A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (44 page)

Burr scrambled up the scree and grabbed a rock when it got steeper. He took a big step and slid. He settled a few feet lower, hands gripping the slab that had just been under his feet. He ground in the toes of his boots an inch deeper, to the firmer rock beneath the gravel, and pulled himself back to the slab. He angled into the rock and listened for another shot.

His approach had been too direct. The rock threatened to crumble with every step and take him hundreds of feet down. To get up, he'd have to kick steps and take a switchback route. His trekking poles were more of a liability than an asset—whenever he put weight on the uphill pole, the rock slid down and threatened to sweep him away from the cave in an unfightable riptide. He telescoped down his aluminum poles and lashed them to his pack.

Inch by inch, kicking in his boots and testing each step, Burr angled up the hill, certain at this point that if the shooter was in range, he would have been hit by now, or at least heard a shot. He heard nothing but his breathing.

Every tenth step a slide.

After a half hour, he'd completed the forty-foot scramble to the surety of boulders. He sipped from the dromedary attached to his pack and looked down on the runnels of black rocks each of his slides had upturned.

Burr looked up again to the cave. There was no motion, no sound in the bunker. He pushed hard with his upper legs on the tested holds, certain that if he missed a grip and skidded back down, he wouldn't have the energy to repeat the ascent.

The ledge was no more than a foot wide and at eye level. He reached high and caught the ground with elbows like axes. Gravel bits burrowed into his fleece and hands as he hauled up his stomach, then his hips, then tilted forward and dangled his feet in the air.

He found his knees in well-worn gravel. Grooves cut from traffic back and forth.

He pulled back the tarp at the mouth of the cave. Rock bits rained down and settled between his shoulders and the pack. A stream of light edged into the cave.

Dawn on his son, asleep.

Burr ducked in and unharnessed his pack without waking Owen. He wanted to collapse and grovel, but summoned the strength to breathe and hold himself up. He had never seen Owen with a beard. He had never seen Owen gaunt. Burr dropped at Owen's feet.

He tugged Owen's toe.

Owen rolled on his felt blanket, turning to face Burr and wiping away sleep with the base of his palm.

He looked at his father: backlit shoulders, a golem in grime and chalk, two streaks of mud across his brow. Owen reached out and took his father's hand.

Burr crawled to Owen's side. He swept back Owen's crisp curls and looked at the bad eye, no longer covered by an eye patch. He placed a firm hand on Owen's shoulder and then tilted his son's chin to the light, making sure this wasn't the inflamed mess the doctor had prepared him for. He squinted back tears.

—Thank God you're okay.

Owen sat up and embraced his father, not quite sure what he was seeing. Head on his father's shoulder, he caught sight of the pack in the corner and realized this was real.

Burr buried his cheek in his son's chest, then patted Owen's cheeks with his gravel-chalked hands.

They sat in silence, laughing and shaking their heads.

Owen hadn't spoken in weeks. He was only able to find one word:

—Dad?

Burr unlaced his boots and dumped out a fishbowl's worth of gravel. He filled his stainless steel canteen, handed it to Owen, and collapsed at his son's side.

—You're safe. We're safe.

They sat in silence until helicopter blades snapped the sky. The rotors whistled toward them, then away.

After a minute:

—You heard the shot? I think that was meant for me.

—What? What the fuck, Dad?

—I'm in some trouble. But we're fine, because you're fine.

T
hey sat together on a bench Owen had constructed from driftwood and blue jugs of sun-bleached plastic he'd collected from the black beach of Heðinsfjörður. If there was anything redeeming about the travesty of one of the most remote beaches in the world littered with ghost nets, bobs, and nurdles, it was how salt, sun, and grinding through the gyres had tumbled these plastics into colors faded richer than their machine-pressed brightness, now turquoise where once they were industrial blue, now coral where once fuel-can red. Owen's father looked the same, weathered and blanched, but with a glow amid the scratches.

Burr looked around the cave at Owen's tiny home.

