The Index

At twenty to twelve every telephone in the library went off at once.

It was not a ring. It was a long rising tone, the same on every telephone, so that for a moment the whole of the second floor of the library sounded like a single instrument, and two hundred people looked down at their laps together.

UNIVERSITY OF THE MARCH. INDEX CLOSURE. The Abernathy Index on the Tempe campus has reached the threshold. All classes are suspended from 12.00. Remain indoors or under cover. Cooling places are open. Do not cross open ground.

And under it, the same in Spanish.

“It’s a hundred and twelve,” said a boy at the next table, aggrieved. “At the airport. It was a hundred and fourteen on Friday and nobody closed anything.”

“It’s wet,” said the girl opposite him.

It was the girl from Yuma, from the green circle at orientation, whose fun fact had been that she was cold. She was in a cardigan.

“It’s what?”

“Wet.” She pointed at the long window at the end of the floor without looking up from her own phone. “Look.”

They looked. The sky over the campus had gone white, a thick heavy lid of white from one side of the Valley to the other, with no sun in it anywhere, only a brightness, so that the palms along the mall stood perfectly still and threw no shadows at all. Frederick had come across the mall from Water in the West at eleven and the air had been like walking into somebody’s mouth.

“The Index counts the wet,” said the girl from Yuma. “That’s the whole point of it. My dad’s a roofer.” She zipped her bag. “We’re not at the airport.”

---

Rhys was at the end of the table with his phone held up a little. “Sergeant says back to the hall. Under the arcades the whole way. Not the short cut by the fountain. She can see the fountain.”

Sam, beside him, was looking at a small map of the campus on his own phone, with a dot in the middle of the mall and a number next to it.

“Eighty-two point four,” said Sam. “Threshold’s eighty-two. It’s taken outside Old Main, on a pole.” He put the phone away. “Not at the airport.”

---

Tyler was on the bed by the window with the keyboard on his knees, in the hood, in the snow.

He lifted one side of the headphones.

“Why are you back?”

“The university’s closed.”

“Closed?” Tyler looked at him with real interest for the first time in a week. “Like a snow day?”

“Like a heat day. The Index went over.”

“What’s the Index?”

“It’s a reading. Wet-bulb. It counts the heat and the wet together. They take it on the mall, not at the airport.” Frederick put his bag on the bed. “It’s called the Abernathy Index.”

Tyler looked at him.

“Abernathy.”

“Yes.”

“Like your teacher.”

Frederick stopped with one hand in the bag.

He had told Tyler about Mr Abernathy on the second night, at about one in the morning, because Tyler had asked what high school was like in New Westminster: the brown jacket and the red pen and the C plus. Tyler had said, at the end, “He sounds intense,” and Frederick had thought he had not heard any of it.

“Yes,” he said. “Like my teacher. It’s not him. It’s a woman. Ruth Abernathy. She was a doctor. A physiologist. In the nineteen-fifties.”

“His mom.”

“No.”

“His grandma.”

“No. He’s from the District. He’s never been to Arizona.”

“That’s what he’d say,” said Tyler.

“Why would he say it?”

“I don’t know. Families.” Tyler put the keyboard down. “Abernathy’s not a common name. I’ve never met an Abernathy. Have you met two Abernathys?”

“I’ve met one.”

“And now there’s two.” Tyler sat back, satisfied. “Related. I bet you a Glacier.”

“A Glacier?”

“A whole one.” He took one out of the small white refrigerator and held it up, blue, cold, like a stake on a card table. “If they’re not related I’ll give you this. If they are, you owe me one.”

“How would we know?”

Tyler thought about this. Then he looked at the snow on the screens, and at the fire, and at the window with the blind down, behind which, somewhere, there was a white sky and a university that had been closed by a number.

“There’s a picture,” he said. “Right? If there’s a lab with her name on it, there’s a picture. Families have a face.” He put the Glacier back in the refrigerator and shut it. “I’ll know.”

Then he did something that Frederick had seen him do only three times since the eighteenth of August. He looked round on the floor by the bed, and found his shoes, and put them on.

