Better Grades

The alarm called NOTHING went at eleven, as it had every night for nine nights, and he rang London.

It was seven in the morning there. She answered on the second ring.

“You are very punctual,” said his mother, in Swedish. “It is the ninth day.”

“Is it?”

“I have been counting. So have you.” He heard a cup put down on a saucer. “Your father has made the coffee. He makes it now. He makes it very strong, because he cannot remember how many spoons, so he puts in all of them.”

“Is it good?”

“It is terrible. I drink all of it.” A pause, short, with the breath in it, which he listened to, which he listened to now all the time, without deciding to, the way you listen to an engine you do not trust. It was better in the mornings. Theo had been right about that as well. “Tell me something. Anything. It is raining here and I am on the sofa.”

He told her about the stone on the butte with the pebbles on it. He told her about the Index, and the white box on its pole, and Tyler swinging the thermometers, and the rain, and Tyler holding his hand out into it like a man feeding a horse. She laughed at that, the low one, and he closed his eyes on the bed by the door to hear it.

“Fredde,” said his mother.

“Yes.”

“Did Theo tell you to ring me in the mornings?”

He opened his eyes.

“Why?”

“Because nobody rings his mother at seven o’clock in the morning for nine days unless a doctor has told him to.” The cup again, on the saucer. “I am not cross. Theo is right. I am better in the mornings, and I like being rung. I only wanted to know that I know.”

He did not say anything.

“Did you go up your hill today?”

“No.”

“Yesterday?”

“There was a storm. They close the path for lightning.”

“And the day before?”

He looked at the ceiling. The snow from Tyler’s screens moved on it, faintly, blue.

“I was tired.”

There was a silence on the line from London. He heard the rain behind it, on a window.

“Because you are ringing me at eleven at night,” said his mother.

“No.”

“Fredde.”

“It isn’t that.”

“Go up your hill,” said his mother. “You chose it, on another hill, in the snow. You did not choose it so that you could lie in bed and ring me.” The breath. “I can be rung at your lunch. I am a Queen. I am available at lunch. Go up your hill in the morning and ring me at lunch, and tell me about it.”

“Theo said your morning.”

“Theo is a very good doctor,” said his mother, “and he is not your mother. Go to bed. Puss.”

---

He did not go to bed, because at twenty past midnight Tyler took the headphones off and turned round in his chair and said, “I need you to do something.”

Tyler had never asked him to do anything. He was sitting at the desk under the window in the hood, with the two screens behind him and the forest in them, and the fire in the middle of the forest, and the ring of small hooded figures round it in the snow, and his face had the look it got when the flame on his telephone went small: narrow and urgent and far away.

“Jussi’s at a wedding.”

“Now?”

“His sister’s. In Tampere. He’s been at it since Saturday. Finnish weddings go on for, like, a week.” Tyler looked at the screens. “And Aino’s not on till three, and I’ve got a test at nine. Programming. It’s a third of the grade.” He looked back at Frederick. “I have to sleep. I’ve never had to sleep before a thing.”

“What do you need?”

“I need you to keep the fire,” said Tyler. “Two and a half hours. Till Aino.”

Frederick looked at the fire on the screens. It was burning in a clearing among black trees, small and orange in an enormous dark, with the snow coming down slantwise through the light of it, and the number in the corner of the screen said 88.

“I don’t know how.”

“I’ll show you.”

---

It took four minutes to show him. It was the most attention Tyler had ever given him, and he gave it entirely, kneeling by the desk chair, with one hand on the back of it, the way Mrs Merriweather had once stood by him at the till.

“That’s you.” A small hooded figure by the woodpile, at the edge of the light. “That’s wood. You pick it up, you walk it to the fire, you put it on. Every log’s about four. It drops one every minute or so, faster if it’s windy, and it’s windy. Keep it over sixty. Under forty it goes low and everybody’s cold and they start dying. Under twenty it’s gone.” He pointed at the east side of the clearing, where the trees were thickest. “Wolves come out of there. If you see eyes, you take a log out of the fire, a burning one, and you walk at them. They hate it. Don’t take too many out.” He stood up. “That’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s the whole game,” said Tyler. “You keep it going. That’s all you do.” He took off the headphones and held them out. “There’s thirty of us. Most of them are asleep. If you get stuck, say so. Somebody in Ohio or Finland’s always up.”

Frederick put the headphones on. They were warm and smelled of Tyler, and in them there was the wind, enormous and soft, and the crackle of the fire, and under it, very faint, a girl’s voice somewhere saying something in Finnish to somebody else.

Tyler got into the bed by the window in the hood and pulled the cover up and turned to the wall.

“Don’t let it go,” he said, into the wall, and was asleep.

---

He did not let it go.

