Edinburgh

by Alexander Chee

  How’s the new swim coach, she says, as soon as she guns the engine and gets us out of the tollbooth area; every time, the conversations begin here, as if the school’s borders extend to the tollbooth. We’re very excited about him, she adds, indicating the direction she’d like the conversation to go toward.

  He’s good, I say. An image of him hovering at the water’s surface, coming out of his suit, splits the view I have of the road ahead of me. I am sitting in the front seat, having beat Tom to saying shotgun. He has tattoos, I add.

  Trendy, she says, smirking at the middle distance. No piercings, I take it.

  None I can see, Tom says from the back. She laughs. And he asks, Do you know who Ms. Fields’s baby’s father is?

  Tom, she says, you are headed for a world of trouble if we talk that part up. But I’ll tell you, she doesn’t have one.

  Immaculate conception, I say, imagining her briefly, holding a jar and a baster.

  Top secret, she says. Alumni support for the new chapel is very strong. We might even get a new dormitory out of it. She’s rallied much of the support, which is brilliant politics on her part: she deflects attention from whatever scrutiny her pregnancy might go under.

  But anyway; are either of you going to do the building? I know you’re both here for spring training.

  Neither Tom nor I responds immediately. Around us, the cars on the road today are full of ordinary families. I wonder if passersby assume we’re Mrs. Walter Thoreau’s children. I might look it; she’s a sharp-featured forty-something woman, well groomed, a little lipstick and mascara, with a good healthy complexion and short dark hair. Gamine, I think, is the word for it. As in, like a young boy.

  I want you to promise me you will, she says. The more we have, the better the project will be.

  Okay, I say.

  Only if you will, Tom says to Mrs. Thoreau, and she laughs again.

  9

  DOWN AT THE school for the deaf the afternoon passes loudly. In a long-windowed classroom overlooking the sea Tom and I tutor students in speech patterning. Welcome to my home. How are you. Microbiology is one of my college degree goals. We teach them how to shape their mouth, watch as the sound comes out in pitches a degree high or low, to shake like a branch in that wind between flat and sharp. We practice our sign language, and as our hands flicker and our mouths stretch and close, the silence fills in with movement, which is what all sound is anyway. Being deaf, reading lips, everyone is at least like a word to the rest of the world. Everyone you meet is a sentence.

  When you read, I ask one of my students, Fiona, what do you hear?

  She laughs.

  What is it like for you reading, I ask. When I read, I hear a voice in my head. Do you?

  She puzzles over this. I don’t know how to tell you what’s in my head, she signs. Her hands bounce near her chest, like butterflies.

  You’ve never heard a sound, I ask.

  I feel them, she says.

  And when you read, lips, or a page, I say. What’s there? What orders it? Is it like someone making noise, and you feel it all over you?

  I have to get back to you on that, she signs, smiling. She’s a pretty girl, Irish skin and the blue eyes like the sky reflected in a sword. The quiet around her seems to make the focus of her prettiness sharper, the airs stillness focuses her in the eye. As if talking might make it harder to see someone.

  Okay, I say. E-mail me.

  10

  WHEN I GET back, there’s an e-mail from my grandparents. Dear Edward: re: Christmas . . .

  It is starting to look as if your father will be released, as he has suggested, by the holiday and so it is a matter of some importance that you reach a decision about how you would like us to include him, or if. We have rarely spoken of how we feel about these things but not because we feel we are protecting you, exactly; we simply wanted you to form independent feelings from ours, for as it was, we were sure you would pick up on these feelings subconsciously.

  The e-mail is long, basically a treatise on their theory of raising me, the borrowed child. They were always tentative around me, as if I were going to explode one day, into a hundred angry Edwards. In retrospect there was a certain danger of me developing MPD or something, from the sheer cognitive dissonance of having a father while not having a father, et cetera. But I know we both feel we’d been careful, and as I read, I began to understand more of why. And then they finally give me the exact reason.

