth every few months to remind himself which eye had which bias. He thought he remembered the right eye being red, but he wasn't sure. He knew he hadn't written it down anywhere. Certain uncertainty. The ghost in the machine.

A sharp poke in his side. The Gods had been absent since his injury, so Owen had turned to churches. The church nearest his hostel was almost entirely godless. Inaudible reverberations of the deep house music played the night before echoed in the nave while Owen sat in a pew, sketching his thoughts. An inflection point was fast approaching when those crossing the narthex in search of Ecstasy would outpace all those who had come during dark times in search of ecstasy. After a few tourist-climbs to the bell tower, he began to show up early and wander, found stairs to the triforium, and sat on a stone bench opposite an installation of spackled abstract paintings. Just this morning he'd sat on one of those benches, flicking the side of an expired glowstick he'd picked up off the ground. That same glowstick was still in his left breast pocket, poking him in the ribs as he rolled around on the floor of the
Wasserturm
. He pulled out the husk of plastic, dead liquid ghosting around a single bubble, and set it on the bench over his head. Perhaps he wasn't so special. Perhaps the glowstick's bathwater grey was the color of everyone's religion: spent glow, with only the memory of enlightenment.

He cracked his neck and fell asleep.

O
wen woke to a voice:

—Things change when you're in a museum's permanent collection.

Owen fumbled for his eye patch and rose to his feet, knocking the underside of the bench and upsetting whoever was sitting over his head.

Hal, Kurt, and a girl draped over Kurt's wheelchair laughed. Owen stood to full height and tucked in his shirt. Hal offered him a cigarette. He refused. The girl offered him red wine in a Solo cup. He accepted. She caught him up:

—Kurt was explaining that talent is bourgeois.

—No. Talent is a myth. I was explaining that no one makes it in art without a platform. You have to have a brand before you have skill. First presence, then an audience, then change your skill set if you're still not selling.

Hal brought over a bottle of Jack and a cup of hot coffee. Owen put the coffee between his feet and took a shallow slug from the bottle. His stomach pulled. Now juggling, he drank the wine and then took a cigarette at Hal's second offer.

It was the first smoke to ever pass the barrier of Owen's teeth. His forehead beaded with cold sweat. He knew his lung capacity to the mL and his VO
_2max
to three sig-figs, yet he smoked again. No one appeared to notice that he didn't know how to inhale. He turned away and tried the sharp double-inhale that he knew was required. He coughed violently. Hal patted his back.

—Captain America!

Owen's throat tightened. He undid another button of his shirt.

The one sitting on Kurt's lap noticed that this was a new experience for Owen. She was layered in washed leather. Hal wore dark layers of hooded sweatshirt, track jacket, leatherish jacket. Kurt wore flannel. Owen smoothed his white shirt and tucked it into the corduroy pants that were falling off his hips. He would need to punch a new hole in his belt.

He drank his coffee and spoke halting German:

—I have been traveling from California to Berlin. I am grateful to have found a house.

Kurt laughed.

—Your German is so formal. Stick to English. But yeah, unpack your bag when we get back. I know what you're thinking, Who goes out on a Friday? but the tourists should have cleared out by now.

—What is it, four a.m.?

—Almost six.

Owen looked at himself in a slept-in suit and everyone else in leather and plaid.

—Don't worry, you can get in anywhere we go, even in a suit and penny loafers.

Hal was still silent, looking at Owen through the viewfinder of a double-grip digital camera. He didn't take any pictures, just dialed the zoom lens in and out, inspecting Owen at different focal lengths, half-clicking the shutter until the camera confirmed focus with a beep. More voluble now that a camera mediated his view of the world, he asked:

—Is that eye patch for real? I mean, either way you look great.

—I was hopped up on painkillers all winter, so everything's a little foggy. But I'm thinking the eye patch is real.

Kurt laughed and clapped Owen's leg.

Hal asked if Owen had any more of the painkillers.

The girl on Kurt's lap stood and stabbed out her cigarette:

—You should come out. Stevie always brings an interesting crowd.

Owen looked at both Kurt and Hal. Kurt had the final word:

—Brigitte's right. But nothing interesting ever happens in a place with a door policy—well, unless Sven is working the door.

Owen had no idea who these people were, but tried to find an artistic response:

—I'm down for whatever.

—I like big fireworks first too, but you've got to work up to some of this shit. We'll go to a bar, then Platte to see Stevie. You'll like Stevie. She's smart. But you'll die if you go straight to Sven's place.

Owen said he would just be a minute.

He walked back down the spiral ramp to his room. He fished the mason jar of sand and oil from his bag and walked up to Hal's bathroom.

He turned the hot water tap and waited until the water steamed. He scooped a handful of sand from his jar, brought a cupped hand of water to his face, and kneaded his cheeks. His fascination with grit had started when an older teammate showed him the pregame trick of scraping his palms back and forth over the texturized gutter, or, if they were playing at a generic suburban pool, over the sandstone lip. His fresh skin gripped the ball better. While his competitors struggled to catch with their off hand or thrust the ball cross-face without losing control, Owen rose high with a lariat loop of tan arm and yellow ball, lassoing the entire game and launching it at the nylon net. From age six to twenty-one he scraped his palms clean and greeted the world with a fresh grip.

His coarse beard buried the grit. Until now he didn't know he could grow one. Chlorine or bromine, depending on which pool he was practicing in at the time, had kept his body delphine, his hair brittle and bleached. Before, he'd scarcely had eyebrows. Now a proper unibrow bridged eye and eye patch, outsight and insight. Since he'd left California, his hair had grown dark.
Monobrow
. More and more of his cheek was lost each day to the barbarian beard.

Brigitte opened the bathroom door. She shut it behind her and held his gaze for a split second. Owen saw her reflection at his side and watched her heft the eye patch hanging from the faucet. She leaned into his hand and whispered into his ear:

—Don't watch.

She took a diagonal step back and out of view. Owen turned to find her unzipping her black jeans slowly, teasing every tooth of the fly with little pops, like air ticked between tongue tip and palate. He pulled clean his eyelashes, put the eye patch back on, and clutched the counter.

She reached around him and turned on the tap, melting into his knuckles. Looping her arm in his, she dipped her fingertips in the warm water and smiled when she made eye contact in the mirror. She flicked her fingers once to dismiss the water beads.

He started to speak, but she interrupted on tipped toe with breath tingling the small hairs of his earlobe.

—You have great lips, but your beard will scratch me.

She ran her fingers over his cheek and then fastened her jeans and left.