Edinburgh (19 page)

I don't give a fuck about the pictures, she says. Are you some kind of moron? I don't mark territory. Where are they, and here she plucks at the desk. Where? My homework spills across the floor.

I leave the room while she isn't watching. I walk to the bathroom, where Tom brushes his teeth. Through a mouth of foam he says, You are a brute, man. Unbelievable. I walk back to the room, where Alyssa sits in the floor's middle on her knees. Paper around her as if she's shed it. I hate you, she says.

I love you, I say.

14

ON THE NIGHT
before I go to Florida, I slip out to visit the silent stone bump we've made. Since finishing it, I've wanted to be alone with it, and after Alyssa's meltdown I want to go somewhere on this campus that doesn't remind me of her.

Open to the four directions, domed, slate benches in rows facing toward a central granite altar, it seems, already, as if it has always been here, since before the school. On the slope of the rise toward the sea, it looks down to the houses of the school, like a large trail marker. There is no electricity for it, no heat, no light, and so in the dark night as I come up to the entrance I do not see that someone is inside. From just outside the door, I feel it, instead, whatever warm air this visitor makes by just standing there reaches me through the stone chill.

I wait. I hear the pitch of the night tide at the beach over the hill, the creaking wood planks of the boat spit. I slide myself to the ground, hide my warmth from the one inside, lean my back into the chapel's serrated wall. I'm pretty sure its him. The one whose idea it was to build this place. Fee. I like to think I can tell him from the heat he gives off.

And then I hear it. A faint sound reaches me, above the ocean: singing. Or rather, humming, the music, but no words.

It makes me want to laugh a little at him. Except even the stones shouldn't be hearing this. The song pricks me like wood sparks off a fire. I wait, quiet, cold, the stone's cold reaching me slowly. And then he leaves, quickly. A sprint, he runs from the same cold that's holding me still.

I watch him go. It's Fee, all right. His car in the far lot spits light across the lot and takes the road in a whirl of white and red. I stand, shake my blood back into my legs, and walk through the chapel with my lighter out, lit. He loves someone, I think, as I enter the chapel, warm from him.

I find a taper, which I light. So this was the warmth. He'd obviously just blown the candle out. I can smell the candle smoke that hangs around me now in the new light. And in the light, the floor shows me where someone has disturbed it, near the base of the altar.

The altar's granite was quarried nearby, in Peterboro, and it is a large dark polished gray. Five-sided, it reflects me as I squat down. There's a picture here, curled up and set in a spot where the stone sides of the floor don't fit perfectly, a rock envelope. It's not obvious at all, as I look at it, but to me it is, as obvious as the weather or the dark outside. Because, as I take it in my hands, I decide, it is for me. I slip it into my pocket. I didn't know why I'd wanted to come out here tonight and now I know, I came for this.

Back in my room, Fiona, my deaf student, has e-mailed me. Re: What's in my head when I read:

I didn't want to say. I mean, is that what hearing's like? I guess it is. I guess I hear. In that, if anyone speaks to me, it's like a transmission, on the optic fiber of my eye, played in my head as if it's a speaker. Speaking frustrates me. Because I know, it's nothing like it should be. I wish only to communicate with other people as gracefully as they communicate with me.

Have fun down in Florida with Tom,

Fiona

15

NOWHERE TO LOOK
at, it seems, when crossing Florida.

The sky looks strained, as if it'll just let go, and the vacuum of space come down, ripping everything off the ground. But the weak sky continues, somehow, a tea-stain white with a peek of blue down near the tops of the trees, as occasionally a crane flies out across the sugarcane fields that stretch endlessly to either side. Chokingly thick smoke, from the burning cane, obscures our view here and there.

Interterm practices ended and we are allowed a five-day break while we taper, in which our bodies store the enormous energy we have been raising daily for practices, and let it out all in a rush, when we compete upon our return. Tom Ludchenko and I have come here for our yearly pilgrimage to his grandparents' place. We knew, they said to us this morning, over breakfast, if we got a place in Disney World, we'd see our family. Tom rolled his blue eyes in his pink face as they laughed at him with their matching blues. Blue, blue, blue, I counted, blowing on my coffee.

