Edinburgh (16 page)

I send myself shooting out into that gathering 5
A.M.
light. And not crying the whole time. Everything is already moving so very fast, but you need a great deal more speed than this to escape the earth's gravitational pull. Seven miles per second. More fuel, please.

The white fire meets the black hammer. Come apart. I fall down but by the time I fall down, I am already not there. Immeasurable dark, I float into it, I feel my body tumble far from me. No note. Richard will understand.

20

RICHARD CALLED AN
ambulance. When he came back to the room, the curtains were on fire, but he put those out quickly. It turns out he's good in emergencies. He didn't know until now. No one knows how the fire started. It's assumed I was smoking a cigarette but I do not remember having the cigarette. We were out. It was the reason he went downstairs.

Before I open my eyes I know I am back. I fully expect to be burned but of course in the mirror opposite my hospital bed I just look bad, like someone beat me up. I'll find out later that Richard did indeed slap me quite a bit when first finding me. Someone did beat me up. But he did CPR. High as a kite on freebase. The bruises will stay for months.

Coe is beside me. In the chair next to my bed, he sits reading and looks up. The sunlight behind him scrapes my eyes.

You're trying to kill me, he says.

That's absolutely what I was up to, I say. My voice sounds oddly alive. And I see now that I've been strapped to the bed with restraints. Huh, I say.

Well, I mean. I mean clearly you were trying to kill yourself, he says. And he takes my hand in his. I told them I thought you were trying to kill yourself.

I nod, this being an ancient form of agreement, and we sit there with this for some time.

Richard, of course, never forgives me, but it hardly matters. Coe graduates with me. I leave to go home for the summer, to San Francisco afterward. He heads off for Bangkok, a job working for Citibank.

Richard deserves his own place in my heart, a shrine where a fire burns and blossoms are tossed into it for fragrance. Apple wood would burn there. But he is too late, for now. A famine has left the people weak and they pray to a god who will not answer them. They lay boys at the altar, a sacrifice.

I wanted to tell him, you see, I am lost in someone else. You are too. We kept company in each other's reminiscences for the nights we spent together. There's nothing more for this.

21

I MEET THE
David brothers when I go as my mother's date to a fund-raiser for the Gulf-of-Maine Aquarium. The party is on a yacht tied to a slip on Central Wharf, in Portland, the parking lot shining, full of Mercedes and Saabs and new Volvos. I see the brothers right away when I come in, the two of them so beautiful side by side, shining like the cars outside, in this crowd. If you waved a wand and turned them into dogs they'd be golden Labradors. They are more beautiful together and safer, I decide, because then you can take turns looking at them. My mom knows their mom, and soon we are shaking hands, Hello, My son Fee, this is Kathy, her sons Matthew and Lebow. Around us cocktails float by on trays and people offer hot tiny foods, spiked by colored picks, and I am looking at these two, with their dark straight hair and dark eyes. We raise our eyebrows as our eyes sweep together toward the same corner and we shrug upstairs, without a word, all agreement, where we get Heinekens and pull out cigarettes. Matt lights mine, bowing his head, courtly.

We're having a party on the Fourth, says Matt. You've got to come.

You do, says Lebow. There's a half pound of shrooms at home, and we don't know anyone. Our folks just moved to the Cape and there's only so many trips we can take on this bag.

Matt is the younger, my age, Lebow three years older, just graduated, from Grinnell, where Matt still schools. Lebow is starting to look like a real man, thicker, where Matt is still thin like a boy, his lips dark like rose hips. A sharp scar, pale pink, a puckered line, runs just under the cheekbone, an inch long. We talk most of the night, the three of us, and when Matt announces the impending arrival of the mothers, we toss, all at once, our cigarettes into the sand bucket, ready to leave as they emerge from the stairs. I am somewhat thrown by the ease with which we all silently move in agreement about how to greet our moms. I am unused to this sort of brotherliness, but I like it.

I'm so glad you boys got a chance to meet, Matt's mom says.

