Edinburgh

by Alexander Chee

  I am up here ostensibly to paint and sketch. The storm has been forecast for days but previous to it are days candled by the sun to a painterly brightness, and the only shadows possible, between sun, clear sky, and snow, hide under my feet. My aunt Pat, my mother’s younger sister, is concerned and has asked repeatedly that I not go out. She has recently divorced, and is dating again, happy, as if her new divorce has shucked off a parasite that had eaten her entire youth. She now seems resupplied, her face colors itself, her hair soft again. On the morning I make my effort, I reorganize her kitchen shelves as I stock my bag out of her pantry. If you get the idea to buy cooking lard or cinnamon, I say, indicating the things I have found in large supply, Don’t. She has the habit of purchasing things she can’t find, a permanent shopping list in her brain: frozen bagels and cream cheese, cinnamon, lard, microwave popcorn and canned beans, always there. As if she will always be safe with these, no matter what.

  I wish you’d wait a few days to see if the storm will pass, she says, brushing her pants. She has just come in from the woodshed, to add logs to the three woodstoves that heat her reconditioned farmhouse. She is built like my mother, and has about her a similar tightness to her movements that gives no indication of her actual strength. She runs a hand through her hair. I’ll feel stupid calling your mother to tell her you died of exposure, she laughs.

  If I die I’ll call her myself, I promise. And then I heave the pack on my back.

  You have enough gas, she calls from the door, as I settle onto a snowmachine I rented that morning.

  I do, I reply.

  All right then, she says, and then she may have said something else but it disappears in the roar as the machine runs under the choke. She steps back in.

  Ice storms appear first as rain, and then sleet, neither of which is an ice storm.

  Even as I head down the trails, the machine banging over the hard-pack snow, I don’t think of it then. I think of nothing. January-thick white snow is everywhere. The new year is under way, and the snow makes everything seem perfected, cleaned off and put away until the spring. The evergreens are the suggestion or the idea of a tree, a green shadow helmeted in white. And the bare trees, arterial, reach out as if they give up something of the earth to the air above.

  I reach what I decide is to be my campsite, situate my tent, and dig a pit to hide my food. I settle in for what turns out to be a long meditation in a quiet so vast my heart and breath make a racket. I bank a firepit and build a fire.

  The sky becomes an ink wash, black scattered by water. And then light again. The sun lights down where it can, as if trying to grab hold. Help me, the sun seems to be saying to the little fire at my feet. I am now to be on the side of the cold and as the ice begins to come I am glad. The sun has every other day to hold us. Now is the storm’s turn. I let my fire go out, stay where I sit, the cold rising across me.

  The storm is a glazier. Then fog passes through, touches the cold trees to add to the ice already there. Here the wind spins glass from the water it has stolen off the sea and the lakes, off the hair on my head and the breath out of my mouth, the storm takes the water from us all everywhere, to make of a mountain range a stained-glass depiction of a saint no one knows. A cathedral for cold January, a place for this gray bitter month, that everyone hates, to come and hide and pray for mercy, to pray to stay, when everyone else wants it to leave.

  I walk down to the edge of the lake, picking my way through the dark woods. The ice here is relatively new. I set out on it, praying it will break. It’s a coward’s way, asking the lake to take me, but I decide that’s how it should be. There’s an island out about a half mile from the shore and I head for it. Death by exposure seems easy to achieve: to lie down in the snow during the storm was a time-honored Inuit passage to the other side of life. The blue expanse of the winter night would wrap you and you would become simply part of the blue, as easy as that. But it requires a patience for the journey, I can see.

  When the ice breaks, I forget what I came to do. My left leg slips through snapping ice. My face slams hard as my leg goes through, cold and then warm again. I curse and roll and as I roll, my legs whipping up through the air, I can feel the ice cut me open.

  I tear off a piece of my T-shirt and wrap my shin. And I crawl on all fours for the first thirty yards back, limp the rest. I laugh in the cold dark.

