Four Hundred Cots

The noise stopped at twenty past two.

Frederick had not known there was a noise. It had been in the room since the day he moved in, so low and so even that it had become part of the walls and the light, and at twenty past two on the Tuesday of the second week it stopped, and the room was suddenly larger and very still. He looked up from the reading for the Charter and listened to nothing.

Tyler did not look up. Tyler was on the bed by the window with the keyboard on his knees and the headphones on, and the hood of the blue sweatshirt up, because the room was always cold, and on the two screens over the desk it was snowing in a forest at night, and somewhere in the snow there was a fire with thirty people round it.

At ten past three Tyler put his hood down. At half past he took the sweatshirt off altogether, without taking his eyes off the screens, which Frederick had not known could be done, and sat there in a grey T-shirt and frowned at the forest.

Then he lifted one side of the headphones.

“Is it hot?”

“The air’s gone off.”

Tyler looked at the vent over the door as though it had said something surprising at dinner.

“Huh,” he said, and put the headphones back on.

---

At four Rhys put his head round the door with his phone held up a little, the way people hold a phone when the person in it is listening.

“Sergeant says it’s the chiller. The whole building. There’s a part.” He listened. “She can see the man from Facilities from her window. She says he’s come down off the roof for water and he’s drinking it very slowly, like a man who doesn’t want to go back up.”

The corridor was eighty-three degrees, and Frederick knew it was eighty-three because Sam was sitting on the floor outside three hundred and sixteen with a small thermometer on a lanyard and a notebook on his knee, writing it down. He had been writing it down every fifteen minutes since a quarter past two.

“Why?” said Frederick.

“Somebody’ll ask,” said Sam, and wrote 4.00: 83.1, and drew a line on a small neat graph from the last dot to the next one, which was higher.

Half the floor was out by then, lying along the corridor on their backs, because the lino was cooler than the air. Somebody had found the laminated sheet that the university was obliged to put up on every floor, headed in red YOUR RIGHTS IN THE HEAT, and was reading it aloud in the voice of a man reading a will.

“Article Four,” read the man. “Every person has the right to a lawful maximum indoor temperature.”

“Yeah, well,” said somebody on the floor. “Where is it, then.”

---

The man from Residence Life came at five.

He was large and slow and patient, in a polo shirt gone dark down the back, with a lanyard that said DOUG, and he carried a small grey box on a long pole, wired to a tablet, and went into every room on the third floor and put the box down beside the pillow on each bed, and waited, and went on.

He came to three hundred and twelve at twenty past.

“Sorry, folks. Won’t be a minute.”

He put the box down on Frederick’s pillow, and then on Tyler’s, and Tyler, who had not heard him come in, turned his head and found it six inches from his face and said, “Jesus.”

“Sorry,” said Doug. “Pillow.”

“What?”

“It’s read at the pillow. Not in the corridor. Not at the thermostat. Where your head goes. That’s the regulation.” The tablet made a small sound. “Eighty-six point four.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s over.” Doug wrote on the tablet with his finger, and it occurred to Frederick, watching, that this was a man who had read a great many pillows. “Eighty-five’s the maximum. Over it, I’ve got two hours to fix it or move you. Facilities say the part’s coming from a depot in Chandler on the overnight truck. So I’m moving you. Anybody who lives in the Valley, go home to your mom. Everybody else, Orne.”

“What’s Orne?”

“The gym,” said Doug. “Pillow, water bottle, meds, charger. Six o’clock. There’ll be pizza.” He looked round the room once, the way a man looks round a room he is responsible for, and then at Frederick, a little longer, with no expression at all. If he knew, he did not let it trouble the reading. “Sorry, folks,” he said, and went.

There was a silence.

“Charger,” said Tyler.

“Yes.”

“Not, like.” He looked at the black case under the desk with the lights turning in it, blue and violet, and at the two screens, and the snow. “Not the rig.”

“I don’t think so.”

Tyler looked at the fire for a long moment. Then he pulled the microphone of the headset down in front of his mouth and pressed something.

