Edinburgh

by Alexander Chee

  My grandparents again. Floating into view, beautiful white hair, so clean. I wonder what it’s like, when it grows in. How you feel, to see this light from the door of the beyond reflected there in your hair. And my hand reaches up to touch them both on the head, a gesture I know they are mistaking for tenderness for them, but it doesn’t matter, for after, when the bird controls me, I know, this memory will console them when I no longer can.

  The doctor says, over his clipboard, that everything checks out. But what about the vomiting? my grandmother asks. Nerves, he says. I recommend counseling. But his bloodwork shows no problems, except maybe dehydration.

  Well all right then, she says. And a few days later, in a counselor’s office, she says it again, as I am prescribed Xanax.

  Lots of people take it, Tom says to me. The phone-line counselor says it too, though he says, I think you wouldn’t need it if you would just come cut.

  As what, I ask.

  As gay, he says.

  I’m not gay, I say. I’m just in love with a man.

  Uh huh, he says. And what is gay, then.

  Gay is wanting men. Sexually. As a rule. I have managed to turn off the booth light, so I can sit here in the dark.

  So let me get this straight. You throw up so much that you are fainting, and now you have been prescribed drugs, because you want this man so much, but, you aren’t gay.

  No, I say. I’m not.

  Okay, he says.

  You told me not to do anything about it, I say.

  You can still tell people, he says. In fact, your life may depend on it.

  And the words I want to say fly in my throat like swallows lost in a church. The bird is many now, small now, hops inside me. Each one carries a possibility in its sharp tiny beak.

  20

  THE DAY OF the party is so beautiful, I wish that morning it didn’t have to be the day that it is.

  Bridey and Fee have set up a large white tent that glows from the yard as I approach, like sails full of light. Bridey comes out of the house as I park my car, slapping flour from his hands as he lets the screen door bang shut behind him. Piecrusts, he says. First I’m blind from cutting paper roses, and now I’ll be crippled from rolling the crusts. He kisses me on the cheek. Fee’s inside, he says.

  In the tent, Fee bends over a long folding table, draping the clothes. Put your finger here, he says to me by way of greeting.

  I put my finger down on the cloth. He pulls it into a neat triangle edge and drops the rest over the side, a clean fold. He pushes a tack in to keep it in place. Bridey’s paper roses, white and pink, cluster in chains strung around the inside of the tent. It’s beautiful, I say.

  Thanks, he says. The missus has been working all week.

  Just another faculty wife, Bridey says, entering the tent.

  And so we spend the hours before the party. I shell piles of shrimp for shrimp cocktail, sip a lemonade, and joke with Bridey. Fee walks in and out of the kitchen on his way to the various tasks of the house and party, saying nothing, while Bridey asks me questions, about Alyssa (She’s still so angry with you, he says) or the Thoreaus (Aren’t they strange, he says, so like characters from a novel about another country). I don’t remember my answers, only a wind full of the meadow, and the light, bright enough to strip paint.

  Read my cards beforehand, Bridey says to me, and brushes shrimp shells off his hands, rinsing them under the faucet. I sit down at the table. He bends his beautiful head over the cards. Shuffle them, I say, and put them in several stacks. He whicks the cards like a professional. Sets them out. Okay, I say. Now pick the one stack that seems to call to you.

  Of the three stacks he takes the one on the left. Hand it to me, I say. He does. I deal the cards out, ten, in quick succession, in a Celtic cross configuration.

  That’s a beautiful card, he says, and sets his finger down in the center. I take the cards in, slowly. Ace of cups in the center. Crossing it, the page of wands. Crowning it, the five of cups, below it, Temperance. In the past, the Lovers.

  Well, he says.

  This is about love, I say. But the Lovers is actually about art, and decisions. The final outcome card is the Tower. Everything you’ve known until now is about to change, based on a recent decision. It’s not bad, [ say. Only if you don’t accept that change is on its way. True love here, I say, and I can barely say it. But I can’t lie to him about his reading.

  This is about change, he says, pointing to the Tower.

