A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall by Will Chancellor

him, but had put continental philosophy on hold to learn how to paint.
    His work was inspired, but the search for relevant texts was proving to be fruitless. In all of recorded history, only two partial inscriptions supported his reading of Heraclitus and the Eleatics.
    Rather than switch to anthropology or wait on the archaeologists to dig up something to analyze, he grew increasingly creative with his source material until his work hit almost New Age levels of mysto . Fellow department members, nonplussed at the camaraderie between Burr and Mission University’s elect, thought he was on drugs—and probably supplying them to senior faculty.
    A new continent began to emerge in 1982. It was unexpected but welcome, like a new Hawaiian island. As this landmass burped from the deep, they traded booze and fritters for macrobiotic staples. They danced through their junior apartment as her belly grew. He sang the only song about Odysseus he knew, “Beyond the Sea,” with a real longing for her, even though she was still there. She wove through the second verse like Penelope, thinking of the globe-trotting that would accompany his unfinished, but surely forthcoming, book Liminality . Whenever he translated the song into Greek—. . . —which repeatedly failed to impress her, she countered with Charles Trenet’s original, “La Mer.” Violins and harps and floating, until the instruments fell.
    The map hissed orange and began to singe. It was easy for Burr to dismiss the dark edges as something fundamentally unrelated to a fire, something reversible that he could fan away, clap out, or smother, something they could fix together, until the edges crackled in flame.
    On August 21, 1982, their map was lost in fire.
    And there’s not much to say about what happened next.
    Islands became ashes.
    Owen took a life before he took a breath.
    He very nearly took two lives. His father bobbed between drowning and drowned. Their map was the Logos that held his world from flying apart. When it burned, every thought broke to atoms and jittered into the sky.
    What was left of Burr was driftwood, silvered still, empty. Each morning saw a lifeless husk wash up on the floor near his bed. He rolled against the jagged bed frame, rolled back until his head wedged against the nightstand and his body curled up fetal. Lifted up, dashed down, bobbing and unable to decide if it was yet time to sink. There is nothing more heroic than the glowing eyes of a vibrant soul inside a body that has given up, the marathon runner who crawls the final mile. Burr was the opposite: dead eyes in a capable body, or a body formerly capable and rapidly depleting. Water was too sweet to drink; lips to throat to lungs parched and cracked. Even when inhaling, his chest seemed to cave in. When he tasted anything, it was ash.
    He surfaced briefly to change a diaper, warm a bottle, drink a bottle. He hung a mobile over Owen’s crib. He called it a marionette, but it was really a Christmas ornament on a string. Burr duct-taped it to the ceiling, but every week it fell, strings dropped and tangled in the bends of the marionette’s knees. In dreams, Burr looked around and found knots and snags in his own joints, tripping up each step, each step a taut and tangled fall. Waking, he couldn’t even look his newborn son in the eyes for fear of being pulled out of his loss. Her loss.
    He initially refused help. Threw both telephones in wicker wastebaskets because recounting what had happened once, just once, shattered a day, and there were at least fifty people who needed to be kept in the loop. An elderly neighbor, widow of a cosmologist, came through the garage door and announced that she was taking over. Owen’s eyes widened when he saw her, and his screaming stopped.
    By the time Burr returned to work, the academic articles written the prior year were just hitting the press. He was taken to task in journals for his prior gambols and