Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

Big Eric searched us like a pannier looking the creek bed over, searched every flash of gold for the sight of a lost love. Burning hides what it burns there. Somewhere deep in him was a memory of light that pierced him from end to end like a spit. He couldn’t see that he was large and we were not. His body to him felt out-sized, a bear costume borrowed for a party, and then it vanished. In the moment he touched us, he was a boy again. And in the moment he touched us we were run through also. The pain reached out, passed, like fire does, from the burned to the burning. Burning hides what burns.

11

The shadows of the trees this night are like stains someone couldn’t quite clean up and the branches hold themselves up like they’ve just stopped screaming. I’m playing hide and go seek, I tell myself.

In the distance, a lit window, gold in the blue night. The bitter smell after rain, under the trees, like used tea bags left out. I approach the house with the lit window. What do I expect? I thought it was Bridey who’d left the note. A Christmas surprise. I ring the doorbell, a metallic ping, and wait for a response. There is none, and then I hear someone behind me. I turn.

Warden. His breath a blue apostrophe in the cold air. He smiles. Hey, he says. He pulls a key from his pocket and opens the door. This way, he says.

What are you doing here, I ask in the doorway. He stands there for a moment holding the turned knob of the door.

He turns to face me. Anger in his face? Bewilderment. I remember the day I caught him as he fell, fainting. His body surprisingly light. I was reminded of my biology, the lesson about the hollow bones of birds. His face, just then, much like it is now. We enter the house together.

Whose house is this? I ask, as we climb the stairs.

The Whites. I’m looking after it for them.

A picture of the twins on the wall at the top of the stairs confirms this. Cherubs.

In their bedroom, he falls across the enormous bed, facedown. Are you all right, I ask.

You should go home, he says.

I should, I say. But you have something to tell me. I realize then, until I saw him on the bed I’d no intentions. Really. He was a child to me, he didn’t exist. But his confusion was making him more than a child, as if that was what an adult was. And now he is sitting up to face me. He hands me the photograph. His bravery oscillates wildly. How did you get the picture, I say. I know what it is immediately.

How did you, he says.

A long time ago, I say, deciding to tell the truth, I was in love. I was in love with someone, and I knew he’d never love me, so I took the picture. Instead of trying to tell him how it was I loved him.

Me too, he says.

The silence between us eats me. I can’t go away again, can I? I can’t. His lips taste like wet grass, cold at first. That was the first kiss. I sit there and he moves about me as if I am a statue. As if I were something he’s made. I will be, soon: his kiss, this silence, they make me into someone else. Someone I don’t know. All of the ways I have of judging remove themselves from me like offended friends.

He tastes clean. Or empty.

What happens next goes by like a blow.

I get up, pull his clothes off. His eyes are wide, like something is trying to fit into them that can’t. I put my hands on him and it seems like as my mouth moves across the hollows of his neck, as I put my tongue across his open mouth, as I hear him choke and go quiet, and I am dizzy, as if the world is spinning faster with each thing we do, faster and faster, so that by the time I leave, by the time my foot spreads to set itself down on the ground outside, this world should be spinning so fast no one could stand on it. No one could stand it.

12

Tell me what I did. If this then that.

Warden, even in front of me, still a memory of green eyes on fire, of gold melting, a memory not of fire but of what the fire burned. A boy who reminded you of something that constantly eluded you. Do you remember the way you caught Warden that day. See the gold flesh, so familiar from a hundred practices, the gold hair, flax but not tow, the gold that was everywhere on him, the one who burned first, the one you chased as far even as this. Remember the times you walked with him in sunlight and caught yourself looking at the way the sun caught on the gold hairs of his body, the tiny hairs shorter than eyelashes. Remember that you knew from first introductions how it was with him, how he wanted you. You.

Walk the stairs to the back of Warden’s dorm. What had eluded you for so long was there literally on the tip of you, gold on you everywhere as if he could gild you. Him on you as if he could turn into light and cover and color you completely, so that he was a million times a million particles of altered color tossed into someone else’s eye to show you, to take you out of the awful realm of being alone, in your body, to the realm of a shared thing, something seen. This journey that has always defeated you.

For a few short weeks, it goes like this. You at the dorm. On the roof at night. He is cold as the wind every time it starts, warm like a tear when you are done. Every time you feel less, every time you are more of a stone thing. And you go back every time hoping to feel again.

13

Warden sleeps on the front seat. I put a blanket over him. He’s a student of yours, my mother had asked, as he went into the bathroom, when we were at her house earlier this evening.

Yes, I’d said.

How do I feel, I ask myself now, in the car.

You feel great, he says, appearing suddenly by the window, a wind with green eyes made this time from dark leaves. Yowu. You feel like you know what you have to do. I nod at him, and he is gone again. Warden struggles with a dream, does not wake up. I lean my face against the car door and it warms slowly under my cheek.

Metal is like love, it takes its temperature from touch. How did we get here?

This way.

Open me, the day says to me that morning. Go ahead. Sunlight on the lawn, the gold stitches of the needle of light coming through our trees. I go outside with my coffee and dew steams off on my bare feet, until they are cold, and then I return to the house. The phone rings and I glance down to my caller ID, and I see the name, in block letters, flash there under the number: gorendt, ERIC, and I freeze, watching it flash, letting it go to the machine, and then go, as the caller hangs up.

What happens next, is the phone rings again, and I pick it up, even as the name flashes back across the screen.

Hello, Warden says, even as I know who it is. Even as I know now who he really is. Fee.

Yes, I say.

He’s crying then, and then he coughs and clears his throat, and he says, I need you to come here.

I can’t, I say.

No, I really, really need you to come here. I’m not going to make it. I may not make it even if you come, but please.

And inside the cold space in me, still cold like my feet, I hear myself say, Not one more. Not even one more. And I say, Okay. I am coming. Where are you. As I say it, knowing and yet, really not knowing, where that man lived in this world.

I thought he had killed a woman, at first.

His legs stick out from behind a chair, like the way it is in monster movies. I know it isn’t him anymore, that he’s not there in the body, but I say his name. Eric, I say. I see the pale legs, rounded calves, the pale, pale feet. And I turn to see Warden come toward me. His pale face. Angel, I say. Why. I say it and the word fills up with my fear.

And he comes toward me, wraps his arms around me. Fee, he says. And then he lets go.

Love’s not Time’s fool, Shakespeare writes. No, Love’s not. He’s still right. Love buys time like we used to buy ice, cold pieces of it brought home to keep what’s loved preserved from every day’s heat. In a box in the basement are the pictures. Here, he says to me, hands me a sheaf of pictures, programs, clippings. Here, you’re right there. Aphias Zhe. First soprano.