A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall Read online

  —That’s not an option. You’ll only have a few months to go from the time your prosthesis is ready until commencement.

  —I’m sure as hell not going to have a glass eye.

  —The medical literature says the best ocular prostheses are acrylic.

  —I’m not getting an artificial eye.

  —Well, what? You’re just going to wear an eye patch forever?

  —Yes.

  —We can talk about it while you recover.

  —There’s nothing to talk about. Have you ever seen someone with a fake eye? It’s uncanny. People can’t help but examine. The best-case scenario is no one noticing. Which is another way of saying that I would be lying to everyone. No. I had an eye. Now I have an eye patch.

  —It’s just so . . . I don’t know . . . cartoonish.

  —James Joyce wore an eye patch.

  —Not by choice! These options weren’t available to him.

  —I can’t do anything about that. And you’re not helping.

  —If nothing else, you’ll need a prosthesis to get back in the water. I’m sure Coach Rudić will want you to train your replacement in Colorado Springs and travel with the team to Athens. Who knows, you may even be able to contribute in certain situations.

  —Like total darkness? In-the-land-of-the-blind type of thing? I’d just be a distraction. You know what they call a particularly effective distraction?

  —What?

  —A mascot.

  Owen’s father withered. He had no response. He looked at his feet.

  —I have no idea about your sport. All I know is that you can do anything.

  —Except art.

  —That’s not fair. I just mean that if anyone can overcome this much adversity . . .

  —This is not a comeback story, Dad. And I refuse to become an ex-athlete, especially at twenty-one. I’m not going to sit on a bench in street clothes, turn and wave graciously to a crowd shaking their heads at what a pity this all is. I’m traveling with whatever’s left of the insurance money.

  —What insurance money? Your grandfather’s estate is all tied up in maintenance on this house, and there’s not more than a thousand dollars left from the other settlement.

  —I’ll work abroad and come back for the rest of my senior year later—several years later, if they let me.

  —They won’t.

  —Then I’ll have to adapt.

  —Adapt? You have no idea what kind of world it is out there. The barbarians are at the gates! You’re talking about serious engagement with the real world, but unfortunately you carry an academic’s passport. Have you been in the company of Vandals? You can visit, but to think you can adapt is just too . . . Lamarckian.

  —Well, I guess we’ll see if I can really do anything.

  Owen turned on the bathroom light. Pale blue chlorine—once from his pores, now from bleach on the tile—flared his nostrils. He gripped the cold slab counter, thick enough for a real grip, and faced the mirror. After a few confidence breaths, the same breaths he took each morning before leaping through the morning steam and crashing into the practice pool elbows-first, Owen unhooked the metal clips and unrolled the bandage around his head. The gauze pad over his left eye was a washed pink, brick red at the edges; Owen picked at the bottom, using his thumbnail as a trowel.

  He braced for the tug of coagulated blood, but at his first prod the pad fell limply into the sink. Instead of a black crusted mess, Owen found a little yellow, a little blue, and a drooping—as if too much eyelid had grown in his sleep. Without thinking, he closed his right eye to compare. He would never see his right eyelid again.

  That was something.

  The water scalded Owen’s hands. He clutched his fists, fanning out the burn. Then cold. He tilted his head and took in a side-mouthful of water, washing a Vicodin into the walls of a throat stripped raw by intubation. He set one bottle and one tube by the sink, unthreaded the cap of the bottle, and shot a saline spray into his left upper lid. It surprised more than hurt, like the puff of a glaucoma test. He put the bottle aside and uncapped the antibiotic gel. Holding his eyelids apart, Owen found something softer than he had expected. Muscle and vasculature leapt forward to fill the vacuum, heaping pillow-flesh hiding sutures that were never going to heal.

  Fuck.

