A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (5 page)

Burr let the words linger and hoped they'd gather weight in the silence.

T
hey were Division III, but Mission University's diving team took their practices seriously and quickly grew tired of their unofficial mascot zipping his boat over aerated water while they summoned enough confidence to turn a handstand into a back double. Owen's first boats, the smaller boats, were cute peripheral distractions that cut the tension of divers pushing the limits of their abilities.
Zebulon
, however, was louder than the bubbler and made it to the center of the plume, right under the ten-meter platform. After a freshman landed on Owen's kickboard and sprained her wrist, the head coach asked father and son to take their afternoons to the beach.

First Pfeiffer Beach, then Sand Dollar Beach, then the coves of Point Lobos, but there were never any other kids. The drive was the most enjoyable part of their beach trips, so they soon ventured farther afield to Zuma Beach and Point Dume. Burr only owned one pair of shorts, orange-sherbet corduroy, and wore them on their monthly outings to Zuma. Legs strong and tan, not yet varicosed and dead-fish blue. He sat on the southern outcrop in the shadow of rock climbers, correcting papers while Owen swam past the basking crowd. He was reviewing a dissertation on Nonnos the day Owen's rude engine cut the chatters.

While Burr edited from the rocks, Owen coiled the rubber leash around
Zebulon
's twin hulls, coupling boogie board and battery-devouring boat with a Velcro wrist bracelet.

Owen of outlier height, six years old, white-blond hair he certainly didn't inherit from his father, behind a kickboard and toy boat, scissor-kicking his mom's old swim fins due west. Beyond where the sun sets. To Caroline.

How many minutes wasted from when Burr first looked up and thought Owen was swimming out too far until even the thought of action arose?
Yes, I should definitely do something. I should do something before things get out of hand
. How much idle contemplation as the word
riptide
became real. Finally,
Help?
Then choking out,
help!
Finding knees strong enough to stand and stumble for the water. Now yelling,
Help!

Burr wasn't the first, not even the fifth, to respond. Those minutes of failing might still be won back. But the sting of that engine, a hornet fighting the wind that blows it out to sea, would always remain. On most days the wasping stayed in the background, but on some days the wasp dove straight for Burr's ear and he could hardly look at his son. Hard to bear, and harder to be rid of.

Wall of memory. Wave rising on the skin of the sea; misting away as it gathers and towers down; surging up-shore until it cuffs your waiting wrists with foam. Water slips through scooped fingers, no matter how tight you bowl them; first it's droplets, then it's driplets, then only whorls of brine in your fingertips and salt chains in the lines of your palm. When attention returns, saturating a memory that was finally dry and salting away, what then?

Swim for that floating remote control while your son drifts out to sea, because this gift was a quarter of your paycheck and who knows if you can replace that joystick without buying a whole new boat. Drift down the beach, showing no more concern than the rest of the Sunday crowd, biting your lip rather than answering anyone's question:
Where are the boy's parents?
If you weren't holding that neon-orange remote control, no one would be staring. Drop it. Pick it up. Yell to your bobbing son with the crowd . . . Pass the yells, the brave yells, on to others.

They have it under control.

There he is.

Then, get ready. This is the best part. Cave to the underemployed twenty-something sirs on the skiff. Wrench your hands in supplication even before they return your son to the shore. Volunteer your failings as a father, a single father. Nod and apologize to someone no older than one of your students as they hand you Caroline's old fins.

But Owen came back smiling. Boat and board in one hand, high fives for all the lifeguards. He marched through ovation, a son returned.

But not returned by you.

He didn't want to read the
Odyssey
that night. He grabbed an illustrated
Iliad
and announced that he was no longer a kid. From now on he would read by himself.

It took Burr a week to realize that reading had been the last thing they had left.

P
rofessor Burr asked a grad student to deliver the lecture on the
katabasis
and left campus early to take Owen to the beach. Owen had been sleeping off the trauma of his final procedure with the surgeon when Burr drove off for his morning seminar. By now, he would be awake and feeling restless. Burr hoped the trip to Zuma would show him that no one wanted to keep him packed away. He could even
stop out
if he wanted. If things went well, they could hash out a plan for 2004 and have him back at Stanford next year.

