Window

Theo was holding a sign.

He was standing at the kerb outside Terminal Four, in the strip of shade under the canopy, beside a small white car with its hazard lights going, and he was holding up in both hands, the way the drivers held them up in the arrivals hall at New Westminster, a square of cardboard on which he had written in black marker, in capitals, HANOVER, F.

“No,” said Frederick.

“I’ve been holding it for twenty minutes.”

“Put it down.”

“A man asked me if I was meeting a German.” Theo lowered the sign and looked at it. “I said sort of.”

Then the doors of the terminal closed behind him, and he understood what the forecast had been trying to tell him all week. It was not weather. Weather happened round you. This had been waiting outside the doors on purpose, and leaned on him from every side the moment they shut, so that his nose went dry in the first breath and his eyes in the second.

“Yeah,” said Theo, watching his face. “That’s what I did.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Since last night. I walked four hundred yards to the rental desk this morning and had to sit down in a bus shelter.” Theo took one of the two boxes out of his arms. “There’s a sign in it that tells you what to do if you’re dying.”

“What does it say?”

“Get in the shade and call somebody.” Theo put the box in the boot. “I was in the shade. I didn’t know who to call.”

In the car, Theo looked at him across the gearstick.

“You said you’d stay indoors until October,” said Theo. “On the hill. In Berlin. I heard you.”

“This is indoors.”

“This is a Nissan.”

---

There was a thermometer on the dashboard. It said 109.

“That’s wrong,” said Theo.

“It says the same as the forecast.”

“That’s the airport’s. Out here they don’t believe the airport. I read about it on the plane.” Theo pulled out from the kerb, indicating for nobody. “You measure it where you are. Where we are is hotter.”

Theo drove the way his father drove the Thirty-Two, both hands on the wheel, at exactly the limit, indicating five full seconds before every change of lane, as though there were forty people behind him with shopping. The road ran east beside a river, and the city lay flat and pale on every side, with mountains standing round the rim of it, brown and violet and not quite real.

“How’s your mum?” said Theo.

“She’s got a cold.”

“Still?”

“She says the doctors won’t let her fly with it. She was going to come. She had the flight.” Frederick looked at the mountains. “Then on Tuesday she rang and said a Swedish cold was not like an American cold and she was not going to bring one to Arizona.”

“I know,” said Theo. “She rang me as well.”

Frederick looked at him.

“Tuesday night,” said Theo, to the road. “She asked if I could take two days off. She said you’d want somebody to carry the other box.” He changed lanes, indicating. “I said I could take three.”

“She didn’t tell me she’d rung you.”

“No. She said she wasn’t going to.”

There was a silence in the car, apart from the air conditioning.

“Colds are about seven days,” said Theo, in the voice he used now for things he had read in a textbook and was not yet allowed to say to anyone. Then, in his own: “Tell her I said get well soon.”

And then the road came round a long curve, and there it was.

---

“There,” said Frederick.

“Where?”

“That.”

It stood up out of the flat city by itself: a single brown hill, bare, the colour of a flowerpot, with a pale path zigzagging up the front of it. Low down on the side that faced them there was a letter laid flat against the slope, an enormous A, faded, peeling, the colour of an old sunburn.

Theo looked at it for some time, at sixty miles an hour.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“You said a hill.”

“It’s a butte.”

“It’s a rock, Freddie. You’ve moved two thousand miles for a rock with a letter on it.”

“It’s three hundred feet.”

“I’ve walked up taller things than that to get to my own kitchen.” Theo looked at the rock again. “Are you going to go up it?”

“Sunday.”

“Every morning? Like you said?”

“Every morning.”

Theo looked at the thermometer, and at the rock, and at the thermometer, and said nothing, in the manner of a man making a note to show somebody later.

---

Palo Verde Hall had been built in 1964, the year the Auditorium was finished, and looked it: a long block of pale concrete, five storeys high, every window set deep behind a row of concrete fins, so that the whole front of it looked like a radiator. There was a shaded arcade along the ground floor, and in front of it, on a strip of gravel, four trees with green trunks. Not green leaves. Green bark, smooth, the colour of a new pea, on every branch.

“Why are the trees green?” said Theo.

“They’re palo verdes. It means green stick.” He had read about them in December, when he could not sleep. “When it’s too dry they drop their leaves and do it with the bark instead.”

“Do what?”

“Eat.”

Theo looked at the trees for a long moment.

