Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

I knew he meant porno.

They are not drawings, he said, sad. These lines are all not even lines. And those that are, they are in different languages from each other. He looked incredibly sad then. I cannot believe it, he said. He hung his head down under my beautiful men.

That night I watched the ceramics students out in the yard of the art complex, where the ceramics studio did raku firing. I sat with my drawings rolled up at my feet, smoking one cigarette after another, as if they could take out the stitch this day had left in my head. He had been right to have been sad. I hadn’t wanted to be a pornographer. I had wanted to take something inside myself, like I had once drawn a breath, and then to send it out, as I had sung. To say that you make something out of thin air: you can, if you sing. You can make an enormous number of things this way.

I watched as the raku students pulled their pieces out with tongs and sunk them into shredded paper. The hot ceramic set fire to the paper instantly. Use this too, I said, pulling my drawings apart in long shreds. I tossed them into the can, and the potters cooled their pieces on them, the paper turning to wet looking black shreds that floated on the air around the kiln.

When you draw, you destroy as you go. Even as you make. I saw now that as long as there was a form that I wanted to make love to, I wouldn’t be free. I would not be able to make lines for it, and as long as I was me, these lines would always be in separate languages. Clay, wet, spinning on a wheel that you kicked as you went, that rose and thinned or flattened and spread with the faint touch of a thumb, that seemed fine. You set it in a hot oven. Almost a thousand degrees. You underglazed or deglazed or glazed, you baked or bisqued, you waited, to see, would it crack. Would the glaze fall off in a pile. It would be fine, this way. And J wouldn’t also have to destroy anything, except for the clay that cracked while drying, tossed back into the reclaim pile, to be used again. There wasn’t anything you could do but set the piece in the fire and wait to see how it would come back to you. As I watched, I thought, and I saw how there was something that could return to you from fire.

I signed up for the ceramics major the next morning.

17

The next year I kept the Polaroid picture of Peter and I from his last night alive in a diary that I wrote in only when I wanted to die. I wrote in that diary, that year, almost every day. Some days I made myself laugh by writing, instead of the date, Hello, Death. I would drive along Route 84, looking at the ditches, thinking about what it would be like if I just didn’t turn, if I continued, into the cement embankments, my car wrinkling shut like an eye closing, my body, chewed as if by a giant lazy jaw. I wanted to wake up and not feel. My life would have been acceptable, I felt, if someone had come in and in the night severed all my nerves where they attached at the skin. If I was numb, then great. More life for me, another helping, please.

There were undergraduate crushes. Always, blond boys: the expression dew-lapped comes to mind. As in, the dew’s tongue passes over and leaves a drop behind. Romantic, to the point of putrefaction, I wrote long terrible poems about whoever it was I was infatuated with. Penny laughed at it all, and came to ask always, which one is this now? She knew there was a way in which these boys were all the same. These boys were all stand-ins for Peter, and none was greater than Coe.

My friends cultivated an active disgust. You’re in love with white power, they’d say. You seek white acceptance. For this reason alone I maintained a careful distance from the political life of the campus, which was considerable, until the last year I was there.

My friendship with Coe turned inward on itself. We lived now in an apartment building owned by the university, a heinous building known only as High-rise that sat across the way from a home for the mentally ill. I walked to the parking lot in the morning wondering which lunatic fantasy I now lived in, as the patients across the way loved nothing better than binoculars, and watched us from behind their barred windows and porches. Coe lived down the hall from me, and I regularly went there to type my papers, as all through school I didn’t have a computer. Neither of us was on crew anymore, and his roommate, Rich, also a former crew-team member, was now on hockey. We walked around constantly in a state of dazed half-dressed stress, trying to make grades. I felt myself to be inside an airtight and airless bubble, invisible to everyone. The gray buildings faced my room, the wrong way for light of any kind at any time. The year a long shadow I walked through.

Below me lived two boys who were in more or less the same state as me and Coe, a boy named Richard, and his roommate, Rafe. Rafe was an elegantly tall, handsome, and dark-haired boy; Richard was an angry redhead who had a reputation for being a nasty drunk. The two of them spent almost all their time together, as Coe and I now did, and the parallel seemed unbearable, not the least for me living directly above Richard and Rafe. Rafe and Coe had girlfriends. Richard and I, increasingly, hung out with each other, reluctantly. He wanted to hate me, I could see, on those nights we stared over each other in the direction of our beloveds. I wanted to give him a reason and have it be done with. It happened like this.

A party in a house we called Eclectic, once a fraternity, now a tumbled-down beer hall of a southern-style mansion with Neoclassical columns, paint peeling off them, holding up a roof full of people high on speed and coke or smoking pot because they hate cigarettes. Richard is there on the porch, a few others sitting nearby. Richard shakes his long red hair, a faint part to the side, dressed in a T-shirt and black jeans faded to gray by washing. He hates the idea of style in himself, even as he worships it in others. Oh hi, he says. He’s drunk already when I find him. Don’t you look terrific. I raise an eyebrow in response. Go get a beer and drink so you’re not so obnoxious, he orders me, pointing in the direction of the keg with his cigarette and I laugh as I head along.

Rafe is across the way. I say hi to him as I pass. He has the face of a boy still on the long body of a man, and he smirks at something the girl beside him is telling him. He’s really too preppy to care about this place, but he’s here because of Richard, ostensibly, and there’s nothing he won’t do without Richard. Except have sex. He nods as I pass, and seems deliberately engrossed. Richard floats at the perimeter of their gaze.

Coe is here also, inside. He is smoking. What the hell is that, I say, pointing at the cigarette.

Trying to be like you, he says, grinning. His girlfriend, Laura, is next to him. A short, pert blonde, glasses shining in the dark, she smiles at me. I amuse her just by walking by.

Tell him to put it out, I tell her.

He listens to you, she says.

The rest of the night piles up around us like this, people like cars looking for parking spots walking back and forth and soon the smoke is so thick that I tell Penny, who has just arrived, that I’m not smoking anymore. I’m just going to breathe, I tell her.

Shut up, she says. You know you like it. I hate it when people who smoke complain about the smoke. She says this as she heads off for a beer. Richard wobbles over, always a bad sign.

Do you think he loves her, he says, suddenly very, very grave.

I don’t ask who he means. I don’t, I say.

Sluts, he says. Both of them. I mean it’s a school of whores, but what sluts. He steps on the cigarette he just lit. I don’t want to smoke anymore. He pushes a thick piece of hair off his face. Come over, he says. Have a drink. I’ve got whiskey.

I look around the party. Coe is gone. There’s no reason for me to be here. I mean, there’s no reason because I want to be dead, actually, but there really is no reason. So I say, sure. Let’s go have whiskey. And then Richard walks as straight as anyone and we leave the party.