Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

Ways to kill a fox-demon:

Burning. Trap it in a house. Set the house on fire.

He knows who you are now, and then you know now, too: he was Baby Eddie, the big-headed baby who peed down his mother’s leg, the boy who bounced like a toy strung on a sunbeam, standing there with these pictures of you, transmissions from oh-so-far away, of Little Eric and you side by side in a sleeping bag, your hands slanting over your eyes as you hold your hands out to stop, as if you could stop, the light from landing on the film to color the negative, to make the space that burns the silver into place on the contact sheet, that makes the photograph. I did this for you, he tells you. After he does it. This is what you don’t see: he has all the pictures, he is burning all the pictures, he is scattering fire, and then the house is burning, and he leaves, and you leave, and there is nothing and everything between you and him. There is a way he was meant to be with you more than Bridey, except that what you had for each other you have given each other and if there is more for you and Bridey it has nothing to do with what is meant by gods but what is chosen, in the most mortal way. Which one wins? The Fates rocked my cradle, Oscar Wilde once said, and you remember this saying right then, thinking that perhaps that is what this wild swinging of the earth is.

We decide that he has to go to the police and confess. I wait in the car for him. When Warden comes out finally, he’s smiling.

What, I say.

Nothing, he says. Just happy to see you.

We drive in silence, or rather, you do. You drive him. You don’t know what’s going through his head and you don’t ask. His happiness seems unlikely to the far extreme, it seems a product of insanity, but it’s really, you find out, for some other reason altogether, when, as you near the exit sign for the highway, he looks at you and says, Take it.

What, you ask.

Take the exit. The house is burning now.

What?

Fee, he says. We have to go somewhere else now. I couldn’t go to the police. And he curls up in the seat. He rolls the window down and produces a cigarette from his pockets, which he lights with the lighter. Smoke from his mouth. I set the fire, he says, and it’s as if the fire is inside him. The house burning but the smoke coming out of him instead.

Jesus, you say, and you really are calling for him when you say it. For you see, Warden’s happiness is from him thinking that he has you now.

And so in the car as you drive you realize that Eric is dead, and to the sky in front of your eyes, receding as you approach it, you address yourself to him, you say, I knew it from the beginning, always something you wanted, always, that there was something in you you wanted to have seen: that you were like us somehow, that inside the heavy body of you was something small and heavy, fear tidied up in muscle and skin. I wanted you dead and now you are dead and now I run from what I know, now I see what you always wanted us to see, the part of you that was just like us burns free now somewhere behind me. Zeus is you is the sky is dead. Ganymede getaway car. Escapes nothing.

You want to tell this boy next to you, how his father isn’t dead. Not the part he wanted to kill. Not as long as you are there. He’s hiding inside us now, you want to say, but you drive him away from the fire instead.

14

I go to my parents’ house. I let Warden and myself in the back door, leave a note to my mother that I am napping on the sun-porch, and then do so, lie down on the beat-up couch under a sunbeam as thick and warm as a blanket and there in the bird-chirped quiet of the afternoon abandon myself. Warden sleeps on the floor below me.

I wake sometime after the sun had started setting. The sky deep blue above me leaves me nothing but a cold night’s rest, waiting for me to resume it. For a moment I forget everything of why I am there. My mother, in the doorway, watches me as I raise my head. I was expecting you, she said.

I screwed up big, Mom, I said. She smiles.

Bridey called here, she says. We spoke. He’ll be all right, I think. He said you’d had a fight, but he didn’t say what and I don’t want to know unless you want to tell me. He certainly didn’t.

I laugh. It’s not a fight. Not exactly.

Your father won’t be home tonight, by the way, she says. He’s got a conference down in Boston so he stayed in Portsmouth. Did you and your student want something to eat?

He spoke to you, I say.

You know he’s my outlet buddy. He’s my boy. Oh Fee. Come have some coffee.

In the kitchen, I drink her coffee. Warden walks around the yard, smoking, and I watch him through the windows. Did he tell you where he’d gone to, I ask.

He went to New York, she says.

Who’s he staying with?

I think he’s staying with John Mark, she says. It looked like his number when I wrote it down.

Did he mention anything else?

Fee, why don’t you call him yourself.

I dial the number. It was indeed John Mark’s, my friend, whom Bridey had gotten along with better than I had. John Mark, I think, had loved me in secret for some time, and then scorned me underneath that love, and so when Bridey arrived, he could welcome him. They’d become friends quickly. Bridey picks up the phone. Caller ID, he says. Hello Mister. Or is it Mom?

How’s John Mark, I say.

He’s okay. He’s been busy. He put a bid in on an apartment, and so we’re sitting here planning the garden.

What does he want, I ask.

What everyone wants. Low-maintenance greens, regular appearances by flowers. This isn’t what I want to talk about, though, he says, and I hear the scrape of something closing. It isn’t even what you’ve called about, unless I really don’t know you.

I need help, I say.

You’re crazy. I used to think it was charming but now it’s just dangerous. You call it love but it’s just humoring you, that I do.

There’s something you need to know, I say. I can’t say it over the phone.

I need to know, he says. You know what I need to know?

What, I say, afraid.

I need to know, he says. I need to know what that was.

Come here to believe me. Come back.

That day, he says. When I met you. I thought you were beyond belief. My diaries are full of entries about you, before I knew you. Me guessing this or that, talking about the things I’d heard about you. I loved you even then. But now it feels like I was set up-

I watch the insides of my mother’s house. All of this furniture, all of these boxes. All of this life. No, Bridey. You never said this, I say. But, more importantly. You were set up, just not by me.

He’s a boy, Fee, he says. He’s a child, even if he’s a beautiful child, or a mature child. He’s a child. I look at him and I wonder what he’ll look like when he grows up. I want you to think about that, he says. I’ll call you tomorrow. And then he hangs up. I look up to see Warden in the door, looking at me.

16

From the obituary page the following day:

Eric Gorendt, of Lincoln Falls, died sometime early in the morning the night before, at the age of 52. He had recently been released on parole, electronically monitored, to finish serving a sentence of twenty years in prison for sexually molesting twelve boys in his charge as their choir master for the popular singing group the Pine State Boys Chorus. An accomplished director at an early age, he is survived by his parents and a son, Edward. The cause of death was listed as burning.

In the dark morning, still roofed in blue and stars, Warden nibbles a doughnut, wanders the doughnut shop. We’ve gone out to get the paper and I am thinking now of how we should leave. Never come back. I shuffle the paper shut and look around. No one else here, except the counterperson.