Authors: Alexander Chee
Bridey swims across the middle distance, lane 4, still churning. He doesn't care what we have to say about him, he doesn't seem to care that we are here. It's fine, it's how it should be. Except preposterously I find myself cheered by Mrs. White's assessment. I have a chance.
Do you know who that is, she asks me.
I don't, I say.
He's the partner of the new swim coach. I'm surprised you haven't seen more of him.
Mr. Zhe's not very social, I say, feeling a bird in my throat. As if it could peek out, as I open my mouth, to talk to Mrs. White. Its shiny eyes behind my teeth. The rumor, I add, and here the bird goes away, is that he's the father of the art teacher's baby.
Her pretty eyes get a little small, and she laughs in a pip. Oh my, she says. Children. He's not, she says, and here she looks over to Mr. White, who is swimming lazily through the water in lane 2. He can't father a child, I shouldn't think. You understand, she says.
I think of my new friend, the hot-line operator. Yes, I say. I do.
And the subject shuts like a book. Bridey slides out of the water, sleek, walks around the edge of the pool. Mrs. White, he says. How charming you are there, with your children. She smiles at him, youthful. Women don't hate beautiful men, I see as I watch her. They may envy them, but that isn't hate. Hate is love on fire, set out to burn like a flare on the side of the road. It says, stop here. Something terrible has happened. Envy is like, the skin you're in burns. And the salve is someone else's skin.
Aphias. Bridey says, I know Fee is planning something for Labor Day, but I don't know what. Probably a garden party with a tent. He pushes his hair back behind his ears. Hi, he says. I'm Albright Forrester. He holds his hand out. I shake it.
Hate. Envy. Hello, I say. No bird in the throat now. I am the bird, now. A raven? A sparrow. I say, I'm Edward. Edward Gorendt. He lets my hand drop and hitches at his suit.
Nice to meet you, he says. You're on the swim team, I suppose.
I am, I say. Mrs. White's gaze on me feels like a sunbeam, warm and from far away.
And all the day afterward fills with hours where the air evanesces like it will open and Mr. Zhe emerge from the sparkly hard center, a flightless angel slipping from God's portal. Fee, Bridey had said. Fee.
Of course, years later, I will know, the bird in my throat was a crow.
I go through the days left before school like they are rooms along a corridor where I stop in, look around, to see if he is there, and leave after waiting. I walk the days with his name lying on my tongue, like a swallow of water that I can't take down my throat. Bridey continues to come to the pool, on occasion. I do not go into the locker room while he is in there. Sometimes Mrs. White is there also, smiling, her twins on each of her knees.
18
THE ROSES ALONG
the wall of the library disappear pretty regularly and soon it is discovered the problem is a Japanese beetle infestation, the roses being eaten the same day they open. In the morning, a flower. In the evening, not a petal.
So one evening on my way back from the pool I find Mr. Zhe standing in front of the rosebush, with what looks like a yellow Santa hat in his hand.
What's that, I say.
Japanese beetle trap, he says. It's got a synthetic hormone in it that attracts them, and then they go in here, get poisoned, and die.
They think they're finding a mate, and instead, they die, I say. I pluck at the yellow fabric. Huh.
He smiles at me. Doesn't seem fair, does it.
Summer lasts forever, I say.
It won't, he says. It only seems that way in August. He rubs a stem in his fingers. Pretty healthy, he says. You miss your friends, though,huh?
Yep, I say, though I hadn't thought of it that way. I didn't really know most of the students in this summer term. Didn't want to. Mr. Zhe looks at me for a long minute. All I know is that all summer I've wanted to run into him, and now that I have, my stomach feels like it is kneeling on my guts, like I could burst into tears right here. I want to say, touch me. Please. And it seems for a moment that he's going to put his hand on my shoulder.
You'll be fine, he says. It's really just two more weeks. I hear you have some stuff you're dealing with, though, and if you need to talk about it, you can talk to me about it.
Rose-breath around us, faint. The dusk like a mist of the night, as if night evaporated at dawn, to collect and then rain down again, to make night again.