Burr opened the door and called for Owen.

Silence.

Empty
. A tumbleweed word, rolling, thirsty, thorned.
Empty
. And whenever
empty
, also
alone
. These words snagged Burr as he gripped the kitchen counter and read Owen's Post-it farewell. He peeled off the note and thumbed through the rest of the yellow pad in search of the real note, the reluctant good-bye from his son that must be here somewhere.

He called upstairs again. The gravity of the house had changed, as if he'd come home to find half of his possessions packed up and moved away. He scanned the living room, taking inventory of chairs and lamps as if he'd been robbed. Had to remind himself that each bare patch of wall had always been empty, never held a mirror, never held a painting. Some emptiness was always there.

Burr stumbled over a stack of books on the floor of his study. Spines bruised and hyperextended, dust covers unflapped and tore as the column crumbled and Burr took a slipping step over the rubble. With a thick thumb he undented the corners, rejacketed the hardbacks and replaced them on the shelf, leaving a two-book gap where his Loeb
Odyssey
should have been, which was fine, but he could have asked.

After surrendering to the scooped-out mitt of his leather chair, Burr toggled through a twelve-disc carousel. He gritted his teeth and pressed the small remote. Each CD sounded hollow. Bill Evans, Getz/Gilberto, Miles, Mingus, Weather Report, Brubeck. All empty.

He thumped his knee with a rolled-up magazine. Then back to the Post-it stuck to his left index finger:

           
DAD
,

                 
I'm going to Europe to find out which half of my life I'm about to waste. After I figure this out, we can talk about graduating
.

               
~Owen

He peeled the note and pressed it into the molding of the doorframe, above pencil marks of Owen's height, taller than his father at eleven, six-foot-eight at age fifteen, but still standing on tiptoes, trying to get that extra quarter inch.

Raising Owen had taught Burr the beauty of being marginal. The vain side of any father wants to be Atticus Finch, but what could be worse for a boy than a father impossible to outgrow? Better to let your son know he's the center of your life and you are one of many moons. But this wasn't that. This was Owen telling him he was irrelevant. And, when he was honest with himself, it pissed him off.

The Volvo ground into gear and skidded into the street. The Burrs lived exactly halfway between the airports, but always flew from LAX. He figured today would be no different. But there was no point to any of this if he couldn't beat the pretraffic traffic and clear Ventura in the next half hour.

He rolled through a red light. In front of his neighbors and with kids walking home from school, Burr ran a red light and then another. Not orangish-red. Burr ran through lamps minutes hot. He glanced at the windshield and read his inspection sticker in reverse. It had lapsed in late '03. He almost wanted an officer to lead him away in handcuffs, just for the moment of concern when a door would be opened for him and he'd be pushed in the back with a “Watch your head.”

Traffic hit long before Ventura, shattering the glassy calm of Rincon and Solimar. He was caught in a static mass and had to suffer the sight of frontage-road drivers whizzing away north and south, making him another nameless roof on Highway 101, a die-cast toy for the news helicopters to beam. He peeked over his shoulder to see if there was any way he could get right and roll down the embankment to the frontage road. A highway patrol car was parked half a mile ahead, blocking his escape.

Cars continued to rush by on the one-lane road to his left and Harbor Boulevard to his right. He was stuck. The empty space at the middle of two lines; the trapped zero in the 101.

By Ventura proper, people were thumbing silver buttons and sliding transmissions to neutral or even park. He fiddled with the gearshift and looked at the analog clock on his rubber dashboard, then at the yellow arrow of In-N-Out, pointing away from the highway to a trafficless side street where families shared French fries on concrete tables.

Traffic crumpled behind him. Burr found second gear, only to round a curve and discover thousands of red taillights. Several of his fellow motorists had given up: one leaned against the window and grinned into her cell phone; one propped a paperback on the steering wheel; one yelled at his windshield and thrust a finger at the dark-tinted windows of a pickup truck rattling license plate frames with its bass. Burr, pinned against cement sclerosis, could do nothing but redden the shadow of the overpass.

