The German Emperor Meets the Heat

Alexander had written a programme.

He took it out of the inside pocket of the linen jacket at ten o’clock in the lobby of Palo Verde Hall, a single sheet of hotel paper folded in four, and unfolded it, and held it so that Frederick could read it, in pencil, in the square hand he had been taught at six:

10.00. Palo Verde Hall. 10.30. The Abernathy Index. 11.15. The A. 12.30. Luncheon. The Avenue. 14.00. The heat.

“The heat,” said Frederick.

“Sam tells me it will be ninety-one degrees at two.” Alexander folded the programme again along its creases. “It is the first ninety of the year. I have allowed an hour for it.”

He was in the pale linen jacket, buttoned, and a white shirt, buttoned to the neck, and a dark blue tie knotted small and exact, and on his head was nothing at all. Behind him, by the post-room hatch, Kessler stood in a dark suit, facing the glass doors, beyond which the arcade was white with sun.

“You’re wearing a tie,” said Jack.

“Yes.”

“It’s going to be ninety-one. You rang me. Twice. You rang me up specially to ask what you wear in Arizona in March, and I said shorts, and you said with a jacket?”

“You did,” said Alexander. “I considered it.”

“And?”

“I have read the law,” said Alexander. “On the aeroplane. The whole of Chapter Nine of the March’s code, which is the heat, and the Travellers’ Act of 1864, and the regulations under both.” He looked round the lobby with the expression of a man arriving at a cathedral he has studied from plates. “There is no provision anywhere concerning ties.”

---

The day porter had the clipboard.

It was Mr Luna’s clipboard, with the same printed sheet on it, INDOOR TEMPERATURE, HOURLY. CH. IX, ART. 4, and the sophomore with her hair up in a pencil was writing the ten o’clock in it when Alexander came and stood at the desk and looked down at it.

10 a.m. 73.

“Every hour?” said Alexander.

The sophomore looked up at him with no particular interest, and then past him at Frederick, and lifted her pen an inch, which was what Palo Verde Hall had done to the King since January.

“By law,” she said.

“Day and night?”

“Mr Luna does nights.”

“And who reads it?”

The sophomore thought about it. She had clearly never thought about it before.

“Nobody,” she said. “It goes in a box in Doug’s office at the end of the month. I think it’s, like, so it’s there.”

Alexander looked at the column of numbers for some time.

“Thank you,” he said, at last, with great feeling, as a man thanks somebody who has given him directions to a thing he has wanted to see all his life; and Kessler, by the hatch, looked at the ceiling.

---

The white box on its pole outside Old Main said 58.

Alexander stood in front of it on the burnt grass with his hands behind his back and read it, and read the small plate beneath it, which gave the threshold and the statute, and all of it again in Spanish.

“Fifty-eight,” he said.

“The threshold’s eighty-two,” said Sam, who had brought the black umbrella and held it up over nobody in particular, a round of shade that anybody could step into. “It counts the wet. There isn’t any. It’s March.”

“So it is not hot.”

“It’s eighty-four,” said Frederick.

“But the Index…”

“The Index is for when it’ll kill you,” said Frederick. “This won’t kill you. It’ll just feel like it.”

Alexander considered the box.

“It is a very modest instrument,” he said, “for so large a claim.”

On the mall the ten-thirties were going past under the palms, and every third one of them lifted a hand or a cup and said “Hey, Fred,” and went on, as Tempe had said it since January, as though he were a weather it had got used to. Not one of them looked at the young man in the tie beside him. A boy on a skateboard went past so close that Alexander had to step into Sam’s shade, and said “Sorry, dude,” to the Emperor of Germany, and “Hey, Fred,” to the King, and was gone.

“Eleven,” said Alexander.

“Eleven what?”

“Eleven people have said good morning to you since the doors of your hall.” He watched the skateboard go. “None of them have looked at me.”

“Does that bother you?”

Alexander did not answer at once. He stood in the shade of Sam’s umbrella and watched the mall, and Frederick saw him settle into something, whatever it was, the way a man settles into a bath.

“I am counting it,” said Alexander.

---

Jack was told it was mild at the bookshop at a quarter to twelve.

