Fireworks

The new year reached Stockholm at four in the afternoon, and he watched it come in at Tyler’s desk, in the coat, on the laptop, with the fire burning on the two screens behind it.

It came in at Skansen, on the hill over the water, as it had come in on the television every year of his life wherever he had been: a crowd in the snow in the dark, in hats, with their breath going up, and the lamps, and the bell, and an actor in a long black coat at a lectern reading the poem about the bells, slowly, in Swedish, with the snow coming down on his shoulders, while the crowd stood quite still and the clock above them went round towards twelve.

When he was seven his mother had made him watch it in New Westminster, at the kitchen table in the north wing, at six in the evening, because that was when it was midnight in Stockholm; and she had said the last verse with the actor without looking at the screen, and had done it every year since, wherever either of them was.

The telephone lit on the desk.

Are you watching?

Yes.

So am I. So is your father. He says the man reads it too slowly.

He looked at that for some time.

Tell him I said so too, he wrote.

I will not, wrote his mother. He would never recover.

On the screen the clock reached twelve, and the bells rang, and the crowd at Skansen in the snow kissed one another and shouted, and somewhere behind them a rocket went up over the water and burst, white, and the snow in front of it lit up like a curtain; and in Tempe it was four in the afternoon, and fifty-eight degrees, and the sun was on the butte.

---

Alexander’s message came at six minutes past four. It was midnight at Potsdam as well.

Happy New Year. It is clear here, and very cold, and Orion is up over the Havel. After supper we poured tin in the observatory, as one does on the last night of the year, to see the shape of the next. (It was lead when we were small. It is tin now. There was a regulation.) Lukas won, which is not possible, since it is not a competition. I am told his shape was a ship. Mine was a shape. A.

And then, a minute later:

I will write to you properly this week.

He read the second message twice. It was not like Alexander to send a second message. Alexander composed one, and sent it, and that was what he had to say.

---

London came at five.

His father rang. He rang at one minute past five, which was one minute past midnight in London, and said, before Frederick had said anything at all:

“Big Ben.”

“Did you hear it?”

“Window.” A breath. “Open.” Another. “Brannigan.” And then, with the deepest satisfaction, as though he had been waiting for this since about August: “On time.”

Frederick sat at Tyler’s desk and laughed.

“Twelve,” said his father. “All of them.” A pause, in which Frederick heard the London house round him, quiet, and somewhere a door, and the clock in the hall below the stairs, which was not on time, and never had been, and had been told so. “Your mother.” A breath. “Asleep.” Another. “Sofa.” And then, more slowly, after a while: “Happy.” A breath. “New.” A breath, and the last word took him some time, and he went and found it, and brought it back. “Year.”

“Happy New Year, Dad.”

“Yes,” said his father, as though agreeing to something, and rang off.

Jack’s came at a quarter past, from Gloucestershire, where it was a quarter past midnight and, from the evidence, extremely loud.

HAPPY NEW YEAR HANOVER FROM THE FUTURE. pub doing auld lang syne. nobody knows the second verse. a man from bibury is doing a verse he has made up. mum crying at the till. And then: not at the song. at the takings. And then: ringing you tuesday. dont argue.

---

Rhys asked about the roof at six.

He asked by message, across the road, standing in the corridor outside 316 with the phone held out in front of him, as he held it now whenever he sent anything over the dentist’s, as though it might go off; and the answer came in four minutes, which Sam recorded.

Rhys read it aloud.

“Roof. 11.50 to 00.20. Not the edge. Not the chillers. Mr Luna holds the key. K.”

“How does she know Mr Luna’s got the key?”

“She knows everything,” said Rhys, and put the phone in his pocket, and then took it out again and read the message once more, to be sure it said what it said.

---

At ten, Parma.

happy new year from the future, wrote Tyler, under a photograph of a back garden at night under snow, with a great many people in coats standing in it holding sparklers and a small boy in the middle of them holding two. 22 inches. grandpa set the hedge on fire. its fine. its too wet to burn. its ohio.

