Snow on His Boots

At six in the morning the building came back on, and Alexander counted it.

Frederick heard it from the bed by the window, as he had heard it from the same bed a year ago: first, very far down, the deep hum in the basement like a ship starting its engines; then the ground floor, the soft heavy clicks running away under them; then the first floor, and the second; and then their own corridor, from the fire door end, the long tubes over the lino coming on one after another towards 312, click, click, click, until the one outside the door came on and the yellow line under it went white.

“Thirty-one,” said Alexander, from the bed by the door, in the dark.

“Thirty-one what?”

“Lights. On this corridor. From the fire door.” A pause. “There were thirty-one when it went off. I counted on the fifteenth.”

“You counted it going off?”

“At six in the evening on the fifteenth. From this end.” Alexander turned over, which he did not often do. “It is the same number both ways. I wanted to be sure.”

The small grey box by the door, which had said sixty-two every morning since the sixteenth of December, thought about it for a while, and said sixty-three.

---

Kessler came back across the road at nine.

Frederick saw him from the bed by the window, with the telephone in his hand and nothing on it: the door beside the dentist’s opening, and Kessler coming out of it in his dark coat with a holdall in one hand and the grey box in the other, with the red seal on it, at the same pace he had crossed that road every morning for three weeks; and then stopping on the pavement, which he had not done on any of the other mornings, and putting the holdall down, and turning round.

He did not look up at the window over the dentist’s. He looked at the door he had come out of, for about a second. Then he picked up the holdall and crossed the road and came in under the arcade, and Frederick heard him on the stairs, not counting, and on the corridor, and at the door of 314, which opened, and shut.

Across the road the blind on the second floor went down an inch.

Alexander was at the desk by the door, with the pill box and the programme and the pencil parallel. He did not turn round.

“Kessler is back,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“The door of 314 has a sound.” He ticked something. “It has been three weeks without it.”

---

“Morning, Fred,” said Rhys, at eleven.

He said it in the corridor, outside 316, at the exact moment the first door on the third floor opened since the fifteenth of December, which was 304, at the far end, where a girl from Flagstaff was backing in through it with a laundry bag in each hand.

He said it perfectly, in the voice of a political scientist greeting the boy two doors down, with nothing in it at all. He had had a year’s practice. Frederick said “Morning,” and did not look at him while he did it, because a year’s practice did not make it free.

“Morning, Alex,” said Rhys, to the door of 312, without a pause.

“Good morning, Rhys,” said Alexander, from inside.

Sam, behind Rhys with the notebook, wrote 11.00: open, and underlined it, and then looked at the door of 312 and wrote something else.

“What’s that?”

“Suns,” said Sam.

Frederick came out and looked at the door.

There were two paper suns on it, maroon card, with gold rays, side by side, in Callum’s careful silver capitals. One said ALEX. Beside it there was a small clean rectangle of old tape, and nothing.

“Again,” said Frederick.

“Since August,” said Sam. He looked at the notebook. “All FRED. No ALEX.”

“Why does nobody take his?”

Sam considered it, as a statistic.

“Sample’s too small,” he said. “But it’s not random.”

---

Callum came at half past eleven, with a roll of tape in one hand and the plastic stencil in the other and a stack of maroon card under his arm, and the face of a man who has spent three weeks at his parents’ house rehearsing a floor meeting in his head.

He went straight to 312 without stopping at his own door, and looked at the rectangle of old tape, and closed his eyes.

“Again,” said Callum.

“Since the fifteenth.”

“I put that up on the fourteenth.” He opened his eyes. “I put it up with four pieces of tape. I pressed each one for ten seconds. I counted.” He looked at the sun that said ALEX, which was perfectly square on the door, with four pieces of tape at its corners, a little yellowed, untouched since August. “Why is it always yours?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it a security thing? Is it in the handbook? Is somebody…” Callum stopped, and lowered his voice, and looked down the corridor. “Is there a protocol?”

Alexander came to the door of 312 and looked at the tape mark, and at the sun with his name on it, and at Callum.

“Nobody takes mine,” said Alexander, “because they do not want it. They take his because they do.”

Callum looked at him.

“That’s,” said Callum. “Okay. That’s actually kind of nice.” He took a new sun off the stack, already cut, already written, FRED, in silver, with straight rays, and pressed it to the door beside ALEX with four pieces of tape, one at each corner, and held each corner for ten seconds, and counted them under his breath, and then, after a moment’s thought, put a fifth piece across the middle.