  In pre-op the surgeon had explained that if his eye didn’t improve, they would be attaching the ocular muscles to a Ping-Pong ball—not “something the size of a Ping-Pong ball.” Was the surgeon serious? Owen had been too drugged to ask. Now he unspooled a ribbon of gel into his lower lid, fluttering his eye instinctively and looking away too fast. A jolt rang the center of his skull, and a world-altering headache was born. Each peal of the bell tightened his temples but made everything else expand. How had people done this before painkillers? Maybe they hadn’t. If they hadn’t, maybe he shouldn’t.

  He dug through his water polo bag for an eye patch. The elastic band bit into his brow. Stretching it did nothing.

  Owen crumbled onto his bed like a tower toppled by ropes and horses. He shaded his eye with his arm. It had been three years, but Owen still saw the ink from his tattoo bleeding and leaving five interlocking rings on his forehead: red, green, black, yellow, blue. Fucking tattoo. Owen read a few lines of Burton. His saccade was off. The gears ground every time he came to the end of a line, jarring, like hitting the right margin on a typewriter during a breathless thought. He took another painkiller before drifting off with the book open on his chest. He woke. Nothing. Read the same sentences again, put the book on the nightstand, and fell out for days.

  Three months passed with no improvement in Owen’s vision. On the few occasions he tested it, his eye, if you could still call it that, took a soft impression of light. He was aware of light, as a magnet is aware when the wrong pole enters its field. He turned from the sun with the same gentle but steady repulsion. Burr agreed at last that it was time to move on, and drove him to the clinic for the final outpatient procedure.

  Four days after his second surgery, in his undersize bed, Owen woke with resolve. He glanced to his clock, hoping for a single digit. A six, an eight, even 9:59 would do. One. The wrong single digit. But it explained the light. Thin winter blue through empty air, not even a dust mote dancing. Or possibly it was just because he needed his left eye to get the oblique angle. He slowly rotated his head, rolling into the thick of a radiating headache. He swallowed a painkiller and went outside for air.

  All it took was a nudge of the aluminum frame to open the screen door, stained with salt-wind and hinge-sprung. The sharp dry squeak, a call to the gulls. An onshore breeze held the door closed after Owen passed through.

  If he would be going anywhere, this sand would have to go with him.

  Owen staggered down the cliff behind his house and over the shale, pooled by the low tide. He crabbed along the rocks until he found his familiar ledge. Leaving his sandals behind, he leapt to the wet sand.

  Large dark grains, lifted and crushed by winter’s northern swell, swallowed his toes. At the tidemark Owen poured a cupped hand of ocean onto his brittle yellow hair. A kayaker in the kelp forest, beyond masses of water crumbling at the point, waved a yellow paddle. Owen filled an empty mason jar with dark pumice sand.

  And pumice from the shore, the dry porous stone of the sea.

  He was used to finding Athene here. Ah-tee-nay, as Owen pronounced it, to his father’s chagrin. She was always around these rocks. Whenever he jumped from the rocks into the cold Pacific, he resurfaced to find her waiting. When she was present, Owen remained submerged to the neck, gripping the rocks to resist the current. She advanced his thoughts farther and along routes that he would not otherwise think of exploring. Dispersed colors condensed until everything cast a shadow of ultramarine. When she was present, everything peripheral vanished. She absorbed it all into her hyperchromatic blue.

  That one shade was the text of his private religion. First he saw the color and then he gave it a face and a name. But it was the color
that mattered. He met the color here, and it stayed with him for days.

  It took Owen years to realize that this belief invited ridicule. In his household, the name Athena, the name Zeus, the name Apollo, were far more common than the name God. When he was very young, his religion had just been a way of matching strange colors to all the stuff his dad was going on and on about. At seven, he thought the gods were something his peers knew existed—because they too knew the names—but couldn’t comprehend, like algebra. At ten, he conceded that faith in the Greek gods would be preposterous, but faith was never the issue. His religion was inductive, grounded exclusively in colors he routinely saw, all with very consistent frequencies. At thirteen, he had faith that the rest of the ancient gods existed, even though he had only seen four. And, yes, he knew he was ridiculous to believe in gods who were extinct.

