A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (11 page)

—I've got work in New York on Friday, she said.

She let the syllables linger in a way that suggested she was considering bringing him as a diversion. She squinted.

—Are you from New York?

—California.

—Los Angeles?

—North of LA.

—Things are different here. Find a hole to hide in and watch your drinks.

And with that admonition Saskia evaporated. She remained glued to Brigitte's hip, but she was finished with Owen.

Jera was back at his sketch. Without looking up, he said:

—They're all trouble, but that one is lethal. Stay away, my friend.

—How do you know Kurt?

—We were in a group show at the Todd Zeale Gallery.

—Did you collaborate?

—With Kurt? No.

—Is he a good artist?

—He makes a lot of money. He's no Immendorff.

—Do you think he's any good?

—If Kurt had any discipline, he'd be a mediocre painter.

Kurt somehow managed to be everywhere at once. He rolled right into Owen's calf.

—I thought you usually described me as a force.

—But I never meant it as a compliment.

—Don't worry, Owen. He's frustrated because no one wants to buy Flemish reproductions from a dreadlocked white guy.

—I had dreadlocks for two years. I was eighteen.

—You should grow them again. You'd give critics something to write about.

—You know I do this for the work, not the press, not the volume.

—People buy loud.

—And you've got a whole team in some factory cranking it out.

—Is it my fault if I can do more in five seconds than you do in a year?

—What do you call the picture,
Pedicabo
? Really great stuff. I'd like to buy it.

—The bar owns it. Not me.

The private room crowd stopped talking and listened.

—Well, I don't know what to say. I have to have it.

—You can't afford it, Jera.

—A trade then.

Kurt registered his audience.

—Didn't I hear something about you having a show up?

—The opening was last month. You went to the afterparty.

Kurt didn't appear to hear.

—I'll trade it for whatever doesn't sell. If you sell out the show, I'll give you the picture for nothing. But I think we both know that's not going to happen.

—Two pieces are already gone.

—And it's been up three weeks. I know for a fact one went to your uncle. Is your gallery even in Berlin? Doesn't matter. Fine. Let's see, what am I getting? I'm going with some allegorical work.
Parable of the Blind
?
Ship of Fools
? Something I could buy at the airport that's taken you over a year.

Jera laughed, but didn't deny any of it.

—Fine. Sold. I haven't destroyed the film yet. I'll have Michael print another and send it over next week.

Jera looked at the picture behind the bar. His nostrils flared and his breathing stopped. Owen could see that Jera only wanted to buy the photograph to remove it from the world. Now there would be two of these pictures in existence rather than one. Owen couldn't hear what Jera was mumbling, but
hydra
would have been fitting.

—Have your gallerist call Michael when the show's down. Let's go out. This bar turned into a business meeting.

Owen recognized the heaviness and emptiness in Jera. He looked like a high-schooler watching the gravel kick from a prom limousine that had just left without him. Which confirmed that Owen had fallen in with the assholes.

I
t was a short walk to the next spot. This bar was louder, but not cacophonous; darker, but with the early electric glow of amber. Owen walked through a projector beam and was temporarily blinded. A standing crowd barely watching the Antonioni film on the wall turned to see whose silhouette was blocking the cliff scene. It took a minute for Owen to realize that they were motioning him to move.

He had read an apocryphal history of the eye patch in
Coping with Changes in Sight
, by Dr. Thomas Friedlan, MD: pirates wanted to keep one eye acclimated to the brightness of the deck and the other hidden until it was time for the darkness of the galley. Apparently there was nothing wrong with most pirates' vision. In fact, the eye patch gave them a distinct advantage.

The darkened crowd was lost to him. A woman in a black horsehide Perfecto jacket stood illuminated by the glow of her laptop screen. She looked stunning in laptop light. Which was something.

Hal was yelling in his ear:

—That's her. Stevie. She's a genius. She memorizes entire books.

Before Hal could expand upon his point, he was introducing Owen to the woman. She held headphones to one ear and had a cigarette behind the other. Hal shouted over the music.