—I don't think I brought anyone to your cave.

—It's more of a lean-to.

Burr's enthusiasm dropped.

—No, no. It's a cave.

Owen took his eye patch from the trekking pole. It was now so overstretched that it sagged across his brow.

—North Iceland was a hell of a landing spot. You know half the farmers in the country think you're the ghost of Odin.

With the lone trekking pole, eye patch, and battered suit, complete with gaiters stuffed and bound to his shins, Burr saw how his son could be mistaken for the ghost of a pagan god.

—That's not why they're hunting me. That sounds like another helicopter making a pass.

They listened to a chopper buzz the cliff and then circle back to the sea.

—That's not for you.

—Whatever you heard isn't true.

—I am positive that you're not a fugitive. You're not guilty of anything, not anything that would make helicopters chase you, at least. I, on the other hand—

—That's not in any way reassuring.

Burr wanted to impress Owen with his celebrity and daring, but he needed to comfort his son. He placed a hand on Owen's back.

—No, you're fine. Kurt didn't . . . die. He was severely hurt, however. He cracked his T-4.

—
He
didn't do it.
I
did it. How can I be even remotely fine?

—It's gonna be all right.

—No, it's not.

Burr spoke in a low, even voice:

—If they pressed charges, Kurt and Altberg would have to answer kidnapping charges of their own. There's also international jurisdiction involved, since this whole work was a process initiated in Berlin and executed through Basel, also encompassing the entirety of your flight to Iceland, I suppose. You running away and disappearing made the piece even more valuable. The actual event will get buried and forgotten, in the name of art—or commerce. You made Kurt a very rich man.

—I don't care about that. I doubt he does either.

—He sold one sculpture for twelve million dollars. You got nothing. In a sense, that's the settlement. Kurt even titled it
Settlement
. No one is after you. They're after me.

—What? Why?

—I burned down the Parthenon trying to find you.

—The Parthenon? In Athens?

—On the Acropolis. Athene's high-built hill itself. I threw a Molotov cocktail at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus.

—Why in the hell would you do that?

—It was the only choice. I was in Athens because that was all I had to go on. Since you've left I've, well, I've made quite a name for myself among activists.

—I leave for six months, and you become an anarchist?

—More or less. But we can talk about that later. You're alive! Not only alive, doing well. You don't know.

Burr was now whispering, exhausted, repeating “You don't know.”

—We should rest. The only thing we need to do is keep quiet and still. You did a great job of disguising the cave.

—Rest.

F
ather and son woke to a dense fog misting into the cave.

—I don't suppose you have a hot shower back there?

—Sure. Just push that rock on the left and the secret entrance opens.

—Aren't there hot springs?

—Not in this part of Iceland. Those are all in the nameless places near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

—I hiked through it! Just last week.

—You flew into Reykjavik?

—I think it was my last international flight.

—Because of the anarchism?

—I think they're calling it terrorism. Jean Baudrillard says they'll throw me in Guantanamo if they find me.

—What?

—He may have been kidding. He's a friend. We spoke together in Athens. During the Olympics. Before the riots. Well, I think the State Department is now calling them my riots. Hence Guantanamo.

—You're not kidding.

—No.

—Jesus, Dad. Seriously?

—I'm afraid—No. That's not true. I'm not afraid at all. I'm perfectly content to stay right here. The only trace I left was a flight record. And a few people have seen me in the north. I stopped at a croft, looking for you. But when's the last time you saw someone in this valley? I'm guessing I could live out the rest of my life and no one would make it up here.

Owen peeked out from under the tarp to see if he could spot any more helicopters.

—I met your girlfriend in Berlin.

Owen rubbed his brow and blinked.

—Dad, I'm a little weak. You've got to keep things slow.

—No rush. I'll unpack.

Burr unloaded all eighty-five liters on the floor opposite the bench. A white canister filled with at least ten gallons of water dwarfed Burr's two aluminum water bottles. Burr washed the grit from his hands and face.

—How did you carry that jug up here?