  Back at my tent, I see red in my fire coals. I add wood, blow on it. Fire again leaps off the bark. The sky now the blue of the underside of a flame, as if above us heaven burned. Some part of me hopes it is true. That Peter is there, spreading fire as he walks from cloud to cloud.

  The next morning the trees split from the cold. The water freezing inside the trees tears the fibers of the wood, and the wind pulls them apart. On the drive back, everywhere I look, sharpened sticks instead of trees. Back at school, Coe asks about the bruise on the side of my face and I show him the cut on my leg as well. You’re crazy, he says.

  Yes, I say. That’s about right.

  16

  IT WAS PERHAPS my drawing master who made me a ceramics major, but it never matters who makes you, ultimately, only that you are made. In any case he helped me find what would end up being the way I would choose to live, for which I am grateful. He was a visiting professor from Germany and as our final assignment we were to do drawings, ten in a series. A tall man who walked like a limping horse and spoke through a gentle voice a broken patter of English and German, he was often seen walking under the trees and looking up through their branches in just about any part of campus. I could be anywhere from a Ph.D. carrel in the library to a friend’s dorm room and there he would be, striding confidently, intent, but of course with the limp that seemed almost a choice, and it would have been suspicious if there weren’t any sign anywhere of him spying. He was entirely internally preoccupied and it mattered not at all what was going on around him unless it had something to do with something he was drawing. I once saw him leaving the cafeteria with a paper towel stretched between his hands, seven strips of cooked bacon balanced there. He saw me and said, I’m drawing them, don’t worry. You can come later and eat them if you like.

  He himself did what he called tender lines. He drew without looking at the paper and with both hands, using pencil, always, that he would rub upward instead of down. He would point at drawings and say of the lines, Do you see, this is another language from this, they are not talking to each other. Or, he would say, You must erase these. There is too much architecture here. He taught the advanced class for majors and he spoke of lines in drawings the way poets speak of lines in poems. This is the best line, he would say, and touch it. The others are only imitating it. You must get rid of them. Start over and keep this only. I hated drawing this way. It made me unsteady, and the figures looked ugly to me. I drew my assignments in one hand.

  I had done for my drawing project nude studies of five boys on the crew team. I admit to having had a more than ordinary amount of fun doing this, but it was also for me an attempt to release what turned out to be an extraordinary amount of lines inside me that awaited figures. These figures. I had wanted to draw these guys for years, and so they would come over in the afternoon when the light in my room was best and there on my comforter I would arrange them in a pose. They had the unselfconsciousness of athletes, the body was this thing they used to go fast, they liked the one they had because as yet it had met almost all their demands of it. They accepted the idea as I put it forward to them and enjoyed the afternoons we spent this way, two drawings per athlete. I remember Mike as being particularly beautiful nude, without an ounce of spare flesh to him anywhere, almost a physician’s muscle chart, and Rich had hair all over his body, like a pelt. Ian, my former coxswain, looked particularly the part of a St. Sebastian, and then Coe, who was so breathtaking that I could almost not draw him. It was all I could do not to rush over to the bed. Aaron studiously enjoyed himself. We both knew that there were two reasons I was drawing him this way, and he knew that the second reaso
n would never express itself past the drawing, and was fine about it. His enjoyment would be in offering for my eye what he would refuse the rest of me.

  I don’t know what these are, the drawing master said, when I presented. The class would have laughed had they not known something of what was next. The drawings were beautiful, I had thought. They were tender, I thought. How could they fail? He reached a finger up and he said, they are like perno.

  I knew he meant porno.

  They are not drawings, he said, sad. These lines are all not even lines. And those that are, they are in different languages from each other. He looked incredibly sad then. I cannot believe it, he said. He hung his head down under my beautiful men.