---

The campus was empty.

It was a hundred and thirteen degrees and the air did not move. There were a few people in the arcades, sitting on the benches with their backs against the pillars, not talking, the way people sit in a waiting room, and out on the open mall, under the white sky, there was nobody at all. A sprinkler had been left going on a lawn by the Wright, and the water came off it and went up into the air and was gone before it reached the grass.

“Oh my God,” said Tyler, at the first arch.

“I know.”

“It’s like the inside of a dog.”

He walked between Frederick and Rhys with his hood down, which was a concession, and Sam walked behind with the umbrella furled, because there was no sun to put it up against.

“This is the most outside I’ve been,” said Tyler, “since I got here.”

“You went to the football.”

“That was a stadium.”

Halfway along the mall, outside Old Main, on the open grass, there was a steel pole about as high as a man, and at the top of it a white box, louvred like a shutter, with a small dark screen on the pole below it, and on the screen, in red, a number.

82.6

Tyler stopped under the last arch and looked at it across the grass. He looked at it for some time.

“That’s it?” he said.

“That’s it.”

“That’s what closed the university?”

“Yes.”

Tyler looked at the white box on its pole, alone on the burnt grass in front of the oldest building in the university, with nobody anywhere near it.

“It’s a screen,” he said, with respect.

---

The Abernathy Heat Laboratory was behind Old Main, a low building of pale brick from the nineteen-fifties with a deep porch along the front and a newer wing of glass behind it, and a sign by the door that said PUBLIC COOLING PLACE. OPEN. in English and Spanish, and under it, smaller, Founded 1957.

Inside it was seventy-two degrees, and the first thing in the lobby was the wall.

It was the whole of the far wall, a single screen, and on it there was the Valley, from Buckeye to the mountains beyond Mesa, drawn in dark grey lines, and scattered across it, in hundreds, there were dots. Most of them were orange. A great many were red. A handful along the river were yellow, and as they watched, one of them, somewhere in Scottsdale, went from yellow to orange, quietly, as if it had been thinking about it.

Tyler stood in front of it with his mouth open.

“Oh,” he said.

“Every one of those is a box on a pole,” said somebody behind them. “Three hundred and forty of them. At bus stops, schoolyards, building sites. Where people are.” A young woman had come round from behind a desk by the door, with a lanyard and a laptop under her arm and her hair tied up off her neck. “We read every one of them every ten minutes. That one’s you.” She pointed at a red dot in the middle of Tempe. “That’s the mall.”

“Who’s we?” said Frederick.

“The lab. I’m Lena.” She nodded at the wall. “Lena Tso. Doctorate. The overnight minimum, which nobody wants to hear about at parties.” She looked at the four of them, at Tyler with his mouth still open, at Rhys and Sam, and at Frederick, a little longer, and her face did nothing at all, very carefully. “You want the tour? There’s nobody else. It’s been a cooling place since noon and so far I’ve had a man with a dog.”

“Is there a picture of her?” said Tyler, without taking his eyes off the wall. “Abernathy.”

“Lots.”

“Has she got a face like a teacher?”

Lena considered this.

“She had a face,” she said, “like somebody who’d been told the number was wrong.”

---

The photograph was on the wall by the stairs, black and white, enlarged until the grain showed.

A small woman in a cotton dress and a straw hat, standing in a street. A plain street of small houses, single storey, with dirt yards and wire fences and a car with its doors open, and the light so white on everything that the houses were nearly lost in it. She was about forty. She had glasses and a notebook under one arm, and in her right hand, held out from her body, she had a thing like a small wooden rattle, with two thermometers on it side by side, and she was swinging it. You could see that she was swinging it. The thermometers were a blur.

Dr Ruth Abernathy, July 1956. South Phoenix.

“That’s a sling psychrometer,” said Lena. “Two thermometers. One dry, one with a wet sock on the bulb. You swing it for a minute, and the wet one goes down, because the water evaporates off it. The difference tells you how wet the air is. How much your sweat can do.” She took one off a hook on the wall under the photograph, a replica, wood and glass, and held it out to Tyler. “Go on. Swing it. Not at anybody.”

