Edinburgh (3 page)

Down the hill, the light stays on. When it goes off, I slip out of my bunk, pull on a pair of shorts, and shrug out the door. I have in my mind the idea that I need to make this end, that there should never be another place like this. I sit down on the dock instead, watch the lake heave in the dark. The waves there seem like a mockery of the ocean. The stars look fake. I sit like this until Peter finds me.

He sits down beside me. He leans against my shoulder, and I can feel the sunburn off his cheek. I make room and he slips against me. I don't ask him why he is crying and when he stops, why he's stopped.

He pulls his head off my shoulder and spits into the water. He lights a cigarette he has had hidden in his hand, and drops the match into the lake, where it sizzles when it lands. We watch the match float in the faint dark together.

5

YOU WERE THERE
, he says. The night it happened you were there.

I was on the dock, I say. You came and found me.

You were there.

Wood-plank floors, dark like molasses, cool to the touch like a lake rock passed to you by someone who held it briefly. Screened windows run the length of this cabin. The low dark ceiling, almost invisible, registers on the mind more as a color and a shade both, than as a roof.

Rehearsals here go long. In the stillness between phrases, we save our voices. Some young sopranos, drunk on high notes, shrill and squeal when away from the room, or sing recklessly their favorite songs. I have practiced writing on my sheet music without looking at it, so as to communicate with Peter, who sits next to me. His pale hair blows up off his head, as if his real mother were a dandelion gone to seed. A few times, at night in my bunk, I find one of his hairs in my bed, left from him sitting there, and I run it through my teeth.

How do you mean, I write.

You were there. He points his pen to it again, what he just wrote. The gesture raises an eye from Big Eric, in the front. I look away.

You need a break, Eric says from the front. I won't keep you here when you all want to be outside right now. Go and take a forty-minute break and be back here to finish. I want full attention for the Kyrie.

The music we are singing has been sung for hundreds of years by boys. I wonder if God expects to hear it rising off the earth, like the bloom of a perennial flower. Or if it is a standing challenge, for us to come together and sing it for Him. Eric tells us, in the old days, of the castrati, the elite Italian choristers who gelded themselves to keep their high clear voices. Some boys hold their crotches when the story is told, but I understand. I could want it that badly, to keep a voice.

Peter walks out at the break first and heads to a large rock out in the center of a field between the rehearsal hall and the canteen. At night the fireflies fill this field with sparks, as if it were ready to burn. Now, during the day, the thick grass is full of Queen Anne's lace and daisies and a little red flower like a cut knot of red thread that my mother calls wild-fire. The rock is enormous, left behind thousands of years ago by a glacier, and a slim white seam runs diagonally through the porous gray granite. Smooth dents in a row lead to the top and Peter climbs them quickly. Sitting up there, Peter looks off to the forest that begins on the eastern edge of the field.

Peter, tell me what you mean, I say.

Go away, please.

I was on the dock. You came and found me.

You knew. How did you know.

He's done it to me, too.

I stand beside the rock. Underneath it, moss crawls up the side. I couldn't believe what I had just said. It wasn't exactly right, though. I had never had a solo. I was not like the others. When Big Eric spoke to me, he knew I knew what he was. That I had always known. And then I remember, the pictures. Try to remember if any were of me.

A shadow, tossed on me, wears a halo made by sun-colored filaments. I look up. Hello, Peter.

He comes down and jumps up on my back, his chin digs between my shoulders, his legs kicked around my waist. Giddyup, he says. I carry him toward the rehearsal room. Across the way, in the room, I feel what I am sure are the eyes of Big Eric.

This horse sure is slow, Peter says.

In my head I pray. There is a saying in Korea that you know who your God is when you think you are about to die. Hello, God. I pray to be able to carry Peter, to carry him off to where he belongs, way above this earth. Well above what could ever touch him. But wherever that is, I instead set him down at the entrance to the dining hall, where we go inside and sneak a soda from the fountain.

In rehearsal again the altos falter, unsure. Most are newly altos, and slip into their old soprano or second-soprano parts, thinking no one can hear them sing falsetto for head tone. Eric calls the rehearsal to a halt then.

