“The Rescue of the Seven Cities of Atlantis: A Diary of the Engineer’s Wife” (part 1) by Alexander Chee

The Exile’s First Morning

The city had fled its moorings in the night, to race the clouds that had surrounded it while we slept. Now we float above the beach, the bottom will shave the dune-tops off if we continue on, and of course the subway tunnels are all in danger of filling with sand.

A boy on the beach, makes from bathing, waves at me when our eyes meet. He rises and walks, shining and wet, stays neatly ahead of our shadow. Our guide.

In the chapel below me the vicar rides his stone horse in a circle while angels somersault through the air above him, charging each other. The vicar, naked, rides bareback, drunk now on the Communion wine, and the coir-mistress waits at the side of the altar, begging him to come down and put on a new robe. I can pity her only a moment.

Above me then a bright square of the sky opens as a door might and in a flood of golden blooms somersaults the engineer. His clogs hit the stones of my balcony first, burnt and broken from whatever return he is making to us. The petals and flowers fall thick, and make a bed to break his slow fall. His journey has taken all of the weight out of him, he is as light as the castle we float on. He lands on my lap and bounces off of me. I grab at him and his laughter pulls me up. “We’re here,” he says. “Lash me to the balcony.” And so I do. He directs the landing from his perch, tagging there, a child’s balloon. “Help Emily dress the vicar,” he says and so I do, taming the stone horse as always by walking into the chapel. For Emily.

The boy on the beach multiplies into hundreds, all made of pearly rose-skin gone blue from shadow. Dark curls cover their smooth necks. They wade into the surf and grab the tow-lines to guide us to our new home. Some climb the lines, leaping into the surf to impress the sailors on our supply ships arriving beneath us, and thus adorned we proceed, above the wild olive trees to the raw wet earth pit dug for us and the castle goes down through pulleys and winches, the beautiful hundreds of brothers dance as they pull the ropes, the engineer’s weight returns and he unties his leash, a gold-satin sash from my waist. He plucks a bloom off the porch, places it behind my ear. “Miss me?” he asks. I did.

And beneath me, the city slides into its place, sighing at its return to earth. The angels, under Emily’s direction, sing perfectly the hymns of the occasion.

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Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is winner of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose and a 2010 MCCA Fellowship. He is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

© LIT Magazine Issue #1, 1999