No Programme

He woke at six, and the desk by the door had no programme on it.

He saw it before he knew he was looking. He saw it the way you see that a picture has been taken off a wall: the lamp on, and the pencil lying on the desk beside the place where the paper always was, parallel to the edge, and the edge, and the wood, and no paper. Nothing square to anything. Just the pencil and the lamp and the grain of the desk, and the Neues Palais paper in its box on the shelf above it with the lid on.

Alexander was sitting on the edge of the bed by the door, dressed, in his shirt with the cuffs buttoned, with his shoes on and laced and his hands on his knees.

“Morning,” said Frederick.

“Good morning.”

Frederick looked at the desk.

“No programme?”

“No,” said Alexander. “I did not need one today.”

“Why not?”

“It is a Monday.” He stood up. “I know what is on a Monday.”

It was true. Frederick knew what was on a Monday too. He could have written it himself, from the window bed, without getting up: the shower at twenty past, the box at seven, Brennan at nine, Mercer at half past ten, luncheon at ten past twelve, the library, dinner, light at half past ten. It was the same every Monday. It had been the same every Monday since August, and every Monday since August it had been written down on a sheet of paper with an eagle at the top and laid square to the edge of the desk with the pencil beside it, and ticked.

“Fair enough,” said Frederick, and got up.

---

Theo had rung the night before, at seven, which was nine in New Westminster now, because the Realm had put its clocks back on Sunday morning and the March, which never put its clocks anywhere, had stayed where it was; and Theo had been delighted by this, as he was every November, and had explained it for four minutes with Desmond held up to the camera in his maroon-and-gold scarf, and Frederick had sat on the window bed with the laptop and let him.

“We’re two hours now,” Theo had said. “Not three. I’m an hour closer.”

“You’re not closer. You’re the same distance.”

“I’m an hour closer in time, Freddie.”

And from the bed by the door, not looking up from the book he was reading, Alexander had said, as he said every Sunday, “Good evening, Theo,” and Theo had said “Hi, Alex,” and Desmond had waved.

That was last night. Frederick had thought about it in the shower, for no reason, with the water running hot and the queue outside the door: that it had been exactly the same as every Sunday, and that he had been glad of it.

---

The knock came at seven. One knock; it was always one.

Kessler stood in the corridor with the box: grey, the size of a large book, with the red seal across the lid where the lid met the side, and on top of it the courier’s slip on its small clipboard, with a pen clipped to it. He held it out across the threshold in both hands, as he had held it out every morning since August, and Alexander took the clipboard and signed the slip, in the square hand, with the date and the time, 07.00, and gave the clipboard back.

Then he took the box, and turned, and put it down on the desk by the door, square to the edge, beside the pencil.

He did not sit down.

Kessler looked at nothing. He took the clipboard back down the corridor to 314 and the door closed behind him, and Alexander stood for a moment by the desk with his hand flat on the lid of the box, on the seal, as a man stands with his hand on the roof of a car before he gets in.

“Breakfast?” said Frederick.

“Yes,” said Alexander, and took his hand off the box.

---

At breakfast Alexander had a coffee.

Frederick had stopped saying anything about it. He had said not hungry? on the Thursday after the Devil’s Advocate, and on the Friday, and on the Monday after, and on each of them Alexander had said I had something, and by the Tuesday Frederick had understood that he would go on saying it every morning in the same words, correctly, until Frederick stopped asking; and so Frederick had stopped asking and started bringing a banana.

He brought one now. He put it down on the table beside the coffee without saying anything.

Alexander looked at it.

“Thank you,” he said, and put it in his bag, in the front pocket, where the pencils went. “For later.”

“You said that on Friday.”

“Yes. I ate it on Friday. At eleven.” He drank some coffee. “It was a good banana.”

Rhys and Sam were arguing about the Commons. Rhys had his fifth highlighter, the one in the colour nobody had a name for, and was using it on a newspaper, and Sam was saying that the numbers did not support him, and Rhys was saying that numbers never supported anybody, they just stood there, and Sam was saying that standing there was the whole point of numbers; and Alexander sat at the end of the table with his coffee and listened, and when Rhys turned to him and said “Back me up,” he said, after the pause, “Sam is right about the numbers. You are right about the people. The Commons is made of both, and so you are both wrong,” and Rhys went pink from the ears inwards and Sam wrote it down.

