Son

They were in the lobby at five to ten, and the desk was empty.

The evening porter had gone at half past nine, a sophomore in a lanyard who had left the lamp on and the clipboard on the desk with the nine o’clock written in it in purple ink, 9 p.m. 77, and a sticky note on the clipboard that said Back in 5!! and was, by the look of it, from about Tuesday. The lobby was dim and colder than the stairs. Under the cold grille by the lift with its laminated apology, a boy and a girl were sitting on the floor with their backs to the wall, sharing a pair of headphones and not talking. The glass doors at the front were black, with the arcade beyond them lit yellow and the four palo verdes standing in the gravel like people waiting for a bus.

Alexander stood in front of the desk with the hat in his hand.

He had put the linen jacket on again to come down, and buttoned it, over a white shirt he had changed into for the purpose, buttoned to the neck; so that he stood in the lobby of Palo Verde Hall at five to ten at night in exactly what he had arrived in at four, as though the six hours between had not counted.

“He comes at ten,” said Frederick.

“I know.”

“Exactly at ten.”

“I know,” said Alexander. “You wrote to me.”

---

Mr Luna came in at ten.

He came in through the glass doors from the arcade, and the heat came in with him for a second, a slab of it, ninety-nine degrees at ten at night, and went out again when the door closed behind him; a small neat man of about seventy, with very short grey hair and a grey moustache, carrying a canvas bag in one hand and, folded over the other arm, in ninety-nine degrees, a cardigan.

He did not look at them. He went round behind the desk and put the bag down, and put the cardigan on, and sat down in the chair, and took things out of the bag one at a time and set them out on the desk in the order they had always gone, as a man lays a table he has laid every night of his life: the small radio with the silver aerial; a glass jar of butterscotch sweets in gold wrappers, which he put down by the lamp and turned a quarter of the way round, so that the label faced out; a book of crosswords, and a pen, not a pencil, laid across it; a paperback western with a man on a horse on the front; and, last, a paper sun, maroon with gold rays, a little bent at one corner, with IGNACIO on it in silver pen, which he propped against the jar.

Then he looked up at the grey box on the wall by the doors, with the red number on it, and took the pen off the crossword, and wrote on the clipboard, under the purple nine o’clock, the first of the night in his own hand.

10 p.m. 76.

Then he put the pen back across the crossword, and looked up over his glasses.

“Son,” said Mr Luna.

“Hello, Mr Luna.”

“You’re back.”

“I came yesterday.”

“I know you came yesterday. Day desk told me. Said you came in at three with two boxes and went straight up and put your blind up.” He looked at Frederick for a moment over the glasses with no expression at all. “Said you could see it from the car park. First time in a year that window had any light in it.”

“Tyler kept it down.”

“Tyler kept it down,” said Mr Luna. “Tyler’s in Ironwood. He’s got an elevator.” He turned the radio on, very low; a ball game, somewhere, in a crowd’s long murmur. “My great-granddaughter’s in Ironwood. Sophomore. Engineering. She says his roommate’s from Mesa, and he talks.” He considered this. “Everybody from Mesa talks. It’s the water.”

Then he looked past Frederick, at the young man in the buttoned jacket standing a pace behind him and to the left, with a hat in his hand; and looked at him for some time, over the glasses, the way he had looked at Frederick the first night, with his whole attention and no expression whatsoever.

“Son,” said Mr Luna.

“Good evening,” said Alexander.

“I know you.”

“We met in March. At eleven at night. I was going out to a car.”

“You were.” Mr Luna nodded slowly. “Nice manners.” He looked at the top of Alexander’s head, which had nothing on it, and then at the hat in Alexander’s hand, and then back at the top of Alexander’s head. “Son. You still need a hat.”

Alexander held up the hat.

He held it up quite seriously, in his right hand, at about the height of his shoulder, for Mr Luna to see, the way a man shows a passport at a frontier: a pale straw hat with a dark band, folded once, crisp, with nothing wrong with it at all.

“I have one,” said Alexander.

Mr Luna looked at it.

“On your head, son,” he said. “That’s where it works.”

There was a pause in the lobby.

“My mother sends them,” said Alexander. “I carry them. It is an arrangement.”

“Your mother wants it on your head.”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s the arrangement,” said Mr Luna, and picked up the crossword.

---

The freshmen came at five past.

There were four of them, two boys and two girls from the second floor, in shorts and flip-flops, with the look of people who had been in the building for fourteen hours and had just discovered something about it, and they came up to the desk together, in a clump, and the tallest of the boys said, “Hi, sorry, is this where you go if your key doesn’t work?”

“Which key?”

“The room key. It works on the room. It doesn’t work on the, like, the bathroom. On our floor.” The boy held it up. “It just turns.”

“It’s the bathroom,” said Mr Luna. “It just turns. It’s been just turning since nineteen ninety-eight. Push the door with your hip while you turn it.” He demonstrated, sitting down, with his hip, at nobody. “Like that.”

The four of them looked at his hip.

“Okay,” said the tall boy. “Thanks.”

