Peter’s the one that burned. Zach was the one who pulled the trigger. Still, I feel like the bullet, the fire, like I tore his head open. I set the fire. Sometimes the scattered thoughts of their deaths run like a jagged red seam of fire inside me and I burn from the inside out, like a lightning-struck tree: the outside whole, the inside, that carried the lightnings charge, a coal. At other times, I feel empty, transparent, a child of the wind. Touching nothing, nothing touching me. And alternating between these states, with no warning as to when one will turn into the other.
They’re gone, I tell the sea. Nothing comes back to me.
On the ferry ride back, off the island, the sun lights up the hair of two little girls in front of me enough for me to see, sure enough, the red threads there in their hair.
Years later on streets in New York, women bustle by me, in fox coats. I want to ask these women, do you ever, in that coat, think you can fly? Do you ever feel, wearing that coat, the thrum of a leg about to let fly?
On the bus back from the train from Moolsan-do, an old man, dressed in the loose linen suit of a retired man, seated in front of me, raises his lighter to my arm and lights it. At first I start to see a faint flame rise from the loose thread there at my side. He smiles at me. It’s like a wick. The thread burns out and off. The fire goes out.
Later, I get off the bus. My grandmother looks at me like an owl looks at a mouse. She kisses me, the owl’s wet feather. Skinny, she says. Get you home.
At my great-aunt’s house she sets out plate after plate of food. The traditional dinner and then more plates: fried Spam, sliced. Fried eggs. A bag of potato chips. You like, my great-aunt says. Grandmother get for you. My grandfather waits until the food is all out and then approaches the table. The driver paces in the garden, smoking.
My great-aunt says something to him in Korean as she pours his water. He looks at her and raises his eyebrow. He says something to her gingham-covered back as she passes back into the kitchen, to sit at her table there. Your granmi, he says. She say we call someone to come look for you. Your ghost missing, she says. We call tomorrow. Ghost-singer. He shouts to my grandmother, turns back to me, and says, Terrible singer, for ghosts. Bad music.
10
THE MUDANG ARRIVES in the morning, a laughing woman with a man’s stride, a man’s way of leaning back from her hips. Who took your ghost, she says to me, her voice deep, almost sounding like it came from inside me. She plucks at the front of her khaki trousers, hitches her linen sleeves up.
I don’t know, I say.
We find it, she says. And then she wanders the house. Up to the third floor, full of old furniture, and then down again. She walks the whole house. My grandfather has gone out to his favorite place, the bar at 8th Army, the officer’s club. My grandmother paces in the garden.
With no warning, the mudang starts singing. Her voice now is unexpectedly high in tone, almost flutelike, and differs so sharply from her speaking voice that I watch, as if what made the difference were something I could see. She sings, and begins to step forward, in a slow dance, punctuated by her clapping hands. In my grandparent’s green courtyard, my grandmother lowers her head, and the mudang sings.
She draws herself up short and says to me, go to your room. Wait there for me. And then she begins her song again.
In my room, I wait. On my bed, made up in thin cotton sheets, a Western bed they’ve had in this guest room since before it was popular to have them in Korea. The song reaches me through the open windows. I can feel the sweat glaze me, and I lie down for a breeze that passes in through the window with the song. My eyes close.
Two eyes glow at me in that dark, green-gold, irisless. Hello, a voice says. Miss me?
No, I say.
They brought me here for you.
It’s something that they want, I say. Yowu.
And then I wake to the singing.
No good, the mudang says, when she comes into the room. How you life? How you life no ghost? And she shakes her head, laughing. Oh, sometime, she says, and I don’t ask. Sometime. Is like diamond, walking.
What, I ask.
Diamond. She takes my grandmother’s hand, where there flashes an extraordinary diamond. See? Comes from earth. Reflects light, most beautifully. Nothing more beautiful for reflecting light, but, belongs in earth first. Like your ghost, diamond.
Huh, I say. I consider it. The ghost, flashing somewhere under the sun, diamond and cloud together. If my ghost is like a diamond, someone has dug it out of me. I see it flying the skies of the world, mistaken for a daytime UFO. I don’t mention the voice I heard when I closed my eyes, I decide nothing good would come of it. We bid the ghost-singer good-bye. My grandmother thanks her and presses money into her hands, which she frowns at as she folds it into her trousers.
