Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

We have one other scene, apart from singing in the first act. In the second one, while Tosca rehearses, offstage, for her royal command performance at the Farnese Palace, we sing with her. We sing softly, to represent distance, and the composer has arranged Scarpia’s interrogation in counterpoint to what we sing. And even later, at the beginning of the third act, as the prisoners wander the yard, Freddy Moran has a brief solo offstage, where he sings, I send you as many sighs as leaves rustle in the wind.

And then later, in the prison, Tosca sings with Cavaradossi, Our love will glow like a blazing rainbow over the sea. She says good-bye to him, before his execution, I’ll close your eyes with a thousand kisses, I’ll call you by a thousand names.

Peter, somehow, shining there in the dark, all the light manages to find an excuse to go his way, to leave him the gifts of their colors. In his choirboy robes, bored by the passage of the opera, waiting for the ride home, the tucking into bed.

Peter sees me looking at him, finally. He smiles and waves, silent. I wave back. I tell myself, Not even the light should dare to love you.

After, as I sit, waiting for my mother to come and pick me up, Mare walks the empty stage, sits down beside me, adjusts the skirts in her costume, and sighs. Her powdery breasts push tightly together, like grapes pinched by fingers. I wanted to laugh tonight, she says.

I can feel the days ahead pulling her away, into other songs.

Me too, I say. Why is that?

Because love like this looks funny. People yelling for each other, shouting their jealousy, killing. Singing the whole time.

I think it’s beautiful, I say.

Of course it’s beautiful, she says. And there’s really nothing like it, when you are climbing the notes and you realize suddenly, there, right there, this, and the music opens to you. You see how you aren’t there, something else is there that belongs… to the music. It doesn’t belong to you at all.

No rehearsal that Monday. My father returns from Sweden. He has begun a consulting business. As far as I can tell, that means he gets paid to tell people how to do things and how much it will cost them. Each time he returns from a business trip he has presents for all of us, my brother, sister, and I. Teddy gets skates. Sam gets a stuffed Laplander reindeer. I get a ski sweater, of some wool from an animal so vigorous, knitted by people so powerful, I feel like I am wearing a force field and not a gray sweater. The yarn seems to add muscle to me. In the mirror, I look powerfully built, like a boy-hero. When I remember the sweater is from Sweden I never wear it again.

While Big Eric runs the newer altos through his spiel about head tone and falsetto, I write about How to Fill a Heart with Hate, a poem, which I title that way. I write, The Heart to become Hate removes the R, which is Rue / a witches’ brew of regret, separates the A which is Art from the E which is Eros by the T, / which was together and is now Terror. Or Time. But never loses / the H, which is Heaven, which is the way back. To the Heart.

Peter has cut all his hair off in what he calls a fade haircut. A blond frost covers his bare head. The altos finally learn, but now we are out of time. I close my music folder and cover my poem. Big Eric announces, at the rehearsal’s close, a tour for the winter. Schools and churches, throughout Maine.

After the rehearsal, I watch Freddy walk in a slow circle as he waits for his mom. Peter waits beside me, pulls out a jar of black fingernail polish and begins to paint every fingernail. My sister, he says to me, dared me to do it. Fifty bucks if I did every finger.

Really, I say. Can you do that at a Catholic school?

Mmm, no. Clashes with the uniform, he says, and giggles. But the hair is fine. I’ll just walk around with my hands in my pockets, like the rest of them do anyway. He casts a green eye my way. You want, he says, offering the bottle.

Just the pinkies, I say, thinking of a boy I saw downtown the other day, hair spiked red, black pinkies.

Tomorrow night, Peter asks, do you want to go to a hardcore all-ages show? Seven bands. My sister and I are going, and she’s driving.

Yes, I say.

On the way home, I feel like I have Peter on my fingers. I curl my hands inside my pockets, and no one sees until swim practice the next day, where the other boys only wrinkle their noses, swimmers being mild-mannered. After practice, I ride my bike over to the barbershop around the corner from the bank near the school and sit down for a five-dollar fade. Fade. Something going away slowly. Pomade? the barber asks, and I ask what is it, and after he tells me, I leave, my hair shining, straight up, like the cut end of a paintbrush. I buy the pomade. I walk out stepping on my own hair, like feathers there on the floor where someone killed a bird.

The next day, when I go over to Peter’s house, he says, It’s good, and traces my fade with his finger for a moment.

What’s this group’s name, I ask Peter.

We’re in his room, the door closed, his big old ugly stereo’s volume turned way up. New Order, he says. He’s smoking a Marlboro, blowing smoke into the sunbeam crossing his room. We are waiting to go into Portland with his older sister, Elizabeth. She’s in the bathroom spraying her hair straight up with Aquanet and drawing lines of eyeliner out to her hairline. Punk-rock pharaoh, she says when I ask her about her look. Liz Taylor Bad Hair Day.

I like Elizabeth. She and Peter say they hate each other. She steals my butts, Peter says. He’s a twerp, she says. Elizabeth is pretty, her blue mohawk cheers me up, like a sail or a blade, the crest of a lizard. Today we are going shopping at Goodwill and then from there to the show.

At the Goodwill, everything Peter finds he grabs one of for me, and there are patch-elbow sweaters, brand-new indigo jeans rolled high, T-shirts from rival high schools or faraway ones, their letters faded off, and then the precious black overcoats. Ten dollars. Good deals, Elizabeth says, who has found an old beaded black dress. I want to wear it now, Elizabeth says, and hops in the car. Play lookout, she orders, and starts to pull her clothes off. Peter and I sit on the sidewalk and paint our thumbs silver, because, we decide, we walk around with our thumbs in our pockets anyway. From far away, sitting down, it looks like we have a nickel out, ready to call, heads or tails.

Later, Peter and I stand together at the back of the all-ages hardcore show. Elizabeth is drunk and hitting on skinheads. The band starts to lean into their guitars and the lights blink. Everywhere around us, kids are throwing themselves into each other, banging and falling. A few, like me, pretend that nothing is happening and light cigarettes. Peter takes a straight razor from his pants and runs the razor up his forearm. A bright bead of blood follows. He does it again. And again.

Peter, I say. What the hell.

Don’t worry, he says. You cut across, so you don’t slice a vein. He begins on his other arm. And then he hands the razor to me. His arms a red crisscross. He winds himself up with a kick and throws himself into the boys.

Blood starts to come off on the other slam-dancers. I look at my arm, the skin there starts to look like it could be anything. I test the blade there but I can’t press down. Peter returns, winded. Splashed ’em, he says. God, that’s good. And he jumps back.

I try to imagine myself at swim practice, my arms marked. I wouldn’t be able to swim with open cuts. I take out a cigarette and light it. The smoke takes the image away.

Dick-face, Peter says, reappearing in front of me. Blood now dried dark on his arms, across his white T-shirt. Give me that. And he takes my Zippo. He runs fluid over his hands and closes the tank, and flicks it across one hand and then the other. His hands on fire now, blue-white, he raises them over his head and spins back into the bodies. Ha! he shouts, and goes down to the floor, and then up again, and with his hands still burning he leaps from the edge of the stage and lands across a tangle of boys. His fire-hands go out.