Booby Prize

The programme was on the desk by the door at half past seven, and it was on palace paper.

It was a single sheet, thick, cream, with the eagle of the Neues Palais embossed small at the top, uncoloured, so that you could only see it when the light came across it from the side; and under the eagle, in ink, in the square hand Alexander had been taught at six, it said:

07.30. Rise. 08.25. Depart. The arcades. 09.00. The Wright. Sun Devil Welcome. 12.00. Return.

Frederick read it from the window bed. He had been awake since twenty to six and his cousin had been awake since a quarter to, and they had both lain in the half dark reading for an hour and three quarters, in silence, on the questionnaire’s terms, and at half past seven Alexander had got up and written the programme and put it on the desk, and Frederick had read it, and it said Rise at half past seven, and Alexander had risen at half past seven.

“You’d been up for an hour and three quarters,” said Frederick.

“I had been awake,” said Alexander. “I had not risen.” He was buttoning his shirt, from the bottom, at the window of the wardrobe door, where there was a small mirror. “A tick is for the time you were told, not the time it happened.”

He made a tick beside Rise.

Then he picked up the programme and looked at it, and then at Frederick, and did a thing that Frederick did not, at first, understand, because he had never seen him do it: he hesitated.

“The leaflet says that families are welcome,” said Alexander.

“What leaflet?”

“The leaflet for the Welcome. From the Dean of Students.” He took it out of the plastic folder on his shelf, a folded maroon sheet with a photograph of the Wright on it, and held it up. “Family members and guests are welcome to attend the morning session.” He put it down. “I should like you to sit with me.”

Frederick looked at him.

“I’m a sophomore.”

“Yes.”

“Sophomores don’t go. I went last year. It’s for first-years.”

“It says family members,” said Alexander. He was looking at the leaflet and not at Frederick. “You are family.”

There was a pause in 312.

It was, Frederick realised, sitting on the window bed with the book about the Four-Year War closed on his knees, the first thing his cousin had asked him for. Not since Thursday. Since a long time before Thursday. He went back over it, quickly, the way you go back through a pocket for a key, and could not find another: not on the hill in Berlin in the frost, not in the dome at Potsdam, not at Sky Harbor at the foot of the steps. Alexander had told him things, and thanked him for things, and corrected him about things. He had never once asked.

“All right,” said Frederick.

Alexander made a small mark on the programme, after 09.00, which might have been a tick and might not.

---

Callum knocked at a quarter to eight.

He knocked on every door of the third floor, four knocks each, and through every door he read the same thing, aloud, in the voice of a man who has found the right page and is not going to lose it: “Sun Devil Welcome. Nine o’clock. The Wright. Attendance is required of all first-year residents. Wristbands will be checked at the door.” A pause, at every door, while he turned the page. “Hydration stations are provided.”

“Is it mandatory,” said a voice through the door of 310, “or is it like, mandatory mandatory?”

“Section four, paragraph two,” said Callum. “Required.” A pause. “There’s a free T-shirt.”

The door of 310 opened.

---

They walked to the Wright under the arcades at twenty-five past eight, and it was ninety-eight degrees.

Alexander walked in the middle, in the linen jacket, buttoned, with the hat in his hand. Frederick walked on his left. Behind them, at a distance that two people who were not following anybody might happen to be walking at, came Rhys and Sam, Rhys with a folder, in case, and Sam with nothing at all, looking at the roofs.

“You don’t have to come,” said Frederick, over his shoulder.

“We’re sophomores, sir,” said Rhys. “We’re not supposed to.”

“Then why are you coming?”

“Because you are,” said Sam.

And behind Rhys and Sam, at a slightly greater distance, at an even pace, in the dark polo shirt, with an orange paper wristband on his left wrist that said FIRST-YEAR, walked Kessler; and beside him, in a T-shirt that said KIELER WOCHE on it, Felix, also with a wristband; and on the other side, with hers on her right wrist because she was left-handed, Lena, reading the laminated sign on every third pillar of the arcade, which explained that under the Charter of the March shade was a right, and making a small note about each one.

“She’s checking them,” said Sam.

“For what?”

Sam watched Lena stop at a pillar and read the sign and look up at the roof of the arcade above it and write something.

“Gaps,” said Sam.

---

The Wright was still round.

It was round in every part, on purpose, the great pink and sand-coloured drum with the arches and the gold discs round the top and the two long curved arms reaching out across the grass, as though it had landed; and Alexander stopped at the foot of the steps, as he stopped in front of everything, and looked at it for some time with his hands behind his back.