Good-bye, she says to me. Sometime, sometime. Is okay. Is hard to die, with no ghost. Almost lucky. And she leaves, humming.
11
THE SCHOOL I’VE decided to go to is Wesleyan. I guess I should be happy, my mother says. She doesn’t understand, even when I point out the enormous art campus, where the modern cement buildings like enormous gravestones keep company, garnished by enormous weeping willows. I’ll be happy here, I tell her, which of course is why she relents.
Of course the real reason is an enormous series of underground tunnels that connects the campus. I found them on my prefrosh visit and wandered through them. Some were narrow and dark and others widened into rooms. Some were covered with indecipherable graffiti, others were spare gray, pipes everywhere. Home, I thought, at last, on that visit. My lost city. I write a postcard to Speck, explaining. He writes back asking for me to send a picture of me in them, which I do.
On my first day, I drive myself down. I arrive at a small suite in Clark Hall. I am to share it with another boy, name of Caleb Oswald Evans, of Beaumont, TX. I am reading this on the door, his name and hometown spelled out carefully, and then the door bangs open. Welcome to Clark Hall, this Caleb says. He’s sitting on his bed, wearing only a pair of shorts. Smooth muscle everywhere I can see. My eyes focus immediately on the smooth arches of his feet. The windows are all open wide, and I see that it’s the wind that pulled the door. No AC, he says.
I see, I say, and my bags drop carefully to the ground where they wait. White rooms, two, side by side. Caleb in a white bed, wearing khaki cutoffs, legs crossed, reading the Tao Te Ching.
So this is the future, I say.
We smile at each other. He looks familiar, and I ignore the feeling. I sit down in his desk chair and we shake hands.
Call me Coe, he says.
I will, I say.
In the first few days I make many friends through smoking cigarettes. During the president’s speech to the new students, I look at the shiny ashtrays on the tables, like cheap mirrors. I wait and wait, no one is smoking. And then I light up. Soon, like a smoke signal, I see another faint rope of smoke some tables away, and I look over, to catch the eye of a thin girl with dark hair and eyes who wiggles her fingers toward me. For the duration of the speech, no one else smokes. When we speak later, she says, Well, there were ashtrays there on the table. I mean, they were letting us smoke if we wanted. It means a lot to me, that you smoked.
I decide to let that stand.
Her name is Penny Fields and she’s from Niagara Falls. She’s the same height as me, and at the party where we find each other she’s the only one who walks up to me to talk. I am dressed in a black shirt and black jeans and boots, and she says, Who died?
A couple of people, I say.
Huh. Good one. Fee, she says, testing my name, like it’s a shoe she’s trying on. Fee. She grabs the hem of my shirt and tugs at it a little. Fee, we need someone to jump on that table over there and dance.
She slips a cigarette into her mouth and stares meaningfully at a long conference table over near the DJ. The party is in a fraternity for the football team, DKE, and besides the table, the large dark room is furnished in chairs that seem to have been upholst
ered in pile carpeting.
Can’t.
C’mon, she says. I saw you earlier. You’re a good dancer, you qualify. She lights her cigarette. People who are good dancers are, and here she puffs on the cigarette until the end is gray with ash, you know. Exhibitionists. This last emerges from her mouth covered in pale smoke.
Did you ever notice, I ask, that when a cigarette burns, the smoke is blue, and when we exhale, the smoke is white?
What are you getting at, she says. We walk toward the table. I push myself up onto the table. All the color gets left inside us, I say, and hold my hand out to her. She grabs it, climbs up, holding her skirt down as she does so. The music is so loud it knocks in my ribs.
Good thing I wore underwear, she says. Here, have some color. She hands me the cigarette.
The football team here is not a very good one, but no one really minds. The boys are cute and relatively nice, and the girls appreciate them. We dance, side by side, facing them. No one looks at us while we watch them.
