Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

Tom, she says, you are headed for a world of trouble if we talk that part up. But I’ll tell you, she doesn’t have one.

Immaculate conception, I say, imagining her briefly, holding a jar and a baster.

Top secret, she says. Alumni support for the new chapel is very strong. We might even get a new dormitory out of it. She’s rallied much of the support, which is brilliant politics on her part: she deflects attention from whatever scrutiny her pregnancy might go under.

But anyway; are either of you going to do the building? I know you’re both here for spring training.

Neither Tom nor I responds immediately. Around us, the cars on the road today are full of ordinary families. I wonder if passersby assume we’re Mrs. Walter Thoreau’s children. I might look it; she’s a sharp-featured forty-something woman, well groomed, a little lipstick and mascara, with a good healthy complexion and short dark hair. Gamine, I think, is the word for it. As in, like a young boy.

I want you to promise me you will, she says, The more we have, the better the project will be.

Okay, I say.

Only if you will, Tom says to Mrs. Thoreau, and she laughs again.

9

Down at the school for the deaf the afternoon passes loudly. In a long-windowed classroom overlooking the sea Tom and I tutor students in speech patterning. Welcome to my home. How are you. Microbiology is one of my college degree goals. We teach them how to shape their mouth, watch as the sound comes out in pitches a degree high or low, to shake like a branch in that wind between flat and sharp. We practice our sign language, and as our hands flicker and our mouths stretch and close, the silence fills in with movement, which is what all sound is anyway. Being deaf, reading lips, everyone is at least like a word to the rest of the world. Everyone you meet is a sentence.

When you read, I ask one of my students, Fiona, what do you hear?

She laughs.

What is it like for you reading, I ask. When I read, I hear a voice in my head. Do you?

She puzzles over this. I don’t know how to tell you what’s in my head, she signs. Her hands bounce near her chest, like butterflies.

You’ve never heard a sound, I ask.

I feel them, she says.

And when you read, lips, or a page, I say. What’s there? What orders it? Is it like someone making noise, and you feel it all over you?

I have to get back to you on that, she signs, smiling. She’s a pretty girl, Irish skin and the blue eyes like the sky reflected in a sword. The quiet around her seems to make the focus of her prettiness sharper, the air’s stillness focuses her in the eye. As if talking might make it harder to see someone.

Okay, I say. E-mail me.

10

When I get back, there’s an e-mail from my grandparents. Dear Edward: re: Christmas…

It is starting to look as if your father will be released, as he has suggested, by the holiday and so it is a matter of some importance that you reach a decision about how you would like us to include him, or if. We have rarely spoken of how we feel about these things but not because we feel we are protecting you, exactly; we simply wanted you to form independent feelings from ours, for as it was, we were sure you would pick up on these feelings subconsciously.

The e-mail is long, basically a treatise on their theory of raising me, the borrowed child. They were always tentative around me, as if I were going to explode one day, into a hundred angry Edwards. In retrospect there was a certain danger of me developing MPD or something, from the sheer cognitive dissonance of having a father while not having a father, et cetera. But I know we both feel we’d been careful, and as I read, I began to understand more of why. And then they finally give me the exact reason.

…in 1982, your father was convicted on twelve counts of child molestation, and then related charges of sexual assault, and the corruption of minors. Your mother was convicted as his accomplice and served a shorter sentence. There is some question also as to the death of a foster child in their care, although the judge, after some investigation, ruled out foul play. We loved him as a child, we are trying to reach a forgiveness of him in our hearts, but with this problem, there is a high rate of recidivism, and so we are concerned. We aren’t concerned particularly for your safety, but we do feel you need to make informed choices. We feel, as you approach the age of majority, that you are an exceptionally mature young man, and so we approach this topic confidently. This is only the beginning of the discussion; please call us after you read this, and we’ll discuss this further. We took the trouble of making an appointment for you with a counselor, should you so wish.

We aren’t concerned particularly for your safety, I think. They mean I’m too old for him now. Not that he’s cured. When Tom comes back to the room I’m calm again, showered, cleaning the toilet in the common bathroom where I threw up. Wow, he says, from the doorway. Clean freak. You know, we have someone who comes through to do that.

They never do a good enough job, I say.

11

I have been having, I know, problems with my flip turns. When I somersault at the wall, I pause before striking the wall with my feet, to look and measure the distance. I look around. My head turning is bad for the water rushing behind me. And so Ms. Fields watches as Mr. Zhe, who has told us today to call him Fee, jumps in the water beside me. Watch me, he says.

He heads in toward the wall as if he will hit it with his head and then bangs through the turn, not even seeming to upend so much as to wriggle his way through. He comes up for air, to say, Don’t breathe before. You can breathe after. Keeping your head down, watch the cross at the bottom. Try to measure yourself according to that. If you look up, you start to become less streamlined. So now watch again. I measure my distance from the wall by knowing that when my head is over the crosshead, it’s time to start the turnover.

And if you butterfly-kick on your way in you’ll be disqualified, Ms. Fields’s yells from the bench. Her stomach now has a tiny perch to it.

Watch from below, he says. I take a breath and start under, watching from below as he heads toward the wall again. He lands on the wall without looking, parts the current following behind him with his arms spread ahead of him like a knife turned to the side, and pushes off, foam at his feet as he kicks. He swims over me, two feet above, and the waves of his passing bump me against the floor, gently.

Did you get that, he asks, when we are both above water again. He didn’t even glance at me as he went over me, and even now, it seems to me he doesn’t see me somehow. As if I’m transparent, made of glass. To make sure, he says, before you continue, I want to see twenty somersaults right here, in front of the wall.

Around me the rest of the team pounds the cold blue water. I stand in the shallow end, turning myself over and over as he watches, to make sure I’ve got it right. I squeeze the memory of him above me out, not so much even the sight of him as the feeling I had, of an aurora of heat and skin above me. I know there is no way for me to feel the heat of him through the chill water. And yet I do. It comes to me later, as I lie under a thin sheet in my dark overheated dorm. I wasn’t feeling it with my skin. The part inside. Entelechy, a word from my SAT vocabulary worksheet, springs into my head. The original energy inside of something. The source of movement.

I hear Tom turn over. Tom, I say.

What.

I’m working on that chapel, I tell him. You too, okay?

Okay. Sleepy-sleepy, he says. He says it every night, has for four years. And like a magic charm tonight, I go to sleep, almost immediately, on hearing it.