Tyler took it and looked at it. Then he held it out from his body and began to swing it, round and round, on its handle, with enormous concentration, like a boy with a football rattle.

“In 1956,” said Lena, while he swung, “a district on the south side of Phoenix was cut off from its water for eleven days. Eleven streets. There was a billing dispute between the city and a private supplier, and the supplier turned the water off, in July, at a hundred and fifteen degrees.” She said it plainly, the way Mr Luna had said the names were on a stone. “It was a Black and Mexican district. No other district in the Valley was turned off that summer, or any summer. The supplier’s records showed arrears the same size in white districts that were never touched.”

Tyler had slowed down. He was still swinging, but slowly.

“She was a physiologist at the county hospital. The dead started coming in on the third day. She went out to the eleven streets with that, and a notebook, and walked them, house by house, and took the reading in every room where somebody had died. Not at the airport. In the room.” She looked at the photograph. “Then she counted. The city said it was a few old people in a heat wave. She brought the Diet the count. That’s why there’s a right to water in the March. And that’s why there’s an Index, and why it’s taken where you are, and not where the airport is.” She looked at the psychrometer in Tyler’s hand. “Stop. Let me see.”

Tyler stopped. Lena took it and held it up to the window and read the two thermometers, and did a sum in her head.

“Eighty-three,” she said. “In here.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s a replica,” said Lena. “It’s been on a hook for nine years. But I’d sit down.”

---

Sam had found the notebooks.

They were in a long glass case in the middle of the lobby, under a low light, six of them, small, with soft brown covers gone black at the corners, and one of them was open. The page was in pencil. It was ruled by hand into columns, very straight, and every line was filled in, small and upright and the same, all the way down: a date, a house number and a street, a time, two readings with a decimal point, and then a name, and an age.

Sam stood in front of it with his hands in his pockets.

Frederick came and stood beside him. He read the first line, and the second. Ages, mostly old. A man of seventy-one. A woman of sixty-eight, and on the line under her, the same house, the same day, a man of seventy, with the time three hours later. A boy of two.

“She put the reading next to every one,” said Sam, after a while.

“Yes.”

“Not just that they died. The temperature in the room. Wet and dry. To a decimal.” He did not take his eyes off the page. “So nobody could say it was something else.”

Rhys came and looked, and read some of it, and went away again quite quickly, to look at the wall with Tyler. Sam did not move. He stood in front of a page of pencil in a glass case with his hands in his pockets, reading every line, the way you would check a column of figures that you had been told added up, and Frederick left him there.

---

There was a smaller panel at the foot of the stairs, beside the photograph, on its own, white with black type, headed WHAT HEAT DOES.

In heat, the body moves blood to the skin to lose it. To do this the heart must beat faster and harder, for as long as the heat lasts. In a healthy heart this is work. In a heart that is already weak, it may be more work than the heart can do.

Of the heat dead Ruth Abernathy counted in the eleven streets in 1956, most did not die of being hot. They died of their hearts.

He read it. He read it again.

Then he went and looked at the psychrometer on its hook, for a while, quite closely, as though there might be something on it he had missed.

When he turned round Sam was looking at him from the glass case, with his hands in his pockets. Sam did not say anything. After a moment he looked back down at the notebook, and turned his head a little, the way you turn away from somebody in a lift, and Frederick understood that Sam had seen him read the panel twice and was not going to have seen it.

---

“Same nose,” said Tyler.

He was standing in front of the photograph with Frederick’s phone in his hand. On the phone was the class of 2031 on the steps of Ellicott High School, a hundred and forty people in rows in the sun, and at the end of the front row, in the brown jacket, with his hands folded, Mr Abernathy.

“Everybody’s got a nose,” said Frederick.

“Not like that.” Tyler held the phone up beside the photograph. “Look. Same look. Like they’re disappointed in you.”