12
I’D ARRIVED ON campus with only black clothes. Boots, jeans, shirts, sweaters, a long black overcoat for fall and winter that buttoned to the neck, made of cashmere, and a black windbreaker for the fall. It soothed me, in Maine, there was no confusion, dressing like this. And so my first August in Connecticut I am a black speck on the campus, emitting puffs of smoke as I walk. Here, out of my mother and father’s sight, I can smoke all I want, and so I do. My grandmother sends a red coral necklace from Korea that arrives shortly after I do. I carefully clasp it so that it can’t be seen, under my shirts.
That first week, Coe comes with me to Arthur the barber, on Main Street, and watches as I get my crew cut. When I am done, he sits in the chair and says, Same again. Arthur laughs and clicks on his buzzers. Coe’s sandy hair is gone quickly. The resemblance is striking. He looks like Peter, I can see now, if Peter had lived and lifted a lot of weights. Oh there you are, I say, inside.
Do you like it, he says, as we leave.
Yes, I say.
With our new haircuts, we walk by Penny’s hall over in Foss 8. She and several of her hallmates are sitting in the hall on the floor reading magazines, their hair tucked into plastic bags. Henna, she says, barely looking up, and then she sees Coe. Well, Hello, she says. Didn’t know we’d have gentlemen callers today. We decided that we’d all dye our hair red to get talked about.
Foss Red, says one girl, looking at what turns out to be a copy of Interview. You made us do it. She does not look up.
You guys have to do it, too, she says.
Coe and I laugh. That’s good, he says. Funny.
Penny, I say. I can’t. I think of Lady Tammamo. The fox. Bad luck, I say.
What? she says.
For me, I say. Bad luck for me.
Hang on, she says, and goes into her room, emerging with the henna and two bags. Here, she says. Do it. If you don’t like it, go get crew cuts again. Coe and I sit down and she rubs our heads with the stuff. You guys will be the Foss Red Men. You’ll be like twins. It’ll be beautiful.
Great, says Coe.
All right, I say. I’ll be beautiful.
Later, in our rooms, we laugh at each other. We go to the showers, and wash. Coe stands in the shower opposite me. The henna runs down him, brownish green. He closes his eyes, leans back, and the foam runs off him to pool at his beautiful smooth feet. He opens his eyes. What, he says. Smiling.
Nothing, I say.
13
I HAVEN’T BEEN angry in years. And yet I’ve been angry since before I remember happiness.
I can’t say it was this or that that was the reason. There is no reason and every reason. Why do you want to die, I ask myself. How else does it stop? If I die, the trouble stops with me. I can see her, Tammamo, her hand closing her husband’s eyes, breathing in the air to make the fire-breath, his family, watching her. Enough, she’d be thinking. Fire on her lips. It ends with me now.
Outside my window a spider floats in the air, as if levitating. I look closely to see that spider is actually hanging by a thread connected some ten feet down, probably. It is floating, spinning upward, counting on the wind to catch in its furry legs and lift it, as it unspools the web. Until it can land someplace else, attach the thread’s other end, and continue, making the web. I continue in this watching, trying to match this sight with the idea that a spider finishes by eating its entire web at the end.
Coe walks in to my room. Wake up, he says. Time for practice. The clock reads 6 A.M. We’ve joined the crew team. I pull back my covers and dress quickly in clothes Coe helped me pick: we decided I could wear gray for exercise. We run the distance between Clark and the boathouse down by the river, more or less straight down the long hill of the campus. In the dark morning the sun is the gold center of everything. Death feels far away in that instant, impossible. We arrive at the cold river as summer touches the beginning of its last days, and Coe smiles. The sun. Coe.
From Penny, I learn how attention is like light. How it is light without heat. How to make a shadow puppet out of the self from the way I stand before it.
Caleb Oswald Evans, she says. From Beaumont, Tea-Ex. Nighttime, in her room. She wears a slip, flip-flops, red nail polish on her fingers and toes. She turns the pages of the freshman face book and finds Coe’s page. She puts a red nail-polish mark next to his name, letter A. He’s for you, she says. Mr. Bisexual.
I’ve just told her that I am bisexual, in answer to her question. What’s your deal, she said. And I wanted to say, None. But instead, I tried to imply the opposite. Everyone.
