Ordinary

The programme had laundry on it.

Frederick read it at six, from the window bed, upside down, by the lamp on the desk by the door, where it lay square to the edge with the pencil beside it.

06.00. Wake. 06.20. Shower. 07.00. Box. 09.00. The Charter (Brennan). 10.30. The Executive (Mercer). 12.10. Luncheon. Dining hall. 17.00. Laundry. 18.45. Dinner. 19.30. Lounge (Callum: Halloween). 22.30. Light.

“Laundry,” said Frederick.

“Yes.”

“You’ve never done laundry.”

“No,” said Alexander, who was sitting on the edge of the bed by the door in his shirt with the cuffs buttoned, putting on his left sock. “That is why it is on the programme.”

---

The laundry had been going to Phoenix.

It had been going since August. Every Monday at seven, when the courier from the consulate came to the day desk with the box and Kessler signed for it, the courier took away a navy canvas bag, and it came back on Thursday with the box, the shirts inside it ironed and folded in tissue by somebody at the German consulate whose job, until August, had not included the Emperor’s socks.

“The girl from 304 saw it,” said Alexander. “On Friday. She asked the courier what was in the bag.”

“What did he say?”

“He said laundry. He is a very honest man. He has never been late.” Alexander put on his right sock. “She told the floor. The floor has been very kind about it.”

“Kind how?”

“Three people have offered to show me how to use the machines. Two of them have offered to do it for me.” Alexander stood up and put his feet into his shoes, side by side. “One offered to do it for five dollars a load. I thought that was the most reasonable.”

“So why not let him?”

Alexander looked at him.

“Because then I should be an Emperor who has his laundry done by a freshman for five dollars,” he said, “instead of an Emperor who has it done by a consulate. It is not an improvement. It is only cheaper.” He took the pencil and ticked 06.00. Wake., and laid it down. “I should like to be a first-year who does his laundry.”

---

At ten past twelve, in the dining hall, Alexander stood in the queue for hot food for nineteen minutes.

Frederick knew it was nineteen because he had been through the queue for the sandwich counter, which took four, and sat down at the table by the window, and eaten half his sandwich, and looked up, and seen Alexander still in the queue for hot food, upright, with his tray held level in both hands, behind eleven freshmen and a tall boy from the rowing club who was asking the woman at the counter in great detail about the chilli.

He watched for a while. Then he got up and went over.

“What are you getting?”

“I should like a salad,” said Alexander.

Frederick looked at the hot-food counter, on which there was chilli and rice and a tray of something orange and a large aluminium dish of macaroni cheese, and no salad.

“The salad’s over there,” he said. He pointed across the hall, at the salad bar under the window, where there was nobody at all.

“I know,” said Alexander. “I saw it from here.”

“Then why are you in this queue?”

Alexander considered the question with perfect seriousness, holding the tray.

“I joined it,” he said, “when I came in. Before I saw the salad. It was the first queue.”

“You can just leave.”

“Leave the queue?”

“Step out of it. Go and get the salad. Nobody’ll mind.” Frederick looked at the eleven freshmen, who had all, by now, turned round to look at the German Emperor in the hot-food queue, and were very much not minding. “People do it all the time.”

“Do they?”

“Every day.”

Alexander looked at the queue in front of him, and at the queue behind him, which was seven more, and at the salad bar under the window, across what seemed for a moment to be a very great distance.

“I did not know that,” he said. He said it quietly, as a man says something he will need to write down. “At home one does not leave a line. One is in it until one reaches the front, and then one shakes the hand.” He stepped out of the queue, exactly sideways, one pace, so that the freshman behind him did not have to move. “Thank you.”

He went to the salad bar and made a salad, and brought it to the table, and ate half of it, in order, from one side, and laid his knife and fork side by side across the plate at the angle of a man who has finished.

Frederick looked at the half.

---

There were five freshmen at the table by the end of lunch.

They came one at a time, with their trays, the way freshmen had come to tables Frederick sat at all through the fall of his own first year, as though by accident, as though the seat happened to be the nearest one; and they sat, and ate, and did not look at Alexander, and then looked at him, and then the bravest of them, a girl from the second floor with a nose ring and a tray of macaroni, said:

“So what’s it actually like?”

“What is what like?” said Alexander.

“Being, like. An emperor.”

The pause. Frederick heard it.

“Mostly I read,” said Alexander. “There is a box every day, with the papers in it, from Berlin. I read them, and I sign the ones I am advised to sign, and I write down what I think of the others. Some days I see people, and they tell me what they do, and I listen.” He considered. “At home there are more people. Here there is more reading.”

