Two Rings

The complaint was two pages long and had a footnote.

Lena had typed it on Wednesday night, in 308, on a laptop with a German keyboard, so that in two places a z had come out where a y should have been and she had corrected both in pen; and she had printed it on Thursday on the lounge printer, which had taken four attempts, and signed it, and on Friday morning at nine she had walked it across the campus to the Office of Residence Life in the building with the blue awnings and handed it in at the desk, in person, and asked for a receipt.

“They don’t do receipts,” Makayla had told her, on Thursday night, in the corridor.

“They will,” said Lena.

They had.

On Sunday morning at nine Doug came.

---

Doug did not come on Sundays. Everybody in Palo Verde Hall knew that, in the way that everybody knows the things about a building that nobody has told them: the lift was out, the stairs were seventy-nine, Mr Luna was nights, and Doug, who ran the hall, large and slow and patient in a polo shirt with a lanyard that said DOUG, came in at eight on weekdays and went home at five and was never, under any circumstances, seen at the weekend.

He came through the glass doors at nine on Sunday the seventeenth of September in the polo shirt and the lanyard and a pair of shorts that nobody had ever seen, with a red toolbox in one hand and in the other, in a clear plastic sleeve, two typed pages.

Frederick was in the lounge. He had been in the lounge since a quarter past eight, on the sofa under the poster about scorpions, with the Spanish set book and a coffee, because the box did not come on Sundays and the room did not need him, and because at eight Lena had gone into the kitchen and stood in front of the hob with her arms folded, looking at the right-hand ring, and he had wanted to see what happened.

Doug went past the lounge door, and stopped, and came back.

“Morning, folks,” said Doug.

“Morning.”

Doug looked at the sleeve in his hand, and then at Frederick, with no expression at all, as he had looked at him over a pillow in August a year ago and over a clipboard in December.

“You know a Vogt?” said Doug. “L. Vogt. Three-oh-eight.”

“Yes.”

“She in?”

“She’s in the kitchen,” said Frederick. “She’s been in the kitchen since eight.”

Doug looked down the corridor towards the kitchen, from which no sound was coming, the deliberate absence of sound that comes from a room in which somebody is standing with their arms folded.

“Huh,” said Doug.

---

Lena was standing exactly where she had been standing at eight, in front of the hob, with her arms folded. She was short and dark and twenty-five, with her hair pulled back very tight, and she was wearing a grey T-shirt that said UNIVERSITÄT LEIPZIG across it in small letters and a pair of running shorts, and she looked at Doug in the doorway with the toolbox and the plastic sleeve as a woman looks at a bus that is exactly on time.

“Good morning,” said Lena. “You are Doug.”

“I’m Doug.” He held up the sleeve. “You’re Vogt.”

“Yes.”

“This came Friday.” Doug looked at it. “Somebody at the desk put it on my chair. With a receipt stapled to it.” He turned the sleeve over. “I’ve been here fifteen years. I’ve never seen them give anybody a receipt.”

“I asked for one,” said Lena.

“Huh,” said Doug again. He took the pages out of the sleeve, and unfolded them, and read, in the voice of a man reading a document aloud to see whether it is really saying what he thinks it is saying. “To the Office of Residence Life. Subject: the kitchen of Palo Verde Hall, ground floor.” He turned it over. “The kitchen of Palo Verde Hall serves approximately six hundred residents. It is equipped with one hob of two rings, of which one ring functions. The ratio is therefore one ring to six hundred residents.”

“I have also given it as a percentage,” said Lena. “In paragraph two.”

Doug looked at paragraph two.

“Zero point one six seven per cent,” he read.

“Of a ring,” said Lena, “per resident. Approximately.”

Doug read on, through the law of the March and the nutritional welfare of six hundred students, to the bottom of the second page, and stopped, and held the paper a little closer.

“Section four’s got a footnote,” said Doug.

“The fire code.”

“I know the fire code.” Doug read the footnote, which was in smaller type, and long. “Moreover, the right-hand ring, when switched on, achieves a temperature after approximately twenty minutes and then ceases. A resident who believes the ring to be off, because it is cold, and leaves it, will return to find it hot. This is a hazard.” He lowered the paper. “That’s true.”

“Yes,” said Lena. “I tested it. Three times. With a thermometer.” She unfolded her arms, for the first time since eight, and pointed at the right-hand ring. “It is like a man who comes to the door and decides not to open it.”

