Authors: Alexander Chee
What do you want of him, I ask myself. I tell myself, to walk inside him and never leave. For him to be the house of me. Below, a list from my notebook at school:
Likes smoking and chew
Find out: What is New Model Army, Gang of Four, DOA
Peter, Peter, Fire-eater, kissed the girls, felt like a heater
Hates his sister, loves mine
Wants to never go home again, always: Why?
To save time for reading, I've taught myself to walk and read at the same time. My father doesn't want me to learn Korean, English only, he says, and so at school I walk the halls reading from the
Webster's Dictionary
for several weeks. Around me the other kids pass in a rush of winking colors and pillowed sounds. I can't hear anything they say to me when I read. I can only hear inside me, a voice, reading to me from the book, lower than my own. This voice hints at directions, possibilities, even as it presses forward, inexorable, to the next word in line. Defect, Defection, Defective. Define. Definition. Definitive. On the next page, I peek. Demon.
What the hell is that, Zach asks, when he sees me in the cafeteria at lunch. He is a choir member in my same class, a lacrosse player with a deer's walk who stayed back a year. He is my class but older, and he likes me for reasons I don't yet understand.
I'm preparing for a spelling bee, I lie.
Tow, it turns out, is what is beaten off the harvested flax. Transparent. Light passes through it, barely. Tow, Towhead. Peter.
By the time the spring comes five months later, I am the section leader of the first sopranos. When I am given this job, Big Eric tells me how my voice is to lead the others. Now he watches me in rehearsals as I watch him. I sing and follow Big Eric's hand as it bobs in the air, showing us the silent percussion to our songs. If I have to look at his eyes, I look at the reflections in the little rims of his gold-framed glasses. I do not think he is completely fooled by this. I feel as if he can see into my throat, to the place just below where my voice starts, where, as he says, the breath resides.
As my voice follows the scales while we warm up and we align our voices around the piano's tone like muscles on a bone, I feel larger. As if the room belonged to the voices that filled it in the way my throat belongs to my voice. The top notes remain for only me and Peter. All the other boys cannot go up this high, high A over high C. Big Eric looks first at Peter and then at me as we hold this note. The sound wavers only when we alternate taking breaths, and then only faintly. Peter barely contains a smile at me that might distort the vowel coming out of him. He seems too small to generate the force he does. His body barely fits around his voice, his mouth a gate to another dimension made up of these pure notes.
Eric touches the next key up. B. We rise together.
Afterward, as the boys prepare to leave rehearsal, running and yelling as they put on their coats, Big Eric approaches Peter and I where we stand. You should have a solo, I think, he says to Peter, at which Peter laughs. A descant, he says.
The descant is a melody sung by a soloist in counterpoint to the melody sung by the sopranos. A single voice above all the others, stepping its way through by means of lyric and syncopation, one part song, one part refrain. The chorus sings at the same time as the descant singer. I want the descant. I know I am good enough. My voice, my range. I learn faster. But I see immediately then, what Big Eric wants. The blond hair at the top of the riser, imagine him singing. You would want to touch what you heard, hold it to your face.
In the car pool with Peter, on our way back from choir rehearsal, I try to read and not look only at him. The other boys in the car cluck and shove at each other, ask loud questions about things that have just happened at school. The mother driving us regards the traffic ahead. On the pages in front of me, the words dissolve a bit, the letters thinning until I can see, on the other side of them, like spying through a wire fence, the pictures of Peter I have collected inside me: Peter laughing as he falls on the ice at Lake Sebago, Peter walking through his dark house, his dog fluttering at his leg, Peter asleep in my basement, gripping the edge of his sleeping bag as if he were, in his dream, trying to escape it. Occasionally I look up, and the real Peter flares beside me. I try to place the smell of him. He smells of carnations and, very faintly, cigarette smoke. Like a corsage someone left in a bar. I am in love with you, I think then. That's what this is.
Too bad you didn't get the descant, he says.
It's yours, I say. You're better for it. There isn't anyone else.
I don't care if I have it. Big deal. Extra rehearsals.
I don't mind, I say. And I won't. There's probably something for me later.