—This is our American friend, Owen.

Stevie, in her deejay perch queuing up the next 1950s song and doing something with a turntable, stood just an inch above eye level.

She slid a knob to the right, hit a button, and dropped her headphones to look at Owen. He looked paralyzed by possibilities. Hal didn't have that problem and yelled up to her.

—We had to leave the Pedicabo because Kurt and Jera were having a pissing contest.

—Uh-huh. I finish in twenty minutes. Take these drink tickets.

She motioned to the bartender and pointed to Hal and Owen.

Hal asked if he could bring her something. Owen kicked himself for being slow.

Stevie held up her water bottle, took a swig, and put her headphones over one ear.

Right elbow raised like a tour guide, Hal led Owen to the bar. He was nodding eagerly to the beat, lighting up another cigarette. Owen ordered tequila and a can of beer. Hal had the same.

Owen cracked the tab and slurped. The cold foam buoyed him up.

—Is Jera's art any good?

—There's a whole school of German artists like that.

—Like what?

—Did he tell you about his diet? He only eats roots. Like beets, turmeric, carrots, radishes . . . he's obsessed with pigments and thinks if he eats roots it'll lead to some insight, because they're brighter. I don't know. “Colors so bright they buried them underground.” That's what he called the only painting that ever got him any press.

—Was it beautiful?

Hal laughed at Owen.

—You're not embarrassed to use words like that? Whatever. I can't remember the last time I thought a painting was interesting. I can't remember the last time anyone important in art thought a painting was interesting.

They threw back their first drink and took the second glass to the back of the bar, where Brigitte, Saskia, and Kurt were waiting. Owen found himself more stimulated than he had been since his pregame speech. All was speedy, hollow, and unwell. He stopped nodding his head.

—Did you put something in my drink?

A crack of laughter started with Kurt and spread through the group. Overwhelmed, Owen laughed a confused laugh.

—Took long enough, said Kurt.

Hal stretched for profundity:

—If the entire drink is a drug, are you really putting something into a drink?

—It's not like it was false advertising, Kurt said. You knew those shots weren't going to make you sober. And if a drug works exceedingly well, why complain about that! Besides, you can't blame me. I have artistic immunity—it's like diplomatic immunity, but for people who don't own neckties.

Owen stood to leave. Brigitte and Saskia gripped his inner leg, fingers deep into his thigh, giving Kurt the chance to continue:

—Look. I didn't do anything. I ordered a drink. The bartender, who's not even my friend, took that order and improvised. He distills his own biodynamic serotonergic whatever.

Hal spoke solemnly:

—Psilocybin.

—Monsters drink monstrous things, Owen. Welcome to Berlin.

—I've been here for over a month, Owen mumbled.

—Well. Welcome to the real Berlin.

Owen looked content, and everyone laughed. They were laughing at laughing. Then laughing at Owen gallantly kissing Brigitte's hand and toppling into an armchair. He toasted:

—My dear fellow mandarins, I drink to our future holidays!

Brigitte asked why Americans have to toast with every drink.

Stevie had now finished her set and caught the tail end of that exchange.

—What's the fucked-up guy's name?

—Which fucked-up guy? Take your pick.

—The lost one.

—The guy watching the movie like he doesn't hear us is Owen.

Kurt's entourage rolled to the front-room bar in a wave of shouts and a shock of laughter. Owen remained behind, enraptured by the woman projected on-screen, wandering a rocky island in a caftan.

—Owen, are you okay?

Owen adjusted his eye patch and did the top button of his shirt, though he knew he was flushed. He saw her lips first. She kept them open, but expectant, not slack, her tongue tickling the roof of her mouth, waiting to speak in a language of els.

—Do you know where you are?

The corners of her mouth met at perfect angles. He didn't think he'd ever seen that before. He felt the corners of his own mouth. They dimpled.

—I'm working on a piece with Kurt.