“Jussi,” he said. “Jussi. Wake up.” A pause. “I know. I know what time it is. I need you to take the fire.” A longer pause, during which a small furious sound in Finnish came out of the side of the headphones. “Because they’re putting me in a gym, man. Because it’s the law.” He listened. “I don’t know which law. There’s a lot of them here.” He listened again, and his face changed, and Frederick saw that whatever had been said in Finland at a quarter to four in the morning had been, in the end, yes. “I owe you. Keep it high. There’s wolves on the east side.”

He took the headphones off and sat holding them in his lap like something that had died.

“It’s four in the morning in Finland,” he said. Then he pulled a duffel bag from under the bed and took out a power strip with a long orange lead, and held it up. “I always bring one.”

“Why?”

“Ohio.” He wound the lead round his hand. “Every winter the power goes. They put everybody in the church basement on Ridge Road, three hundred people, and there’s one outlet, by the coffee urn, and some old guy’s got his oxygen on it. So you bring a strip, and you let everybody use it, and they love you.” He put the strip in his pocket. “I came three thousand miles to get away from that. Sleeping in a basement with three hundred people because the weather broke. And it’s August, and I’m in fucking Arizona, and I’m going to a gym.” He picked up his pillow. “It’s the same thing. It’s literally the same thing. It just doesn’t have snow on it.”

---

“She says,” said Rhys, in the corridor, at half past five, with the phone to his ear, “that the flat over the dentist has a spare room and a compressor that works.”

“No.”

“He says no,” said Rhys, into the phone.

He listened. Sam, on the floor, wrote 5.30: 86.0, and drew a line.

“She says she knew you’d say that. She says the law says a cooling place, and it doesn’t say which, and her flat’s got air, so it counts.”

“Does it?”

“Article Three,” said Sam, without looking up. “Public.”

“Is her flat public?”

“No,” said Sam.

“Sam says it’s not public, Sarge,” said Rhys, into the phone, and then held the phone a short distance from his ear for a while, looking at the ceiling, while a small sound came out of it.

When it stopped he put it back.

“Yes, Sarge. Yes. Both of us. Yes. I know he does.” He put the phone away. “She says if you’re going to the gym we’re going to the gym, and we sleep either side of you, and she’s not happy, and she’ll be up all night over the dentist, and she’d like you to know that, sir.”

“Fred.”

“Fred,” said Rhys, with the effort of a man lifting something. “Sorry. Fred.”

“Tell her I’m sorry.”

“She knew you’d say that as well,” said Rhys.

---

They walked to Orne at six under the arcades, four hundred of them, with their pillows. The other two hundred had gone home to their mothers in Mesa and Chandler and Glendale, in cars, by half past five, because they could.

It was a hundred and eight degrees. The sun was low over the roofs and still lay on the back of your neck like a hand, and the arcades made a long blue tunnel of shade with the white glare going past at the open end of every arch.

Frederick walked with his pillow between Tyler and Rhys, with Sam a little behind, and nobody looked at him. He kept waiting for it and it did not come. Four hundred people had the same pillow and the same walk in the same heat, and there was nothing left over in any of them to notice who was carrying which.

“You’re smiling,” said Rhys.

“I know,” said Frederick.

---

The Orne Gymnasium had been built in 1937 for a college of women, of dark red brick, with tall windows high under the roof and a running track round the balcony on iron brackets. It was seventy-four degrees inside and smelled of floor polish and old dust.

There were four hundred cots, in rows of twenty, green canvas on aluminium frames, and every one had stencilled at the foot, in black, MARCH OF ARIZONA. HEAT EMERGENCY STORE. DO NOT REMOVE, and on every one there was a thin grey blanket, folded, and a bottle of water.

Priya, the resident adviser, stood at the door with a list and sent them where they went by floor and room, with the face of a person defusing something. So it came about that the King of fourteen countries was allocated the third cot of the ninth row of the Orne Gymnasium, with his roommate on his left and his protection officer on his right, and the officer’s colleague beyond him, at the end of the row, against the wall, where he could see the doors.

Tyler went straight to the wall, and came back with the end of the orange lead, and plugged his phone into it, and lay down on his back with the phone held up over his face. On the phone there was a small picture of a fire, with a number beside it.

“Ninety-four,” said Tyler. “He’s keeping it high.” He watched it. “Okay.”

“There’s an old guy?” said Frederick, looking at the lead.

“No old guy. There’s a girl from the fourth floor with a hair straightener.” Tyler did not take his eyes off the fire. “She loves me.”