He had gone in for a hat, because he had left his grandfather’s on the camp bed and had begun, by the foot of the butte, to go the colour of a postbox from the collar up; and the woman at the till, who was about sixty and wore a cardigan, rang up a maroon cap with a gold fork on it and looked at him over her glasses and said, with deep pleasure, “Isn’t it lovely? So mild this week.”

Jack put the cap on.

“It’s ninety,” he said.

“I know,” said the woman. “Enjoy it, hon. Wait till June.”

He came out into the sun and stood on the pavement with the cap on and his face the colour of the cap.

“Five,” he said. “That’s five people. The man at the hotel. Mr Luna. The bloke on the tram. That girl with the dog. And her.” He looked at the sky, which was blue from edge to edge. “In November it was the fete. Now it’s mild. I’m going to come back in May and they’re going to tell me it’s brisk.”

---

The photograph happened at the foot of the butte.

A girl came down the stepped path at noon with two friends, in a maroon vest and a sweat she was proud of, and saw Frederick at the bottom, and stopped, and said “Oh my God, Fred, can I?”, and held out her telephone; not to Frederick, who was in the picture, and not to Rhys or Sam, who had a look about them, but to the nearest person standing about with nothing to do, who was a young man in a tie.

Alexander took the telephone.

He took it in both hands. He held it out at the correct distance, and looked at the screen, and moved one step to his left, so that the butte was behind them and the A was in it, and said “A little closer, please,” in his exact English, and the girl came closer, and put her arm round the King’s waist, and her two friends crowded in on the other side; and Alexander took the photograph.

Then he turned the telephone on its side and took it again.

Then he looked at the screen, and said, “One of your friends had her eyes closed,” and took it a third time.

“Thanks, man,” said the girl, and took her telephone back, and looked at the pictures, and said “Oh, these are good,” with surprise, and went away up the mall with her friends, showing them; and did not look back, or at him, at all.

Alexander stood at the foot of the butte with his hands empty.

“Twelve,” he said.

Behind him, Lukas, who had said nothing since breakfast, which for Lukas was a morning, made a small sound.

“She thought you were the photographer,” said Lukas.

---

At half past one the heat arrived, half an hour before its time, which Alexander noted.

They had had lunch on the Avenue under an awning with the misters going, and come out, and it was there: not a temperature but a thing, standing in the street, pressing down on the tops of their heads and coming up off the pavement into their faces. Frederick had lived in it since August. He watched it meet his cousin.

Alexander did not unbutton the jacket. Nor did he take out the hat, which was in its pocket, folded, where it had been since Potsdam, carried and not worn, as agreed.

He walked up the Avenue in it, upright, at his ordinary pace, as Frederick had watched him walk the length of a guard of honour in nine degrees of frost, and the sweat ran down his temples into his collar, and he did not touch it. Kessler walked behind him in the dark suit, a pace back and a pace to the left, and did not sweat at all. Frederick thought it possible that Kessler had been told about the heat in advance, and had declined it.

“Alex,” said Lukas.

“I am quite well.”

“You have not had water since the hotel.”

“I had a lemonade at luncheon.”

“That was an hour ago,” said Lukas, in the voice of a running partner who is losing patience with someone losing. “And it was a lemonade.”

Alexander stopped.

He had stopped in front of the bar with the cactus in a hat, where the black rail ran along the kerb and the trough stood full under it with the sun on the water; and he was not looking at the water. He was looking at the brass plate.

TRAVELLERS’ ACT 1864.

Frederick watched him read it twice, once for what it said and once, he supposed, for the errors, of which there would be none. Then Alexander straightened up and looked through the open door into the dark of the bar, where the cold came out across the threshold in a slab you could feel on your shins.

“Nobody keeping water by a road,” said Alexander, quietly, “shall refuse it to a traveller.”

“Alex,” said Frederick.

“I am a traveller,” said the German Emperor, and went in.

---

They followed him in, Kessler last, who took up a position by the door without appearing to have arrived at it. The bar was long and dark and almost empty, and the barman was a large slow man with a towel on his shoulder; and Alexander went up to the counter, upright, in the jacket, and put both hands flat on the wood.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “I should like some water, please. Under the Travellers’ Act.”

The barman looked at him.

He looked for a while at the tie and the buttoned jacket and the face, which was a narrow pale serious face like a hundred young men’s in Berlin; and then he filled a pint glass with ice and water from the gun, and put it down in front of the German Emperor on a paper mat.

