Edinburgh

by Alexander Chee

  I find Matt on the lawn, naked, glowing blue in streaks as if lit from some secret blue sun, holding a cup for me and for him. Cheers, he says, and we drink. The sky looks full of comets and the crescent moon is a little pink on the tip, like it cut someone before rising. We watch as the goddesses play in the glowing pool with his brother, and Matt asks me, Are you getting cold, I have some clothes in the house, and so we walk the lawn, the earth rolling under our feet as we go, and in his room he says, Here, hands me cold cream, and he says, It’s the only way to get this shit off, and he takes a shirt and starts removing the orange paint from me, and I lie back as he does this, until he is kneeling in front of me, humming my dick into his mouth, and I am not glowing anymore, just greasy, in the dark.

  And now the fireworks go off, banging the dark open, fire tossed everywhere, and somewhere probably one of the invisible boys the beer goddesses brought finds the stereo, and whoever it is puts on New Order, and the singer sings How Does It Feel, To Treat Me Like You Do, and Matt glows blue as he swallows me from the foot of the bed, and when I look out the window, Peter is there, hanging inside a star, singing along to the New Order song, his thumb on fire again but now a roman candle, and he tells me, Love is the regrowth of the wings of the soul. And the song lyrics are now spelling themselves out in the sky in blue letters, and on Matt in the dark swallowing me, the heat from him melting me into the sheets, and I ask Peter though I know I’m not speaking, to take pity on me, to take me with him, and he says, You can’t come, you’re not ready yet, and I say what, and then he recites Plato to me, he says, “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 parched and closed up . . .”

  And then Matt is spread out on me, and the blue is running off him onto me, he shows me into a kiss like a treasure vault hidden from all of heavens searches, and I hear a dog crying somewhere and turn to see out the sky Peter, now waving, he’s saying, You’re free now, you are, and he grows wings of corkscrew stars, he has a fire around him, he rises. He lights the sky. And Matt appears before me now, he says, Fucking God, and he says, don’t cry, and then we disappear, all three, into the deepening blue.

  AND NIGHT’S BLACK SLEEP UPON THE EYES

  Warden

  1

  A VOICE LIKE a summer’s day, my grandfather says to me.

  I am twelve, singing out in the yard. York Beach, Maine. My grandfather and grandmother have taken custody of me and are preparing to send me off to a boarding school upstate. Someplace experimental, my grandmother says, knowing of my fondness for science. Small. You’ll like it.

  My mother and father are in prison, serving terms. That’s all I get to know about it. I’ve never known them to miss them, that I know of; they were arrested and tried and sentenced well before I was old enough to remember anything. I occasionally find myself missing something, but hard-pressed, I can’t say for sure that it is mother, father, family. My foster mother, who had me for four years, was good to me, but also quite plain about my status. My borrowed sugar, she would say to me. Found you in a cup.

  I know they can’t see me, forbidden, by court order. I receive letters, occasional pictures. Occasional. The pictures are occasions. Until recently all I had was a picture of my father as a teenager, thick brown hair, leaning against a granite boulder while hiking. Long brown hair wrapped in a handkerchief. My mother, also a teenager, dressed as a nurse for a Halloween costume. They met in college, my grandmother tells me when I ask. And she shows me the pictures of their wedding. When I get the new photograph, my father is bald. I ask, What happened to all that hair?

  It goes, grandfather says. He rubs his thick hair, a gray spume.

  Why am I so light, I ask. I know enough to know that parents and children are supposed to resemble each other. My hair is fair, eyes are light, green-blue, like the leaf of the lavender plants that border this house, where my grandmother grows roses and sweet herbs. My grandmother says nothing, but later emerges from the attic before dinner. I put these away, she says, but there’s no point to not having them. A picture of a little blond boy, hair cut in a towhead Prince Valiant cut. A gleaming helmet for a tiny warrior. Who’s that, I ask.

  Your father, my grandmother tells me. My son.