It was a good answer. It was exactly the kind of answer he gave. Frederick ate his waffle and thought so.

---

The statistics quiz had come back on Friday. Frederick had a 61.

“Sixty-one,” said Sam, at lunch, looking at it as a doctor looks at an X-ray of somebody else’s leg.

“It’s better than fifty-eight.”

“It’s three better than fifty-eight. Out of a hundred.” Sam took the quiz and turned it over and looked at the back, where there was nothing, and turned it back. “You got question four wrong in the same way you got it wrong in September.”

“Consistent.”

“That’s not what consistent means in statistics.”

“What does it mean?”

Sam looked at him for some time over the round glasses.

“Six o’clock,” he said. “Tomorrow. 316.”

Across the table Alexander had a salad, which he had gone straight to, without joining any queue first, and he ate half of it from one side and laid his knife and fork across the plate. Frederick looked at the half and did not say anything, because he had stopped saying anything about that too.

---

His mother rang at twenty past eleven, which was twenty past six in the evening in London.

He took it on the step on the landing, under the window, as he took every call from her, with the telephone against his ear and his back against the wall and his feet on the step below, and the car park outside between the concrete fins, and a different car in the place where the shadow fell.

“Fredde,” said his mother, in Swedish. “You sound tired.”

“I’m not tired.”

“Then you sound like a man who has had a statistics quiz.”

“Sixty-one.”

“That is three better than the last one.” He heard the cup go down on the saucer. “I keep a note. Your father keeps it with the reports.” She was quiet a moment. “He is well today. He walked in the garden with Brannigan to the bench and back, and he said bench when he got to it, as though he had not been sure it would be there.”

“Tell him I said…”

“I will tell him. He will say hill.” Another pause. “And Alexander? How is Alexander?”

“Okay.”

“Okay does not count, Fredde.”

He had known she would say it. She had said it since he was six. He looked at the car park.

“He’s fine,” he said. “He’s busy. He’s doing everything. He folded a girl’s laundry last week and she put it on the internet.”

“I saw.” His mother laughed, low, the laugh that came down the line from London and went on. “Ebba showed me. I’m not okay, it said. I thought that was very sweet.” The laugh went. “Is he sleeping?”

“He goes to bed at half past ten.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“Light off at half past ten. Every night. Exactly.”

There was a silence on the line from London. It was not a long one. It was the length of a woman deciding not to ask a second time, because the first time had been heard.

“Give him my love,” said his mother. “Tell him I think the laundry was very sweet. And tell him his mother has written to me about a hat, and that I have told her he will not wear it, and that she has sent it anyway, and that it is coming.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Good.” And then, in the voice that was hers and not the one for papers: “You are a good roommate, Fredde.”

“I’m not. I took the window.”

“Yes,” said his mother. “I heard. That is also very sweet.”

---

In the afternoon Tyler came at four.

He sat on the floor between the beds with his back against the window bed and his hood up and a bottle of Glacier, and put his headphones on, and did not say anything, because the point of 312 was that nobody said anything; and Frederick sat on the window bed with the History reader; and Alexander sat at the desk by the door with the box.

It was still sealed.

Frederick saw it when he came in. He saw the red seal across the lid, whole, where it met the side, in the light from the lamp. He looked at it for perhaps a second. Then he sat down on the window bed and opened the reader at the Four-Year War, where Ashby had them now, and read the same paragraph about the Olive Branch three times.

Alexander was not working on the box. He was reading a book, a library book with the university’s label on the spine, about the executive power in the Realm since 1783, for Mercer; and he was reading it with the pencil, making small marks in the margin of a sheet of paper laid beside it, because one did not mark a library book; and the box sat at his left elbow, square to the edge, sealed.

At five Tyler took one side of his headphones off.

“This is the quietest room on campus,” he said, to nobody. “Brayden’s doing a podcast now. About Mesa.”

“Who listens to it?” said Frederick.

“Me,” said Tyler. “Through the wall.” He put the headphones back on.

