The Right Question

The stone was on the east side of the path, below the A, where Lena had said it would be.

He had gone past it twenty-eight times. He found that out on the twenty-ninth, at a quarter to six in the morning, in the half dark, by stepping off the path at the second bend, where a low iron fence he had never looked at ran along the slope, and a gate in it stood open on a few dozen graves among the rocks, old ones, with their stones leaning, and creosote growing between them. He walked along the row with Rhys at the gate and Sam a little way up the path, looking at the sky.

It was at the end. A plain grey stone, small, upright, with nothing carved on it but the letters.

RUTH ABERNATHY

1914 to 1991

No Dr. No physiologist. Nothing about the Index, or the eleven streets, or the Diet. He stood in front of it for a while. Somebody had put a small round stone on the top of it, a pebble from the path, and somebody else had put another beside it, and there were five or six of them now, in a row, along the top edge, the way you would leave a coin on a bar.

He picked one up off the path and put it with the others.

“Did you tell your teacher?” said Rhys, from the gate.

“I sent a postcard.”

“What did you say?”

“That she invented the heat.”

Rhys considered this.

“He’ll mark it,” he said.

---

“Twenty-nine,” said Sam, at the top, when the sun had come up over the mountains and the heat had come with it, in its single wave, the way it always did. He was looking at his watch.

“Of fourteen hundred and sixty-one,” said Rhys, with his hands on his knees.

The old man in the white cap was on his stone on the east side with his thermos. He had looked round when they came up, and nodded, once, the way he nodded every morning, and gone back to the sun. Frederick had begun to think of the nod as a sort of entry in a register: present.

“He still thinks I’ll stop,” said Frederick.

“He’s been coming up here since before you were born,” said Sam. “He’s got data.”

---

Theo rang at seven, on the laptop.

He did it on the laptop on Sundays now, because, he said, he needed to see Frederick’s face to know whether he was eating, and because Desmond wanted to see Arizona. Desmond was behind him, on his stand, in the corner of the small room in the medical school’s hall in New Westminster, a skeleton of a grown man held together with wire, and this week Desmond was wearing a maroon and gold scarf round where his neck would have been.

“Where did you get that?”

“Mail order. The university shop. Desmond’s a Sun Devil now.” Theo looked at him through the screen. “You look all right.”

“I am all right.”

“You look like you went up the rock.”

“I go up it every morning.”

“Every morning?” Theo leaned in. “Still?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“Out of how many?”

“Twenty-nine.”

Theo sat back and looked at him for a while, in the manner of a man revising an estimate.

“Huh,” he said.

Behind Frederick, on the bed by the window, the headphones came off.

“Is that your brother?”

Tyler had turned round. He was looking past Frederick’s shoulder at the laptop, at Theo’s face on it, and at the skeleton in the scarf behind.

“Hey,” said Theo, and his whole face lit up. “Tyler.”

“Hey. You’re the brother.”

“Sort of.”

“Is that a skeleton?”

“That’s Desmond.”

“Is he real?”

“He’s a teaching model.” Theo turned round and looked at Desmond with affection. “Most of him’s real. Not the left foot. The left foot’s resin. Nobody knows what happened to the left foot.”

Tyler looked at the left foot through the screen with deep interest.

“You’re a doctor?”

“Medical student. First year.”

“What does a doctor actually do, though?” said Tyler. “Like actually.”

Frederick turned round in his chair and looked at him. Tyler was looking at the laptop with his face open, interested, complete, and entirely for whatever was in front of it.

“Well,” said Theo, delighted, settling in. “First year’s mostly anatomy. So that’s structure, which is what Desmond’s for, and then physiology, which is how it all works, and we’ve just started on the heart, actually, which is four chambers and four valves, and the valves are…”

“Hang on,” said Tyler.

His telephone had lit up on his chest. The small flame, guttering. He was gone into it at once, thumbs going, the headphones on, and on the two screens over the desk the forest came up out of the dark and the snow went on falling, and he was saying into the small microphone, “Jussi. Jussi, I’m here, who’s on wood.”

There was a silence on the laptop.

Theo was staring at the back of Tyler’s head through the screen with an expression of the purest joy.

“He did it,” said Theo.

“He does it to everybody.”

“He did it to me. He asked, and he didn’t…” Theo put both hands over his face. “Oh, I love him. Freddie, I love him so much. He’s the only person in the world who’s ever asked me that and not wanted to know.”

---

The telephone rang at twenty-five past seven.

It rang on the desk beside the laptop, face up, and the screen of it said Pappa, and Frederick looked at it, and at the corner of the laptop screen, where it said 7.25 PM, and did the sum before he had decided to, and his stomach went over.

