Edinburgh Page 7

  It’s one way to make sure she can’t go back, he says, and he laughs. I fucking hate those pricks, he says, and finally leans into me, and I do not move for the rest of the ride.

  I get home late. My mother waits, a single light in the kitchen, reading a book she puts down the moment I walk through the door.

  Is it rebellion, my mother asks, my hand between her hands as she rubs off the polish with a cloth, the acetone on it making me dizzy. I sit on the shut toilet seat. I want to scratch my neck.

  Just tell me you aren’t sniffing it, she says, and I say, Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.

  Oh great. Honey, listen. Please remember that people at school are worried about you and that this reflects on me. It’ll be hard for you to be friendly with the boys on the swim team if you do stuff like this.

  Good, I say. They’re ridiculous and I hate them.

  She lets my hands go and pats my hair. That word. Will this shampoo out, she asks.

  I don’t know, I say, hoping that it doesn’t.

  A regular little iconoclast, aren’t you. I guess I’ll stop while I’m ahead. Is this blood? She looks me over, as if I were someone else’s child, and I try to stay calm. Don’t say I didn’t try, she says.

  I don’t want her to wash the blood off. It’s not like I got a mohawk, I say.

  The next day, when Peter and I walk into rehearsal together, identical hair, identical Goodwill clothes, Big Eric asks, Are you cadets or sopranos?

  Soprano cadets, I say.

  We’ll learn Britten’s War Requiem someday then, he says. We’ll all get crew cuts. He taps the music stand. Tck tck tck. His promise to remove me, if I showed bizarre behavior, broken.

  20

  DID YOU SEE his arms, Zach asks me.

  We are in his beige room, naked. The afternoon on Sunday. His parents are out, his brothers are out, and in an odd way, it feels as if this is our house. I get up to get a glass of water, and look at myself naked, with my short hair. I have a premonition then, of my future. That this is the start of what it looks like. I go back, and settle next to Zach. He has been asking me questions about Peter.

  I didn’t, I say. What did they look like?

  Like cigarette burns. Round, red scabs, blistered. James Dean used to do it, apparently.

  I think of James Dean. Peter has the same look, at certain angles. The raised eyebrows, the beautiful eyes, the way the whole face seems to lean forward to get your confidence, and, having it, whispers something just for you. I say, He’s going to pierce his ear.

  Big deal. Does he burn himself? Zach rubs my head. I like it, he said the first day. Soft.

  I haven’t seen anything of it. But I’ll look for it, I say. And I have a memory of pale arms in the dark, hands burning.

  I look down to see my hand on Zach’s penis, the silver nail. Soon we will get dressed, leave, we will speak as if none of this is happening. I’ll find out, I say, and unspoken in the air is, to tell you next time.

  Zach turns over my forearm. Plain skin, he says.

  21

  FREDDY MORAN’S HOUSE takes up most of the plot it sits on, a narrow stripe of yard barely surrounds it. He lives in Cape Elizabeth not far from me, in one of the town’s newer houses, on Old Ocean House Road. This house is newly made, the carpeting new, and Freddy has an enormous upstairs room, a sunroof he can climb through to the roof deck, furnished by his telescope, on a steel tripod mounted by bolts into the wood.

  Some days I feel like a perfectly normal boy, and this is one of those. Freddy and I eat pizza his mom made and watch television. We wait for the sky to be dark enough to see stars.

  Do you like the X-Men, Freddy asks, during another commercial break.

  I do, I say. Who’s your favorite character?

  Charles Xavier, he says. I like that he can go into peoples minds and see what they’re thinking.

  Phoenix is mine, I say. She can blow a hole through the world if she’s not careful.

  Christmas is near and Mrs. Moran comes into the room suddenly with a box that turns out to be full of decorations: pine boughs, modeled birds with real feathers and wire feet to twine around branches, twinkling lights. She begins to put the string lights up around the edge of the ceiling. Hi boys, she asks. How’s everything?

  Good, I say.

  Are you excited to get away at the end of January, she asks.

  I am, I say. I really am.

  I thought your solo was wonderful, Fee. You have a remarkable voice.

  I think of my mom, hear her say, accept all compliments with thank yous. Thank you, I say.

  She taps tacks into place with a tiny ball-peen hammer. Freddy tells us he’s getting a solo soon, for the Benjamin Britten concert in April, at Easter. We’re looking forward to him singing for us.

  The television chatters away, merciless. I hadn’t heard that Freddy was getting this, but it makes sense. I want to say, Take your son out of harm’s way. I want to say, Run, go on, get out of here. I want it to be like in the movies, where the dangers are ridiculous disasters no one faces regularly, like nurses who deliberately shoot air into your veins, or villains from Russia who want to fake international incidents. If a robber were to knock at the door, I would know how to respond.

  We go upstairs to look at stars. There’s worlds above this one, a night sky full of separate infernos so far away they look to us like they are only tiny lights, and easily extinguished. Freddy and I try to make out the rings of Saturn and Jupiter, but the sky, clear as it looks, won’t allow it.

