Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

How do they know it’s sick, I ask my father.

Because she tells them, my father says.

We return home for lunch, replaced on our watch by a lobster-man and his son, a salvage diver who has worked with my father. You’ll have cake and ice cream at home later, my mother says to me as I eat a fast bagel pizza. When we return in the early evening, we go by car, because now the dolphins are trying to beach themselves. We are going to have to try to get them back in the water.

There are seven other rescuers there, including a veterinarian with a stethoscope. The four healthy ones are rolled back into the water. My father, in his wet suit, swims dolphin-style out at the edge of the cove, trying to get the dolphins to imitate him. He splashes as he breaks the surface. The other men wait in the water, in case the dolphins try to turn back.

I am on the beach, with the dying one. She is covered in wet towels and I pour seawater on her with a cup from a pail beside me, my cast wrapped in a plastic bag. Her eyes roll under her double lids, and inside, her heart beats a soft tatter. She is warm still. I turn at the sound of my father in the distance, to see his orange snorkel blow water as he clears it before going under again. No one is saying anything.

Her heart starts to beat faster, as if her blood were tightening. It amazes me how fast the seawater dries. I pour more water onto the towel. Away from the rest of the sea, the seawater joins the air, instead. How does the ocean stay together, I wonder.

You’d better come over here, I say to the vet. I think she’s going to go.

Off in the distant water her friends try to learn to swim without her, following my father’s lead.

Why does she want to die, I asked my father, after he returned from his successful swimming lesson. We stood over her cooling body.

I think it’s like getting buried, Aphias, my father said to me then. We put our dead underground. They lay their dead above-sea. She wanted simply the right rest for her race.

But we don’t bury ourselves, I said.

I had watched the water on the way home in the car, the sunset across every wave.

I lie awake, thinking of her, under the guard of the printed Jacks and Jills linked in repeating patterns on my bedroom wallpaper. I watch as the passing lights of cars sweep through my room, the teenagers on my road coming home from dates, businessmen returning to their families, mothers driving car pools for theater, or speech and debate. The light swings across the room in bars, shaped by passing through my window frame. Light splatters, I know, on the outside of the house. I can almost hear the impact. I watch the hall light come in under the door. Light is a force, a wave and a particle. Light can touch me, and has to, actually, in order for anyone to see me.

15

School begins in August this year. I live nearby, and so I walk and skip the bus. I read while I walk to school up the two hills, one sidewalk, a more or less straight line. I pretend the streets I pass through are empty. I have been reading about the Neutron Bomb. I want to be like that, radiant and deadly, a ghost of an impact, to pass through walls, to kill everyone, in flight among the empty houses, punching through molecules like a knife through a paper bag. See me. I am five feet and two inches tall. I am still thin, freckled, large eyes, small nose. My hair waves and grows long, to my neck. I pick flowers for my mother as I walk. The neighborhood kids call me Nature Boy. I want to die.

Help with my roses today, my mother says. We have to deadhead. She hands me a glove and the shears; this is something I can do one-handed. While she walks around the house watering, I snip off the faded blooms, spotty leaves. It is the final day of August, the sun already has its mind on its vacation, distant skies. I pause, hold up my arm cast and the shears: Look, Mom, I’m a crab.

She laughs. Blond and tan, a faint sheen from the hose gives her a glow. She squirts a pip of water my way and I yelp, dodging. You sure are, she says.

Later, inside, over lemonade and peanut butter and jelly, she tells me that Eric has called to say we have been asked to be a part of an opera this fall. A production of Tosca, she says. He’s calling the boys he wants in advance, to clear it with their parents. You’re supposed to act surprised when he announces it, because there is some small pay involved, the part is small.

Oh-kay, I say. Surprise. No problem. I push my hair out of my face. My hand as it goes by smells like the inside of the glove.

I guess he doesn’t hold grudges, huh, she says. She begins putting away the lemonade, sets the jars of jelly and nut butter away.

I guess not, I say. Not until I go up to my room to get a book do I realize, I have no idea what she means.

In my gifted-and-talented speed-reading class seven of us sit in a dark room with a projector that prints lines on the walls. We read stories in this way and then are tested for comprehension.

Today we begin Boccaccio’s Decameron. Jay, one of the more aggressive students, turns the machine on.

The story flashes by. The teacher opens the door, glances in. Oh, he says. All right then. And he goes back out. We sit, the story beaming on, punctuated by the projector’s loud fan.

And it pleased Him that this love of mine, whose warmth exceeded all others, and which had stood firm and unyielding against all the pressures of good intention, helpful advice and the risk of danger and open scandal, should in the course of time diminish in its own accord. So that now, all that is left of it in my mind is the delectable feeling which Love habitually reserves for those who refrain from venturing too far upon its deepest waters. And thus what was once a source of pain has now become, having shed all discomfort, an abiding sensation of pleasure.

The Decameron was a collection of love stories told by ten people running from Florence during the time of the Black Plague. They told the stories to pass the time rather than playing games, at the direction of the Queen, traveling with them. Seven women, three men. Everywhere they looked, people dying. What a pleasure it must have been, I think, as the story flies up the screen in front of me in sections. To survive.

Afterward, the comprehension quiz asks, what were the afflictions of the Black Plague? And I write, bloody noses in the East, but in Florence, egg-shaped swelling in the groin.

How many people does the narrator describe dying?

Several hundred thousand in Florence, many more through the countryside.

Rehearsals in the fall are tighter: the camp has done its magic. We sit in ordered rows, we sing that way as well, chords offered like gleaming chains. Cathedral ceilings are references to Noah’s ark, I have just learned. The idea being that he founded his church by upturning the boat: when we look up, it’s supposed to be like looking at the prow of a boat above us. I think of this often, as I look at the bowed ceiling. This boat, I say to myself, is turning over.

Today is warm, and our rehearsal is going well. The choir has recently auditioned new members, and now we sit, forty, in broken arcs around our director. New money has provided music stands, nice folding chairs with padded seats. You’re real pros now, Big Eric announces in one break. In another, he points to Little Eric and says, Now, and Little Eric gets up and leaves the room. I have a surprise, Big Eric says. Eric is helping me with it.

Little Eric returns, a miniature monk. Muslin tunic, burgundy overtunic. Rope belt. The shoes are obscured by the hem, which falls to the floor. He smiles at us and raises his hands palm-up in mock propriety. Big Eric walks around to stand beside my seat. If he were Friar Tuck, Big Eric says to me, Robin Hood would not be so busy rescuing Maid Marian.