The cloverleaf, a maze of misdirection, spun traffic to all four compass points—but not the fifth, the omphalos, the only defined point of a compass, the director of direction.

He tried the radio. NPR helped. But then they started asking for money, not understanding that even though he had tenure, he had no savings account. He squirmed.

He depressed the clutch for second, then the brake lights washed back over him and he came to a full stop. A gash of metal, which he took to be a discarded fender, rocked with the wind, tickling the cement barrier and catching the setting sun.
Fire, the process we mistake for a thing. Traffic, the thing we mistake for a process
.

He lurched in his lane then aimed straight for the front tire of a bumper-hugging Infinity. The driver clucked his pointer finger. At that moment, Burr's Volvo could have been a tanker. Burr was moving right. And then right and right again, over the rumble strip, straddling highway buttons and whistling the raked asphalt.

Down the spiral ramp he drove. Thrown from the great clog and breezing past telephone poles and cypress-tree fences, green lights yellowing in his wake. Only when he was nearing Highway 1 on the two-lane road through the canyons did he realize that this was the pass for Point Dume, for Zuma.

He had stayed away for fifteen years, knowing that what he found would be bolted in tighter than the yellow bollards of the car park. Now he parked, fender inches from the trailhead.

He unlaced his boots, kicked off his socks, and walked tenderly over loose gravel to the sand below. His feet were pale, frozen, senseless things that molded to the rock bits. The beach was deserted except for a lineup of surfers.

The ocean breathed up and sneezed down on the shore. Windswept sand soon anchored the cuffs of his trousers. He looked at the sky, a washed peach smear where the sun snuffed into the thick. A steady salt-wind carried him back to the safety of his car.

He sat on the hood of the Volvo, tired arches of his pale feet on the hard plastic bumper. A young woman knocking water from her ear recognized him from campus and nodded. She had one of the few spaces. She asked him how he'd ended up at a trailhead two and a half hours from Mission.

—Bested by traffic, I'm afraid. I was headed to LAX. If there's any way I could borrow your phone, I might be able to justify this excursus as a shortcut.

She coiled the leash around the tail fins of her surfboard and handed Burr a phone.

He called LAX Terminal Services and pawed through an automated directory while she folded her wetsuit, snapped it into a Rubbermaid bin, and poured a plastic jug of water over her head.

Burr repeatedly apologized for eating up her minutes. An agent finally told him that without a court order, there was no way to access the manifests of every flight out of LAX with connections to Europe.

Thanks for that, Owen. No flight number. No airline. Not even the qualifier
mainland
. Just
Europe
.

Burr thanked the student profusely and gave her twenty dollars for the minutes, striving to make the gesture appear breezy and avuncular rather than—what's the term—sketchy.

—Wait. Here. I want you to have this.

That doesn't sound any better
.

Burr opened his trunk and grabbed a book from the two dozen in a cardboard box. She held it with the hem of her beach towel, looked at her friends lashing the boards on the roof rack, and thanked him with a squint that asked if this was going to be on the final.

As they drove away, Burr watched planes rattle the skies westward, then loop around and trace the shore. He wondered if he was supposed to infer some hidden meaning in “Europe.” When Owen was eight, Burr had sent him a postcard from Stonehenge reading “The World's Meeting Spot”—but the chances of Owen recalling that were slim.

Before sunset, Burr wound back to Mission along Highway 1. The narrow meander to Big Sur took lives every year, so he never chanced it after dark. The mountains were just as deadly as the cliffs. Two copies of his book slid across the backseat. On sharp turns he heard the box shift in the trunk.

Three years ago Burr had finished his grand dictionary of
hapax legomena
, words occurring only once in the written record of an ancient language. The professor assured his university press that the standard library-bound hardcover run of a thousand copies would be woefully insufficient. They bought his pitch and doubled the run to two thousand, assuring him the book would be everywhere. And everywhere it was.