  2

  THIRTEEN, MY MOTHER gets out of prison. Divorces my father. Returns to Sweden. She’s from there, my grandmother tells me, explains. She’s got people there.

  3

  FOURTEEN, HOME FROM school for Christmas, in York Beach. A resort town, empty in winter except for the few year-round residents. A present under the tree looks different from the rest. Store wrapping, unlike the home-done tinsel of my grandparents. I fumble the large package and hear muffled banging from inside. I fumble because my grandparents are staring. Finally it opens to spill out a butterfly net. A killing jar. A book of lepidoptery. Framed specimens, on tiny pins, to be hung on the walls. Beautiful, my grandfather says, and my grandmother looks at him as if she is choking.

  Lovely, she says, her voice coming off the back of the room as she stands up and goes into the other room.

  Will you use it, son, my grandfather asks.

  Sure, I say. I am thinking of my father in the picture, our hair the same golden color. I am thinking, I don’t want the change. I don’t want my hair to change.

  4

  I AM A junior at Thomas Bethune Day and Night Academy, a private school for two hundred boys and seventy girls in East Knot, Maine, between Orono and Blue Hill. This school has been my home for years: a modern residence hall separated into two wings, New East and New West, by a dining hall; the Arts and Humanities building, called, strangely, Blue, and the Science and Math building, Farren, both the old original buildings. Blue was the manor house, a stone house with, originally, thirteen bedrooms, a ballroom, a dining room, a kitchen, servants’ quarters, library, study, and sunroom. Farren was the barns and greenhouse; botany and animal husbandry are specialties there. The gymnasium is brand new, courtesy of a recent alumnus who made a fortune in leveraged junk bonds, and comes with a pool and indoor track. I spend my time there. Swimming helps keep my darkening hair blond. My name is Edward Arden Gorendt; my friends call me Warden.

  5

  THE NEW ASSISTANT swim coach arrived as the solution to a scandal: Ms. Fields, our swim coach these many years, had become pregnant out of wedlock and was determined to have the child and not marry and not give up her job; the school, in a rare conciliation, agreed. The board was mostly pro-life, something Ms. Fields wisely tailored her appeal toward. He was to begin early, in order to learn her training styles and workouts, and then the board hoped that seeing a man beside this increasingly pregnant teacher would give the illusion of codified heterosexuality the board supported. Mr. Zhe would also take the opening in the art department, being that rarity, an athletic fine artist.

  He works in ceramics, Ms. Fields tells us, when we ask her. In her one-piece Speedo, her belly has started to dome. I imagine the baby’s head there, as if it were trying to sit up in a made bed, trying to press through. I wonder if she will jump in and help us out with troubled strokes as before. And then he arrives.

  Not so tall, actually; a bit shorter than me. Dark and yet pale, he looks young, like he is still in college. Not quite thirty, he has broad shoulders, a swimmers bowed chest, strong, wide legs. He is dressed in running pants, flip-flops, a white tank, and a coral necklace at his neck. His hair is cut short, military-style, a widow’s peak on his forehead points to his goatee that points to his feet. He has the look of a Russian, a Eurasian. I think of a picture of Cossacks I once saw. He smiles at me, and it is a knock on my chest, as if he had reached out and rapped it. My chest opens, my heart admits him. Hi, I say.

  Hello, he says. He goes around shaking the hands of the team members. When he gets to me he asks my name and I say, Warden. His left eyebrow goes up. Nice to meet
you, he says. A nice jail you got here.

  6

  HE TAKES A house near the school but not too near, on a tiny two-block street at the edge of town called Willow Street, and he lives there with a “roommate” by the name of Albright Forrester, a name I learned by taking his junk mail out of the garbage one day before practice after I saw him discard it. Albright Forrester, it read, you have been selected for a special subscription rate for the new House and Garden. I said the name that day as I practiced, Albright Forrester, Albright Forrester, mumbled into the chlorine-blue water.

