His Bad Year

Lukas was asleep on the floor of 316 under the federal tax brackets.

He was on his back on Sam’s mat, between the two beds, with the book about the ship face down on his chest and one arm flung out across the carpet towards the door, and he did not wake when Frederick came in at six, or when Sam turned on the desk lamp, or when Rhys, on the bed by the window, said into his pillow, in a voice of great suffering, “It’s six,” and put the pillow over his head.

“It’s six,” agreed Sam.

He had the whiteboard propped on his desk against the wall, under the poster, the small one he had bought in September for the purpose, with a marker on a string. It was Monday, and six o’clock, and 316; and Frederick sat down on the end of Sam’s bed with his statistics book and his notebook, and stepped over Lukas’s arm to do it.

“Variance,” said Sam.

“I know what variance is.”

“You don’t,” said Sam, without unkindness, as a man states the balance of an account. “You got the question wrong on Friday. Both parts.” He uncapped the marker. “Variance is how spread out something is. How far things are from the middle. On average.”

“I know.”

“Then what’s a standard deviation?”

Frederick looked at the whiteboard.

“It’s the…” He stopped. “It’s the square root. Of the variance.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Because isn’t a reason,” said Sam, and drew a line across the whiteboard, and a mark in the middle of it, and wrote MEAN under the mark. Then he looked round the room for something to count, as he always did; and his eyes went past the tax brackets, and Rhys under the pillow, and the window, and came down to the floor.

“Right,” said Sam. “Lukas.”

---

He did it with Lukas.

He did it with the whole of the last four days, from his notebook, where it had all been written down, every game and every score: the darts on the Avenue, and the whist, and the foosball, and the butte at six against nobody, and Tyler’s game with no name on the floor of 312. He wrote the scores on the whiteboard in a column, everybody’s, for each thing, and worked out the mean, and the spread, and the standard deviation, slowly, with Frederick doing the sums on his telephone; and then he put a mark on the line for each person, for each thing, and stood back.

The marks were all bunched together in the middle of the line, Frederick’s and Rhys’s and Theo’s and Felix’s and Tyler’s and Lena’s, and the man from the pool table’s.

And then, a long way off at the right-hand end of the line, on its own, there was a mark that said L.

“That’s how far he is,” said Sam, and tapped it with the marker. “From everybody. In standard deviations. That’s what it’s for. It tells you how far away somebody is from where everybody else is, in a unit you can compare.” He looked at the mark. “He’s about four. At everything. That’s an outlier. You don’t see four. In a hall of six hundred you might not see one person who’s four at anything.”

Frederick looked at the mark on its own at the end of the line.

He understood it. He understood it all at once, the whole of it, the square root and why, and the spread and the middle and the unit you could compare; he could feel it go in and stay, the way a thing does about once a year, and he sat on the end of Sam’s bed and looked at the line and at the L and did not say anything for a moment in case it fell out again.

“Oh,” he said.

“Yes,” said Sam.

On the floor between the beds, Lukas opened his eyes.

He did not move. He lay on his back with the book on his chest and looked up past Sam at the whiteboard, at the line, and the bunch of marks in the middle, and the one at the end on its own, with his letter under it. He looked at it for some time, as though somebody had set it as a sum.

Then he closed his eyes again and went back to sleep.

“He can’t do arithmetic,” said Sam, recapping the marker. “Alex says. It’s in his reports.” He looked down at Lukas with what in Sam was affection. “He doesn’t need to. He just stands at the end of the line.”

From under the pillow, Rhys said, “Is it over?”

“Yes,” said Sam.

“Did he get it?”

Sam looked at Frederick.

“He got it,” said Sam, and wrote something in the notebook, small, and closed it.

---

Monday was ticked.

