2
THE SUN ON the first day of the section-leader camping trip with Big Eric is a shiny white smear in the center of a white sky. There’s four of us: me, Zach from the altos, Little Eric from the second sopranos, and Big Eric. We hike for hours that first day and then find a rock pool to swim in at some distance from the trail. We decide to camp here and pitch our tent, first. Then we take off our clothes, Big Eric first, and he removes all of his and stands, looking at us, waiting. Swimming nude, he says, is one of God’s greatest gifts to us.
Zach shrugs. I like it. His clothes come off, then Little Eric, then me.
Big Eric takes out his camera then.
Krick. The camera shutter flicks open-shut.
Little Eric perches on the edge of the rock pool, sylphlike, naked. His blond wavy hair frames his profile, an elegant twelve-year-old Swede. Big Eric holds his camera across his broad hairy chest. He aims at Little Eric and shoots. Krick. Slower, that time, his finger lingers at the sight in the frame. Zach and I stand to the side, crouch occasionally in a pool here at the stream, naked also, the summer air like a wet towel on my back.
That’s great, he says to Little Eric. You look like a faun.
I sink myself under the water and expel the air from my lungs to make myself heavy, to fall quickly to the bottom of the deep pool. It’s a diver’s trick my oceanographer father taught me. I keep enough air so I can lie flat on the smooth stones of the bottom and look up, through the glossy, pearled surface of the water, to the sky.
The currents spill softly around me. The water has the milky freshwater taste of having come through granite, which is why it is so clear here. The sun above turns flat and silver like a dropped coin.
I stand and shove and a dolphin kick brings me to the surface, where I gasp. Little Eric and Big Eric continue. Click. I dive down again, drifting.
Zach punctures the pool in a jackknife and water careens in sheets. I lift my head from the water to see the Erics disturbed. Little Eric is laughing, and Big Eric says, Don’t you worry, You’re next.
Later, we build a fire and cook dinners wrapped in tinfoil: hot dogs, potatoes, corn on the cob. I am sunburned again and Zach rubs a lotion on my back for me. There is a quiet in which I pretend I don’t know what all of this means, Big Eric’s talks on the drive up here about libertarianism, nudism, child rights. And then I don’t pretend. The mosquito-screen zipper sizzles shut.
In the tent at night his body is huge. Covered in hair. His penis looks comical, enormous, a cartoon. His age renders him like another gender, or a species apart from us. Our bodies are small, bones are small. Of the three of us boys, I am the only one with a little bit of hair swirled at the base of my penis. I feel half him, half them. Zach and Little Eric reach out fingers toward me, and touch the hair.
In the morning the sky lights an hour before the sun shows and we wash in the pool with Dr. Bronner’s, check our food for raccoon assaults, make a fast breakfast. Big Eric makes coffee and I ask for some. At some point I remember: the Erics huddled in a sleeping bag, like hideously mismatched twins. Zach and I. And then a switch, Little Eric slipping inside with me, Zach gone over. I didn’t think I would like kissing so much, Little Eric giggles.
And then the trees, the prismatic air presses on everything that needs it here on the earth, the sun fires itself on the stream and spreads light through the underbrush where we are camped, spangling our faces. Vertigo. The night before scatters away. I press the hot coffee to my face. I look at my face in his shaving mirror and don’t recognize myself. My hair is streaking from the sun. My pupils are huge. I want to say, Take me apart. Leave me here for dead, if you can.
Zach gets out of the tent and stands in front of me and when I meet his eyes he winks. He puts a finger on my lips and smiles. Hey, he says. Nice tan.
Too bad we can’t hike nude, Big Eric says to me, as he stands, his camera in hand. Zrrick. The hideous slide forward of film. He slides into his shorts and shirt reluctantly.
3
JULY. TWO WEEKS before camp, I am at Peter’s house watching television. His mother and father are gone to work. He lives in South Portland, next door to my town, Cape Elizabeth, the town of a rival swim team. We rode our bikes to the beach this morning and ran in the ocean with his dog, Peg, for hours. Now we are sunburned. I am brown and red like a rose cane and when I pull down my shorts I see a band of white skin that sits there around my hips like reflected light. Peter is red all over and now lies on the couch, covered in Milk of Magnesia that his mother applied before leaving. We are watching television now. I want to tell him, to warn him not to be alone with Big Eric. What that means. But I don’t.