“This whole place,” he said, “is just things finding ways not to die.”

The car park was full of open boots and families and students in maroon T-shirts that said MOVE-IN CREW, pushing grey carts piled with lamps and rugs and mini-fridges and, on one, a drum kit. A girl in a maroon T-shirt came up to the white car with an empty cart and said, very brightly, “Hey! Welcome to Palo Verde! Do you want a cart?”

“I’m all right, thank you,” said Frederick, and took his box out of the boot.

The girl looked at the box, and at the second box, and into the empty boot, and at Frederick, and her face went through four things, slowly, like pages being turned, and stopped on the fourth.

“Two boxes,” said Theo helpfully. “He travels light. It’s his first time.”

---

The lift had a sign on it that said OUT OF SERVICE. Under it somebody had written in biro, TAKE THE STAIRS, THE STAIRS ARE GOOD FOR YOU, and under that somebody else had written THE STAIRS ARE 104 DEGREES, and under that a third person, LIAR, THEY ARE 79.

The stairs went up from the back of the lobby in concrete half-flights, with a rail painted maroon and a narrow window on every landing.

“Forty-four,” said Frederick, on the third floor.

“Forty-five.”

“I counted.”

“You missed the little one on the first landing.” Theo shifted his box. “My dad says every staircase in the world has one step that’s there for no reason.”

The corridor was long and bright and loud, with every door open and music coming out of four of them at once. A girl came out of one with a lamp, and saw Frederick, and stopped dead, and said to the woman behind her without moving her lips, “Oh my God,” and then, aloud, “Hi.”

“Hi,” said Frederick.

“Hi,” said the girl again, and walked into the wall with the lamp.

There were paper suns on every door, maroon with gold rays, a name on each in silver pen. Three hundred and twelve was the sixth door on the left. One sun said TYLER. The other said FRED.

“Fred,” said Theo.

“It’s what I put on the form.”

“You’ve never been Fred in your life.”

“I’ve been Fred since I filled in the form,” said Frederick, and went in.

---

The room was dark, and cold, colder than the corridor.

It was long and narrow, with walls of painted breeze-block the colour of a hospital that had given up, two beds, two desks, two wardrobes, and at the far end a window with the blind pulled all the way down. The only light came from the desk under the window: a tall black computer with lights turning slowly inside it, blue to violet and back, and two screens, on both of which, enormous and silent, it was snowing, thick and white and endless, across a dark forest, in a wind.

On the bed by the window, cross-legged, with a keyboard on his knees and large black headphones on, sat a boy of about eighteen, broad and pale, with a round face and a dark blue hooded sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled down over his hands.

He looked up. He lifted one side of the headphones an inch off his ear, and looked at Frederick in the doorway for about a second and a half.

“Hey,” he said.

And put the headphones back.

---

Theo put the second box down on the other bed, and looked at the boy, and at the snow, and leaned in and said, without moving his face, “Does he know?”

“I don’t think so.”

“He looked at you.”

“Yes.”

“He looked right at you and said hey.”

Theo looked at the back of the boy’s head, at the headphones and the small blue light on them, with an expression Frederick had seen on his face once before, on the top of Camelback, when the sun came up.

“This,” said Theo, “is the best thing that’s ever happened to you.”

The boy lifted one side of the headphones again.

“You Fred?”

“Yes.”

“Tyler.” He nodded at the blind. “I took the window. Is that cool? I can’t do glare. I’m on the screen a lot.”

“That’s fine.”

“Cool.” He looked at Theo. “You his brother?”

Theo opened his mouth and did not say anything for a moment.

“Sort of,” said Theo.

“Cool,” said Tyler, and the headphones went back on.

---

“Where are you from?” said Frederick, when he had unpacked the first box into the wardrobe, which took four minutes, and Tyler had taken the headphones off to drink something blue.

“Parma.”

“Italy?”

“Ohio.” Tyler looked at him as though he had said something very strange. “It’s by Cleveland.”

“Why Arizona?”

“Snow.” Tyler screwed the top back on the bottle. “Every year since I was born. You go out and it’s on the car, and you scrape it off, and you come out of school and it’s on the car again.” He shrugged, a large slow shrug from deep in the sweatshirt. “It basically never snows here. I looked it up. So.”

Frederick looked at the two screens, on which, in a forest at night, it was snowing harder than he had ever seen anything snow.

“That’s snow,” he said.