It was the first programme of the second week. Frederick had written it on Sunday night at the card table under the scorpion poster, on the hotel paper, in the worse hand, as he had written every one since the first; and it had 06.30. Wake. and 06.45. Water (Mr Luna’s rule). and 07.00. Box: give it to Kessler. at the top, as they all did now, and 22.30. Light off. Tick. at the bottom; and in between it had Brennan at nine, and lunch, (eat it), and Tyler at four, and dinner, (eat it), and at half past nine, in the square hand, added by Alexander himself on the first night and copied by Frederick into every one since, 21.32.

They were all ticked. Every line. The glosses were in the margin in the square hand: (toast, whole). (soup). (Tyler: quiet). (rice, half).

The pill box on the desk had been filled again on Sunday night, from MO. MO had its tick.

At half past ten exactly Alexander turned off the lamp over the bed by the door, and in the dark Frederick heard the pencil make its tick, and be put down.

He lay on the window bed and did not sleep.

He had not slept properly for a week, and he had stopped minding. He lay on his side, facing the room, in the dark, with his eyes open, and listened to his cousin breathing carefully on the bed by the door, as he breathed every night now, carefully, the way you breathe in a room where somebody else is sleeping; and the floor of 312 was empty between them, because Lukas was in 316 under the tax brackets, by the table; and it seemed to Frederick, lying there, that the floor had never been so wide.

---

At ten to one, Alexander sat up.

He sat up the way he did now, slowly, in order. He swung his feet down onto the floor. He sat on the edge of the bed by the door for a while in the dark, with his hands on his knees.

Then he stood up, and found his shoes, by feel, beside the bed, where he had put them square, and put them on, and tied them. Frederick heard the laces. He found the jacket on the back of the chair. He put it on. He buttoned it, in the dark, from the bottom, the way he had buttoned it once at the foot of the stairs in the lobby in March, at eleven at night, before going out to a car.

Then he opened the door, and the line of light from the corridor came in across the floor and up the side of the window bed, and Frederick shut his eyes.

The door closed. It did not click.

He counted sixty.

He counted it the way Alexander would have counted it, exactly, without hurrying the end, and at sixty he got up, in his T-shirt and shorts, and did not put his shoes on, and opened the door.

---

The corridor was empty and very bright.

The suns were on the doors in a row under the strip lights, maroon with their gold rays: ALEX, and the empty place beside it where FRED had been until Friday; RHYS, SAM; FELIX, K.; LENA, MAKAYLA. At the far end, the fire door at the top of the stairs stood shut, with its narrow pane of wired glass.

The door of 314 was open an inch.

As Frederick came along the corridor in his socks it opened another inch, and Kessler was in it. He was in his shirtsleeves, again, at one in the morning, and he was not doing anything. He had been standing in the doorway of 314 in the dark with the door open an inch, and he had watched Alexander go past, along the corridor and through the fire door; and now he looked at Frederick, in his socks, coming after.

Kessler looked at him for a moment.

Then he inclined his head, a quarter of an inch, towards the fire door. And stepped back. And the door of 314 closed to its inch again, and stayed there.

Frederick went through the fire door, and down.

---

He stopped on the landing.

He had not decided to. His feet stopped there, on the landing between the third floor and the second, by the step under the narrow window, where the thermometer on the wall said 79, as it always said, even at one in the morning in November with the window open an inch and the air coming in off the car park at seventy-one.

He did not go any further. He could not have gone any further without being seen from the lobby, at the turn of the next flight; and he did not want to be seen. He stood with his back against the wall by the thermometer, in his socks, on the cold concrete, and listened.

The stairs carried. They had always carried. They were concrete, and bare, and went down from the top of the building to the bottom in a single well, half-flight by half-flight, and every sound in the lobby came up them, clear, the way sound comes up a well: the hum of the drinks machine, and the small radio on the desk, low, a replay of something from earlier in the evening, a game, a man’s voice saying a score; and a door closing; and footsteps on the lino of the lobby, not hurrying, stopping.

“Can’t sleep, son?” said Mr Luna.