“That’s not in the handbook,” said Rhys.

“Nothing’s in the handbook,” said Callum, with feeling, and went to his own door.

---

The hall filled all afternoon, like a bath.

It filled the loud way first, with suitcases on wheels that still did not like the lino, and parents from Prescott and Yuma and Flagstaff carrying mini-fridges up the forty-five steps or the forty-four, and the lift, which had come back on with the building at six and gone off again at a quarter past, with the notice back on its doors in somebody’s capitals, SORRY FOLKS, and under it, newer, in a different hand, THE STAIRS ARE 79. And then it filled the quiet way, by doors: all along the corridor, one after another, doors that had been shut since December came open and stayed open, with music coming out of them, until by three there were only two shut, and then one.

Felix and Lena came at two, with a tin and a box.

They came up the stairs together, as they did everything, Felix tall and fair with a rucksack on one shoulder and a cardboard box under his arm, Lena short and dark beside him with a suitcase she would not let him carry and a round tin held against her chest in both hands, as a woman carries a thing she has carried through two airports on her lap.

“Pfefferkuchen,” said Lena, at the door of 316, before anybody had said anything. “From Leipzig. From my grandmother. She made two hundred. These are thirty.” She held the tin out to Sam. “I have counted them for you.”

Sam took the tin. He looked at it with the face of a man who has been given the one present that could not be improved.

“Thirty,” he said.

“Thirty-one,” said Lena. “One is broken. It does not count.”

“It counts,” said Sam. “It’s just in two.”

Felix put the cardboard box down on the floor of the corridor and opened it. It was marzipan, in small gold paper, in rows, a great deal of it.

“From Lübeck,” said Felix. “My mother says Kiel is near Lübeck and it is the same thing.” He considered this. “It is not the same thing. But it is near.”

“Did you have a good Christmas?” said Rhys.

“Yes,” said Lena. “It was very cold. My grandmother asked whether I am eating properly in America. I said I am studying nutrition in America. She said that is not what she asked.” She put the suitcase down. “Also I have written to Residence Life.”

“From Leipzig?”

“On the twenty-eighth. About the heating during the break. Sixty-two degrees is not a temperature, it is a decision.” She took a folded sheet of paper out of her coat and held it up; it had a reply printed on it, with DOUG at the bottom. “He has replied. He says there is no law about minimum warmth in the March. I have replied to the reply. I have said that there is no law about minimum warmth in the March yet.”

Felix looked at Frederick over her head, with no expression at all, and Frederick understood that Felix had read the second letter on the plane, and corrected the commas, and was proud of it.

---

Makayla came at three, from Kingman, with her mother.

Her mother was carrying a lamp. Makayla was carrying a pillow and a laundry bag and a small cactus in a pot shaped like a cowboy boot, and at the top of the stairs she stopped and looked down the corridor and saw Lena, outside 308, unlocking the door with the tin of Pfefferkuchen under her arm.

“Hey,” said Makayla. “Hi. You’re back.”

“I am back.”

“Did you have a good time in, um.” Makayla looked at the tin, as though it might help. “Germany?”

“In Leipzig.”

“Is that, like.” Makayla lowered her voice, but not much. “Where they train you? For the, like. The cop stuff?”

Lena looked at her for a long moment.

“Leipzig is a city,” said Lena. “It has a university, and a zoo, and a church where Bach was the cantor for twenty-seven years. My grandmother lives in it.” She opened the door of 308. “I am a student of nutrition.”

“Okay,” said Makayla, in the voice of a girl from Kingman who has decided to believe something because it is easier, and went in after her with the cactus.

Makayla’s mother stood in the corridor with the lamp, and looked at Frederick, who was in the doorway of 312, and then at the door, and the two suns on it, ALEX and FRED, and at Frederick again, with the face of a woman from Kingman who has seen a photograph in the newspaper in October and has been told by her daughter not to say anything.

“You look like somebody,” she said.

“I get that a lot.”

“Hm,” said Makayla’s mother, and held the lamp out to him. “Can you take this? My back.”

He took the lamp into 308. It had a shade with horses on it.

---

Tyler came at twenty past four.

They heard him before they saw him, or rather they heard Brayden.

