Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

I watch my grandparents as well. They fascinate me. Their ears seem tuned to some signal not quite in range of hearing. And their quiet, a readiness. My grandfather rises to do Tai Chi in the mornings on the back lawn, facing the sun as it rises. My grandmother meditates, and then cooks for him. When she smiles, her smile has the force of a joy as old as her and as unbroken.

Zach and I continue. What we continue, we don’t know. We don’t ever talk about what we do, directly. We say, I’ll be over. Or, Are you coming over? As if one or the other of us had decided to visit, and hadn’t yet informed the other. I don’t love him. He doesn’t love me. Now we tear at each other more, for wanting not to want this. And afterward, as I look at his white thighs and brown arms, there’s real tenderness in knowing, whatever it is we want from each other, it seems always to be the same. No one asks about how we spend our time. His parents, often not home, would have no way of knowing. That I had been there.

In my bed I keep Peter’s letter to me. The one that arrived after he was dead. I keep it with a picture I have of him, in its envelope. My mother doesn’t move it when she changes my bedding. Ever.

6

Speck’s other home is in New York City, and he promises to me to take me there sometime. There’s nothing like New York, he says. I feel young there. Everything there is much older than me.

On an afternoon when the sun is starting to come and stay longer, and the snow melts enough to show all the dead grass, Speck interrupts both our silences. I am in a pile of his bills, marking the ones to be paid. Subscriptions, utilities. Doctors. Ugh, he says. So, would you like to see this?

I reply with a look.

Come here, he says. Come on. I’ve been looking it over again, and will probably never allow it out ot its case again. Not while I’m alive. He takes me into the library. A letter in two pages, under glass.

They were renovating an old building, and it sort ol fell in, in the cellar, he says. They came across the spire of an ancient cathedral, buried shallowly and unfinished. The letter was found in the top of the spire. Here’s my translation.

1361. Edinburgh, I do not know the day, since they were abolished. A last letter. To whomever finds it, whenever they have heart enough to dig.

This was to be a cathedral built for Robert (I, but now is mine.

I had fallen asleep. A fever had come over me and I had left my house, where I had been a boarder. I was the last one, I think, of those who hadn’t left and were not dead. In any case the house was empty and I sought the company of our Lord, even though I was soon to have it.

Our area had been set off, and no one was allowed to enter or to leave. The death rolls for this street of the township had increased so quickly and stayed so high that soon no one was coming in to bury the dead. They were being left, and sometimes a house would burn, to indicate that everyone in that family had passed. Being unable to partake of a regular service at the church, I came here instead. And I had been so unhappy, and so afraid, I tried, here in the unfinished cathedral, to make some peace in myself toward what my fate would be, when this fever ended.

I hadn’t expected this.

I do not know how it is they have succeeded, by what art they have buried us. But they have. No light fills the windows. When I look from the door, I see a narrow and dangerous tunnel, the roof timbered. Piles of dirt are there. Refuse. And I am sure the smell is not just from the dead left here, but from those brought over and thrown here. Since we are a street of graves anyway. And so the air is foul and close, and there is now a stink that I suspect to be myself. I am lucky, I think, that the boils on me arrive now, where no one will try to burn them with irons. I am given to remembering now, how a friend had said, of the Black Death, that the leprosariums are now closed. The lepers being dead. Soon, all will be dead.

I am Andrew Hunter. I am a Norman, my family recently given over charge of the forests of Arran. I had come here to study stoneworks. In particular, I had been interested in a Roman bridge, back in Normandy, where my family is from, made of coursed stones, and made so that the water passing could pass through the stones, even as the bridge stood. Many days I spent looking at the bridge, studying the construction. But I am not sore, for surely it is God’s work that I be here. Surely it is Heaven’s own intent that I be here, alive, to record what has been done. For no one will write of it otherwise, a record of what happened here. I do not doubt, the new death roll is simply the number of the souls buried here, and the name of the road. I do not doubt.

Mostly I fear the rats, gruesome and huge and black. They fear my candlelight, what I can draw from these tapers left here. Meant for future services, now to be burned only for this. There are, as far as I can tell, no survivors beside myself, at least that can move. Sometimes I think I hear a moan, but it is hard to know if it is the new weight of the earth above us, or someone, still long in dying, in their home. I haven’t eaten in a time past remembering, but it matters little to me. I have burned three of these tapers. The fourth burns now, recently begun. And I find myself hoping, even here in this hell, and surely, this must be hell; hoping to live long enough to have burned the thirty tapers all. For even here my life is precious to me, precious remembrance alive in this dark. Though now I fear losing the candle to the dark before I lose myself.

3 Tapers more

I have slept. I have woken. My fever is gone. I have survived the Death but am unlikely, it seems, to survive the cure of the city. Exploring the cathedral, I found the tower. It is spoked by timber supports that wind up in the manner of a stair, and I think I can climb it. It occurs to me that there is a chance I could crawl out the top. Though I would, of course, be carrying on me the Death. As I looked up, through the struts above me, my candle jumped, which told me the air moved. A breeze.

I remember the Italian who came to the city to try and instruct us, on how to avoid the Death. He looked like Death. He wore a robe and a hook-nosed mask, and a hood. This is what we wear to avoid the Death, he told us. We laughed at him. He moved among us in the streets, his eyes hidden in the mask, but I felt, in his passing, the laughter that followed. Not of how strange he looked but of how there was nothing we could do. Looking at him, we knew, this wasn’t for Scotland. Robes and masks. We’d all be dead instead. And Italy rule the world.

It was Rome brought us this, I heard one man say, after the Italian went by. But I knew it wasn’t. Hand him a scythe, somebody, said another, and then there was more laughter. If I were to make my return, I suppose I could dress like that. Protect people from me. Disguise myself from those who know me to be dead.

There’s no more to it, Speck says, when he can tell that I’m done reading.

In the kitchen, where his housekeeper has left us a supper, we eat quietly at a Formica table, each looking off into separate corners. And then he looks up from his plate and he says, I’ll be leaving soon, in a few weeks more.

New York in the summer, I say.

Yes, he says. Delightful. Everyone bad leaves. All my friends are gone off to colonies and the like, and I can get some work done.

It’s the most beautiful thing in the world, I say.

He doesn’t pause. Yes, it is, he says. I thought so too.

They buried the whole neighborhood, I say.

Yes, he says. They’re giving tours now, sometimes. But it’s terribly unsafe. Won’t last. Just wait until some visiting mayor is trapped and that will end right quick.

At home, in bed, I imagine the fresco of Edinburgh from Speck’s ceiling on my own. Trace a tunnel down through. Before going to bed I had looked through a book of my mother’s, a guide to Scottish clans. Hunter, it said, had the motto, “I finish the hunt.” It was a dog, sitting on a crown, for the crest.