The Wristband

Mr Luna was at the desk at ten to eleven, under the lamp, with the radio on low and the crossword open and a second piece of cake on a napkin beside the clipboard, which he had brought down from the lounge in the same napkin and had not yet decided about.

He looked at them over his glasses as they came down the last flight: Alexander first, in the linen jacket, buttoned, with the grey hat in his hand; then Frederick, and Jack in the red sweatshirt, and Tyler with his hood up; then Rhys and Sam, and Felix and Lena, and Kessler last, a pace behind and a pace to the left, not there.

“Where you going, son?”

“The Avenue,” said Alexander. “It is on the programme.”

Mr Luna looked at the clock on the wall, and at the grey box with the red number in it, and wrote on the clipboard, 11 p.m. 71, and laid the pen across the crossword.

“Take a jacket.”

“I am wearing a jacket.”

Mr Luna looked at the jacket for some time.

“Take a jacket,” he said again, in exactly the same voice, as though Alexander had not spoken; and Alexander stood in the lobby for a moment with the hat in his hand, and then, without a word, went back up the forty-five steps, and came down again two minutes later with the maroon fleece that the university had given every first-year in August and that nobody had ever seen him wear, folded over his arm.

Mr Luna nodded at it, once.

“Drink water,” he said, and turned the radio up.

---

It was fifty-eight degrees on the Avenue, and Jack walked down the middle of the pavement with his arms out and his face turned up to the sky, which was black and clear, with a few stars in it over the orange of the city.

“It’s warm,” he said. “It’s the middle of the night in January and it’s warm. Do you know what it is in Coln? It’s two. Mum sent me a picture of the thermometer on the back door. It had frost on the thermometer.”

“It is fourteen degrees Celsius,” said Alexander.

“I didn’t ask.”

“You were going to.”

Tyler, inside the hood, with his hands in the front pocket of the sweatshirt, said, “It’s kind of cold, dude,” and Jack looked at him with real pity.

The bakery that opened at six was dark, with the chairs up on the tables. The tram went past them going north with nobody on it but the driver. Outside the bar with the cactus in a hat the black rail ran along the kerb under the lamp, and the trough stood full beneath it, with the brass plate on the end, and the lamp on the water.

Alexander stopped and read the plate.

He read it as he had read it in March, twice, once for what it said and once, Frederick supposed, for the errors, of which there were none. Then he looked at the door.

---

The man on the stool was the same man.

He sat where he had sat in March and in May, just inside the door, with the same small torch in one hand and the orange bands on a ring round his other wrist, like keys.

Tyler went first, because he was nearest, and held out his card from inside the hood, and the man shone the torch on it, and on him, and without a word took a band off the ring and fastened it round Tyler’s wrist and gave him the card back.

Rhys and Sam showed theirs and were waved through. Felix and Lena showed theirs. Kessler showed something that Frederick did not see, and the man looked at it and then at Kessler’s face, which was like the end of a wardrobe, and did not wave him through so much as move his own knee out of the way. Jack showed his passport and said “Gloucestershire,” as though it were a password. Frederick showed his card. The man looked at the photograph, which made him look as though the camera had told him something alarming, and at the date, and gave it back.

Then Alexander held out his card.

The man shone the torch on it. THE UNIVERSITY OF THE MARCH. The photograph. HOHENZOLLERN, A. And the date. He read the date, and looked at the photograph, and looked up at the face, and back at the date, for exactly as long as he looked at everybody’s.

His hand did not go to his wrist.

“Happy birthday,” said the man, and gave him back the card, and looked past him at the street.

Alexander did not move.

“Thank you,” he said. “I should like a band, please.”

The man looked at him again.

“You’re twenty-one, buddy.”

“Yes. Since midnight.”

“So you don’t need a band.”

“No,” said Alexander. “I should like one anyway.” He took the programme out of the inside pocket of the jacket, unfolded it to the second page, and held it out, with his finger on the line. “It is on the programme that it is cut off. It cannot be cut off unless it is on.”

The man looked at the programme.

He looked at it for a long time, in the light of the small torch, with the queue behind them, which was two girls from the nursing school and a man in a Sun Devils cap, waiting. Then he looked at Alexander’s finger, and at the line, and up at Alexander’s face, which was perfectly serious, and at the King behind him, who was trying very hard to keep his own the same.