Were he to put his hand on me, I would be revealed as nothing more than a newspaper, erect. A screen on which is projected the image of a boy. How could he love me? There's nothing to me except a place where the light resists moving forward. Okay, I say, instead. I will.
Do you have a number for me at home, he says.
I don't, I say.
Here, he says, and writes it out on a slip from his pocket. Later, at my dorm, I lie on my bed looking at the number. It was a receipt he wrote on. $10.00, Japanese beetle, trap and bait. Augusta Hardware.
19
AROUND THIS TIME
is when I start to throw up for what at first seems like surprising or unlikely reasons. At first, on the day in question, a day I spend in a sea kayak with Tom, I think that it is seasickness, even though I've never had travel sickness of any kind.
We are in Bar Harbor, today, sea kayaking. Tom has developed, since the stone-house episode, into something of a junior geologist. The sea kayak was a birthday present for him, and we've been practicing in it a few times a week. September is on us now up here, and we feel, as our paddles pluck at the waves, the chill wind off the sea, the cold front coming up just after the warm morning. We are out in the water off Burnt Porcupine Island, a tiny drop of stone spiny with spruce pines, and Tom navigates us to the edge of the shore through the bright-colored sea kayaks of the tours passing by, with their friendly instructors announcing loudly to speed up or slow down. We let them pass. We idle in the water in front of an enormous egg-shaped granite boulder, sitting, without a friend, among shattered sandstone and siltstone at the top of a short stone beach.
Glacial erratics is when a boulder or rock of a very different era or climate is carried for great distances by a glacier and set down far away, where it remains, Tom says. And so it looks out of place. He indicates the near shore. I look.
The glacial erratic.
It looks very out of place, I say.
I try to imagine the area, covered in an ice blanket thirty stories tall and as long as the coast, shaving down the mountains, pushing the rocks into each other, like when the guys at the ice cream shop pound the toppings into the ice cream. Glaciers, carrying these boulders along on their underside like the pebbles that stick to my feet when I walk the beach. Thus preoccupied, we don't notice, behind us, the Cat.
The Cat is a jet-propelled catamaran-style ferry built in Transylvania that can make the Bar HarborâNova Scotia passage in two and a half hours, half the time of the boat it replaced. The Cat blows out of the harbor and the waves come out of its wake like water sprites cut loose to make mayhem. We almost don't notice in time.
Fuck, Tom says, and he whips his oar into the water to shove us around. Get the stern facing the wave!
And too late I turn as he turns, too late as the kayak follows the wave up on its side. It doesn't turn us all the way over, exactly, but the weight of the boat follows and then we are under. Here in the blue light of the water, I see Toms golden hair like kelp. I pull at my splash skirt, tug it free, and break the water, spitting. I wait to see Tom join me and he does, he spits, he says, Fucking assholes.
We aren't far from the shore, and so we right the kayak and pull it in to shore. The water, even in summer, is the temperature of an ice cube melting in your shirt. The stones of the beach warm us as we walk up and lie down on them to dry off. Their dark color catches the heat better than white sand.
And then I feel the air catch that peculiar hardness, as if Mr. Zhe floated on a beam out of sight, waiting to take shape in front of me. And my stomach rises and tightens. I throw up.
Oh, man, Tom says. Are you all right?
Yes, I say, and I spit the rest out. Seawater.
I ask Mr. Zhe about glacial erratics on the first day of school. I've waited to ask him. We stand outside the pool, waiting to go in for practice. It's forty minutes beforehand, and I know he gets there that early. I pretend I have the time wrong. I pretend he believes me. I've lately begun to feel he knows what I am thinking.
Oh sure, he says. Cool stuff. And he leaps the fence running the edge of campus. The grass there is from when this was old cow fields, and enormous rosebushes grow here and there in the middle, unruly giants. Mr. Zhe has taken cuttings from them, he tells me, for his garden at home, and is excited that he may have found some old roses. Among the fields in the roses are a few of these giant rocks.
This one is gray and ribbed with marble, it looks like, or quartz. This, he says, is a glacial erratic from Ellsworth. It's old. But see here, how smooth it is? It was rubbed down. But here, and he points to places where the rock looks punched open, these are called shatter marks.
