The Empty Seat

Lukas came at seven with two coffees.

He came every morning now, from 316, with the two cardboard cups from the cart on the mall, one that said ALEX in marker and one that said LUKAS. He put the one that said ALEX on the desk by the door, beside the programme. He sat down on the floor with the other, against the frame of the bed by the door, and opened the book about the ship.

The programme said:

WEDNESDAY 22 NOVEMBER

06.30. Wake. 06.45. Water (Mr Luna’s rule). 07.00. Box: give it to Kessler. 07.15. Breakfast (eat it).

08.40. Walk to Tolliver.

09.00. Brennan.

At twenty to nine Alexander was sitting on the edge of the bed by the door, dressed, in the linen jacket, buttoned, with the shirt buttoned to the neck and the little blue Charter shut on his knees.

06.30 had its tick. 06.45 had its tick. 07.00 had its tick, and 07.15, beside which it said (toast, half).

He did not stand up.

Frederick, by the door with his own bag, waited.

The coffee that said ALEX stood on the desk with the lid on, untouched. Lukas turned a page.

“Frederick,” said Alexander.

“Yes.”

“I cannot today.”

He said it to the Charter on his knees. He said it quite plainly, in the exact English, the way he had said No on Sunday a week ago at the desk, with nothing before it and nothing after; and his hands lay on the blue cover, one on top of the other, and did not move.

“Then don’t,” said Frederick.

Alexander looked up.

“It is Brennan.”

“I know.”

“I have not missed Brennan. I have not missed anything.” He looked at the programme on the desk. “It is on the programme.”

“I wrote the programme,” said Frederick. “It’s my programme. I’m saying don’t.”

Alexander looked at him for some time.

Then he reached over to the desk, and picked up the pencil, and took the programme onto the Charter on his knees; and beside 08.40. Walk to Tolliver. he did not make a tick. He drew a line. He drew it through the whole of the item, neatly, from the first figure to the full stop, in the square hand, straight; and then the same through 09.00. Brennan.

He looked at the two lines.

“A tick is for the time you were told,” said Alexander. “A line is for the time you were told, and did not go.” He put the programme back on the desk, square to the edge. “That is new. I have not needed it before.”

On the floor, Lukas turned another page.

Frederick stood by the door with his bag. He had History at half past ten, and Ashby, who would look up at the third row when he came in and be relieved, visibly, that the witness was present. He looked at Lukas.

Lukas did not look up from the book. He moved his shoulder, very slightly, an inch, so that it was against the frame of the bed by the door; which was where it had been all week; which was where it would be, Frederick understood, until somebody came back.

“I’ll be back at twelve,” said Frederick.

“Yes,” said Alexander. “It is on the programme.”

---

He went the long way, past Tolliver.

It was not on his way. It had never been on his way. He went along the mall in the shade of the arcade, and in at the side door of Tolliver, and along the corridor that smelled of floor polish, past the fire notice and the water fountain, three steps along from which, fifteen months ago, a professor with a fish on his tie had stopped and turned round with a question he could not keep on a shelf.

The door of Tolliver 104 had a narrow window in it, at the height of a man’s face, a single long pane.

He stood at it and looked in.

The room went up in its curved rows from the bench, eighty seats, nearly full. Brennan was at the board with his back to the room and the chalk in his hand, in the crumpled linen jacket, and at the left-hand end of the board, in the large rapid capitals, where it had been since the first Monday of the semester, the question of the year:

CAN A MAN BE A CITIZEN AND A SOVEREIGN AT ONCE?

Brennan finished writing something under it, and put the chalk down, and turned round.

He took three steps along the front of the bench, and turned, the way he always did; and as he turned he looked up the rows, all the way up, to the back, to the last row, to the seat on the aisle, where since August, three mornings a week at nine, a young man in a linen jacket buttoned to the neck had sat with a notebook and a pencil laid beside it, and had argued with him, correctly, in three parts, until the end of the hour.

The seat was empty.

Brennan looked at it. He looked at it for about as long as it takes to read a short line on a board. Then he looked back down at the room, and said something, and the room laughed, and he picked the chalk up again.

He looked at the seat once more, at the end of the next three steps, as he turned.