---

There was a pause.

“No,” said Alexander.

There was a sound Frederick knew. It was the sound of a plastic chair being pushed out from the end of a desk across a lino floor by a foot. It went about two feet, and stopped.

“Sit,” said Mr Luna.

The chair creaked.

Then, for a while, there was nothing but the radio. The man on it said something about a free throw, and somebody in a crowd somewhere cheered, faintly, a long way off and a long time ago, and the radio went quieter, as though a hand had turned it down. Frederick heard a pen. He heard the scratch of it, short, on paper on a clipboard, and Mr Luna’s voice, to nobody, the way he always said it, as you read a thing aloud to make sure you have written it right:

“One a.m. Seventy-two.”

The pen went down.

“Every hour,” said Mr Luna. “Inside of a dwelling. It’s the law.”

“Chapter Nine,” said Alexander. “Article Four.”

“That’s the one.” A pause. “You read it?”

“I read all of it. In August.”

“Huh,” said Mr Luna. “Most kids read the part about the trough.”

There was another silence. The crossword: Frederick heard the page of it turn, the soft sound of newsprint, and the pen picked up, and put down again.

“Seven across,” said Mr Luna. “Five letters. Grows dim.”

A pause.

“Fades,” said Alexander.

The pen. “Fades.” The pen went down. “That’s the one.”

---

The radio went off.

Frederick heard the click of it, the small switch on the side, and the lobby was suddenly very quiet: only the drinks machine, humming, and the faint tick of the clock over the post-room hatch, which he had never heard before from the landing, and could hear now.

“You want to hear something?” said Mr Luna. “You don’t have to.”

“Yes,” said Alexander.

There was a long pause. Frederick stood against the wall by the thermometer with his hands flat on the concrete behind him.

“My wife’s name was Rosa,” said Mr Luna.

He said it quite slowly, and quite plainly, the way he said drink water and call your mother, as a thing he had said before and knew the shape of; and Frederick, on the landing, heard the tense, as he had heard it a year ago at Christmas, and did not move.

“We used to pass in the kitchen. Her coming in, me going out.” A pause. “She went in the spring. It was quick. Quick’s better, they tell you. It’s not better. It’s just quick.”

Alexander did not say anything.

“The year after,” said Mr Luna, “was my bad year.”

The clock over the hatch ticked.

“I was nights already. Here. I kept nights. Nights was the only thing I could do. Days, people look at you. They come up and they want you to be better. They mean it nice. Nights, it’s just the clipboard. You sit here, and every hour you look at the box on the wall, and you write the number. Somebody’s got to write it down.” A pause. “So I wrote it down. Every hour. A whole year. I don’t remember any of the numbers.”

“No,” said Alexander.

“I’d go home at six. Day girl comes on at six. I’d get home at a quarter past, and my mother’d be in my kitchen.” Mr Luna stopped. “She had a key. She’d let herself in at half past five. She’d have the coffee made. And she’d be sitting at the table with her cup, in her coat, and she’d watch me come in, and sit down, and drink it.” Another pause. “And she didn’t say anything.”

The drinks machine hummed.

“A year, son. Every morning. Three hundred and sixty-five. She didn’t say a thing. Not how are you, not eat something, not Rosa would want. She’d sit, and I’d drink the coffee, and she’d wash the cups, and she’d go home.” A sound that might have been a laugh, or the chair. “My mother. You don’t know my mother. She’s never not said anything in her life, before or since. You ask anybody in the old barrio. Ninety-two, and she still tells the priest what he got wrong.”

There was a long silence in the lobby.

“Did it go?” said Alexander.

Frederick, on the landing, closed his eyes.

For a fortnight Alexander had answered everything. He had answered Brennan and Makayla and the pharmacist and Callum and Dr Sato, correctly, every time, and had asked nothing that was not about a time or a fact. And he had asked this now, at one in the morning, in the lobby, in the exact English, quite quietly, of a night porter of seventy; and it was not a polite question, the kind he had asked all his life at the ends of lines of people. It was the other kind.

