Edinburgh

by Alexander Chee

  We pass a sign, SPIRITUAL READINGS, PAST LIFE REGRESSION, TAROT, HANDWRITING ANALYSIS, ONCALA, WHERE THE SPIRIT MOVES US ALL. WELCOME TO VOLUSIA COUNTY.

  What’s that about, I say to Tom.

  There’s a town nearby called Cassadaga, where there’s been mediums for years, he says. But recently it got too large, internal squabbling, et cetera. So some moved here to found a new town on the same theme. He shrugs his huge shoulders. Want to stop?

  I do, and say so.

  At a rose-covered visitor center a kindly white-haired man asks me a few questions as Tom waits in the car and soon he hands me a brochure. Clairvoyant. Tanya Roux is a Certified Clairvoyant of Oncala’s Council of Clairvoyance and Clairaudience . . .

  We head over, according to the map, a few blocks away, where Tom waits again in the car while I am seated in a velveted parlor, midnight blue from floor to ceiling, a dazzling crystal ball in the center of a small white table. I set my brand-new credit card down on the table and when Tanya comes in, a strikingly young, dark-haired girl so thin it shocks me, I find myself desperate to get this over with.

  I explain myself quickly, and hand over the photograph. The picture is of a boy, dated August 1983, and the boy, so blond his hair is the color of the noontime summer sky. He is yelling something to the photographer, his eyes crossed in a manner both charming and sad. The medium takes the picture and lets go of it immediately.

  So hot, she says. She holds her hand a few inches above. This is as close as I can get to it. It’s burning.

  I leave with her advice in my ears. The boy is gone but the fire is not. Get rid of the picture or the fire will come for you. Tom smiles at me as I climb into the car. Done wasting your money, he asks.

  Sure, I say, and put the picture in the copy of The Wapshot Chronicle that I had brought with me to read. We drive out, the sunset beginning to make a red mark on the sky’s bottom.

  The next day at Disney World I find myself watching the children.

  Small. Skin like a petal. Hair that won’t do what it is supposed to. Eyes like lake water at night. A need to eat but not to stay clean. Holding legs as parents try to walk. I try to imagine what it is my father saw that he would have done what he did. There is nothing about them, that I can tell. I try to see the Eros here, he is often, after all, shown as a baby boy. The child of love and war. But no effect. No Affect. Just Popsicles melting. Smeary faces. Yelling. Punches. In the line for Space Mountain, Tom notices me watching and he says, Biological clock ticking? This is something Mrs. Thoreau says all the time.

  Space Mountain. Rushing through the dark at high speed. Someone else is driving. You could die, if they aren’t paying attention. This is what childhood is, and we line up for it. In the line, a little boy of eleven stands in front of me. I can see he’s already sturdy, he has the hero’s triangle of a body, the broadening shoulders, the tiny waist and hips, the sturdy legs. The man in him waits, barely. But isn’t anything you could touch. It’s not love, I see. It’s not like when I want Fee to touch me, when I would take hold of Alyssa by her neck and pull her in for a kiss.

  Tom’s grandparents take us out for dinner. Lobster, four and five pounds each. To get this large, they have to be thirty years old. We sit foursquare around the table, over huge broken red bodies, pull the meat out and soak it in yellow butter. Around us, children yell for their parents’ attention.

  16

  BY THE TIME we return from vacation it feels like a month has gone by but it isn’t a month, just shy a week. Tom feels the same way. We float in and out of classes, the teachers’ voices a syncopation, and we drift down to the quad, where we sit on wet grass and watch the clouds hurtle by like islands cut loose from below. Blue Hill is one of the most beautiful places in the whole world, anyone knows it, Tom tells me. We shouldn’t be glum. But we are. Tom misses one of the girls he met on our adventure over at the stroke camp down in Florida, and I have the picture I found in the chapel. Somewhere in Fee is a picture of this. I can’t help but wonder who the boy is but I don’t know him and so he fades, becomes transparent. And as he does I do, the boy I knew myself to be dissolving.

  Did you ever see a bee lying drunk on a rose? Lost in the petal, so close you can’t see its tiny burrowing. In this way, I hang as I can. As close as I can.

