Arthur's Seat

EDINBURGH, read the glowing, purple monument outside of the airport, about one and three-quarters men tall. Estimating things like that, things that have to do with numbers, is not a skill of mine. But I could tell this time because there was a real man standing between the D and the I, which, while convenient for estimating the sign’s height, was inconvenient for the picture I was taking. He was smoking and arguing on the phone, his little four-wheeled suitcase patient at his side.

I took the photo anyway and continued along without a rolling companion. Only my backpack was with me, filled with most traveling necessities, barring any extra clothes. I’d found this round tip flight for £30 and pounced, which meant that my furlough from the Cambridge study abroad center would last a mere twenty-four and a half hours. I got on the bus to the city center, sitting alone on the top deck in a window seat, headphones in, backpack bouncing on my lap. On the right, we passed the Rat Pack, a jazz bar with subway stairs down to the entrance. I wondered what it might be like to get off the bus and sit down at a small table for two, my backpack and I listening to something reminiscent of Ella Fitzgerald. Someone might come join us, ask me to dance—my own Fred Astaire. On the right, we passed apartments, closed blinds yellowed by the light behind them. I wondered if my Fred would live there.

I got off the bus for dinner at a pub, Auld Hundred. It was quiz night, so I scrunched my arms to my chest as I stepped in between middle-aged men who were holding pints of Guinness and debating which European City the River Amstel flows through. Upstairs it was much less populated, housing a few waitresses, two couples on a double date, and thick, lit garland strung around the ceiling beams. I sat alone at a small circular table. My cheeks were warm with strawberry and pomegranate cider, and my mind wandered, as it had been doing recently, to a month ago, when I hadn’t sat alone.

At the end of the pier, under a willow tree, reflections of the surrounding lights bobbed in the Seine’s low, dark peaks. His camera clicked beside me as he took a photo of a couple at the other edge of the pier, who we had decided were on a Tinder date. I sat with my legs straight out, holding my feet just above the water and played a game with the little waves, tapping them with the soles of my boots before they broke on the stony rim.

We were quiet for a while, which was a small continuation of what a lot of the day had been like, even though we hadn’t seen each other in a month. He was studying in Germany and I was in Cambridge. That afternoon, on top of a big red bus, I’d held his hand as we drove around Champs-Élysées and by the tunnel where Princess Diana died. I talked the most with the people who sat across the aisle from us: my parents, who met us in France from Michigan. They were now sitting on a bench five minutes away, watching our dinner cruise boat pull up to the dock.

“What’s wrong,” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said after a while, not really meaning that he didn’t know what was wrong, but that he didn’t know how to tell me that he didn’t know if he wanted to be with me anymore.

I bit my lips together, releasing them only to say, “We should head back.” I got up, brushing off my jeans and bringing my right forearm behind my neck to throw my hair onto my back. The curls swished on my leather jacket as I started walking without waiting for him.

My steak and ale pie arrived, and as I devoured it, it soaked up some of the booze in my stomach.

I drowned the pier out of my mind as the four of us settled at two tables for two facing right out the window, side by side: dad, mom, me, him. There was a small bottle of champagne at their table and red wine at ours. We all immediately filled our little crystal glasses. After inhaling the appetizer bread on our plates, mom’s hand shot out and grabbed two dinner rolls from the table behind us, which was, at least for now, unoccupied. She handed them to me and scouted around for two more for her and my dad.

The cruise photographer bound in front of us and asked us, energetically, how we were all related.

“Well, this is my sister,” my mom said, motioning to me, her straight face framed by shoulder-length gray hair.

The photographer laughed. My mom continued to tell him that the man to her left was her husband. I thought it was likely that she was going to say that he was her lover but changed her mind at the last moment. I didn’t answer the photographer’s question.

The camera flashed a few times. Once at all four of us and then at each couple. Dad put his arm around mom, and he put his arm around me.

In the middle of dinner, mom reached behind her again and retrieved a bottle of champagne.

In the United States, I always order water and an entrée. No dessert. But in my semester abroad, which felt very luxurious, I spared fewer expenses.

“The chocolate cake with ice cream, please,” I said to the waitress.

On the top deck of the boat, he and I were alone, and I held a glass of merlot. We had climbed up between a break between dinner and dessert. I set the wine down on a table, and we stared at each other. He stepped forward and kissed me. Hard, like he was trying to siphon a bit of my devotion out of me and then reveal it as his own.

I put my hands on either side of his face.

“Do you still love me?”

“I do,” he said, like a sad groom.

“You do,” I asked, without making my voice go up at the end how a question usually does. Trying to will it into truth.

“I’m not sure,” he said after a moment.

I shook my head and took my hands back. As I rushed down the stairs to the main deck, to my unknowing parents, I scoffed at the irony. Paris, the City of Love.

