Three of Us

The fire had burned down in the night.

He saw it before he was properly awake, from the bed by the door, with the blanket up to his ears: on the two screens under the window, where the blind was still up and the sky beyond it was grey and lightening over the butte, the forest was dark and the snow was coming down slantwise, and in the middle of the ring of huts the fire was a low red heap with no flame on it at all, and round it the figures in furs were standing closer than they had stood the night before, with their hands out.

He got up.

The room was cold, the dull still cold of a house that nobody is heating, which gets into the walls and comes back out of them. The small grey box by the door said sixty-two. It was the law’s thermometer, which told the building how hot it was allowed to be and had nothing to say about anything else.

He put on the coat.

It was navy and long and Swedish, and his mother had said you will want it in December in the voice there was no door in, and it had hung in the wardrobe since August and been laughed at by Tyler twice. He sat down at Tyler’s desk in it and woke the mouse.

The small brown square was in the corner of the left-hand screen, where Tyler had said. He clicked it. Nothing happened. He clicked the fire. Nothing happened. He clicked the square again and then the fire again, more slowly, the way his father found the next word, and one of the figures in furs turned round and walked to a pile at the edge of the camp and bent down and came back with a log in its arms, and put the log on the heap, and the heap caught, and the fire went up, orange and then yellow, and all round it, on both screens, in the snow, the figures in furs stepped back a pace and stood a little straighter.

He sat back in Tyler’s chair.

A line of white writing appeared at the bottom of the screen.

morning tyler

He looked at it for some time. Then he typed, with one finger, brb.

There was a pause. Then:

you always say brb lol

brb, typed Frederick, and took his hand off the keyboard as though it were hot, and sat in the coat in front of the fire in the forest with the real sky going white over the real butte beyond it, and found that he was absurdly pleased.

---

Rhys was at the door at eight.

He stood in the doorway in a grey sweatshirt with a mug in each hand and looked at the King of fourteen countries in a long navy coat at his roommate’s desk in front of a forest fire.

“Sir,” said Rhys.

“There’s nobody here.”

“That’s why, sir.” Rhys came in and put one of the mugs down beside the keyboard. “When there’s nobody here, it’s sir. When there’s somebody, it’s Fred. The sergeant says it’s like the fire door. You don’t prop it open just because nobody’s coming.”

“Did she say that?”

“She said something like it. It had the fire door in it.” Rhys looked at the screen. “Is that his game?”

“I’m keeping it going.”

“For him?”

“For thirty-one people. There’s a man in Leeds.”

Rhys looked at the fire for a while, and at the figures in furs round it, and at the snow coming down slantwise, with the face of a political scientist trying to decide whether a thing was an institution.

“Why do they need a fire?”

“If it goes out they all die.”

“All of them?”

“Tyler says.”

“That’s a very fragile society,” said Rhys, and drank his coffee, and they both watched it burn.

---

Sam came at a quarter past with the notebook and a problem, which he set out at the foot of Frederick’s bed in the manner of a man presenting the quarterly figures to a board that would not like them.

“The dining hall’s shut,” said Sam. “Till the eighth. The shop in the hall next door’s shut. The coffee cart’s shut. The sergeant says no deliveries.”

“Why no deliveries?”

“Because a delivery,” said Sam, reading from the notebook in the sergeant’s cadence, which he did not know he was doing, “is a stranger who knows the address and the room and the time, and we don’t let strangers know all three.” He turned a page. “So we can go out, together, on foot, within the perimeter, which is the Avenue and the lake and back, and she wants to know where. Or we can cook.”

“Cook where?”

“There’s a kitchen. Ground floor, behind the lounge. It’s got a fridge, a microwave, a sink, and a hob with two rings.” He looked up. “One ring works.”

There was a short silence in the room.

“What can you cook?” said Frederick.

“Rice,” said Sam.

“Rhys?”

Rhys considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.

“A cheese toastie,” he said. “In a pan. My mum’s way. With the butter on the outside.” He thought. “Two, if the bread’s thin.”

They both looked at Frederick.