“You want me to put a band on you,” said the man slowly, “so somebody inside can take it off.”

“Yes. Please.”

The man considered it.

“Okay,” he said. He took a band off the ring and fastened it round Alexander’s left wrist, over the cuff of the buttoned shirt, with the care of a man who has never once been asked to do this and does not intend to get it wrong. “Happy birthday.”

“Thank you.”

Behind them on the pavement Jack made a sound that was not a word, and was the sound Mr Purvis made, he had once told Frederick, when the cricket on the radio went right.

---

“I wore one in March,” said Alexander, inside, looking at his wrist. “Kessler cut it off at the hotel. With nail scissors.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He said Majestät.” Alexander turned his wrist a little in the light of the neon sign for the beer from Flagstaff. “In a tone.”

The bar was half full, for a Thursday in January: two men at the pool table, a couple at the long table with a plate of nachos, three nursing students in a booth, a man on his own at the end of the counter watching basketball with the sound off, the girl behind the bar, and the barman, a large slow man with a towel on his shoulder, who saw Alexander come in and stopped drying the glass in his hand.

Alexander went up to the counter and put both hands flat on the wood.

“Good evening,” he said. “I should like some water, please. Under the Travellers’ Act.”

The barman looked at him for a while.

“You again,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You don’t need a law, buddy. It’s water.”

“I know,” said Alexander. “I like to cite it.” He turned round and looked down the length of the bar, at the pool table and the booth and the long table and the man at the end, and at his own party, and back at the barman. “For everybody, please. There are sixteen, not counting me.”

The barman looked down the bar too, as though he had not counted his own customers in some time.

“Sixteen,” he said.

“I was not certain whether to count you and your colleague.” Alexander considered it. “The definition is any person journeying. I do not think you are journeying. But I did not want to leave you out.”

The girl behind the bar put her hand over her mouth.

“Sixteen waters,” said the barman, and began, without any change of expression, to fill them from the gun, one after another, and set them along the counter on paper mats in a long line, like a row of candles. The girl carried them out: to the pool table, where the two men looked at them and at each other; to the booth; to the long table; to the man at the end, who looked at his glass and then up the bar at the young man in the buttoned jacket with an orange band on his wrist, and lifted it an inch.

“And then,” said Alexander, “I should like to buy everybody a drink.”

The barman stopped.

---

“Everybody,” said the barman.

“Yes. The same sixteen. Whatever they are drinking.” Alexander had the programme out again, turned over, and was writing on the back of it in pencil, a column of small exact figures, one for each person, while the barman watched. “Those under twenty-one will have lemonade, or whatever is lawful. Those on duty will have lemonade.” He looked along at Rhys and Sam and Felix and Lena, and at Kessler at the end of the counter with his back to the wall. “Those not on duty and of age will have what they are having. I will have a beer from Flagstaff. The one on the sign.”

“That’s a lot of lemonade,” said the barman.

“It is correct,” said Alexander.

The barman looked at him a moment longer. Then he put down the glass, and took the towel off his shoulder, and laid it on the counter, as a man takes off his jacket before a job.

“Okay,” he said.

“And one more thing.” Alexander held out his left hand, across the wood, with the wrist turned up and the orange band round it. “I should like this cut off, please. It is on the programme.”

The barman looked at the wrist.

He looked at it for a long time. Then, without a word, he reached under the counter beside the till, where Frederick supposed he kept the things that a barman keeps under a counter, and came up with a pair of scissors, large ones, black-handled, of the kind used for cutting string off barrels; and he took Alexander’s wrist in one enormous hand, gently, the way a man holds a bird, and slid one blade of the scissors under the band, against the cuff of the shirt, and cut it.

The band fell on the counter.

It lay on the wood in a small orange curl, cut through, with the snap fastening still closed on the other side.

Alexander looked at it. Then he picked it up and put it in the inside pocket of the jacket, with the programme, and buttoned the pocket.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Happy birthday,” said the barman, and put the scissors back under the counter, and picked up a glass, and held it under the tap at the end, the one with the sign over it, and filled it, and put it down in front of the German Emperor on a paper mat.

“Six-forty,” he said.

---

Alexander paid it with a ten, out of his own wallet, which Frederick had never seen him use, and got his change, and counted it.