  . . . in 1982, your father was convicted on twelve counts of child molestation, and then related charges of sexual assault, and the corruption of minors. Your mother was convicted as his accomplice and served a shorter sentence. There is some question also as to the death of a foster child in their care, although the judge, after some investigation, ruled out foul play. We loved him as a child, we are trying to reach a forgiveness of him in our hearts, but with this problem, there is a high rate of recidivism, and so we are concerned. We aren’t concerned particularly for your safety, but we do feel you need to make informed choices. We feel, as you approach the age of majority, that you are an exceptionally mature young man, and so we approach this topic confidently. This is only the beginning of the discussion; please call us after you read this, and we’ll discuss this further. We took the trouble of making an appointment for you with a counselor, should you so wish.

  We aren’t concerned particularly for your safety, I think. They mean I’m too old for him now. Not that he’s cured. When Tom comes back to the room I’m calm again, showered, cleaning the toilet in the common bathroom where I threw up. Wow, he says, from the doorway. Clean freak. You know, we have someone who comes through to do that.

  They never do a good enough job, I say.

  11

  I HAVE BEEN having, I know, problems with my flip turns. When I somersault at the wall, I pause before striking the wall with my feet, to look and measure the distance. I look around. My head turning is bad for the water rushing behind me. And so Ms. Fields watches as Mr. Zhe, who has told us today to call him Fee, jumps in the water beside me. Watch me, he says.

  He heads in toward the wall as if he will hit it with his head and then bangs through the turn, not even seeming to upend so much as to wriggle his way through. He comes up for air, to say, Don’t breathe before. You can breathe after. Keeping your head down, watch the cross at the bottom. Try to measure yourself according to that. If you look up, you start to become less streamlined. So now watch again. I measure my distance from the wall by knowing that when my head is over the crosshead, it’s time to start the turnover.

  And if you butterfly-kick on your way in you’ll be disqualified, Ms. Fields’s yells from the bench. Her stomach now has a tiny perch to it.

  Watch from below, he says. I take a breath and start under, watching from below as he heads toward the wall again. He lands on the wall without looking, parts the current following behind him with his arms spread ahead of him like a knife turned to the side, and pushes off, foam at his feet as he kicks. He swims over me, two feet above, and the waves of his passing bump me against the floor, gently.

  Did you get that, he asks, when we are both above water again. He didn’t even glance at me as he went over me, and even now, it seems to me he doesn’t see me somehow. As if I’m transparent, made of glass. To make sure, he says, before you continue, I want to see twenty somersaults right here, in front of the wall.

  Around me the rest of the team pounds the cold blue water. I stand in the shallow end, turning myself over and over as he watches, to make sure I’ve got it right. I squeeze the memory of him above me out, not so much even the sight of him as the feeling I had, of an aurora of heat and skin above me. I know there is no way for me to feel the heat of him through the chill water. And yet I do. It comes to me later, as I lie under a thin sheet in my dark overheated dorm. I wasn’t feeling it with my skin. The part inside. Erztelechy, a word from my SAT vocabulary worksheet, springs into my head. The original energy inside of something. The source of movement.
r />   I hear Tom turn over. Tom, I say.

  What.

  I’m working on that chapel, I tell him. You too, okay?

  Okay. Sleepy-sleepy, he says. He says it every night, has for four years. And like a magic charm tonight, I go to sleep, almost immediately, on hearing it.

  12

  THE PIT IS dug in advance by a bulldozer, and the stones, having been quarried nearby, arrive in several trucks, where they are dumped into a pile, the entire thing causing less sound than I had thought. So that’s what it sounds like when all those rocks fall, I tell myself, as I stand, watching, from my window. I bet you didn’t know that rocks could rustle, did you? These do. They fall off the truck as if they were dragon scales, to shine wetly across the distance from my dorm here, the far hill for the chapel, there. And so it is we gather, on a somehow-clear day in March, to put this together. Thirty of us, in sweaters and fleece vests. We look like an ad, Tom says to me, as we look at all the pretty people around us, so well cared for, clear-eyed.

  But for what, I say. Clean living?

  Tommy Hilfiger, he says.