“Do you have a crown?”

“There are two. They are in museums. I have worn each of them once.”

“What was that like?”

The pause.

“Heavy,” said Alexander. “And cold. It had come up from the vault that morning.” He looked at the girl with the nose ring, gravely. “It warmed up during the sermon.”

The table laughed. The girl with the nose ring laughed so hard she had to put her fork down, and a boy beside her said dude, and a third freshman, who had been too frightened to say anything, said in a rush: “Can you say something in German?”

“Es freut mich, Sie kennenzulernen,” said Alexander.

“What does it mean?”

“It means I am pleased to meet you.” He considered. “It is a little formal. With you I should say freut mich.” He considered again. “But I am pleased to meet you formally. I wanted you to have the whole of it.”

The frightened freshman looked at him as though he had been given a present, and went red, and said “Thanks, man,” and the girl with the nose ring said “That’s so nice,” to the table, with feeling, and Frederick sat and ate the rest of his sandwich and watched his cousin answer every question correctly, completely, warmly, with the pause in front of every one, and laid his own knife and fork down any way they fell.

---

The laundry room was in the basement, down a flight of concrete stairs at the back of the lobby behind the post-room hatch, where it was always seventy-five degrees and smelled of hot lint and somebody else’s fabric conditioner.

There were twelve washing machines and twelve dryers, and a long folding table, and four plastic chairs, and a sign on the wall in red capitals that said DO NOT LEAVE YOUR LAUNDRY IN THE MACHINE. WE MEAN IT. RESIDENCE LIFE, and somebody had written underneath, THEY DON’T MEAN IT, and under that, in a third hand, I’VE BEEN WAITING 3 HRS FOR #7.

And between the washers and the dryers, on the wall, there was the machine.

It was a grey metal box with a slot for a card and a slot for quarters and a small green screen, and a panel of instructions screwed to the front of it, eleven lines long, in English and Spanish, with a diagram.

Alexander stood in front of it at five o’clock exactly, with his laundry in a plastic basket and a box of detergent he had chosen on Saturday, on the Avenue, after reading the labels of nine.

He read the instructions.

He read them once in English. He read them once in Spanish, Frederick supposed for the errors. He read them once more in English, slowly, with his lips moving very slightly, and then he took his student card out of his shirt pocket and looked at it, and looked at the slot, and looked at the diagram, which showed the card going in with the stripe facing left.

“The stripe faces left,” he said.

“Yes,” said Frederick, who was sitting on the folding table, because Alexander had not asked him to come and he had come anyway.

“Last year,” said Alexander. “Did yours face left?”

“I just put it in till it worked.”

“That must be very restful,” said Alexander, and put the card in with the stripe facing left, and selected number four, and read the seven lines on its lid, and sorted the laundry.

He sorted it into three: whites; colours; and a single navy jumper, which he read the label of and put back in the basket. He measured the detergent with the cap and looked at the line from the side, at eye level, as a man reads a thermometer, and poured a little back. He closed both lids at the same time, with both hands.

The machines began.

Alexander sat down on the plastic chair in front of number four, upright, with his hands on his knees, and watched it.

“It takes thirty-one minutes,” said Frederick.

“Yes. It says so on the lid.”

“You don’t have to watch it.”

“No,” said Alexander. “I know.”

He watched it for thirty-one minutes.

---

The dryer took forty-five, and he watched that too.

Alexander had moved the plastic chair two feet to the left, square to the dryer’s door. A freshman from the fourth floor had come in with an enormous bag and put a load in number ten and sat on the folding table with her telephone, and every so often she looked up at the young man on the plastic chair watching his shirts go round, and looked down again.

The dryer stopped. Alexander opened the door and took the laundry out into the basket, and carried the basket to the folding table, and folded it.

He folded it in squares, every shirt the same size as every other, the sleeves laid back at the same angle, the socks paired and turned over once. It took nineteen minutes, and when it was done the laundry stood on the folding table in four exact stacks, like a model of a city.

The freshman from the fourth floor had put her telephone down.

“Dude,” she said. “Can you do mine?”

Alexander looked at her, and at the dryer, number ten, where her load had just stopped, and at the enormous bag.

“Yes,” he said. “If you would like.”

“Oh my God. I was kidding.”

“I was not,” said Alexander, and folded it, all of it, while she stood beside him with her hands over her mouth; and at the end she took a photograph of the stacks, and said “You’re like the best person on this floor,” and went upstairs with her stacks held level in front of her like a cake.

