They’re headed this way, my father says. And he pulls us up short around to a cove where he has taken me on occasion to see seals. We wait. I shiver.
There are three dolphins here. They hang just under the water’s surface, as if they were frozen in a leap. Two more arrive and the four push the sick one to the surface again and again, where its blowhole plucks at the air. Occasionally, a belly flashes white through the dark water.
How do they know it’s sick, I ask my father.
Because she tells them, my father says.
We return home for lunch, replaced on our watch by a lobsterman and his son, a salvage diver who has worked with my father. You’ll have cake and ice cream at home later, my mother says to me as I eat a fast bagel pizza. When we return in the early evening, we go by car, because now the dolphins are trying to beach themselves. We are going to have to try to get them back in the water.
There are seven other rescuers there, including a veterinarian with a stethoscope. The four healthy ones are rolled back into the water. My father, in his wet suit, swims dolphin-style out at the edge of the cove, trying to get the dolphins to imitate him. He splashes as he breaks the surface. The other men wait in the water, in case the dolphins try to turn back.
I am on the beach, with the dying one. She is covered in wet towels and I pour seawater on her with a cup from a pail beside me, my cast wrapped in a plastic bag. Her eyes roll under her double lids, and inside, her heart beats a soft tatter. She is warm still. I turn at the sound of my father in the distance, to see his orange snorkel blow water as he clears it before going under again. No one is saying anything.
Her heart starts to beat faster, as if her blood were tightening. It amazes me how fast the seawater dries. I pour more water onto the towel. Away from the rest of the sea, the seawater joins the air, instead. How does the ocean stay together, I wonder.
You’d better come over here, I say to the vet. I think she’s going to go.
Off in the distant water her friends try to learn to swim without her, following my father’s lead.
Why does she want to die, I asked my father, after he returned from his successful swimming lesson. We stood over her cooling body.
I think it’s like getting buried, Aphias, my father said to me then. We put our dead underground. They lay their dead above-sea. She wanted simply the right rest for her race.
But we don’t bury ourselves, I said.
I had watched the water on the way home in the car, the sunset across every wave.
I lie awake, thinking of her, under the guard of the printed Jacks and Jills linked in repeating patterns on my bedroom wallpaper. I watch as the passing lights of cars sweep through my room, the teenagers on my road coming home from dates, businessmen returning to their families, mothers driving car pools for theater, or speech and debate. The light swings across the room in bars, shaped by passing through my window frame. Light splatters, I know, on the outside of the house. I can almost hear the impact. I watch the hall light come in under the door. Light is a force, a wave and a particle. Light can touch me, and has to, actually, in order for anyone to see me.
15
SCHOOL BEGINS IN August this year. I live nearby, and so I walk and skip the bus. I read while I walk to school up the two hills, one sidewalk, a more or less straight line. I pretend the streets I pass through are empty. I have been reading about the Neutron Bomb. I want to be like that, radiant and deadly, a ghost of an impact, to pass through walls, to kill everyone, in flight among the empty houses, punching through molecules like a knife through a paper bag. See me. I am five feet and two inches tall. I am still thin, freckled, large eyes, small nose. My hair waves and grows long, to my neck. I pick flowers for my mother as I walk. The neighborhood kids call me Nature Boy. I want to die.
Help with my roses today, my mother says. We have to deadhead. She hands me a glove and the shears; this is something I can do one-handed. While she walks around the house watering, I snip off the faded blooms, spotty leaves. It is the final day of August, the sun already has its mind on its vacation, distant skies. I pause, hold up my arm cast and the shears: Look, Mom, I’m a crab.
She laughs. Blond and tan, a faint sheen from the hose gives her a glow. She squirts a pip of water my way and I yelp, dodging. You sure are, she says.
Later, inside, over lemonade and peanut butter and jelly, she tells me that Eric has called to say we have been asked to be a part of an opera this fall. A production of Tosca, she says. He’s calling the boys he wants in advance, to clear it with their parents. You’re supposed to act surprised when he announces it, because there is some small pay involved, the part is small.
