Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

Coffee, I say.

Sluts don’t get coffee. Come on. Choose.

Coffee, I say, again. And then I roll over. I hear him in my kitchen. It occurs to me I have no idea how he got in. How did you get in, I ask.

I can pick a lock, he says. Boarding school. I’ll show you sometime. He lights a cigarette. I’m sad my stupid porno-flick manners didn’t work.

Uh huh, I say. Me too.

You know what I hate, he says. I hate it when people make like they are going to knock themselves off and they leave a note and everything and then arrange to be found. What is that? I mean, I’m sort of glad Sylvia Plath died. The bitch was playing at it.

The lamp on my desk lights only the lower half of him. His shadow head says all of this. The cigarette is a pale orange, like a firefly on its last burn. I’d been wondering why I had him in my life, and then suddenly I know why. And I am so happy. What’s the other choice, I say. Knowing.

Coke, he says. But this time we freebase. He stands up and comes back with coffee, which he sets down on my bedside table. We both look at the spoon handle in the mug, like it’s a compass needle.

Sluts get coke, I say, and he smiles again.

Coke cooking as you smoke it smells like burning carpet. A house on fire. What time is it, I say.

Who cares.

I thought I’d care more about it, but this adds nothing but an opportunity. Needles, knives, thugs in the dark, thugs in the light. There’s the whole world waiting to do you in if you get the chance. For instance, almost everything in my kitchen can be used to kill me. The hour that comes next arrives sheathed in a white fire that burns cold along all my nerves. While Richard fucks me I feel like a god. Like I can set things on fire with a touch, leap into the sky and not come back. Like I can cook my own dose, an extra one, while Richard goes down to get cigarettes at five in the morning.

I send myself shooting out into that gathering 5 A.M. light. And not crying the whole time. Everything is already moving so very fast, but you need a great deal more speed than this to escape the earth’s gravitational pull. Seven miles per second. More fuel, please.

The white fire meets the black hammer. Come apart. I fall down but by the time I fall down, I am already not there. Immeasurable dark, I float into it, I feel my body tumble far from me. No note. Richard will understand.

20

Richard called an ambulance. When he came back to the room, the curtains were on fire, but he put those out quickly. It turns out he’s good in emergencies. He didn’t know until now. No one knows how the fire started. It’s assumed I was smoking a cigarette but I do not remember having the cigarette. We were out. It was the reason he went downstairs.

Before I open my eyes I know I am back. I fully expect to be burned but of course in the mirror opposite my hospital bed I just look bad, like someone beat me up. I’ll find out later that Richard did indeed slap me quite a bit when first finding me. Someone did beat me up. But he did CPR. High as a kite on free-base. The bruises will stay for months.

Coe is beside me. In the chair next to my bed, he sits reading and looks up. The sunlight behind him scrapes my eyes.

You’re trying to kill me, he says.

That’s absolutely what I was up to, I say. My voice sounds oddly alive. And I see now that I’ve been strapped to the bed with restraints. Huh, I say.

Well, I mean. I mean clearly you were trying to kill yourself, he says. And he takes my hand in his. I told them I thought you were trying to kill yourself.

I nod, this being an ancient form of agreement, and we sit there with this for some time.

Richard, of course, never forgives me, but it hardly matters. Coe graduates with me. I leave to go home for the summer, to San Francisco afterward. He heads off for Bangkok, a job working for Citibank.

Richard deserves his own place in my heart, a shrine where a fire burns and blossoms are tossed into it for fragrance. Apple wood would burn there. But he is too late, for now. A famine has left the people weak and they pray to a god who will not answer them. They lay boys at the altar, a sacrifice.

I wanted to tell him, you see, I am lost in someone else. You are too. We kept company in each other’s reminiscences for the nights we spent together. There’s nothing more for this.

21

I meet the David brothers when I go as my mother’s date to a fund-raiser for the Gulf-of-Maine Aquarium. The party is on a yacht tied to a slip on Central Wharf, in Portland, the parking lot shining, full of Mercedes and Saabs and new Volvos. I see the brothers right away when I come in, the two of them so beautiful side by side, shining like the cars outside, in this crowd. If you waved a wand and turned them into dogs they’d be golden Labradors. They are more beautiful together and safer, I decide, because then you can take turns looking at them. My mom knows their mom, and soon we are shaking hands, Hello, My son Fee, this is Kathy, her sons Matthew and Lebow. Around us cocktails float by on trays and people offer hot tiny foods, spiked by colored picks, and I am looking at these two, with their dark straight hair and dark eyes. We raise our eyebrows as our eyes sweep together toward the same corner and we shrug upstairs, without a word, all agreement, where we get Heinekens and pull out cigarettes. Matt lights mine, bowing his head, courtly.

We’re having a party on the Fourth, says Matt. You’ve got to come.

You do, says Lebow. There’s a half pound of shrooms at home, and we don’t know anyone. Our folks just moved to the Cape and there’s only so many trips we can take on this bag.

Matt is the younger, my age, Lebow three years older, just graduated, from Grinnell, where Matt still schools. Lebow is starting to look like a real man, thicker, where Matt is still thin like a boy, his lips dark like rose hips. A sharp scar, pale pink, a puckered line, runs just under the cheekbone, an inch long. We talk most of the night, the three of us, and when Matt announces the impending arrival of the mothers, we toss, all at once, our cigarettes into the sand bucket, ready to leave as they emerge from the stairs. I am somewhat thrown by the ease with which we all silently move in agreement about how to greet our moms. I am unused to this sort of brotherliness, but I like it.

I’m so glad you boys got a chance to meet, Matt’s mom says.

When I get to their house a few days later, in the sunny part of the afternoon, we pick up where we left off, sitting around drinking beers on their deck while Lebow makes the shroom punch, grinding the fungi in a blender with ginger ale and sherbet. Slowly, girls arrive, it would seem, almost exclusively, a four-to-one ratio, and Lebow and Matt grin, waving, the girls coming in with the familiarity of visiting family, picking up beers from an ice-filled garbage can, shaking them gently to lose the wet, jumping back at the foam spray. The David house is a big stone house on the ocean, on a spit of land far from the road, protected by birch-pine forest, with a separate pool house, where an indoor pool, glass-enclosed, occupies a stand of trees. Within a few hours it is completely occupied by ponytailed girls glossy from lavender lip shine, buff manicures, bathing-suit tans, and shaved legs. The boys seem invisible, the opposite of the way it is with birds, the male of the species here more inclined to vanish into the background while the girls flick hair back from their shoulders and smoke skinny white cigarettes that they stub out before moving on in a kind of rotation.

There isn’t anyone who doesn’t take some of the punch, and Matt and I throw down a fast two Dixie cups’ worth, the strange chalky hallucinogenic fungus going down smooth. Grinnell College recipe, Lebow says, as we three toast in the kitchen. Who are these people, Lebow asks, and we laugh.