  Respecting his absurd belief was too much to ask of both his peers and their parents. Adults who caught a whiff of Owen’s strange private world thought him fair game because of all his natural advantages. They joked in carpools. They joked in the stands. When his homeroom teacher presented his father with the brewing scandal of Owen qua pagan at third-grade parent-teacher conferences, Burr’s only response was “Of course he’s being ironical. I think we should applaud his sense of humor and knowledge of history.” Owen would never volunteer his idiosyncratic faith to his father, and Burr never raised the issue. Their conversations were limited to calligraphy, Latin, and the injunction to “be a leader, not a follower.”

  Still. There was a moment every few days when the light would change, and Owen felt the presence of divinity. Most of his days were steeped in one of these hues, the shades that shouted for a name.

  As far as pantheons go, the gods in Owen’s world remained surprisingly few. His palette held four distinct colors—each unique to a divinity, never blended, never diluted, never confused. He experienced one of four precise chromatic shifts. Each bias would last for days. After a decade of collecting paint cards from Home Depot, memorizing a hefty portion of the Pantone scale, writing to everyone from entomologists to geologists to a pen pal in Uttar Pradesh, he had found the conventional, albeit esoteric, names for these colors: peridot, gamboge, carmine, and ultramarine.

  But even after that exhaustive chase, the names he’d invented for the colors were the ones he trusted. And ultramarine was Athene.

  Athene had watched over his mother, more or less approved of his father, and was the blue mist that surrounded and protected Owen. Before the accident, she raised him above every decision, giving him a privileged topsight.

  Now he couldn’t see beyond immediate impediments, and every decision dwarfed him. This nameless world was colorless, collapsed.

  The old colors had stained him for days. Nothing could wash one away; it reflected deep into the empty space of his cells. He likened it to a suntan: the light came in, and his body responded. But he kept the experience to himself as long as he could. At age eight he’d watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and learned that words can only hurt you when someone’s questioning your mental health.

  It’s tempting to say that Owen was an empty vessel waiting for whatever he chose to call divinity to fill him with heightened thoughts. But no. Light has no volume, and he was no vessel. He was not filled. Light can exert pressure, however. It can lift. And in these washed moments, Owen was lifted to a different height. His body was strengthened, engrafted new. His hands stronger and wiser, his vision clearer.

  Christmas 1992 he told his father about it. And that’s when the psychoanalysis started.

  Owen’s first therapist was Lacanian. Why Lacanian? His father called psychotherapy “palliative care in drag,” but thought there was real value in learning about Jacques Lacan, the subject of half the dissertations being defended at Mission University. When Burr examined his darker motives, he feared that he was using his son to take lecture notes.

  They had trouble locating a Lacanian analyst at all, then trouble finding one willing to take on a preadolescent. Santa Cruz had the man for the job.

  In his first session, Owen told his therapist about one of the Gods.

  —A flash of peridot at sunset means that Hermes is there. The other colors happen gradually, like the shadow on a sundial. Hermes is like a bomb blast that happens so quickly the walls bend like saw blades and snap back with a warbling like this: wa wa wa waaah.

  —What color is peridot exactly?

  —It’s exactly peridot. That’s the whole point. It’s a grassy green. Peridot.

  —Continue.

  —The peridot days are like sculpture or buildings. Like when I see a building in an architecture book, I can put thoughts inside my mental map of the building. Everything fits. But I’m not sure what fits with what; whether the idea comes first or the building. I just sort of let it happen.

  —Do you know what a metaphor is?

  Owen couldn’t brook condescension even when he didn’t know the answer. He was silent, snarling in the way that only a ten-year-old can snarl.

  —Are you using the peridot as a metaphor for your feelings?

  —No.

  —Would you say you are perturbed during these peridot days?

  —No. Everything falls into place. It settles. I’m not perturbed.

  —Is today one of the peridot days?

  —Yes.

  —Does this remit? I mean, do you ever have days or parts of days that are not peridot?