  February.

  I remember that this night is very dark. I remember the tour as long dark nights and short days, and starchy, sleepy food. I remember families looking at us, trying to decide what we are.

  The motel we have in Bar Harbor is dark, every window shut against a cold night. Beside me, Peter smokes, the only light besides the security light comes from the tip of his cigarette, getting brighter and darker. We sit together in the oily parking lot, on a snowbank. Peter’s crying and I’m pretending not to notice, even though it is the single reason I’m keeping him company.

  I’m not, he says. Fuck him. I’m not.

  The school concerts had finished to uniform applause, everyone clapping thirty times, more or less. I’d started to count, to know the time it takes for your hands to get sick of each other. The church concerts were bizarre, little pale white-haired men and women emerging slowly from the pews to escort each other home, as if we were visiting a country where only the elderly prayed. We arrived in Bar Harbor, and went to the spitting rock, where the tide shoots up through a throat-shaped tunnel from an entrance just below the water, to blow a spume, accompanied by a basso whump, like a merman clearing his throat. Other such attractions followed, ending in a fish-and-chips dinner eaten in an early, unwelcome dark. After unpacking and watching television for an indeterminate period of time, Peter came to our door, knocking, and drew me out. Zach’s eyes as I left indicated he didn’t want to wait up long for me. The whole trip long, Adam and Merle fell asleep quickly and deeply, snoring loudly together and not waking each other, and so we had been having what felt to me like a busman’s honeymoon. For two busmen.

  I’ll be right back, I’d said to Zach. That had been some hours ago.

  Now we sit in the parking lot surrounded by what seems a slow nighttime convulsion of darkened houses and bright streets and air that tastes like cold metal between breaths of a cigarette. I’ll tell this time, Peter says to me. Fucking unbelievable.

  Was anyone else there, I ask, as if it makes all the difference. As if there are details that will order what is currently resisting order. Peter came back to the room, and Big Eric had emerged from the bathroom with his fly open, partly aroused. Nothing had happened like that since the tour began, and we had all begun to pretend again that nothing happened ever, of that sort. It comes to me that there was a time when we could have said something, but I can’t think of what that time was. As if I have been sleepwalking all these years, singing through
a dream, waking only occasionally. And this time out here will end and the dream pick up again.

  Our breath looks like smoke. As Peter twists his cigarette, looking at it, I think of what Zach told me about cigarette burns. I turn, meet his eyes. He sees what is there a moment too late, as I lunge, knocking him into the snowbank. His cigarette bounces to wink a few feet away, and he makes a crying groan underneath me. What the fuck, he says, sobbing. What.

  With my teeth, so I don’t let go of his wrists, I pull back the sleeve of his sweater, to see his wrists, crisscrossed with pale red lines, some purple, raised circles. Almost a tic-tac-toe. Knife sketches.

  What are those, I ask.

  What do they look like, faggot, he says. Just leave me alone. Fuck off me. Get the fuck off me. He pushes, unable to move against me, and then he manages, rolling us over so that he pops up and off. Dick, he says, kicking snow across the top of me. Dick. The snow on my face begins to melt.

  Peter, I say. I love you. I sit up, to see his face, dark and wet.

  What. Is. This. He yells each word. What. Shut. Up.

  A light comes on in a room next to the lot. I jump up and run, hear Peter following me. As I head for the corner, and begin climbing the far snowbank there, I hear Peter’s feet dig into the crunchy snow, and it is like he is climbing my heart. In the lot on the other side of the snowbank, I head for a space between two parked cars and we sit, each facing over the other’s shoulder, assuming the automatic position that allows us to look out, each way. We are panting, and Peter pulls his pack of cigarettes out, and as he holds it up to light it, he notices that the filters were smashed off when I rolled him over. You fuck, he says, holding the pack up for me to inspect. He flicks the filter off and lights the cigarette, spitting out tobacco shreds as he exhales.

  I wanted to kill you, he says, chuckling.

  Peter, I say.

  Shut up. Just . . . you’re my fucking best friend, okay? But be a friend. Just, uh . . .

  Okay, I say, and reach for his cigarette.

  We do not finish the tour.

  According to the police report filed by Freddy Moran and his parents, Freddy returned to his room after watching television in my room with Zach and Adam and Merle, at around 9 P.M. on the night of January 27. He walked in to find Big Eric lying in bed, naked and erect and fondling himself. He appeared to be alone. Big Eric began talking to him in a casual manner, as if nothing was different, and asked if he had seen Peter. Freddy could only reply that he had been in my room, and that Peter and I had left together and not returned. At which point Big Eric, referred to in the report as Mr. Gorendt, became agitated.

  Dungeons & Dragons, eh? Is that it? he apparently asked.