She looked disappointed. He followed it with the question everyone else asked:

—How do you know him?

—I've played the
Wasserturm
.

She blinked quickly a few times then looked up. She might have been trying to blink away an eyelash, but Owen thought she was trying to blink away the recollection. She looked at Owen's forehead:

—You're sweating.

—I don't usually smoke.

The words weren't funny in themselves, but Owen pursed his mouth, on the verge of cracking up. He thought something objective—numbers, science—might help. He put two fingers to his pulse, counted twenty-five beats in fifteen seconds, and multiplied by four. One hundred bpm. Very high. Too high. Almost techno-music high.

Stevie touched his wrist, and everything opened. His toe resonated with his temple; charges delocalized to build a glistening bridge. He breathed with his arms, his neck. He couldn't speak. Stevie smiled.

—You look like someone dumped a glass of water on your head.

Owen wiped his brow with his cuff. He pointed at the aquiline nose on the screen. His father had called it her Nefertiti nose.

—That's my mother.

—Unless your mother is Monica Vitti, I believe you're mistaken. Let's get some air.

Stevie helped him up at the hand and elbow. Now that he was standing, mostly on his own, he saw that Stevie was at least a foot and a half shorter than him. They stumbled past the crowd. She spoke to the doorman:

—I'll vouch for him. He'll be fine.

—If he falls, Stevie, I can't let him back in.

Owen squinted and blustered:

—Not a problem.

Dawn had risen and run away. The sky was scalloped grey and drizzling down. They leaned against the cinder-block wall and smoked. The concrete snagged his corduroy coat like Velcro. Owen draped the coat over her leather jacket as a great cloak. When she laughed and thanked him, a gold ring shone in her blue eyes.

—What did you do before “collaborating” with Kurt?

—I was a student until a little while ago. I had an accident and stopped out.

—Stopped out?

—I left. I lost an eye, my eye, in a water polo game.

—It sounds so suspicious whenever something real comes from something trivial. Like people who fall in love at the disco.

He drifted at her mention of love.

—Did you do it on purpose?

She shocked him into sobriety.

—What?

—People mark themselves, destroy their bodies in every way possible, kill themselves . . . seems conceivable that someone would blind himself.

—I didn't do this on purpose.

She only smoked, didn't respond, prompting him to consider the matter further. When he began speaking, his voice sounded heavy and strange:

—Well, I don't know, maybe there's something to that. Most of the players on that level have this
qualia
, this x-factor, this ability to will a game-winning goal and perform best when the stakes are highest. I never had that. The only real thing I had going for me—other than size, but that only gets you so far—was the ability to intuit what was going to happen next, to feel what every player in the pool was about to do. So maybe I did know that the hole guard was going to swing for my head, and maybe I did turn right into his thumb at precisely the wrong time. Because, you know what, I always hated sports.

—But you didn't quit.

—Well, it was paying for college, for one.

—And for two?

—Being on a team is a great way to be alone.

She smiled. He smoothed his hair and repositioned the strap of his eye patch.

—Has having
that
changed how you see the world?

—I'm beginning to think it saved me from becoming an asshole.

—It didn't save you from asshole friends.

—They're your friends too.

—Does it feel like you made friends? Everyone here's on friendly terms, but Kurt isn't anyone's friend.

—You're right. Which means you need to save me from them. Let's get out of here.

Owen watched her lips roll the possibility of sharing coffee and breakfast with him. He saw a quiver at the side of her mouth and traced the tremor to her eye, where an eyelash comma held on to her skin in the tight morning gusts.

—Hold still.

It trembled with the wind, but remained perched on his finger.

—Can you hand me my passport from the left pocket?

She held the passport open to a blank visa page. Owen placed the eyelash in the center of a square and wrote beneath it: “4-30-4. In a goddamn disco.”

Kurt, Hal, Saskia, and Brigitte, fueled by new and sweatier drugs, crashed through the heavy metal door and announced that everyone was off to Sven's party at an abandoned East German power plant.