Edinburgh by Alexander Chee Page B

brake lights of the cars ahead of us flashing between bright and dull red in the early night. This week my father is in Sweden. I imagine him surrounded by blond people, the overwhelming numbers, him a shiny black-haired speck at the center. My blond mother. Sweden looks like a country of my mother. When he told me he was going, I thought of Big Eric’s books. If my father had ever seen anything like them.
    They parent me in a team, these two, my mother teaches me about people, my father about science. These subjects each teach me patience about the other. My mother and I sit quietly in the car as we consider this evaluation of me. All of my friends are in the choir, I say to her, finally, and she nods as she takes me home.
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    16
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    THE PLASTER SAW takes the cast off in a minute. Beneath, my arm is a scaly white thing, the dark hairs stand out starkly. How’s that feel, the doctor says. Smiling. Rose-colored fat man, big black-framed glasses.
    Fine, I say. I stretch it forward. Fine. And this is not a lie. The hand looks like it belongs to a monster. I think of my mother’s rose cuttings, covered up for a month, until the branch, in desperation, grows new roots to live. This hand, it looks like it is ready to grow a whole new boy off itself.
    Out in the waiting room, my mother stands as I come out the door. There’s my little tree climber, she says. In the car, on the way home, the sunlight yawns through the trees, more faraway fire. Soon the clocks will go forward, the nights shrink close like turtleneck collars.
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    17
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    YOU, AS THE chorus, Big Eric tells the opera choir, are supposed to be innocent choirboys, and yet you all are supposed to act as if you are passionately in love with Floria Tosca. And you are both.
    Saturday mornings belong to Opera now: the eight of us meet in the church room alone to rehearse, and soon, we will rehearse with the rest of the cast and orchestra. While my little brother and sister watch the Smurfs, I learn songs about vengeance, love, and slow death. Today Big Eric is explaining to us the role we have in the opera. The coffee he has brought bitters the room’s air while we all drink hot tea with lemon to clear and tone our throats. Again, it reassures me less to know the history here. The story, though, is a good one: Tosca, the lover of a handsome painter, Cavaradossi, betrays him in order to protect him from his torturer. Tosca can save her lover by giving herself to the torturer, and she says she will in exchange for a mock execution. He comes to her and she instead, impulsively, stabs him to death with his dinner knife, in his chambers. She then visits her lover in prison, assures him of his safety, rushes to his side after the firing squad, only to find he really is dead. The torturer’s murder is discovered, and his police come for Tosca, who then flings herself from a parapet to her death.
    Operas, Big Eric announces, as he walks the room in long paces, are mainly about betrayals in love. Squalid light surrounds him from the stained-glass windows as he says this. His round bald head gleams, recently polished, he tells us, and from above the ears, the remaining hair, vigorous, grows long, to meet his mustache and beard.
    After, he comes up to me. How did you like
Fire from Heaven
, he asks me. He twists his hands over each other in a way I’ve never seen before and only read about. He’s the only person I know who rubs his hands.
    It’s fine, I say. I liked it. Big Eric had urged me to go read this novel, and I checked it out from the library. When I got home with it, I realized why he wanted me to read it. The novel is about Alexander the Great, who has an affair with his older, adult teacher, when he is still a teenager.
    He smiles. Beautiful, right? You should read the
The Persian Boy
, next. About his eunuch lover.
    I will, I say.
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    Every now and then, I think of Ralph, dead Ralph. He wings in, hovers over the rehearsal