A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (19 page)

Sonny extended a hand.

—Good luck in Athens. Just stay away from the homemade raki, and you'll be fine.

Burr walked past a group of students waiting in line to see a rapper perform in the main auditorium. Could he compete with a rapper for these students' attention? He would see in Athens, before a crowd of thousands. One of whom might be his son.

He made it the mile from bar to home without incident, grabbed a few Baudrillard books from his trunk, and collapsed on the leather chair in the study.

Burr selected Cannonball Adderley from his rotating tray of CDs. He tried to make sense of Baudrillard. Either he was really drunk or this text was really opaque. Perhaps both. He put some gas on the fire and opened a bottle of 4 Puttonyos Tokaji he had been saving for a special occasion. The floral aromatics of the sweet wine clashed with the well-worn pages. He detected a hint of graphite. These ideas had been digested. The pages had been touched, absorbed. He wanted this fate for
Hapax
. He wanted the highlighters, stretched spines from photocopying, ink notes in margin—even though this was a library book. The self-pity in the air would have been overpowering were there not also a bracing note of excitement. Renown by association was renown no less. Sweet thoughts of being heard by a large crowd, lemon thoughts of connection, leapt from the heavily underlined and dog-eared pages. He was happy for Baudrillard, not jealous of these well-cared-for, which is to say lived-in, books. As the bottle began to vanish, he teetered on the edge of maudlin. Luckily his terror at what might happen on that Athens stage kept him from drowning in his cups. But it didn't keep him from falling asleep in his chair.

Burr woke up to the sunlight—a problem, given that his flight was at 8:00 a.m. He threw a few handfuls of clothes into a canvas duffel, folded a half dozen suits and shirts into a hanging bag, and stuffed the Mission University copies of
Simulacrum and Simulation
and
America
into his laptop case.

On his way out the door he remembered his passport. He grabbed the first hundred pages, Aare-Atuamatariri, of the unfinished French translation of
Hapax
, and threw it in the passenger seat with his duffel. He slammed the car into reverse without looking back and would have destroyed a garage door had he not previously had it removed for the very theory he was on his way to promote.

T
he professor spent the flight trying to imagine himself as a provocative man. Provocateur. One who provokes. Invoke, evoke, revoke . . . Do provocative men trace etymology? Not likely. He squinted at the flight attendant, trying to look both dangerous and mysterious.

—Are you okay, sir?

This wasn't going to work. But it didn't have to. He was really just banking on the posters being printed and his name attached to the event. He didn't need to deliver the actual speech for Owen to get the message.

This would be his first lay audience. Whatever they might or might not know, he was certain that they would boo him off the stage if he came across as condescending. This made his whole “You have been lied to your whole lives” strategy a bit suspect. He had his first line ready: “The twentieth century was ruled by the Subliminal. This century will be devoted to the Liminal.” He juggled emphasis: “The
twentieth . . .
The twentieth
century
. . .” It would really be best to avoid beginning a provocative speech with a passive sentence construction. He drank. He slept.

Rosy-fingered dawn appeared at the horizon just before he landed. She reached up and slid her palm under the belly of the plane, then closed her fingers in a gentle cascade. The windows grew warm in her clutch until they blended into the tarmac. Passengers applauded the landing.

A young man with long brown hair was waiting for Burr in his hotel lobby. He'd had to check the name several times because the university always put him up in the Grande Bretagne or the King George; this was far rougher than either.

—Joe? George Skandos. Good to meet you.

Joe? He had never been one for titles or yessirs or even respect insofar as it extended beyond common decency and practical considerations. But dammit, they had invited him, and this young man wasn't even thirty.

—I don't go by Joe, actually.

The young man looked as if he had just been slapped.

—Professor Burr, I apologize for not being at the airport . . . I wasn't there for Jean either. I'm afraid there has been a logistical emergency.

Upon further examination, “Joe” somehow sounded provocative when this young man said it.

