A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall Read Free Page A

looked at his feet.
    â€”I have no idea about your sport. All I know is that you can do anything.
    â€”Except art.
    â€”That’s not fair. I just mean that if anyone can overcome this much adversity . . .
    â€”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.
    â€”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.
    â€”I’ll work abroad and come back for the rest of my senior year later—several years later, if they let me.
    â€”They won’t.
    â€”Then I’ll have to adapt.
    â€”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.
    â€”Well, I guess we’ll see if I can really do anything.
    O wen 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