At ten, also, Wilmington, and Rhys went into 316 and shut the door and rang his mother, and came out twenty minutes later quite pink, and said that the whole street had been in the house, and had said happy new year to him on the speaker, one at a time, and that the man from the hardware store had cried.

At ten, also, New Westminster.

Happy New Year, Freddie, wrote Theo. It’s next year here. It’s all right so far. You’ll like it.

He sat on Tyler’s bed by the window with the telephone and read it several times, more times than it needed; and outside the window the butte was a black shape on the stars, and the A on it, and a plane was coming in low across the bottom of the glass into Sky Harbor with its lights on, from somewhere where it was already next year, bringing somebody back to where it was not.

---

Mr Luna came on at ten with a paper bag.

He put it on the desk beside the radio and the jar of butterscotch and the crossword, and did not explain it, and wrote 10 p.m. 62 on the clipboard, and sat down, and turned the radio on, low. It was not a game. It was music, a band with trumpets, from a station in Phoenix, and at the end of every song a man said how long it was until midnight in a voice of tremendous excitement, as though it might not come.

At twenty to twelve they came down, the three of them, in their coats, and stood by the desk.

Mr Luna looked at them over his glasses.

“Sergeant says you’ve got the key,” said Rhys.

“Sergeant’s right.” Mr Luna opened the drawer of the desk and took out a ring of keys, a great many of them, on a loop of grey wire, and found one without looking, by feel, and held it up. “Every year since oh-four. Five to twelve. Up the back stairs, out the hatch, fireworks, back down, write the number.” He considered them. “Never had company.”

“Is that all right?” said Frederick.

“Son,” said Mr Luna, “I’ve been waiting thirty years for somebody to ask.” He stood up, with his hand on the edge of the desk, and picked up the paper bag, and the radio, and the clipboard, and then looked at the clipboard, and at the clock on the wall over the post-room hatch, which said eighteen minutes to twelve.

“Midnight,” said Sam. “The reading. You’ll be on the roof.”

“I will.”

“The law says every hour.”

“The law says every hour,” said Mr Luna. “Doesn’t say which minute.” He tucked the clipboard under his arm. “I’ll write it at twenty past, and I’ll write twenty past next to it. That’s not breaking it. That’s telling it the truth.”

Sam thought about this all the way up the back stairs, and at the hatch said, “That’s correct,” as though he had checked it against something.

---

The roof of Palo Verde Hall was flat and gravelled and very much larger than it looked from the ground, and most of it was the chillers.

There were four of them, grey, the size of small houses, standing in a row along the middle of the roof on steel legs, with fans in the tops of them under grilles, still; and between them and the low parapet at the edge there was a strip of gravel about ten feet wide, and that was where they stood, the four of them, in a line, as far from the edge as the rule required and as far from the chillers as Rhys could make them, which was not very far.

“That one,” said Mr Luna, and nodded at the third. “August. That’s the one that went.”

They looked at it.

“It looks fine,” said Rhys.

“They always look fine,” said Mr Luna. “That’s the trouble with them.” And he set the radio down on the gravel, and opened the paper bag.

It was grapes.

He gave them out in paper cups from the kitchen, one each, and in each cup there were twelve green grapes, and Sam counted his at once and found that there were twelve, and looked faintly disappointed that there were not eleven.

“At midnight,” said Mr Luna. “One every bell. Twelve bells, twelve grapes. Twelve wishes. One for every month.” He looked at his own cup. “My mother’s. Every year. She’s in bed now, the nurse says, but she’s got her twelve by the bed in a saucer, and she’ll do ‘em when the radio says, and if she doesn’t finish she’ll say it was the radio’s fault.”

“There aren’t any bells,” said Frederick. “In Tempe.”

Mr Luna looked at him over his glasses.

“Then somebody’s going to have to count,” he said.

They all looked at Sam.

Sam looked at his watch, which he had set, he said, to the second, at nine, from the time signal on the radio, and then at the cup in his hand, and then at the three of them, and his face did a thing Frederick had never seen it do, which was light up from the inside like a building at night, one floor at a time.

