Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

You think no one is going to suspect us, I say.

No, he says. I think no one is going to find us.

17

Leave him in a hotel room near the turnpike that night.

I check in, and he sneaks in once I’ve got the room open, so the clerk doesn’t see. He’s exhausted and so am I, and he falls back across the bed, arms over his head, in surrender, falling asleep almost at once. I look at him in the cheap yellow light of the room and take in the smell, of old smoke from the thousand cigarettes that must have gone out here. It’s not us, I want to say. I want to wake him and tell him, that we need to escape this, that what he’s done has trapped us and not freed us, but the planes of his sleeping face rebuke me, which is when I see myself in the mirror above the bed: tired, lonely, him stretched out below me, looking for all the world like I’ve knocked him out or worse.

You did this, I tell myself. Not him.

I don’t want to be the one to turn him in to the police. I want him to do that or not. I want him to have the choice, to say he did it or not, but I want him to choose what happens next even as I do, as I walk toward the door and, leaving the key inside on the carpet, close it. From a pay phone I call the hospital and say I need an ambulance for room 322, that my friend has closed the door and won’t answer and I think it’s an emergency.

He’s unconscious, the operator asks.

He won’t wake when I call him, I say. I am lying only a little. What he needs to hear he’ll never hear if I say it.

I roll the car down the drive to turn the engine over in the street. Drive off without headlights for the first two minutes, and then, when the headlights pick the night’s hem up off the road, I head for Cape Elizabeth, for Fort Williams. There are empty houses over there, perfect to hide for a little while. A night.

I park the car at the edge of the beach and I begin walking out on the sand. I stopped it, I tell myself, not sure where I am walking. I stopped it. He didn’t die. It is low tide. Dawn will be up soon and here on the beach there are scattered pools of water, shallow as a plate. The three streetlights along the beach’s edge fret me a shadow three ways around me, so that I look like a walking crowd when I look down. Walking, I see the reflections of stars in the pools, my shadows across them. And I stop at the sight of one shadow that takes a pool of night for a face, two stars where the eyes should be.

Hello, he says.

I say nothing. I want him gone, even as I know, my standing here is the only way he can speak to me.

You know who I am now, don’t you, he says.

I do, I say. The two shadow’s to the side of this one seem suddenly shadow wings, ready to take him away and take me with him. The night turns over us like a stile.

You know who I am now too, I say. So stay.

I wake up the next morning in the charred room of a ruined mansion that burned partly to the ground here in Fort Williams Park some time ago. No one rebuilt it. Supposedly the house is haunted, or cursed. The other houses in the historic neighborhood park, kept empty of residents to preserve them, were locked against me when I tried them, the good people of the town thinking no doubt of someone like me.

There’s a blanket over me that I didn’t put there. I get up, checking it, and then go to the window.

Bridey sits on the hood of my car, looking off to the sea. He blows on a cup of coffee, squinting. There’s a car beside him I don’t recognize, looking suspiciously like a rental.

Why did Lady Tammamo take her life instead of living forever? Love ruins monsters. She didn’t need the spell of a thousand livers to become human. She just had to love one man. Feel the change come over her: the fur recedes across her brow, the fangs flatten to a smile. The paws turn to feet and say good-bye to flight. The danger of her hides itself in shame. I wrap myself in the blanket and walk down, and then I run down the stairs set in the hill, stopping only when I am in front of him. He doesn’t move, just looks at me. It’s not the time just yet for questions, not just yet.

Hi, Bridey says.

Hi, I say. Hi.

For their excellent readings that helped me to shape this novel, thank you to Sarah Sheffield, Shauna Seliy, Patrick Merla, Kirsten Bakis, Emily Barton, Patrick Nolan, Karl Soehnlein, Julie Regan, Sandell Morse, Betty Rogers, Caleb Crain, my brother, Christopher, my sister, Stephanie, and my brother-in-law, Adam Barea. For her unalloyed support for this novel and for her advice, thank you to Hanya Yanagihara. Thank you to Quang Bao, for his support for the novel and his efforts on my behalf. For their beautiful example in persistence, thank you to my mother, Jane Chee, and to my departed father, Choung Tai Chee. For their assistance, without which this book could not have appeared, thank you to Frank Conroy and Connie Brothers, to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Michener/Copernicus Society, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and to Donna Brodie and the Writers’ Room of New York City. Special thanks to my aunt and uncle, Priscilla and Brian St. Louis, for the use of their barn, and to Katie Mac-Nichol, for her long friendship to me and to this effort. Thank you to my teachers, especially Kit Reed, Annie Dillard, Beatrix Gates, Mary Robison, James Alan McPherson, Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Benedict, Denis Johnson, and Deborah Eisenberg. Thank you to Elaine Kim, Tricia Juhn, Mina Park, and all the members of the dinner workshop. Thank you to Rebecca Kurson of Liza Dawson Associates, my agent, and to Chuck Kim, my editor, for having the vision to publish this book. Thanks also to John Weber, Karyn Slutsky, Michele Rubin, Caroline Dennehy, Fritz Metsch, Christian Dierig, and Laura Jorstad, for their excellent work on the novel’s behalf. And for my website, thank you to D.J. Paris.

This novel is a work of fiction, invented and imagined. A resemblance of the characters to people living or dead, and to situations from history, if it happens, will be largely a function of a synchronicity between the imagination of the writer and the life of the reader. I would acknowledge there is a boy I did not know, who did set himself on fire in my hometown when I was too young to remember fully, and the faint memory of which haunted me until I wrote this. His story is inviolate, and not here.