Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

It’s something that they want, I say. Yowu.

And then I wake to the singing.

No good, the mudang says, when she comes into the room. How you life? How you life no ghost? And she shakes her head. laughing. Oh, sometime, she says, and I don’t ask. Sometime. Is like diamond, walking.

What, I ask.

Diamond. She takes my grandmother’s hand, where there flashes an extraordinary diamond. See? Comes from earth. Reflects light, most beautifully. Nothing more beautiful for reflecting light, but, belongs in earth first. Like your ghost, diamond.

Huh, I say. I consider it. The ghost, flashing somewhere under the sun, diamond and cloud together. If my ghost is like a diamond, someone has dug it out of me. I see it flying the skies of the world, mistaken for a daytime UFO. I don’t mention the voice I heard when I closed my eyes, I decide nothing good would come of it. We bid the ghost-singer good-bye. My grandmother thanks her and presses money into her hands, which she frowns at as she folds it into her trousers.

Good-bye, she says to me. Sometime, sometime. Is okay. Is hard to die, with no ghost. Almost lucky. And she leaves, humming.

11

The school I’ve decided to go to is Wesleyan. I guess I should be happy, my mother says. She doesn’t understand, even when I point out the enormous art campus, where the modern cement buildings like enormous gravestones keep company, garnished by enormous weeping willows. I’ll be happy here, I tell her, which of course is why she relents.

Of course the real reason is an enormous series of underground tunnels that connects the campus. I found them on my prefrosh visit and wandered through them. Some were narrow and dark and others widened into rooms. Some were covered with indecipherable graffiti, others were spare gray, pipes everywhere. Home, I thought, at last, on that visit. My lost city. I write a postcard to Speck, explaining. He writes back asking for me to send a picture of me in them, which I do.

On my first day, I drive myself down. I arrive at a small suite in Clark Hall. I am to share it with another boy, name of Caleb Oswald Evans, of Beaumont, TX. I am reading this on the door, his name and hometown spelled out carefully, and then the door bangs open. Welcome to Clark Hall, this Caleb says. He’s sitting on his bed, wearing only a pair of shorts. Smooth muscle everywhere I can see. My eyes focus immediately on the smooth arches of his feet. The windows are all open wide, and I see that it’s the wind that pulled the door. No AC, he says.

I see, I say, and my bags drop carefully to the ground where they wait. White rooms, two, side by side. Caleb in a white bed, wearing khaki cutoffs, legs crossed, reading the Tao Те Ching.

So this is the future, I say.

We smile at each other. He looks familiar, and I ignore the feeling. I sit down in his desk chair and we shake hands.

Call me Coe, he says.

I will, I say.

In the first few days I make many friends through smoking cigarettes. During the president’s speech to the new students, I look at the shiny ashtrays on the tables, like cheap mirrors. I wait and wait, no one is smoking. And then I light up. Soon, like a smoke signal, I see another faint rope of smoke some tables away, and I look over, to catch the eye of a thin girl with dark hair and eyes who wiggles her fingers toward me. For the duration of the speech, no one else smokes. When we speak later, she says, Well, there were ashtrays there on the table. I mean, they were letting us smoke if we wanted. It means a lot to me, that you smoked.

I decide to let that stand.

Her name is Penny Fields and she’s from Niagara Falls. She’s the same height as me, and at the party where we find each other she’s the only one who walks up to me to talk. I am dressed in a black shirt and black jeans and boots, and she says, Who died?

A couple of people, I say.

Huh. Good one. Fee, she says, testing my name, like it’s a shoe she’s trying on. Fee. She grabs the hem of my shirt and tugs at it a little. Fee, we need someone to jump on that table over there and dance.

She slips a cigarette into her mouth and stares meaningfully at a long conference table over near the DJ. The party is in a fraternity for the football team, DKE, and besides the table, the large dark room is furnished in chairs that seem to have been upholstered in pile carpeting.

Can’t.

C’mon, she says. I saw you earlier. You’re a good dancer, you qualify. She lights her cigarette. People who are good dancers are, and here she puffs on the cigarette until the end is gray with ash, you know. Exhibitionists. This last emerges from her mouth covered in pale smoke.

Did you ever notice, I ask, that when a cigarette burns, the smoke is blue, and when we exhale, the smoke is white?

What are you getting at, she says. We walk toward the table. I push myself up onto the table. All the color gets left inside us, I say, and hold my hand out to her. She grabs it, climbs up, holding her skirt down as she does so. The music is so loud it knocks in my ribs.

Good thing I wore underwear, she says. Here, have some color. She hands me the cigarette.

The football team here is not a very good one, but no one really minds. The boys are cute and relatively nice, and the girls appreciate them. We dance, side by side, facing them. No one looks at us while we watch them.

12

I’d arrived on campus with only black clothes. Boots, jeans, shirts, sweaters, a long black overcoat for fall and winter that buttoned to the neck, made of cashmere, and a black windbreaker for the fall. It soothed me, in Maine, there was no confusion, dressing like this. And so my first August in Connecticut I am a black speck on the campus, emitting puffs of smoke as I walk. Here, out of my mother and father’s sight, I can smoke all I want, and so I do. My grandmother sends a red coral necklace from Korea that arrives shortly after I do. I carefully clasp it so that it can’t be seen, under my shirts.

That first week, Coe comes with me to Arthur the barber, on Main Street, and watches as I get my crew cut. When I am done, he sits in the chair and says, Same again. Arthur laughs and clicks on his buzzers. Coe’s sandy hair is gone quickly. The resemblance is striking. He looks like Peter, I can see now, if Peter had lived and lifted a lot of weights. Oh there you are, I say, inside.

Do you like it, he says, as we leave.

Yes, I say.

With our new haircuts, we walk by Penny’s hall over in Foss 8. She and several of her hallmates are sitting in the hall on the floor reading magazines, their hair tucked into plastic bags. Henna, she says, barely looking up, and then she sees Coe. Well, Hello, she says. Didn’t know we’d have gentlemen callers today. We decided that we’d all dye our hair red to get talked about.

Foss Red, says one girl, looking at what turns out to be a copy of Interview. You made us do it. She does not look up.

You guys have to do it, too, she says.

Coe and I laugh. That’s good, he says. Funny.

Penny, I say. I can’t. I think of Lady Tammamo. The fox. Bad luck, I say.

What? she says.

For me, I say. Bad luck for me.

Hang on, she says, and goes into her room, emerging with the henna and two bags. Here, she says. Do it. If you don’t like it, go get crew cuts again. Coe and I sit down and she rubs our heads with the stuff. You guys will be the Foss Red Men. You’ll be like twins. It’ll be beautiful.

Great, says Coe.

All right, I say. I’ll be beautiful.

Later, in our rooms, we laugh at each other. We go to the showers, and wash. Coe stands in the shower opposite me. The henna runs down him, brownish green. He closes his eyes, leans back, and the foam runs off him to pool at his beautiful smooth feet. He opens his eyes. What, he says. Smiling.