His Own Words

Jack’s text had come from the gate on Sunday the twenty-sixth, at a quarter to one, in capitals.

TELL ALEX THE LAST SNAP WASNT HIS FAULT

Frederick had read it out in 312, standing by the window, and Alexander had looked up from the desk by the door, where he was writing nothing.

“Tell him it was not a question of fault.”

He says it wasnt a question of fault

TELL HIM ITS A FOOTBALL MATCH

“Tell him I know.”

He says he knows

There was a pause of about a minute. Then:

YOU TWO ARE EXHAUSTING. BOARDING. LOVE YOU. TELL HIM THAT TOO. NOT THE LOVE YOU THE EXHAUSTING

Frederick had read that out as well, all of it, and Alexander had considered it for some time, with the pencil over the blank page.

“Tell him that I accept both,” he had said, “in the spirit intended.”

---

That was a week and a day ago. Since then there had been a Thursday.

On the Thursday at four Kessler had driven Alexander to Phoenix, to the office on Camelback Road, and brought him back at a quarter past six, and Alexander had come up the stairs and into 312 and sat down on the bed by the door and ticked 16.00. Phoenix on the programme in Frederick’s worse hand, and then sat for a while with the sheet on his knee, and then said, “She asks very good questions,” and nothing else. On the Friday he had handed in the Charter essay, in Tolliver, at nine, in a clear plastic folder. Frederick had seen the footnote over his shoulder nine days before, 7. Alexander I, personal communication., small, at the bottom of page six, and he had not said anything, and he did not say anything on the Friday either. It was not his to say.

On Monday the fourth of December it was sixty-eight degrees at noon, and the March had put its coats on.

---

Sam had him at six, in 316, under the poster of the federal tax brackets.

It was dark outside and the desk lamp was on and Rhys was asleep under a pillow on the bed by the window, as he was every morning at six, and Sam had the notebook open and a pencil and the look of a man who has been given a difficult account and intends to close it.

“Hypothesis tests,” said Sam. “The final’s the week after next. You’re going to get one.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know what a p-value is.”

“I know what it is. I don’t know what it’s for.”

Sam considered this, under the tax brackets, in the lamplight.

“It’s for how surprised you should be,” said Sam. “That’s all. You think something’s normal. Then something happens. And the p-value tells you how surprised you’re allowed to be, if the normal thing’s true.” He drew a curve in the notebook, a hill, and put a small cross out on the edge of it, at the bottom, nearly off the page. “If it’s out here, you’re allowed to be very surprised. And then you have to stop thinking it’s normal.”

Frederick looked at the cross on the edge of the hill for a while.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, I know what it’s for.”

Sam looked at him over the notebook with deep suspicion, as at a column that had added up first time.

“You’ll forget by lunch,” said Sam.

He forgot by lunch.

---

The programme for Monday was on the desk by the door when he got back at seven, in his own worse hand, written the night before.

06.30. Wake. 06.45. Water. 07.00. Box: Kessler. 07.15. Breakfast (eat it). 09.00. Brennan. 10.30. Mercer. 12.00. Lunch (eat it). 14.00. Free. 16.00. Library. 18.00. Dinner. 22.30. Light off. Tick.

Alexander ticked 06.30 and 06.45, and went down at five to seven to the lobby for the box, and came back up with Kessler and the box at four minutes past, and Kessler took the box away into 314 unopened, as the programme said; and at a quarter to nine Alexander put on the linen jacket and buttoned it from the bottom, and took the hat from the shelf, and went to Brennan.

Frederick went to Ashby, and Spanish, and a lecture in Statistics about hypothesis tests in which a tiny woman drew a hill on the board and put a cross out on the edge of it and said “Variance is your friend,” and he looked at the cross, and could not, for the life of him, remember what it was for.

He did not see Alexander all afternoon. That was ordinary. They had different days.

---

He found out at seven in the evening, because Alexander told him.

He was at the desk by the door with the programme in front of him, the pencil beside it, not parallel; and he had ticked everything down to 18.00. Dinner, and at 14.00. Free he had ticked it and written beside the tick, very small, in his own exact hand, one word.

Frederick saw it from the window. He could not read it from there.