Doug looked at the ring for a long time.

“Thirty semesters,” he said, at last. “Thirty semesters that ring’s done that. Everybody knows. Nobody ever wrote it down.” He folded the two pages and put them back in the sleeve, carefully, the way a man puts away a document he intends to keep. “Nobody ever wrote it down with a footnote.”

He put the toolbox on the counter and opened it.

“Sorry, folks,” said Doug, to the ring.

---

Callum came at ten, because Makayla had told him Doug was in the building, and because Callum believed, as a matter of faith, that if Doug was in the building on a Sunday then a form had gone wrong somewhere and it was his.

He had the residence hall handbook under his arm, as always, in a ring binder with coloured tabs, and the expression he had worn since the seventeenth of August, of a man put in charge of two unexploded bombs and a corridor of freshmen and told that the freshmen are the difficult part.

“Is it a complaint?” he said, in the kitchen doorway, to nobody, to the handbook. “Is somebody making a complaint? Because it says, it says on page nine, complaints go through the RA. That’s me. I’m supposed to…” He opened the binder at a green tab. “There’s a form.”

“I have copied you,” said Lena.

Callum looked at her.

“Copied me?”

“You are in the footnote.” Lena took the plastic sleeve off the counter, and the pages out of it, and showed him, at the bottom of the second page, below the long footnote about the fire code, a very small line: Copy: Mr C. Reyes, Resident Adviser, Third Floor. “And there is a copy under your door. Since Friday.”

Callum looked at the line with his name in it, in a footnote, for some time, with the face of a man who has been told that the bomb has been defused and that he is mentioned in the report.

“Oh,” he said. “Okay. Okay. Thank you.”

“You are welcome.”

“Do I need to sign it?”

“No,” said Lena. “It needs Doug.”

From under the hob, where he was lying on his back on the kitchen floor with his head in the cupboard and his legs out across the lino, Doug said something that might have been damn right.

---

Makayla was in the lounge by eleven, on the arm of the sofa, with a smoothie.

“She’s on exchange,” she told Frederick, watching the kitchen door. “From Germany. For nutrition.”

“Yes,” said Frederick.

“She’s, like, so smart. She wrote to the university. About the stove.” Makayla drank some smoothie. “Like, a real letter. With a stapler.”

“I know.”

“Who even does that?”

Frederick thought about his mother, who had once written by hand to the chairwoman of the Republican Association, and been written back to by return.

“People from Europe,” he said.

Makayla considered this, with great seriousness, as though it explained a good deal.

“She’s twenty-five,” she said, lowering her voice. “She told me. She took some years off. Before.” She looked at the kitchen door again. “She won’t say what she did.”

“No?”

“She said administration,” said Makayla. “But like, in a way.”

---

Felix fixed the foosball at noon.

Nobody had asked him to. He came into the lounge from 314, tall and fair and quiet, in the kind of sandals that Germans wore in the heat as though there were a regulation about it, and stood at the foosball table in the corner and spun the handle of the red goalkeeper.

The red goalkeeper went round.

It went round and round, freely, without stopping, its little painted feet flying over its head, for about eleven seconds, because it had been loose on its rod since before anybody in Palo Verde Hall could remember, and every game on that table for as long as anybody could remember had been played with the red goalkeeper spinning like a man on a fairground ride and the blue side winning.

Felix watched it stop.

Then he took a screwdriver out of the pocket of his shorts, which nobody had known was there, and lay down on his back on the carpet, and slid under the table.

Tyler, who had come early because Brayden had been on the phone to his grandmother about Mesa since nine, sat on the sofa beside Frederick with a Glacier and watched the underneath of the table with deep attention.

“Dude’s got a screwdriver,” said Tyler.

“Yes.”

“Like, on him.” Tyler drank. “Just like, in his shorts.”

From under the table there were small sounds, metal on metal, patient. Then Felix slid out, and stood up, and put the screwdriver back in the pocket of his shorts, and spun the handle of the red goalkeeper.

It went a quarter of the way round, and stopped, and stood there with its feet on the ground, upright, a goalkeeper.

Tyler stared at it.

“Oh my God,” said Tyler. “Dude. Dude.”

“It was a pin,” said Felix. He did not seem to think it needed saying. He looked at the table for a moment longer, and at the blue goalkeeper, which was fine, and then turned the table round, very slightly, an inch, so that it was square to the wall, and went back to 314.