  That night I watched the ceramics students out in the yard of the art complex, where the ceramics studio did raku firing. I sat with my drawings rolled up at my feet, smoking one cigarette after another, as if they could take out the stitch this day had left in my head. He had been right to have been sad. I hadn’t wanted to be a pornographer. I had wanted to take something inside myself, like I had once drawn a breath, and then to send it out, as I had sung. To say that you make something out of thin air: you can, if you sing. You can make an enormous number of things this way.

  I watched as the raku students pulled their pieces out with tongs and sunk them into shredded paper. The hot ceramic set fire to the paper instantly. Use this too, I said, pulling my drawings apart in long shreds. I tossed them into the can, and the potters cooled their pieces on them, the paper turning to wet-looking black shreds that floated on the air around the kiln.

  When you draw, you destroy as you go. Even as you make. I saw now that as long as there was a form that I wanted to make love to, I wouldn’t be free. I would not be able to make lines for it, and as long as I was me, these lines would always be in separate languages. Clay, wet, spinning on a wheel that you kicked as you went, that rose and thinned or flattened and spread with the faint touch of a thumb, that seemed fine. You set it in a hot oven. Almost a thousand degrees. You underglazed or deglazed or glazed, you baked or bisqued, you waited, to see, would it crack. Would the glaze fall off in a pile. It would be fine, this way. And I wouldn’t also have to destroy anything, except for the clay that cracked while drying, tossed back into the reclaim pile, to be used again. There wasn’t anything you could do but set the piece in the fire and wait to see how it would come back to you. As I watched, I thought, and I saw how there was something that could return to you from fire.

  I signed up for the ceramics major the next morning.

  17

  THE NEXT YEAR I kept the Polaroid picture of Peter and I from his last night alive in a diary that I wrote in only when I wanted to die. I wrote in that diary, that year, almost every day. Some days I made myself laugh by writing, instead of the date, Hello, Death. I would drive along Route 84, looking at the ditches, thinking about what it would be like if I just didn’t turn, if I continued, into the cement embankments, my car wrinkling shut like an eye closing, my body, chewed as if by a giant lazy jaw. I wanted to wake up and not feel. My life would have been acceptable, I felt, if someone had come in and in the night severed all my nerves where they attached at the skin. If I was numb, then great. More life for me, another helping, please.

  There were undergraduate crushes. Always, blond boys: the expression dew-lapped comes to mind. As in, the dew’s tongue passes over and leaves a drop behind. Romantic, to the point of putrefaction, I wrote long terrible poems about whoever it was I was infatuated with. Penny laughed at it all, and came to ask always, which one is this now? She knew there was a way in which these boys were all the same. These boys were all stand-ins for Peter, and none was greater than Coe.

  My friends cultivated an active disgust. You’re in love with white power, they’d say. You seek white acceptance. For this reason alone I maintained a careful distance from the political life of the campus, which was considerable, until the last year I was there.

  My friendship with Coe turned inward on itself. We lived now in an apartment building owned by the university, a heinous building known only as High-rise that sat across the way from a home for the mentally ill. I walked to the parking lot in the morning wondering which lunatic fantasy I now lived in, as the patients across the way loved nothing better than binoculars, and watched us from behind their barred windows and porches. Coe lived down the hall from me, and I regularly went there to type my papers, as all through school I didn’t have a computer. Neither of us was on crew anymore, and his roommate, Rich, also a former crew-team member, was now on hockey. We walked around constantly in a state of dazed half-dressed stress, trying to make grades. I felt myself to be inside an airtight and airless bubble, invisible to everyone. The gray buildings faced my room, the wrong way for light of any kind at any time. The year a long shadow I walked through.

  Below me lived two boys who were in more or less the same state as me and Coe, a boy named Richard, and his roommate, Rafe. Rafe was an elegantly tall, handsome, and dark-haired boy; Richard was an angry redhead who had a reputation for being a nasty drunk. The two of them spent almost all their time together, as Coe and I now did, and the parallel seemed unbearable, not the least for me living directly above Richard and Rafe. Rafe and Coe had girlfriends. Richard and I, increasingly, hung out with each other, reluctantly. He wanted to hate me, I could see, on those nights we stared over each other in the direction of our beloveds. I wanted to give him a reason and have it be done with. It happened like this.