“I can count,” said Sam.

---

The town was very quiet. They could see all of it from up here: the dark campus with almost nothing lit in it, the Avenue to the west with its lights, and beyond the Avenue, faintly, music, a long way off, and voices, where the town had come out to the bars. To the west the city went on for ever, a carpet of orange light to the mountains, and the planes went down into it one after another. And to the north, close, much closer than it looked from the window, the butte, black, enormous, with the stars over it and its edges clean against the glow of the town beyond, where the lake was.

“They do them over the lake,” said Sam. “The fireworks. The town does.”

“Why the lake?”

“It’s the law.” Sam had read about it, it emerged, at four that afternoon, on the town’s website, against exactly this. “You can’t set anything off in the March in the dry months. You can’t set anything off anywhere near brush. The town gets a permit every year for the lake, from a barge, because the lake’s the only thing in the March that won’t burn.”

“It evaporates, though,” said Frederick, who had done Water in the West and got a B. “Two thousand eight hundred acre-feet a year.”

“That’s not burning,” said Sam.

“It’s going up.”

Sam considered this with great seriousness.

“I’ll allow it,” he said.

At eleven fifty-eight, on the gravel, the man on the radio began to shout.

At eleven fifty-nine Sam held up his left hand with the watch on it, flat, palm down, like a starter at a race, and looked at it, and they stood in a line along the strip of gravel between the chillers and the parapet with their paper cups, and waited; and across the road, over the dentist’s, Frederick saw, out of the corner of his eye, the one lit window, and the blind halfway down it.

“Twelve,” said Sam.

---

He counted like a man who had been waiting all his life to count something for everybody at once.

“One,” said Sam, and they each ate a grape. “Two.” He gave each second its whole length, exactly, and not a hair more, and his voice went out over the roof in the cold, quite clear, not loud, like a man calling the figures at the end of a long year to a board that had waited for them. “Three.” Rhys, on the end, was behind already, with his cheeks full. “Four.” Mr Luna ate his one at a time, small, neat, as he did everything, with his eyes on the butte. “Five.”

Frederick ate his grapes.

He did not make twelve wishes. He found, at about the third, that he was making the same one, and at about the sixth that he was not going to stop, and so he did not; he made it twelve times, one grape at a time, the same wish, on a roof in Arizona, in a Swedish coat, between a chiller that had failed and a parapet he was not allowed to stand at, while an accountant counted the seconds of the new year aloud.

“Eleven,” said Sam. “Twelve.”

And over the black shoulder of the butte the first rocket went up.

It went up from behind the hill, from the lake they could not see, a thin line of gold climbing very fast and very straight, and at the top of the line it stopped, and hung there for a moment as if deciding, and then opened, all at once, enormous, silent, a great slow chrysanthemum of gold over the whole of the butte, and the butte stood up black in front of it with every edge of it outlined in light, the summit and the shoulder; and then, as the gold came down, the light came down on the near face as well, and the stepped path going up it and the A on its flank came up out of the dark for a second, as clear as at noon; and then the sound came, a long while after, a deep soft thump that they felt in the gravel under their feet.

Then the others.

They went up from behind the butte in twos and threes and then in dozens, gold and white and a red so deep it was nearly brown, and green, and one that opened into a ring and hung in the sky like a halo with nobody under it; and every one of them lit the hill from behind for an instant, so that the butte stood there against the sky being photographed, over and over, from the wrong side, by somebody who would not stop; and the sound came after each one across the town, thump, thump, and the smoke went drifting west in long grey ribbons in the light, over the Avenue, towards the city.

Rhys had swallowed the last of his grapes. He stood with his mouth open and the empty cup in his hand and watched it with the face of a boy from Wilmington who had been sent to guard a King in a palace, and had been given a roof.

“Happy New Year, sir,” said Rhys, not looking away from it.

“Happy New Year.”

“Feliz año, son,” said Mr Luna.

“Feliz año.”

Sam did not say anything. He had taken out the notebook, and was counting the fireworks, under his breath, with the pencil going in short strokes in fives, four and a bar across them, four and a bar.