Tyler went on looking at the red goalkeeper standing upright on its rod.

“I’ve played on that like a hundred times,” he said, to Frederick. “Last year. I always took blue.” He thought about it. “Everybody always took blue.”

---

There was a thing Frederick did not think about on the sofa that morning, and so thought about all morning.

He had been away. On the Tuesday he had gone out to Sky Harbor at five in the morning with a small suitcase and three pages in Swedish, and he had been in Stockholm for three days, and in the Riksdag he had read the three pages in three minutes and eleven seconds, without a joke; and his mother had watched it in London and rung him in the car afterwards and said very good, Fredde, which from his mother in Swedish was a great deal. He had come back on the Thursday, through Terminal Four.

And Alexander had been alone in 312 for the first time.

Frederick had thought about it on the aircraft, both ways: the programme on the desk with no Frederick anywhere in it, from the top to the bottom, and the door shut at seven, and nobody to knock on it at half past.

When he had come up the forty-five steps on Thursday at four, the door of 312 had been open, and Tyler had been on the floor between the beds with his headphones on, and Alexander had been at the desk by the door with the Charter, and he had looked up and said “Good afternoon, Frederick,” and gone back to the Charter.

The room had been exactly as Frederick had left it.

It had been more than exactly. That was the thing. It had been exactly as he had left it, except that his bed was made.

He had left it at five in the morning in the dark as he always left it, with the cover pulled up and the pillow more or less at the top. And it had been made. The sheet had been taken off and put back. The corners had been done. They had been done the way nurses do them in hospitals, folded under at the end and then folded again, tight, at forty-five degrees, so that the bed looked like an envelope.

He had not said anything. He had slept in it three nights, and every morning the corners had come undone, and every night they had been done again.

---

At five, the second ring went red.

Doug had been under the hob on and off all day. He had gone away at one and come back at three with a part in a small cardboard box, and lain down again with his head in the cupboard, and said things to it at intervals that nobody else could hear. At five he slid out, and stood up, slowly, with one hand on the counter, the way a large man stands up from a floor, and reached over and turned the knob of the right-hand ring.

It went red.

It went red at once, and stayed red, and they all stood in the doorway of the kitchen and looked at it, Frederick and Tyler and Makayla and Callum with the handbook and Rhys and Sam, who had come down from 316 when Tyler texted them a photograph of the red goalkeeper, and Lena in front of it with her arms folded, as though it were a thing on a stage.

Doug looked at it for a while, red, steady.

“Sorry, folks,” said Doug, to everybody, and to nobody, and to thirty semesters, and picked up his toolbox, and went home.

---

Lena cooked that night.

She had bought the things on Saturday, at the supermarket a mile away across the road, because she had known the second ring would be working by Sunday evening, because she had complained in writing. It was a thing from Leipzig, mostly vegetables, carrots and peas and asparagus and cauliflower, in a sauce with butter in it, and it was called Leipziger Allerlei, which Rhys asked her to spell, and wrote down, and highlighted.

“It means everything,” said Lena. “All sorts. Everything in the garden.”

“Is it healthy?” said Makayla.

“It is mostly butter,” said Lena, “and also very healthy. I am a student of nutrition. I can tell you which part is which.”

She had potatoes on the left-hand ring and the vegetables on the right-hand one, both going, both red, and the kitchen was built for perhaps four people at a time and had in it, by six, the whole of the third floor: Rhys and Sam, Felix by the window, Makayla on the counter, Callum in the doorway with the handbook open at a page about fire, Tyler, three freshmen who had smelled it, and the boy in flip-flops who sang in the shower; and Kessler, at the door, with a plate, standing, eating, not there.

Alexander had been given an onion.

He had come down at six exactly, which was on the programme, 18.00. Dinner (Frau Vogt), and Lena had put him at the end of the counter with a board and a knife, because everybody in her kitchen did something, and he had folded his linen jacket over a chair and rolled up his sleeves, each to the same place on the forearm, and looked at the onion for some time.

Then he began to cut it.

He cut it very slowly. He cut it into slices of exactly the same thickness, and turned them, and cut them again, the other way, into strips of exactly the same width, and turned them again, and cut them into cubes, and every cube was the same size as every other cube, and he lined them up on the board as he went, in rows, and it took him eleven minutes, and the tears ran down his face the whole time, and he did not stop or wipe them or say anything about them at all.