  The house is a saltbox Cape, with a widows walk like a hat on top even though there is no sea there, and while its run-down, they refurbish the house and grounds with incredible speed, as the roommate seems to have no occupation other than keeping the house. A cutting garden sits next to a vegetable plot in the backyard, and the small yard is home to two mixed-breed dogs that seem to be siblings, probably Labrador-pit bull mixes. Albright is younger than Mr. Zhe and prettier, slightly taller, his hair worn shoulder-length and always falling forward to obscure eyes the color of the swimming-pool water. He walks the campus on occasional visits with a casual air, as if there were nothing at all strange anywhere in the world, nothing that could take his interest from whatever middle distance he seems always focused on. To say he attracts a good deal of attention on these visits is an understatement. The smile he gives Mr. Zhe on greeting is more intimate than a kiss hello.

  I go to their house some weeks later, drive down the street. I pause over the clutch and let my old black Volvo wagon drift. Albright comes out of the house, cutting shears in hand, headed for a lilac bush by the front of the driveway. His eyes flick toward the car. I shift and pull away. He returns to his cutting, the blooms coming away into his hand. I declutch and drift, watching in my rearview mirror. I can’t stop looking at him, imagining Mr. Zhe coming home to him; do they kiss in the door? Do they act like brothers? I shift, the car engine grinds slightly, slower now, I don’t want the brake lights to flash, attracting attention. I take the turn, U-turn, drive back by to see Albright in the door, plucking leaves off the lilac stems, unmindful of me. I drive away. That night, as I lie in bed, I think of a Mason jar of lilacs in the middle of their table, their dinner spread around it. A dark shape in my window ledge catches my eye: my binoculars, for butterfly catching.

  The next day I take the afternoon and park after school in a meadow not far away. I tell myself, as I unpack net and killing jar, grease my face with sunblock, that as I walk the fields bordered in heather and wild rose I will only be after the luna moth. I won’t try for anything else. I march the meadow with more than a little enthusiasm, and for the first hour or so find nothing, and then I see what looks like a buttercup take off into the air, fighting a breeze. My net swings out and it is so easy, as I tug in. The pale yellow greenling floats in and settles into the jar, almost resignedly. Personality in a wing flutter. I walk, binoculars up, to a rise of lichen-encrusted bedrock, the bone of the hill emerging, focused on the far edge of the trees, where the house of my coach hides, and so barely hear when a voice nearly below says, Watch out.

  I jump back. On a green army blanket, eating his lunch, wearing just a pair of shorts on the beautiful body and sunglasses to cover the beautiful eyes, is Albright.

  Hello, Collector, he says.

  Hello, I say.

  If you were to fall over out here on something less congenial, you could hurt yourself. Come to think of it, even if it were congenial, you could have hurt yourself.

  I’m sorry, I say. Bad habit. Can’t see for the looking.

  Indeed. He laughs. I’m Bridey, he says, and reaches a hand toward me.

  I’m . . . Ed, I say, not a lie. But suddenly I don’t want Fee to know I’ve been here. That we’ve met.

  Are you a student at Bethune? he asks.

  Yes, I say.

  Well, he says. It’s early for butterflies, don’t you think? I’m not a lepidopterist though.

  Not so bad, I say, indicating my killing jar, where inside, the wobbly captive opens and closes its wings like a fast-motion flower. Today we caught a moth, I say. I’m about to jump up. I’ll see you, then, I say. I’ve got to be going. Very sorry to have nearly clobbered your picnic there.

  He shines in front of me. All of him reflects light: dark hair, bright eyes, smooth skin. The dead blond grass around him, as if we were picnicking on a giant’s crown.

  Sure, he says. No harm done.

  7

  I HAVE A girlfriend now, Alyssa is her name, also a swimmer. If anamnesis is a memory of paradise returning, this is what she seems like to me. Sometimes. She knows something is wrong but I don’t know how to tell her about how it is I’ve fallen in love with our assistant coach. We see each other every day, after practice, and today, as we leave the building, she smirks at me through the wet dark hair she shakes behind her, in order to wrap it in a ponytail. She’s the master of the skinny smile, which she offers me now as we walk the linoleum hall out to the yard.