—

I made my way, bloated, back through the downstairs crowd of trivia-goers in a serpentine fashion and exited onto the street. It was only a fifteen-minute walk to the hostel through well-lit, empty streets with equally empty shops, some apartments, and a parking garage. Attached to a zipper on my backpack was a white teardrop shaped siren, my ‘murder siren.’ Mom had thoughtfully included this in the first package she sent me, wishing me safety in my travels. And if not safety, auditory defense. However, I wasn’t sure that, if someone did jump out of a dumpster and tackle me, that someone in the surrounding buildings would think of the high pitched ringing as anything more than a nuisance in the street. It was equally likely the assailant would have been annoyed as well, finding in my wallet only ticket stubs, minimal cash, and credit cards that charged an international fee.

I made it to Kick Ass Hostel without needing to operate my siren. On either side of the front door hung pink and purple posters with the head of the tongue-out-smiling, sunglasses-wearing donkey mascot. At the front desk stood someone about my age who looked very much like Logan Lerman. He welcomed me with an Edinburgh accent and a smile that spread up to his eyes. To confirm my booking, he took my Michigan driver’s license, checking my birthday and matching my face to the one on the card.

I hoped, as I usually did when someone examined my ID, that they would be on the verge of uncertainty that this was really me. I had been told about this four-year-old photo that, due to the baby weight I held in my cheeks at sixteen, it almost appeared as if I had a severe bee allergy and had crawled out of an angry hive into the Secretary of State office.

He handed back my card, unfazed, and while he looked at my reservation on the computer screen, began to ask me a string of questions, which I hoped were more out of genuine interest than small talk to fill awkward silence. “What are you doing in Edinburgh,” “Why study abroad in Cambridge,” “What are you studying in school?”

“Creative Writing and Computer Science,” I said, boasting a bit with the exaggerated implication that the left and right sides of my brain were well-matched and equally brilliant.

“Oh yeah? How do you like it,” he asked.

“Oh, it’s… great,” I said, fumbling, as, at this point in this trite topic of conversation, the asker tended to comment on how “unusual” this combination was, rather than request my opinion. He laughed, unimpressed by my improvised description, clearly, as someone employed by Kick Ass Hostels, a diction buff.

His final question, “What do you plan to do in Edinburgh,” was half a genuine question, half an advertisement for advice. I told him that I planned to hike up to Arthur’s Seat, not fully knowing what it was, only that it was high. From behind the desk, he pulled a map of Edinburgh, which was framed by promotions for authentic Scottish cuisine destinations: one for Indian, one for Mexican, one for Japanese, and three for Italian. He marked Edinburgh Castle with an X and circled the University and Calton Hill, making no distinction between the X and the O, as he recommended visiting all three. Handing me the map and my room card, he offered me information about the co-ed bathrooms and encouragement to try the bar and game room downstairs.

In the eight-bed female dorm, I was alone but decided, to be safe, that I would take my backpack with me to brush my teeth. This was my only bedtime preparation. I slept in my jeans, long sleeve shirt, and jean jacket, stuffing my raincoat into the corner of the top bunk of the bed I’d chosen. I lugged my backpack with me up the ladder. There were lockers right next to the bed, but I, lockless, decided to keep it close while I slept, ceding the position of little spoon.

I plugged my phone into the USB port by my head, and Googled “sunrise tomorrow time.” 7:46am. Toggled to Apple Maps. It would be a fifty-two-minute walk from the hostel to the base of Arthur’s Seat. My last bit of last-minute research was on trail maps, determining the best and, preferably, the easiest way to the top. The first result appeared to be a product of early 2000s Microsoft Paint, the colorful trail options drawn in jagged, pixelated lines over a green and gray map. I screenshotted it and began to set my alarms, tapping to slide the little knobs to green next to 5:45am, 5:50am, 5:55am, and 6:00am. It was likely that, after the hourlong walk to simply be able to stand and tip my head back to stare up at the peak, it would take another hour for my rarely exercised limbs to make it there.

—

I woke up to my 5:45am alarm still holding my docile, zippered bed partner.

I emerged from my room around 5:52am, my backpack and I returning with my toothbrush to the bathroom—the first step of the morning routine. After a few swipes of deodorant, I checked my hair carefully, in case Logan Lerman was working the morning shift. He wasn’t. Instead, I handed in my key card to an older man with a groggy voice, and stepped out onto the sidewalk, past the eternally awake, smiling donkeys into mid-November’s cascading mist.

—

At the end of a long road of shops, most brownstone but some painted flat reds or blues, a man with a backpack of his own walked towards me in the opposite direction, smoking. I made a slight zag closer to the wall, keeping a reasonable distance and granting him a good two-thirds of the sidewalk. As he passed, uninterested in me, he held his cigarette under his hand to protect it from the drizzle, and little gray clouds formed under the umbrella of his own palm.

Apple Maps directed me through an apartment complex maze, porch lights on, indoor lights off. I jogged down flights of three stairs in an offbeat rhythm. As I approached the outskirts of the apartment complex, my path was losing man-made light and not earning any God-made. I stopped when I saw a forest in front of me. Apple Maps was telling me to go through it. Reassuringly with a light blue line, which didn’t look anything like the reality of the dark black mass. I felt like Little Red Riding Hood. Except a Little Red Riding Hood who had listened to podcasts about wolves devouring little girls who walked alone through the woods and was leery of such circumstances.