  A party in a house we called Eclectic, once a fraternity, now a tumbled-down beer hall of a southern-style mansion with Neoclassical columns, paint peeling off them, holding up a roof full of people high on speed and coke or smoking pot because they hate cigarettes. Richard is there on the porch, a few others sitting nearby. Richard shakes his long red hair, a faint part to the side, dressed in a T-shirt and black jeans faded to gray by washing. He hates the idea of style in himself, even as he worships it in others. Oh hi, he says. He’s drunk already when I find him. Don’t you look terrific. I raise an eyebrow in response. Go get a beer and drink so you’re not so obnoxious, he orders me, pointing in the direction of the keg with his cigarette and I laugh as I head along.

  Rafe is across the way. I say hi to him as I pass. He has the face of a boy still on the long body of a man, and he smirks at something the girl beside him is telling him. He’s really too preppy to care about this place, but he’s here because of Richard, ostensibly, and there’s nothing he won’t do without Richard. Except have sex. He nods as I pass, and seems deliberately engrossed. Richard floats at the perimeter of their gaze.

  Coe is here also, inside. He is smoking. What the hell is that, I say, pointing at the cigarette.

  Trying to be like you, he says, grinning. His girlfriend, Laura, is next to him. A short, pert blonde, glasses shining in the dark, she smiles at me. I amuse her just by walking by.

  Tell him to put it out, I tell her.

  He listens to you, she says.

  The rest of the night piles up around us like this, people like cars looking for parking spots walking back and forth and soon the smoke is so thick that I tell Penny, who has just arrived, that I’m not smoking anymore. I’m just going to breathe, I tell her.

  Shut up, she says. You know you like it. I hate it when people who smoke complain about the smoke. She says this as she heads off for a beer. Richard wobbles over, always a bad sign.

  Do you think he loves her, he says, suddenly very, very grave.

  I don’t ask who he means. I don’t, I say.

  Sluts, he says. Both of them. I mean it’s a school of whores, but what sluts. He steps on the cigarette he just lit. I don’t want to smoke anymore. He pushes a thick piece of hair off his face. Come over, he says. Have a drink. I’ve got whiskey.

  I look around the party. Coe is gone. There’s no reason for me to be here. I mean, there’s no reason because I want to be dead, actually, but there really is no reason. So I say, sure. Let’s go have whiske
y. And then Richard walks as straight as anyone and we leave the party.

  In his apartment the dark seesaws around a desk lamp he flicks on and then faces into the wall. No other light other than the awful street lamps, always too bright, shining in. If sleeping in the light of a moon makes you mad, I think, what does a streetlight do to you?

  I turn around. Richard is opening whiskey. He has taken his shirt off. A boy’s body with a man’s face, Richard has the opposite arrangement to Rafe’s. His hairless chest a bone in the dark. He hoists the bottle to his mouth and drinks hard, like cowboys in movies do. He flicks at his nipple as he does this and then sits at his desk. Holds out the bottle. There’s nowhere in his small room to sit but the bed, so that’s where I sit. I reach for the bottle and then lean back. If he wants the bottle he’ll have to come and get it, I decide.

  I’m not prepared for this, which thrills me. Almost more than he does, or the same way. I tip the bottle up to my mouth, holding it by the neck, and slide some whiskey down. I breathe through my nose, swallowing. As I take the bottle away, Richard is reaching and pulling off my shoes, my socks. I balance the bottle on his bedside table, which is covered in Thomas Mann books, and I lift my hips as he slides my pants off. He then kneels on the bed and walks over to me, where he leans down to kiss me, but then stops, just above my lips.