Tyler turned round and looked at his screens as though he had forgotten they were there.

“That’s not real snow,” said Tyler. “That’s Rimefall.” He said it the way people say that’s Shakespeare. “It’s winter forever and you have to keep a fire going. That’s the whole game. If the fire goes out, everybody in your camp dies. There’s thirty of us.” He put the headphones back round his neck. “I’ve had the fire going since June.”

“Since June?”

“There’s people in Finland,” said Tyler. “They do nights.”

---

Rhys and Sam came at four, from three hundred and sixteen, two doors down: two young men in new maroon T-shirts with the creases still in them from the packet, and lanyards with their student cards hanging in the middle of their chests, exactly where other people wore warrant cards.

Rhys was tall and fair and already red across the nose, with a smile he had obviously practised. He came in with his hand out toward the window bed.

“Hey! I’m Rhys. Rhys Whitfield. Political science. We’re just two doors down, so if you ever need anything, anything at all…”

Tyler shook the hand, the way people shake a hand that has been put in front of them.

“Tyler.”

“Great to meet you, Tyler! Where are you from?”

“Parma.”

“Great,” said Rhys.

Sam was shorter, and compact, and very calm, with round glasses and his hands in his pockets. He did not come in. He leaned in the doorway and looked at the window, and the blind, and the door, and Tyler, and the window again, and then nodded at Tyler, once.

“Sam,” said Sam. “Accounting.”

He said nothing else. It would be the whole of his introduction to everybody he met that year, and Frederick, who had been introduced by the heralds of five countries, came to think it the most complete he had ever heard.

“Cool,” said Tyler.

---

In the corridor Rhys said, out of the side of his mouth, “The sergeant’s across the road, sir.”

“Fred.”

“Fred.” Rhys said it like a man lifting something heavy. “Sorry. Fred. Across the road, second floor, over the dentist.”

Through the window at the end of the corridor he could see a low building across the road with a dentist’s sign, and above it a row of windows, one with its blind exactly half down.

As he looked at it, it went down another inch.

“She saw you look,” said Sam.

“About the bed,” said Rhys. “The sergeant says ideal. She didn’t want you by the window. We were going to have to ask you to swap.” He looked back up the corridor at the two paper suns. “He got there first.”

“So Tyler’s on the detail now,” said Theo.

“Tyler’s on the detail,” said Sam. “He doesn’t know.” He paused. “Two boxes.”

“I said two.”

“The Household estimated nine. The Household didn’t believe you. They sent the other seven to the sergeant.” Sam looked at the half-drawn blind. “They’re in her front room.”

“What’s in them?”

Sam considered.

“A kettle,” he said. “A reading lamp. Two dozen towels with your cypher on. A first-aid kit for a ship. And one marked IN CASE, which she hasn’t opened, because she says she’s frightened of it.”

---

The second box had his books in it, and his notebook, and the map of the wold with HANOVER in red biro on the gate above the school, and on top, folded square, the parcel that had come from London on Monday in brown paper. He had known what it was by the weight and the way it gave in the middle, and had put it in the box unopened because he had wanted to open it here.

He unfolded it on the bed.

It was a jumper, hand-knitted, heavy, in a dark red that was not quite crimson and not quite brown. Maroon. With a band of gold at the cuffs and the neck and the hem. She had looked the colours up. Somebody in an office in Tempe had probably sent the Queen of Sweden a card with two squares of colour on it, and she had matched the wool.

Pinned to the collar was a small white card in her handwriting, small and upright, in Swedish.

For October. M.

Theo looked at the card for longer than it took to read it.

“It’s a hundred and nine,” he said.

“It’s for October.”

“She knitted you a jumper in the colours.”

Tyler had taken the headphones off and was looking at the jumper with an interest that was open and complete, and that would turn out to be the whole of Tyler: it lasted exactly as long as the thing in front of it, and then stopped.

“Your mom made that?”

“Yes.”

“That’s sick,” said Tyler, with great sincerity. “That’s really nice.” He leaned down and opened a small white refrigerator beside the bed, and inside it, in four rows of six, filling it entirely, there were twenty-four bottles of the blue drink. “You want a Glacier?”

“A what?”

“Glacier Freeze. It’s electrolytes.” He held one out across the gap between the beds. “My mom made me bring twenty-four. She read about the heat.”

Theo took one too and read the label, all of it, the small type as well.