Later, the sun sets. We wrestle on the couch. My mother is coming to pick me up, as I can’t ride my bicycle home in the dark. I have Peter trapped on the couch, my elbow across his chest, as he jabs his knees into my ribs repeatedly. His mother is in the kitchen, his father is still not home. I want to kiss him. I want to not want to kiss him. His face is red from laughing and his sunburn. As I pound his chest a last time, I tell myself, Not possible. When I finally let him up I move to the other side of the couch and we catch our breaths. You suck, he says, laughing. You suck so bad. I slap his hot face and he laughs harder and I pin him back to the couch again.
I leave without telling him, afraid all the way back home in my mother’s car that it leaks out of me, this desire I have, like the fungi that grow in Peter’s yard, puffing out little clouds when you crunch them with your feet.
You have freckles, my mother says at home. Angel kisses. They sure love you a lot.
In the bathroom I kick off my swimsuit from where I lie on my sunburned back against the cool tiles of the floor, One, two, three. The door is closed and locked and after a while my mother knocks. Aphias. Open the door.
I say nothing because that is what nothing says. I am nothing, a O, an outline around a hole.
Aphias. You are worrying me. Dinner’s going to be ready soon. If you aren’t downstairs for it, I’m going to call your grandfather and father to come and get you.
Time passes. Eventually, something passes through me and I get up and pull on my suit. I close the bathroom door behind me.
It’s still daylight and I find my mother in the yard. Hey there, she says. She is squatting over a plant. Poppies, she says. After they bloom, they die back. You can’t see them. I run a finger over the fuzzy leaves, the yard-long stems. Now I know what I want to be when I grow up.
The difference between a remainder and a reminder is an A, which stands for Aphias, my name, and the letter slips in and out like a cartridge in a rifle.
4
CAMP BEGINS. FOR two weeks we rehearse twice a day, before and after lunch. Immediately after lunch is a play period of ninety minutes, including a supervised swim. The morning rehearsals are for memorization and pronunciation, lectures on the meanings of the words. The afternoon is run-throughs and music. Our fall program is in the majority sung in Latin and Italian.
I am the designated cabin leader of Cabin 2, bed checker, referee. The first night arrives damply. We unroll sleeping bags across skinny mattresses and change into long T-shirts down to our knees. I move through the cabin, touching each mattress with my finger, saying each boy’s name as I go. Across the yard, down the hill, the other cabin glows, light pours out of it, and the moths and mosquitoes that dive in it are like fairies, holding long glowing trains. Through the tall grass, fireflies flash and in the distance, the lights of far-off cabins ring the lake’s edge. Big Eric is down in the first cabin, and even though it is minutes past lights-out, the boys sit in a group in the main area, naked or in their underwear. Big Eric, whenever possible, preaches to us the virtues of nudism. Our swim hour is clothing-optional. Today, the first day, I wore a T-shirt in the water, like the two fat boys, Jim and Paul.
The bed check done, I turn off the lights. Around me in the dark the other boys turn in their beds. A few are instantly asleep. I haul myself up into my bunk. In the bunk benea
th me is yet another Eric, Eric B., as he is called, for further clarity, with all the Erics around. He whispers, Fee?
I stick my head over the edge to see him. Where Little Eric is pretty, this one is handsome. You can see the man coming on in him, like the change of a werewolf, except better. What are they doing, he asks.
Telling stories, it looks like, I say. First cabin is like a cabin of brothers, blond, Scandinavian, mild, clean-limbed. Peter is down there and I have not been able to concentrate since finding out. I want to pretend to Eric B. below me that we are just in the woods at a normal summer camp, but as I make out the trace of his eyes in the dark, I can see this will not happen.