“It looks like a cake,” said a first-year going past.

“I have read that there are no straight lines in it,” said Alexander, to the first-year, who had already gone.

“There’s one,” said Frederick. “There’s a fire exit.”

Alexander considered it.

“Then there is one,” he said, as a man notes a figure, and went up the steps.

---

Inside it was cool and dim and red, and there were two thousand people in it, and they made the noise.

Frederick had forgotten the noise: the surf of two thousand people of eighteen in a new place, all talking at once and none of them listening. He stood in it at the top of the aisle with his cousin beside him and remembered Tyler in the sweatshirt, and a woman with a remote control who had held it like a microphone at a wedding.

Alexander had seats on the programme. He went down the aisle to them without looking at a ticket, because there were no tickets, to the third row of the second tier, on the aisle.

Frederick stopped.

“These are the seats,” he said.

“Yes.”

“These were my seats. Last year. Exactly these.”

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

Frederick sat down beside him, slowly. Behind them Rhys and Sam sat in the row behind, because that was where they were going to sit. Kessler sat at the end of the row behind that, against the wall, where he could see the doors, a man of forty-something in a polo shirt among two thousand eighteen-year-olds, with his orange wristband on and his hands folded in his lap; and two girls in the row in front of him turned round and looked at him, and then at each other, and one of them said, quite audibly, “Is that somebody’s dad?”, and the other said, “He’s got a wristband,” and they turned back to the front and did not turn round again.

---

The Dean of Students spoke first, about water.

She said to drink it. Sam, behind, counted it under his breath, and at the end said “Eleven,” exactly as he had said it a year before; and Frederick, in front, found that he had counted it too, and got eleven too, and that it was the same speech, nearly word for word, about dwellings and the law of the March and the most heat a room could lawfully hold, and about not being brave, because people had been brave about it in this university before, and had died. The hall went quiet for that, as it had gone quiet a year ago, and came back.

Beside him Alexander had the notebook open on his knee and the pencil out. He was not writing. He was listening, with his head a little on one side, the way he listened to the Chancellor on a Tuesday.

The President spoke for four minutes about the river, and sat down.

And then a junior came out onto the stage with a remote control in his hand, and stood in front of the enormous screen, on which there was a picture of a bird.

---

It was Dev.

He was a junior now, with the shaved head and the clipboard gone and a gold T-shirt in its place, and under the bird on the screen it said DEV, VICE-PRESIDENT FOR STUDENT LIFE; and Frederick, who had last seen him at the end of the long arm of the Wright with an expression of deep and weary sympathy, waiting for a senior with a remote control to come back across the grass to him, saw at once that Dev had been waiting a year for this, and had prepared.

“Hi!” said Dev.

Two thousand people said hi.

“Okay. So. I’m going to tell you a story. Every freshman at this university hears it in their first week. And last year,” Dev pointed the remote at nobody in particular, with great confidence, “somebody got it wrong. So this year we’re doing it right.” He clicked. “This is a booby.”

On the screen the bird looked at them, with its long beak and its expression of great stupidity and its enormous bright blue feet.

“It’s actually a really cool bird,” said Dev.

Somebody at the back whooped.

“So. In eighteen eighty-five,” said Dev, with tremendous emphasis, and paused, and looked up at the tiers as though daring anybody, and behind Frederick, Rhys let out a breath he had clearly been holding since Wilmington. “In eighteen eighty-five, the March was created.”

Behind Frederick, Sam’s hand came up off his knee with one finger raised.

Beside Frederick, the pencil moved.

“And the very first Diet of the March,” said Dev, “the Diet, not the King, the King was in London, the King didn’t even know where Tempe was,” and two thousand people laughed, and about thirty of them, in the rows nearest the third row of the second tier, laughed very carefully, “sat down to decide where everything was going to go. And they gave Tucson the university. And they gave us,” he spread his arms, “a school. For teachers.”

The surf made its long low groan.

“And they sent us our first Principal,” said Dev. “Lucius Orne. A schoolmaster. From Connecticut.”

Sam’s second finger went up.

The pencil moved.

“And Lucius Orne met his very first class,” said Dev, lowering his voice, as people lower their voices for the good part, “in one room. Three hundred students. In one room.”

“Thirty-three,” said Rhys, behind, in agony, into his folder.

Sam’s third finger went up.

The pencil moved.

“And everybody in Tucson laughed at us. In the actual Diet. Out loud. They said we got the booby prize.” Dev let that sit. “And do you know what our founders said? The week after? In the newspaper?” He lifted the remote over his head like a torch. “We will teach the teachers!”

