Authors: Alexander Chee
I admire in particular, in the mudroom, a bench attached to a mirror and hung down the sides with bronze fixtures resembling moose antlers.
I'm only here, he says, for the cold months. We sit in the parlor, on matching giant leather club chairs. His has an enormous hassock in front of it. A Persian rug, the color of several wines, muffles us.
Why's that, I ask.
Because cold air concentrates oxygen powerfully. It's wonderful for the brain. And also, no one likes to be here in this time of year, so no one visits me, and I am left alone.
I see. And, I do.
We agree on payment (he decides for more than I'd thought) and he outlines some responsibilities: opening and filing all his mail for him to go through, returning books placed to the right of the desk to his library, returning books placed by the door to either the Portland library or the library of the university (check inside flyleaf). Occasionally, he says, I will ask you to look things up for me, and then photocopy what you find, along with related articles, or to take out the book. You won't have to do any writing or household work, although sometimes I may ask to be driven. I will need you for ten to twelve hours a week.
He stands. Now, for the tour.
The ceilings of the dark house accommodate people much taller than him or I. The library I remember and envy. When I first enter it, I realize I would work without pay to be able to come here. For some genius thought to make a room like this: three stories tall, shelves on all sides, brass ledges to them connected by ladders made of iron. And all the books shelved and stored behind glass doors crisscrossed with iron. Windows edge only at the top, so that light glows into the room instead of falling, and then the ceiling with a fresco of a dark city, a mountain in the center of it.
What is that city, I ask.
Edinburgh, he replies.
The mountain? I say.
Arthur's Seat, he says. A hill.
On my way out, he looks at me and asks, What is your parentage?
I am used to the question. I know the look: people searching my features for matches, finding few that correspond. It is confusing to some people to look at me. Watching me takes longer than most.
Half Korean, I say, and half Scottish-English.
You look like a Russian, he says. A young Cossack, really.
I think of Mongolia. Lady Tammamo. A little Mongolian too, I say.
An ancient race. He pauses, lit from within inside his doorway. Excellent, he says. We'll see you soon. And oh, by the way, call me Speck, please. Everyone does. And with that he closes his giant door.
4
THE LIBRARIANS LAUGH
as I carry my piles of books out of the library. My mother is incredulous as I bring them in from the car.
I don't pretend I understand, my mother says, surveying the piles of books in my room. But if this is what you want.
It's really interesting, I say. It created a great deal of what we know as culture today.
Uh huh, she says. I can't wait until you and your father go over this one.
This is just something I want to do, Ma, I say. And she pulls the door shut, saying, Come down for dinner in an hour. One hour.
I look over the books before closing the door to go downstairs. A job, I understand now, is a purpose. I feel a sense of mission. My hours with Speck leave me feeling protected. I walk through the quiet house attending to my duties. Under his instructions, I am to speak with him when I arrive, after school at four, and when I leave, at six. At no other time, unless, of course, he comes to find me. But these restrictions leave me feeling free inside the silence, which, inside his house, is as thick as the drapes that protect his dark house from the light that would bleach the color from the chairs and yellow all the books. Even in their pristine cases. The relief of nothing to say. I'd always prized silence for being the absence of other noises. In this house I come to see how one can prize silence for being articulate, as well.
5
PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL
seems to me to be a barbarian ritual of four years that leaves me with no ability to mark its beginning or end except through shame and occasional violence, from which I hide in a series of classes for the precollegiate, and the thirty of us who fall into this category come by senior year to seem a race apart from the hundred others in the class. One girl in the year ahead is ridiculed for having her picture taken with her baby, for the yearbook. The father had died. I look at the picture and they seem to me unbearably beautiful. Her hair carefully folded back by a curling iron, his baby hair tied atop his head with a ribbon. She had always been, I recalled, a fiercely silent girl, pretty and small. Now she seems a giant. I see her in the school, nonchalant. Widowed, a mother, a high school senior. Our lives, I decide, watching her, are tiny beside hers.
I watch my grandparents as well. They fascinate me. Their ears seem tuned to some signal not quite in range of hearing. And their quiet, a readiness. My grandfather rises to do Tai Chi in the mornings on the back lawn, facing the sun as it rises. My grandmother meditates, and then cooks for him. When she smiles, her smile has the force of a joy as old as her and as unbroken.
Zach and I continue. What we continue, we don't know. We don't ever talk about what we do, directly. We say, I'll be over. Or, Are you coming over? As if one or the other of us had decided to visit, and hadn't yet informed the other. I don't love him. He doesn't love me. Now we tear at each other more, for wanting not to want this. And afterward, as I look at his white thighs and brown arms, there's real tenderness in knowing, whatever it is we want from each other, it seems always to be the same. No one asks about how we spend our time. His parents, often not home, would have no way of knowing. That I had been there.
In my bed I keep Peter's letter to me. The one that arrived after he was dead. I keep it with a picture I have of him, in its envelope. My mother doesn't move it when she changes my bedding. Ever.
6
SPECK'S OTHER HOME
is in New York City, and he promises to me to take me there sometime. There's nothing like New York, he says. I feel young there. Everything there is much older than me.
On an afternoon when the sun is starting to come and stay longer, and the snow melts enough to show all the dead grass, Speck interrupts both our silences. I am in a pile of his bills, marking the ones to be paid. Subscriptions, utilities. Doctors. Ugh, he says. So, would you like to see this?
I reply with a look.
Come here, he says. Come on. I've been looking it over again, and will probably never allow it out of its case again. Not while I'm alive. He takes me into the library. A letter in two pages, under glass.
They were renovating an old building, and it sort of fell in, in the cellar, he says. They came across the spire of an ancient cathedral, buried shallowly and unfinished. The letter was found in the top of the spire. Here's my translation.