Chatter marks? I ask.
Shatter, he says. Where another rock pressed against the larger one with such force that they both broke as the glacier moved. The smaller one would have powdered, and here is where it shattered. The larger one looks like its been shot.
I like chatter marks better. Where the small stone was trying to talk to the big one, but because they were so close to each other, in the rub of the glacier, the small one exploded, trying to talk.
I'm having a reception on Labor Day, he says. An open house. I'll tell the rest of the ream. But Bridey and I will need some help and it would be great if you could, you know. Come by early. How's that sound?
Fine, I say.
We'll be expecting everyone at around three, so if you can be there at one, that'll be great, he says, rubbing his hand along the shatter marks. And here the sun catches on him, coming through the trees. Gilt. Guilt. Gild. In my medieval lit books, it says that
gilt
first meant, blooded. And here in the sunset, he looks red, almost bloody. Not blood spilled, but the essence of blood, the red heat, the transaction of all life. A gas passing from one color to the next, blue to red, even the act of breathing a certain alchemy, sure of itself and its result.
I'll be there at one, I say. I could bring my tarot cards, read fortunes in the tent.
He blinks and says, You know how to do that?
Sure, I say.
That'd be terrific, he says. And he pats the rock like a dog.
It's not so much like a crush: I don't do anagrams of his name. I don't write our names together, on trees, in bathrooms, a heart drawn around it like a fence: Fee and Warden, forever love. I make sure there is no trace of what I am thinking. No paper (except me) for someone to find, no drawings of his face or poems, only the worn photograph from the night at the stone chapel, of someone he had once cherished and tried to give up. Fire, the fortune-teller had said. Fire clings to what it burns. No weight to it, just color, light, heat. Indeed.
The fire was inside me, though, the paper boy lit up like a paper lantern.
The practice is over too soon. I swim clumsily, I know. Mr. Zhe says little about it. I catch him watching me, a feeling not unlike sunlight falling on me, a warmth as particular as it is gentle, and for its gentleness, not unnoticeable, not unable to create, in me, a feeling like I am going to throw up. And after the practice, I do.
I stand in the stall and my stomach, mostly empty, throws whatever it finds into the bowl, which I flush repeatedly to cover the sound.
I lose weight. Everyone notices. At meals, the team jokes that I am vanishing. I am turning flat. I throw up a couple of times a week after practice. The paper boy. And in this state my grandparents demand and receive another visit.
You look thin, dear, my grandmother says, as she hugs me. And I can feel your shoulder blades. That's bad. It means you're near turning into an angel. She searches first my left and then my right eye, as if that's where it will show.
In their home, the air is stuffy, fans everywhere try to cool the turgid air. I watch one in particular, where the blades, in their turning, create a shine not unlike sun crossing water.
Honey. My grandmother says this, an assertion. This is not working for me. Not one bit. Eric, she says. My grandfather walks up to stand beside her. In front of me, like a pair. The pair they are. Pare. A pair pares. Any thirds away.
I mean, do they think this is what a normal boy looks like? she asks my grandfather, as she raises a hand to my brow.
Talk to me, I say, and I begin to cry. To me. Not to each other.
Edward, she says, and I sit down on her couch.
I am what a normal boy looks like, I say. And then I run to the bathroom.
I hear her outside, in between retches. We've got to get him . . . doctors who might have . . . often, sure, but Eric . . .
At a doctor's office in the afternoon, they extract blood, poke, look inside me with lights. As I lie there on the bed, I wonder. If they can see the bird, in my throat. If when they look in there with the light it bounces back the dark eyes. The small terrible beak. No matter how much I throw up, the bird never comes. Never feathers. Just more of what might have been me, tossed into the bowl and flushed away. The bird excavates me this way, to make room inside me to grow.
My grandparents again. Floating into view, beautiful white hair, so clean. I wonder what it's like, when it grows in. How you feel, to see this light from the door of the beyond reflected there in your hair. And my hand reaches up to touch them both on the head, a gesture I know they are mistaking for tenderness for them, but it doesn't matter, for after, when the bird controls me, I know, this memory will console them when I no longer can.