  After practice we go as a team for a carb-loading premeet meal to an Italian restaurant that has an all-you-can-eat buffet, where we pay our six dollars apiece to the elderly cashier and head off to stuff ourselves in the glass-candle twilight of the room. We sit in three booths at the back of the restaurant, eating, talking loud, and Ms. Fields takes an uneasy seat next to me. Hey there, she says.

  Hey, I say. Precious Cargo, I say, pointing to her stomach.

  You doing okay? she says. She twirls at her spaghetti and drops a ball of it into her mouth.

  I, uh, yeah? Yeah. Why?

  Go ahead and convince me, she says, chewing. I was just talking but I guess there is something there.

  Is it weird, having someone inside you like that, I ask.

  She emits a laugh, choking a little as she swallows. Wow. Nice question. Um, well, it is bizarre, but it’s beautiful, she says.

  Beautiful, I say. Ms. Fields still hasn’t told anyone who might tell who the father is. And then Mr. Zhe sits down next to me.

  Get enough to eat there, he says. His large head here in the dark restaurant like a lamp inside the dark cave of me.

  He starts talking about the chapel’s finishing ceremony, the inauguration of it. Easter there’ll be a service, he says. The headmaster likes the idea of having an Easter service, brief, of course, because of weather (It might snow, adds Ms. Fields), as Jesus rolled the stone away and this chapel is rolled stones.

  Not hungry, Ms. Fields asks me.

  I see that I’ve stopped eating, and so I pick up a fork. Resting, I say, and stab a shiny ziti among the rest in the sauce lake on my plate.

  Mr. Zhe puts his hand on my forehead. You’re not warm, he says. Maybe a bit clammy. His hands are warm, dry, they have a faint smell of sweet cinnamon. Around us, the other swimmers din the air with their conversations, and suddenly all the sounds flatten. No one sound any louder than any other. A leveling takes place. I hit the floor on my side.

  And so it is that the faint, caused by my thinking of the theft of the picture, is the first reason he takes me in his arms. I’ll remember it later. At the time, he lifts me to carry me outside, his arms hard like wood. As the air comes back to me, the light, as we go through the doors to the outside, breaks on us like rain. He lays me out on the grass, stays above me, searching my eyes, lifting one lid, then the other. Ms. Fields appears above me, the pillars of her legs looming suddenly, the blue sky above her, heaven’s sieve. Is he all right, she asks.

  I think so, Mr. Zhe says. Are you all right, he asks.

  I close my eyes. Yes, I say. I will be.

  In my dorm’s phone booth, the door pulled shut, I talk through some fast options with a hot-line operator for “gay, bisexual and questioning youth” I find on a number from a newspaper ad. He’s down in Portland, he tells me his name’s Kevin, that he’s thirty-five, that he wants me to know that the conversation is confidential.

  Do you know how he feels about you?

  I don’t, I say. I mean, I have no reason to think he feels anything. I’m just his student.

  You mentioned you know he’s gay; is he out at the school?

  No, I say. I, uh, I went over to his house. Saw him with his boyfriend.

  A little Harriet the Spy, are we, he says, chuckling. Sorry. I mean Encyclopedia Brown.

  No, I say. It’s fine.

  Do you fantasize about other men, he asks.

  No, I say. I don’t. I don’t fantasize.

  Hmm. Well, how about this. What do you imagine, happening, when you think of him.

  And here, for some reason, I think of my father. Your pause, he says, is a little damning.

  I, uh, was distracted for a moment. I don’t know.
That’s why I called. I don’t know what this is, I say. I twirl the phone cord, and the phone numbers, written in ballpoint and pencil on the wall, start to look like a map to some country, topographic: here, the mountains. There, a river. A notice, above the phone, reads PLEASE LIMIT CALLS TO 20 MIN. I look at my watch. I’ve got thirteen minutes.

  How about this, the operator says, all business. How about, if you imagine him getting fired and you getting suspended or expelled. Because you are not yet eighteen and he is your teacher and no one, no one, thinks of this as the happy ending for the story you’re telling me. Not even you, right?

