A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (26 page)

Owen stood barefoot on the floor. He stepped from the scrubs and put on his corduroy suit over a black tee. His passport and wallet were missing. Not in his suit. Not under the bed. Not here.

The bracelet on his wrist read “Max Mustermann.” He hooked it from under his sleeve and pulled until the plastic stretched and finally snapped. When the bracelet gave, his left arm flung wildly and rang the chrome bed rail. He dampened the cold buzzing metal. Stepping into his shoes, he braved the tiled hallway.

Owen had become a man of shifting sands, emptying every grain into one leg until he had enough ballast to swing his other leg forward and repeat the process. Above the waist, he was as thin and empty as an expired hourglass, and just as easy to shatter.

Though these steps were labored, they were firmly directed. Pivot to pivot, he bore down on Kurt's
Wasserturm
. With a few dozen steps, his attention shifted to his head, bandaged yet again, as if some international agreement had been reached that Owen Burr must always stay under wraps. All he wanted was to be the invisible man beneath the gauze. Free to laugh, free to disappear. His temples throbbed and swelled until he was nothing more than the sum of his pains, an effigy of chicken wire and plaster, a tiki-bar version of an Easter Island
moai
. And just as those ancient monoliths trudged from mountain to shore, one corner at a time, so Owen sloshed his way from the height of the hospital to the depths of Berlin.

He walked through the automated glass doors of his second hospital in six months. His legs held him loosely; once-taut braids were now wet rope.

This time, he could have used a wheelchair escort, and maybe even someone waiting to deliver him home. The early summer wind ripped through Owen's shirt and blew out the vents of his corduroy coat.

North and east, north and east, he pegged along until he was winding around the ring of Torstrasse. His steps were now a crumbling shuffle, leaving behind a trail of sand. He patted his pockets again and found no wallet, no passport. Were his pockets not empty, he would have stopped at one of the cafés, had a coffee, regrouped, and devised a plan more elaborate than breaking into the water tower and throwing Kurt through the blue-tarped window. But he had no plan, no money, no identification, no things.

As if he were ascending a broken escalator, no stride took him as far as it should. The dissonance of intention and movement nested in his head. Looking to his feet didn't help. His steps were fixed when they should be moving. He clomped. The once mellifluous was now a clatter. Each step hit the ground like a stack of plates.

Collapsed clubgoers sprawled on the rough lawns of the Volkspark Freidrichshain. The conscious in any circle tracked Owen as he staggered through the park. He watched skaters hold video cameras inches from the ground, ironing the asphalt to document kickflips and ollies. In the thousands of times he had walked by a group of skaters, he had never seen a trick landed. Ever. Because they were always trying something new. Perhaps their absurdly low ratio of success to failure was not exceptional at all. Perhaps the skateboard, one of the most primitive inventions imaginable, a plank with wheels that somehow eluded Leonardo and took civilization thousands of years to invent, was measuring a universal constant. Perhaps we were meant to fail thousands of times, in public, for every achievement. This was learning laid bare. He remembered the wheel-scraped walls of the tower, which was now in view, and wondered which, if any, of these park kids was Kurt's lookout.

He scrutinized the hollows of each tree. A big camera would be hard to disguise, but one of those small snake cameras, curled vipers, would be impossible to spot on a tree branch. It would have to have wires, right? And there were no wires. The door had been repainted firehouse red. No need to check the lock. Nothing could be less relevant. He looked around him one final time, twisted his left foot as if extinguishing a cigarette, then let the tension of a month of being kept in a cage uncoil from his hip to his heel.

Four sounds as he kicked down the door: one, the explosion of the hinge drowning the sound of heel meeting wood; two, the quick skid of the door's base against the ground; three, the drawn-out
timber
as the door confirmed the hypothesis of gravity; and four, the gunshot of a sixty-pound door hitting the concrete ground.

No one was around, and no one came running, but he was certain people on the other side of the trees had heard him stave in the door. The door was rocking on top of something and wasn't quite flush to the ground. Loud electro played from the wall-mounted speakers, but he knew that didn't guarantee occupancy.