—It's fine. Really. And you can call me Joe if you prefer. Joe or Professor B.

—Fine, Joe . . . Right now we don't have a stage. The mayor caved to American pressure and deemed our event an unacceptable security risk during the Games.

—Where does that leave us?

—In limbo. As of now, we are scrambling to find an alternative venue, but I'm afraid it is going to be far from the city center.

—Couldn't we just speak in the streets?

—Jean said the same thing. For him every bureaucratic pitfall is an opportunity to return to the glory days of Paris '68, so I expected that from him. But I am a bit surprised to hear you advocate “taking it to the streets.”

—It's far from ideal, but I would like to speak before the Olympics crowd has cleared out.

—You won't have to worry about crowd size. There are sure to be well over five thousand students who show up to hear—well, let's be honest, they're really going to be waiting to hear Jean, but in a decade they may look back at the event and remember it as the night they heard you speak. This is something like your international debut? But no. There's no chance that the mayor is going to let people listen to leftist taunts in a city square when he has already deemed too threatening a university auditorium in Zografou.

This was the first time Burr had been called a leftist. It was exciting, but it seemed like they had the wrong man. This was also the first time he had heard an estimate of the audience size. For a crowd of five thousand, he was willing to be a leftist, socialist, Maoist, whatever. That size crowd, during the middle of the Olympics, serving up whatever blend of dissent Baudrillard had concocted, would surely get Owen's attention. He could only miss it if he were living in a cave.

—You won't have to worry about crowd size—provided the talk even happens. This doesn't look good. We're no strangers to improvisation, but we've never met this much international pressure. This is the best I have in the way of an itinerary . . . as you can imagine, everything is subject to change.

The professor was handed a gaggle of acronyms, typos, acronyms that looked like typos, and a full schedule of crossed-out speaking engagements and time slots listed TBA. Conspicuously absent was any engagement with the Olympic crowd. He had expected to find hologrammed tickets and an all-access pass in the inner pocket of a binder. In comparison, the sheet of paper seemed a little flimsy.

—I need to mention an elephant in the room, and I hope you don't take offense, but the word
Olympics
doesn't appear once on this sheet. I'm not sure if you are aware, but I am officially here as a liaison.

—Perhaps my English is not so good. You understand you are speaking at a conference against state hegemony, and it would be glaringly hypocritical for us to be involved with something as postcolonial as the Olympics? Oh. I see. You were joking.

—Not really, no.

—You want to make time to go watch sports?

—I'm no fanatic, but I would like to see the spectacle.

George seemed to be looking over Burr's head. Burr leaned up to catch his gaze and then felt a hand clap on his shoulder.

—Sounds like a splendid idea!

Professor Burr turned around to find a man in khaki pants, a crisp white shirt, and a blue linen coat. His strong jaw, bushy eyebrows, and aviator-rim glasses reminded Burr of Tommy Lee Jones. He leapt forward to take Burr's hand.

—Jean Baudrillard. Pleasure to meet you, Professor Burr.

His manner was as firm as his grip. A patient grin. He was presumably happy to hear Burr stammer in French rather than immediately taking their conversation to English.

—Go unpack, and I'll arrange the details with George. Is there anything in particular you'd like to see?

—The US water polo team plays tonight. I need to go for personal reasons.

Baudrillard looked genuinely puzzled.

—I'll see what I can do.

—Oh, I almost forgot. I brought you a copy of my latest book. The unbound pages are from an incomplete French translation I'm having some grad students help me with. I'm hoping to win an endorsement from L'Académie française.

Baudrillard recognized
Hapax
immediately for what it was. He read an entry, his finger marking his place, then held the book in front of him as if he had been given something as obsolete as a Laserdisc player, thinking, no doubt, of how he was going to fit this new ten-pound contraption into his luggage or in the small rubber trash can in his room.

He smiled.