  —There are other colors too. But once the color starts, it stays that way for a few days.

  —What stays that way?

  —Everything shifts slightly.

  —Do you want to draw this for me? I have several green markers. I’m not sure if peridot is in there. But you can probably make do.

  Owen couldn’t hide his reaction to the therapist’s condescension. He might only be ten, but he knew what remit meant, and he didn’t want to draw.

  —I’m going to wait out front for my dad.

  —It’s that I’m treating you like a child, isn’t it? I invite all my patients to draw, to play, to explore. Your Hermes is fascinating. Let’s follow him and see where he goes.

  Owen went out the front door and waited in the sun.

  Professor Burr revealed to Owen several years later that this first therapist considered Owen actively psychotic and wrote out a prescription for chlorpromazine. He thought Owen was in severe danger of becoming “stuck there,” and advised a medicated future in order to manage these delusions.

  That single experience was enough psychiatry for the Burrs. Mission School District, however, insisted that Owen continue to seek professional help. They recommended a psychologist of mixed lineage who was loosely Adlerian. He had succeeded with several troubled children. Because the phrase troubled child had enough potency to pluck a talented athlete from the Olympic Development Program, Owen agreed to a full year of sessions.

  The first three months were a standoff. The therapist didn’t hide the fact that he viewed religiosity—any religiosity, much less idiopathic religiosity—as neurosis. He told Owen that Hermes, a name appearing over and over in the previous analyst’s patient notes, was certainly an attempt to rationalize the absence of his mother—which certainly wasn’t his fault.

  Every session was the same: “Talk to me about your mother. Do you feel her death was in any way your fault? What do you associate with mothers? What do you associate with women? Do you know what labor is?” Throughout therapy, Owen refused to say a word.

  On the day he knew would be his last session, as a Parthian shot, Owen told the therapist about the gamboge days, the days of Apollo. How time slowed, nearly stopped, and allowed him to realize his visions. How the color pulled ideas together in a thick resinous current. How he shot far ahead and found the mark.

  The Adlerian refused to let go of the idea that Owen was being metaphorical. The therapist wouldn’t even go so far as to call gamboge a mistaken belief. Owen couldn’t get into his story without the therapist
insisting that they talk about his relationship to his mother and father. That conversation wasn’t going to happen. After ten minutes of Owen refusing to answer direct questions, the therapist offered an astute analysis of the impasse.

  —I ask you about your parents and you stonewall me. Instead you talk about gods as if they’re real. Maybe you’re putting me on. Either way, it’s not a problem. I think you’re a really interesting young man, Owen. What you need, and what I’m going to tell your father that you need, is a good Jungian.

  They never found the Jungian, which, as Owen would later reflect, was probably a shame. And thus ended Owen’s brief experience with psychotherapy. His father convinced a colleague in the Psych Department to sign any paperwork from the school district. A taboo concerning psychology fell over the Burr house.

  As a sophomore at Stanford, Owen broke the taboo by registering for Professor Philip Zimbardo’s survey course. To pass, each student was required to participate in fifteen hours of grad student experimentation. The sign-up form for paranormal psychology was at the top of the bulletin board in the hallway outside the auditorium. He scheduled himself for the maximum of three hours. It was just enough time for him to tell the story of Ares.

  The psych grad students, in part due to the pioneering work of Zimbardo, typically designed observational experiments that posed little risk of warping the precious minds of their subjects. Gone were the days of getting psych credit for MKUltra projects at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. Gone were the days of Ken Kesey and Perry Lane. These were the days of a microphone, a tape recorder, and the invitation to tell your story. Owen pulled up a chair in the windowless room and hit record.

  “Ares is the heaviest of the Gods to bear. His color is carmine. The word itself is as violent and beautiful as days under this influence. It comes on slowly, like mist filling a thimble. The effect lasts only a few hours, whereas the other light lasts for days. Ares only comes for big games—and at the higher levels, he comes for other people too.