“You don’t need a law, buddy,” said the barman. “It’s water.”

Alexander looked at the glass.

Then he picked it up and drank it, the whole of it, standing at the bar, without stopping, the way Frederick had once watched him drink a cup of Kessler’s coffee with three sugars in it at the top of a hill in Berlin; and put it down; and the barman, without saying anything, filled it again.

Alexander unbuttoned his jacket.

He unbuttoned it slowly, from the top, as a man takes off a decoration at the end of a long day, and took it off, and folded it over his arm, and stood at a bar on the Avenue in Tempe in his shirtsleeves, with his tie still knotted at his throat, and drank the second glass.

At the door, Kessler looked at the sky.

“He has taken off his jacket,” said Lukas, to nobody, in the voice of a man announcing a comet.

---

The woman came over while they were sitting in the cold at the long table by the window, recovering.

She had been at the far end of the bar with a man and a plate of nachos, a woman in her thirties in a work lanyard, and she came down the length of the bar with a beer in her hand, slowly, looking, and stopped at the end of their table, and looked at Lukas.

Lukas looked back.

“No,” said the woman. “No.” She put her beer down on the table. “You’re the kid.”

Lukas did not say anything.

“Boondocks. Scottsdale. A Tuesday night in August, like three years ago.” She was smiling now, the way people smile at a thing they have told at parties for years and have begun to suspect they made up. “You didn’t say one word. For an hour. You just kept throwing them in the hole.” She turned round to the end of the bar. “Mike! Mike, it’s the kid. The cornhole kid. The German.”

At the end of the bar, the man with the nachos put his face in his hands.

“It was my promotion,” said the woman, to the table. “We were out for my promotion, and you came over and asked if you could have a go, and you beat me twenty-one to four.” She looked at Lukas with enormous fondness. “I’ve never forgotten it. Twenty-one to four.”

“Twenty-one to four,” said Lukas, gravely.

“He talks!” She was delighted. “Mike still won’t play. He says the game’s dead to him.” She looked round the table then, for the first time, at the others: at Jack in the maroon cap, and the two officers, and Alexander in his shirtsleeves with the jacket over his arm and the second glass of water in front of him, and her eyes went over the German Emperor and on, without stopping, as eyes go over a chair; and arrived at Frederick, and stopped.

“Oh my God,” she said. “And you’re Fred.”

“Hello.”

“Hi. Sorry. Hi.” She picked up her beer. “Congrats on Sweden. I mean it. My mom watched it, the speech, she cried.” She looked back at Lukas, which was clearly, to her, the main thing. “Do you still play?”

“No,” said Lukas. “There is never a rematch.”

“Oh, I know,” said the woman, with deep satisfaction, and went back up the bar to tell Mike, who did not take his face out of his hands.

There was a silence at the table.

“Thirteen,” said Alexander.

He said it to the glass of water, quite quietly, and did not look up. But Frederick was opposite him, and saw his face, and understood, watching it, that the German Emperor had been recognised by nobody in the March of Arizona for four days, and passed over as a missionary and a photographer and a chair, and given water by a man who did not need a law, and had just watched his oldest friend be remembered for an hour in which he said nothing, while he himself was not remembered at all; and that it was the happiest Frederick had ever seen him.

---

Tyler came into the lounge at four, in his socks, with the headphones round his neck and a Glacier in his hand, and stopped.

Alexander was in the armchair by the window, in his shirtsleeves, with the programme open on his knee, making a tick beside the last line, 14.00. The heat, very small, the same size as the others.

He looked up.

“Good afternoon,” said Alexander. “You are Tyler. You keep the fire.”

Tyler looked at him for a moment.

“Hey,” said Tyler. “Yeah.” He looked at Lukas, on the sofa, who had been the camp’s hero since Monday and was now, in Rimefall, a kind of rumour. “Are you with him?”

“Yes,” said Lukas.

“Tyler,” said Frederick. “This is my cousin. Alexander.”

“Hey, man.” Tyler sat on the arm of the sofa and considered the young man in the armchair with the frank interest he gave to things that were not on a screen, which lasted, in Frederick’s experience, about a minute. “What do you do?”

Alexander considered the question.

“I am the German Emperor,” he said.

Tyler did not say anything.