Oh-kay, I say. Surprise. No problem. I push my hair out of my face. My hand as it goes by smells like the inside of the glove.
I guess he doesn’t hold grudges, huh, she says. She begins putting away the lemonade, sets the jars of jelly and nut butter away.
I guess not, I say. Not until I go up to my room to get a book do I realize, I have no idea what she means.
In my gifted-and-talented speed-reading class seven of us sit in a dark room with a projector that prints lines on the walls. We read stories in this way and then are tested for comprehension.
Today we begin Boccaccio’s Decameron. Jay, one of the more aggressive students, turns the machine on.
The story flashes by. The teacher opens the door, glances in. Oh, he says. All right then. And he goes back out. We sit, the story beaming on, punctuated by the projector’s loud fan.
And it pleased Him that this love of mine, whose warmth exceeded all others, and which had stood firm and unyielding against all the pressures of good intention, helpful advice and the risk of danger and open scandal, should in the course of time diminish in its own accord. So that now, all that is left of it in my mind is the delectable feeling which Love habitually reserves for those who refrain from venturing too far upon its deepest waters. And thus what was once a source of pain has now become, having shed all discomfort, an abiding sensation of pleasure.
The Decameron was a collection of love stories told by ten people running from Florence during the time of the Black Plague. They told the stories to pass the time rather than playing games, at the direction of the Queen, traveling with them. Seven women, three men. Everywhere they looked, people dying. What a pleasure it must have been, I think, as the story flies up the screen in front of me in sections. To survive.
Afterward, the comprehension quiz asks, what were the afflictions of the Black Plague? And I write, bloody noses in the East, but in Florence, egg-shaped swelling in the groin.
How many people does the narrator describe dying?
Several hundred thousand in Florence, many more through the countryside.
Rehearsals in the fall are tighter: the camp has done its magic. We sit in ordered rows, we sing that way as well, chords offered like gleaming chains. Cathedral ceilings are references to Noah’s ark, I have just learned. The idea being that he founded his church by upturning the boat: when we look up, it’s supposed to be like looking at the prow of a boat above us. I think of this often, as I look at the bowed ceiling. This boat, I say to myself, is turning over.
Today is warm, and our rehearsal is going well. The choir has recently auditioned new members, and now we sit, forty, in broken arcs around our director. New money has provided music stands, nice folding chairs with padded seats. You’re real pros now, Big Eric announces in one break. In another, he points to Little Eric and says, Now, and Little Eric gets up and leaves the room. I have a surprise, Big Eric says. Eric is helping me with it.
Little Eric returns, a miniature monk. Muslin tunic, burgundy overtunic. Rope belt. The shoes are obscured by the hem, which falls to the floor. He smiles at us and raises his hands palm-up in mock propriety. Big Eric walks around to stand beside my seat. If he were Friar Tuck, Big Eric says to me, Robin Hood would not be so busy rescuing Maid Marian.
This, Big Eric says to the room, gesturing to Little Eric, i
s the way we will dress for the Italian pieces. I’m having the costumes ordered, and you will all be fitted for them afterward. Also, please welcome Freddy Moran, a new soprano. Freddy stands from where he is seated in the row in front of me.
Unable to join us for the summer, he is a new soprano with a clear light voice and all the other details of Big Eric’s favorites: long blond hair, straight, cut in a Viking mop, with a short sturdy frame and then the surprise, brown eyes, long lashes. The sort mascara means to replicate. He doesn’t look particularly Irish except perhaps this last part, the eyelashes. Zach’s mother, Mrs. Guietz, calls them sooty eyes. Merle and Peter have them also.
Big Eric then makes his announcement about Tosca and reads off the boys to be included. Little Eric and Zach are a bit old for this and so weren’t included, Big Eric concludes, and he laughs as he says this and puts his hand on Little Eric’s shoulder.
Little Eric, mouth firm, continues to stand in the tunic beside him.