---

He carried the basket up the forty-five steps himself.

Frederick walked behind him and watched him do it: the basket held level in both hands, the four stacks in it, the navy jumper on top, folded in squares although it had not been washed; up the first half-flight and round, and up the second, at his ordinary pace, upright. And on the landing between the second floor and the third, under the narrow window, where the thermometer on the wall said seventy-nine as it always said seventy-nine, he stopped.

He stood on the landing with the basket. He did not put it down.

“Are you all right?” said Frederick.

“Yes.” Alexander did not turn round. He was looking at the thermometer. “It is warm on the landing.”

“It’s always warm on the landing.”

“Yes. Seventy-nine.” He looked at it a moment longer, the red line at its number, as he had looked at the white box outside Old Main in March. “It is a very modest instrument.”

Then he went on up the last half-flight, with the basket level, and into 312, and put the four stacks away on his shelves in the wardrobe, one shelf each, and took the pencil and ticked 17.00. Laundry., and sat down on the edge of the bed by the door, and sat there with his hands on his knees until a quarter to seven, which was dinner, and then stood up and went to dinner.

At dinner he had a bread roll. He tore it into four and ate two of the quarters.

---

Callum had put a form on the door of the lounge.

THIRD AND FOURTH FLOOR HALLOWEEN SOCIAL. MON 30 OCT. 7.30 TO 10 P.M. NO CANDLES (SEE SECTION 9). NO OPEN FLAME. COSTUMES OPTIONAL BUT ENCOURAGED!!! SIGN IN BELOW.

It was the night before Halloween because Callum had decided that a Monday was less of a school night than a Tuesday, which nobody could disprove.

The lounge was full by eight. The scorpion on the poster had been given a witch’s hat, cut from black card. Felix had fixed a string of orange lights along the top of the window, and they worked. Lena had made something in the kitchen on the two rings, in a pot the size of a dustbin, that was orange and hot and turned out to be pumpkin soup with ginger, and stood behind the card table with a ladle, as a fried egg.

“I am an egg,” she said, to anybody who asked.

Makayla was a cop. She had a blue shirt and a badge cut out of tinfoil and a pair of sunglasses, and she stood beside Lena at the card table all evening with her arms folded, and whenever anybody came for soup she said “Ma’am. Sir. Move along,” and Lena ladled the soup with perfect composure and said “Thank you, officer,” and the two of them were, Frederick thought, very happy.

Rhys was the Charter, Article One in five colours of highlighter on a sheet of cardboard round his neck. Sam was an accountant.

“You’re always an accountant,” said Frederick.

“Tonight it’s a costume,” said Sam. He had a green eyeshade, which he had bought, and a pencil behind his ear, which he had not. “Last year I was an accountant who’d come as nothing. Tonight I’m an accountant who’s come as an accountant. It’s very different. You wouldn’t understand.”

Tyler had come from Ironwood with his hood up.

“What are you?” said the girl from 304, who was a crown, made of gold card.

“I’m a guy in a hood,” said Tyler.

“You’re always a guy in a hood.”

“Yeah,” said Tyler, and took some soup, and sat down on the floor by the foosball table with his headphones round his neck. “It’s a classic.”

Kessler stood by the door, in a black polo shirt, and was not there; and when a boy from the fourth floor said “What’s Kessler supposed to be?”, it was Lena, behind her ladle, who said, without looking up, “Kessler is a first-year.”

---

Frederick had come as himself.

He had cut a sun out of maroon card, with gold rays, and written FRED on it in silver pen, as Callum wrote them, and pinned it to the front of his T-shirt with two safety pins. It had seemed funny at seven. It was still quite funny at eight, when the girl from 304 read it and laughed and said “Oh my God, it’s you,” and the girl with the lacrosse stick said “Dude, that’s so meta.”

It was gone by ten.

He did not know when. He had put his soup down on the windowsill and gone to look at the foosball, where Felix was playing the girl with the lacrosse stick and losing on purpose, very slowly, and when he looked down at his T-shirt there were two safety pins and a small torn piece of maroon card and nothing else.

“Somebody took your sun,” said Sam.

“I know.”

“Somebody always takes your sun.” Sam wrote something in the notebook. “That’s another one.”

---

The boy from 305 had come as Alexander.

He had a white shirt, buttoned to the neck and at both cuffs, and grey trousers that were a little too short, and on the right cuff, across the white, in maroon marker, a single stripe a quarter of an inch wide, ruled with a ruler. He had parted his hair. He carried, in his left hand, a baseball cap, which he did not put on.