  You’re quiet, she says.

  I’m just listening to you, I say, and we laugh. It’s a line from Truffaut’s Two English Girls, something a man says to one of the sisters. He’s a lover to both of them. This makes me familiar to her again, I know, and so we walk through the spring night wet, us wet, the grass wet. Her there, me pretending. Is this how it is now, I ask myself.

  She turns, smooth skin covered in shadow, to ask me, Did you ever know your father, before he went off to prison?

  Yes, I lie to her.

  What do you remember.

  Music, I say. But not any specific kind. People singing. That’s how I remember my father. That part is true, I think. I think.

  That’s beautiful, she says, and pulls open the door to New West, the light coming out, restoring all her colors. She’s beautiful to me again here. She kisses me. Good night, she says. Call me later if you want.

  Okay, I say.

  My father is a paper father. Letters, with a prison address. A crime I’d never been told about. My flesh-and-blood mother, the one who left all those years ago, after the divorce and her release, about her, my paper father says, She loved you. And she left because of it.

  8

  IN ORDER TO make the best use of the teams during the spring-break training, the school announces that under the direction of Mr. Zhe, the new art teacher, a sculptor-ceramist, we will begin the building of a nonsectarian chapel made of loose-stone construction. A Vermont stoneworker is coming to oversee at points. Bethune had lacked a chapel until now, as the radically liberal board that had put the school together had all had various chapel experiences at their respective boarding schools that hadn’t predisposed them toward either religion or spirituality. A blind spot, one was quoted, in the school paper, the Bethune Tribune. At the grand old age of ten, the school decided it ought to have a place for “restful meditation.” Mr. Zhe had providentially mentioned his interest in doing some loose-stone construction, and so now the search for a site begins, in earnest. Spring break, two weeks away, will mark a groundbreaking. When done, it will be the largest modern building of its type.

  They’re going to smudge the site, says Tom Ludchenko, wrestling the paper shut. We are in our room, waiting by the electrical outlet for the hot pot to boil for tea.

  What’s that? I ask.

  They blow sage smoke to the four corners. I’d not be able to conduct any restful meditation anywhere that wasn’t properly mortared. He yanks the plug from the wall and a spark chases out from the wall, after the plug fork.

  Gravity holds it together, I say. I watch my tea brew. We get either an art credit for doing it or a science one.

  Now the alumni can have weddings here, Tom says. Though it’ll only be big enough for ten people to sit.

  Four people’s a wedding, I say.

  Tom Ludchenko and I have been roommates for four years. I’ve seen him grow four inches in a year, the year between twelve and thirteen. One summer he was a blond stick with
nothing for his shirt to hang on, and the next year he was a girl-eyed soccer player, playing goalie so as to avoid getting scrimmaged, knocking balls off with shoulders you could climb on. One Saturday a month we go down to Baxter School for the Handicapped, where we are student buddies to deaf peers; we help them with speaking, they help us with lipreading, this last an innovation of Tom’s, and an excellent espionage tool. Tom and I use it to spy on every girl we go out with, on the faculty meetings on our yearly performance, and of course parental stuff. Sometimes, he’ll stand across a room, and I’ll talk to Alyssa while he watches my mouth, and as I repeat occasional things that she says for what seems like emphasis, she of course getting impatient (What, she asks every time, is there an echo?), while Tom prepares to meet me for strategy afterward.

  We ride down today in the Range Rover of the headmistress, Mrs. Walter Thoreau, pronounced threw; the program was her idea, and she “administers it.” Her brother is deaf and works at Baxter now, and she enjoys shopping at Freeport outlets while we spend our three hours in conversation; her brother is now actually part of a radical group of the deaf who don’t want hearing aids or the new surgical corrections, and this is how she waits out yet another of their political contretemps. She also likes to grill us for gossip.