In the rehearsals that follow, we learn to wear the robes. How to stand for hours without fainting under the hot lights, and sing: breathe from the diaphragm, tilt the head forward slightly to project sound from the throat out through the forehead, keep the knees bent slightly; feet under the shoulders, and the fingers of your hands rest on your thighs, your pointer finger pointed at your foot, along the seam of your slacks. We go to Biddeford to meet the opera cast where the director tells us stories of past Toscas, past choruses: one director told the boys to follow her wherever she went on the stage, and so when she dives to her death, the boys followed her, jumping also, all landing in the orchestra pit trampoline installed for the stunt. In another, the diva dove and bounced back up. In another, she missed the pad, crashing into orchestra members and breaking a collarbone.
I combine the stories gradually over the rehearsals, until in my mind I see us all following Tosca, jumping with her and bouncing back up, all of us in the air together, broken.
My mother picks me up today from rehearsal. She has come after a teacher conference at school, where my teacher team, Mrs. Strauss and Mr. Christie, ask if everything is all right at home. My mother assures them everything is.
They say you don’t have friends, she says to me. She drives the slow rush-hour traffic across the bridge back to Cape Elizabeth, the brake lights of the cars ahead of us flashing between bright and dull red in the early night. This week my father is in Sweden. I imagine him surrounded by blond people, the overwhelming numbers, him a shiny black-haired speck at the center. My blond mother. Sweden looks like a country of my mother. When he told me he was going, I thought of Big Eric’s books. If my father had ever seen anything like them.
They parent me in a team, these two, my mother teaches me about people, my father about science. These subjects each teach me patience about the other. My mother and I sit quietly in the car as we consider this evaluation of me. All of my friends are in the choir, I say to her, finally, and she nods as she takes me home.
16
THE PLASTER SAW takes the cast off in a minute. Beneath, my arm is a scaly white thing, the dark hairs stand out starkly. How’s that feel, the doctor says. Smiling. Rose-colored fat man, big black-framed glasses.
Fine, I say. I stretch it forward. Fine. And this is not a lie. The hand looks like it belongs to a monster. I think of my mother’s rose cuttings, covered up for a month, until the branch, in desperation, grows new roots to live. This hand, it looks like it is ready to grow a whole new boy off itself.
Out in the waiting room, my mother stands as I come out the door. There’s my little tree climber, she says. In the car, on the way home, the sunlight yawns through the trees, more faraway fire. Soon the clocks will go forward, the nights shrink close like turtleneck collars.
17
YOU, AS THE chorus, Big Eric tells the opera choir, are supposed to be innocent choirboys, and yet you all are supposed to act as if you are passionately in love with Floria Tosca. And you are both.
Saturday mornings belong to Opera now: the eight of us meet in the church room alone to rehearse, and soon, we will rehearse with the rest of the cast and orchestra. While my little brother and sister watch the Smurfs, I learn songs about vengeance, love, and slow death. Today Big Eric is explaining to us the role we have in the opera. The coffee he has brought bitters the room’s air while we all drink hot tea with lemon to clear and tone our throats. Again, it reassures me less to know the history here. The story, though, is a good one: Tosca, the lover of a handsome painter, Cavaradossi, betrays him in order to protect him from his torturer. Tosca can save her lover by giving herself to the torturer, and she says she will in exchange for a mock execution. He comes to her and she instead, impulsively, stabs him to death with his dinner knife, in his chambers. She then visits her lover in prison, assures him of his safety, rushes to his side after the firing squad, only to find he really is dead. The torturer’s murder is discovered, and his police come for Tosca, who then flings herself from a parapet to her death.
Operas, Big Eric announces, as he walks the room in long paces, are mainly about betrayals in love. Squalid light surrounds him from the stained-glass windows as he says this. His round bald head gleams, recently polished, he tells us, and from above the ears, the remaining hair, vigorous, grows long, to meet his mustache and beard.
After, he comes up to me. How did you like Fire from Heaven, he asks me. He twists his hands over each other in a way I’ve never seen before and only read about. He’s the only person I know who rubs his hands.
It’s fine, I say. I liked it. Big Eric had urged me to go read this novel, and I checked it out from the library. When I got home with it, I realized why he wanted me to read it. The novel is about Alexander the Great, who has an affair with his older, adult teacher, when he is still a teenager.