“I went to the Devil’s Advocate this afternoon,” said Alexander.

Frederick turned round.

“The Devil’s Advocate.”

“The office. It is in the basement of the student union, at the end of a corridor, next to the room where they keep the chairs for graduation.” Alexander looked at the programme. “I went in the free hour. It was free.”

“On your own?”

“Kessler was in the corridor.”

“Kessler’s always in the corridor.”

“He was not at my elbow,” said Alexander. “That is a different place. He sat on a stacking chair outside the graduation room for fifty minutes and read a pamphlet about the student health service, and was not there.” He turned the pencil over once. “I asked for the girl with the pencil. They did not know whom I meant. There are eleven people in that room, and four of them have pencils.”

“Did you find her?”

“She came out from behind a filing cabinet. It was behind her ear.” He paused. “She knew me.”

“Everybody knows you.”

“Yes. Since October. She was the one who made that so.” Alexander considered it. “She was not sorry. I respected that. She said, Is this about the photograph, and I said no, and she sat down, and took the pencil from behind her ear, and I told her.”

Frederick waited.

He stood by the window in the dark, with the butte a black shape outside it, and waited, the way his mother waited, and Theo, and the way he had learned to wait for his father’s next word, without filling the space, because if you filled it the thing went away and did not come back.

“Told her what?” he said, when it was clear that it would not come by itself.

“I will show you when it is printed.”

“Alexander.”

“I said it once,” said Alexander. “In the basement of the student union, to a girl with a pencil, at a quarter past two. If I say it to you now, here, it will be twice.” He looked up. “I should prefer you to read it.”

---

They did not say anything for a while.

Down the corridor somebody was playing music with the door open, and somebody else shouted at them to close it, and they did not, and Frederick heard Lena in the kitchen two floors down, through the floor, through the stairwell, telling somebody in German exactly what they were doing wrong with an onion.

“Can I ask why?” said Frederick.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Alexander laid the pencil on the programme.

“Three reasons,” he said.

“Of course.”

“The first is that the floor knows something. They do not know what. They saw that my seat was empty on a Wednesday. They see Kessler’s car at four on Thursdays. They saw Lukas on the floor of this room for a week and Theo with a scarf, and they are not stupid, and they have been very kind, and they have not asked.” He looked at the window, past Frederick, at the butte. “When people know the shape of a thing and not the thing, they make the thing up. They make it kinder than it is, or worse. I would rather they had the thing.”

“And the second.”

“The second is October. The photograph. The girl with the pencil had a story, and she held it a week, and then she printed it, and it was true.” He paused. “It was true and it was not mine. I had not said one word of it. I would like there to be one thing in that paper about me that is mine.”

Frederick looked at him.

“And the third?”

“The third is in the paper,” said Alexander, and picked up the pencil, and drew a line under 22.30. Light off. Tick., which there was no need to do, because the line was already the last one.

---

At twenty-nine minutes past ten he turned off the lamp by the door. At ten thirty he ticked the line in the dark, by feel. Frederick heard it from the window: the small sound of the pencil on the paper, once.

“Frederick.”

“Yes.”

“It is a short piece.”

“Okay.”

“I wrote it down first,” said Alexander, to the ceiling. “On Neues Palais paper. Then I read it to her from the paper, so that I would not add anything. She asked me whether I wanted to add anything. I said no.” A pause. “She asked me whether I was sure. I said that I had been asked that before, in Berlin, and that this time I was.”

Frederick lay on his back in the bed by the window with his hands on the blanket and looked at the ceiling.

“Did she let you see it? Before it goes in?”

“She let me read the proof,” said Alexander. “I moved a comma.”

---

The Devil’s Advocate came out every weekday morning, in stacks, in a wire rack by the post-room hatch, and on Tuesday morning at five to seven Alexander went down for the box and came back up at four minutes past with Kessler and the box and, under his arm, folded once, a copy of the Devil’s Advocate.

Kessler took the box away into 314.

Alexander stood in the doorway of 312 with the paper. He did not unfold it. He held it out across the room, at the full stretch of his arm, the way Mr Luna held out the cream telephone on its curly cord.

“Page three,” said Alexander. “I am going to have breakfast. It is on the programme.”

He went.