I don’t say anything as she does this. She offers me a cigarette and I decline. Good Lord, she says. You’re quitting?
Crew, I say.
You’re leaving me not for one man but a boatful, then. You won’t hold onto the bi in bisexual for long, she chuckles. Uh. You saw Another Country, right?
Yes, I say.
You want a romantic attachment to men, but instead, you are attaching romance to things that men do. She lights her cigarette and adds, I guess I’m smoking for two now.
I know what you think I’m doing, I say. But I want to get into shape, too. Besides, nothing would ever get started if we didn’t first attach romance. Everyone always ranks on illusion, but illusion is a mighty thing.
You’re on your own with that one, she says. She shucks off her flip-flops and folds her feet under her, leaning over the face book. The face book has everyone’s last high school picture. Already everyone seems smoothed out, prettier, more adult. The pictures are improbable. Coe’s shows him in a jacket and tie, which is more clothing at once than I’ve yet to see him wear. Tae Kwon Do, it says, she says. Does he really?
I’ve not yet seen it, I say. But he’s not the type to exaggerate. Penny leans back then, into a chair pillow. The arms stick out around her and it’s as if she’s in the arms of an alien mammal.
Tell me all about it, she says. You know, his father is a very powerful man. He won’t like what you’re thinking about his son.
Uh huh, I say. I gave him a back rub today after practice. He told me he was half Korean inside, like I’m half Korean outside.
Penny’s head falls back. You two should be stopped, she says.
I laugh. For no other reason than I know that there’s no stopping. I wish you were a girl, he’d said to me this morning as I rubbed the muscles of his warm back.
Oh, Fee. You have to go now, she says. I think it’s hopeless. I changed my mind. I can’t hear anymore. Men are hopeless, you know. You’ll learn this someday, and she says this as if I weren’t one. We both know she isn’t talking about me.
In my room in the dark I can feel it sometimes. The red inside. I shave and look at the hairs in the sink, red mixed with the rest. In my beard is every color of hair: brown, blond, black. Red.
14
LOVE IS THE regrowth of the wings of the soul, Plato says, years in the past almost past seeing. Except of course they are as alive as words are. As we are readin
g words. On the breath of an ink wind, spread on a sail made of a paper page, this, in translation:
. . . he receives through his eyes the emanation of beauty, by which the soul’s plumage is fostered,
and grows hot, and this heat is accompanied by a softening of the passages from which the feathers grow, passages which have long been closed up, so as to prevent the feathers from shooting . . .
I read everything I have ever wanted to know about the world in this. And then Plato quotes Homer:
Eros the god that flies is his name in the language of mortals:
But from the wings he must grow, he is called by the celestials Pteros.
Peter. The morning opens and closes. The library around me rises in acres of books and bricks and glasses in alternation. All the distances between me and everything else seem uncrossable, a permanent exile.
I stand up. It’s time for my Classics of Western Thought class. I am a Greek, I tell myself as I go down the marble steps out of the library. A long time ago, there were cities where boys loved each other enough to give speeches about it. They loved books more than money. I pause and go back inside to the card catalog, where I look up Mary Renault, and head up along the aisles where the air is so dusty my throat catches. The Persian Boy sits there. Alexander the Great’s eunuch lover.
I leave the book on the shelf, unread.
Out in front of the library, students walk, hair messy from bed, in giant sweaters, heads down against the new cold in the wind. Mingle not with those you do not love, Plato warns, or you will be condemned to wander the earth nine thousand years without wisdom.
15
WINTER BREAK COMES like an open grave in winter, a dark cold slot after the fall term’s last snowy days.
The first time I try to die I am on a mountain, near my aunt’s house, and I’ve decided to go on an overnight camp just before an ice storm comes through. The Friendship Mountain Range sits on the border of Canada, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine near where I am visiting my aunt in Rangeley, Maine, a place she’s lived for twenty-five years as a librarian. I haven’t planned this too far in advance, but, after Christmas concluded in a pile of nonrecyclable paper and satin ribbons, and as I again pack up the art materials that I regularly get every year for Christmas, the trip, as it was suggested to me then, seemed “a perfect opportunity to lose myself.” A pattern of literalism that continues to this day.
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