Frederick went away from the door before Brennan’s eyes could come down the aisle to the narrow window and find him there.

---

At twelve he was on the mall, on his way back, and Brennan was coming the other way.

He was coming along the middle of the mall in the sun, not the arcade, with the leather bag on his shoulder and a fresh cardboard cup in his hand and the little blue Charter rolled up under his arm, at the pace of a man of fifty-six going to his lunch, and he saw Frederick at about forty yards, and did not change his pace, and did not look away.

Frederick did not look away either.

They came level by the stone with the fifteen names on it. Brennan stopped.

He stood in front of Frederick in the sun, in the crumpled jacket, with the tie with the fish on it, and looked at him. He looked at him the way he had looked at him in the corridor outside Tolliver 104 a great many times, with a question taken down off the shelf where he kept them; and Frederick waited for it. Mr Hanover. Where’s Mr Hohenzollern? Or something cleverer, and kinder, that would come at it from the side, the way Brennan came at everything, wondering professionally.

Brennan looked at him for some time.

Then he did not ask it.

Frederick watched him not ask it. He watched him have it, the question, all of it, in the grey beard and the eyes over the cup, and look at it, and put it back on the shelf, and leave it there; and it was the first time, in fifteen months of corridors, that Frederick had ever seen him do that.

“Drink water, Mr Hanover,” said Brennan.

He went on.

He went on along the mall in the sun, with the bag on his shoulder, towards the library; and Frederick stood by the stone with the fifteen names and watched him go, three steps, and four, and ten, and Brennan did not stop, and did not turn round, and went on until he was a crumpled jacket among a great many other people, and was gone.

Frederick stood there for a while.

Then he went to the drinking fountain at the end of the arcade, and drank, for some time, and went home.

---

When he came in at ten past twelve, the coffee that said ALEX was gone from the desk, and the cup was in the bin, empty.

Alexander was lying on his back on the bed by the door, with his shoes off, and his hands folded. Lukas was on the floor where he had been, with the book. Neither of them looked as if anything had been said in the room for three hours.

Beside 10.00. Back here. Lie down if you want. That counts. there was a tick.

---

Tyler came at four, and had added a rule.

He announced it from the doorway, in his hood, before he had sat down: he had been up till two thinking about it, in Ironwood, while Brayden recorded an episode about the history of Mesa’s water.

“You can’t play sevens,” said Tyler, to Lukas. “New rule. Just you.”

Lukas looked up from the book.

“Any sevens,” said Tyler. “Not just the diamond one. You get a seven, you have to hold it. Till the end.” He sat down on the floor opposite, against the window bed, and took the cards out of the front of his hoodie and took the rubber band off. “That’s fair, right? That’s fair. Because you’re like, way better. Sam said you’re four. I don’t know what that means but he said it like it was bad.”

“Yes,” said Lukas.

Lukas won the first hand.

He won it holding two sevens, which he laid down at the end, face up, as the rule required, one beside the other; and Tyler looked at them for a long time.

“Okay,” said Tyler.

He dealt again, and lost again, and dealt again; and on the bed by the door Alexander turned his head on the pillow and watched them, the boy from Parma and the boy from Potsdam, on the floor of 312, on either side of the strip of carpet the colour of nothing, playing a game with no name that had been invented on a snow day in Ohio, with a rule in it now that had been invented last night against one person; and Frederick, on the window bed, saw the corner of Alexander’s mouth move, very slightly, and go away again, and come back, and stay for nearly a second.

---

Callum came at six with the clipboard for the last night.

It was the last square of Sam’s table. Wed 314. Kessler signed it as host, in the corridor, standing, against the wall, in the small hard German hand, and Felix signed it as roommate, consenting, and Lukas signed it as guest, on the back of the book, and showed his card again, which Callum looked at again for some time, as though it might have changed since Thursday.

“So that’s,” said Callum. “That’s everything? That’s the last one?”

“Yes,” said Sam, from the doorway of 316.

He had copied the table out again, because he did not like to be without it. He took the pencil from behind his ear and drew a line through the last square, neatly, from corner to corner.

“Seven nights,” said Sam. “Three rooms. Ten signatures. Nobody over.”