Then he paid for the rest, which Sam had added up at the counter without being asked and written on the back of his hand, and which came to a figure the barman read off the till and Sam confirmed from his knuckles, and the barman gave Alexander the receipt, and Alexander folded it in half and put it in the pocket with the band.

The drinks went out down the bar. The two men at the pool table raised their glasses towards the counter, and one of them said “Hey, thanks, man,” and went back to the game. The nursing students in the booth sang the first line of something and stopped, laughing. Tyler stood at the end of the counter in his hood with a lemonade in one hand and the water in the other and his orange band on, looking at the room.

“Dude,” he said. “You bought the whole bar a drink.”

“Yes.”

“Everybody.”

“Sixteen,” said Alexander. “It is not the whole of anything.”

“Sick,” said Tyler, with deep sincerity, and drank his lemonade.

Alexander picked up his glass. He held it in front of him for a moment and looked at it, at the colour, and the light of the neon sign coming through it, the way he looked at a page before he began to read it. Then he drank, a mouthful, carefully, and put it down.

“Well?” said Jack.

“It is bitter.”

“It’s beer.”

“Yes. Lukas said it would be.” He drank again. “He said that one does not drink it for the taste, but for the second one, and that I would understand that at twenty-one and not before.” He considered the glass. “I do not understand it yet.”

“You will,” said Jack. “About half past twelve.”

---

The man at the end of the counter came down at twenty past eleven.

He was the one who had been watching the basketball with the sound off, a big man in a work jacket with a company’s name on it, and he came down the bar with the water in one hand and the beer Alexander had bought him in the other, slowly, the way people come down a bar to say a thing they have been working up to.

“Hey,” he said. “Somebody said it’s your birthday.”

“Yes,” said Alexander.

“Twenty-one?”

“Yes.”

“Hey. Happy birthday.” The man smiled, and put the water down, and reached for his back pocket. “Let me get you the next one…”

“No,” said Jack.

The man looked at him.

“Sorry, mate,” said Jack. “House rule. Nobody buys him a drink.”

“Whose house?”

Jack opened his mouth, and Frederick saw him look at Alexander, and stop, because it was not his house, and he had only said it once before, in May, for somebody else.

“Mine,” said Alexander. He looked at the glass in the man’s hand. “And I have already bought yours.”

The man looked at his beer.

He looked at it for some time, and at the water on the counter beside it, and at the young man in the buttoned jacket, and then he laughed, a big surprised laugh from the stomach, and lifted the glass an inch.

“Well, okay,” he said. “Happy birthday, buddy. Thanks for the beer.”

“You are welcome.”

The man went back to the end of the counter and the basketball. Jack watched him go, and then looked at Alexander, and then at Frederick.

“That’s not the house rule,” said Jack.

“No,” said Frederick.

“That’s the house rule turned round.” Jack picked up his own glass, which Alexander had bought, and looked into it. “That’s allowed, though,” he said, after a while. “That’s definitely allowed.”

---

At a quarter to twelve the barman came down the counter with the towel back on his shoulder and leaned on the wood in front of Alexander, as a barman leans when the bar is quiet and he has been thinking.

“That law,” he said. “The water one. You know a lot about it.”

“I read it,” said Alexander. “On the aeroplane, in March. The whole chapter, and the amendments.”

“There’s amendments?”

“Seven.” Alexander set his glass down exactly in the wet ring it had left on the mat. “The most important is 1999, which defines a traveller. The one I like best is 1919. A member of the Diet for Yuma was refused water for his motor car at three ranches between Phoenix and the river, because the Act said beasts, and he told the Diet that if his Ford was not a beast, they had not driven it.” He considered it. “They laughed, and then they passed it. That is the correct order.”

The barman looked at him.

“Never knew that,” he said. “Twenty-two years behind this bar.”

“Most people remember the rail,” said Alexander. “The water is the part that matters.”

The barman thought about that for a while. Then he took the towel off his shoulder and wiped a part of the counter that did not need wiping.

“Huh,” he said, and went to serve the nursing students.

---

At one minute to twelve Alexander took the programme out of his inside pocket and unfolded it on the counter, beside the glass, and smoothed it flat with the side of his hand. He took the pencil out of his shirt pocket. Then he looked at his watch, and waited.

“What’s he doing?” said Jack, low, at Frederick’s shoulder.

“Waiting.”