  Yes, I say. It’s Poseidon tearing down the world. This, I say, and point to the ace of cups, that’s Aphrodite coming out of the water. His daughter.

  Fee comes over, dressed in a tank top and sweatpants. He smells faintly of dill. Potato salad’s done. How’s the future look?

  Poseidon, I think. Good, I say. The bird says.

  And then the guests arrive.

  The party charms us all. The warm afternoon lets the chill of the night ahead enter early, and so everyone draws a little closer. The paper rose banners flap up, as if to say, this land is claimed for paper roses. The Thoreaus, the Whites, the Ms. Fields, extremely pregnant. I could let go at any minute, she says, and Fee widens his eyes with alarm. It turns out they have known each other for a very long time. Since college. Don’t worry, she says to the group. No stories. He and I could destroy each other. The teachers and their spouses fill their plates, they chill glasses with punch they drink slowly, at first. And then Mrs. White whips a cigarette from her purse, and soon, Fee is sent to climb his kitchen counter for the bourbon he’s stashed up above the cabinets.

  Why’s it up there, Mrs. White says, smoking from below.

  So you wouldn’t see it, he says, and Mr. White laughs.

  You’re real funny, she says, and points her cigarette at her husband.

  Mrs. White and Mrs. Thoreau take up a spot in the tent, with bourbon and cigarettes, and wave the smoke away from Ms. Fields, who fans herself gently with a paper plate. When I approach, their talk stops. Hello, Mrs. Thoreau says to me. You look wonderful.

  Thanks, I say. My grandparents are worried I’m too thin.

  You’re a teenager, she says. It’s practically what being a teenager is, being thin.

  21

  I CLIMB THE mountain in the dark, but the moon is full and helps me, as much as it can. The party ended hours ago. Near the moon, when I can see it, there is a planet posing as a star. I know it’s a planet because only a pretender wouldn’t be faded by the moon. Only an impostor would remain when all the other stars recede.

  I had set the note down, in its envelope, in Fee’s stack of mail. The two stacks were neatly sorted. The party outside whickered in the breeze, polyphonic conversations. Their bedroom. The bed was neatly made, the pillows stacked to make a crude, soft geometry.

  The eagles nest is here on a ledge, like Tom said. I pause before getting in. Large as a bathtub. I can almost lie full length in it. The nest’s soft walls stretch when I settle in. No eggs here. Lulled, I close my eyes, and I must fall asleep, though it feels like no time at all when I open my eyes to the eagle looking at me.

  A gold coin in the snow. The enormous eye. Feathers that look like armor. I’d never seen feathers look like they could protect anything until now, but here, I can see how they hold the air, strain it like a whales baleen strains the water. The wings draw open. In the dark, wings spread, he could be an angel sent here to bring me home. To tell me, go home, Fee loves you, and nothing’s wrong. But he isn’t and Fee doesn’t. Unless eagles have been angels all along. I can see why someone, on seeing one, would think that God had sent for them in this way.

  He pulls his wings close again in front of him and a huff of oil scent comes off him, a musk. A faint powdery itch in my nose, like down.

  I slowly climb out of the nest, the eagle surprisingly quiet. It’s okay, I say to the eagle. I’m leaving row. And as I head down the mountain in the morning, it seems like this bird I am now should be able to fly.

  22

  AT THE DORM my gra
ndparents wait. Grandfather in a tan suit, a blue silk tie creasing the white shirt. His hair shining against his head like the inside of a shell. Grandmother in a dress of navy silk, hemmed at her ankles, which she crosses as she sits in the chair there in lounge. They look up as I enter the room. You’re late, my grandmother says.

  I can’t imagine why, my grandfather says, and she elbows him.

  I’ll just be a second, I say, and head to the showers.

  The stink comes off. I dry, thinking of waterproof feathers. The guillemot, cousin to the parrot, dives in the water in pursuit of fish, where it swims on its wings, flapping them under water. I push hair gel through blond hair, wondering whose it is.

  Hi, I say, reappearing. They inspect my father-meeting attire: gray sweater, red polo, jeans.