Callum looked at the clipboard with the face of a man who has crossed something very high on a very narrow plank and has only now looked down.

“Thank you,” said Callum, with great feeling, to Sam, and to the corridor in general, and to Kessler, who was not there; and went away to lie down.

---

The programme said 19.00. Essay (if you want).

Frederick had put it in on Tuesday night, on the hotel paper, at the card table, and had looked at it for a long time before he did, and had put the brackets round the last three words twice, to make sure. The essay was for Brennan. It was due on Friday the first of December, two thousand words, on the question of the year; and he had heard Rhys say that Alexander had not begun it, in the corridor, to Sam, in the voice for things Rhys was not sure he should have noticed.

At seven Alexander sat down at the desk by the door, and drew the lamp towards him, and opened a pad of lined paper, and took out a pen.

He wrote it in three hours.

He did not stop. Frederick lay on the window bed with the Machado, which he had at last learned on Monday, and watched his cousin write. Alexander wrote the way he did everything when he was well, and Frederick had not seen him do anything like it for three weeks: fast, and upright, and without crossing anything out, the pen going across the lined paper in the square hand, line after line, page after page, turning each page over and squaring it on the pile at his left with the side of his hand and going straight on to the next. He did not look up. At half past nine he stopped, and drank the glass of water that Frederick put down beside him without a word, and opened the lid that said MI, and took what was in it, and ticked under 21.32, and went straight back to the page.

At ten past ten Frederick got up to take the glass away.

He took it from beside the pad, and as he took it he looked down, because he was there, and because the lamp was on the page, and because he had been looking at the square hand on pages since he was five.

It was the last page but one. Near the bottom of it there was a paragraph, and in the paragraph a sentence, and at the end of the sentence a small raised figure, 7:

A sovereign may be a citizen of a place in which he is not sovereign, and keep its laws, and be bound by them, and be glad to be; the difficulty is only that he cannot cease to be a sovereign while he is there, and so he is never, for an hour, only the citizen.

And at the foot of the page, under a short ruled line, in the same hand, smaller:

7. Alexander I, personal communication.

Frederick stood by the desk with the glass in his hand.

He knew the rule. He had learned it in December of last year, in Tolliver 104, at the cost of a grade: in this course you may not cite yourself. He had heard Brennan say it again in March, in the back row, to a visitor; and the visitor had said, I know. He wrote to me. Alexander knew it better than anybody. Alexander had been told it in writing.

And he had done it anyway, tonight, in the third hour, without noticing, correctly footnoted, in the square hand, with a full stop at the end; because he had written the sentence about himself, and it was true, and somewhere at the bottom of the page the part of him that had been taught at six never to state a thing without saying where it came from had said where it came from.

Frederick looked at the footnote.

He thought about saying it, for as long as it took Alexander’s pen to go across the next line; and he understood, standing there with the glass, that it was not his to say. He had spent the warning. It was Brennan’s rule, in Brennan’s course, on Brennan’s question, and Alexander’s sentence; and it was the first thing in three weeks that Alexander had done fast, and without stopping, and well; and it was not his.

He took the glass away, and put it on the windowsill, and lay down on the window bed with the Machado, and did not say anything.

At twenty past ten Alexander wrote the last line, and put the pen down, and squared the pile with the side of his hand, and put it in a folder, and wrote on the folder in pencil CHT 101. Brennan. 1 December., and laid the pencil down beside it.

At half past ten exactly he turned off the lamp, and in the dark Frederick heard the tick.

---

Lukas’s flight was at ten past ten on Thursday morning, to Chicago, and Hamburg after.

Jack’s came in from Chicago at a quarter past nine, at the same gate, on the same aircraft, Frederick had found on Wednesday night, which would turn round in fifty minutes and take Lukas back the way Jack had come. Kessler drove, with Rhys in the front. Alexander came, in the jacket; it was on the programme, 08.15. Terminal Four (Lukas), and 09.15. Jack, and he had ticked the first in the car.

They stood at the window of the gate lounge, Frederick and Alexander and Lukas with his rucksack, and Rhys, and Kessler a little apart, not there, and watched the aircraft come in across the field and turn and stop with its nose almost against the glass.