A book I had with me for one week was about Russian psychics spontaneously combusting into flame. The author thought it mysterious, the sudden acceleration of the body's heat to a temperature that would sear bone. This did not mystify me then. The person writing had never met Peter.
2
THE SUN ON
the first day of the section-leader camping trip with Big Eric is a shiny white smear in the center of a white sky. There's four of us: me, Zach from the altos, Little Eric from the second sopranos, and Big Eric. We hike for hours that first day and then find a rock pool to swim in at some distance from the trail. We decide to camp here and pitch our tent, first. Then we take off our clothes, Big Eric first, and he removes all of his and stands, looking at us, waiting. Swimming nude, he says, is one of God's greatest gifts to us.
Zach shrugs. I like it. His clothes come off, then Little Eric, then me.
Big Eric takes out his camera then.
Krick. The camera shutter flicks open-shut.
Little Eric perches on the edge of the rock pool, sylphlike, naked. His blond wavy hair frames his profile, an elegant twelve-year-old Swede. Big Eric holds his camera across his broad hairy chest. He aims at Little Eric and shoots. Krick. Slower, that time, his finger lingers at the sight in the frame. Zach and I stand to the side, crouch occasionally in a pool here at the stream, naked also, the summer air like a wet towel on my back.
That's great, he says to Little Eric. You look like a faun.
I sink myself under the water and expel the air from my lungs to make myself heavy, to fall quickly to the bottom of the deep pool. It's a diver's trick my oceanographer father taught me. I keep enough air so I can lie flat on the smooth stones of the bottom and look up, through the glossy, pearled surface of the water, to the sky.
The currents spill softly around me. The water has the milky freshwater taste of having come through granite, which is why it is so clear here. The sun above turns flat and silver like a dropped coin.
I stand and shove and a dolphin kick brings me to the surface, where I gasp. Little Eric and Big Eric continue. Click. I dive down again, drifting.
Zach punctures the pool in a jackknife and water careens in sheets. I lift my head from the water to see the Erics disturbed. Little Eric is laughing, and Big Eric says, Don't you worry, You're next.
Later, we build a fire and cook dinners wrapped in tinfoil: hot dogs, potatoes, corn on the cob. I am sunburned again and Zach rubs a lotion on my back for me. There is a quiet in which I pretend I don't know what all of this means, Big Eric's talks on the drive up here about libertarianism, nudism, child rights. And then I don't pretend. The mosquito-screen zipper sizzles shut.
In the tent at night his body is huge. Covered in hair. His penis looks comical, enormous, a cartoon. His age renders him like another gender, or a species apart from us. Our bodies are small, bones are small. Of the three of us boys, I am the only one with a little bit of hair swirled at the base of my penis. I feel half him, half them. Zach and Little Eric reach out fingers toward me, and touch the hair.
In the morning the sky lights an hour before the sun shows and we wash in the pool with Dr. Bronner's, check our food for raccoon assaults, make a fast breakfast. Big Eric makes coffee and I ask for some. At some point I remember: the Erics huddled in a sleeping bag, like hideously mismatched twins. Zach and I. And then a switch, Little Eric slipping inside with me, Zach gone over. I didn't think I would like kissing so much, Little Eric giggles.
And then the trees, the prismatic air presses on everything that needs it here on the earth, the sun fires itself on the stream and spreads light through the underbrush where we are camped, spangling our faces. Vertigo. The night before scatters away. I press the hot coffee to my face. I look at my face in his shaving mirror and don't recognize myself. My hair is streaking from the sun. My pupils are huge. I want to say, Take me apart. Leave me here for dead, if you can.
Zach gets out of the tent and stands in front of me and when I meet his eyes he winks. He puts a finger on my lips and smiles. Hey, he says. Nice tan.
Too bad we can't hike nude, Big Eric says to me, as he stands, his camera in hand. Zrrick. The hideous slide forward of film. He slides into his shorts and shirt reluctantly.
