Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

In a half hour, it won’t matter, Matt says.

A half hour later finds Matt and me on the lawn, watching girls play Frisbee as the sun starts to go down. A stereo system has been set outside and music plays as the shiny girls toss shiny discs. God, they’re beautiful, it’s so beautiful here, Matt says, and the girls do seem like goddesses, like everything there is here is only to gild them a little more. Matt wrestles off his shirt and lies down on it, to reveal that he is shiny also, shiny brown with nipples as big as eyes and a smooth belly puckered by an outie belly button. I restrain myself from bending over to put my mouth on it, but it looks like the place you would begin inflating him by, if he were a gas-filled balloon.

Instead I take my shirt off also, and Matt says, God, you’re built, and he says, Feel this, and he curls his biceps, hiking himself up so I can reach, because for some reason I can’t move, and I touch the muscle, like a fist under his skin, and as my hand drops away I can feel how his nipple gives off heat like a lamp. The shiny girls watch, toss their Frisbee some more, and one of them yells, Arm wrestle, and it does seem like a command from the goddesses, so we face off, lying down, hands curled together, and as we struggle, I start to feel like we’re both vanishing, and the girls sit around us, watching, and we’re vanishing because the ground is swallowing us. We’re evenly matched, but also, I don’t particularly want to win, I never have, and so when Lebow walks over and grabs our hands and presses mine down over Matt’s, Matt rolls with him, bringing him down on top of us so that we make a pile, and I am wedged against Matt’s shoulder as Lebow grabs his brother’s head and forces a big wet kiss on his lips that smacks like gum snapping. He jumps up laughing as Matt tosses me off him to wipe his mouth and spit. All of us pause, me and the shiny girls, as Matt barks to his brother, Shithead, and Lebow just keeps laughing, shrill and repetitive. Gratified, the goddesses return inside, looking after another beer, leaving their cigarette-filled empties on the counters of the kitchen.

By now I can tell this is the identifiable trip, the thing, and I stand in amazement, looking at it all: the whirling world of blue sky and sunshine and pretty white girls with expensive cars, the whirling from the heat I can feel where the parts of me that were pressed to Matt feel irradiated, like they should glow bright enough for me to read by, the way I can hear each tree breathe. Trees breathe, I say to Matt, an amount of time later that I am unable to quantify, except by knowing it is still not yet sundown, and he says, It all breathes. Feel the world take a breath all at once. And we go quiet together.

We head down to the pool house where the beer-drinking Frisbee goddesses have not yet arrived, and Matt flicks on underwater dome lights that spread a green-gold glow from below, and he strips out of his shorts, naked quickly. C’mon, he says, and I do, in awe, of him transformed into a baby Neptune. He fumbles open a jar and dips his hand in, and spreads a thick paint stripe across the forearm that glows blue as it starts to dry, and he hands me another paint jar. I open it and test it on my stomach, to see orange come up. I look up and see Matt has painted bars on his face, and he smiles as he runs his fingers flat down my face, painting it. His hand pauses under my chin, and he pulls me in by it, for a phosphorescent, dry-lipped, teeth-knocking kiss.

He laughs and dives in. The glow from underneath scatters light and dark across him, the blue glows darker, his white smile like an elbow of lightning. In the water he looks like a storm I once saw from above, inside a plane, and that’s about how far up I feel when he soaks me with a splash. Stop looking and start swimming, he says.

I dive in, and when I surface, I see the beer goddesses by the side of the pool, removing, slowly, their clothes, their white breasts flash like whale bellies, and behind them the sky finally goes dark. They find the paints and start decorating each other. Music starts and I realize it isn’t in my head but that there are speakers, in the walls of the pool house, and then there’s Lebow, who drops his shorts, and starts laughing as the goddesses paint him, one taking his chest, the other his face. I hear the water on the deck behind them for a moment just before Matt knocks them all in the water, and kicks their clothes in behind them. Soon the pool is littered with bikini tops and cutoffs, and the laughing beer goddesses jump into the glowing pool, screaming and laughing, grabbing for their clothes, and Lebow swears at his brother, but the two goddesses with him restrain him, they aren’t interested in what he wants from his brother. I pluck my shorts and Matt’s from the water’s surface, and head off in search of a towel.

I find Matt on the lawn, naked, glowing blue in streaks as if lit from some secret blue sun, holding a cup for me and for him. Cheers, he says, and we drink. The sky looks full of comets and the crescent moon is a little pink on the tip, like it cut someone before rising. We watch as the goddesses play in the glowing pool with his brother, and Matt asks me, Are you getting cold, I have some clothes in the house, and so we walk the lawn, the earth rolling under our feet as we go, and in his room he says, Here, hands me cold cream, and he says, It’s the only way to get this shit off, and he takes a shirt and starts removing the orange paint from me, and I lie back as he does this, until he is kneeling in front of me, humming my dick into his mouth, and I am not glowing anymore, just greasy, in the dark.

And now the fireworks go off, banging the dark open, fire tossed everywhere, and somewhere probably one of the invisible boys the beer goddesses brought finds the stereo, and whoever it is puts on New Order, and the singer sings How Does It Feel, To Treat Me Like You Do, and Matt glows blue as he swallows me from the foot of the bed, and when I look out the window, Peter is there, hanging inside a star, singing along to the New Order song, his thumb on fire again but now a roman candle, and he tells me, Love is the regrowth of the wings of the soul. And the song lyrics are now spelling themselves out in the sky in blue letters, and on Matt in the dark swallowing me, the heat from him melting me into the sheets, and I ask Peter though I know I’m not speaking, to take pity on me, to take me with him, and he says, You can’t come, you’re not ready yet, and I say what, and then he recites Plato to me, he says, “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 parched and closed up…”

And then Matt is spread out on me, and the blue is running off him onto me, he shows me into a kiss like a treasure vault hidden from all of heaven’s searches, and I hear a dog crying somewhere and turn to see out the sky Peter, now waving, he’s saying, You’re free now, you are, and he grows wings of corkscrew stars, he has a fire around him, he rises. He lights the sky. And Matt appears before me now, he says, Fucking God, and he says, don’t cry, and then we disappear, all three, into the deepening blue.

Warden

1

A voice like a summer’s day, my grandfather says to me.

I am twelve, singing out in the yard. York Beach, Maine. My grandfather and grandmother have taken custody of me and are preparing to send me off to a boarding school upstate. Someplace experimental, my grandmother says, knowing of my fondness for science. Small. You’ll like it.