  No, I say. I mean, right.

  So, what’s worth that.

  I love him, I say, surprising myself. When he’s around, it feels like he’s in charge of everything in me. I don’t know what to do with that. Do you kiss it? I don’t know.

  Oh, boy. The operator’s quiet a moment, and then he says, I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t fall in love with that.

  I laugh.

  I remain worried, he says. The school thing is large. I really think, with a year to go, that you should consider doing nothing until you have graduated. Your graduation is the most important thing right now, and the year will give you time to really know what you want to do about this.

  He’ll be gone by then, I say.

  See how smart I am? the operator says. Look, I know what this feels like but at your age, you’re going to feel like this every three days.

  Feel like I’m going to die, I ask. Every few days?

  You’re not dying, he says. I guarantee it. But if you do anything about this you could get into trouble so deep you might wish you were dead. And that’s, well, that’s not what this should be about. Love should be about making you want to live.

  In the hall I see Alyssa’s brown-skinned back as she passes by, headed for my room. I don’t have a lot of time. I say, There are Mexican Indians who believe that gold is the earth’s blood.

  Huh, he says. Beautiful. What’s that go to do with anything?

  We cut the world to marry, I say.

  Marriage, he says, is not a big topic for this hot line, despite what people might think.

  I’d cut the world for him, I say.

  Don’t even cut a class for him, the operator says. Do yourself a favor. Stay young. For another year, and try to find a nice boy your own age. Okay? And one other thing, he says.

  Yes, I say.

  Call me here at this number if you decide to try anything. Talk to me before you do. All right?

  Alyssa, in the window of the booth, mouths, Who are you talking to? I raise a hand to her, signaling a moment, and I say, All right. We hang up. I imagine him logging the call. 6:15 P.M., April 30, 1997. A 17-year-old male, questioning. Talk time, 18 minutes. In love with teacher. Alyssa pulls the door open.

  Hi, she says. Who’s your new girlfriend?

  What, I say.

  This phone booth has someone else written all over it. She pulls back.

  There’s no other girl but you, I say.

  She turns, her hair falls over her face, and then she pulls it back, and looks at me. Let’s go look at the comet, she says.

  Outside the comet Hale-Bopp sits in the sky. Alyssa and I sit and watch it from the lawn. Comets are burning ice, gas frozen and made solid and then burned by the friction, so cold it’s fuel. So hot you can see it from planet Earth. I know exactly how you feel, I tell the comet.

  It’s amazing, isn’t it, she says. A comet, and for a few weeks, we get to look at it every night as though it were the most ordinary star.

  At the low edge of the sky, a bright smear. The slow burning, light pealing like struck bells at the speed of its passing. A bright tear in the night’s dark belly.

  Did you ever notice, I tell Alyssa, shortly before we leave the comet’s company. How tear, as in to cry, and tear, as in to rip or pull, how they’re spelled the same? You could write them and someone reading would not know if you were crying or separating.

  You’d know, she tells me. You would know.

  17

  EVEN A SLOW angel moves faster than we know how to.

  For my senior English thesis, the topic of which I had to choose this year, I decide to choose my subject at random. Inspired by a game the swim team played on the bus, Lucky Bug, I pick the letters and numbers off license plates I see on Volkswagens that our bus passes on our way to swim meets, until I arrive at a Dewey decimal system number. I take the number into the library and enter it into the computer to search for the title, and the title comes up, quickly. Sappho, The Poems of.

  I want to write a paper about Sappho, I tell my English adviser, Mrs. Autry, at a meeting shortly after. A brisk, red-haired woman with large eyes in a thin face, she reminds me of an elf. She approves it with a smirk. Good luck, she says.

  What, I say.

  You’ll be trying to write that paper your whole life, she says. Sappho’s an enduring question.

  Later, I am reading her and Mrs. Autry is right.

  Sappho, fragment 168:

  And Night’s black sleep upon the eyes.

  He writes a letter.