The voice came up from the car park. It came in through the window of 312, which was shut, and through the glass, and across the room, quite clearly, a young man’s voice, cheerful, tireless, at a steady volume that did not rise or fall, the voice of somebody who had been talking since about Thanksgiving and saw no reason to stop for a building.

”… and the thing about Mesa that people don’t get, right, is that it’s actually bigger, it’s bigger than, like, a lot of places, it’s bigger than Tempe, it’s bigger than, I want to say, Saint Louis, my uncle says, and nobody knows that, nobody, and I’m like, dude, it’s Mesa…”

Frederick went to the window and looked down.

In the car park, in the long low gold light of a January afternoon at a quarter past four, there was a small red car with its engine running and its doors open, and beside it, with his back to Palo Verde Hall and his hands in the pockets of a sweatshirt that said MESA on it, a young man with short hair, talking to a person who was not there. The person who was not there was walking away from him across the car park towards the arcade, in a vast black quilted coat with the hood up, in sixty-one degrees, carrying a bag on one shoulder and something small and clear in one hand.

”… and you know what else is in Mesa, Tyler? Tyler. Dude. Are you…”

The person in the hood went in under the arcade.

”… okay, so I’ll see you at the dorm, dude, I’ll take your stuff, I’ve got your stuff, I’ll just…” Brayden looked round the car park, and saw that it was empty, and nodded to himself, and got back into the car still talking, and shut the door, and the voice went on inside the car with the windows up, faint, like a radio in another room, until the car went out onto the road and away towards Ironwood with the voice still in it.

Alexander, at the desk by the door, had not looked up.

“That was Brayden Kish,” said Alexander. “Of Mesa.”

“How do you know?”

“He has told everybody,” said Alexander. “Since August.”

---

Then the stairs.

Nobody else in Palo Verde Hall came up stairs like that: in a slow heavy shuffle, one step at a time, as if each had to be agreed to separately; and each step with a second sound in it, a squeak and a thud, wet rubber on concrete, the sound of an entirely wrong kind of shoe.

Then Tyler was in the doorway of 312.

He was in the coat. It was the same vast black quilted thing with the hood trimmed in grey fur, and he had the hood up, and inside it his face was pink and getting pinker. On his feet were the boots, black, laced to the shin, with soles like tractor tyres, and all round the toes and up the sides of them in a wavering line like the mark a tide leaves on a harbour wall there was a grey-white crust.

“Hey,” said Tyler.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” said Tyler, to Alexander.

“Good afternoon, Tyler.”

Frederick looked at the boots.

“There’s snow on your boots.”

“Salt,” said Tyler, bitterly. “Still salt. It’s always salt. It’s in the car. It’s in my soul. I told you that.” He turned round from inside the hood, slowly, the way a man turns in a coat that size, until he was facing the desk by the door. “But I brought snow.”

He held out his hand.

In it there was a sandwich bag, the kind with the zip along the top, sealed, with a strip of tape across the zip for good measure; and in the bottom of the bag, moving slightly as he held it out, there was about an inch of clear water.

Alexander put down his pencil, parallel to the edge of the desk, and looked at it.

“That is water,” said Alexander.

“It was snow at Hopkins.”

“I believe you.”

“It was snow on the plane,” said Tyler, with rising feeling. “I had it in my coat. Against me. In here.” He put his hand on the front of the coat, where on a cold day a man keeps his wallet. “It was snow in Denver when we changed. I checked. It was snow at Sky Harbor, like, mostly. And then Brayden’s car doesn’t have, like, it has no off on the heat, it’s just on, it’s always on, he says it’s a Mesa thing, and he talked from the airport to here, about Mesa, the whole time, and I couldn’t…” He looked at the bag. “It went.”

There was a silence in 312.

“You said,” said Tyler, to Alexander. “Before break. In the lounge. You said Ohio snow is wet.”

“I said it was wetter than Potsdam snow.”

“Same thing.”

“It is not the same thing,” said Alexander. “But it is near.”

Tyler held the bag out a little further, at the end of his arm, in the hood.

“So I brought you some,” he said. “To see. So you’d know. It’s not wet.” He looked at the inch of water. “It wasn’t wet.”

---

Alexander stood up.

He came across the room and took the sandwich bag from Tyler, in both hands, carefully, by the corners, the way he took the grey box from Kessler in the mornings, and held it up to the light from the window, and looked at the water in the bottom of it for a long time, quite seriously, with the low gold light of the afternoon coming through it onto his face.

“Parma?” he said.