  Lost more weight, my grandmother says. Are you sick?

  No, I say.

  I ask him to show me the collar on his ankle. Electronic, he can’t remove it. He’s tagged, like the animals in Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom. Here in his new home, a tiny cottage, in Belfast, Maine, he smiles. Pours me coffee. God, he says, looking at me. Milk?

  Sure, I say.

  My grandparents are driving the roads in search of antiques. So they say. I know this is a lie. My grandmother hates them. If they’re not inherited, she says, they’re just junk. We have breakfast together, this man and I. My father.

  He sits, pushes his cup forward. Edward, he says. I want to answer any questions you have.

  That was when I asked to see the bracelet. He pulls up the leg of his pant, where it shines, like a plastic baby snake. Huh, I say.

  You’re so tall, he says.

  Six feet and two inches, I say.

  There aren’t any pictures on the walls yet. A mix of wildflowers in a glass Mason jar is the only color in the room. He’s a tall man, this father. His hair, going silver, gone in the middle. The forehead shines. His hands, large, white, soft. Some men go to prison and become huge, caricatures of muscle. He is thin, ruddy, his glasses occasionally gleam in such a way that his eyes are hidden. The lenses go white. Windows into a world made of some other light the sun’s not fathered.

  What’s the most important thing I need to know about my son, he asks me, and I realize, I’ve just been watching him.

  You, I say.

  He tells me about how much my mother wanted to stay in the States, as he calls them, but how much she hated the idea of wearing a collar. Of neighbor notification. I’ll not walk beside my son in that, she said to him in a letter. They didn’t see each other much after the conviction. Epistles.

  You are so handsome, he says finally. We walk the road. A skinny asphalt lane, no line in the center, even the trees look dry.

  Thanks, I say.

  23

  BIRDS NEVER KNOW their fathers. After birth, under the mother, after learning to fly, they usually never know how they share the sky with their father. Their father, careening after the same school of fish seaming the water below. Is there a memory, as the father cuts through the same cloud?

  They all said it would be like this. Alyssa says it, back straight, carrying a duffel bag into my room. She empties it by my closet door.

  Like what, I say. I am reading on my bed. I set the book down.

  That you’d just stop. One day, you’d just vanish, and it would be over.

  I’m here, I say.

  So you say, she says. So you say.

  All right then, I say. It’s over. Are you happy now? I stand up and walk over to the bag. Is everything really here? Let me check. I look over the books, the CDs. A bead necklace with my name strung on it. All right, I say. I stand up and she’s crying now, but it’s not enough. She needs to be far away. Before something worse happens. I haven’t disappeared, but she has.

  Can you leave now, I say. It’d be better.

  I take the things she’s brought back down to the laundry room, with a sign that says, PLEASE TAKE. They all look like something I’ve never seen or owned, stuff someone else left behind, dingy with strangeness. Except the necklace.

  I know him in the dark.

  In the chapel he sits waiting for me. No candle.

  What is it you want, he says. He doesn’t turn to look my way.

  You really can’t tell, I say.

  He doesn’t move. He sits still, like the hill we are on, as if he were a part of it. A rock in a coat.

  I’m in love with you, I say. In the dark, my wings ride inside the shadow. Here in the shadow the earth casts, my wings, large as my love, extend to the upper reach of the sky. The boy I am is small, made to fly on wings the size of the sky.

  I step beside him, slide onto the cold stone bench. Fee, I say.

  I have to go, he says. And is gone. I sit for a while, as the heat of him disperses into the air, the stone, me. He thinks he can leave me by leaving me.

  The next note I leave for him I leave in his campus mail. I’ve seen Bridey leave him notes. Campus mail is fairly unprotected: the honor code means, no locked doors. Nothing is ever stolen. That’s not the danger in Mr. Zhe’s mail today. The Whites are out of town, and asked me to house-sit for them. I know that nothing can happen in the dorms, but in the Whites’ house, a few things seem possible. I just need one more chance. And so I make it. I walk to the wooden honeycomb of mailboxes and slip the note inside, folded just like I’ve seen Bridey fold his. So that it perches there, almost origami: crisp and geometrical. I write only the address and a time, typed on a typewriter I find in the typing room of the town library.