They did not go. They stood at the desk in a clump and looked at the jar of butterscotch and the radio and the paper sun that said IGNACIO, and at the small neat man in the cardigan behind it, the way people look at a thing in a new place that they suspect is going to matter; and Mr Luna looked back at them over his glasses, at all four of them, one after another; and then he held up a finger.

“Drink water,” he said.

The freshmen were silent.

A second finger.

“Call your mother.”

A third.

“And don’t go up the butte in August.”

The four of them looked at the three fingers. Behind Frederick, he heard his cousin take a small breath, the way a man takes a breath at the beginning of a piece of music he has read about and never heard.

“What if you want to go up the butte in August?” said Alexander.

Frederick shut his eyes.

He heard Mr Luna not answer for a long moment. He did not need to open his eyes to see the face that went with it, because he had seen it on the first night of last year, from the plastic chair, when he had asked the same question in the same words in the same lobby: the long look over the glasses with nothing in it whatsoever.

“Then drink water,” said Mr Luna, “and call your mother.”

“Thank you,” said Alexander, with great feeling, as a man thanks a guide.

The freshmen looked at him, and at Frederick, and at each other; and the shortest girl, who had a lanyard with her student card on it and the card turned round so that nobody could see the photograph, looked at Frederick for a long time, and then said, “Hi,” very quietly, and the four of them went back up the stairs in their clump, and from the first landing, carrying down the stairwell, came a voice saying, “Was that him? Was that, like, him?” and another, “Who was the other guy?” and a third, “Shut up, he can hear you.”

Mr Luna looked at the stairs.

“Six hundred a year,” he said, to the crossword. “Thirty-one years in October.” He wrote something in seven across. “They all ask about the key.”

---

Kessler came down at a quarter past.

He came down the stairs at an even pace in the dark polo shirt, and across the lobby, and stopped at the end of the desk, where there was a black binder with GUEST LOG on the spine in white tape, open at the night’s page, with a pen on a string. Nobody had signed it. Kessler picked up the pen on its string and wrote in it, in the column for the date and the column for the time and the column for the room, in small square capitals; and then, in the column for the name of the guest, he wrote a short horizontal line; and in the column for the signature of the host, his own initial.

Mr Luna watched him do it over his glasses.

“You’re not a guest, son,” said Mr Luna.

“No,” said Kessler.

“You don’t have a guest.”

“No.”

“Then what are you signing?”

Kessler considered the page.

“That there is nobody,” he said.

Mr Luna looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at the line in the column, and the initial, and the time, 22.16, written the German way, with the full stop; and something happened under the grey moustache, at the corners, and went away again.

“Okay, son,” said Mr Luna.

Kessler inclined his head exactly one inch, and went back to the foot of the stairs, and stood there, with his back to the wall and his hands folded in front of him, facing the glass doors, and was not there.

Frederick had known Kessler for years. He had seen him called Herr Kessler by a Chancellor and Kessler by an Emperor, and you, by Jack, in a beer hall, at volume. He had never seen anybody call him son. He watched Kessler, at the foot of the stairs, for a while, to see what it had done to him, and as far as he could tell from the face like the end of a wardrobe, it had done nothing at all; except that Kessler, who never moved his hands once he had folded them, had moved one of them, a little, to the other wrist, and left it there.

---

Mr Luna pushed the plastic chair out from the end of the desk with his foot.

He pushed it out for Frederick, as he had the first night and most nights after; and then, after a moment, he reached under the desk without looking, and found a second one, folded, and unfolded it with one hand against his knee, and pushed that out too, beside the first, with the same foot.

“Sit,” said Mr Luna.

They sat, the two of them, side by side on two plastic chairs at the end of the night desk of Palo Verde Hall, under the lamp, with the ball game going very low on the radio.

“So,” said Mr Luna, to the crossword. “Cousin.”

“Roommate,” said Frederick.

Mr Luna’s pen stopped in seven down.

He looked up, over his glasses, at Frederick, and then at Alexander, and then at Frederick again; and then, for some reason, at the clipboard, as though the answer might be in the column of hourly temperatures, in the law, CH. IX, ART. 4, in somebody’s hand.

“Room?”

“Three twelve.”

“Your room.”

“Yes.”

“Which bed?”

“The one by the door,” said Alexander.

Mr Luna considered this for some time. Then he wrote something in seven down, in pen, and Frederick did not see what it was.

“The housing office does a questionnaire,” said Mr Luna.

“Yes.”

“Up before six. Reads in bed. All that.”

“Yes.”

“Hm,” said Mr Luna. He pushed the jar of butterscotch an inch across the desk, towards the two plastic chairs; not to Frederick, but past Frederick, by about the width of a hand, so that it stood on the corner of the desk nearest to Alexander, in the lamplight, with its gold wrappers. “Somebody’s algorithm,” he said, to the crossword.

Alexander looked at the jar.

He looked at it for some time, upright on the plastic chair with the hat on his knee, with his hands folded on the hat. Then he looked up at Mr Luna.

“Thank you,” he said. “No.”