  Dear Edward:

  I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to seeing you after all this time, at Christmas. It’s the answer to a prayer, at least. Your grandparents are some of the best people the world has to offer, and I’m sure they’ve done a terrific job at raising you, and that they’ve given you lots of love. They wrote to me regularly here to let me know how things were going with you, and while it hurt me to not be able to be in touch with you directly, I always hoped that when I was done here, that we might meet, and at least be friends. I don’t want you to think that I’ll magically emerge from here and be, overnight, this father you never had. I think I can say that. But I remember you as my baby boy, and it’s been so long since I’ve held you. I know it’ll be a shock, to see you as a young man. I’ve gotten pictures at Christmas, so I’ve seen it, but it’s another thing altogether to meet you.

  I wasn’t ever happy with the arrangements the court made, please know that. And also, know that your mother loves you. She and I aren’t in touch anymore, but shortly after her term ended, she wrote to me to say that her way of loving you would be to leave you to my parents. I know that sounds odd, but she really felt that it was a duty of love, to remove herself. And that’s your mom.

  There’s more. It’s just a letter, I tell myself, as I get out of bed that morning, pull on a shirt and shorts, and head out to the pool. It’s not an omen.

  Years later I would come to regard it as one of those moments where you learn to trust your first instinct. For instance, you always tell yourself something isn’t what you think it is because you are trying to scare yourself off what you know is true. For now, though, I am headed across the summer lawns of the school, bright green for the visiting students and the summer kids. I applied for and got a summer term special program of independent study, for reading Sappho, and Fee had the idea that I should work at the pool as a lifeguard. And so that, and the letter from my father, is my summer. Sappho, swimming, Mr. Aphias Zhe, and a criminal pedophile’s correspondence. My father.

  Phile, for love. Fil, for son. Pedophilial, pedofilial. Fil de pede. A rhyming voice crowds me as I go across the campus. I get to the pool, unlock the doors, and enter the fluorescent rooms and halls stinging from the chlorine. Trophies here by the entrance, pictures of young boys and girls huddled, pink and a little pinched, before the camera. It’s cold, the AC pump the only sound besides my flip-flops going pit, pit, pit. A whistle for the kids. Unlatch the locker room doors, turn on the radio, to top 40, flick the hair back with a bandanna. I slump into my chair.

  Phil de pede. The love of children. What is it called, when a child loves a man? Notice how the word goes one way. I won’t be a child much longer. Paper father, paper son. What I want doesn’t have a word. But made of paper, I can be written on. I can find, make, write this word.

  The first of today’s sw
im guests are a faculty family, Mr. and Mrs. White, the algebra and algorithm husband-wife team with two tiny blond seven-year-old boys, twins, who bob in the pool, squeaking. Mrs. White is really nice and seems just now to be catching up on sleep lost raising the twins, while Mr. White seems unchanged, still almost a teenager. The twins take after him with his blond hair and his peaked nose. Mrs. White is a striking woman with pale skin and dark blue eyes, which the children have also, the one place her colors touched them. Mr. White, as he smiles at me while the boys giggle at apparently nothing, shows eyes so pale I am reminded of the sea salt my grandmother cooks with. She uses it to crust mackerel.

  How’s Sappho treating you, Mrs. White asks. She rises out of the pool on strong arms, pulling herself out in one yank, twisting to sit near my feet. She wrings her hair and the water falls out of it in a slap.

  Sappho’s great, I say. There’s nothing like an old Greek Lesbian.

  Mrs. White furrows her brow at this. I mean, I say, resident of the isle of Lesbos.

  Her sexuality is the subject of some controversy, Mrs. White says with a faraway look.

  Is it? I ask.

  Thoreau says so, Mrs. White says, meaning the Mrs. They are old friends, refer to each other from their days back at Chapin, in New York, by last name. White, Thoreau. As if taunting each other for taking the name of the husband.

  Seems pretty clear, reading her, I say.

  Whose translations are you reading? She turns to look at her husband, rising from the water, a twin under each arm, as if he found them there.

  Guy Davenport, I say.

  None better, White says. A friend of mine studied with him down in Kentucky. He would hand out his translations of Herodotus as he finished them. “There isn’t one sufficient,” he’d said, at the beginning of the class, “and so I’ll be giving these to you as they’re done.” Isn’t that amazing? A genius that knows itself.