He thought about it. He thought about twenty years of palaces and schools and a bar, in all of which food had arrived, on plates, from doors; and about the one time Mrs Merriweather had let him behind the kitchen counter at Eight Bars and had taken the spatula back from him after a minute and a half without a word.

“Eggs,” he said.

“What kind of eggs?”

“The kind where you break them into a pan,” said Frederick, “and then something happens.”

Sam wrote it down. He wrote it down in a column under rice and toastie, and beside each, in pencil, a figure, and at the bottom a line, and under the line, after a moment’s thought, a single word that Frederick, reading it upside down, made out as scurvy.

---

They went to the supermarket on the Avenue at ten, the three of them, on foot, through a campus with nobody in it.

He had not known that a place could be so empty and so bright. The mall ran away under the palms in the low sun with every arcade empty and the fountains off, and their feet made a sound on the paving that he had never heard on it, because there had always been six thousand other feet making it at the same time. A cat sat on the steps of the library as though it had been left in charge. And the butte stood at the end of the mall with the sun on it and the A on its flank, which he had painted, a small part of it, in October, and nobody at all on the stepped path, from the bottom to the top.

“It’s very quiet,” said Rhys, at his shoulder, in a low voice, as though the campus might wake up.

“Yes.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I love it,” said Frederick, and Rhys looked at him sideways and did not say anything, and Sam, on his other side, wrote something down while walking, which Frederick had not known was possible.

In the supermarket Sam pushed the trolley and Rhys chose the bread, holding loaves up to the light to judge their thinness like a jeweller, and Frederick was sent for eggs, and stood in front of the eggs for a long time, because there were twenty-two kinds of eggs and he had not known there were more than one; and when he came back with a box of a dozen brown ones Sam took them out of his hands and opened the box and looked at every egg, and closed it, and put it in the trolley.

“One was cracked,” said Sam.

“Was it?”

“No,” said Sam. “But you didn’t look.”

At the till a woman of about seventy in a lilac fleece and shorts, with legs as brown as a saddle, looked at the three of them and their trolley and said to Frederick, in the voice of the upper Midwest, very kindly, “You boys stuck here for the holidays?”

“Yes,” said Frederick.

“Us too. Every year. We’re from Duluth.” She looked at his coat. “Honey, it’s sixty-three.”

“I know.”

“We’re in shorts,” said the woman from Duluth, with deep satisfaction, and looked at him once more, a little longer, with her head on one side, as though trying to place a face from a newspaper in a dentist’s waiting room; and then decided, visibly, that she could not have, and went out into the sun.

---

The eggs happened at one.

The right-hand ring, it turned out, got warm in a thoughtful, unhurried way after about twenty minutes and then went off again, like a man coming to the door in his dressing gown and deciding not to answer it. He broke the eggs into the pan on the left one, four of them, one at a time, while Rhys stood at his elbow and said “Gently” and Sam stood in the doorway with the notebook and said nothing, and the first two went in whole and the third broke on the edge of the pan and went in partly and the fourth went on the hob. Then something happened. It was not, by any standard he knew, eggs. It was not, either, anything else. It was yellow and white and brown at the edges and it moved when the pan moved, and Rhys looked at it for a long time, as a man looks at a car that has been in a flood.

“That’s scrambled,” said Rhys.

“I didn’t scramble them.”

“They scrambled themselves, sir,” said Rhys. “Out of fear.”

They ate it anyway, with Rhys’s toasties, which were perfect, cut corner to corner the way his mother cut them, and Sam’s rice, which was also perfect and of which there was a great deal, because Sam had made it by weight; and they ate it in the lounge under a poster about scorpions, the three of them, with nobody else in the building but a drinking fountain that coughed every so often in the corridor, to keep its pipe clear.

“Your mum,” said Frederick, to Rhys. “Where is she?”

“Wilmington.” Rhys ate a corner of toastie. “My dad was a constable there. Thirty-one years.” He looked at the toastie. “He thinks this is the best thing that ever happened. Me. Here. With you.” He thought about it. “He doesn’t say. He tells the man at the hardware store and the man at the hardware store tells my mum.”

“And she told the street.”

“She’d told the street before he’d finished telling the man at the hardware store,” said Rhys. “She rang them. She has a list.”

