Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

What, he says.

It’ll be a surprise, I say.

I drive back out to Cape Elizabeth. I haven’t been in years. Over a decade. I don’t know what to expect. There at the top of the hill is the door, still strangely new. I swing it open. Benign neglect, we call it in Maine. No money to change anything, so everything stays the way you left it.

As we are getting out of the car, Bridey turns to me and says, about Freddy’s apartment, Why blue?

Because it’s the color everyone turns in the dark, I say. I push through the broken greenhouse and he follows, slowly.

A nice view, he says. He takes in the marsh. He thinks he knows what this is.

Oh no.

Down in the center of the tunnels, I don’t understand them anymore. Or, rather, I do. But all of it feels small. There’s the clay cold of it, there’s the unbelievable earth smell. He turns to face me after taking it all in. You built this, he says.

I nod.

I decide I should fill it in. I tell him that. It’s not right, I say. What I felt, about wanting to die, that’s not right. Look at Freddy. He wants to live.

You’re guessing about that one, Bridey says. But you are right, you shouldn’t want it, shouldn’t want to die. But you can’t fill this in.

Upstairs, in the car, Bridey lights one of his occasional cigarettes. And that’s when he says, Build something else.

What do you mean?

He slumps across the seat, his head falling into my lap. I see his beautiful eyes. Want to be in them, jealous of my reflection, for being there. Build something else, he says. At the school, maybe. Make it a project.

Along the edge of the field here is a wall from the Revolutionary War. Unmortared stones. I see it as he’s talking. It stays in my head, the image of it, for months, before I get curious about it. My thoughts return to it like a tongue to teeth. Build something else.

And so one day, Bridey comes to meet me for lunch at the campus. You know, he says. I went to prep.

I know, I say.

It’s weird, he says. There’s no chapel here.

Blue. Blue because it’s the color people turn in the dark. Because it’s the color of the sky, of the center of the flame, of a diamond hit by an X ray. Blue is the knife edge of lightning. Blue is the color, a rose grower tells you, that a rose never quite reaches.

Because when you feel threatened by a demon you are supposed to imagine around you a circle of blue light. You do this because the demon cannot cross the blue light.

Freddy dies on an afternoon after my regular visit. A few weeks before, I had gone with his mother to his old apartment. Together Bridey and I had moved all the furniture to the middles of the rooms and replastered the whole apartment white. When I hear from her that he is dead, I remember sitting in the middle of the apartment and feeling something huge and invisible swing through the colorless room. White is a death color, I thought then. It is the absence of all color.

Fee, she says. Thank you for being there for him at the end. I know he knew. I just know it.

How, I think afterward, sitting on my roof. How can I set this world on fire. How can I get the whole thing to burn.

Back in San Francisco, I remember how a friend of mine once went out and broke every window he could find when his boyfriend died. He walked street to street through the empty shopping district and left behind blocks of broken glass. He wasn’t caught. And the next day the papers couldn’t explain it. And it never happened again.

Bridey gets home and sees me up there as he pulls the car in. He stands in the driveway. Hey.

Hey.

I’ll start dinner, he says.

Okay.

8

The planning of the chapel takes a few months. The building of the chapel takes a week. My students are enthusiastic, as is the faculty. I seem to be moving to some sort of permanent position here. I wonder about Penny, how she’ll feel about it, if they don’t want her back. I have no sense of her carrying our child. I think of it as hers. Entirely. Every now and then she cracks a smile, pats her tummy and says, Hey, Daddy. But I don’t know what to make of it.

I know how to make the chapel, though: I base the constuction on designs I see of Roman bridges and also of things made in South America, by the Incas. I find a man from Vermont who specializes in this particular method of construction through an article about him in a garden magazine, and now, the chapel sits in the corner of the school grounds, overlooking the water and the beach.

During the construction I would be doing whatever I was doing, and then Warden’s hair would fire in the spring sun. I was reminded of how hunters aim for the white tail of a deer. His girlfriend, Alyssa, worked beside him. They’re good kids, I told myself. You are their good teacher.

I sit in the chapel now in the middle of a cold night. With me I have the picture of Peter, and his letter. I don’t want them anymore.

I light a candle, like I used to do in the cave. The chapel is warm somehow inside. We built it better than we thought, I tell myself. I read the letter a last time. There’s the stuff about how much he tried to die before. And then there’s this, which I had forgotten about.

You ought to know, you were my best friend. You were. I know you loved me. I loved you.

No one should have gone through what we went through, but we did. And it kills me to think of it.

But I didn’t love you like you loved me. I don’t hate you for that. It just makes me sorry, that there isn’t someone else who could love you better.

I know when you think about how I went, you’ll get it. I was always uneasy about being alive. The idea of being dead makes me feel clear. When I think of it. It makes me think peace, peace, peace. It makes me happy. I am looking forward to it, to the absence of everything. And so I want you to be happy for me, that this is better for me. That I found what I needed. I know you won’t be. But it’s the last thing I want. You happy.

I burn the letter in the candle and stick the photo in between some stones. I rub the ashes to spread them. Good-bye to all that, I tell myself as I walk to my car. When I get home, Bridey says, Fee. What the hell is on your face?

In the mirror my face is gray from the ash, like I’d been doing a raku fire. And where the tears ran through there are branches. I go to the bathroom and the ash turns the water blue like smoke.

Bridey comes in to check on me. I grab him and pick him up in my arms, taking him to the bed. Our bed. Holy shit, he says. Call me princess.

Take me apart. Put me back together again. I take him all night, as much as we can stand and then a little more. And it does feel like taking. As if I am sending something of myself through him again each time that enters him and comes out through his throat, where I catch it back into myself, in a kiss. To send it through him again. I land on him afterward when finally we lie still.

I love you, Bridey says.

Blue light of the night around us. Blue light has half the wavelength of red, it rushes to get there. Blue us, violet, blue where the light comes off us, violet where it doesn’t reach. I take his blue hair in my blue hand, open him with my blue tongue, blue again.

9

Chronotope: an intersection of time and place. Here is time, here are the places of your life, a connect-the-dots; here are the people, made from time into radiant, concatenated glowworms, all the forms they’ve been from first glance to good-byes run together in a sine-cosine curve of color-lights, as if they had walked through a camera frame with the shutter stuck open, one age at the beginning, another at the end. You decide, I want to remember this or that, and so the part of you that faces the future is now like a dragon flying over the sea, moves in on a flash of color here or there that looks familiar, bites down and spits the bite to its glance, which catches fire. Here is the flaming pearl, famous from every Chinese calendar. Imaginary appendages attaching it to past and future-past fly to the pearl’s side. Imaginary eyes to see past conditional, the “if this then that,” blink open. An angel, it seems, but, really, what you make is a golem out of your own life, and then you ask it a question, you say. Speak to me. Tell me what I did. How did I get here?