He came into the lounge at a quarter past eight and stood in the door, and the lounge saw him, and saw who was standing by the foosball table, and went quiet.

Alexander looked at him.

He looked at the shirt, and the cuffs, and the stripe, and the parting, and the cap carried in the left hand, in that order.

“The stripe should be a little further up,” he said. “Towards the hand. It was the lip of the rock.”

The boy from 305 looked down at his cuff in horror.

“Otherwise,” said Alexander, “it is very accurate.”

The lounge went up. The boy from 305 went the colour of the stripe and then a deeper colour, and somebody gave him a marker and he redrew the stripe half an inch further up with the whole of the third floor advising him, and at ten o’clock, when Mr Luna came on at the desk and looked through the door of the lounge at the scene with no expression whatever, he looked longest at the boy from 305, and at the cap in his hand, and said:

“Son. Needs a hat.”

---

Somebody asked Alexander what he was.

It was a freshman from the fourth floor, a boy dressed as some kind of skeleton, and he came up to the foosball table where Alexander was standing with a cup of Lena’s soup that he had not drunk, and looked at him, at the jacket and the shirt buttoned to the neck and the hat in his hand, and said, friendly, “What are you supposed to be?”

The pause.

“A first-year,” said Alexander.

The skeleton looked at him for a moment, and then laughed, delighted, the way people laugh at a thing that has been said well, and clapped him on the arm, and said “That’s so good, dude,” and went off to tell somebody.

Alexander stood by the foosball table with the soup.

Frederick watched him from the windowsill. He watched him for a long time. He watched him be asked about the stripe, and about Germany, and whether it was true he’d folded a girl’s laundry in squares, which the girl from the fourth floor had put on the internet with the caption THE EMPEROR FOLDED MY LAUNDRY AND I’M NOT OKAY. He watched him answer, each one, correctly and completely and warmly, with the pause in front, and smile at the right moment, and laugh once at a thing Tyler said from the floor, a short laugh, correct; and he watched the floor love him.

It did love him. Frederick could see it. The boy from 305 had redrawn his stripe. The girl from the fourth floor had brought him a second cup of soup that he had not asked for and he had thanked her for it as though she had brought him a decoration.

And between the questions, when nobody was asking him anything, standing by the foosball table with a cup of soup in each hand, Alexander’s lips were moving.

Very slightly. Not speaking. Frederick could not hear anything from the windowsill, over the music and Felix losing at foosball and Makayla saying move along; and he would not have heard anything from a foot away. But he could see it, in the orange light from the string along the window, the lips moving very slightly and evenly, in a rhythm, as a man’s lips move who is counting under his breath.

He knew what it was. He had been told.

He had been told on the seventh step of a staircase in Berlin, at two in the morning, with a band playing a waltz below them and the silver light coming up the wall, in a voice that had said it plainly and in order, as it would have said it in a statement. I was composed for two years. It was the only thing I was permitted to choose, how composed I was, and so I chose it as hard as I could, and I was very good at it. And then, after: It is like a waltz with a very good dancing master. Every step is correct. You are never lost. And you count, the whole way round, under your breath.

Frederick sat on the windowsill with his soup going cold and two safety pins on his T-shirt and watched his cousin count.

Then Tyler said something from the floor that Frederick did not hear, and the girl from 304 shrieked, and Alexander turned his head to look and the lips stopped, and he said something back, and the corner of the lounge laughed; and it was a party again, in a residence hall, the night before Halloween, with a scorpion in a witch’s hat and a cop from Kingman and an egg, and everybody in it was having the time of their lives.

---

At half past ten exactly his light went off.

The programme lay on the desk by the door, square to the edge, with the pencil beside it, and every item on it was ticked, all ten, from 06.00. Wake. to 22.30. Light., in the same small mark, in the same place, as though nothing that day had been any harder than anything else. In the wardrobe, on four shelves, the laundry stood in squares.

Frederick lay on the window bed with the blind down and the inch of orange at the edge of it.

“Frederick,” said Alexander, in the dark.

“Yes.”

“What did you come as? I did not ask.”

“Me. A sun. With FRED on it.”

“Where is it?”

“Somebody took it.”

“Ah,” said Alexander. There was a silence from the bed by the door, a long one. “It always goes missing.”

“It always goes missing.”

Another silence. The breathing, slow and even. Frederick waited for it to change into the breathing of somebody asleep, and it did not.

“Mine never does,” said Alexander.