There was a moment’s silence in the Wright, and in it Frederick heard, behind him, Rhys breathe out with something like relief, because it was right; it was right, at last, after a year, in front of two thousand people.

“And that,” said Dev, “is why it’s our motto. It’s on the seal. Look.” He clicked. On the screen the seal came up, enormous, maroon and gold: the sun coming up behind the butte, and the stepped path, and the river, and the open book, and round the ring the name of the university, and TEMPE, and 1885. “We will teach the teachers. It’s been on there since eighteen eighty-five.”

The seal on the screen had no motto on it at all.

Behind Frederick, Rhys put his face in the folder.

Sam leaned forward, between Frederick and Alexander, with four fingers held up beside his ear where only they could see them, and said, under the beginning of the chant, in the voice of a man reading out a column of figures he has checked twice and found correct:

“Four.”

Beside him Alexander did not look up. He was writing. He had been writing since created, small, in pencil, in the notebook on his knee, a line at a time, and he was numbering the lines.

Kaylee Brandt-Ortiz had got it wrong in three ways, Frederick thought. Dev, who had told her so, at the end of the long arm of the Wright with his clipboard, had got it wrong in four.

He found that he did not mind at all. He found, in fact, sitting in his own seat in the third row of the second tier of the Wright for the second time in his life, in a hall that had been told the story of who it was and had got it wrong again, that he was very nearly happy.

---

It caught, of course.

It caught the way it had caught a year ago, in the first tier and then the second and then all the way up to the back, because two thousand people of eighteen want very badly to be told who they are and do not much mind the details; TEACH THE TEACH-ERS, TEACH THE TEACH-ERS, with stamping, so that the floor shook under Frederick’s feet, and he looked along the row at Rhys, and Rhys had taken his face out of the folder and was chanting it, red to the ears, because it was, at least, the right words.

“So remember,” said Dev, when it had died down, “we are the booby prize. We came last. And we are a hundred thousand strong.” He held up his hand, the one without the remote, with three fingers crooked, the thumb and little finger folded down: the fork. All over the hall, two thousand hands went up with it. “Who are we?”

“THE BOOBY PRIZE,” said two thousand people.

Frederick had his hand up. He had not decided to put it up. It had gone up, as it had gone up in the gate lounge at Terminal Four in March for a man in a maroon cap, three fingers crooked, the thumb and the little finger folded.

He looked at his cousin.

Alexander had his hand up too. He had put the pencil down on the notebook, parallel to the edge of the page, and raised his right hand, at the height of his shoulder, with the palm outwards; and he was holding up three fingers, the thumb and the first two, straight, and the other two folded into the palm, exactly, gravely, as a man holds his hand up in a German court to take an oath.

Frederick looked at the hand for a long moment.

“That’s the oath,” he said, under the noise.

“Yes.”

“It’s not the oath. It’s a fork. It’s a pitchfork. It’s the Devil’s.” He held up his own hand, beside his cousin’s, close, so that Alexander could see it. “Those three. Crooked. Like that.”

Alexander looked at Frederick’s hand.

He looked at it the way he had once looked at the brass plate on a bar on the Avenue, reading it twice, once for what it said and once for the errors. Then he lowered his own hand, and folded the thumb down, and the little finger, and raised the three in the middle, and crooked them, slowly, one at a time, the first, the second, the third, each to the same angle, as though there were a correct angle and he intended to find it; and held the hand up again, at the height of his shoulder, beside Frederick’s.

“Who are we?” shouted Dev, a second time, because a second time was in his notes.

“THE BOOBY PRIZE,” said two thousand people, and the German Emperor with them, quite clearly, in his exact English, correctly punctuated.

---

“And okay, one more thing,” said Dev.

His voice changed, the way Kaylee’s had changed, into the voice of somebody leaving the script; and the surf began to go down, and Frederick, who knew this part, felt the thirty people in the rows nearest him go still.

“I know some of you are wondering,” said Dev. “So I’m just going to say it. He’s a sophomore now. He’s not here. This is for first-years.” He spread his arms. “So you can all relax.”

Two thousand people relaxed.

Frederick felt it happen, all round the hall, a long soft settling, like a field after the wind has gone over it; and about thirty heads in the rows nearest the third row of the second tier on the aisle, which knew exactly where he was and had known since a quarter to nine, did not relax at all, and looked straight ahead at the stage with enormous concentration.

Beside him Alexander picked up the pencil, and wrote a fifth line in the notebook, and looked at it, and crossed it out.

“That one is not a matter of record,” he said.