Frederick looked at Sam.

“Detroit,” said Sam, before he was asked. “My mother’s a deaconess. My father’s a tax accountant. My sister’s a tax accountant.” He ate some rice. “I’m the one who went into the police. They pray for me in two churches.”

“Why did you?”

Sam considered it, with his fork in the air.

“The pension,” he said.

Rhys laughed so suddenly that a piece of toastie went down the wrong way, and Frederick had to hit him on the back, twice, which was the first time in his life he had hit an officer of the Royal Protection Service, and Sam watched the two of them and ate his rice and did not smile, very carefully, for a long time.

“And because I’m good at it,” he said, when Rhys could breathe. “Standing in doors. Noticing what’s out of place. It’s the same as the other thing, really.” He put the fork down. “It’s the same as a ledger. Something’s always out of place in a ledger. You just have to want to find it more than it wants to hide.”

---

They played cards in the afternoon, because there was nothing else to do, and because Rhys had a pack in his kit, as all officers of the Royal Protection Service had a pack in their kit, for waiting.

They played a game Rhys’s father had taught him in a patrol car in Wilmington, which had a name that could not be said in front of a deaconess, and Sam won it. They played cribbage, which Frederick’s father had taught him on the quiet nights at Eight Bars, with a board and pegs and a great deal of patience, and Sam won that. They played whist, because it was the only game all three of them knew, and Sam won every hand, steadily, without any expression, laying his cards down one at a time like a man paying a bill exactly, and at the end of the fourth hand Rhys put his cards face down on the table and looked at him.

“You’re counting them.”

“Yes.”

“That’s cheating.”

“It’s not cheating,” said Sam. “It’s arithmetic. You could count them too. Nobody’s stopping you.” He shuffled. “You just don’t want to as much as I do.”

At four the light went gold and then pink on the wall of the lounge, and Frederick went up to the room to put another log on the fire, because it was burning low again and he could not stop thinking about it, and found a line of white writing waiting for him at the bottom of the screen.

tyler ur fire is low mate

And under it, from somebody else, an hour later:

ty??

He put the log on. The figures in furs stepped back and stood straighter. He sat in Tyler’s chair in his coat and looked at the two lines of writing for a while, and then he typed, carefully, with one finger, because Tyler had said don’t talk to anybody and it seemed to him that this was a matter in which the instruction might have to be read in its spirit and not its letter:

Tyler is in Ohio. I am his roommate. I am keeping the fire until January. Merry Christmas.

The answer came at once.

legend, said the man from Leeds.

---

Mr Luna came on at ten.

Frederick heard him come, through three floors of a building that had nothing else in it to hear: the lobby door, and Mr Luna’s voice saying good evening to the day porter going off, and then, very faint, a radio coming on, low, a man talking about a game somewhere that was being played in the warm.

He went down at eleven, in the coat.

The lobby was dim and cold, with the post-room hatch shut and the lift standing open with its light on and nobody to take anywhere; and at the desk, under the lamp, in the cardigan, with the radio and the jar of butterscotch and the crossword in pen, Mr Luna was writing a number on the clipboard.

11 p.m. 62.

“Can’t sleep, son?”

“No.”

Mr Luna pushed the plastic chair out from the end of the desk with his foot, as he had in August, and Frederick sat in it.

“Lowest I’ve written in that column since February,” said Mr Luna, and laid the pen across the crossword, and looked at the coat. “That’s a good coat.”

“It’s Swedish.”

“Looks it.” He took a butterscotch out of the jar and unwrapped it and put it in his mouth and pushed the jar an inch across the desk, which was an invitation, and Frederick took one. “Your two up there?”

“Rhys is on the chair at the end of the corridor. Sam’s asleep. They swap at two.”

“Good boys.”

“They beat me at cards. All afternoon.”

“Accountant one counts ‘em,” said Mr Luna.

Frederick looked at him.

“Thirty years,” said Mr Luna, by way of explanation, and listened to the radio for a while with his head on one side.

They sat. Outside the glass doors the arcade was dark, with one lamp at the far end, and beyond it the road, and across the road, over the dentist’s, the one window with its light on and its blind halfway down.