“Suit yourself, son.”

Frederick took one. He unwrapped it and put it in his mouth, and it tasted, as it always did, of the inside of a biscuit tin in a house where nobody had ever been in a hurry; and he sat beside his cousin on the plastic chair and did not offer him half, and Mr Luna did not push the jar back.

---

They went up at a quarter to eleven.

The stairs were empty. The half-flights went up from the back of the lobby in concrete, with the rail painted maroon and the narrow window on every landing, and the thermometer on the landing between the second floor and the third, by the step, said 79, as it always said, and Alexander stopped and looked at it, and read it, as he read everything, twice, and went on.

At the top he stopped.

“Forty-five,” said Alexander.

“Forty-four.”

“I counted.”

“So did I.”

“There is a step on the first landing,” said Alexander, “that is lower than the others. It is perhaps four inches. It is a step.” He looked back down the stairs. “I counted it.”

“It isn’t a step. It’s a,” Frederick looked for the word, and found that he had never in a year needed to find it, because Theo had found it for him on the first afternoon, “it’s a little one.”

“A little step is a step.”

“Theo says every staircase in the world has one that’s there for no reason.”

“Then it is there,” said Alexander. “That is my point.” He turned and went along the corridor towards 312. “Forty-five.”

“Forty-four,” said Frederick, behind him, and heard his own voice, and the tone of it, in the long bright empty corridor, and found that he did not care.

---

On the door, under the rectangle of tape, the paper sun that said ALEX was still there. Above it, where the tape was, nobody had put another FRED.

---

They read in bed.

Of course they read in bed. It was on the questionnaire. Frederick lay on the window bed with the lamp on the window desk turned towards the pillow and the book about the Four-Year War, and across the room his cousin lay on the bed by the door, on his back, in the dark blue pyjamas buttoned to the neck, with the lamp on the desk by the door turned towards his own pillow and the little blue Charter held up in front of him in both hands, at exactly the distance from his face that an optician would have recommended.

Neither of them said anything for twenty minutes.

“What are you reading?” said Alexander, at last, without lowering the Charter.

“The Four-Year War.”

“Which?”

“The green one. It’s on the list for History.”

“I read it on the aeroplane.”

Frederick looked at him across the room.

“Of course you did.”

“It is very good on the winter of 1777,” said Alexander, to the Charter. “And it is weak on the money. It does not say where any of it came from.” He turned a page. “You will see. In about chapter nine.”

Frederick looked at the book.

He was on chapter three. He read the same paragraph about a river crossing in Pennsylvania four times and could not afterwards have said which river it was, because across the room the pencil had come out from under the pillow by the door, where it had evidently been kept, and made a small mark in the margin of the Charter, and gone back.

---

At half past ten exactly Alexander closed the Charter.

He did it on the half hour. Frederick did not need to look at the clock on his telephone to know that, though he looked at it anyway, and it said 22:30, and as he looked at it the numbers did not change. His cousin closed the little blue book and put it on the desk by the door, square to the edge; and took off his reading glasses and folded them and put them on top of the book, square to the book; and put out his hand to the lamp and turned it off.

That half of the room went dark.

Then he opened the drawer of the desk by the door, in the dark, without looking, and took something out of it, and lay down on his back, and put it on.

It was a mask. A black silk sleeping mask, with an elastic band, of the kind they gave you on long flights in the front of aeroplanes, and on the corner of it, Frederick saw by the light of his own lamp across the room, very small, embroidered in grey thread, there was a crown.

Alexander lay on his back on the bed by the door in the black silk mask with his hands folded on the grey blanket, like a man in a painting of a man asleep.

“Your lamp,” he said, “does not trouble me.”

“Good.”

“I should not like you to think that it did.”

“I don’t.”

“Good,” said Alexander, and was silent.

Frederick looked at his book.

He read it. He read the river crossing in Pennsylvania, all of it, and the whole of chapter four, and the first half of chapter five, which was about a winter. He read it with the lamp on, turned towards his pillow, at its full brightness, which it had never once been in a year, because Tyler had liked the dark. He read until a quarter past eleven, and then until half past, and then, at twenty to twelve, with his eyes going, he read one more page out of nothing he could have put a name to, and knew it, and turned it anyway.

Across the room, in the black mask, his cousin had not moved at all.

At ten to midnight Frederick put out the lamp.

The room went dark. Not black: the blind was down, but there was the inch at the edge of it, on the far side, by his own pillow now, where a strip of night came in, dull orange, the colour the sky goes over five million people with their lights on; and at the bottom of the strip, if he put his head at the very end of the pillow, black against the orange, a shoulder of rock.

He lay and looked at the edge of the butte through an inch of his own window.

“Goodnight, Frederick,” said Alexander, out of the dark by the door, quite clearly, as though he had been awake the whole time, which he had.

Frederick did not answer for a moment.

“Forty-four,” he said.

There was a silence in 312, of a particular quality, the silence of a man in a black silk mask with a crown on it deciding not to say forty-five.

“Goodnight,” said Frederick.