At a quarter past seven, after dinner, at which he had had a bread roll, Alexander moved the library book to the right side of the desk and put the box in front of him and took a small knife from the drawer and cut the seal, cleanly, at the corner, and opened it, and began.

He worked until twenty-nine minutes past ten. Frederick watched the clock over the door. At twenty-nine minutes past ten he closed the box, and put the knife in the drawer, and laid the pencil down beside the box, parallel to the edge, and at half past ten exactly his light went off.

“Done?” said Frederick, in the dark.

“Yes.”

“You usually do it in the morning.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “Today I did it in the evening.”

---

On Tuesday there was no programme either.

Frederick looked at six. He did not mean to; he had decided in the night that he would not look, that it was a Tuesday and Alexander knew what was on a Tuesday; and at six his eyes opened and went to the desk by the door before the rest of him was awake. The lamp. The pencil. The wood. The box from yesterday, closed, on the right side of the desk, waiting for the courier to take it back.

Alexander was dressed, on the edge of the bed, with his shoes on.

“Tuesday,” said Frederick.

“Yes.”

“Pike at eight.”

“I know,” said Alexander. “I have not got Pike. You and Kessler have Pike.”

---

The music building at eight was cool and dim and smelled of floor polish and old piano, and in the long low room on the ground floor, with its twenty-four chairs, there were two students, as there had been since August: Frederick, in the third chair of the front row, because last spring that had been his chair and nobody had told him to move; and Kessler, in the chair at the end of the second row, by the wall, in a black polo shirt with his lanyard, and his face.

Dr Pike came in at eight with her music under her arm. She was seventy-six and had taught this course for twenty years, and since the fifth of September she had come into this room every Tuesday with the expression of a woman who has been given something by God and is not sure she is allowed to keep it.

“Good morning, Mr Hanover,” she said. “Good morning, Mr Kessler.”

“Good morning, Dr Pike.”

Kessler inclined his head, one degree.

“A part-song,” said Pike, and sat down at the piano. “English. Seventeenth century. Very old, very short. Four parts, and there are two of you, so you will sing the tenor, Mr Hanover, which you will find too high, and Mr Kessler will sing the bass, which nobody will find too anything.” He played the first chord. “From the top. Lightly.”

They sang it.

Frederick sang the tenor, which he found too high. And from the end of the second row, by the wall, the bass came up under it, deep and level and exact, the sound filling the room from the floor upwards, as water fills a lock, so that the twenty-two empty chairs seemed to hum with it; and Pike at the piano did not stop playing this time, as she had in September, and did not take her glasses off, but Frederick saw her hands, on the keys, go very slightly gentler.

At the end Pike sat with her hands in her lap.

“Again,” he said. “Just the bass. Please.”

Kessler sang it again, alone, the whole of it, without the piano, standing against the wall with his arms at his sides and his face looking at nothing, and the room filled up and stayed full, and then he stopped, and the room emptied, slowly, as a room empties of a bell.

“Thank you,” said Pike, quietly.

“Doctor,” said Kessler.

---

They walked back across the mall at a quarter past nine, under the palms, in the shade of the arcades, with the sprinklers going on the burnt grass, and Kessler walked a pace behind Frederick and a pace to the left, as he walked behind Alexander, as though it were the only way he knew how to walk beside anybody.

“That was the best yet,” said Frederick.

Kessler said nothing.

“The bass. The second time. Pike nearly cried.”

“Dr Pike is a musician,” said Kessler. “Musicians weep. It is professional.”

Frederick looked at him. It had a joke in it, and Kessler’s face, saying it, had not changed at all.

They walked on. Ahead of them, at the end of the mall, Old Main stood in its red brick with the white box on its pole outside it, and the stone with the fifteen names, and the students going past it in their hundreds to the nine o’clocks; and somewhere behind it, Frederick knew, Alexander was in the library, on the second floor, at the table by the window that he had taken in August and that the second floor now left for him, reading about the executive power.

Frederick nearly said something then. He did not know what it was. It was in his mouth, on the mall, in the shade, with Kessler a pace behind him and a pace to the left; and he did not know what it was, so he did not say it.