1361. Edinburgh. I do not know the day, since they were abolished. A last letter. To whomever finds it, whenever they have heart enough to dig.
This was to be a cathedral built for Robert II, but now is mine.
I had fallen asleep. A fever had come over me and I had left my house, where I had been a boarder. I was the last one, I think, of those who hadn't left and were not dead. In any case the house was empty and I sought the company of our Lord, even though I was soon to have it.
Our area had been set off, and no one was allowed to enter or to leave. The death rolls for this street of the township had increased so quickly and stayed so high that soon no one was coming in to bury the dead. They were being left, and sometimes a house would burn, to indicate that everyone in that family had passed. Being unable to partake of a regular service at the church, I came here instead. And I had been so unhappy, and so afraid, I tried, here in the unfinished cathedral, to make some peace in myself toward what my fate would be, when this fever ended.
I hadn't expected this.
I do not know how it is they have succeeded, by what art they have buried us. But they have. No light fills the windows. When I look from the door, I see a narrow and dangerous tunnel, the roof timbered. Piles of dirt are there. Refuse. And I am sure the smell is not just from the dead left here, but from those brought over and thrown here. Since we are a street of graves anyway. And so the air is foul and close, and there is now a stink that I suspect to be myself. I am lucky, I think, that the boils on me arrive now, where no one will try to burn them with irons. I am given to remembering now, how a friend had said, of the Black Death, that the leprosariums are now closed. The lepers being dead. Soon, all will be dead.
I am Andrew Hunter. I am a Norman, my family recently given over charge of the forests of Arran. I had come here to study stoneworks. In particular, I had been interested in a Roman bridge, back in Normandy, where my family is from, made of coursed stones, and made so that the water passing could pass through the stones, even as the bridge stood. Many days I spent looking at the bridge, studying the construction. But I am not sore, for surely it is Gods work that I be here. Surely it is Heaven's own intent that I be here, alive, to record what has been done. For no one will write of it otherwise, a record of what happened here. I do not doubt, the new death roll is simply the number of the souls buried here, and the name of the road. I do not doubt.
Mostly I fear the rats, gruesome and huge and black. They fear my candlelight, what I can draw from these tapers left here. Meant for future services, now to be burned only for this. There are, as far as I can tell, no survivors beside myself, at least that can move. Sometimes I think I hear a moan, but it is hard to know if it is the new weight of the earth above us, or someone, still long in dying, in their home. I haven't eaten in a time past remembering, but it matters little to me. I have burned three of these tapers. The fourth burns now, recently begun. And I find myself hoping, even here in this hell, and surely, this must be hell; hoping to live long enough to have burned the thirty tapers all. For even here my life is precious to me, precious remembrance alive in this dark. Though now I fear losing the candle to the dark before I lose myself.
3 Tapers more
I have slept. I have woken. My fever is gone. I have survived the Death but am unlikely, it seems, to survive the cure of the city. Exploring the cathedral, I found the tower. It is spoked by timber supports that wind up in the manner of a stair, and I think I can climb it. It occurs to me that there is a chance I could crawl out the top. Though I would, of course, be carrying on me the Death. As I looked up, through the struts above me, my candle jumped, which told me the air moved. A breeze.
I remember the Italian who came to the city to try and instruct us, on how to avoid the Death. He looked like Death. He wore a robe and a hook-nosed mask, and a hood. This is what we wear to avoid the Death, he told us. We laughed at him. He moved among us in the streets, his eyes hidden in the mask, but I felt, in his passing, the laughter that followed. Not of how strange he looked but of how there was nothing we could do. Looking at him, we knew, this wasn't for Scotland. Robes and masks. We'd all be dead instead. And Italy rule the world.
It was Rome brought us this, I heard one man say, after the Italian went by. Bat I knew it wasn't. Hand him a scythe, somebody, said another, and then there was more laughter. If I were to make my return, I suppose I could dress like that. Protect people from me. Disguise myself from those who know me to be dead.
There's no more to it, Speck says, when he can tell that I'm done reading.
In the kitchen, where his housekeeper has left us a supper, we eat quietly at a Formica table, each looking off into separate corners. And then he looks up from his plate and he says, I'll be leaving soon, in a few weeks more.
New York in the summer, I say.
Yes, he says. Delightful. Everyone bad leaves. All my friends are gone off to colonies and the like, and I can get some work done.
It's the most beautiful thing in the world, I say.
He doesn't pause. Yes, it is, he says. I thought so too.
They buried the whole neighborhood, I say.
Yes, he says. They're giving tours now, sometimes. But it's terribly unsafe. Won't last. Just wait until some visiting mayor is trapped and that will end right quick.
At home, in bed, I imagine the fresco of Edinburgh from Specks ceiling on my own. Trace a tunnel down through. Before going to bed I had looked through a book of my mother's, a guide to Scottish clans. Hunter, it said, had the motto, “I finish the hunt.” It was a dog, sitting on a crown, for the crest.
Disguise myself from those who know me to be dead. I see him crawl the timber supports. See him place the letter. Did he jump down to his death? Or did he indeed leave? Could he? In this way I keep myself awake until the morning. Blue outside my window turns to spreading white, to show me, in greater degrees, the shadow of my grandfather practicing the slow dance of his life. The colors of the morning world.
7
THERE'S A HOLE
in me the size of you, from where you came through.
Edinburgh, after the Plague.
I begin building the tunnels. On a hilltop past the greenhouse where I meet Zach regularly now, to drink, I find a cellar, old-fashioned, dirt for a floor, and nothing remaining above except a few burned timbers. The tall grass hides it from the road, frames the squared-off divot here. A check with Town Hall confirms the lot is for sale but has been for thirty years. A farm here burned to the ground, 150 years ago, and nothings been built since. Until now.