In actuality we have come to hate Disney but there is a swim camp near here where Tom knows some girls from another team, the Mount Desert team, who've all come down here to do stroke-work. Alyssa will kill me if she finds out but Tom is the only one who'll tell, and he speaks to her less than I do all the time. And there is a lot she'll kill me for besides all of this.

We pass a sign,
SPIRITUAL READINGS, PAST LIFE REGRESSION, TAROT, HANDWRITING ANALYSIS, ONCALA, WHERE THE SPIRIT MOVES US ALL. WELCOME TO VOLUSIA COUNTY
.

What's that about, I say to Tom.

There's a town nearby called Cassadaga, where there's been mediums for years, he says. But recently it got too large, internal squabbling, et cetera. So some moved here to found a new town on the same theme. He shrugs his huge shoulders. Want to stop?

I do, and say so.

At a rose-covered visitor center a kindly white-haired man asks me a few questions as Tom waits in the car and soon he hands me a brochure. Clairvoyant. Tanya Roux is a Certified Clairvoyant of Oncala's Council of Clairvoyance and Clairaudience . . .

We head over, according to the map, a few blocks away, where Tom waits again in the car while I am seated in a velveted parlor, midnight blue from floor to ceiling, a dazzling crystal ball in the center of a small white table. I set my brand-new credit card down on the table and when Tanya comes in, a strikingly young, dark-haired girl so thin it shocks me, I find myself desperate to get this over with.

I explain myself quickly, and hand over the photograph. The picture is of a boy, dated August 1983, and the boy, so blond his hair is the color of the noontime summer sky. He is yelling something to the photographer, his eyes crossed in a manner both charming and sad. The medium takes the picture and lets go of it immediately.

So hot, she says. She holds her hand a few inches above. This is as close as I can get to it. It's burning.

I leave with her advice in my ears. The boy is gone but the fire is not. Get rid of the picture or the fire will come for you. Tom smiles at me as I climb into the car. Done wasting your money, he asks.

Sure, I say, and put the picture in the copy of
The Wapshot Chronicle
that I had brought with me to read. We drive out, the sunset beginning to make a red mark on the sky's bottom.

The next day at Disney World I find myself watching the children.

Small. Skin like a petal. Hair that won't do what it is supposed to. Eyes like lake water at night. A need to eat but not to stay clean. Holding legs as parents try to walk. I try to imagine what it is my father saw that he would have done what he did. There is nothing about them, that I can tell. I try to see the Eros here, he is often, after all, shown as a baby boy. The child of love and war. But no effect. No Affect. Just Popsicles melting. Smeary faces. Yelling. Punches. In the line for Space Mountain, Tom notices me watching and he says, Biological clock ticking? This is something Mrs. Thoreau says all the time.

Space Mountain. Rushing through the dark at high speed. Someone else is driving. You could die, if they aren't paying attention. This is what childhood is, and we line up for it. In the line, a little boy of eleven stands in front of me. I can see he's already sturdy, he has the hero's triangle of a body, the broadening shoulders, the tiny waist and hips, the sturdy legs. The man in him waits, barely. But isn't anything you could touch. It's not love, I see. It's not like when I want Fee to touch me, when I would take hold of Alyssa by her neck and pull her in for a kiss.

Tom's grandparents take us out for dinner. Lobster, four and five pounds each. To get this large, they have to be thirty years old. We sit foursquare around the table, over huge broken red bodies, pull the meat out and soak it in yellow butter. Around us, children yell for their parents' attention.

16

BY THE TIME
we return from vacation it feels like a month has gone by but it isn't a month, just shy a week. Tom feels the same way. We float in and out of classes, the teachers' voices a syncopation, and we drift down to the quad, where we sit on wet grass and watch the clouds hurtle by like islands cut loose from below. Blue Hill is one of the most beautiful places in the whole world, anyone knows it, Tom tells me. We shouldn't be glum. But we are. Tom misses one of the girls he met on our adventure over at the stroke camp down in Florida, and I have the picture I found in the chapel. Somewhere in Fee is a picture of this. I can't help but wonder who the boy is but I don't know him and so he fades, becomes transparent. And as he does I do, the boy I knew myself to be dissolving.

