Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

I turn and go upstairs, to prepare to meet the students the next day. Bridey undresses for bed, reminding me of no one but himself. I sit down and take off my shoes.

Sometimes, I think I know what my grandparents were listening for. Sound waves don’t ever go away. Not one sound goes away. The wave simply expands, infinitely. The sound remains. Imagine a cosine arc the size of Jupiter, and that might be the size of the wave of the last thing Peter said. I’d need an ear the size of another solar system to hear him again.

Tomorrow I would meet my students.

Good night, Bridey says, when I pull the sheets up over us, and it rolls off into eternity to join every other sound ever made.

That night we both dream. I have my recurring dream, Bridey has his. This is how we find out about them. My recurring dream: I am in a barracks, walking back from having gone to the bathroom, and I know it in the way you know something in your life: where you had coffee that morning, where you ate your breakfast. And the corridor is dark. I begin to feel it then, the dread, a chill like someone has opened a door to the outside, except that the chill is in my mind, the door, in my mind. The chill is coming from somewhere else through an opening somewhere inside me, and I start to slow down, to try and turn and face the demon. And then instead, I try to run faster, to the main room, where everyone lies asleep. But I never get there. I always wake before that happens, with the knowledge that I am dead. I didn’t make it.

I have the dream again. I wake up, to see Bridey looking at me, one eyebrow raised. Coffee, he says, and leaps out of bed. I wait as I hear the smooth feet echo across our wood floors. I drowse off, and awake again to him naked, holding two cups of coffee. Hiya, he says. Had a nightmare. A recurring one of mine.

Yeah, I did, I say.

No, he says. I meant, I did. You did too?

What was your dream, I ask.

I dreamed I was in a massacre. That all around me, people were dying. And I couldn’t move. There was some monstrous invisible force, ripping through people. Blood everywhere. We were in some kind of barracks. And everyone was dying. All soldiers, all of us. And then I couldn’t see it but I felt the monster come for me. And I woke up. He slurps his coffee then, and settles himself into the bed beside my knees.

I love you, I say.

What was your nightmare, he says.

I don’t want to talk about it, I say. Not now.

I think of it later, though, when he’s left the house, to go swimming. What if you meet someone from your future life? You are in your past life now, as far as the future is concerned. That morning it seems to me that Bridey and I are somewhere in the future, both a part of a massacre. We are different parts to the same dream. That we were given this present to make us strong for the future to come. I’ll think differently of it later. But for the purpose of the events to follow, this is my opinion, now.

7

I see his blond hair first in the morning light warming the natatorium. Towhead. The color of a beating.

Penny is funny in her suit, her whistle. The boys and girls yawn, push at their hair and faces. She leads them in stretching and visualizations. I pretend the boy on the other side of the room doesn’t look like Peter. I stretch as they stretch, close my eyes when they visualize and see myself walking out of the room. Selling the house. Leaving. The silliness of it cures the moment and when I open my eyes I am still smiling from it. I am in love with Bridey now, anyway.

As I stand behind Penny, I imagine telling Bridey about it, and him telling me, it’s easy. You have blondphobia. You have the irrational fear of blonds who have caused you pain and their look-alikes.

Kids, Penny says, meet your new assistant coach, Aphias Zhe.

What’s your name? I say, not hearing the first time this new apparition speaks. We are stuck in the handshake then, hands clasped.

Warden, he says, and he takes his hand back.

Nice jail you got here, I say. Penny rolls her eyes.

He’s not the new comedian, she says. That’s for sure.

They follow me, I tell myself, as I drive home. When Bridey opens the door I say nothing about this, in the manner of anyone avoiding calling the name of a ghost.

*

I go to Portland every two weeks on a Saturday and sit with Freddy. Bridey comes with me sometimes. Is this the reason I moved back to Maine, I ask myself, as I drive the long black road south to Portland or north to Bangor. As I head out to East Knot. As I watch Bridey move through the kitchen. I think of some of the stories I know to fill the silences of being with Freddy: a man who found out he was positive and shot himself in the head, his house rigged to burn to the ground. Another who found out his status when he collapsed from walking pneumonia, and died a few days later. I wanted to be a teacher; my namesake was a teacher, and ever since knowing that, a tiny part of me has known, I was meant to stand in front of a group of children. I love my job, my fast students, my bright swimmers. Love watching someone figure something out and then use it, watch the idea go from me to them and see how it belongs to them afterward. Not mine at all. And afterward, you can only wonder at how it happens. It doesn’t happen all the time. But when it does, it feels like this is what magic wants to be, when it grows up.

I bring flowers to Freddy, cut them down and set them in a water glass by his bed. I straighten the edge of his sheet, check his vital signs. He never makes a noise while I’m there. I understand he sometimes sings. I don’t know what I’d do, if he started singing.

Afterward, I go out to Two Lights. A small state park out in Cape Elizabeth, on the water, it boasts a lighthouse and an abandoned six-story gun tower, left over from World War II. The park was never really closed when we were younger, which is to say, it was easy to break into, and we used to go out there to drink sometimes or smoke pot. The police were ordinarily an amiable bunch about it, having grown up in the area and come here to do the same things when they were our age. It was called Two Lights because Cape Elizabeth had two lighthouses, one on each side of the cape.

Here the lighthouse sits, new luxury homes around on its hillside, and down by the water, on a bedrock point, the Lobster Shack, where you can get fried seafood and steamed lobsters. At night, you can sit out on the rocks, and the lighthouse here as it sends its beam out into the night becomes a pinwheel of light, the beams reaching out across the dark water and fading as they head for the horizon. Where, as soon as the light seems to thin and vanish, it appears again, thickens and turns, into a distant pinwheel.

As I sit on the rocks and the light swings out over my head, it seems to me there is another, far, lighthouse, its arms of light reaching back to this one, though I know there isn’t, the two of them reaching for each other and never quite touching as they match each other in these huge sweeps of the sky’s night arch. It’s a trick in the sky. The light bends, somewhere out over the bay. I come here after my visits with Freddy. Here in the dark, what I see: the light, the distance, the night. And what it shows me: that even light bends. That even light is made to carry weight. And if there is a God, and he does attend to all things, if he is with even this beam of light as it heads out across the Atlantic into the night to warn distant sailors of danger, then the place he touches it is where it bends, where it disappears for a while, because that is where it needs help.

Do you want to see something, I say to Bridey, one day when he has made the trip with me, after we leave Freddy. In the blank white of the hospital corridors, anything seems possible.