Book Nine: Junior Year Part Four: Spring Characters
Chapter Thirty-three
Finals
Frederick. New Westminster. Monday, 3 June, to Friday, 7 June 2030.
The Register notes the sequence without asserting a motive, because the allocation followed the damage assessments and the damage assessments followed the property values.
The desks were back in the gym. Two hundred and forty in rows between the painted lines, the clock on its stand, Mr Abernathy at the table under the scoreboard with the stopwatch. The paper streamers from the prom had gone, all but one, red, caught on a girder high up over the half-court line, where nobody had been able to reach it. It moved very slightly when the doors opened.
He found H and sat.
Chemistry was Tuesday.
He had been to Mrs Okonedo’s room at lunch on eleven Thursdays since February. She had not made anything of it. She had put a sheet of paper in front of him each time with one problem on it, and sat at her desk marking, and when he had finished she had looked at what he had written and said yes or no or, twice, nearly, and given him another.
On the eighth Thursday he had got it. Not suddenly. It had come up out of the problems slowly, the way the fields had come up out of the cloud over England, a piece at a time, until there was more of it than not. Le Chatelier. A system pushed one way pushes back the other. He had sat in her room with the pencil in his hand and seen it, all at once, the whole shape, and said oh, out loud, and Mrs Okonedo had not looked up from her marking.
Yes, she had said. That.
On Tuesday in the gym, page two of the paper was equilibria.
He did it. He did not hurry it. He did not write things down in the hope that they would become understanding. He wrote down the understanding. It took twenty minutes and when he had finished he read it through and it was right, and he knew it was.
History was Thursday. An hour and a half. Six questions, answer two.
Mr Ferrante had set it. Mr Abernathy gave it out face down, walking between the rows, and said begin at nine exactly by the stopwatch, and two hundred and forty papers turned over at once with a sound like birds going up.
He read all six. He always read all six.
1. The Charter of Union (1783) has been called “a treaty between two sides arguing about what the piece of paper should say.” Discuss.
2. Why did Parliament not assemble at New Westminster until 1801?
3. Assess the significance of the Rechteveld campaign (1918) for the Realm’s understanding of itself.
4. “The Realm adopted the poem rather than earned it.” How far do you agree?
5. Who heard the Speech from the Throne of 1932, and who did not?
6. The Valley earthquake of 1988 rewrote the building code. Afterwards the money for reconstruction followed the damage assessments, and the damage assessments followed the property values. Who said so at the time, who heard it, and what happened to the ones who did not?
He sat and looked at question six.
He could not write it.
That was what he thought first. He was the one who had said it. Not in 1988; he had not been born. But on the first of June last year, in a plastic chair in a principal’s office, on a satellite telephone, to a Prime Minister, once. The Register’s sentence. The allocation followed the damage assessments and the damage assessments followed the property values. He had read it at fourteen in the library at Columbia Palace and it had stayed in him, and when the time came he had said it, and a clause existed because he had.
He could not write about 1988 without writing about the first of June. And he could not write about the first of June, because it was his, and because it would be the King writing about the King in a history exam, and Mr Ferrante would read it, and so would whoever moderated it, and somebody, somewhere, would write it down.
He looked at question one. The Charter. He knew the Charter. He could write about the Charter in his sleep.
He looked at question six.
Who said so at the time, who heard it, and what happened to the ones who did not?
Not who said so later. At the time.
He picked up his pen.
He wrote about 1988.
Only 1988. Not a word after it. He wrote about the Valley, and the code, and the hospitals that stood in November because of it. He wrote about the money: where it went, and how, and why, without asserting a motive, because the Register did not and he had no evidence that it should. He wrote about who had said so at the time, which was almost nobody: a city councilman from the eastside whose speech was reported in four lines on page eleven of a newspaper that had since closed; a priest in Boyle Heights who had preached on it twice and been asked by his bishop not to a third time; a study by a graduate student at the university that had been published in 1991 and read, as far as anybody could tell, by eleven people.
Who heard it. Almost nobody. The eleven. The congregation. The readers of page eleven.
And the ones who did not. He wrote about them for forty minutes. About the streets east of the river that were hurt less and were poorer to start with, and what had not been built there, and what had been built instead, slowly, over seventeen years, and by whom. He wrote about a woman who was forty in 1988 and lived on one of those streets, without naming her, because she was not in any source and he could not cite her, and because she was not his to name. He wrote that she remembered.
He did not mention himself. Not once. Not the plastic chair, not the telephone, not the clause, not on the damage, not on the property. He stopped in 1988, and in what happened afterwards to the people who had not heard, and when the stopwatch said ten-thirty he put his pen down and read it through and did not change a word.
Then he did question one, in twenty minutes, in his sleep.
At the gym door, at the end, Mr Ferrante.
He was standing just outside in the corridor with his hands in his pockets, watching them come out, the way he had stood at the top of the west stairs on the first day of every year. He did not look at Frederick. He looked at the corridor.
“Mr Hanover.”
“Sir.”
“Which did you do?”
“One and six.”
Mr Ferrante nodded at the corridor.
“I wondered,” he said, “whether you’d do six.” He did not take his hands out of his pockets. “I set it in March. I sat in my kitchen and thought, I can’t set that, he’ll be in the room. And then I thought, he’ll be in the room for the rest of his life. I can’t set history around him.” He looked at the floor. “So I set it. And I thought, if he does it, he’ll do it properly.”
“I stopped in 1988.”
Mr Ferrante looked at him at last.
“Did you?”
“I didn’t write anything after it.”
Mr Ferrante was quiet for a moment.
“Good,” he said. “That’s where the question stops.” He looked down the corridor. “Who heard it, Mr Hanover?”
“At the time? Almost nobody.”
“And now?”
He thought about it.
“A woman of eighty-one on Twenty-Second Street,” said Frederick. “From an inspector with a tablet.”
Mr Ferrante looked at him.
Then he took one hand out of his pocket and put it, very briefly, flat on Frederick’s shoulder, the way Lucía had put hers on his arm on a bluff, and took it away.
“Go and have your lunch,” said Mr Ferrante.
At the end of the corridor, by the window, Inés was standing with Lucía, with her bag on her shoulder.
“Six?” said Lucía, to Frederick.
“And one.”
“She did six,” said Lucía, and jerked her head at Inés. “And five.”
Inés did not look at him. She looked out of the window.
“I did it from the other end,” said Inés. “1988 from the Valley. My grandmother lived in the Valley in 1988. In Reseda.” She shifted the bag. “She got the money. To rebuild. All of it. On the house.” She looked at him. “She never knew it was anybody else’s. She said so, when I asked her, last week, on the telephone. She said we didn’t know there was anybody else.”
Frederick looked at her.
“So I wrote about her,” said Inés. “Who heard it. Who didn’t.” She looked out of the window again. “She didn’t hear it either. Just from the other side.”
The marks came back on the last Monday, face up.
Mrs Okonedo walked between the desks with the stack against her chest and put each one down and said the name.
“Hanover.”
Seventy-three.
Under it, in her small upright hand: Equilibria. Understood.
“Mr Hanover,” said Mrs Okonedo, at the front, not lowering her voice.
“Miss.”
“That is all seventy-three means.” She put the empty stack down. “It does not mean anything else, and it should not.”
“Yes, Miss.”
“It does, however,” said Mrs Okonedo, turning to the board, “mean that.”
Beside him Theo had eighty-four, in chemistry, and was looking at it with an expression of very great seriousness, and folded it in half, carefully, along a line that was not there yet, and put it in his bag in a separate pocket, which he zipped.