Did you ever see a bee lying drunk on a rose? Lost in the petal, so close you can't see its tiny burrowing. In this way, I hang as I can. As close as I can.

After practice we go as a team for a carb-loading premeet meal to an Italian restaurant that has an all-you-can-eat buffet, where we pay our six dollars apiece to the elderly cashier and head off to stuff ourselves in the glass-candle twilight of the room. We sit in three booths at the back of the restaurant, eating, talking loud, and Ms. Fields takes an uneasy seat next to me. Hey there, she says.

Hey, I say. Precious Cargo, I say, pointing to her stomach.

You doing okay? she says. She twirls at her spaghetti and drops a ball of it into her mouth.

I, uh, yeah? Yeah. Why?

Go ahead and convince me, she says, chewing. I was just talking but I guess there is something there.

Is it weird, having someone inside you like that, I ask.

She emits a laugh, choking a little as she swallows. Wow. Nice question. Um, well, it is bizarre, but it's beautiful, she says.

Beautiful, I say. Ms. Fields still hasn't told anyone who might tell who the father is. And then Mr. Zhe sits down next to me.

Get enough to eat there, he says. His large head here in the dark restaurant like a lamp inside the dark cave of me.

He starts talking about the chapel's finishing ceremony, the inauguration of it. Easter there'll be a service, he says. The headmaster likes the idea of having an Easter service, brief, of course, because of weather (It might snow, adds Ms. Fields), as Jesus rolled the stone away and this chapel is rolled stones.

Not hungry, Ms. Fields asks me.

I see that I've stopped eating, and so I pick up a fork. Resting, I say, and stab a shiny ziti among the rest in the sauce lake on my plate.

Mr. Zhe puts his hand on my forehead. You're not warm, he says. Maybe a bit clammy. His hands are warm, dry, they have a faint smell of sweet cinnamon. Around us, the other swimmers din the air with their conversations, and suddenly all the sounds flatten. No one sound any louder than any other. A leveling takes place. I hit the floor on my side.

And so it is that the faint, caused by my thinking of the theft of the picture, is the first reason he takes me in his arms. I'll remember it later. At the time, he lifts me to carry me outside, his arms hard like wood. As the air comes back to me, the light, as we go through the doors to the outside, breaks on us like rain. He lays me out on the grass, stays above me, searching my eyes, lifting one lid, then the other. Ms. Fields appears above me, the pillars of her legs looming suddenly, the blue sky above her, heaven's sieve. Is he all right, she asks.

I think so, Mr. Zhe says. Are you all right, he asks.

I close my eyes. Yes, I say. I will be.

In my dorm's phone booth, the door pulled shut, I talk through some fast options with a hot-line operator for “gay, bisexual and questioning youth” I find on a number from a newspaper ad. He's down in Portland, he tells me his name's Kevin, that he's thirty-five, that he wants me to know that the conversation is confidential.

Do you know how he feels about you?

I don't, I say. I mean, I have no reason to think he feels anything. I'm just his student.

You mentioned you know he's gay; is he out at the school?

No, I say. I, uh, I went over to his house. Saw him with his boyfriend.

A little Harriet the Spy, are we, he says, chuckling. Sorry. I mean Encyclopedia Brown.

No, I say. It's fine.

Do you fantasize about other men, he asks.

No, I say. I don't. I don't fantasize.

Hmm. Well, how about this. What do you imagine, happening, when you think of him.

And here, for some reason, I think of my father. Your pause, he says, is a little damning.

I, uh, was distracted for a moment. I don't know. That's why I called. I don't know what this is, I say. I twirl the phone cord, and the phone numbers, written in ballpoint and pencil on the wall, start to look like a map to some country, topographic: here, the mountains. There, a river. A notice, above the phone, reads
PLEASE LIMIT CALLS TO 20 MIN
. I look at my watch. I've got thirteen minutes.

How about this, the operator says, all business. How about, if you imagine him getting fired and you getting suspended or expelled. Because you are not yet eighteen and he is your teacher and no one, no one, thinks of this as the happy ending for the story you're telling me. Not even you, right?