It was twenty-five past three in the morning in London.

“Who is it?” said Theo.

“My father.”

Theo’s face changed. “Get it.”

He got it.

“Dad?”

There was a silence on the line, which was not alarming, because there was always a silence on the line first, with his father: the silence of a man going to the shelf for the first word and making sure he had the right one before he brought it down.

“Sunday,” said his father.

Frederick closed his eyes.

“It’s Monday there, Dad. It’s half past three.”

“Yours.” A breath. “Sunday.”

He held the telephone. Somewhere in London, in the dark, his father had looked at a clock and worked out that it was Sunday evening in Tempe, and had picked up a telephone, at twenty-five past three in the morning, because it was Sunday somewhere and on Sundays you rang.

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes.” A breath. “Up.”

“Why are you up?”

His father did not answer that. He said instead, after a moment, “Theo,” as if he could see the laptop, which he could not; and Frederick realised that he must have heard Theo through the telephone, faintly, saying get it.

“Theo’s here. On the computer. It’s his night.” He looked at the laptop. “Can I put you on the speaker? So he can hear?”

“Yes.”

He put the telephone down on the desk beside the laptop, face up, on the speaker, and Theo leaned toward his own screen, as people do, though it made no difference.

“Good evening, sir. Morning. Sorry.”

“Theo.” A breath. “Thirty-Two.”

“It’s fine, sir. It’s always fine.”

“Tuesday.” A breath. “Four minutes.”

“That was the bridge, sir. They had the bridge up. Dad says it’s not late if it’s the bridge.”

“Late,” said the Duke of Cumberland, with deep satisfaction, from London, at half past three in the morning; and Theo laughed out loud, and so did Frederick, and on the window bed Tyler said into his microphone, “No, I’ve got it, I’ve got the fire,” and did not look round.

---

His mother spoke from somewhere further off.

He heard her before he understood her. Her voice came from behind his father’s, across a room, low, the way it came at Solliden from the end of the terrace when she was in the long chair and you were at the table: not close to the telephone, not meant for it, in Swedish.

Ernest. It is half past three. Let the boy go to bed.

It was not quite like that. She said Ernest, and stopped, and said it is half past three, and stopped again, and then let the boy, and stopped, and then go to bed; and he heard every stop, and every word, and thought nothing of the stops at all, because his mother had always spoken like that, his whole life, choosing each part of a sentence before she let it go, slowly, from several.

“He’s not,” his father said, over his shoulder, in Swedish, which he spoke worse than he had once, and with fewer words. “In bed.”

Then let him go there.

He heard her breathe after it. He heard it the way you hear a clock in a room that you have stopped hearing, and then do. It was nothing. It was a breath.

“Freddie,” said Theo.

He looked at the laptop.

Theo was not laughing any more. He was sitting quite still in front of his screen in the small room in New Westminster, with Desmond behind him in his scarf, and he was not looking at Frederick. He was looking at nothing, a little to one side of the camera, the way he had looked once in a bar when somebody on the next stool had started to say the sky is blue and had said something else. His face had gone very calm. It was the calm that frightened Frederick, a little, before he knew why. It was the calm of somebody listening very hard to something that was not the words.

“Sir,” said Theo.

“Yes.”

“Can I ask you something?”

There was the silence on the line, the shelf, the first word.

“Yes,” said his father.

“How many pillows,” said Theo, “is she sleeping on?”

---

Frederick stared at the laptop.

“Theo. What?”

Theo did not look at him. He was looking at the telephone on Frederick’s desk, through two screens and two thousand miles and an ocean, as if it were a person in a bed.

On the line from London there was a very long silence.

It was longer than the shelf. It was the longest silence Frederick had ever heard his father make, and he had heard a great many, in hospital corridors and on station platforms and at the end of a bar on darts night; and somewhere at the back of it, across a room in London, there was his mother breathing, which he could hear now, because it was the only sound there was.

Then his father said, quite clearly, each word found and set down on its own:

“None.”

A breath.

“Sofa.”

A breath.

“Sitting.”

Theo closed his eyes, very briefly, and opened them.

“All night, sir?”

“All,” said his father. A breath. “Night.” And then, after a moment, in a different voice, lower, the voice of a man who has been waiting a long time for somebody to ask him something he knew the answer to: “Three weeks.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Theo.

From across the room in London, sharp, his mother said, “Ernest.”

There was a sound on the line of the telephone being taken out of somebody’s hand, gently, and not given up at once, and then given up.

“Good evening, Theo,” said his mother, in English.