  Alyssa slaps her face with sunscreen. Rosy as always. She wears little makeup, probably more than I suspected. She says a sharp hello, passing me by. I follow.

  Yes, I say.

  You make plans to go to Florida with Tom and I find out from Tom. What is that?

  A mistake, I say. I’ve been really busy, I forgot. I actually thought I’d already told you, I say, as the other twenty-eight students follow Mr. Zhe, who eyes us briefly before starting. Can we talk about this later, I ask.

  You have all the time in the world, she says. For Tom. Interesting. Her eyes narrow, nostrils widen, as if something were leaving through the one, taken in by the other. I see I never think of her anymore, in this moment. She had departed my thoughts completely, to the extent it took seeing her to remind me of her.

  When I find out who the bitch is, she says, looking over my shoulder to the sea behind me, I’ll punish. Fully punish.

  Alyssa, I say. There’s no one else.

  It’s all over this, she says. Someone else is all over this. And she turns, to sit down, in a cross-legged drop. I drop beside her.

  Mr. Zhe wears a gray zip-up turtleneck sweater that makes him look like he’s a sailor preparing us for departure. He shrugs back and forth in front of us, laughing occasionally, nervous as he outlines what the job is. It’s like putting a puzzle together, he says, and introduces a handsome blond guy, his skin brown like he’d been left out in the sun since birth. The expert. We watch as he and Mr. Zhe put together a few of the rocks.

  Listen to the rock, the expert says, as you hold it. I think of the rustle they made as they fell. The rock has a shape, search for where it meets the rock below, how it will ask for the rock to go above it. The idea is to set them in such a way that gravity holds them in place.

  The first day, the foundation is set and banked. At night, from the dorm, it looks like a giants footprint. Someplace a god stood on the earth. In the morning that follows, we set the stones quietly, all jokes gone. We work in pairs, one holds the stone as the other orients it, and it is built in strips. We cut one way, then the next, and when we break for lunch, the walls to the chapel rise to our shins. The shape they imply is in the air above them, like they’re singing a song of the next thing to come.

  When Alyssa slaps the back of my head, passing by, I don’t do a thing. Tom Ludchenko mouths to me, What happened? And I mouth back, I don’t know.

  We return to building.

  13

  THE CHAPEL IS completed in a week. At night Tom rubs my shoulders and talks to me about the girls of Florida. I say nothing I remember in response. Alyssa has told everyone in our class that I am cheating on her, and that when she finds out who the girl is, there’ll be real trouble. This last is emphasized with her right fist slapping her left palm. Smack.

  Who is it? Tom asks me after our last day of building. You can tell your Tom, sure.

  She’s high, I say. Even Tom believes her now. I am taking her pictures down from the wall, sick of her smiling reproach. I still love her, I say. She’s the only girl.

  What are you doing with those, he says. Presuming you aren’t lying even to your best friend.

  I pull them all down, sunny picnic smiles, the class trip to Katahdin, the road trip we took out to Montana with her family. I put them in a file folder and slide them into my filing cabinet. Best friend, I say. I am teaching her a lesson in silence.

  You mean, she’s right, he says. He walks up to the wall and puts his hand on it. What are you going to put here instead?

  Don’t know, I say. She’s not right, I say. She’s just going to embarrass herself, when the truth comes out.

  Uh huh, Tom says.

  You are such a fuck, she says, when she sees the wall the next morning. Really.

  Tom runs out of the room for the bathroom. Listen, I say. All you have to do is admit you are wrong, and I’ll put the pictures back up.

  I don’t give a fuck about the pictures, she says. Are you some kind of moron? I don’t mark territory. Where are they, and here she plucks at the desk. Where? My homework spills across the floor.

  I leave the room while she isn’t watching. I walk to the bathroom, where Tom brushes his teeth. Through a mouth of foam he says, You are a brute, man. Unbelievable. I walk back to the room, where Alyssa sits in the floor’s middle on her knees. Paper around her as if she’s shed it. I hate you, she says.

  I love you, I say.