  The time between then and when he arrives presses on me. So much so that I wait outside, in the dark, across the street. I can’t wait in that house without him. I smoke and wait in the dark. I don’t have to wait long, though it feels, when he arrives, that I am another age, a new age that I’ve never been. Suddenly older. I walk across the street, crushing the cigarette as I go.

  He turns.

  His panic makes me sad. He tries very hard, I can see. To act as if I am just his student, he just my teacher. My coach. Hey, I say. It feels a fraud as soon as I say it. I pull the keys out. And the cold sweeps us into the warm house. I try not to cry and am successful. And this makes the difference, I think. Through the warm house, the dry house, the house usually full of children’s sharp noises, we slip, quiet, and in the Whites’ bedroom I let myself fall onto the bed.

  I’m not as pretty as Bridey, I know this. But it doesn’t matter. Not anymore. He kisses me like he’s tasting something strange, and for a moment, I remember, the bird, and my heart tatters. I worry that he will taste the bird, hit it with his tongue. But the bird lies quiet tonight. Tonight I get everything I have wanted. For the first time.

  24

  MY FATHER IS a Mainer. He doesn’t lock his doors. I have questions, too many to ask. And so he wakes up in the night at some point and comes down to find me in his living room. What the fuck is this, I say.

  I hold the pictures out in my hand, fanned like poker cards. I’ve been looking at them all, looking for some reason to understand what made me. The two of you, I ask.

  He’s frozen in the doorway, like victims in those goofy movies where criminals gain control over the mechanism of time. Did you hear me, I ask. I toss the pictures down, and they scatter, as if trying to get away from each other. From him. From me. Answer me, I say, and stand up, and reach for the first weapon I can find. The lamp’s shade falls like a hat, the bare bulb shines.

  Answer me! I walk to the wall and plunge the lamp bulb-first into the wall. Answer! Me! The glass pops, the drywall singes, the lamp sits there, hung in the wall. I pull it out and throw it at the window, and it carries the broken glass with it into the yard. I grab the box of pictures and toss them out after it, and they spread on the lawn.

  I look back at him and he’s still frozen. The dark room shows him better than the light did and I register now, the beetled brow, the eyes. Why did eighteen boys keep quiet as he ran his hands over them? These eyes, each a knife. Silence shrinks me. I want
their names, I want to know, want to find each one of them. Give each one of them a piece of him.

  In the dark quiet room my wings return to me. Yeah, I say. Come on. I unbutton my shirt. C’mon. I open the shirt totally, the cold air a blade laid on my skin. You’re a fuck-face! You and her both! Do you know what I want from you?

  Leave, he says.

  I want you dead, I say.

  Leave now.

  Children, I say. It would’ve been like eating them.

  You don’t know what it was like, he says. And you need to leave.

  BLUE

  Fee

  1

  SOMETIMES I IMAGINE my grand-aunts. Escaped from their tormentors, unable to go home. They would be like my grandfather, of course, thin and tall and silver. Their hair would be wrapped into modest buns, let down only at night, when some daughter might help them brush it. The red hair would be gone, turned silver now. The white fox, very rare, is the good fox, the most holy one. Helper to the rice god.

  If they were still alive, though, they would have come home. Could they be alive out there, somehow unable to have found their way home? Sometimes I see them: old women, vigorous as teenagers, stepping across the night in a rush of wind, their hair turning to fire. When the fox flies her hair is a fiery tail behind her. Watch them come. They dodge church spires and office towers in their pell-mell, sow sparks, set mysterious fires at the homes of their now-elderly tormentors, who emerge to put them out, a little afraid. They laugh as they go.

  We love him, they would say of their brother, their words scattering across the roof of sky. We miss him. But we can’t come home.

  2

  WHEN A FOX marries another fox, fox trouble ends for one whole day. Kitsune no yomeiri, the Japanese say. Rain and sun together at the same time. Good luck.