Edinburgh (10 page)

Fifteen. I lose my voice. My new voice sounds like a burned string rubbing. Singing is touching, you bang the air and the air moves something inside you and the thing moved registers, says, That is a sound. When we sing to each other we are touching each other through this sleeve of air between us. When my voice changes I know this new creature is capable of no significant touch, no transformations. This voice cannot erase me, take me over and set me aside. This new voice has no light. It can barely push enough air aside to tell people, Hello, Good Morning, Good Night. I stop talking as much.

I hear my recorded new voice in a tape my school music teacher makes, and it sounds like a stranger. If I called after myself in the street, with this voice, I wouldn't hear me. I would keep walking, away.

The memory I have of my old voice, the soprano of my childhood, is a memory of desire. For the voice to unstring itself. To rise free of the vocal cords, shed the body like a cormorant sheds the sea after plucking its catch. Not to fly but to be flight, not to carry but to be the carrying.

I go to classes, swim. Swimming is good, shucks me off of me. In the water, nothing. No harm anywhere, and the repetition excites me. Everything, when I feel it, feels bad. The swim team avoids me, even when I win. Zach and I continue to see each other. Peter and I go out with his sister sometimes to “straightedge” shows where no one drinks or does drugs or smokes. Peter lights up only on the way home. He has to change schools now again. Sometimes I wonder if he knew why I always asked him to never tell. Why I helped Big Eric hide in plain sight. I didn't have an answer for Peter then but he never asked. I have an answer, now.

Hiding him hid me.

 

1

THE CHURCH-CHOIR
director's daughter is the only person who saw him. He had walked to the far edge of the field, burning, unrecognizable, unable to make any sound as the fire took the air out of his lungs. He had set himself on fire and then, perhaps unable to bear the pain while seated, walked, and while walking, Melinda, poor thing, saw him. She was at home, eating some cereal, a few minutes left to her before she was to go down and catch the bus. That morning as he fell to the ground, she left the house to get help, her mother already at the school.

It would have been around seven in the morning on a morning at the end of August, perhaps the last day of the month. Peter had planned his death for two years. In letters sent to his friends, he talked of how he had tried to kill himself for the first time when he was eleven. He had failed and in such a way that no one suspected he had even tried. He resolved then to keep it a secret, and to plan well for the next time. He threw a Dungeons & Dragons game that lasted until late and then we left to go home, as it was the first school night of the summer. He stopped me to take a picture of us together, a Polaroid. Here, he said, and gave it to me, and then laughed. I said, It's not as much fun to play anymore, is it. And he said, Yeah. It's not.

At the end of the night he went to bed for a few hours, waking up in the early morning to go and buy the gasoline he would use to burn himself to death.

I remember Melinda, the choir director's daughter, going away for a season and not knowing why, and how, when she returned, the curiosity I'd always seen in her eyes was gone. Mildly retarded, with glasses as thick as a bottle, it seemed like her glasses let you see more of what was going on inside her rather than showing her anything at all.

When she returns, I see her first again at church. She has grown over the winter, and her eyes no longer meet mine; she no longer seems like she is pressing up against her glasses to escape, like before. She seems like she hides now. As if she feels someone blames her for seeing the burning boy, and so now, she has no particular interest in seeing something else that will get her sent away again.

I wonder, if it would be like being with him forever, to see him like that. I think it is. I want to ask him what it was he thought he was going to burn when he set his fire. And if what burned, if that is what is really gone now. In the picture, he is a white glare, his face there the shape of a fist, his hair a gold outline. His blue eyes alight with what looks like real cheer. That is what burned, I tell myself. Not the thing he hated. Because that is with me.

At Peter's funeral service, his mother approaches me. Fee, she says. Come by after for the wake. We'll drive you home if your mom can drop you off. It'll just be some family, mostly, but you were a good friend to Peter. We'd like to see you.