3
JULY. TWO WEEKS
before camp, I am at Peter's house watching television. His mother and father are gone to work. He lives in South Portland, next door to my town, Cape Elizabeth, the town of a rival swim team. We rode our bikes to the beach this morning and ran in the ocean with his dog, Peg, for hours. Now we are sunburned. I am brown and red like a rose cane and when I pull down my shorts I see a band of white skin that sits there around my hips like reflected light. Peter is red all over and now lies on the couch, covered in Milk of Magnesia that his mother applied before leaving. We are watching television now. I want to tell him, to warn him not to be alone with Big Eric. What that means. But I don't.
Later, the sun sets. We wrestle on the couch. My mother is coming to pick me up, as I can't ride my bicycle home in the dark. I have Peter trapped on the couch, my elbow across his chest, as he jabs his knees into my ribs repeatedly. His mother is in the kitchen, his father is still not home. I want to kiss him. I want to not want to kiss him. His face is red from laughing and his sunburn. As I pound his chest a last time, I tell myself, Not possible. When I finally let him up I move to the other side of the couch and we catch our breaths. You suck, he says, laughing. You suck so bad. I slap his hot face and he laughs harder and I pin him back to the couch again.
I leave without telling him, afraid all the way back home in my mother's car that it leaks out of me, this desire I have, like the fungi that grow in Peter's yard, puffing out little clouds when you crunch them with your feet.
You have freckles, my mother says at home. Angel kisses. They sure love you a lot.
In the bathroom I kick off my swimsuit from where I lie on my sunburned back against the cool tiles of the floor, One, two, three. The door is closed and locked and after a while my mother knocks. Aphias. Open the door.
I say nothing because that is what nothing says. I am nothing, a O, an outline around a hole.
Aphias. You are worrying me. Dinner's going to be ready soon. If you aren't downstairs for it, I'm going to call your grandfather and father to come and get you.
Time passes. Eventually, something passes through me and I get up and pull on my suit. I close the bathroom door behind me.
It's still daylight and I find my mother in the yard. Hey there, she says. She is squatting over a plant. Poppies, she says. After they bloom, they die back. You can't see them. I run a finger over the fuzzy leaves, the yard-long stems. Now I know what I want to be when I grow up.
The difference between a remainder and a reminder is an
A
, which stands for Aphias, my name, and the letter slips in and out like a cartridge in a rifle.
4
CAMP BEGINS. FOR
two weeks we rehearse twice a day, before and after lunch. Immediately after lunch is a play period of ninety minutes, including a supervised swim. The morning rehearsals are for memorization and pronunciation, lectures on the meanings of the words. The afternoon is run-throughs and music. Our fall program is in the majority sung in Latin and Italian.
I am the designated cabin leader of Cabin 2, bed checker, referee. The first night arrives damply. We unroll sleeping bags across skinny mattresses and change into long T-shirts down to our knees. I move through the cabin, touching each mattress with my finger, saying each boy's name as I go. Across the yard, down the hill, the other cabin glows, light pours out of it, and the moths and mosquitoes that dive in it are like fairies, holding long glowing trains. Through the tall grass, fireflies flash and in the distance, the lights of far-off cabins ring the lake's edge. Big Eric is down in the first cabin, and even though it is minutes past lights-out, the boys sit in a group in the main area, naked or in their underwear. Big Eric, whenever possible, preaches to us the virtues of nudism. Our swim hour is clothing-optional. Today, the first day, I wore a T-shirt in the water, like the two fat boys, Jim and Paul.
The bed check done, I turn off the lights. Around me in the dark the other boys turn in their beds. A few are instantly asleep. I haul myself up into my bunk. In the bunk beneath me is yet another Eric, Eric B., as he is called, for further clarity, with all the Erics around. He whispers, Fee?
I stick my head over the edge to see him. Where Little Eric is pretty, this one is handsome. You can see the man coming on in him, like the change of a werewolf, except better. What are they doing, he asks.
Telling stories, it looks like, I say. First cabin is like a cabin of brothers, blond, Scandinavian, mild, clean-limbed. Peter is down there and I have not been able to concentrate since finding out. I want to pretend to Eric B. below me that we are just in the woods at a normal summer camp, but as I make out the trace of his eyes in the dark, I can see this will not happen.