The Butte

The alarm went at ten to five, under his pillow, where he had put it so as not to wake Tyler.

Tyler was not asleep. Tyler was at the desk under the window, in the hood, with the headphones on, in the blue light of the two screens, where in a forest in the dark it was still snowing, and when Frederick sat up and switched on the small lamp by the door Tyler turned round in his chair and lifted one side of the headphones and looked at him with deep suspicion.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting up.”

“It’s five.”

“I know.”

“Where are you going?”

“To see the sun come up.”

Tyler looked at him for a long time.

“Why?”

“To see it.”

Tyler thought about this. He seemed to be trying to find the part of it that was a reason, and not finding one, and being too polite to say so.

“Is it, like, a thing?” he said at last. “Is it for a class?”

“No. It’s just the sun coming up.”

“Huh,” said Tyler. He took off the headphones altogether, and put them on the desk, and stood up, and stretched, so that the sweatshirt rode up over a white stomach, and then he got into the bed by the window and pulled the cover up over the hood and turned to face the wall.

“Night,” said Tyler.

“It’s morning.”

“Not for me,” said Tyler, into the wall, and was asleep.

---

Mr Luna was at the desk, at the end of his shift, in the cardigan. The radio was off. The crossword was finished, in pen, every square. On the clipboard his column of numbers went down from 10 p.m. 76 to 4 a.m. 74, and he was looking at the small grey box on the wall, waiting for it to be five so that he could write the next one.

He looked at Frederick over his glasses: at the running shoes, and the shorts, and the cap.

“Where you going, son?”

“The butte.”

Mr Luna did not say anything for a moment.

“What’d I tell you?”

“Drink water. Call my mother. Don’t go up the butte in August.”

“And what month is it?”

“August.”

Mr Luna looked at him for some time with no expression. Then he bent down, slowly, and opened a small refrigerator under the desk that Frederick had not known was there, and took out two plastic bottles of water, frozen solid, white all through, and put them on the desk side by side.

“Hold it on your neck,” said Mr Luna. “Here.” He touched the side of his own neck, under the ear. “Not your head. Your neck. That’s where the blood goes past.” He pushed the bottles across. “When it’s melted, drink it.”

“Thank you.”

“And son.”

“Yes?”

Mr Luna had turned back to the grey box on the wall. It had gone to five. He picked up the pen.

“Come down before it’s up properly,” he said, and wrote 5 a.m. 74.

---

Rhys and Sam were in the arcade outside the doors.

Rhys was in running kit, all of it new, with a pack on his back from which a clear plastic tube came round over his shoulder and ended in a valve clipped to his chest, so that he could drink without using his hands. He looked as if he were about to cross a desert, which, Frederick supposed, he was. Sam was in jeans and a grey T-shirt, with his hands in his pockets, and hooked over one arm he had a large black umbrella.

Frederick looked at the umbrella.

“Shade,” said Sam.

“The sergeant says we turn round at a hundred and five, sir,” said Rhys. “Fred. Wherever we are. Top or not.”

“It’s a hundred now.”

“Ninety-nine,” said Sam, looking at his watch. “You’ve got six degrees.”

---

The city was hot in the dark.

That was the thing nobody had told him. He had known that the days would be hot. He had not known that the night would be, too: that the pavements and the walls and the roads would hold the day in them all night, and give it back, so that walking along the street at a quarter past five in the morning, under the street lamps, with the sky still black, was like walking past a long row of ovens that had been switched off and left with their doors open.

They walked north up the Avenue. It was empty. A street-sweeper went by on the far side, slowly, with its brushes turning and its orange light going round. The shops had their shutters down under the shade awnings. Outside a bar with its lights still on, a girl in a party dress was sitting on the kerb with her shoes in her lap and a slice of pizza, and as they went past she looked up at Frederick, and he waited, as he always waited, for the face to change.

It did not change. She looked at him, and at the man with the tube on his chest, and at the man with the umbrella, and said, “Morning,” with her mouth full, and went back to the pizza.