T
he dusty air of Athens looked as if it might catch fire. Chalk-white buildings, like the cirrus clouds wisping the bright sky, drifted together or drifted apart; it was an architecture subject to plate tectonics. Some buildings leaned in as if bowed in prayer. In a century, their upper floors would touch foreheads with the building opposite. Others fell back, increasingly estranged from their neighbors. Athens ever-bright. Brightness unavoidable, because in this city Burr always looked up.

In his earlier life, Burr had traveled here for dozens of conferences. Those trips adhered to a well-established formula: (1) a walk through his host's building, culminating in coffee and baklava in a conference room; (2) dinner at a taverna with a three-hour decline in the quality of wine and the originality of thought—the espresso course being most similar to the recitation of a Works Cited; (3) the conference itself; and finally; (4) an apology from a drunk dinner guest, which was really an overture to blurb said dinner guest's forthcoming book. Athens had given him some of his sharpest memories, but it had never given him a chance to roam.

This was Olympics Athens, where a vast current of tourists in soccer jerseys from all nations and hats of all outlandishness swept past Burr and Baudrillard whichever direction they walked. Rare was the unadorned neck. Every tourist over thirty wore a camera necklace or a lanyard holding prized tickets to an event. Like a blackjack player counting cards, Burr kept a running total of lanyards versus cameras. Lanyards were winning by 31 when he turned to his companion.

Baudrillard was certainly not a lanyard man. He did carry a camera with him, and he carried it like a billy club. The photography books had been an unexpected surprise in the two-foot stack of books that the Mission University librarian hauled to the desk. Burr was surprised that Baudrillard took pictures, and he was surprised at the pictures themselves. Every picture looked silent. As they walked, Burr heard the shutter snap and the gear wind and click at the ready. He wondered if any of these shots from the Athens din would have that same quiet.

The crowd thinned. No one trampled their shadows. Baudrillard's shadow overlapped Burr's own on the honeycomb street tiles, a darker intersection drawn on the stone. He thought the pooled shadows before the two of them would make a good photo and thought, perhaps, a fan might be taking it right now. As vain as it was to admit it, he saw the image reprinted in an intellectual biography: “Baudrillard and companion” in the first edition; “Baudrillard and Joseph Burr” in the second edition; “Baudrillard and Burr” thereafter.

—I love all of the face paint, Baudrillard said.

—Very Celtic.

—I suppose they have stencils for this sort of thing.

—I think most of these flags, at least the ones that kids wear in the USA, are stickers.

They stopped and watched the crowd.

—That reversal is telling: it is a movement from land, in the form of pigments, applied to
visage
, to
Visage
applied to land. It's lazy.

—The difference between an athlete and a fan. I've never been either, but my son is the former. Or rather, he used to be. And in my experience, athletes neither apply symbols nor wish to become symbols. Olympians have a unique view of subjectivity; they are almost unconscious when they are performing. I'd say they're vacant—in a non-pejorative sense.

—I would never presume emptiness is a bad thing. Emptiness and sight are closely linked. You can only see when it is empty.

—
Vide
and
videre
. You're right, of course. You can only use a chalkboard when it is wiped clean. Historically, however, I believe it's a false etymology.

—Then you would say it is both true and false.

Burr was shocked, literally speechless, that Baudrillard was alluding to liminality.

—Isn't that what you say? Everything is both true and false? Or am I reading you wrong?

—No . . . that's right. Absolutely right.

—The one question I had, and pardon me if this comes across as an attack, is, “How is what you're saying any different than the Buddhist notion of Bardo?”

Burr flushed and became defensive.

—As far as I know, Bardo represents the intervening time between death and reincarnation.

—That's just one Bardo. There are six.

—To be sure. But the very act of dividing requires fixed points.
I
am never born—birth is something my mind doesn't have access to—nor do
I
ever die.
I
am everything in between those two points, but for me, as a subject, the points necessarily do not exist. But it's not just people. I am saying that
everything
is Bardo; everything is betwixt and between. There are no real identities, only relational identities.