—I nearly fell when I tried to carry it all at once. Now I add to it a few liters at a time. What do you mean, you met my girlfriend? Stevie?

Burr unzipped the lid extender of his pack and handed a silver flask of whisky over his head.

—One and the same. At the Pergamon Altar. I've never met anyone like her.

—If what you said about Kurt's true, I'm going back to Berlin for her.

—You'll have to hurry.

Owen looked quizzically at his father.

—If Gaskin kept his word, she should already be at our place. Possibly even taking classes.

—He admitted her to Mission?

—As you get older, you lose the wonder of youth. And when you find even a flicker of that old light, you're very nearly brought to tears—not by the beauty of what you see, it's more selfish than that, but by the fact that you can still see beauty. You aren't this rheumy broken thing. You have the capacity for wonder and beauty and light and are not yet dead. Gerry heard that in my voice. He's heard it before. You try not to press a friend, because then it gets weepy real quick, but you hear it in his voice and you nod and you realize that we are all these perfect broken things, holding a thimbleful of light.

Owen nodded. They drank. Owen smiled.

—Or a Molotov cocktail.

Burr coughed.

—That actually happened. This guy comes running down the center aisle . . . Wait, let me back up. I'm giving a talk on Liminalism in
Scarface
—

—When did you get an ism?

—Baudrillard gave it to me. So Baudrillard's backstage. I'm at the Herodes Atticus at twilight, giving a talk on
Scarface
.

—
Scarface
?

—I don't know. It was on the TV at the hotel. I'm talking about how Tony Montana is great. How we need to refuse constraints of the binary. How anticapitalism is doomed so long as it remains nonliminal. The crowd is finally starting to laugh at my jokes and whoop and cheer and just be young, you know, have fun on this beautiful night in Athens. Everyone is feeling alive, maybe even a touch of wonder, definitely a sense of self-satisfaction veering on smugness because they're listening to an academic talk about Aristotle's law of noncontradiction when there are blue funnel glasses and sports just a stone's throw away. And then this guy in a black shirt and a mask comes running down the center aisle with a Molotov cocktail in his hands. He's not in a particular hurry, considering he's holding a bomb. He just sort of stands there, like he's delivering a pizza. Torchlight is flickering off the crowd. This thing's going to explode and take out the first three rows of my wonderful laughing crowd, so I throw it as far away from them as I can.

—Into the walls of the Odeon?

—I was hoping it would make it through one of those arched windows behind the stage, you know what I'm talking about?

—Yeah, I know those windows. But it didn't?

—Not so lucky. It explodes on the side of the wall. Glass shards, flame spittle, people screaming—everyone's fine, but the people who aren't sitting there totally stunned are vaulting over the top row and running up the slope of the Acropolis. And I'm more than a bit flustered. Then I see Baudrillard striding over to the podium, like he's going to calm everyone down. He adjusts the microphone, everyone is totally silent at this point, and he lifts his arms and says: “Go,” like Moses or something. So everyone runs toward the lights of the Parthenon, but the Greek riot police are waiting. They're wearing gas masks with respirators and thumping their shields with truncheons.

Spittle, respirators, truncheons
. Owen realized that all of his words, all of his sounds, came from his father.

—Someone throws a jag of rock, and you hear it thump off the shield. The police fire off tear gas. Missiles launch, and they start swinging clubs at the students clinging to their jackboots. I don't know. I've seen pictures since then, and I can't remember what I actually saw. Baudrillard and I ran down the southern slope and booked it for the airport. And that's how I got to Berlin.

—Where you found Stevie?

—I went on a talk show to send up a flare.

—Athens wasn't enough of a flare?

—You know, all of this could have been avoided if you would have just answered your fucking e-mail.

—I was indisposed. I'm sorry.

—Before then. I mean before then.

—I didn't have anything to tell you. I mean, what was I going to write? “Hey Dad, everything's great. I'm really making a difference in the world. Think this art thing is going to take.” You realize you're impossible to disappoint.