Emboldened by the door at his feet, he roared to the heights:

—Kurt!

He wanted to add, “You're coming down here or you're coming down here without the ramp!” But instead he listened.

Owen stomped up the central spiral to the top of the tower, shouting for Kurt as he walked. No one responded. There was no one to push against, so Owen gripped hard against his own lapels and led himself to the table of the top floor. The table was scrubbed of everything he remembered.

In the place of drug residue, nearly empty liquor bottles, take-out, and napkin sketches offered up to the world with the surety of cocaine genius, Owen found an airline ticket for Basel with red carbon triplicate. Underneath, a note from Altberg.

           
May 28
^th
, 2004

           
Dearest Owen
,

                 
As you may have surmised by now, this motley crew is deeply indebted to you for the vision you brought to this project. You are more than a male model to us. We would be delighted if you would join us for the premiere of Kurt Wagener's latest artwork at Art 35 Basel. The opening reception is Wednesday, June 16
^th
.

                 
Enclosed you will find an airline voucher. You can redeem this coupon at the Lufthansa ticket counter of either Tempelhof or Tegel Airport. If you are unable to connect all the way to Basel, fly to Zurich, and we will compensate you for the rail expense. We leave accommodation to your own discretion. Should you choose to lodge in Basel, I will say that you should book at once and look far afield, for the hotels fill up fast
.

                 
You will also find (1) the executed contracts for your work in the photo shoots of May 3
^rd
through May 15
^th
, 2004; (2) payment of €500 for the aforementioned photo shoot; (3) the fully executed Non-Disclosure Agreement covering the months of April and May of 2004
.

                 
Everyone is unanimous in expressing what a pleasure it was to collaborate with you
.

                 
Come join your fellow Gentlemen of the Shade, Minions of the moon
.

                 
Yours truly
,

                 
Robert Altberg, Esq
.

Screams bottled in his head. He checked the dates again. Almost two weeks they had him on the floor. Probably every floor. Which meant thousands of pictures, not the dozen he could remember. Pictures until they were bored.

A signed agreement in duplicate relinquishing all rights to Kurt Wagener to use Owen's image for any project intended as a work of art. None of the documents included his last name, just Owen, which gave him hope that the pictures could be removed from the world. They either wanted to keep him anonymous or hadn't taken the trouble to investigate. Stevie must have been the one who looked him up online. He looked at his shaky signature and clutched his head. Beside the two copies of the agreement were a cashier's check for €500, a hundred-Swiss-franc note paper-clipped to the paycheck, and a brochure from the Basel Tourist Council. He took the money, left the rest untouched.

He felt watched.

Owen found a camera. It was sunk into the wall, directly in front of the table, and recording everything. He snuck around the side of the field of view, grabbing a Joseph Beuys monograph and a ballpoint pen on the way.

He thumbed open the pen, letting the cap fall to the floor, and scratched the roller ball along the masonry until it sank into the spyhole. He stood with his back against the wall, camera just beside his right hip, blue PaperMate pinched between his fingers with ballpoint against the glass sphere. He slammed the thick book in his left hand directly into the tail of the pen. The glass didn't shatter like he had hoped, but the pen had driven the camera from the spyhole. He repositioned the pen, then hammered it into the hole with the same slap he would have used to kill an insect. The hole now appeared to be no more than a blue screw anchor.

Owen found two more cameras and drove two more PaperMates into the wall. Downstairs, he entered the room that had been his for a few ill-fated weeks. It too had been swept clean. The black-iron plumbing pipe was gone, and the cotton candy insulation had been stripped from the unfinished walls. The woven plastic tarp remained, but in the still afternoon it was silent. At this time of year, at this hour of day, the tarp imitated stained glass, filtering the room in cerulean blue that gave Owen pause.

