Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

At the end of the night he went to bed for a few hours, waking up in the early morning to go and buy the gasoline he would use to burn himself to death.

I remember Melinda, the choir director’s daughter, going away for a season and not knowing why, and how, when she returned, the curiosity I’d always seen in her eyes was gone. Mildly retarded, with glasses as thick as a bottle, it seemed like her glasses let you see more of what was going on inside her rather than showing her anything at all.

When she returns, I see her first again at church. She has grown over the winter, and her eyes no longer meet mine; she no longer seems like she is pressing up against her glasses to escape, like before. She seems like she hides now. As if she feels someone blames her for seeing the burning boy, and so now, she has no particular interest in seeing something else that will get her sent away again.

I wonder, if it would be like being with him forever, to see him like that. I think it is. I want to ask him what it was he thought he was going to burn when he set his fire. And if what burned, if that is what is really gone now. In the picture, he is a white glare, his face there the shape of a fist, his hair a gold outline. His blue eyes alight with what looks like real cheer. That is what burned, I tell myself. Not the thing he hated. Because that is with me.

At Peter’s funeral service, his mother approaches me. Fee, she says. Come by after for the wake. We’ll drive you home if your mom can drop you off. It’ll just be some family, mostly, but you were a good friend to Peter. We’d like to see you.

During the service I had stared at the dark brown mound, pale flowers in a pile where the head should be, some six feet below. No one said, I wish he was still here. No one seemed to rage that he was gone. For all that we were surprised, I saw, as I looked around at the mourners, we also accepted it. Boys and girls from the private school he attended filed past me in twos and threes. This whole time Peter’s mother hadn’t asked to see the letter I had received from Peter. I’d not offered to show it. And until then, it didn’t occur to me, that it might belong, in a way, to her. But then she breathed, hugged me to her and moved on.

I stayed until everyone was gone. I think I was waiting to cry. I think I was waiting to fall apart, and to find him standing there at the center of the pieces of me, alive again.

In his room after the ceremony the sunlight, the last of the day, makes a bright patch on the carpet and I watch it as it moves, slowly, across the floor, which I later realize means I have been there for over an hour. I throw myself onto his bed, briefly, to smell cigarette ash and tobacco, old beer, the salty carnation smell of him underneath that.

I pass by his father downstairs, who nods at me, saying nothing. He shakes the ice in his glass gently, as if he is thinking about pouring the Scotch on the floor. His mother moves about the kitchen as she always did, except she is dressed in widow’s black. I go out the door to find his blue-haired sister, Elizabeth, outside. She had braided her mohawk for the ceremony, tucked it under a hat, and the whole effect had been, actually, quite elegant. It’s the end of the summer, and the heat is just bearable. She smokes, her right arm holding the cigarette with the support of her left, crossed under her, holding herself.

Do you want one, she asks, and holds out a pack of Marlboros. Peter’s brand. And then I notice his handwriting on the pack. POH.

She sees me read it. He always did that, she says. You never saw it before? He always did it so I wouldn’t take his cigarettes. I always did, though.

I take one, light it. There’s a half carton upstairs, she adds. Go take some before you leave.

Peter’s dog slips through the hedge, back from a hunt at the yard’s edge. Odd, she says, exhaling as she spoke. To buy a carton before your suicide.

For a few weeks after, I keep seeing her around town. Elizabeth everywhere, it seems. She smiles, nods, chewing gum and smoking or talking and smoking, seven safety pins now in her left ear and her boot buckles rattling every time she steps forward. I think, when I see her, about his initials tucked somewhere in her clothes. From the attention I give her I know she thinks I’m strange, but I also know I’m on her list of boys people think are gay, because we don’t go skinhead. Peter told me about the list, because she had showed him. In order to show him our names together on the list. I see her with a new boyfriend. I see her smoke Marlboros, and then not, and then I know, when I see the white filter in her fingers instead of the yellow, the carton is gone. I think of the initialed packs, tossed out in different cans wherever she was, a Dumpster here, a riverbank there. Of how I wanted to follow her, and pick up every one.

2

Here we go a caroling among the leaves so green, Here we…

Christmas Eve. On the street where I live, we carol to our neighbors regularly every year. At the end, one family has everyone inside for eggnog. This year is suddenly cold, where before it had been mild, and snow upon snow arrives on the days before Christmas. Cape Elizabeth is going from being one kind of town to another, everyone says. And when they say it they mean there is nothing good to this, and they say it always to the new arrivals, who accept this as a kind of hazing, even as they assume it doesn’t mean them. Here in the Masrichs’ house, on a kidney-shaped downturn off our street, Brentwood, these pronouncements are meaningless at the party. We are all new on this street. All our houses are not quite ten years old. During the caroling I had finally put together what another child from down the road had said, about how he could find the bathroom in my house even if he had never been there, because it was just the same as his. There were, I could see now, four or five different plans, used in rotation, so that no matches were visible each to the other. At the Masrichs’, also a Frontier Colonial, like ours, I sat on the stairs to the side as adults trooped up and down past me, glow-bright cups of eggnog in their hands. Let me give you the tour, Mrs. Masrich said to each newcomer to the house, and so they would go, up and down and around. This is the sewing room, and the bathroom is over here, I hear from the upstairs hall. You can put your coats there.

I have grown two inches in the last year. I have big legs. I look at them a fair amount, amazed at them. My thighs are as big as heads. I think of when I was on vacation last summer with my Grandfather Zhe, to the man who wanted to massage them for me. I’m a soccer coach back home, you know, he said. You look like a nice husky boy. The hotel where we were staying had a faux-desert landscape, around the pool area, and so we were hidden by a peach-brown dune of cement from the view of my dozing grandfather and siblings. I told him, I don’t think so. But thanks. He told me his room number, just in case I felt “sore.” Later that night, in my hotel room, I thought of how I could kill him.

My mother appears in front of me at the bottom of the stairs. She has dressed in a foam-green crew-neck sweater under a loden coat she wears on her shoulders, her blond hair arranged there, pulled back with one barrette to her nape, making her look much younger than most of the other mothers. Why are you here on the stairs, she asks. She settles a hand on my leg.

She asks me something I don’t hear over my own thoughts. I’m sorry, Mom? I ask.

You were looking right at me, I’d swear, she says, and she grabs my ear, bending it a little toward her. I said, Are you feeling well?

Sure, I say. All this Christmas stuff just depresses me. I really only like the music.

You’re not very convincing. You’re so angry these days.