“Parma. Our yard. By the hedge. The part grandpa didn’t set on fire last year.”

“Thank you, Tyler.”

“It’s water, dude.”

“It is evidence of snow,” said Alexander. “That is very nearly as good.” He looked at the bag. “There is a freezer in the kitchen. On top of the refrigerator. Lena found it in September. Nobody uses it, because it has a smell.” He considered. “It will not be snow again. But it will be ice. That is closer.”

Tyler looked at him from inside the hood.

“That’s,” said Tyler. “Okay. Yeah.”

They went down together, the two of them, Tyler in the coat and the boots, squeaking, and Alexander in the buttoned shirt, carrying the sandwich bag in both hands in front of him like a man in a procession carrying something on a cushion; and Frederick went after them as far as the landing, where the thermometer said seventy-nine, because it always said seventy-nine, and stood there and heard them in the kitchen below.

“It has a smell,” said Alexander’s voice.

“Dude, it stinks.”

“Lena has written to Residence Life about it.”

“Of course she has,” said Tyler’s voice, with real admiration.

When they came back up, Alexander had a black marker in his hand that he had not had going down, and Frederick went down to the kitchen afterwards, alone, and opened the small freezer on top of the refrigerator, which had a smell, and looked.

The sandwich bag was lying flat on the bottom of it, by itself, with its inch of water already going cloudy at the edges. On the strip of tape across the zip, in square black capitals, the same size, correctly spaced, it said:

SCHNEE. PARMA. 7.1.35. NICHT ESSEN.

---

He took the coat off at five. It took a while. Underneath it there was the dark blue hoodie, with the sleeves over his hands, and underneath that, it emerged, another hoodie. He took the boots off last, sitting on the floor by the door, and stood them side by side against the wall under the desk by the door, beside Alexander’s shoes, where they made two small grey puddles on the carpet of no colour, and looked at them.

“Never again,” he said.

“Until May,” said Frederick.

“Until Christmas,” said Tyler, as though correcting a much worse error. He took a bottle of Glacier out of the pocket of the second hoodie, blue, cold, which had been there since Ohio and had survived Brayden’s heater by some means of its own, and opened it, and drank. “You good?”

He said it to Alexander, not looking at him, to the bottle, the way he said everything.

Alexander, at the desk by the door, had picked up the pencil again.

“Yes,” said Alexander.

Tyler considered this for a moment, with the bottle.

“Okay,” said Tyler.

“It does not count,” said Alexander. “Okay. There is a rule.”

“Whose rule?”

“His mother’s.”

Tyler looked at Frederick, and then at Alexander, and then at the bottle of Glacier, and seemed to decide that this was one of the things about the two of them that he was never going to understand and did not need to.

“Sick,” said Tyler, which counted.

---

Then he did what he had come for.

He sat down on the floor of 312 with his back against the side of the bed by the window and his knees up, in the two hoodies, with the hood of the outer one up, and put the headphones on over the hood, and the bottle of Glacier on the carpet beside him, and the controller in his lap; and he did not turn the controller on. He sat. On the bed by the window Frederick had the History textbook open on his knees, A Realm of Many Crowns, bought on Friday at the bookshop for an amount he had not told Sam, and did not read it. At the desk by the door Alexander read a paper from the box all the way to the end, including the small type, and initialled it, and put it on the pile, and put the pencil down, parallel.

Outside the window the butte stood in the last of the light, brown, rough, with the A on its flank, and the stepped path going up its face, and nobody on it.

Down the corridor a door shut, the last one, and music came through it, faint, and stopped. Further down, Lena’s voice, through the wall of 308, was explaining to somebody in a perfectly level tone what a protein is.

Nobody in 312 said anything for some time.

It was the quiet that Tyler crossed a campus for: two people at two desks who did not need anything from him, and a floor that did not talk about Mesa. Rhys had asked him once, in September, in the lounge, why he came, and Tyler had thought about it for a while and said, “Nobody wants anything. They just read,” and Rhys had not understood, and Frederick had.

At ten to six Tyler took one side of the headphones off his ear, an inch, without looking round.

“Hey.”

“What?”

“Is it still ice?”

“Not yet,” said Alexander, from the desk by the door, without looking up. “It will be by eight. It is a small freezer.”

Tyler put the headphone back.

“Okay,” he said, to nobody, and then, after a moment, quietly, inside the hood, as though correcting himself: “Cool.”