The Floor of 312

Lukas came through the doors at Terminal Four at twenty to one with a rucksack on one shoulder, and stopped under the canopy, and looked at Frederick, and said nothing.

He was in a grey jumper and jeans, in seventy-four degrees, pale and unhurried, with the grey eyes that looked at a thing as though somebody had set it as a sum. He looked at Frederick for about two seconds. Then he looked at Rhys, beside the car, and nodded, once. Then he put the rucksack in the boot himself, before Rhys could take it, and got into the back.

“Good flight?” said Rhys, in the car.

“Yes.”

“Long, though. Hamburg. What is it, fourteen hours?”

“Yes.”

“Did you sleep?”

Lukas considered the question.

“No,” he said, and looked out of the window at the Valley going past, flat and pale, with the mountains round the rim of it, and did not say anything else all the way to Tempe; and Rhys looked at Frederick in the mirror, and Frederick shook his head, very slightly, and Rhys drove.

---

Alexander was at the desk by the door.

He was dressed for Phoenix, in the jacket, buttoned, with the programme on the desk in front of him, Frederick’s, in the worse hand, on the hotel paper. 06.30. Wake. had its tick, and 07.00. Box: give it to Kessler., and 07.15. Breakfast (eat it)., beside which it said (toast, whole). Further down, the line Frederick had written last night: 12.40. Lukas (Terminal Four). F. and Rhys. And below that, 15.15. Kessler: car. 16.00. Dr Sato. 17.30. Back.

The pill box was on the desk beside it, square to the edge. MO, DI and MI had their ticks.

Alexander stood up.

Lukas stood in the doorway of 312 with his hands at his sides and looked at him.

He looked at him for a long time. He looked at the jacket, and the collar, and the hands, and the desk, and the pencil lying on the desk beside the programme at its angle, which was nothing in particular. He looked at the pill box. He looked at Alexander’s face last, and longest, the way he looked at a dartboard.

“Lukas,” said Alexander.

Lukas did not say anything.

He came in. He put the rucksack down on the floor between the two beds, against the window bed, and sat down beside it on the floor, with his back against the frame of the bed by the door, Alexander’s bed, and his knees up; and took a book out of the rucksack, a paperback, German, with a picture of a ship on it; and opened it; and began to read.

That was all.

Alexander stood by the desk for a moment longer. Then he did not sit down at the desk again. He sat down on the edge of the bed by the door, just above Lukas, with his hands folded on his knees, and sat there; and Lukas read, with his shoulder six inches from Alexander’s shin; and neither of them said a word.

Frederick went and stood in the corridor for a while.

---

At a quarter past three Kessler knocked, and Alexander stood up, and picked up the pencil, and ticked 15.15, and went.

Lukas did not look up from the book. He turned a page.

---

Callum came at half past three with a clipboard.

He had the handbook under one arm and the clipboard held in front of his chest with both hands, and the face of a young man who has read the section on overnight guests four times since breakfast.

“Hey. Hi. Fred. Sir. Hi.” He looked at Lukas on the floor. “Is this the, um. Guest. So it’s three signatures, host, guest, roommate. And it’s three nights. Maximum. Per room. Section four.” He swallowed. “Is he staying three nights?”

“Seven,” said Frederick.

Callum looked at him.

“Seven,” he said.

“Till Thursday morning.”

“That’s, okay, that’s more than three.” Callum opened the handbook on top of the clipboard, and turned to section four, and read it, again, with his lips moving very slightly. “It says per room. It says no guest may be registered in any one room for more than three nights in a period of fourteen days.” He looked up. “So he can’t. In this room. Seven. I’m really sorry. I don’t make the…”

“It’s fine,” said Sam, from the doorway.

Sam had come along the corridor from 316 with the notebook, and leaned in the doorway as he had leaned in it on the first day of their first year.

“It says any one room,” said Sam. “It doesn’t say any one floor.”

Callum looked at the handbook.

“It doesn’t,” he said, slowly, as a man says it who has been looking at a door for an hour and has just seen the handle.

Sam opened the notebook, and turned to a clean page, and drew a table.

He drew it in pencil, with a ruler from the back of the notebook, in about four minutes, and turned it round and held it out.

LUKAS. Thu 312. Fri 312. Sat 312. Sun 316. Mon 316. Tue 316. Wed 314.

THEO. Thu 316. Fri 312. Sat 312.

Max per guest per room: 3. Nobody over.