Down the hill, the light stays on. When it goes off, I slip out of my bunk, pull on a pair of shorts, and shrug out the door. I have in my mind the idea that I need to make this end, that there should never be another place like this. I sit down on the dock instead, watch the lake heave in the dark. The waves there seem like a mockery of the ocean. The stars look fake. I sit like this until Peter finds me.
He sits down beside me. He leans against my shoulder, and I can feel the sunburn off his cheek. I make room and he slips against me. I don’t ask him why he is crying and when he stops, why he’s stopped.
He pulls his head off my shoulder and spits into the water. He lights a cigarette he has had hidden in his hand, and drops the match into the lake, where it sizzles when it lands. We watch the match float in the faint dark together.
5
YOU WERE THERE, he says. The night it happened you were there.
I was on the dock, I say. You came and found me.
You were there.
Wood-plank floors, dark like molasses, cool to the touch like a lake rock passed to you by someone who held it briefly. Screened windows run the length of this cabin. The low dark ceiling, almost invisible, registers on the mind more as a color and a shade both, than as a roof.
Rehearsals here go long. In the stillness between phrases, we save our voices. Some young sopranos, drunk on high notes, shrill and squeal when away from the room, or sing recklessly their favorite songs. I have practiced writing on my sheet music without looking at it, so as to communicate with Peter, who sits next to me. His pale hair blows up off his head, as if his real mother were a dandelion gone to seed. A few times, at night in my bunk, I find one of his hairs in my bed, left from him sitting there, and I run it through my teeth.
How do you mean, I write.
You were there. He points his pen to it again, what he just wrote. The gesture raises an eye from Big Eric, in the front. I look away.
You need a break, Eric says from the front. I won’t keep you here when you all want to be outside right now. Go and take a forty-minute break and be back here to finish. I want full attention for the Kyrie.
The music we are singing has been sung for hundreds of years by boys. I wonder if God expects to hear it rising off the earth, like the bloom of a perennial flower. Or if it is a standing challenge, for us to come together and sing it for Him. Eric tells us, in the old days, of the castrati, the elite Italian choristers who gelded themselves to keep their high clear voices. Some boys hold their crotches when the story is told, but I understand. I could want it that badly, to keep a voice.
Peter walks out at the break first and heads to a large rock out in the center of a field between the rehearsal hall and the canteen. At night the fireflies fill this field with sparks, as if it were ready to burn. Now, during the day, the thick grass is full of Queen Anne’s lace and daisies and a little red flower like a cut knot of red thread that my mother calls wild-fire. The rock is enormous, left behind thousands of years ago by a glacier, and a slim white seam runs diagonally through the porous gray granite. Smooth dents in a row lead to the top and Peter climbs them quickly. Sitting up there, Peter looks off to the forest that begins on the eastern edge of the field.
Peter, tell me what you mean, I say.
Go away, please.
I was on the dock. You came and found me.
You knew. How did you know.
He’s done it to me, too.
I stand beside the rock. Underneath it, moss crawls up the side. I couldn’t believe what I had just said. It wasn’t exactly right, though. I had never had a solo. I was not like the others. When Big Eric spoke to me, he knew I knew what he was. That I had always known. And then I remember, the pictures. Try to remember if any were of me.
A shadow, tossed on me, wears a halo made by sun-colored filaments. I look up. Hello, Peter.
He comes down and jumps up on my back, his chin digs between my shoulders, his legs kicked around my waist. Giddyup, he says. I carry him toward the rehearsal room. Across the way, in the room, I feel what I am sure are the eyes of Big Eric.
This horse sure is slow, Peter says.
In my head I pray. There is a saying in Korea that you know who your God is when you think you are about to die. Hello, God. I pray to be able to carry Peter, to carry him off to where he belongs, way above this earth. Well above what could ever touch him. But wherever that is, I instead set him down at the entrance to the dining hall, where we go inside and sneak a soda from the fountain.
In rehearsal again the altos falter, unsure. Most are newly altos, and slip into their old soprano or second-soprano parts, thinking no one can hear them sing falsetto for head tone. Eric calls the rehearsal to a halt then.