Mr Luna took his time.

“It went,” he said. “Not all at once. Nobody tells you that, so I’m telling you. It doesn’t go all at once. You don’t wake up one day and it’s gone.” A pause. “It went the way the heat goes in October, son. You live here, you know. You don’t see it go. Nobody ever sees it go. It’s a hundred and four, and it’s a hundred and four, and it’s a hundred and two, and you don’t notice, it’s still hot, it’s still hot every day. And then one morning you go out the door at six and it’s cool. And you stand there.” The chair creaked. “And you think, when did that happen. And you don’t know. You never know. You just know that one day you need a jacket.”

The clock over the hatch ticked.

“I am wearing a jacket,” said Alexander.

There was a pause. Then a sound from Mr Luna that was not quite a laugh, low, from somewhere in the chest.

“That one doesn’t count, son,” he said. “That one’s for the heat.”

---

Frederick stood on the landing with his hands flat on the wall and found that his face was wet, and did not do anything about it, because there was nobody to see, and because if he moved his hands off the wall the concrete under his socks would make a sound.

“Did you see a doctor?” said Alexander.

“No,” said Mr Luna. “I should’ve. Rosa would’ve made me. She wasn’t there to.” A pause. “Don’t do what I did, son. Do what you’re doing.”

“Thursdays,” said Alexander.

“Thursdays. In Phoenix. I know.” Mr Luna did not say how he knew. Nobody needed to tell Mr Luna anything; it came up the drive at night, in cars, and in through the doors, and he wrote it down. “You keep going.”

“I will keep going.”

“Every Thursday.”

“Every Thursday,” said Alexander. “At four. Kessler drives.”

“Good man, Kessler,” said Mr Luna. “Signs the book for nobody. Every night. Nobody in it. Signs it anyway.” A pause. “I like a man who signs for nobody.”

---

There was another sound Frederick knew.

It was the sound of a glass jar being pushed across a wooden desk. It was not a long sound. It went about an inch, and stopped, and the butterscotch in it shifted, a small dry rattle, like gravel.

The lobby was quiet.

Frederick stood on the landing and listened to it be quiet. He had been offered that jar on his first night, at ten o’clock, in August of last year, with a can of earplugs; and he had seen it pushed to Lukas, in March, which was an invitation; and to Jack, and to Theo. He had never once, in fifteen months, heard anybody refuse it. He did not know what he would do if he heard it now.

The quiet went on.

Then there was the sound of a hand going into a jar, and the rattle, and the crackle of cellophane, very small, the gold wrapper being turned in somebody’s fingers, and untwisted at one end, and the other.

“Thank you,” said Alexander.

“Hm,” said Mr Luna, and the radio clicked back on, very low, and the man on it said something about the fourth quarter.

---

He went back up before they could hear him go.

He went up the half-flight on the sides of his feet, along the edge of each step by the wall where they did not give, and through the fire door, holding it so that it would not close on its spring, and let it close, slowly, against his hand. The door of 314 was open an inch. It did not open any further, and it did not close.

He went into 312, and lay down on the window bed, on his side, facing the room, and pulled the blanket up, and waited.

At twenty to two the door opened, and the line of light came in across the floor and went away again.

He heard Alexander cross the room. He heard him take off the jacket, and hang it on the back of the chair, and stand for a moment by the desk. He heard the shoes, untied, and put down beside the bed. He heard the bed by the door take his weight.

Then nothing, for a while.

Then, in the dark, very small, the crackle of a gold wrapper being undone the rest of the way, and folded, once; and a long breath, in, and out, not careful this time, all the way down.

The room smelled, very faintly, of butterscotch.

Frederick lay on the window bed with his eyes open and did not say anything, and after a while, for the first time in a week, he slept.