“Morning,” said Frederick.

At the top of the Avenue, where it ran out against the dark, there was the butte.

---

There was a gate at the foot of it, in a low stone wall, and a sign on the gate that said HAYDEN BUTTE and CITY OF TEMPE PARKS, and beside the gate, on a post, a small square board with lit letters, green.

PATH OPEN.

And under it, smaller, in white:

CLOSES 8 A.M. TODAY. INDEX TAKEN AT THIS SITE.

And on the post under the board, a laminated notice, sun-faded, with a drawing on it of a man lying down:

IN SUMMER, CLIMB BEFORE SUNRISE OR NOT AT ALL.

“Before sunrise,” said Rhys, approvingly, reading it. “That’s us.”

They went through the gate.

The path went up the face of the butte in steps. Not built steps, at first, but the rock itself, cut and squared and worn smooth in the middle by a century of feet, so that each one was a little hollow, like the step of an old church; and then, higher up, where the slope steepened, concrete, with a pipe rail painted maroon, zigzagging back and forth across the face. It was very dark. There were no lights on the path. The rock on either side was warm under his hand, warmer than his hand, as though something under the hill were breathing.

They were not the only ones. There was a torch ahead, bobbing, high up, near the top. There were two women behind them, in running clothes, talking about somebody called Derek, who came up past them at the second bend, said “morning” each, and went on up without stopping or looking at anyone, still talking about Derek.

He held the frozen bottle against his neck, under the ear, where the blood went past.

It helped. It helped so much that he nearly laughed.

---

Halfway up, the path came round a corner and went across the top of the A.

He had not understood how large it was. From the road, on Thursday, it had been a letter. Here, close, it was a field. It lay against the slope below the path, enormous, its two legs going down into the dark and its crossbar out of sight, and the edge of it was right there, by the path, at his feet, where he could crouch and touch it.

He crouched and touched it.

It was paint. It was paint on rock, and it was thick. At the very edge, where it had begun to peel away from the stone, he could see the layers, one on another, all different, maroon and darker maroon and something nearly brown and something nearly pink and, very deep, near the rock, a thin line of white, a great many of them, pressed together, like the pages of a book seen end on. One for every autumn. Every first-year class there had ever been, one coat each, on top of the one before.

“October,” said Rhys, behind him. “First cool week. It’s the law. You’ll be doing it.”

Frederick looked at the layers for a moment longer, and stood up.

---

The top was small.

It was a rough little plateau of broken rock, no bigger than a tennis court, with a low fence round a cluster of aerials in the middle and a few flat stones round the edge that people had evidently been sitting on for a long time. The torch that had been ahead of them belonged to an old man, of about eighty, in a white cap and a white short-sleeved shirt, who was sitting on one of the flat stones on the east side with a thermos between his feet and a cup in his hand, looking east. He did not look round.

And below them, on every side, there was the Valley.

It went on for ever. That was the first thing. It went away from the foot of the butte in every direction, flat, to the edge of the world, and every inch of it was lit: streets in long straight lines of orange lamps, crossing other long straight lines, to the horizon, a grid of light so large and so regular that it looked less like a city than like the workings of something, a circuit. The lake lay below them to the north, black, with the lights of the far shore lying on it in long trembling lines. There was the stadium, close, a great dark bowl. A tram was crossing the bridge over the lake, lit, small, empty, the first one, going toward Phoenix.

And to the west, three miles off, the airport.

He could see the whole of it. The runways in their long lines of blue lights. The terminals. And on the runways, one after another, the aircraft going out: an engine rising to a roar that reached them a second after the lights began to move, and the lights going faster and faster down the runway, and lifting, and climbing away to the west over the city with their lights on, red and green and white, one, and then two minutes later another, and another, all of them going now, at half past five in the morning, because the air was thick enough to carry them at half past five and would not be at noon.

“Morning bank,” said Sam, beside him, watching them. “Everything that can, goes before seven.”