---

Across the road the light went out.

He did not mean to look; he was looking at the fireworks, and the window was at the edge of everything, and the edge of everything changed. The one window over the dentist’s, which had had its light on every night since August, at every hour he had ever looked at it, at two in the morning and at five and on the night the C came, went dark. Not the blind. The lamp behind it. Somebody in the room had reached out and turned it off, as you turn off a lamp when you want to see out of a window and not be seen in it.

Rhys had seen it too. He did not turn his head.

“She’s watching,” said Rhys, very quietly.

“She’s watching the fireworks.”

“She’s watching us watching the fireworks,” said Rhys. And then, after a moment, quieter still, with something in his voice that Frederick had heard there once before, at the end of a corridor, under a night light, saying his name: “That’s the first time it’s been off.”

“I know.”

The fireworks went on. Mr Luna sat down on the edge of a steel housing at the foot of the third chiller, the one that had failed, with his clipboard on his knee and the radio at his feet playing a band with trumpets, and watched the hill, and the light on it, and did not say anything at all.

At eleven minutes past twelve, without a word, Sam turned the notebook round and held it out.

Under the fireworks, which stood at three hundred and six in fives, there was another line, in the same pencil, small and square and underlined, which he had evidently worked out before they came up, at the desk or on the back stairs, the way he worked out everything, and only now written down:

31 d 7 h 26 m.

Frederick looked at it.

Sam did not say anything. He waited until he was sure it had been read, and then he turned the notebook back round and closed it on the pencil and put it in the pocket of his coat, and looked up at the sky, where a gold one was opening over the butte, slow and huge, as though there were all the time in the world.

---

“Resolutions,” said Mr Luna, at a quarter past, when the last of them had gone up and come down and the smoke was going away west over the city, and the band on the radio had started again. “Everybody’s got to say one. That’s the rule.”

“Whose rule?” said Rhys.

“Mine. It’s my roof.” Mr Luna pointed at him with the pen. “Political.”

Rhys thought about it with the seriousness it deserved.

“Read the Charter,” he said. “A twelfth time.”

“Accountant.”

“Fewer eggs,” said Sam.

Mr Luna looked at Frederick over his glasses, in the light from the stairwell hatch, which was the only light on the roof.

“Son.”

Frederick looked at the butte. The smoke was off it now, and it stood where it always stood, black against the glow of the town beyond it, with the stars coming back over it one by one, and the A, which he could not see, and knew was there.

“Stay,” he said.

Mr Luna considered this.

“Stay where?”

“Here.”

“Till when?”

“May,” said Frederick. “And then the next one. And the one after that.” He thought about it. “Four years.”

Mr Luna looked at him for a long moment, on the steel housing at the foot of the chiller that had failed, with the clipboard on his knee.

“That’s not a resolution, son,” said Mr Luna. “That’s a lease.”

Rhys laughed, out loud, the sudden one that had gone down the wrong way with a toastie, and Sam made a small sound in his nose that might have been the beginning of something; and Mr Luna stood up, with a hand on the chiller, and picked up the radio and the clipboard and the empty paper bag, and looked once round the roof, at the four of them, and at the town, and at the hill.

“What’s yours?” said Frederick.

“Same as every year,” said Mr Luna. “Be here.” And he went to the hatch, and down, and they heard him on the back stairs, slowly, going down to write the number at twenty past and to write twenty past beside it, so that the law would know.

---

The text came at twenty past, while they were still on the roof, picking the paper cups up off the gravel. It was twenty past seven in the morning in London.

Gott nytt år, Fredde. It is light here. Your father fell asleep in the chair by the window after Big Ben, with the window open, and Brannigan shut it and put a blanket over him. I am on the green chair. It is the first morning of the year.

And then, after a minute:

I am glad it has started.

He stood on the gravel between the chillers and the parapet and read it, and then he put the telephone in the pocket of the coat, and looked across the road. The window over the dentist’s was still dark. He looked at it for some time; and then the lamp came on again behind the blind, halfway down, as it always was.