“For what?”

“The minute.”

Jack looked at the programme on the counter, and at the last line on it, which was the last line Frederick had typed on Tuesday night in the lounge, with Sam reading out the time and Rhys removing a comma and Tyler on the floor saying nothing.

23.59. Tick.

The second hand went round. Alexander watched it, with the pencil held a quarter of an inch above the paper, quite still; the whole bar went on round him, the pool balls, the basketball, the nursing students laughing in the booth; and at the top of the minute he put the pencil down on the paper and ticked it, small and exact, a short stroke down and a long one up.

Then he laid the pencil on the counter beside the programme.

He laid it parallel to the edge of the counter. He did not look at it to do it. He did it the way he had done it on a desk in Potsdam and a desk in Tempe and a table in the lounge on Christmas Day, without thinking, exactly, with the side of one finger, so that it lay along the edge of the wood as though it had been ruled there.

Frederick looked at the pencil.

He looked at it for a while. Then he looked up, and Jack was looking at him; and Jack had seen him look at it, and did not know why, and did not ask.

“All right?” said Jack.

“Yes,” said Frederick.

Alexander folded the programme in half, and in half again, and put it back in his inside pocket with the band and the receipt, and buttoned the pocket, and picked up his glass.

“There,” he said. “That is the whole of it.”

---

Mr Luna was at the desk at twenty past twelve, with the radio on and the second piece of cake eaten and the napkin folded into a square beside the jar of butterscotch.

He looked at them over his glasses as they came in, Alexander first, with the maroon fleece still folded over his arm, unworn.

“You didn’t put it on.”

“It was fifty-eight degrees,” said Alexander. “I carried it.”

Mr Luna looked at the fleece, and at the hat in his other hand, and at the young man between them, holding both.

“You carry a lot of stuff, son,” he said.

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

Mr Luna looked at the grey box, and wrote on the clipboard, at the top of a new day, 12 a.m. 70, and laid the pen across the crossword.

“Call your mother?”

“She sent a hat,” said Alexander. “My aunt sang.”

Mr Luna considered this, for some time, with the pen in his hand.

“Both count,” he said.

---

When they came up, Alexander took down from the shelf over the desk by the door the grey folder with Charter on the front in pencil, and opened the bottom drawer of the desk, where Frederick had never seen him keep anything but the stapler.

He did not hide it. He opened the folder on the desk under the lamp.

There were two things in it already. There was a printout of an email from Brennan, of the fifteenth of December, with the letter C in it. And there was a sheet of hotel paper from the take-one pad on the lounge noticeboard, written on in a worse hand than his own, in biro, with a column of times down the left and a tick against every one of them in pencil, and at the bottom 22.30. Light off. Tick.

He put the programme in, on top, folded as it had been folded in the bar.

Then he took the orange band out of the jacket pocket, cut through, still curled, with the fastening shut, and laid it on the programme, and closed the folder, and put it in the bottom drawer, beside the stapler, and shut the drawer.

He did not say anything about it. Frederick, on the bed by the window, did not ask.

At twenty to one Alexander’s light went off. Frederick’s stayed on for a while after that, and then it went off too.

---

Jack flew home on Saturday at six, from Terminal Four.

At the gate he did it to Alexander first, because Jack did not know how not to, the hand and then the arm, quickly, with his palm flat on the middle of his back, for exactly as long as two men hold on at an airport; and Alexander stood in it as a man stands for an anthem, as he had stood in it on the concrete at Sky Harbor in March, and when it was over he did not look at Jack as though he had been given directions. He put his hand on Jack’s arm, for a second, and took it away.

“Tell Mr Purvis,” said Alexander, “that I bought my own.”

“He’ll say it’s a waste.”

“Tell him I bought his as well. In absentia. It is on the receipt.”

Jack stared at him.

“You put Purvis on the receipt?”

“No,” said Alexander. “I put him in the count. There were sixteen in the bar. I paid for seventeen.” He considered it. “Sam noticed. He did not say anything.”

Jack looked at him for a long moment, and his face went slowly the colour of the sweatshirt, and then he turned round to Frederick and did it to him, the arm and the hand, and held on a second longer than two men hold on at an airport, and let go.

“Hanover,” he said. “You absolute lemon. He’s better at birthdays than you.”

“I know.”

“Good,” said Jack, and went.