He thought about the top of the Kreuzberg, and the aircraft coming down out of the snow into Tempelhof with their lights on, and Alexander knowing which one was the Hamburg. That had been seven months ago, in fourteen degrees of frost, and he had been standing at a parapet with four people who loved him, choosing this.

Here it was a hundred degrees, and there was nobody here who knew him at all.

He went and stood on the east side, a little way from the old man in the white cap, and looked east.

---

The sky over the mountains was going grey.

Then it was not grey. It went, very quickly, from grey to a pale clean yellow, the colour of the inside of a lemon, along the whole line of the mountains to the east, which stood up black against it with their tops ragged like torn paper; and the yellow went orange at the bottom; and then, exactly at the place where the old man was looking, as if he had been told, there was a point of light on the edge of the mountains so bright that it was not a colour at all.

Eight minutes to six, said Sam’s watch.

It came up fast. It came up the way nothing comes up in Berlin in January: in a rush, as though it had been waiting behind the mountains with its engines running, and the whole of the upper edge of it was over the ridge in a few seconds, and the light came across the Valley toward them, across the grid of lamps, which went pale under it one after another, mile after mile, and across the lake, which went from black to bronze from end to end in one long flash, and up the side of the butte, and onto his face.

It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in Arizona.

It lasted about forty seconds.

Then the heat arrived. It did not come gradually. It came as the light came, in a single wave, from the east, across the Valley, as though somebody standing behind the mountains had opened the door of an oven; and it hit his face and his arms and his chest all at once, so that he took a step back.

“Christ,” said Rhys.

“A hundred and one,” said Sam, looking at his watch.

Frederick stood on the east side of the summit of Hayden Butte with a melting bottle of water against his neck, in the full face of the sun, with his eyes watering, and the shirt already dark on him from collar to hem, and found that he was laughing.

He did not know why. He could not have explained it to anybody. He stood and laughed into the sun, out loud, and nobody on the top of the butte took the slightest notice of him: not the two women talking about Derek, who had their telephones up, photographing the sun; not the old man in the white cap, who poured himself another cup of something from the thermos and drank it, in a hundred and one degrees, without looking round.

---

The women went down. The old man stayed.

After a while, without turning his head, he said, “First time?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so.” The old man drank. “You’ll stop by October.”

Frederick looked at him.

“Why October?”

“Everybody stops by October.” The old man screwed the cup back on the thermos. “In August you come up because it’s the only time you can. In October it’s nice. When it’s nice you can come any time you like.” He stood up, slowly, with a hand on his knee. “So you don’t.”

He put the thermos under his arm and nodded at Frederick, once, the way one man nods to another at a bus stop, and went away down the path in his white cap without looking back.

“One,” said Sam.

Rhys looked at him.

“One what?”

“Morning.” Sam was looking at the sun, with his hands in his pockets and the umbrella still furled over his arm. “Every morning for four years. That’s what’s in the file.” He did a sum, without moving his lips. “That’s one of fourteen hundred and sixty-one.”

“Sixty-one?”

“There’s a leap year,” said Sam. “In thirty-six.”

---

His telephone buzzed at the bottom of the path, by the gate, where the green sign said PATH OPEN and the white one under it had changed to CLOSES 7 A.M. because the Index had gone up.

He had sent Jack a photograph from the top: the sun, just clear of the mountains, enormous and white, and the Valley under it in a gold haze to the edge of the world. It was two in the afternoon in Coln. Jack would be behind the bar.

THATS JUST THE SUN

And then, a moment later:

WE HAVE THAT HERE

And then:

WELL NOT TODAY. ITS RAINING

He stood by the gate with sweat running into his eyes and typed with one thumb: It’s a hundred and one degrees.

There was a pause. He could see Jack, at the end of the bar of the New Inn, with a cloth over his shoulder and a glass in his hand that was already dry, reading it twice.

AT SIX IN THE MORNING

Yes.

The answer took a little longer.

HANOVER YOU ABSOLUTE LEMON

And then, after another pause, on a line by itself, without capitals, which Jack never did:

its beautiful though

---

Theo rang at seven, which was ten in New Westminster, exactly, to the second, as he had said he would.

