Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

Not hungry, Ms. Fields asks me.

I see that I’ve stopped eating, and so I pick up a fork. Resting, I say, and stab a shiny ziti among the rest in the sauce lake on my plate.

Mr. Zhe puts his hand on my forehead. You’re not warm, he says. Maybe a bit clammy. His hands are warm, dry, they have a faint smell of sweet cinnamon. Around us, the other swimmers din the air with their conversations, and suddenly all the sounds flatten. No one sound any louder than any other. A leveling takes place. I hit the floor on my side.

And so it is that the faint, caused by my thinking of the theft of the picture, is the first reason he takes me in his arms. I’ll remember it later. At the time, he lifts me to carry me outside, his arms hard like wood. As the air comes back to me, the light, as we go through the doors to the outside, breaks on us like rain. He lays me out on the grass, stays above me, searching my eyes, lifting one lid, then the other. Ms. Fields appears above me, the pillars of her legs looming suddenly, the blue sky above her, heaven’s sieve. Is he all right, she asks.

I think so, Mr. Zhe says. Are you all right, he asks.

I close my eyes. Yes, I say. I will be.

In my dorm’s phone booth, the door pulled shut, I talk through some fast options with a hot-line operator for “gay, bisexual and questioning youth” I find on a number from a newspaper ad. He’s down in Portland, he tells me his name’s Kevin, that he’s thirty-five, that he wants me to know that the conversation is confidential.

Do you know how he feels about you?

I don’t, I say. I mean, I have no reason to think he feels anything. I’m just his student.

You mentioned you know he’s gay; is he out at the school?

No, I say. I, uh, I went over to his house. Saw him with his boyfriend.

A little Harriet the Spy, are we, he says, chuckling. Sorry. I mean Encyclopedia Brown.

No, I say. It’s fine.

Do you fantasize about other men, he asks.

No, I say. I don’t. I don’t fantasize.

Hmm. Well, how about this. What do you imagine, happening, when you think of him.

And here, for some reason, I think of my father. Your pause, he says, is a little damning.

I, uh, was distracted for a moment. I don’t know. That’s why I called. I don’t know what this is, I say. I twirl the phone cord, and the phone numbers, written in ballpoint and pencil on the wall, start to look like a map to some country, topographic: here, the mountains. There, a river. A notice, above the phone, reads please limit calls TO 20 min . I look at my watch. I’ve got thirteen minutes.

How about this, the operator says, all business. How about, if you imagine him getting fired and you getting suspended or expelled. Because you are not yet eighteen and he is your teacher and no one, no one, thinks of this as the happy ending for the story you’re telling me. Not even you, right?

No, I say. I mean, right.

So, what’s worth that.

I love him, I say, surprising myself. When he’s around, it feels like he’s in charge of everything in me. I don’t know what to do with that. Do you kiss it? I don’t know.

Oh, boy. The operator’s quiet a moment, and then he says, I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t fall in love with that.

I laugh.

I remain worried, he says. The school thing is large. I really think, with a year to go, that you should consider doing nothing until you have graduated. Your graduation is the most important thing right now, and the year will give you time to really know what you want to do about this.

He’ll be gone by then, I say.

See how smart I am? the operator says. Look, I know what this feels like but at your age, you’re going to feel like this every three days.

Feel like I’m going to die, I ask. Every few days?

You’re not dying, he says. I guarantee it. But if you do anything about this you could get into trouble so deep you might wish you were dead. And that’s, well, that’s not what this should be about. Love should be about making you want to live.

In the hall I see Alyssa’s brown-skinned back as she passes by, headed for my room. I don’t have a lot of time. I say, There are Mexican Indians who believe that gold is the earth’s blood.

Huh, he says. Beautiful. What’s that go to do with anything?

We cut the world to marry, I say.

Marriage, he says, is not a big topic for this hot line, despite what people might think.

I’d cut the world for him, I say.

Don’t even cut a class for him, the operator says. Do yourself a favor. Stay young. For another year, and try to find a nice boy your own age. Okay? And one other thing, he says.

Yes, I say.

Call me here at this number if you decide to try anything. Talk to me before you do. All right?

Alyssa, in the window of the booth, mouths, Who are you talking to? I raise a hand to her, signaling a moment, and I say, All right. We hang up. I imagine him logging the call. 6:15 P.M., April 30, 1997. A 17-year-old male, questioning. Talk time, 18 minutes. In love with teacher. Alyssa pulls the door open.

Hi, she says. Who’s your new girlfriend?

What, I say.

This phone booth has someone else written all over it. She pulls back.

There’s no other girl but you, I say.

She turns, her hair falls over her face, and then she pulls it back, and looks at me. Let’s go look at the comet, she says.

Outside the comet Hale-Bopp sits in the sky. Alyssa and I sit and watch it from the lawn. Comets are burning ice, gas frozen and made solid and then burned by the friction, so cold it’s fuel. So hot you can see it from planet Earth. I know exactly how you feel, I tell the comet.

It’s amazing, isn’t it, she says. A comet, and for a few weeks, we get to look at it every night as though it were the most ordinary star.

At the low edge of the sky, a bright smear. The slow burning, light pealing like struck bells at the speed of its passing. A bright tear in the night’s dark belly.

Did you ever notice, I tell Alyssa, shortly before we leave the comet’s company. How tear, as in to cry, and tear, as in to rip or pull, how they’re spelled the same? You could write them and someone reading would not know if you were crying or separating.

You’d know, she tells me. You would know.

17

Even a slow angel moves faster than we know how to.

For my senior English thesis, the topic of which I had to choose this year, I decide to choose my subject at random. Inspired by a game the swim team played on the bus, Lucky Bug, I pick the letters and numbers off license plates I see on Volkswagens that our bus passes on our way to swim meets, until I arrive at a Dewey decimal system number. I take the number into the library and enter it into the computer to search for the title, and the title comes up, quickly. Sappho, The Poems of.

I want to write a paper about Sappho, I tell my English adviser, Mrs, Autry, at a meeting shortly after. A brisk, red-haired woman with large eyes in a thin face, she reminds me of an elf. She approves it with a smirk. Good luck, she says.

What, I say.

You’ll be trying to write that paper your whole life, she says. Sappho’s an enduring question.

Later, I am reading her and Mrs. Autry is right.

Sappho, fragment 168:

And Night’s black sleep upon the eyes.

He writes a letter.

Dear Edward:

I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to seeing you after all this time, at Christmas. It’s the answer to a prayer, at least. Your grandparents are some of the best people the world has to offer, and I’m sure they’ve done a terrific job at raising you, and that they’ve given you lots of love. They wrote to me regularly here to let me know how things were going with you, and while it hurt me to not be able to be in touch with you directly, I always hoped that when I was done here, that we might meet, and at least be friends. I don’t want you to think that I’ll magically emerge from here and be, overnight, this father you never had. I think I can say that. But I remember you as my baby boy, and it’s been so long since I’ve held you. I know it’ll be a shock, to see you as a young man. I’ve gotten pictures at Christmas, so I’ve seen it, but it’s another thing altogether to meet you.