A head tone’s quality, he says, cannot be duplicated. There is almost nothing like it except the clarinet, for sound. Is that clear? Falsetto, falsetto sounds like this, and then he trills a terrible, reedy impression, screwing up his features. His beard bobs. The new altos are almost in tears.
Do not, I repeat, do not ever use falsetto. If your voice is changing, you will be moved to the altos, so that you may sing with us until you develop into a tenor, bass, baritone, et cetera. I will not tolerate it. At all. Don’t think I can’t hear it, because I can. I can hear it. Is that clear?
Clear, we say, in unison, as if it were another piece we would be rehearsing throughout the afternoon.
After a dinner of meat loaf and peas and soggy boiled potatoes we go into town in the van for a movie. They are showing Xanadu, starring Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly. Gene Kelly plays a clarinet. Olivia Newton-John sings in a clear high voice and roller-skates through a tepid plot, something involving love. There is laughter in the audience when several of us sopranos, including me, sing along. The songs are easy for us to pick up. Olivia plays one of several muses who descend to earth, arrayed in beautiful mortal bodies that cover their true selves, beams of colored heaven-made light. We sing the songs afterward, in the van on the way home, softly, as we have already sung all day. Some of us boys sleep as we pass through the dark quiet towns along the main road back. We are on the other side of the equation of light and sound. When we sing, we try on the robe of a muse. We wear a color of light.
6
IN THE NUMBER 2 Cabin bathroom Zach and I are pressed up against each other, Zach sitting on the sink as I push toward him. I am trying to get used to his tongue in my mouth. The first time it happened he said, This is how you French kiss, and then licked my lips with his tongue.
At the time, I wondered who it was that taught him.
I get down on my knees. I take him in my mouth. I have read that this is something that men like. It makes me nervous when Zach does it to me, but I feel in control when I do it to him, and this much I know I like. I don’t like doing it for itself.
Jesus, he whispers, and I pinch him. The other kids in the cabin are supposed to be asleep. I had finished my bed check when I heard the door open, not even the sound of the door itself but the whisper of the air moved by its opening. Days ago I had greased the hinges and oiled the spring. For him.
He jumps against me when I pinch him, knees knocking my chest. He smells like warm bread down here, if you rubbed it with salt. I take advantage of my swimming lessons, I breathe through my nose and take him in my throat. He squeezes my shoulders, start
s pounding lightly and then harder. His legs shake.
What’s that on your shoulder, Eric B. asks me the next morning on my way back from the shower. I look back to see, on my skin, five purple dots in a row. I got punched, I say.
Eric B. grins. Yeah.
7
WHEN YOU SAY Excelsis, you need to land hard on all three syllables. Egg. Shell. Cease. Got it? Egg—Shell—Cease. Excelsis. Put it together. Now, Do-ho Na-ha No-beese, In-Egg-Shell-Cease Day-Oh. Ready?
The baton flicks up. And then down.
We have been working on this piece for three days. We rehearse two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. This is my first summer camp. Usually, camp means a cottage my family rents, where we drive up and swim more or less continuously. Zach’s family has one on Lake Sebago, a log cabin with a screened-in porch and a dock, built by his architect family. Here, we have the rehearsal building, the canteen where the food is served, the two cabins, with another half cabin for Eric’s wife, Leanne, and her new baby, a big-headed round ball of a boy who is so quiet he makes me afraid. Ralph, Eric’s foster son, stays in Cabin 1 with Big Eric.
Leanne is a giantess, taller than Eric, who is tall. Each of her breasts right now seems as big around as my head. She is the camp nurse, a title that fits as she is always breast-feeding her new baby. The half cabin, her tiny domain, is the last one in the row of buildings going down to the dock and the lakefront. There are no near neighbors. Watching her come and go, it seems there should be hidden compartments to accommodate her bulk.
Dona Nobis. This whole phrase, it means thank you Lord for your gift. It is sung to celebrate Jesus. Thank you Lord for your gift, all thanks be to God. Noble gift, all thanks be to God above all others. Big Eric tells us the meanings of the words, because he insists it will help us sing. I like it better when I don’t know the meanings. When the word is empty and I fill it like a glass. Knowing what they mean takes away some of my courage.
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