During the service I had stared at the dark brown mound, pale flowers in a pile where the head should be, some six feet below. No one said, I wish he was still here. No one seemed to rage that he was gone. For all that we were surprised, I saw, as I looked around at the mourners, we also accepted it. Boys and girls from the private school he attended filed past me in twos and threes. This whole time Peter's mother hadn't asked to see the letter I had received from Peter. I'd not offered to show it. And until then, it didn't occur to me, that it might belong, in a way, to her. But then she breathed, hugged me to her and moved on.

I stayed until everyone was gone. I think I was waiting to cry. I think I was waiting to fall apart, and to find him standing there at the center of the pieces of me, alive again.

In his room after the ceremony the sunlight, the last of the day, makes a bright patch on the carpet and I watch it as it moves, slowly, across the floor, which I later realize means I have been there for over an hour. I throw myself onto his bed, briefly, to smell cigarette ash and tobacco, old beer, the salty carnation smell of him underneath that.

I pass by his father downstairs, who nods at me, saying nothing. He shakes the ice in his glass gently, as if he is thinking about pouring the Scotch on the floor. His mother moves about the kitchen as she always did, except she is dressed in widows black. I go out the door to find his blue-haired sister, Elizabeth, outside. She had braided her mohawk for the ceremony, tucked it under a hat, and the whole effect had been, actually, quite elegant. It's the end of the summer, and the heat is just bearable. She smokes, her right arm holding the cigarette with the support of her left, crossed under her, holding herself.

Do you want one, she asks, and holds out a pack of Marlboros. Peter's brand. And then I notice his handwriting on the pack. POH.

She sees me read it. He always did that, she says. You never saw it before? He always did it so I wouldn't take his cigarettes. I always did, though.

I take one, light it. There's a half carton upstairs, she adds. Go take some before you leave.

Peter's dog slips through the hedge, back from a hunt at the yard's edge. Odd, she says, exhaling as she spoke. To buy a carton before your suicide.

For a few weeks after, I keep seeing her around town. Elizabeth everywhere, it seems. She smiles, nods, chewing gum and smoking or talking and smoking, seven safety pins now in her left ear and her boot buckles rattling every time she steps forward. I think, when I see her, about his initials tucked somewhere in her clothes. From the attention I give her I know she thinks I'm strange, but I also know I'm on her list of boys people think are gay, because we don't go skinhead. Peter told me about the list, because she had showed him. In order to show him our names together on the list. I see her with a new boyfriend. I see her smoke Marlboros, and then not, and then I know, when I see the white filter in her fingers instead of the yellow, the carton is gone. I think of the initialed packs, tossed out in different cans wherever she was, a Dumpster here, a riverbank there. Of how I wanted to follow her, and pick up every one.

2

HERE WE GO
a car-oling among the leaves so green, Here we . . .

Christmas Eve. On the street where I live, we carol to our neighbors regularly every year. At the end, one family has everyone inside for eggnog. This year is suddenly cold, where before it had been mild, and snow upon snow arrives on the days before Christmas. Cape Elizabeth is going from being one kind of town to another, everyone says. And when they say it they mean there is nothing good to this, and they say it always to the new arrivals, who accept this as a kind of hazing, even as they assume it doesn't mean them. Here in the Masrichs' house, on a kidney-shaped downturn off our street, Brentwood, these pronouncements are meaningless at the party. We are all new on this street. All our houses are not quite ten years old. During the caroling I had finally put together what another child from down the road had said, about how he could find the bathroom in my house even if he had never been there, because it was just the same as his. There were, I could see now, four or five different plans, used in rotation, so that no matches were visible each to the other. At the Masrichs', also a Frontier Colonial, like ours, I sat on the stairs to the side as adults trooped up and down past me, glow-bright cups of eggnog in their hands. Let me give you the tour, Mrs. Masrich said to each newcomer to the house, and so they would go, up and down and around. This is the sewing room, and the bathroom is over here, I hear from the upstairs hall. You can put your coats there.