When I get to their house a few days later, in the sunny part of the afternoon, we pick up where we left off, sitting around drinking beers on their deck while Lebow makes the shroom punch, grinding the fungi in a blender with ginger ale and sherbet. Slowly, girls arrive, it would seem, almost exclusively, a four-to-one ratio, and Lebow and Matt grin, waving, the girls coming in with the familiarity of visiting family, picking up beers from an ice-filled garbage can, shaking them gently to lose the wet, jumping back at the foam spray. The David house is a big stone house on the ocean, on a spit of land far from the road, protected by birch-pine forest, with a separate pool house, where an indoor pool, glass-enclosed, occupies a stand of trees. Within a few hours it is completely occupied by ponytailed girls glossy from lavender lip shine, buff manicures, bathing-suit tans, and shaved legs. The boys seem invisible, the opposite of the way it is with birds, the male of the species here more inclined to vanish into the background while the girls flick hair back from their shoulders and smoke skinny white cigarettes that they stub out before moving on in a kind of rotation.

There isn't anyone who doesn't take some of the punch, and Matt and I throw down a fast two Dixie cups' worth, the strange chalky hallucinogenic fungus going down smooth. Grinnell College recipe, Lebow says, as we three toast in the kitchen. Who are these people, Lebow asks, and we laugh.

In a half hour, it won't matter, Matt says.

A half hour later finds Matt and me on the lawn, watching girls play Frisbee as the sun starts to go down. A stereo system has been set outside and music plays as the shiny girls toss shiny discs. God, they're beautiful, it's so beautiful here, Matt says, and the girls do seem like goddesses, like everything there is here is only to gild them a little more. Matt wrestles off his shirt and lies down on it, to reveal that he is shiny also, shiny brown with nipples as big as eyes and a smooth belly puckered by an outie belly button. I restrain myself from bending over to put my mouth on it, but it looks like the place you would begin inflating him by, if he were a gas-filled balloon.

Instead I take my shirt off also, and Matt says, God, you're built, and he says, Feel this, and he curls his biceps, hiking himself up so I can reach, because for some reason I can't move, and I touch the muscle, like a fist under his skin, and as my hand drops away I can feel how his nipple gives off heat like a lamp. The shiny girls watch, toss their Frisbee some more, and one of them yells, Arm wrestle, and it does seem like a command from the goddesses, so we face off, lying down, hands curled together, and as we struggle, I start to feel like we're both vanishing, and the girls sit around us, watching, and we're vanishing because the ground is swallowing us. We're evenly matched, but also, I don't particularly want to win, I never have, and so when Lebow walks over and grabs our hands and presses mine down over Matt's, Matt rolls with him, bringing him down on top of us so that we make a pile, and I am wedged against Matt's shoulder as Lebow grabs his brother's head and forces a big wet kiss on his lips that smacks like gum snapping. He jumps up laughing as Matt tosses me off him to wipe his mouth and spit. All of us pause, me and the shiny girls, as Matt barks to his brother, Shithead, and Lebow just keeps laughing, shrill and repetitive. Gratified, the goddesses return inside, looking after another beer, leaving their cigarette-filled empties on the counters of the kitchen.

By now I can tell this is the identifiable trip, the thing, and I stand in amazement, looking at it all: the whirling world of blue sky and sunshine and pretty white girls with expensive cars, the whirling from the heat I can feel where the parts of me that were pressed to Matt feel irradiated, like they should glow bright enough for me to read by, the way I can hear each tree breathe. Trees breathe, I say to Matt, an amount of time later that I am unable to quantify, except by knowing it is still not yet sundown, and he says, It all breathes. Feel the world take a breath all at once. And we go quiet together.

We head down to the pool house where the beer-drinking Frisbee goddesses have not yet arrived, and Matt flicks on underwater dome lights that spread a green-gold glow from below, and he strips out of his shorts, naked quickly. C'mon, he says, and I do, in awe, of him transformed into a baby Neptune. He fumbles open a jar and dips his hand in, and spreads a thick paint stripe across the forearm that glows blue as it starts to dry, and he hands me another paint jar. I open it and test it on my stomach, to see orange come up. I look up and see Matt has painted bars on his face, and he smiles as he runs his fingers flat down my face, painting it. His hand pauses under my chin, and he pulls me in by it, for a phosphorescent, dry-lipped, teeth-knocking kiss.