  14

  ON THE NIGHT before I go to Florida, I slip out to visit the silent stone bump we’ve made. Since finishing it, I’ve wanted to be alone with it, and after Alyssa’s meltdown I want to go somewhere on this campus that doesn’t remind me of her.

  Open to the four directions, domed, slate benches in rows facing toward a central granite altar, it seems, already, as if it has always been here, since before the school. On the slope of the rise toward the sea, it looks down to the houses of the school, like a large trail marker. There is no electricity for it, no heat, no light, and so in the dark night as I come up to the entrance I do not see that someone is inside. From just outside the door, I feel it, instead, whatever warm air this visitor makes by just standing there reaches me through the stone chill.

  I wait. I hear the pitch of the night tide at the beach over the hill, the creaking wood planks of the boat spit. I slide myself to the ground, hide my warmth from the one inside, lean my back into the chapel’s serrated wall. I’m pretty sure its him. The one whose idea it was to build this place. Fee. I like to think I can tell him from the heat he gives off.

  And then I hear it. A faint sound reaches me, above the ocean: singing. Or rather, humming, the music, but no words.

  It makes me want to laugh a little at him. Except even the stones shouldn’t be hearing this. The song pricks me like wood sparks off a fire. I wait, quiet, cold, the stone’s cold reaching me slowly. And then he leaves, quickly. A sprint, he runs from the same cold that’s holding me still.

  I watch him go. It’s Fee, all right. His car in the far lot spits light across the lot and takes the road in a whirl of white and red. I stand, shake my blood back into my legs, and walk through the chapel with my lighter out, lit. He loves someone, I think, as I enter the chapel, warm from him.

  I find a taper, which I light. So this was the warmth. He’d obviously just blown the candle out. I can smell the candle smoke that hangs around me now in the new light. And in the light, the floor shows me where someone has disturbed it, near the base of the altar.

  The altar’s granite was quarried nearby, in Peterboro, and it is a large dark polished gray. Five-sided, it reflects me as I squat down. There’s a picture here, curled up and set in a spot where the stone sides of the floor don’t fit perfectly, a rock envelope. It’s not obvious at all, as I look at it, but to me it is, as obvious as the weather or the dark outside. Because, as I take it in my hands, I decide, it is for me. I slip it into my pocket
. I didn’t know why I’d wanted to come out here tonight and now I know, I came for this.

  Back in my room, Fiona, my deaf student, has e-mailed me. Re: What’s in my head when I read:

  I didn’t want to say. I mean, is that what hearing’s like? I guess it is. I guess I hear. In that, if anyone speaks to me, it’s like a transmission, on the optic fiber of my eye, played in my head as if it’s a speaker. Speaking frustrates me. Because I know, it’s nothing like it should be. I wish only to communicate with other people as gracefully as they communicate with me.

  Have fun down in Florida with Tom,

  Fiona

  15

  NOWHERE TO LOOK at, it seems, when crossing Florida.

  The sky looks strained, as if it’ll just let go, and the vacuum of space come down, ripping everything off the ground. But the weak sky continues, somehow, a tea-stain white with a peek of blue down near the tops of the trees, as occasionally a crane flies out across the sugarcane fields that stretch endlessly to either side. Chokingly thick smoke, from the burning cane, obscures our view here and there.

  Interterm practices ended and we are allowed a five-day break while we taper, in which our bodies store the enormous energy we have been raising daily for practices, and let it out all in a rush, when we compete upon our return. Tom Ludchenko and I have come here for our yearly pilgrimage to his grandparents’ place. We knew, they said to us this morning, over breakfast, if we got a place in Disney World, we’d see our family. Tom rolled his blue eyes in his pink face as they laughed at him with their matching blues. Blue, blue, blue, I counted, blowing on my coffee.

  In actuality we have come to hate Disney but there is a swim camp near here where Tom knows some girls from another team, the Mount Desert team, who’ve all come down here to do stroke-work. Alyssa will kill me if she finds out but Tom is the only one who’ll tell, and he speaks to her less than I do all the time. And there is a lot she’ll kill me for besides all of this.