Lukas had said nothing all week.

He had not said anything in the car, either. He stood at the window with the rucksack on one shoulder and his hands at his sides and watched the jet bridge go out to the aircraft and lock on, and the door of it open, and the people begin to come up it into the terminal: a man with a guitar, a woman with a baby, three men in suits, a girl in a Sun Devils sweatshirt crying for some reason or none.

Then a red sweatshirt.

Jack came out of the jet bridge at a fast walk, with a rucksack and no hat, his face already braced, as it was braced every time he came through a door into Arizona, for August; and he saw them at the window, and his face did a thing that went through four pages very quickly and stopped on the last one; and he came straight on across the carpet, with his arms already coming up.

Lukas had turned round from the window.

He was nearest. He had turned round to see what Frederick was looking at, and he was standing a step in front of Frederick and a step to the side, in the grey jumper, with his rucksack; and Jack, who had been looking at Frederick and not at anything else, did not change course.

He did it on Lukas.

He did all of it. The arm, and the hand flat between the shoulder blades, and the exact length of it, as long as two men hold on at an airport; and he was most of the way through it before he understood, and Frederick watched him understand, over Lukas’s shoulder, his eyes going wide in the red face, and then, being Jack, finish it properly, to the second, because you did not stop it halfway.

Lukas stood in it.

He did not move. He stood in it as he had stood in it once before, at the foot of the steps of a grey aircraft in March, with his chin over Jack’s shoulder and his eyes open; and he allowed it, all of it, to the end.

Jack let go.

“Christ,” said Jack. “Sorry. Bloody hell. Lukas. Sorry. Hello.” He looked at Frederick, and at Lukas, and at Frederick. “I was aiming.”

Lukas looked at him with his grey eyes, steadily, the way he looked at a dartboard.

He did not say anything.

Over the speakers a woman said that the flight to Chicago was now boarding at this gate, all passengers, all groups, and thanked them for their patience, and Lukas picked up his rucksack, and shouldered it, and looked at Alexander.

Alexander looked back.

They looked at each other for some time, at the gate, in the jacket and the grey jumper, the two of them, who had stood at the back of a line together in a school corridor in Potsdam at eight and had not been separated since by anything that mattered; and neither of them said a word; and it was, Frederick thought, watching it, the longest conversation he had ever seen them have.

Then Lukas went to the door of the jet bridge, and gave the woman his boarding pass, and went past her.

At the door he stopped, and turned round, and lifted one hand; and Frederick saw that he was holding up, very slightly crooked, three fingers.

And went down the jet bridge, and did not look back, because looking back was not in it.

---

“Did he say anything?” said Jack, at the window, watching the aircraft. “To you. All week.”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“Not a word,” said Frederick. “About anything.”

Jack thought about this for some time, with his hands in the pocket of the red sweatshirt. Then he turned round, and looked at Alexander, properly, for the first time, the way he looked at a man who had come into the New Inn on his own on a wet Tuesday and sat at the end of the bar.

“Alex.”

“Jack.”

“You look bloody awful, mate.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “I am told it is temporary.”

“Good,” said Jack. “Who told you?”

Alexander considered the question.

“A doctor in Phoenix,” he said. “On Thursdays. And a night porter. And a medical student from Milwaukee, on the stairs, for an hour.” A pause. “And Lukas, for a week. Without saying it.”

Jack looked at him a moment longer. Then he nodded, slowly, as a landlady’s son nods at a man at the end of the bar who has told him something and will not be telling him anything else.

“Right,” said Jack. “Happy Thanksgiving. Is that what you say?”

“It is what they say here,” said Alexander. “There is a turkey. There is no crown.”

Outside, the aircraft pulled back from the gate, and turned, slowly, towards the end of the field, with Lukas in it; and Jack turned at last to Frederick, and did it properly this time, the arm and the flat hand and the exact length, and then a second longer, which he had done once before, in March, and had not done since.

In the car, in the back, between Frederick and the window, Alexander took the programme out of his jacket pocket, and unfolded it on his knee, and took the pencil, and beside 09.15. Jack made a tick; and then looked at it for a while; and folded it again, along the same fold, and put it back.

Jack was asleep against the far window before they reached the river.