He smiles. Beautiful, right? You should read the The Persian Boy, next. About his eunuch lover.
I will, I say.
Every now and then, I think of Ralph, dead Ralph. He wings in, hovers over the rehearsal chapel, paler than ever before because he is slowly fading away. I know it is not a proper haunting because no one else sees him. We sang for him at a memorial service, held for him in a country church up by the camp. It was a choral service, which is to say, we sang a selection of things, and then there were remembrances and a sung prayer.
Occasionally, I imagine that the ball-lightning of that night at camp was him, finally emerging from the lake, the part of him that really was lost to the depths now running loose, looking for its small body lying in its small grave. That he is now a Will-o’-the-Wisp.
Now that we wear these rope belts, I think of him often as I knot it. The boat rope, too thick for a child to loosen easily. Think of the boats, the oarlocks above him. When he turned his face in the rain to the bottom of the boat, I wonder, looking up at the cathedral ceiling, did he think of God? Did he think of Noah? What did he pray for?
And then Big Eric swings back into view. And I mutter, Father, Son, Holy Ghost, inside, in the mouth I keep in my mind, as opposed to the beautiful mouth, the real mouth, the slave that sings beautiful things. Or kisses.
18
AT SCHOOL NOW, as it has been decided that I need friends, my mother has mentioned I must go out for a sport. I am a good swimmer, so these parents of mine decide that I must join the swim team. I am somewhat angry at my parents for being duped by my teachers this way but consent, because what else am I going to do?
The Cape Elizabeth High School swimming pool: Long thin windows band the walls reaching up to triple-height ceilings. The starting blocks at the shallow end remind me of altars. The pool has six lanes, is twenty-five yards long and is forever aquamarine, stinking of the chlorine acid poured in to clean the water. Now the time that I spent in the library between class and choir is spent here, doing laps. All those words, obliterated by this: I look to the pool bottom through goggles, where there is a single stripe at the bottom of each lane in the shape of the letter I.
We do dril
ls for distance and speed. We separate out the elements of the stroke: first, just the arms, then just the legs, then the whole stroke, reassembled. We stretch, led in visualizations: Visualize yourself winning, my coach says, a young man watching his tiny potbelly, named Dan. See yourself ahead of everyone else. Do you see what that looks like?
I do. I see myself, having outdistanced them all. I begin to win races. I give the ribbons to my grandmother, who kisses them and then kisses me. My champion, she says. My grandfather laughs and rubs them in his fingers and he says, Fox is fast swimmer too.
I see Zach occasionally in the gym, when I have to do weight training. He is filling out from lacrosse. He shrugs. Says, Hey. We see each other less now, but my knowledge of him runs through these school rooms between us, so that some days, I feel like I know where he is no matter where he is. Other days, it feels like he doesn’t even exist.
Come over, he says sometimes. Sometimes I do.
In Zach’s room, we kiss. Like in a movie, long slow kisses, I count his teeth, he bites my lips. Today we haven’t seen each other this way in over a month. When Little Eric’s mom’s car pulls up for choir car pool and honks, we separate and lie still for a moment, regarding each other: disheveled, our lips swollen. I need to put on jeans, he says. Go out and stall them. I wait a minute for him to pull off his shorts and then I get up, and pulling his penis toward me, give it a quick kiss, before heading out the door to tell Mrs. Johannsen that Zach will be right out.
Late October.
The concert where Peter is to sing the descant is held in St. Andrew’s Cathedral. Zach and his parents come here. Stained-glass depictions of the lives of saints. A few angels on a mission. For the occasion we wear the robes and rope belts as we stand on the choir risers, a priory-in-miniature. The audience watches. We are halfway through the program and each pair of eyes in the audience, it seems, emits a force like a breeze—we stand before a gale of attention. The organ starts and we sing. I wait. Peter is to begin his descant. As I sing, it feels suddenly airless, as if in taking his breath, Peter has swept the atmosphere clean away. We hit the air repeatedly with the chords in our throats and bellies, making our devotions.
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