“Sir,” said Kessler, behind him, at the door of Palo Verde Hall, and held it open.

---

At four, when Frederick came back from Spanish, the box was on the desk.

It was Tuesday’s box. The courier had come at seven, while Frederick was in 316 with his own, and Kessler had signed for it at the day desk and carried it up, and Alexander had signed the slip and put it down on the desk by the door, square to the edge, beside the pencil. Frederick knew that because there it was, square to the edge, beside the pencil.

The red seal was whole.

Alexander was not there. He was at the library, or at Mercer, or somewhere on the programme that was not written down. Frederick stood in the doorway of 312 with his bag on his shoulder and looked at the box, and at the seal, and at the pencil, which lay parallel to the edge of the desk, exactly, as it always lay.

He put his bag down. He did not touch anything on the desk by the door. He went and sat on the window bed.

Tyler came at four and sat on the floor and put his headphones on.

At half past five Alexander came in with the library book under his arm and said “Good afternoon,” and “Good afternoon, Tyler,” and Tyler lifted one side of his headphones and said “Hey,” and put it back; and Alexander sat down at the desk by the door, and opened the library book, and moved the box six inches to the left, so that it was out of the way of the book, and squared it to the edge again, and read.

---

In the corridor at eight Rhys had the Mercer quiz.

He was standing outside 316 with it held up in front of him like a man holding up a fish he has caught, and his ears were already pink, and when Alexander came out of 312 to fill his water bottle Rhys turned the quiz round so that the mark faced outwards.

“Ninety-one,” said Rhys.

Alexander took his own quiz out of the library book, where it had been marking a page, and turned it round.

It said ninety-one.

“Again,” said Rhys. “That’s four. That’s four in a row. Identical. He’s doing it on purpose. Mercer’s doing it on purpose. He’s marking us to the same number because he can’t…” He stopped. He looked at Alexander, and waited, with his ears going pinker, for the thing Alexander always said next: the dry thing, the short exact thing, about Mercer or about strong executives or about the statistical likelihood of four identical marks, which Sam would have the figure for. Frederick, in the doorway of 312, waited for it too.

“Yes,” said Alexander.

That was all. He looked at the two quizzes, held up side by side in the corridor, and said yes, and nothing after it.

Rhys stood with his quiz held up for a moment longer, as a man stands when a door he has leaned on has opened.

“Rematch,” he said. “Next week.”

“Yes,” said Alexander, and went down the corridor to the fountain by the stairs and filled his water bottle, and came back, and went into 312.

Rhys looked at Frederick.

“Huh,” he said. “He must be tired.”

“It’s November,” said Frederick.

“It’s November,” said Rhys, and nodded, as though that settled it, and went back into 316 with his quiz.

---

At a quarter past nine the box was open.

Frederick did not see it opened. He had gone down to the kitchen for a glass of water, because the one by the stairs tasted of the pipe, and he had stood in the kitchen for a while looking at the two rings, which Lena had cleaned, and the note above them in Lena’s hand, PLEASE WIPE, and the note under it, in Makayla’s, SHE MEANS IT, and when he came back up the forty-five steps the box was open on the desk by the door, the red seal cut at the corner, the papers out in a stack, and Alexander working through them with the pencil.

He worked until twenty-nine minutes past ten. At half past ten exactly his light went off.

Frederick lay on the window bed in the dark.

The corridor light came in under the door, a thin line of it across the floor, as far as the leg of the desk by the door, and up the leg in a faint grey shine, and he could see by it the edge of the desk, and the box, closed now, on the right, and the pencil, lying beside it, parallel. He could see the place in front of them, square in the middle of the desk, where every morning since August there had been a sheet of paper with an eagle at the top.

He lay and looked at the place where it was not.

It was a small thing. It was two mornings. People did not write lists every day of their lives; Frederick had never written one in his. It was a Monday and a Tuesday, and Alexander knew what was on a Monday and a Tuesday, and he had said so, correctly.

Across the room the breathing was slow and even and exact.

Frederick turned over and faced the blind, and the inch of orange at the edge of it, and the black shoulder of the butte; and then, after a while, turned back, and looked at the desk again, because it was easier than not looking.