“Who’s usually here?” said Frederick. “At Christmas.”

“Kids from far off.” Mr Luna did not have to think. “Kids who can’t go home, or can’t afford to, or haven’t got one. Nigeria. Sonora, when the border’s bad. Korea. A boy from Fiji, three years running, played the ukulele in the lobby at four in the morning and I never once told him to stop.” He sucked the butterscotch. “Girl from Mongolia, one year. Cried for three days. Then she ate everything in the building. Married a hydrologist.” He thought about it. “Usually there’s eight, ten. They put ‘em in one hall, the far one, and I go over there.” He looked round the dim lobby with its open lift and its shut hatch and its long noticeboard of September. “Never had one in this hall before. Never had three.”

“Sorry.”

“What for?”

“For keeping you here.”

Mr Luna looked at him over his glasses for a while with no expression at all.

“Son,” he said. “I’d be here anyway. I’d be over in the far hall with a boy from Fiji. I’m here for Christmas every year since oh-three. I asked for it.” He turned the radio down a little. “My wife used to say it’s the only night of the year a night man’s any use. Everybody else has gone home. Somebody’s got to be where they’ve gone from.”

He did not say anything else about his wife, and Frederick, who had been brought up by a woman who knew the length of every silence, heard the tense, and did not ask.

On the radio somebody hit something, and a crowd a long way off made a sound, and Mr Luna listened with his head on one side and made a small noise of satisfaction, as he had in August.

“You call your mother?” he said.

“This morning. She was resting. Ebba said she’d ring back.” He stopped. He had said it once, in a hallway outside a gym, at two in the morning, and it had sat between two folding chairs. “She rests in the afternoons now.”

“Hm,” said Mr Luna. He picked up the pen and looked at the crossword. “Mine doesn’t. Ninety-one. Never rested an afternoon in her life. Called this desk at six this morning to see if I was home.” He wrote a word in the crossword, in pen, without hesitating. “Twenty-third, Friday, she’s got the whole family in her kitchen. Forty people. My sisters, their kids, their kids’ kids. Making tamales. A hundred dozen. She hasn’t made one herself since twenty nineteen. Sits in a chair at the end of the table and tells everybody they’re doing it wrong.” He wrote another word. “She’s always right.”

Frederick sat very still on the plastic chair.

“A chair,” he said.

“By the stove. Same chair forty years. My father bought it.” Mr Luna looked up. “What?”

“Nothing.”

Mr Luna looked at him over his glasses a moment longer, in the way of a man who has worked nights for thirty years and knows when something has gone into the space in a hallway and does not need to pick it up.

“Go to bed, son,” he said. “Tell the political one he can have a butterscotch at two.”

---

Rhys was on the chair at the end of the corridor, by the fire door, under the single night light, in his sweatshirt, with his feet flat on the floor and his hands on his knees and a book face down on the lino beside the chair leg, not open.

He stood up when Frederick came out of the stairwell.

“Sir.”

“There’s nobody here.”

“No, sir.”

“Mr Luna says you can have a butterscotch at two.”

Rhys thought about this.

“That’s very good of him,” he said gravely, and sat down again.

Frederick went along the corridor in the coat past the shut doors, all of them shut, with their paper suns still on them, faded, and the names in silver pen, and the one at 312 that said TYLER, and beside it the small rectangle of old tape where his own had been. At the door he stopped and looked back. Rhys was on the chair under the light, at the far end of the empty corridor, at the fire door, with his hands on his knees, looking at nothing in particular and everything in the corridor at once.

“Rhys.”

“Sir.”

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, sir,” said Rhys, and then, after a moment, along the whole length of the empty corridor, quite quietly: “Fred.”

He went in. The fire was burning on the two screens in the dark, and the snow was falling in the forest, and the figures in furs stood round it, close, all thirty-one of them, with their hands out; and beyond the screens, through the window with the blind up, the butte was a black shape against a sky full of stars, and across the bottom of the window, low, very far off, a single aircraft was coming down into Sky Harbor with its lights on, from somewhere colder, bringing somebody home.