  Freddy reported that there had been, to his knowledge, no game planned for tonight, as tomorrow was to be an early day. At which point, Freddy asked after the whereabouts of Little Eric, in the report known as Eric Johannsen. He had advanced into the room only a little.

  He’s right here, Mr. Gorendt replied, and pointed to the floor by his bed. Freddy Moran approached to confirm this, to see what appeared to be either an asleep or unconscious Eric Johannsen, he couldn’t be sure. Eric Johannsen was later confirmed to have been asleep, as the result of a sleeping pill dosed to him by Mr. Gorendt so that he would not interfere with the seduction of either Peter or Freddy.

  Eric Johannsen was naked. Freddy waited to see a rise in his chest, to confirm that he was still alive, and then he looked at Mr. Gorendt, sitting calmly, now pulling a sheet over himself, as if he were cold. He’s sound asleep, Mr. Gorendt said, and dropped a towel over him. Freddy Moran drew back.

  I know that if Big Eric had been photographed in that hour he wouldn’t have recognized himself at all. Freddy pretended to be looking for something, and then at the door, he bolted, running, full speed. He knew Big Eric wouldn’t chase him naked. He pounded on the door for Zach to let him in, who did, and he called his mother. I’m okay, he said. I’m not injured or in pain, just scared. At this point, Big Eric was pounding the door, now locked against him, bellowing various threats. Freddy’s mother called the police, who were there in minutes, already having been called by the owners of the hotel, frightened into thinking Big Eric was a stranger. They didn’t, they said, recognize him as being the kind man who had checked in.

  The police found Peter and I in the parking lot, where we had fallen asleep, beside each other, between the cars. They had feared on first seeing us that we were dead. Like Freddy thought of Little Eric.

  22

  I HAD ALWAYS wondered exactly how many, had tried to figure it out, but the twelve counts surprised me. Me and almost every friend I had in the choir, except for Merle and Eric B. Adam had been a surprise. He had brown hair, was stocky, was not his type as I had come to know it. He resembled me. Until recently twelve boys represented half the choir. I saw us then in a dim procession, Big Eric was Saturn, he had swallowed us, out of fear and gluttony, and now we marched out of him as out of a cave, and overhead, a now-happy Ralph, winged not like angels but with the tiny brown wings of a sparrow or a phoebe. He would perch, hold the walls tight, as if he didn’t trust his wings to hold him up. When nothing else had.

  23

  IT’S NOT YOUR fault, my dad tells me.

  I can tell, he doesn’t understand. He can’t understand. How it really is all my fault. We are out in back of the house. I can see my grandmother, slicing at her cutting board. I can’t see what she’s cutting, but I can tell she’s cooking something for me. When the first news of the scandal came out in the papers, and Mom and Dad told her, she stayed quiet. She sighed, and it sounded like a sigh that had been learned under a different sorrow. Her face had deepened for a moment then, in a way I had never seen but would see again, many times.

  It is my fault, I say.

  He draws a deep breath. We love you, Aphias. And we feel terrible, that all of this happened and we weren’t able to protect you. He kneels as he says this, and now our eyes are even.

  His eyes dark like the color the Atlantic takes, when there’s no land in sight.

  I say it again. It is my fault. It really is all my fault. My face is running wet now. It is all my fault.

  And here my grandmother comes running across the lawn. I have never seen her run. She is crying also. And she pulls me into her skirt. Aphias, she says. Aphias. Come in and see what Granmi has made for you. Come in and see.

  Peter and I, next to the sea. On a beach in Falmouth, a sand spit. The far water ripples like smoke. It’s over, he says. He’s in jail.

  He’s in prison, I say.

  Peter had to change schools when the kids found out. He goes to Waynefleet Academy now, a private school in Portland. He helps pay for it by bar backing at his father’s bar. His angel-face now a study in waiting. A man coming on in him, too, there’s added sturdiness now, every month a soft edge loses to a harder one. What do you do, when the criminal goes away? Where’s the rest of the story?

  The criminal is still here. Story, here.

  The sheet music told us, what you are trying to do, boys have tried to do for five centuries. They used to castrate the boys with the most beautiful voices. We were afraid to find this out, but also, excited. This seemed, if not reasonable, understandable. To always be able to sing like this. Five hundred years of beauty. When I was a boy and I sang, my voice felt to me like a leak sprung from a small and secret star hidden somewhere in my chest and whatever there was about me that was fragile disappeared when my mouth opened and I let the voice out. We learned, we were prisons for our voices. You could want to try and make sure the door was always open. Be like a bell, Big Eric would say. But he didn’t know. We weren’t something struck to make a tone. We were strike and instrument both. If you can hold the air and shake it to make something, you learn, maybe you can make anything. Maybe you can walk out of here on this thin, thin air.

  Fifteen. I lose my voice. My new voice sounds like a burned string rubbing. Singing is touching, you bang the air and the a
ir 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.

  JANUARY’S CATHEDRAL

  Fee

  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.