---

The T-shirts were on trestles in the shade of the long arms of the Wright, in piles by size, maroon, with THE BOOBY PRIZE across the front in gold. Kessler took one in the largest size they had, and held it up against himself, and looked down at it, and folded it into a square and put it under his arm without any expression whatsoever, and Lena took two, and Felix took one and read the label.

Alexander did not go to the T-shirts. He went to the stage.

Dev was at the foot of it, by the steps at the side, with a bottle of water and two other people in gold T-shirts, being told it had gone really well; and he saw a young man in a buttoned linen jacket coming towards him across the front of the hall against the stream of first-years going out, with a sheet of paper in his hand, and stopped drinking.

Frederick followed, three paces behind. He did not know why. He did, in fact, know why, and followed anyway.

“Good morning,” said Alexander. “That was very well delivered.”

“Oh. Hey. Thanks, man.”

“There are four errors in it,” said Alexander, and held out the sheet. “I have written them down. With the sources.”

He had torn it out of the notebook along the perforations, cleanly, and it was covered on one side in small square pencil, in four numbered lines, each with a bracket after it; and Frederick, coming up behind, could read it over his shoulder, because his cousin was holding it at exactly the right height for Dev to read and therefore for him.

1. The March was created in 1884. Its first Diet met in 1885. (The University of the March, its own history, in the library: the first chapter.)

2. Lucius Orne came from Massachusetts. (The same, the same chapter.)

3. His first class was of thirty-three students, in a single room. (The same.)

4. “We will teach the teachers” was the founders’ reply of 1885 and was never adopted. The seal carries no motto. (The seal, which was behind you.)

Dev looked at the page.

He read it all the way down, slowly, holding the bottle of water, and his face did what Kaylee Brandt-Ortiz’s face had done a year ago at the T-shirt table, a series of things one after another like pages being turned, and stopped on the last.

“Did you footnote this?”

“I gave the sources,” said Alexander. “So that you may check them. I do not ask you to take my word.”

Dev looked up from the page at him. He looked at the linen jacket, buttoned to the throat in August, and the white shirt buttoned to the neck, and the hat in the hand, and the narrow pale serious face, like a hundred young men’s in Berlin, that was looking back at him with an expression of complete and courteous attention.

“Who the fuck are you?” said Dev.

He said it without heat. He said it in simple wonder, as a man asks the name of a bird.

“Hohenzollern,” said Alexander. “A first-year.”

Then Dev’s eyes went past him, over his shoulder, and found Frederick, three paces back, in the shade of the stage; and stopped; and Frederick watched him put it together, sophomore, not here, relax, the whole of the last part of his speech, and go slowly the colour of the stage curtain.

“Fred,” said Dev.

“Hello, Dev.”

“You’re, I said you weren’t…”

“It’s all right.”

“Is he,” Dev held up the page, “is he with you?”

Frederick looked at his cousin, who was standing at the foot of the stage of the Wright with his hands at his sides, upright, waiting, perfectly polite, for the speaker to finish with the sheet of paper so that he could be sure it had been received.

“He’s my roommate,” said Frederick.

Dev looked from one of them to the other. Then he looked at the page again, at the four numbered lines in pencil and the four brackets, and at the last line, The seal, which was behind you, and turned round, slowly, and looked up at the enormous screen, where the seal still was, maroon and gold, with the sun and the butte and the river and the open book, and round the ring the name and the town and the date, and nothing else.

“Oh my God,” said Dev.

---

They walked back at noon, at a hundred and six degrees, under the arcades.

Alexander walked in the middle again, with the hat in his hand. Halfway along the long arcade by the library he stopped in the shade by a pillar, where the laminated sign was, and took the programme out of the inside pocket of the jacket and unfolded it, and took the pencil out, and made a tick beside 09.00. The Wright. Sun Devil Welcome, very small, the same size as the one beside Rise.

Then he stood for a moment longer with the programme in his hand.

“Thank you,” he said, “for sitting with me.”

Frederick looked at the pillar.

He had been going to say it’s all right. He had been going to say it in the voice in which he had been saying everything since four o’clock on Thursday, which was a voice that was not cross, quite, and was not anything else either. He found, in the shade, at a hundred and six degrees, with Rhys and Sam stopped ten yards behind them pretending to read a sign and Kessler stopped ten yards behind that holding a T-shirt folded in a square, that he could not quite find it.

“Your fingers were wrong,” he said instead.

“Yes. I corrected them.”

“You did the oath.”

“It was the only three fingers I knew,” said Alexander, and folded the programme along its creases, and put it away, and walked on.