“Actually,” said Theo, “that’s not stupid.”

---

Theo went at six, because his flight was at seven in the morning, and because, he said, if he stayed another hour he would have to enrol, and he did not want to study anywhere the trees ate through their skin.

They stood by the car in the long gold light, which was no cooler. The thermometer said 107.

“Sunday,” said Theo. “I’ll call at ten. That’s seven here, I worked it out. Drink water. That’s medical advice. It’s the only medical advice I’m allowed to give.”

Then he did what Theo did, which was to put one arm round his shoulders, roughly, the way a defensive lineman puts an arm round anybody, and hold on, in a car park in Tempe at a hundred and seven degrees, until both their shirts were wet through where the arm was.

“You picked a rock in an oven,” said Theo, into his shoulder.

“I know.”

“Good,” said Theo, and let go, and got into the small white car, and indicated for a long time for nobody, and went.

---

The paper sun that said FRED was gone from the door by eight. Tyler’s was still there. Priya, the resident adviser, a junior in nursing who had been briefed about him by somebody who had frightened her, put up another at half past, with the face of a person defusing something.

It was gone again by ten.

---

At ten he went down to the lobby, because he could not sleep in the cold dark with the snow falling on two screens three yards away and the keys clicking, and Tyler saying every few minutes into the small microphone on his headphones, “No. No, I’ve got it. I’ve got the fire.”

The lobby at night was dim and colder still. At the desk by the doors, under a lamp, sat a small neat man of about seventy with very short grey hair and a grey moustache and reading glasses on the end of his nose, in a cardigan, the first cardigan Frederick had seen in Arizona. On the desk in front of him, in a row, there were a small radio with a silver aerial, playing a baseball game very low; a clipboard; a glass jar of butterscotch sweets in gold wrappers; a coffee can with the label peeled off, full of small orange foam earplugs; and a book of crosswords, open, with a pen lying across it, not a pencil.

Taped to the desk beside the lamp, where only the man behind it could see, there was a card with a telephone number on it and one word, in capitals, in a hand Frederick knew.

KIMURA.

The man looked at him over his glasses.

“Can’t sleep, son?”

“My roommate’s keeping a fire going.”

The man considered this.

“In the room?”

“On the computer.”

“Ah,” said the man, and nodded slowly, as somebody nods at a thing that has been explained to him every August for a long time. He pushed a plastic chair out from the end of the desk with his foot. “Sit.”

Frederick sat.

The man looked up at a small grey box on the wall by the doors with a red number on it, and wrote on the clipboard, under a column of numbers in somebody else’s hand, the first of the night in his own: 10 p.m. 76.

“Every hour,” he said. “Inside of a dwelling. It’s the law. Somebody’s got to write it down.” He laid the pen back across the crossword. “Ignacio Luna. I’m nights.”

“How long have you been nights?”

“Thirty years in October.” Mr Luna turned the radio down a little. “I was born four blocks from here. It’s student apartments now.”

“Why nights?”

“Days are hot,” said Mr Luna. “You know what I tell ‘em?” “Six hundred a year in this hall. Thirty years. Every one of ‘em, the same three things.” He held up a finger. “Drink water.” A second. “Call your mother.” A third. “And don’t go up the butte in August.”

Frederick looked at the three fingers.

“What if I want to go up the butte in August?”

Mr Luna looked at him over his glasses for a long moment with no expression whatsoever.

“Then drink water,” he said, “and call your mother.”

He reached out and pushed the coffee can an inch across the desk.

“For the fire,” said Mr Luna.

---

He went back up the forty-five steps. The snow was still falling on the two screens, and Tyler had his hood up now, against the cold. The blind was down.

Frederick lay on the bed by the door with an earplug in each hand and did not put them in.

There was a gap at the edge of the blind, about an inch wide, on the far side, beyond Tyler’s bed. If he put his head at the very end of the pillow and looked past Tyler and the screens, he could see through it a strip of night an inch wide: not black but a dull dark orange, the colour the sky goes over five million people with their lights on. And at the bottom of the strip, black against the orange, a shoulder of rock.

He lay and looked at the edge of the butte through an inch of somebody else’s window.

“Night, Fred,” said Tyler, to the snow, without taking off the headphones.

“Goodnight, Tyler.”

And then, a moment later, quietly, into the microphone, to somebody in Finland, where it was already tomorrow morning: “No. I’m here. I’ve got the fire.”