I have grown two inches in the last year. I have big legs. I look at them a fair amount, amazed at them. My thighs are as big as heads. I think of when I was on vacation last summer with my Grandfather Zhe, to the man who wanted to massage them for me. I'm a soccer coach back home, you know, he said. You look like a nice husky boy. The hotel where we were staying had a faux-desert landscape, around the pool area, and so we were hidden by a peach-brown dune of cement from the view of my dozing grandfather and siblings. I told him, I don't think so. But thanks. He told me his room number, just in case I felt “sore.” Later that night, in my hotel room, I thought of how I could kill him.

My mother appears in front of me at the bottom of the stairs. She has dressed in a foam-green crew-neck sweater under a loden coat she wears on her shoulders, her blond hair arranged there, pulled back with one barrette to her nape, making her look much younger than most of the other mothers. Why are you here on the stairs, she asks. She settles a hand on my leg.

She asks me something I don't hear over my own thoughts. I'm sorry, Mom? I ask.

You were looking right at me, I'd swear, she says, and she grabs my ear, bending it a little toward her. I said, Are you feeling well?

Sure, I say. All this Christmas stuff just depresses me. I really only like the music.

You're not very convincing. You're so angry these days.

I'm not. I'm not angry. I stand up and walk down the stairs to the foyer. See, I say, heading to the main room. See how happy I am?

There's no call for sarcasm. She crosses an arm over her stomach and props up her elbow, her drink resting up near her face.

Hey Nora, come in here. Aphias, come here. My dad comes from around the corner. His face flushed, he takes my mom by the hand. C'mon.

On the television was some footage from the Spirit of Christmas Concert, taken from two years before. The chorus had sung with an adult choir, the Portland Symphony, and a few guest stars from the Biddeford Opera production of
Carmen
. My father had seen my face on the screen and looked for it again. You were right there, he said, indicating the corner of the screen in which my face had appeared. Right there.

3

ENDLESS JANUARY INTO
endless February. Sunny days hit the snow and make me hate light, cold that snaps my nose numb and then burns me once I'm inside. I spend the days reading.

I had been doing an English paper on the pantoum, a literary form, originally Sri Lankan, that came to Italy in pages wrapped in silks. The same silks that perhaps had arrived with the infected fleas of the Plague. I think of the elegant horses, stung as they ride, carrying the death of nations.

I take a break from studying and find my grandfather reading through the paper in the gray winter light shading the kitchen. It's the afternoon, just before dinner. He favors our kitchen as a place to hide from my grandmother. She favors her kitchen as a place to hide from him. Anyung haseo, I say, sitting down. I've been practicing some Korean, because it makes my grandparents smile.

He chuckles, almost to tears. Pretty good, round-eyes, he says. He learned a lot of his English from G.I.s, and says things like this, or, I take leak. But he's salty in his own right. He didn't learn English from them by accident. He sets the paper down. Hows my smart grandson?

Good, I say. And I pick up the paper to look at the classifieds, because I've decided I want to work a job and have some extra money. And so I see this:

Wanted: student researcher, for book project. Please be energetic, bright, a fast learner, and extremely quiet, with an interest in history, in particular the 14th century in Europe. Please call Edward Speck, at . . .

When I call the number listed, the man I speak to is good-natured and reserved, and tells me to come by to see him. He gives me an address in South Portland, nearby, in a part I don't ever go to, though not for any particular reason I can think of, and the next afternoon I drive over and find myself ringing the doorbell of a large brownstone house that looks out of place, surrounded as it is by new houses. As if this house had been here for a very long time, alone, and suddenly been joined by neighbors just beyond the boxwood shoulders of its lawns.

Edward Speck is a tiny man. His white hair drifts above a cheerful face. He lets me into the house on this afternoon looking like he's decided, seeing me through the door, to hire me. He tells a brief history of himself (study at Oxford, Ph.D. from Columbia) and that he lives here because it was his grandmother's house and he had always wanted it. The furniture was all hers and is original. He asks me no questions. I've added nothing, he says.