---

Mr Luna came at ten.

The hall was empty, so the night porter came where the hall had gone. He came in through the double doors in his cardigan, because the gym was seventy-four, with the coffee can from the night desk in one hand and a cardboard box under the other arm, and went along the rows with it.

“Earplugs,” said Mr Luna, to each cot. “You’ll want ‘em. Earplugs.”

Frederick took a pair.

“Earplugs, son,” said Mr Luna, and looked at him for a moment over his glasses, and went on to Rhys.

“Why have you got so many?” said Frederick, after him.

Mr Luna turned round.

“Two thousand and eleven,” he said. “Same gym, same cots. Chiller went in July. Two hundred and some kids, and one of ‘em snored like a truck going up the hill to Payson, and nobody slept, and a girl cried at four in the morning, and I thought, Ignacio, next time.” He shook the can. “There’s been three next times. I keep a box behind the desk. Nobody’s ever asked me to.” He looked down the rows. “I wrote it at ten, in my lobby. Ninety-one, and nobody in it.” He shrugged. “Somebody’s got to.”

At the end of the row Sam took a pair, and looked at them, and wrote something in his notebook, and Frederick was quite sure that it was 10.04: earplugs, porter, own expense.

---

“Hey,” said Tyler, at a quarter to eleven, in the dark.

The lights had gone down at half past ten, all but the exit signs and a row of small lamps along the balcony rail, so that the gym was a long dim room full of shapes, like the hold of a ship. Tyler had looked at the fire for the last time and put the phone face down on his chest, and was lying there with nothing to do with his hands for perhaps the first time since June.

“Yes.”

“What’s a March?”

Tyler was looking at the foot of his cot, where the stencil was.

“It’s the polity,” said Frederick. “Arizona’s called a March. It used to mean a border. It’s governed a bit differently from the others, because of the heat and the water and the border.”

“And there’s like a lord.”

“The Lord Marcher. Appointed. Represents the Crown in the March, does the emergencies, signs the degrees.”

“Is that like a king?”

“Not really.”

Tyler thought about this in the dark.

“What does a king actually do, though?” he said. “Like actually.”

He had given Tyler the short answer in the Wright, and Tyler had not heard it. In the dark, with four hundred people settling round them and nothing else to do, he gave him the long one.

“Well,” he said. “There are the boxes. Every day. Red boxes, from the government, with papers in. You read all of them, because you’re entitled to be told things, and that’s half the job, being told. Then there’s assent. Every Act of Parliament has to be assented to, and it always is, but it has to be, if you see what I mean; it has to go through somebody. And appointments, on advice. And the three rights, which a man called Bagehot wrote down, to be consulted, to encourage and to warn, which is the only part where you say anything yourself, and you say it in private, once a week, to the Prime Minister, and nobody ever knows what you said. And then there are the reserve powers, which nobody can quite agree about, which are for when everything else has gone wrong, and which you hope you never…”

He stopped.

Tyler was asleep. He had been asleep, Frederick thought, from about the boxes. He lay on the green canvas with his mouth slightly open and the phone rising and falling on his chest, face down, and the orange lead running away from him across the floor to the wall.

From the cot on the other side, very quietly, Rhys said, “Bagehot,” in the voice of a man underlining something.

“Go to sleep.”

“I’m on till two. Then him.” He meant Sam, at the end of the row, sitting up against the wall with a small torch held in his teeth and a calculator, doing his accounting. “Then you can tell me about the reserve powers.”

---

He did not sleep.

He lay on the cot with the earplugs in his hand and did not put them in, and listened. Four hundred people asleep were not loud. He had expected them to be. They breathed, all of them, at different speeds, so that the whole room breathed, with a sound like the sea a long way off, and somewhere far down the rows somebody snored like a truck going up the hill to Payson, and nobody minded.

He had been listening to people breathing for six days. It had started on the Wednesday, on the telephone, while his mother was talking, and he had not been able to stop since, and he did not know what he was listening for.

At a quarter past two he got up and went to the doors.

Sam took the torch out of his teeth and watched him go and did not follow. Mr Luna was in the hallway on a folding chair, with the can at his feet and the crossword on his knee and the radio, very low, playing a game from somewhere it was still early.

“Can’t sleep, son?”

“No.”