Lena came down the counter and looked at the board.

There were about two hundred cubes of onion on it, in rows, like a parade ground seen from the air.

“Alex,” she said.

“Yes.”

“It is an onion.” She took the knife out of his hand, gently, in the way you take something from somebody who does not know they are holding it too tightly. “It does not need to be correct.”

Alexander looked at the rows of cubes on the board, with the tears running down his face.

“Everything needs to be correct,” he said, and then, as though he had heard it, “I beg your pardon. That is a very good onion. I shall stop.”

He wiped his face with the back of his wrist, once, and rolled his sleeves down, each from the same place, and put on the linen jacket, and buttoned it, from the bottom; and Lena swept the two hundred cubes into the pan with the side of the knife in one movement, all the rows at once, and they hissed.

---

They played whist after, in the lounge, at the card table under the poster about scorpions: Rhys and Sam and Felix and Lena.

Frederick did not play. He was on the sofa with the Spanish set book, which he was not reading, and Alexander was in the armchair by the window with the Charter, which he was, and Tyler was on the floor with the headphones on and the red goalkeeper in his eyeline, and the four of them played whist.

He had watched Rhys and Sam play cards before. He had watched them all last year, at this table, with each other, and with him at Christmas, and with Jack, and once, in March, with Lukas, who had won every hand, which Sam had decided did not count, because Lukas could not count. Apart from Lukas, Sam had never lost. That was a fact of Palo Verde Hall, like the stairs. Sam did not lose at whist.

Sam lost.

He lost the first rubber to Lena and Felix, and looked at the cards for a long time, and said “Again,” and lost the second, and Lena laid down the last trick and said “I watched you count,” and Sam took off his round glasses and cleaned them on his shirt, slowly, and put them back on, and began to laugh.

Frederick had never heard Sam laugh like that. He had heard Sam laugh, last year, sometimes, a short low sound that was put away almost before it had come out. This was not that. This went on. Sam sat at the card table with the cards in his hand and laughed, helplessly, with his shoulders going, and Rhys began to laugh because Sam was laughing, and Felix, who had not said more than ten words all day, said something in German to Lena that made her put her cards face down on the table and her face in her hands; and the four of them sat at the card table under the scorpions and laughed at nothing, at a rubber of whist, at a Sunday, like four people who have known one another for years and not for four weeks.

Frederick watched them from the sofa.

They did not look at him. That was the thing, and he noticed it, and noticed that he had noticed it. All last year, in every room, at every table, Rhys and Sam had looked at him: not often, not so anybody else would see, but always, every few minutes, a glance, the door and the window and Frederick, in that order. They had been his. They had been the most his of anybody in Tempe.

They did not look at him now for nearly a quarter of an hour.

He sat on the sofa with the Spanish book open on his knee and found that he did not know what to feel about it, and that what he felt was two things, at once, one on top of the other, and that he was not going to say either of them to anybody.

In the armchair by the window, Alexander turned a page of the Charter, and looked up, over the top of it, at Frederick, for about a second; and then looked down again, and did not turn the next page for a long time.

---

At twenty-nine minutes past ten Frederick came back from the shower and the bed by the window was made.

The sheet had been taken off and put back. The corners had been done, folded under at the end and then folded again, tight, at forty-five degrees, so that the bed looked like an envelope.

Alexander was in the bed by the door, with the sheet folded down to his waist in a straight line and the lamp on and the programme for Monday on a book on his knees.

Frederick stood by the window and looked at the bed.

“Did you make my bed?” he said.

Alexander did not look up.

“No.”

“Somebody’s made it. Every day. Since Thursday.”

“I see.”

“Did Kessler?”

“Kessler does not make beds,” said Alexander, and wrote something on the programme, and laid the pen down on the book, parallel to its edge.

Frederick looked at him for a while. Then he looked at the bed by the door, which Alexander was in, and which had been made that morning before the shower, as it was made every morning before the shower, 05.45. Rise: the sheet folded under at the end, and then folded again, tight, at forty-five degrees.

He got into the envelope, and it took him some time, because the corners were very good, and turned off the lamp.

“Good night, Frederick.”

“Good night,” said Frederick, in the dark, and lay on his back in the bed that somebody had made, and did not undo the corners, and heard, after a while, very quietly, the pencil, and the tick.