Frederick took the paper out into the corridor and along it and through the door to the stairs, and down to the landing, where the window was, and sat down on the step under it, where he took all his mother’s calls, and unfolded the Devil’s Advocate on his knees.

It was not on the front. The front was about the parking levy and a basketball player’s knee. It was on page three, in the bottom right-hand corner, in a plain box with a thin line round it, under a heading in the paper’s ordinary type, the size it used for notices.

A STATEMENT

The following was given to the Devil’s Advocate on Monday afternoon by a first-year resident of Palo Verde Hall, who came to the office on his own and asked that it be printed as he said it, in full, without comment. It is printed as he said it. He read the proof, and moved one comma.

And under that, in the same plain type, not italic, not larger, five sentences.

In November I was unwell, as I have been before. I am being treated by a doctor in Phoenix, on Thursdays. I am telling the Devil’s Advocate because a reporter in Berlin once asked me whether I was well, and I said yes, and it was not true. That is all. I will not say it again.

A. Hohenzollern, Palo Verde Hall

He read it twice.

Then he sat on the step with the paper on his knees and looked out of the narrow window at the car park, where a girl was trying to fit a lamp into the back of a very small car, and the concrete fin, and the strip of morning beyond it; and he thought of a reporter in Berlin, whom he had never heard of, and a boy of fourteen or fifteen or sixteen in a uniform somewhere, on some steps, being asked a question in front of cameras and saying yes, correctly, composed, the way he said everything; and the reporter writing it down and going away; and nobody, in the whole of Germany, knowing that it was not true except the boy.

He did not know which comma had been moved. He read it a third time to find out, and could not, and understood that this was the point.

---

The floor said nothing.

That was the thing he would remember. By eight o’clock every copy in the wire rack by the post-room hatch had gone, and by nine there was one on the lounge table under the scorpion poster open at page three, and one in the kitchen, and one on the noticeboard on the third floor, pinned up beside the fire notice by somebody who had not signed it; and nobody on the third floor of Palo Verde Hall said one word about it to Alexander, all day, in the corridor, or on the stairs, or in the queue in the dining hall at the table by the window with the butte a mile off.

They said hi, Alex. They said it as they always said it. A freshman from the end of the corridor, who had borrowed the pencil sharpener in September and given it back in October and come to the door in November, worried, to ask whether Alexander wanted it again, said hi, Alex on the stairs at noon, and held the fire door, and went on down.

“Nobody’s said anything,” said Frederick, in 312, at half past three.

“No,” said Alexander. He was at the desk, with the programme. “That is what I asked for.”

“Did you ask for it?”

“I said, That is all. I will not say it again,” said Alexander. “They read it.” He ticked 14.00. “This floor can read.”

---

Callum came at a quarter to four, in the doorway, with the handbook.

He did not have a form. Frederick had never seen him without a form. He stood in the doorway of 312 with the handbook held against his chest in both arms, the way Tyler held a bottle in a procession, and looked at Alexander at the desk, and went red from the neck up.

“I just wanted to say,” said Callum. “There’s nothing in here.” He held the handbook out an inch. “I looked. Last night. There’s a section on wellbeing. It’s got the counselling centre’s number in it and a picture of a sunrise.” He swallowed. “I didn’t think you needed the number.”

“No,” said Alexander. “Thank you. I have one.”

“Right.” Callum looked at the handbook. “Right. So I’m not going to read it to you.”

“Thank you, Callum.”

“Okay,” said Callum, and stood in the doorway a moment longer, and then went away down the corridor very fast, as though somebody had told him there was a fire, and Frederick heard the door of the RA’s room shut, and then, faintly, through it, what sounded like a man saying oh my God to himself several times.

---

Tyler came at four, for quiet.

He sat down on the floor between the beds with his back against the frame of Frederick’s, and put the Glacier down on the carpet, and put the headphones round his neck, not on; and he did not put them on. He looked at Alexander at the desk for a while.

“Dude,” said Tyler. “You’re in the paper.”

“Yes.”

“Again.”

“Yes.”

“Brayden read it to me. Out loud. At breakfast. He read the whole paper out loud. He read the parking thing.” Tyler looked at the Glacier. “Is it true? The doctor thing?”

“Yes.”