“Did you go up it?”

“This morning.”

“How was it?”

“A hundred and one.”

“At six?”

“At eight minutes to six.”

There was a silence on the line. He could hear Theo’s room behind it, a fan going, and a door shutting somewhere down a corridor. Theo was in the medical school’s hall, in a room Frederick had never seen, with a desk and a skeleton on a stand that Theo had bought second-hand from a final-year student and called Desmond.

“Freddie,” said Theo.

“It was lovely.”

“Was it?”

“It was the loveliest thing I’ve seen since the Kreuzberg.” He was sitting on the bed by the door, in the dark, because Tyler was asleep again, or still. “For about forty seconds. Then it was like being in a kiln.”

“Did you put anything on your neck?”

“A frozen bottle. Under the ear.”

“Good,” said Theo, with surprise and enormous approval. “Who told you that?”

“The night porter.”

“I like the night porter,” said Theo.

“Nobody looked at me,” said Frederick.

Theo did not say anything.

“On the way up. On the top. Nobody. There was a girl on the kerb with a pizza, and she said good morning, and that was it. There were two women who talked about somebody called Derek the whole way up and down. There was an old man with a thermos.” He looked at the gap at the edge of Tyler’s blind, which was dark now, because the sun had gone round. “He said I’ll stop by October.”

“Will you?”

“No.”

“Okay,” said Theo, in the voice in which he had said okay, Freddie, eat your dinner at the Hartigans’ table five years before, which meant that he had heard it and was not going to argue with it tonight. “Does Tyler know yet?”

“No. He looked for me at orientation.”

“He what?”

“Somebody told the whole hall I was there, and two thousand people turned round to look, and Tyler turned round too.” He heard Theo begin to laugh. “He said he didn’t see me. He said he thought I was probably at the back with guys.”

Theo laughed. He laughed the way he laughed at things that were not supposed to be funny, helplessly, on a long rising note, until Frederick could hear him put the telephone down on the desk and pick it up again.

“Guys,” said Theo, wiping something. “Oh, I love Tyler. I want Tyler for Christmas.”

“How’s medical school?”

“We meet our donors tomorrow.” Theo’s voice changed, a little. “That’s what they’re called. Donors. You’re not allowed to give them names.” A pause. “Everybody gives them names.”

“What will you call yours?”

“I’m not telling you,” said Theo. “It’ll be private, between me and him.” Another pause. “How’s your mum? Has she rung?”

“She texted. She’s still in bed with the cold.” He looked at his telephone, at the last message from London, which had come at eleven that morning, Tempe time, seven in the evening there, in answer to the photograph of the sun. “She says she’s looked at the sun eleven times.”

There was a short silence on the line.

“In bed,” said Theo.

“She says it’s a Swedish cold.”

“Since when?”

“Since Tuesday. Since before Tuesday.” He did the sum. “Since about the fifteenth.”

Theo was quiet for long enough that Frederick looked at the telephone to see if the call had dropped.

“Tell her I said hi,” said Theo at last.

“I will.”

“Sunday,” said Theo.

“Sunday.”

---

He went down at ten to get a bottle of water from the machine in the lobby, and Mr Luna was at the desk in the cardigan, just come on, with the radio on and a new crossword open and a new page on the clipboard, blank.

Mr Luna looked at him over his glasses.

“Went up,” said Mr Luna.

“Yes.”

“Came down.”

“Yes.”

Mr Luna nodded, slowly, and looked at the grey box, and wrote 10 p.m. 76 at the top of the page, and reached out without looking and pushed the jar of butterscotch an inch across the desk toward him, and Frederick took one, and stood by the desk with it in his mouth, under the cold grille, while somebody on the radio struck out.

“Call your mother?” said Mr Luna.

“She texted.”

Mr Luna looked at him over the glasses for a long moment.

“That’s not what I said,” said Mr Luna, and went back to the crossword.