A head tone's quality, he says, cannot be duplicated. There is almost nothing like it except the clarinet, for sound. Is that clear? Falsetto, falsetto sounds like this, and then he trills a terrible, reedy impression, screwing up his features. His beard bobs. The new altos are almost in tears.

Do not, I repeat, do not ever use falsetto. If your voice is changing, you will be moved to the altos, so that you may sing with us until you develop into a tenor, bass, baritone, et cetera. I will not tolerate it. At all. Don't think I can't hear it, because I can. I can hear it. Is that clear?

Clear, we say, in unison, as if it were another piece we would be rehearsing throughout the afternoon.

After a dinner of meat loaf and peas and soggy boiled potatoes we go into town in the van for a movie. They are showing
Xanadu
, starring Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly. Gene Kelly plays a clarinet. Olivia Newton-John sings in a clear high voice and roller-skates through a tepid plot, something involving love. There is laughter in the audience when several of us sopranos, including me, sing along. The songs are easy for us to pick up. Olivia plays one of several muses who descend to earth, arrayed in beautiful mortal bodies that cover their true selves, beams of colored heaven-made light. We sing the songs afterward, in the van on the way home, softly, as we have already sung all day. Some of us boys sleep as we pass through the dark quiet towns along the main road back. We are on the other side of the equation of light and sound. When we sing, we try on the robe of a muse. We wear a color of light.

6

IN THE NUMBER 2
Cabin bathroom Zach and I are pressed up against each other, Zach sitting on the sink as I push toward him. I am trying to get used to his tongue in my mouth. The first time it happened he said, This is how you French kiss, and then licked my lips with his tongue.

At the time, I wondered who it was that taught him.

I get down on my knees. I take him in my mouth. I have read that this is something that men like. It makes me nervous when Zach does it to me, but I feel in control when I do it to him, and this much I know I like. I don't like doing it for itself.

Jesus, he whispers, and I pinch him. The other kids in the cabin are supposed to be asleep. I had finished my bed check when I heard the door open, not even the sound of the door itself but the whisper of the air moved by its opening. Days ago I had greased the hinges and oiled the spring. For him.

He jumps against me when I pinch him, knees knocking my chest. He smells like warm bread down here, if you rubbed it with salt. I take advantage of my swimming lessons, I breathe through my nose and take him in my throat. He squeezes my shoulders, starts pounding lightly and then harder. His legs shake.

What's that on your shoulder, Eric B. asks me the next morning on my way back from the shower. I look back to see, on my skin, five purple dots in a row. I got punched, I say.

Eric B. grins. Yeah.

7

WHEN YOU SAY
Excelsis, you need to land hard on all three syllables. Egg. Shell. Cease. Got it? Egg—Shell—Cease. Excelsis. Put it together. Now, Do-ho Na-ha No-beese, In-Egg-Shell-Cease Day-Oh. Ready?

The baton flicks up. And then down.

We have been working on this piece for three days. We rehearse two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. This is my first summer camp. Usually,
camp
means a cottage my family rents, where we drive up and swim more or less continuously. Zach's family has one on Lake Sebago, a log cabin with a screened-in porch and a dock, built by his architect family. Here, we have the rehearsal building, the canteen where the food is served, the two cabins, with another half cabin for Eric's wife, Leanne, and her new baby, a big-headed round ball of a boy who is so quiet he makes me afraid. Ralph, Eric's foster son, stays in Cabin 1 with Big Eric.

Leanne is a giantess, taller than Eric, who is tall. Each of her breasts right now seems as big around as my head. She is the camp nurse, a title that fits as she is always breast-feeding her new baby. The half cabin, her tiny domain, is the last one in the row of buildings going down to the dock and the lakefront. There are no near neighbors. Watching her come and go, it seems there should be hidden compartments to accommodate her bulk.

Dona Nobis. This whole phrase, it means thank you Lord for your gift. It is sung to celebrate Jesus. Thank you Lord for your gift, all thanks be to God. Noble gift, all thanks be to God above all others. Big Eric tells us the meanings of the words, because he insists it will help us sing. I like it better when I don't know the meanings. When the word is empty and I fill it like a glass. Knowing what they mean takes away some of my courage.