On the ground floor, he walked over the broken door, seesawed on whatever it had landed on. Glass rolled on the concrete and popped under his step. He lifted the door, uncovering his duffel bag. He unzipped it to find his clothes neatly folded, sand and oil on his black rollneck sweater, wallet, passport, and oil-soaked copy of the
Odyssey
with a note from Stevie peeking out the top. She wrote that she was worried for him when she went back to the tower and only found his bag. She was waiting for him in Basel. She then said she had no idea what he and Kurt were doing, which quickly digressed to a discussion of the role of the outsider in Andrzej Wajda's film
Ashes and Diamonds
, James Dean, and the music of Jacques Dutronc. She ended with the following: “If the Sun and Moon should doubt, / They'd immediately go out.”

Owen kept the note because her handwriting sang and the trace of tuberose bloomed into his head like the first steeps of a dark red tea. The note smelled like the back of her neck, and in the moment he caught himself sculpting the air in eddies, whorling a fingerprint of the moment, despite the olive oil soaking his bag and the hollow pumpkin air.

He dumped the shattered glass and sand from his bag. Oil dripped from the white plastic teeth of the zipper and hit the floor in droplets. The combination of sand, shattered glass, and oil looked a little too intentional on the cement floor; the shitty little pattern looked like something Kurt might fob off as art. Owen kicked the sand and glass to different ends of the water tower. But this scattering vaguely resembled a mandala, so he kicked the sand and glass farther, to the edge of the brick. Stubbing his toe as he kicked glass into brick, he realized that he looked totally insane. But insanity is the only rational response when trapped in the profanity of someone else's world.

He sat on a park bench overlooking the tower to make sure Kurt hadn't been watching the whole scene from around the corner. He bent his credit card back and forth until he could tear it in two. His bank account was an empty crypt. His earlier attempt to withdraw 300 euros had been rebuffed by the ATM, 200 got a polite chuckle. He successfully bargained for 100, but was denied 40, then denied 20—unbearably frustrating, given that he'd definitely had the money before the international transaction fees. In three months of travel he had spent the entirety of his assets in this world. He folded the card back and forth until he tore it in two. He threw half in the trash can and put the other half in the ticket pocket of his corduroy jacket.

Everything that he left in Berlin would be left for good. He tried to see the latent potential of his situation: Berlin could be a time capsule, a burying ground for everything he wanted to be rid of; crisis as chrysalis. The idea fell apart as a cliché of transformation; he had clearly lost color and his former strength, he was no butterfly, couldn't fool anyone there. The chrysalis thing worked, however, when he thought of this moment as an inevitability. Flight, no matter how it seems at the time, is never voluntary. Owen had no more control of his path than a dapple-throated nightingale in a hawk's talons. He recalled Hal's tarot card tattoo of two men falling from a tower. The final thought of anyone falling: I can fly.

Rather than redeem the airline voucher Altberg had left in his name, Owen would take the ICE train to Basel. He walked the length of Berlin, bag strap crossing his chest, to the ticket window of the Berlin Zoologischer Garten. He paid for his ticket in cash—from here on out it had to be cash to avoid transaction records.

He found a window seat in the rear of a car, at the rear of the train. He thought about the reality of what might happen, what his hands might do.

He remembered when injustice was a B+ on an essay. What he'd said to Stevie was fundamentally true: the injury had saved him from being an asshole, and the insult had taught him that there are people like Kurt out there to give you real problems if you're too trivial, people who will make your values an exposed nerve that you have to keep out of the wind.

The train ticked through the Black Forest, and Owen thought of how he would explain what had happened, and what was coming, to his California friends. It wasn't that he was acting, per se, it was that he was refusing to have limits placed upon his action. His hands told him that there could be no restraint on the violence. These were smaller arms, half their creatine-swollen diameter and twitching with atrophy. Frequently the muscle would fire from a single node in his arm. Right now his right biceps was involuntarily contracting. He watched with detachment, imagining nanonauts in his bloodstream docking on these twitching fiber shores and excavating the trapped resources of all those tofu-steak and black bean taco lunches. Though his arms were shaky, his grip was tighter than ever, and that was something like harmony.