Mr Luna nodded at the other folding chair.

“Ninety-one out there,” said Mr Luna, looking through the glass of the outer doors at the shape of the butte against the orange sky. “Two in the morning. It’ll get down to eighty-eight by five, maybe, and that’s your night. That’s what kills ‘em. Everybody thinks it’s the afternoon. It’s the night that doesn’t come down.”

“Did people die? In the halls, before the law?”

“Yeah.” He said it plainly, the way he said earplugs. “Two in one August, in ninety-four. There’s a stone by Old Main. Fifteen names.” He put the pen in the crossword. “Before the law you didn’t move anybody. You opened the window and put a wet sheet on. My mother slept on the roof every July till I was twenty, four blocks from here.” He looked back at the long dim room with its lamps. “Now a man with a stick reads your pillow and you all go to the gym and they bring you pizza. It’s a lot better. People don’t know.”

They sat.

“Your folks know you’re in a gym?” said Mr Luna.

“No.”

“Rule two.”

“I know.”

Mr Luna waited, which was a thing that people who had worked nights for thirty years knew how to do, and Frederick found, after a while, that the waiting had made a space in the hallway, and that something was going to go into it whether he wanted it to or not.

“My mother’s not very well,” he said.

He had not said it aloud before. Not in Tempe. It came out quite small, at two in the morning, and sat there between the two folding chairs, and Mr Luna looked at it for a moment without picking it up.

“Then don’t tell her about the gym,” said Mr Luna.

“That’s what I thought.”

“Call her, though.” He opened the crossword. “Tell her about the earplugs. Mothers like earplugs. Shows somebody’s thinking.”

---

The chiller came back at ten to five.

He was lying on the cot again by then, not asleep, and from somewhere far off across the campus, so faint that he was never afterwards sure he had not imagined it, he heard a sound come on, low and even, the sound of a building beginning to breathe. At a quarter past five Doug came in through the double doors with his pole over his shoulder and said to Priya, quite loudly, “Eighty at the pillow,” and went out again.

Frederick got up and folded the grey blanket on the foot of the cot. Tyler did not stir. His phone had slid off his chest onto the canvas, face up, and on it the small fire was burning at ninety-six.

Mr Luna was standing by the doors, stretching.

“Going up, son?”

“Yes.”

“In August.”

“Yes.”

Mr Luna bent down to a small cool-box beside the folding chair and took out a bottle of water, cold, wet on the outside, and held it out.

“Then drink water,” he said. “All of it. Don’t be a hero. It’s eighty-eight.”

Behind Frederick, on the ninth row, a cot creaked, and a voice said, with great feeling, into a pillow, “Oh, come on,” and Rhys sat up.

---

They were on the top of the butte at ten to six, Rhys with his hands on his knees.

The Valley lay below them in the half light, flat to the mountains, with the planes coming down into Sky Harbor with their lights on, and under them the dark roof of the Orne Gymnasium with four hundred people still asleep under it. On the roof of Palo Verde Hall there was a truck and two men and a small hard light. Across the road, over the dentist, a blind was half down.

“You slept, right?” said Rhys, when he could.

“No.”

“Me neither.”

“You were asleep in about a minute.”

“I was resting my eyes. It’s a technique. They teach it.” He looked east, where the sky over the mountains beyond Mesa had gone the colour of the inside of a peach. “She’s going to ask me if you slept.”

“Tell her I did.”

Rhys looked at him.

“I’ll tell her you lay on a cot all night listening to four hundred people breathing,” he said, “and then you went and sat with the porter, and then you climbed a hill. She’ll know what that means.” He looked east again. “I don’t. But she will.”

The sun came up at three minutes to six, in a thin bright line over the far mountains and then all at once, and the light came across the Valley very fast and reached the butte and the two of them, and was already hot.

His phone went in his pocket.

It was two in the afternoon in London. His mother had written to him in Swedish, as she always did.

Your father saw the Valley on the news. 112. Is it very hot?

He looked at it for a while, with Rhys not looking over his shoulder. Then he wrote back.

Not indoors. The porter gave me earplugs.

It was true, as of ten to five. He sent it, and put the phone away, and watched the sun come up the rest of the way; and down in the Orne Gymnasium, at the end of the ninth row, he thought, Sam would be writing it down.