“Who’s Theo?” said Callum faintly.

“Friday,” said Frederick.

“He’s on Thursday.”

“He lands at twenty to one on Friday morning,” said Sam. “So he sleeps Thursday’s night. In 316, so he doesn’t wake anybody up in here.” He looked at the table. “Then two in 312. Then he goes home Sunday. Three nights. Two rooms. Nobody over.”

Callum looked at the table for a long time, and at the handbook, and at the table again.

“Can I,” he said. “Can I photocopy that?”

“No,” said Sam, and tore the page out of the notebook, and gave it to him.

---

The form wanted three signatures.

Lukas signed it on the floor, as guest, on the back of his book, in a small upright hand, and showed Callum his identity card, which was German and had an eagle on it, and which Callum looked at for some time, as if it might be tested on. Frederick signed it as roommate, consenting.

“And the host,” said Callum.

“He’s at the doctor.”

Callum went white.

“He has to sign before the first night. It’s…” He found the line. “Before the guest’s first night.”

“It’s half past three,” said Sam. “It’s not night.”

Callum looked at the window, and at the light coming through it, and at Sam, and closed the handbook, and said, “Okay. Okay. That’s. Okay,” and went away down the corridor with the clipboard and the page from Sam’s notebook held against his chest, as though he had been given something in a church.

---

Tyler came at four.

He stood in the doorway with his hood up and a Glacier in each hand and looked at Lukas on the floor with the book.

“Oh,” said Tyler. “Hey. You’re the guy.”

Lukas looked up.

“Spring break,” said Tyler. “Pubs’s friend. You beat Pubs at darts.” He thought about it. “You beat everybody at everything. Sam said.”

“Yes,” said Lukas.

Tyler sat down on the floor, against the window bed, where he always sat, which put him opposite Lukas across the strip of carpet. He held out one of the Glaciers. Lukas looked at it, and took it, and inclined his head.

“You want to play a game?” said Tyler. “It’s cards. I made it up.”

“Yes.”

Tyler took a pack of cards out of the front pocket of his hoodie, soft with handling, held together with a rubber band.

“I made it up in seventh grade. On a snow day. It doesn’t have a name.” He took the rubber band off. “So it’s, okay, so you deal seven, and the twos are wild, except on a Tuesday, and then the fours are, and you can pass, but only to the left, unless somebody’s played a jack…”

He explained it for eleven minutes. There was a rule about the seven of diamonds that Tyler said his brother had added in eighth grade and that Tyler had never agreed with but had to keep. Lukas listened to all of it with the Glacier unopened on his knee and his face perfectly still.

Tyler won the first hand.

He won it easily, and said “Okay, so, that’s how it goes,” kindly, as one explains a thing to somebody who is new to it, and dealt again.

Lukas won the second hand.

He won the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. He won them the way he did everything, laying the cards down one at a time with no expression, as though he had been watching somebody else play it for years; and on the sixth hand, with a two on a Tuesday, which it was not, he passed to the left, and played the seven of diamonds under the brother’s rule, and Tyler stared at the carpet.

“Dude,” said Tyler. “I made it.”

“Yes,” said Lukas.

Tyler looked at him for a long time, with his face open and complete.

“Okay,” said Tyler, and gathered up the cards, and put the rubber band back on them, and put his headphones on; and the two of them sat on the floor of 312 opposite each other until five, Tyler with his music and Lukas with the book about the ship, in perfect contentment, and neither of them said anything else.

---

Alexander came back at twenty to six.

He came in and stood by the desk and picked up the pencil and ticked 16.00. Dr Sato. and 17.30. Back., in that order. Then he looked down at Lukas, on the floor, who had not looked up.

“Thursdays,” said Alexander, to the room.

“Was it all right?” said Frederick.

“It was an hour. Her window is onto a car park. There is a palm tree in the car park with a cart under it.” He considered. “She asked me about the programme. I told her who wrote it. She asked to see it.” He looked at the sheet on the desk. “I said no.”

“Fair.”

“She said that was also a good sign,” said Alexander, and sat down on the bed by the door, above Lukas, with his hands on his knees.

Callum came back at six with the clipboard, and Alexander stood up and signed the form, as host, A. Hohenzollern, in the square hand, slowly, with a full stop after the A; and Callum looked at the signature for some time and then went away again without saying anything at all, which Frederick understood to be the most frightened he had yet been.

At twenty-eight minutes to ten Alexander opened the lid that said DO.