He laughs and dives in. The glow from underneath scatters light and dark across him, the blue glows darker, his white smile like an elbow of lightning. In the water he looks like a storm I once saw from above, inside a plane, and that's about how far up I feel when he soaks me with a splash. Stop looking and start swimming, he says.

I dive in, and when I surface, I see the beer goddesses by the side of the pool, removing, slowly, their clothes, their white breasts flash like whale bellies, and behind them the sky finally goes dark. They find the paints and start decorating each other. Music starts and I realize it isn't in my head but that there are speakers, in the walls of the pool house, and then there's Lebow, who drops his shorts, and starts laughing as the goddesses paint him, one taking his chest, the other his face. I hear the water on the deck behind them for a moment just before Matt knocks them all in the water, and kicks their clothes in behind them. Soon the pool is littered with bikini tops and cutoffs, and the laughing beer goddesses jump into the glowing pool, screaming and laughing, grabbing for their clothes, and Lebow swears at his brother, but the two goddesses with him restrain him, they aren't interested in what he wants from his brother. I pluck my shorts and Matt's from the water's surface, and head off in search of a towel.

I find Matt on the lawn, naked, glowing blue in streaks as if lit from some secret blue sun, holding a cup for me and for him. Cheers, he says, and we drink. The sky looks full of comets and the crescent moon is a little pink on the tip, like it cut someone before rising. We watch as the goddesses play in the glowing pool with his brother, and Matt asks me, Are you getting cold, I have some clothes in the house, and so we walk the lawn, the earth rolling under our feet as we go, and in his room he says, Here, hands me cold cream, and he says, It's the only way to get this shit off, and he takes a shirt and starts removing the orange paint from me, and I lie back as he does this, until he is kneeling in front of me, humming my dick into his mouth, and I am not glowing anymore, just greasy, in the dark.

And now the fireworks go off, banging the dark open, fire tossed everywhere, and somewhere probably one of the invisible boys the beer goddesses brought finds the stereo, and whoever it is puts on New Order, and the singer sings How Does It Feel, To Treat Me Like You Do, and Matt glows blue as he swallows me from the foot of the bed, and when I look out the window, Peter is there, hanging inside a star, singing along to the New Order song, his thumb on fire again but now a roman candle, and he tells me, Love is the regrowth of the wings of the soul. And the song lyrics are now spelling themselves out in the sky in blue letters, and on Matt in the dark swallowing me, the heat from him melting me into the sheets, and I ask Peter though I know I'm not speaking, to take pity on me, to take me with him, and he says, You can't come, you're not ready yet, and I say what, and then he recites Plato to me, he says, “He receives through his eyes the emanation of beauty, by which the soul's plumage is fostered, and grows hot, and this heat is accompanied by a softening of the passages from which the feathers grow, passages which have long been parched and closed up . . .”

And then Matt is spread out on me, and the blue is running off him onto me, he shows me into a kiss like a treasure vault hidden from all of heavens searches, and I hear a dog crying somewhere and turn to see out the sky Peter, now waving, he's saying, You're free now, you are, and he grows wings of corkscrew stars, he has a fire around him, he rises. He lights the sky. And Matt appears before me now, he says, Fucking God, and he says, don't cry, and then we disappear, all three, into the deepening blue.

 

1

A VOICE LIKE
a summer's day, my grandfather says to me.

I am twelve, singing out in the yard. York Beach, Maine. My grandfather and grandmother have taken custody of me and are preparing to send me off to a boarding school upstate. Someplace experimental, my grandmother says, knowing of my fondness for science. Small. You'll like it.

My mother and father are in prison, serving terms. That's all I get to know about it. I've never known them to miss them, that I know of; they were arrested and tried and sentenced well before I was old enough to remember anything. I occasionally find myself missing something, but hard-pressed, I can't say for sure that it is mother, father, family. My foster mother, who had me for four years, was good to me, but also quite plain about my status. My borrowed sugar, she would say to me. Found you in a cup.