I stood there for five minutes pondering whether or not the omniscient Apple Maps would knowingly send me to a wolf and also becoming increasingly aware of the exact location of my murder siren dangling from my backpack. A sound broke my paralysis. An incoming woosh on the other side of the woods. And then headlights passing perpendicular to Apple’s proposed path. I could see, as two more cars passed, that the forest was not a forest, but, at maximum, ten trees on either side of a footpath, which ended at the well-traveled, ill-lit road, a belt around Arthur’s Seat. I trusted Apple Maps again, but as I passed through this parted woods I still regularly looked to my left and right for something lurking.

I crossed the road and stood at the base. Looking up, I could hardly tell the difference between the darknesses of the cliff and the sky. This was an opportune time to pull out the Microsoft Paint trail map. The orange, blue, and pink routes were a long way off on my left, but the start of the red route was nearby, just past the roundabout, where I could see cars looping around. The description of the red route said, “very steep climb,” but countered that discouragement with “but has awesome views of the Salisbury Crags.”

After a fleeting moment of evaluation, I chose the red route. One-third of the length of all of the other routes, it had to be the quickest. Time was the most important factor to me in making this decision, as my flight back to England left in less than twelve hours and Logan Lerman’s marked-up map was heavy in my raincoat pocket, an illustrated sightseeing laundry list. The cons, I easily dismissed: it would be muddy from the unrelenting soft rain; the ankle boots I was wearing had long since lost their traction, having endured many falls and winters and early springs; I had no climbing experience; it was pitch black.

I turned right to walk towards what I thought was the entrance to the red route, comparing the street names on Apple Maps to the ones on the trail map. With only the occasional blip of headlights to cut the black, I turned on my iPhone flashlight, which was almost less helpful than the headlights. It lit up my boots squishing in the mud and then tapered off two feet ahead. I settled for this illuminated squishing, as I continued for ten minutes before hitting roundabout, which, like the road it was connected to, was nearly deserted.

I looked up towards the red route. Dark. Except for a light—it was flickering. I thanked God that the path was lit, at least in one spot. As I moved towards the start of the trail, I checked on the light, my beacon, every so often. On the fifth check, I realized it was moving and not just because my visual perspective was ever-changing. It was bobbing downhill and likely attached to a person. I stopped, thought again of my murder siren, and contemplated the safest course of action.

No, I told myself. A murderer wouldn’t wear a headlamp. That would obviously make it impossible to sneak up on victims. That’s a hiker or a runner or someone from the Department of Natural Resources surveying how the land looks in the dark.

Set at ease by this quick justification, I continued on. To set the pace and the mood, I turned up the volume on my headphones and put “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” on repeat, bobbing my head back and forth to the beat. “There’s no turning back,” Curt Smith sang, which was wrong because I kept on making turns onto paths that looked like paths but weren’t really paths. Turning back was a necessity. As I scooted down from those places to the main drag, I held hands with multiple scrawny, leafless plants, my grip pulling a few twigs free. At last, I found the right way, a worn dirt trail that meandered to the top. The sun began to rise, but it was not all yellow and glorious like it is behind the woman on boxes of Land O’Lakes butter. It was still overcast from the earlier drizzle, so the sky simply faded from black to a sort of purple and then through a handful of grays.

I kept on reaching new tops. I’d stand with my hands on my hips taking in the city and then look to my right and notice there was a higher plateau. The third plateau was my final stop. It seemed to be the highest point around, so that was it. Arthur’s Seat.

I made a 360, turning slowly, small rocks grinding underneath my feet. There was a body of water behind me that I hadn’t noticed in the dark. Like the sky, it was a calm gray hue, as if they were looking at each other in imitation. Around me, and even far off in the distance, the ground jutted up, dimpled rock laced in green. I knew these were the “awesome views” the red route had promised. The wind pushed back against my body and baby hairs flew loose around my forehead. I sat down facing the city, back to back with my backpack, leaning into it, content for it to just be us. We watched buildings’ lights pop on asynchronously and the roundabout now whir with cars. The trees were changing color below us, evolving from green to yellow in their own time.

—

I had only made it a few steps down the hill when I returned to the top. My capacity for self-consciousness had, for years, been slowly working its way into nonexistence. Trying on shoes at the mall, I would tap dance in the aisle to see if they clip-clopped satisfactorily. If the chair was comfortable enough, I might openly take a nap in public. I’d call out “Polo!” in the grocery store when other patrons, searching for their shopping companions cried, “Marco?”

“I’M THE KING OF THE WORLD,” I shouted as loud as I could, flinging out my arms, for all the city of Edinburgh and, possibly, the man with the headlamp to hear. But my voice was smaller than I thought it would be and hardly filled up any airspace. I let my arms flop back down to my sides, the friction of my raincoat making that swishing noise. I laughed that I, the King, had declared my sovereignty with a few words that could be mutilated by a rush of wind. I basked in the absence of my own echo. It was cathartic, almost, to say something to no one, to be alone and unheard. I tightened the straps on my backpack and walked away from the peak, starting down the path, afresh.