---

Theo came through the doors at Terminal Four at twenty to one on Friday morning with a holdall and a maroon and gold scarf round his neck.

He saw Frederick under the canopy, in the dark, in the warm, and dropped the holdall on the pavement and came straight on, and put one arm round his shoulders, roughly, the way a defensive lineman puts an arm round anybody, and held on.

“Where’s Desmond?” said Frederick, into the scarf.

“Desmond doesn’t fly. I told you.” Theo let go and looked at him. “You’ve lost four pounds. I can see it in your neck. Have you eaten?”

“Lena makes us.”

“I like Lena,” said Theo. “I’ve never met her and I like her.”

He slept in 316 that night, Thursday’s night, on Sam’s floor, under the poster of the federal tax brackets, on a mat Sam had found from somewhere, because Sam’s table said so; and at seven in the morning Sam woke him by standing over him with the notebook, and Theo looked up at the tax brackets for some time before he remembered where he was.

---

Lukas won everything.

He went up the butte at six on Friday morning by himself, against nobody, in shorts, at a run. Sam stood at the gate at the bottom with his watch and timed him, because, he said, somebody should; and Lukas went up the stepped path in the grey light past the sign that said IN SUMMER, CLIMB BEFORE SUNRISE OR NOT AT ALL, which did not apply, and touched the top, and came down again, and stopped at the gate, not out of breath.

“Eleven minutes and forty seconds,” said Sam.

Lukas looked at him.

“You beat the next best I’ve timed by four minutes,” said Sam, and wrote it down. “That’s not a record. That’s a different event.”

Lukas nodded, and went to breakfast.

He beat Felix at foosball on Friday afternoon, ten to nothing. Felix had fixed the table in September and had not lost on it since, and he stood at the end of it afterwards and looked at the rod he had straightened, and turned it in his hand, and said, in German, a single word, which Lena translated for the lounge as Hm.

He beat everybody at darts on the Avenue on Friday night, at the bar with the cactus in a hat, with an orange wristband on, because he was twenty: Theo, and Rhys, and Felix, and a man from the pool table who remembered him from March. He still could not work out what he needed, because darts was subtraction; and Sam stood behind his left shoulder all evening and said a number quietly before every throw, as he had in March, and Lukas threw it.

Alexander came for an hour.

It was on the programme: 21.00. The Avenue. One hour. Lemonade. He sat at the little round table by the board with an orange wristband and a lemonade and the jacket buttoned, and watched, with his hands folded, like a man in the front row of a theatre before the lights go down; and at ten o’clock he took the pencil out of his jacket pocket and ticked it, on the table, in the noise, and stood up, and Kessler was at the door.

“I am going back,” he said to Frederick. “It was a good hour.”

“Do you want me to…”

“No. Stay. Lukas has not finished.” He looked at the board, where Lukas was standing on the line with three darts, waiting for Sam. “He will not finish for some time.”

He beat Felix and Lena at whist on Saturday afternoon, with Theo as his partner, in the lounge, under the scorpion poster. Lena kept the score. At the end of the fourth rubber she turned the score sheet over and wrote on the back of it, in her small hard hand, and pushed it across the table to him.

THIS GAME IS UNFAIR. I WISH TO COMPLAIN. L. VOGT.

Lukas read it. Then he turned it back over, and looked at the score, and inclined his head to her, exactly, as he inclined it to a Hofmarschall; and Lena looked at him for a long time and then laughed, suddenly, a short hard sound that made Makayla look up from the sofa, and said, “Gut. Again,” and dealt.

He said nothing about anything.

He did not ask Alexander how he was. He did not ask Frederick. He did not say Thursdays or doctor or Berlin. He slept on the floor of 312 on Thursday and Friday and Saturday night between the beds, on his back, with the book on his chest and the light from the corridor on his face, six inches from the frame of the bed by the door; and in the mornings he was up before either of them and gone, and back by seven with two coffees from the cart on the mall, one of which said ALEX on the side in marker and the other of which said LUKAS, and he put the first one on the desk by the door, beside the programme, and sat down on the floor with the second, and opened the book.

It was how he said it. Frederick had never once heard Lukas say anything that mattered except by not saying it; and he lay on the window bed on Saturday morning and watched him on the floor with the coffee, and the book, and his shoulder six inches from the bed by the door, and understood that he was hearing it now, all of it, louder than anybody had ever said anything in that room.