She was close to the telephone now. Her voice was low and unhurried, the English with the Swedish under it and the American at the ends of the words, the voice that had told a Household what it would and would not do; and it was entirely her own; and in the middle of the first sentence she stopped, and breathed, and went on.

“Good evening, ma’am.”

“It is half past three in the morning,” said his mother, “and my husband is telling the medical school how I sleep.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I asked.”

“I heard you ask.” There was a pause, a short one, with a breath in it. “Do not be sorry, Theo. It was the right question.” Another pause. “You will be a very good doctor. I am not sure I like it.”

Theo did not say anything. He sat in front of his screen in New Westminster and looked at the telephone on Frederick’s desk, and his ears had gone red from the top, the way they did.

“Fredde,” said his mother.

“Yes.”

“Go to bed. You are young. It is your job.” A breath. “Puss.”

“Puss, Mamma.”

The line went.

---

Neither of them said anything for a while.

On the window bed Tyler said, quietly, into his microphone, to Finland, “Okay. Okay, we’re good.” The snow fell on the two screens. On the laptop, behind Theo, Desmond stood in his maroon and gold scarf with his resin foot, grinning, as skeletons do, at nothing.

“Why pillows?” said Frederick.

Theo looked at him at last.

“It’s a thing they teach you to ask. First week of history-taking. How many pillows do you sleep on.” He said it slowly, carefully, in the voice for things he had read in a textbook and was not yet allowed to say. “It tells you how somebody’s sleeping. Whether they can lie flat.”

“And she can’t.”

“She’s sleeping sitting up.”

“Is that bad?”

Theo looked at him through the screen for a long moment.

He was choosing, Frederick saw. He was choosing the way his mother chose, from several, and putting some of them back on the shelf, and Frederick watched him do it and did not know what was on the shelf and did not, at that moment, want to.

“It’s a thing to know,” said Theo.

Frederick looked at the telephone on the desk, dark now.

“Freddie,” said Theo. “I’m not going to ask you anything.”

“Okay.”

“You’d have to answer, and you can’t. Can you.”

Frederick did not say anything. He sat at the desk in the cold of Tyler’s room with his hands flat on either side of the laptop, and said nothing at all, as hard as he could, and Theo watched him say it.

“Right,” said Theo quietly. “Okay.”

He sat back. He looked at the ceiling of his room for a moment, and then at Desmond, as though Desmond might have something to add, and then back at the screen.

“Ring her,” said Theo. “In her morning. Not her night. When she’s been up a bit and had her coffee and she’s got her voice back. Ring her every day, if you can.”

“About what?”

“Nothing,” said Theo. “Anything. The weather. What you had for lunch. The rock.” He shrugged, the large lineman’s shrug that he could not do on a screen without filling it. “Just so you’re already on the phone.”

Frederick looked at him.

He thought about a plastic chair at the end of a desk in the lobby, at ten at night, a month ago, and a man in a cardigan filling in a crossword in pen, and that’s the point, son. Theo had never met Mr Luna. Theo had never heard of Mr Luna. Theo was two thousand miles away in a room with a skeleton, and he had said it in nearly the same words.

“That’s what the porter says,” said Frederick.

“Then the porter’s right.” Theo leaned toward the screen, the way he would have leaned in and put his arm round Frederick’s shoulders if there had been no screen, roughly, and held on. He could not. He put his hand flat on the desk in New Westminster instead, on the edge of the laptop, where Frederick could see it. “If I was there,” said Theo.

“I know.”

“I’d make you eat something.”

“I’ve eaten.”

“I’d make you eat something else,” said Theo, and his voice did a small thing in the middle, and he let it, and did not pretend it had not.

---

At eleven he went down to the lobby.

Mr Luna was at the desk in the cardigan, with the ball game, and the butterscotch, and the clipboard, on which the column for the night went 10 p.m. 76 and nothing yet after it. He looked up over his glasses.

“Call your mother, son?”

“My father called me.”

Mr Luna looked at him for a while.

“What time is it there?”

“Seven in the morning.”

“Call her now, then,” said Mr Luna, and went back to the crossword.

He did not. He stood by the desk for a moment, and then he took out his telephone and opened the clock, and below the alarm that was already there, 5.40, BUTTE, which had gone every morning for twenty-nine mornings, he set another. 11.00 PM. Every day. He looked at the box where you could give it a name, and thought about it, and typed NOTHING, and saved it.

Then he went up the forty-five steps, and lay down on the bed by the door in the cold, and did not sleep, and at a quarter to one, in the light of the snow, he heard Tyler say to Finland, very quietly, “Night, Jussi,” and take the headphones off, and lie down, and breathe; and he lay and listened to it, in, and out, and in, all the way down, flat, the way people breathe who can lie down.