Frederick looked. Ruth Abernathy, in her straw hat, in South Phoenix, in 1956, swinging her thermometers, looked out of the wall at him with exactly the expression of a person who had been told the number was wrong. Mr Abernathy, at the end of the front row, looked out of the phone with exactly the expression of a man about to write see me.

It was the same look. It was undeniably the same look.

“It’s not a family look,” he said. “It’s a teacher look.”

“She wasn’t a teacher.”

“She was here.”

Lena, at the desk, looked up at the phone in Tyler’s hand, and then, for about a second, at the photograph on it: at the rows, and at the boy in the middle of the second row, because H came in the middle, in a blazer, with his hair rather better than it was now. Then she looked at Frederick, and then back at her laptop, and typed something, quite fast.

“She’s buried on the butte,” she said, without looking up. “If you want to ask her. On the flank, in the old cemetery, on the east side of the path. The stone doesn’t say doctor or anything. Just her name and the years.”

“I go up the butte every morning,” said Frederick.

“Then you go past her every morning,” said Lena, and typed.

---

There were postcards on the desk, in a wire rack, a pound each, and one of them was the photograph by the stairs.

He bought it with a pound coin with his own head on it, which Lena took without looking at, and sat on the bench under the wall of dots with the card on his knee and Rhys’s pen.

Mr Abernathy, care of Eight Bars, Garfield Street, New Westminster, Columbia District.

He thought about the stool, the third from the window, and the red pen, and the stick hooked over the edge of the counter, and Mrs Merriweather handing it across the bar at a quarter past eight on a Friday, and Mr Abernathy putting on his glasses to read it.

Sir. This is Dr Ruth Abernathy, who invented the heat. My roommate says you must be related and has bet me a bottle of something blue. I have told him you are not. Please advise. Hanover.

“Invented the heat?” said Tyler, reading over his shoulder.

“He’ll like it.”

“If he says no,” said Tyler, “he’s lying.”

---

They came out at five, because the wall had turned from red to orange in the middle of Tempe, and the sky had changed.

It had gone from white to grey, and then, in the last hour, to a dark bruised yellow in the south, over the mountains, a colour he had never seen a sky go, and the air had begun to move. Not a breeze. A push, from the south, warm, all at once, like a door opening somewhere in a large house, and the palms along the mall, which had not moved all day, began to move, all of them together, the same way.

Then the smell came.

He did not know what it was. It came on the push of air, ahead of anything else, a smell so sharp and so green and so strange that he stopped under the arch to find it: like tar, and like pepper, and like something medicinal and very old, and under it all, wet earth, wet dust, a whole desert of it at once.

“Creosote,” said a woman on the bench by the pillar, with her eyes shut, breathing it. “The bushes. It’s the rain on them.” She did not open her eyes. “Best smell there is. It’s coming.”

It came.

It came across the mall in a grey wall from the south, a hiss on the far lawns and then a roar on the roofs, and then it was on the mall, rain, hard and straight and enormous, in drops the size of coins that hit the paving and bounced and steamed. In ten seconds the mall was a lake. People came out of the doors of every building, out of the library and the Wright and Old Main, and stood along the edges of the arcades in rows, under the shelter, and looked at it, and did not say anything, and breathed.

Tyler stood at the very edge of the arch, where the water came off the roof in a sheet, and looked at it.

“Is that rain?”

“Yes.”

He had come three thousand miles to get away from weather. He held his hand out through the sheet of water off the arch, slowly, palm up, the way you would hold your hand out to a dog you did not know.

“It’s warm,” said Tyler.

All along the mall, at the same moment, every telephone in every pocket went off together, the same long rising tone, so that the whole of the arcades sounded like a single instrument.

INDEX CLOSURE LIFTED.

Tyler did not look at his. He stood at the edge of the arch with his hand out in the warm rain, and his sleeve getting wet to the elbow, and on the screen of the white box in the middle of the mall, through the water, the red number went to orange, and then, while they watched, to yellow.

“Still related,” said Tyler.