---

At three on Saturday afternoon Theo said, “Alex. Come for a walk.”

“Where?”

“Not far,” said Theo. “The stairs.”

Alexander looked at the programme on the desk. 15.00 was blank. Frederick had left it blank on purpose, on Theo’s instructions, on Friday night; and Alexander looked at the blank line for some time, and at Theo, in the scarf, in the doorway; and stood up.

“Yes,” he said.

Frederick did not go with them.

He stayed in 312 with Lukas for twenty minutes, Lukas on the floor with the book and Frederick on the window bed with the Machado he still had not learned, and neither of them said anything. Then he got up and went out into the corridor and along it, past RHYS and SAM, past FELIX and K., to the end, to the fire door at the top of the stairs, which had a narrow pane of wired glass in it at the height of a man’s face.

He did not open it. He stood and looked through the glass.

From the door you could see down the half-flight to the landing between the third floor and the second, and the step under the narrow window, where the thermometer said 79. They were sitting on it. Theo was on the step itself, big, with his elbows on his knees and the scarf round his neck, maroon and gold, the ends of it hanging down between his knees. Alexander was beside him, on the same step, upright, in the jacket, with his hands folded in his lap.

Theo was talking.

Frederick could not hear him. The fire door was thick and the glass was wired and the stairs carried sound down and not up. He could only see. He saw Theo talking, slowly, with his hands, turning to Alexander, and then away from him, to the window, and then back. He saw Alexander listening. He saw that Alexander was not answering, and that Theo was not waiting for him to; that it was not that kind of talking. It was the other kind. It was somebody putting things down, one at a time, on a step, beside somebody else, so that they would be there when he wanted them.

After a long time Alexander said something.

It was short. Frederick saw his mouth move, three or four words. Theo stopped talking and looked at him, and nodded, slowly, and did not say anything for a while; and then took one end of the scarf in his hand and looked at it, and said something, and Alexander’s mouth moved at the corner, very slightly, and went away again.

Lukas came and stood beside him at the fire door.

He did not say anything. He looked through the wired glass for about as long as he had looked at Alexander on Thursday in the doorway of 312; and then he went back down the corridor, and Frederick heard the door of 312, and knew without looking that he had sat down on the floor again, with the book, six inches from the bed by the door.

Frederick stayed.

He stood at the fire door for an hour, and did not open it, and watched them through the glass; and at four Theo stood up, and Alexander stood up, and they came up the half-flight, and Frederick went back down the corridor before they reached the door, quickly, the way you leave a window before the person outside it looks up.

---

“He’s safe,” said Theo, at the kerb at Terminal Four on Sunday, at noon, with the holdall.

“You said.”

“I’m saying it again. He’s safe, and he’s not well, and those are two different things, and they’re both true.” Theo looked at him. “He’s got a doctor. He’s got the pills. He’s got you and Lukas and Kessler and a girl who writes complaints. He’s got Thursdays.” He shifted the holdall. “It’s going to be weeks, Freddie. Not days. You know that.”

“Four, he said.”

“He would.”

“What did you say to him? On the stairs.”

Theo considered it for some time.

“Nothing you haven’t,” he said. “I just said it for an hour.” He looked at the doors of the terminal. “And he said one thing back. And it’s his.”

“Okay.”

“Okay doesn’t count,” said Theo. “Your mum told me that.”

Then he put the arm round Frederick’s shoulders, roughly, and held on, at the kerb, in seventy-six degrees, which was nothing; and let go; and went in through the doors, and turned round once on the other side of the glass, and held up the end of the scarf, and was gone.

---

On Sunday night Lukas took his rucksack and his book along the corridor to 316, because Sam’s table said so, and slept under the tax brackets.

The floor of 312 was empty. Frederick folded the camp bed, which had been out since Friday for Theo, in three, and pushed it under the window bed beside Brannigan’s box, where it sighed, once, and was quiet; still breathing.

At twenty-eight minutes to ten Alexander opened the lid that said SO.

He took what was in it, with the water. He closed the lid. He picked up the fine black pen and made a tick under 21.32 on the masking tape.

Then he looked at the box, for some time, at the seven lids in a row, MO DI MI DO FR SA SO, each with its time and its tick, all seven, a week.

“Seven,” said Alexander.

He did not say anything else. He took the lids, one at a time, and opened them all, so that the box lay open on the desk like a row of small mouths; and took the white paper bag out of the drawer; and began, with the tip of the scissors, to fill it again, from MO.