Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

In his apartment the dark seesaws around a desk lamp he flicks on and then faces into the wall. No other light other than the awful street lamps, always too bright, shining in. If sleeping in the light of a moon makes you mad, I think, what does a streetlight do to you?

I turn around. Richard is opening whiskey. He has taken his shirt off. A boy’s body with a man’s face, Richard has the opposite arrangement to Rafe’s. His hairless chest a bone in the dark. He hoists the bottle to his mouth and drinks hard, like cowboys in movies do. He flicks at his nipple as he does this and then sits at his desk. Holds out the bottle. There’s nowhere in his small room to sit but the bed, so that’s where I sit. I reach for the bottle and then lean back. If he wants the bottle he’ll have to come and get it, I decide.

I’m not prepared for this, which thrills me. Almost more than he does, or the same way. I tip the bottle up to my mouth, holding it by the neck, and slide some whiskey down, I breathe through my nose, swallowing. As I take the bottle away, Richard is reaching and pulling off my shoes, my socks. I balance the bottle on his bedside table, which is covered in Thomas Mann books, and I lift my hips as he slides my pants off. He then kneels on the bed and walks over to me, where he leans down to kiss me, but then stops, just above my lips.

If you tell anyone, he says. His breath on mine, wet.

Won’t, I say. I know he doesn’t care, and that I’m lying, and that he knows I’m lying and that I know this. He just wants me to be able to say he said it when I tell about it, later. He wants to be able to believe it for now, also. That boys do things together and it’s a secret. That we are boys and not men dressed like children, surprised by the passage of even a year. And as he kisses me I try to decide, if he likes secrets better than kisses. After, I decide it’s kisses. For the night, he is wild, A storm. His grief at losing Rafe, I see, is a daily one, as for a Sisyphean task. Each day Rafe is at the bottom of the hill, each day, Richard tries to roll him up. No end, barely no solace.

I reach up under his balls, in his jeans, and slip a finger into his anus, where it goes easily. I think about how there is skin here only a few cells thick. Sex is asking someone to touch you where your skin is thinnest. His eyes roll back.

I leave to go upstairs before Rafe gets back. Richard is asleep before I close the door. I have dreams of him, flying through the night sky, his blue-white skin cuts the black.

Some days later. In the cafe, at the top of the student center, we sit and have coffee together while Richard reads The Magic Mountain and I flip through the course catalog. We say nothing. I can see, in the sunlight, the profile of his penis through his pants, which I watch. I am thinking of how in the light off the street I saw the glint of the red hair around his penis. Eventually we leave. We go to his apartment, and undress. He starts to cut us some lines of coke before I think of whether I want any or not. He cuts the lines on a mirror on his lap, then holds it out to me. He smiles. Please, he says.

I do my line and hand the mirror back to him. I love this drug, he says.

Why, I say, as he slides his coke back and forth on the mirror.

Because I can’t ever cry when I do it, he says. Like there was nothing I couldn’t watch on this drug.

I wish I could be in love with him, I tell Penny, when I tell her about it later.

Don’t be annoying, she says. That’s out of the question. It’s bad enough he’s so ugly. She is reeling anyway. Richard isn’t known for this sort of thing, but he is about to be, when she gets off the phone with me.

He’s not ugly, I say. But I don’t say any more to her. The best of him doesn’t share well, I see now. I regret having said anything, immediately.

18

My drawing teacher had asked me to sit for him, and so on an afternoon after the end of reading period but before my exams began I sat naked in his studio. The May Connecticut weather was awful, humid, and despite myself I sweated. My German teacher seemed unaffected. He drew, pulled the paper, drew again. I had had allergies for some time and they were a problem and now I was sure another attack was coming on because I could only sit there and cry. I sat there naked and cried in front of him. He never asked me why I was crying. After an hour I felt that even if I wanted to I couldn’t speak. In the enormous silence he made no conversation, nor did I, only crying there in the studio. I made no effort to wipe my tears for fear of losing the poses and I was after all being paid well and wanted to be able to pose again at another time. And I was sure he was drawing the tears.

Some time later in my room, as I looked out into the longest gray shadow I had ever occasioned to notice, I could breathe again. Some days later I thought back to the incident of the crying and thought to call my doctor, who told me that if my eyes had been itchy then yes the crying was an allergic reaction, but that otherwise it had been an emotional one. The teacher had marked each pose with a careful Polaroid, and the tears that day were my only tiny reminders that the photographs Big Eric had taken of us had never been found. Of everything that had been turned in for evidence, the pictures were not among them. I wondered then if somewhere, pictures of me with him filled a book. Being shown to someone else.

There were more reminders, certainly, to come, and I would not know them, not even when they were happening, and would likely not be able to do anything about them. From somewhere inside me the photos altered me all the time, like a virus that hides in the organs, emerging, from time to time, to kill and reproduce again.

A few days later I went downstairs and did some more coke with Richard, which is when he told me someone had told them we’d slept together, and did I know who I might have told?

I took the envelope and shook some more of the white powder onto the tray. He was right. You couldn’t cry on coke, not in the first fifteen minutes; and those fifteen minutes were lit up, as if the coke burned the seconds in torn strips, each second cut from the other and set on fire. I cut a line, and then another, and divided them both into two short lines, and then finally met his eyes. He had lit a cigarette, and a smile sought out his mouth. A Doris Day song found me there, and I started to sing it. I’ve counted, a thousand sheep…

Fee, he said.

But it wouldn’t be make-believe, if you believed in me. Cause without, your love, it’s a honky-tonk parade. Without, your love, it’s a…

Fee. Don’t do that.

Everyone saw us leave together, I said. Rumors start. Et cetera. I took the rolled dollar from him, did the lines, and passed the mirror.

He didn’t believe me, but it didn’t matter, either, he saw that. in the tray I handed to him. He saw it in the way I stayed there, waiting for him to finish, and the way, when he was done, I had the sense to leave, as he put it, without his asking. I wanted to leave, too. When you draw, you learn first that sunlight is the true judge, of color, of texture. Neither of us wanted to see each other that way, in the first light of waking.

19

The second time I try to die. Sunset in my apartment. I fall asleep in a gold chimney of light, perhaps the first to ever find its way into my apartment. I’d been up for two days on coke to finish some drawings I supposedly had been doing all semester and then I passed out, and I wake up to Richard standing next to the bed. His fly is open, his dick hanging out. When my eyes open he smiles.

You have a choice, he says, which you want first. He shakes it near me. I watch the pink head move up and down, the unmistakable bounce of a penis. It has its usual appeal, and yet.