Tyler nodded. He picked up the bottle and drank some and put it down again on exactly the same ring of wet on the carpet.

“My mom has a guy,” said Tyler. “Tuesdays.”

The room was very quiet.

“In Parma. Since I was, like, twelve. She says it’s like the dentist.” Tyler considered it. “For your head. She goes on her lunch. She says nobody at work knows.” He thought about that. “Everybody at work knows. My aunt Donna works there.”

“Thank you, Tyler,” said Alexander.

“Okay,” said Tyler, and put the headphones on, and sat on the floor between the beds in the quiet he had come for, with his eyes on the screen of his phone and the hood up, until ten to six, as he did every day, and did not say anything else about it, then or ever.

---

His mother’s message came at ten past five, which was ten past midnight in London.

Ebba showed me the Devil’s Advocate. It is on the Internet, where everything is. Tell Alexander that it was well said. Once. M.

And a minute later, as though she had put the telephone down and picked it up again:

Your father read it. He read it twice, with his finger, and then he gave the telephone back to me and did not say anything at all, which for your father is the longest speech there is. Puss.

He read both of them out to Alexander, from the window.

Alexander listened with the pencil in his hand.

“Tell your mother thank you,” he said. “In Swedish. She likes it in Swedish.”

“He didn’t say anything,” said Frederick.

Alexander considered it.

“No,” he said. “He would not need to.”

---

At the dining hall the ABC was on the television over the waffle iron, with the sound down, and at seven o’clock Frederick saw the five sentences on it, on a white card, in German, and then in English, under the photograph of the A on the butte in October, the one from the city paper, with a man in a buttoned shirt in the middle of it and one maroon stripe on his cuff. Underneath, in the band that ran across the bottom of the screen, it said that the statement had been printed in full by Berlin’s papers that afternoon, from the Devil’s Advocate, credited, without addition.

He did not point it out. Alexander had his back to the television. He was eating his dinner, all of it, as the programme said.

On the mall afterwards, under the palms, in the dark, they passed a girl coming the other way with a satchel and a pencil behind her ear, and she looked at Alexander, and Alexander inclined his head to her, perhaps a quarter of an inch, which he had learned from Kessler; and she nodded back, once, and went on.

“That’s her,” said Frederick.

“Yes.”

“She didn’t say anything.”

“No,” said Alexander. “She is a good reporter.”

---

Mr Luna came on at ten.

They went down together at twenty past, because the programme said 22.30. Light off and there was time, and because Alexander had asked, at the door of 312, in the voice he used for the things he was not sure he had the right to, whether Frederick would come.

The lobby was dim, with the post-room hatch shut and the lift standing open with its light on and its sign, SORRY FOLKS, and at the desk, under the lamp, in the cardigan, with the radio and the jar of butterscotch and the clipboard of hourly temperatures, Mr Luna was writing a number.

10 p.m. 66.

Under the clipboard, under the crossword, folded small, so that only a corner of the plain box showed, was page three of the Devil’s Advocate.

Mr Luna did not look at it. He looked at the two of them over his glasses for a while, with no expression at all, and pushed the plastic chair out from the end of the desk with his foot, and then, because there were two of them, reached behind him without getting up and brought out another.

“Son,” said Mr Luna.

Alexander sat down.

“Son,” said Mr Luna, to Frederick, and Frederick sat down too.

On the radio somebody a long way off hit something, and a crowd made a sound, and Mr Luna listened with his head on one side and made a small noise of satisfaction. Then he took a butterscotch out of the jar, and unwrapped it, and put it in his mouth, and pushed the jar an inch across the desk.

Alexander took one.

Nobody said anything about anything. They sat at the night desk of Palo Verde Hall under the lamp for eight minutes, by the clock over the hatch, with the radio, and the crossword in pen, and the corner of page three showing under it; and at twenty-eight minutes past ten Alexander stood up, and said “Goodnight, Mr Luna,” and Mr Luna said “Goodnight, son,” without looking up, and wrote a word in the crossword, in pen, without hesitating.

They went up the stairs. Alexander counted forty-five. Frederick counted forty-four. Neither of them mentioned the little one.

At ten thirty, in the dark, by feel, Frederick heard the pencil, once.