Edinburgh (27 page)

Hi, he says, when you look up. He'd had his hair cut so it shot up at odd angles across his head, mussed and held there by gel. His shirt reads
BETHUNE SWIMMING
. Brand-new jeans across his tiny hips, covering his long legs. Speedo slides on his long feet. He is tan, and beautiful with a tan in the way you can only be if you are blond and seventeen and it is summer in Maine. A way you remember, from growing up.

Let no man put asunder. No mention of a boy. Put your hand here, you tell him, and nod at the corner of the tablecloth you are trying to box-fold around the folding table. I don't feel this, you tell yourself. This isn't me feeling this.

10

DESTROYING THE LINE
.

In the legend of Narcissus, it wasn't that he was in love with his reflection, entirely. His reflection, as his love object, had the ability to move him. Who of us can move ourselves? His love is a legend for it.

Peter is there just past the red of my closed eyelid. Peter at the center of the light that spreads the red, hidden in the center of the flame. Burning hides what it burns there. The letter like a torch. Peter was never mine, I see now, because I was his. I belonged to him as certainly as the dog that always sought out the palm of his hand.

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 outsized, 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 Wardens 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 days 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.

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 sunporch, 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.