We sing for a half hour past the rehearsal end. The altos have finally adapted, the sopranos are holding themselves back, the second sopranos support us both through the gap left for them now. Big Eric sets his wand down after the end is reached for the fifth time that afternoon. He wipes sweat off his forehead and smiles at us and says, You're done. Come back for dinner, at six.

Back in my cabin my sweat dries in the cool air coming off the lake. I think about writing to my family. I wouldn't know what to say. Last night, Big Eric broke up a Dungeons & Dragons game I'd been leading for the Cabin 2 boys, so they wouldn't feel so left out by the nightly naked story hour. But then Peter and Zach had wanted to play, and so Big Eric came up and shut it down and took them back to Cabin 1. I look over the interrupted game story, and then put it away. I take out a book of Greek mythology I stole from the town library. The myths are occasionally checked by a pencil, as if this were a catalog, and someone had gone along marking what they wished to buy. I read until the dinner bell, dreading what Big Eric will say. When I go to dinner with my book, Big Eric looks at it. Greeks, he says. Wise men, the Greeks. He smiles and I shut the book, slip it under my thigh on the bench. At dinner, Big Eric announces that cliques are forbidden in the choir, and that, until further notice, the D&D games would be suspended. I wonder about naked story hour.

After dinner, I take my sketch pad down to the edge of the water, where I can look at the late-summer sun still afternoon-bright at six-thirty in the evening. I draw two eyes there on the page. I can never decide easily whether to draw the eyes as white eyes or Asian ones. My eyes are white eyes, though slanted slightly, but with the white-boy eyelids. The irises have green centers and brown edges. Split through the middle.

I look at my two eyes there on the page. I begin to draw hair, then fill in the face shape, put in lines for the neck. I taught myself to draw by tracing comics, so I draw smooth-lined broad-shouldered men and women of enormous cleavage, supported by powerful, tiny waists and long, muscled legs. I always wait for the eyes to tell me who they are, so I can know who I am drawing. I decide I am drawing my favorite character from D&D, a sorceress I've named Tammamo, for my long-ago great-grandmother. I draw a heart-shaped face atop a long beautiful body, with flowing red hair past her waist that rises behind her like fire in a storm wind. I try to make her look like one of my grandfather's missing sisters.

Who are you drawing? Behind me stands Big Eric.

A character of mine, from D&D. As I say this, I feel a change come over me, like a direction change in the wind. All my air is now coming from another direction.

You're very good. She looks scary.

She's not supposed to. I guess I'm not that good.

I look up at him. He is a tall man, he does carpentry. His round-rimmed gold-framed glasses gives him an owlish demeanor, though not the wise owl but the startled one. When the owl blinks around trying to see.

I'm not targeting you, he says.

All right. If you say so.

They tell me you are the Dungeon Master. What does that mean?

It means I am in charge of the game rules. I have the maps, I tell them who the enemies are, and I monitor the plays, to make sure the dice are rolled and everyone gets a turn. And I make up the stories.

I turn back to my drawing. I draw Tammamo wearing a white buckskin fringe bikini and her power gem rests on a headdress that rides atop her hair. Her boots are thigh-high.

I say, Adam's a dungeon master too. A good one. Zach hates it. Merle or Luke can be good if they don't get bored. It's not just me.

Big Eric bends down. All right then, he says. Just remember, some of these boys are not as sophisticated as you. I don't want them feeling left out, and I don't want them complaining to their parents. If someone wants to play I want you to find them a way. All right?

Yep.

When I finish my drawing, the light is nearly gone, and Tammamo's hands each hold a ball of fire-lightning. I see her leap into the wind's wide arms, her hair a torch, see her laugh as she rides the night. Before she fell in love, I think, she would have been mad with grief, wanting love. How would she have fallen in love with her husband? Was she preparing to destroy him and fell for him instead?

Back in my bunk, later, I read some of a comic book a cousin sent me from Korea. He is learning English and has translated it for me, his careful, squared-off handwriting, all in capitals, tells me the story. FOX-DEMON MUST EAT THOUSAND LIVERS, YOUNG MEN VIRGINS, TO BECOME HUMAN. This fox has been drawn ugly, but she wears a beautiful mask, made from the face of a victim, to hide her ugliness. She is Korea's most famous fox-demon.