He sat on the arm of the sofa with the bottle halfway to his mouth, and looked at Alexander; and then at Frederick; and then at Lukas, who inclined his head to him exactly; and then at Jack, in the doorway in the maroon cap, who had his hand over his mouth again.

“Like,” said Tyler, “of Germany.”

“Of most of it.”

“Is that bigger than a king?”

“It is a different shape,” said Alexander.

Tyler lowered the bottle. He looked round the lounge, at the poster and the card table and the drinking fountain, and then back at Frederick, with the expression of a man who has begun to suspect that his whole year has been a kind of joke and that he is the only one who has not been told it.

“Is everybody you know a king?” he said.

“No,” said Frederick. “Jack runs a pub.”

“My mum runs a pub,” said Jack, through his hand.

Tyler thought about that for a while. Then he turned back to the armchair, and put the bottle down on the carpet between his feet, and put both his hands flat on his knees, which Frederick had seen him do once before, across a table in a dining hall, on the ninth of January, before a telephone went off.

“Okay,” said Tyler. “So what does an emperor actually do? Like, actually.”

Frederick opened his mouth, and shut it.

Alexander folded the programme in four and put it in his shirt pocket, and sat forward with his hands together between his knees, and looked at Tyler Kowalczyk of Parma, Ohio, as he must have looked at the Chancellor on a Tuesday, and answered.

“Every morning,” he said, “a box comes to me from Berlin. In it are the things the government has decided. I read all of them, twice, once for what they say and once for the mistakes. If the Chancellor asks me to sign one, I sign it, because he must answer for it to the Reichstag and I need not answer for it to anybody, and a man who answers to nobody should not be the one who decides. I may ask him why. He must tell me. I may tell him I think he is wrong. He may do it anyway.” He paused. “Then I stand in the places where the Empire needs someone to be standing. That is the rest of it.”

He sat back.

“That is all,” said the German Emperor.

There was a silence in the lounge of Palo Verde Hall.

Tyler sat on the arm of the sofa with his hands on his knees, and looked at Alexander, and his face did a slow complicated thing, and Frederick watched it happen with a feeling he could not at first name, and then could: it was the face of a man who has heard the whole of an answer, to the end, for the first time.

“Huh,” said Tyler.

He picked up the Glacier again.

“That’s it?”

“That is it.”

“Okay.” Tyler nodded slowly. “Okay. That I get.” He turned round on the arm of the sofa and looked at Frederick, with real reproach, as one man looks at another who has kept something easy from him for seven months on purpose. “Dude. Why couldn’t you just say that?”

“I did say that.”

“You did not say that.”

“I’ve been saying it since August.”

“Sixteen times,” said Sam, from the doorway, where he had been standing for some time with the notebook. He looked at Alexander, and his pencil went towards the page, and stopped. “That one doesn’t go in the column,” he said. “Different monarch.”

---

At eleven, at the foot of the stairs, with Kessler waiting under the arcade by the car and the lobby dim and Mr Luna’s radio playing a ball game very low from somewhere in the Valley, his cousin stopped, and put on the linen jacket, and buttoned it, from the bottom.

“How many?” said Frederick.

Alexander did not need to ask what he meant.

“I have counted eleven hundred and four people today,” he said. “On the mall, and on the Avenue, and at the hill, and in the bookshop, and in the bar.” He did the last button. “Eleven hundred and four. And one photographer.”

“And?”

“And none,” said Alexander.

He stood a moment longer, at the foot of the stairs, with his hands at his sides.

“In Phoenix,” he said, “five people bought me a drink. I did not want any of them.” He looked through the glass doors at the arcade, at the four palo verde trees, black now against the lamps. “Today a man gave me water and did not want to know who I was.”

“Was it good?”

His cousin considered it. It was a thing he had done with questions since they were small: took them in his hands, and turned them over, and looked at the underneath.

“Yes,” said Alexander. “It was the best day.”

Then he went out through the glass doors into the arcade, upright, in the jacket, in the warm dark, where it was still seventy-four degrees at eleven at night, and Kessler opened the door of the car without a word; and at the desk, under the lamp, Mr Luna looked up from the crossword over his glasses, and watched the car go, and looked at Frederick.

“Who’s that, son?”

Frederick thought about it.

“My cousin,” he said.

“Hm,” said Mr Luna, and went back to the crossword. “Nice manners,” he said, to seven down. “Needs a hat.”