Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

Nothing, I say.

13

I haven’t been angry in years. And yet I’ve been angry since before I remember happiness.

I can’t say it was this or that that was the reason. There is no reason and every reason. Why do you want to die, I ask myself. How else does it stop? If I die, the trouble stops with me. I can see her, Tammamo, her hand closing her husband’s eyes, breathing in the air to make the fire-breath, his family, watching her. Enough, she’d be thinking. Fire on her lips. It ends with me now.

Outside my window a spider floats in the air, as if levitating. I look closely to see that spider is actually hanging by a thread connected some ten feet down, probably. It is floating, spinning upward, counting on the wind to catch in its furry legs and lift it, as it unspools the web. Until it can land someplace else, attach the thread’s other end, and continue, making the web. I continue in this watching, trying to match this sight with the idea that a spider finishes by eating its entire web at the end.

Coe walks in to my room. Wake up, he says. Time for practice. The clock reads 6 a.m. We’ve joined the crew team. I pull back my covers and dress quickly in clothes Coe helped me pick: we decided I could wear gray for exercise. We run the distance between Clark and the boathouse down by the river, more or less straight down the long hill of the campus. In the dark morning the sun is the gold center of everything. Death feels far away in that instant, impossible. We arrive at the cold river as summer touches the beginning of its last days, and Coe smiles. The sun. Coe.

From Penny, I learn how attention is like light. How it is light without heat. How to make a shadow puppet out of the self from the way I stand before it.

Caleb Oswald Evans, she says. From Beaumont, Tea-Ex. Nighttime, in her room. She wears a slip, flip-flops, red nail polish on her fingers and toes. She turns the pages of the freshman face book and finds Coe’s page. She puts a red nail-polish mark next to his name, letter A. He’s for you, she says. Mr. Bisexual.

I’ve just told her that I am bisexual, in answer to her question. What’s your deal, she said. And I wanted to say, None. But instead, I tried to imply the opposite. Everyone.

I don’t say anything as she does this. She offers me a cigarette and I decline. Good Lord, she says. You’re quitting?

Crew, I say.

You’re leaving me not for one man but a boatful, then. You won’t hold onto the bi in bisexual for long, she chuckles. Uh. You saw Another Country, right?

Yes, I say.

You want a romantic attachment to men, but instead, you are attaching romance to things that men do. She lights her cigarette and adds, I guess I’m smoking for two now.

I know what you think I’m doing, I say. But I want to get into shape, too. Besides, nothing would ever get started if we didn’t first attach romance. Everyone always ranks on illusion, but illusion is a mighty thing.

You’re on your own with that one, she says. She shucks off her flip-flops and folds her feet under her, leaning over the face book. The face book has everyone’s last high school picture. Already everyone seems smoothed out, prettier, more adult. The pictures are improbable. Coe’s shows him in a jacket and tie, which is more clothing at once than I’ve yet to see him wear. Tae Kwon Do, it says, she says. Does he really?

I’ve not yet seen it, I say. But he’s not the type to exaggerate. Penny leans back then, into a chair pillow. The arms stick out around her and it’s as if she’s in the arms of an alien mammal.

Tell me all about it, she says. You know, his father is a very powerful man. He won’t like what you’re thinking about his son.

Uh huh, I say. I gave him a back rub today after practice. He told me he was half Korean inside, like I’m half Korean outside.

Penny’s head falls back. You two should be stopped, she says.

I laugh. For no other reason than I know that there’s no stopping. I wish you were a girl, he’d said to me this morning as I rubbed the muscles of his warm back.

Oh, Fee. You have to go now, she says. I think it’s hopeless. I changed my mind. I can’t hear anymore. Men are hopeless, you know. You’ll learn this someday, and she says this as if I weren’t one. We both know she isn’t talking about me.

In my room in the dark I can feel it sometimes. The red inside. I shave and look at the hairs in the sink, red mixed with the rest. In my beard is every color of hair: brown, blond, black. Red.

14

Love is the regrowth of the wings of the soul, Plato says, years in the past almost past seeing. Except of course they are as alive as words are. As we are reading words. On the breath of an ink wind, spread on a sail made of a paper page, this, in translation:

…he receives through his eyes the emanation of beauty, by which the soul’s plumage is fostered,

and grows hot, and this heat is accompanied by a softening of the passages from which the feathers grow, passages which have long been closed up, so as to prevent the feathers from shooting…

I read everything I have ever wanted to know about the world in this. And then Plato quotes Homer:

Eros the god that flies is his name in the language of mortals:

But from the wings he must grow, he is called by the celestials Pteros.

Peter. The morning opens and closes. The library around me rises in acres of books and bricks and glasses in alternation. All the distances between me and everything else seem uncrossable, a permanent exile.

I stand up. It’s time for my Classics of Western Thought class. I am a Greek, I tell myself as I go down the marble steps out of the library. A long time ago, there were cities where boys loved each other enough to give speeches about it. They loved books more than money. I pause and go back inside to the card catalog, where I look up Mary Renault, and head up along the aisles where the air is so dusty my throat catches. The Persian Boy sits there. Alexander the Great’s eunuch lover.

I leave the book on the shelf, unread.

Out in front of the library, students walk, hair messy from bed, in giant sweaters, heads down against the new cold in the wind. Mingle not with those you do not love, Plato warns, or you will be condemned to wander the earth nine thousand years without wisdom.

15

Winter break comes like an open grave in winter, a dark cold slot after the fall term’s last snowy days.

The first time I try to die I am on a mountain, near my aunt’s house, and I’ve decided to go on an overnight camp just before an ice storm comes through. The Friendship Mountain Range sits on the border of Canada, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine near where I am visiting my aunt in Rangeley, Maine, a place she’s lived for twenty-five years as a librarian. I haven’t planned this too far in advance, but, after Christmas concluded in a pile of nonrecyclable paper and satin ribbons, and as I again pack up the art materials that I regularly get every year for Christmas, the trip, as it was suggested to me then, seemed “a perfect opportunity to lose myself.” A pattern of literalism that continues to this day.

I am up here ostensibly to paint and sketch. The storm has been forecast for days but previous to it are days candled by the sun to a painterly brightness, and the only shadows possible, between sun, clear sky, and snow, hide under my feet. My aunt Pat, my mother’s younger sister, is concerned and has asked repeatedly that I not go out. She has recently divorced, and is dating again, happy, as if her new divorce has shucked off a parasite that had eaten her entire youth. She now seems resupplied, her face colors itself, her hair soft again. On the morning I make my effort, I reorganize her kitchen shelves as I stock my bag out of her pantry. If you get the idea to buy cooking lard or cinnamon, I say, indicating the things I have found in large supply, Don’t. She has the habit of purchasing things she can’t find, a permanent shopping list in her brain: frozen bagels and cream cheese, cinnamon, lard, microwave popcorn and canned beans, always there. As if she will always be safe with these, no matter what.