It was nearly the most difficult thing he had ever done, and he would not have said so to anybody, because it was a game, and nobody would have believed him. It was two and a half hours of a small figure walking from a woodpile to a fire and back, in the snow, in the dark, alone, with the number in the corner going down every minute and up by four, down and up, eighty-four, eighty-eight, eighty-five, while thirty people slept round it who did not know who he was and did not need to. At one he found the rhythm. At half past one a boy in Akron said in his ear, “Who’s on wood? Is that Tyler?” and he said, “No, it’s Fred, I’m his roommate,” and the boy said, “Cool, thanks, man,” and went back to sleep, and Frederick sat at the desk in the dark in the cold with the snow on the screens and found that he was quite absurdly pleased.

At twenty to three there were eyes on the east side.

Two, and then four, and then a great many, yellow, low down, in the black between the trees. He took a burning log out of the fire and walked at them, as Tyler had said, and they went back; and he walked back to the fire, and it was at fifty-one; and there were eyes again, on the other side; and he took another log out, and it was at forty-three; and in his ears the girl’s voice said something sharp in Finnish, and then, in English, “Hey. Hey, wood. Wood.”

He fed it. He fed it four logs in a row, as fast as the small figure would walk, and it went to forty-four, and forty-eight, and fifty-five, and at sixty he sat back in Tyler’s chair with his heart going as though he had climbed something.

At ten past three the girl’s voice said, “Okay. Aino. I’m on. Who was that?”

“Fred,” said Frederick. “Tyler’s roommate.”

“You went to eleven,” said Aino. “On the east side. I saw it in the log.” A pause. “But it’s still going. Go to bed, Fred.”

He took the headphones off and put them on the desk, very carefully, beside the keyboard, and sat for a minute in the dark, listening to Tyler breathe, and went to bed.

---

The alarm called BUTTE went at twenty to six.

He heard it. He knew exactly what it was. He put his thumb out of the bed and found the telephone on the floor and put his thumb on the word without opening his eyes, and the telephone said, kindly, Snooze, 9 min, and he lay there, and the nine minutes went by like one, and it went again.

There was a knock at the door. Two knuckles, soft.

He got up and opened it. Rhys was in the corridor in his running kit, with the hydration pack and the tube clipped to his chest and his face arranged, as it had been at twenty to six every morning since the twenty-first of August.

“Morning. Sir.” He corrected it. “Fred.”

“Tomorrow,” said Frederick.

Rhys looked at him. He looked at the dark room behind him, and the bed, and the snow on the two screens, and Tyler asleep in the hood, and at Frederick in the doorway in a T-shirt with his eyes half shut. Something went across Rhys’s face very fast, very far back, and was put away at once, like a man who has been told that the meeting is cancelled and does not want his colleagues to see him pleased.

“Tomorrow,” said Rhys, with great seriousness. “Right. Absolutely. Tomorrow.”

He went back down the corridor to three hundred and sixteen at a pace that was not running, and the door shut behind him, and through the wall, quite distinctly, Frederick heard the sound of a man in running shoes getting back into bed.

---

“Thirty-one,” said Sam, at breakfast, with the notebook beside his tray.

“Out of?” said Rhys, who had had an extra hour and a quarter of sleep and was eating eggs with the face of a man who had been given an extra hour and a quarter of sleep.

“Thirty-nine. Since the twenty-first of August.” Sam looked at the column over his glasses. “Four storms. They close the path for lightning. I don’t count those against him.” He turned a page. “Four snoozes.”

“Four?”

“Saturday. Sunday. Yesterday. Today. Monday was a storm.” Sam wrote something. “Thirty-one of one thousand four hundred and sixty-one. Two point one two per cent.” He capped the pencil. “On course for about one thousand one hundred and sixty. If the rate holds.”

“It won’t hold,” said Rhys, happily.

---

The Charter met at nine in Tolliver 104, and at five to ten Brennan gave back the quiz.

It had been a quiz on Article Two. Twenty questions, set on Friday, to be done at home over the weekend, on paper, because Brennan said he was old and liked to hold things; and Rhys had done it on Friday night, at his desk, with the Charter open in front of him and four highlighters, in three hours, and then on Saturday morning again, from the beginning, to check; and Sam had done it on Sunday afternoon on the tram to Phoenix, on his knee, in forty minutes, because he had wanted to look at the river.

Brennan walked up the curved rows handing them back, one by one, face down, without comment, the way a man deals cards.

He gave Rhys his. Rhys turned it over and looked at it and went a slow dark red from the collar up.

89.

He gave Sam his. Sam turned it over, glanced at it, and put it in his bag.

“What did you get?” said Rhys, in a voice of terrible calm.

“Ninety-one,” said Sam.

“On the tram.”

“I did it on the tram properly,” said Sam.

Brennan was at the end of the row. He held out the last paper, face down, and Frederick took it, and Brennan did not let go of it at once. They held it between them for a moment, across the end of the desk, the professor of the Charter and the King, one at each edge of a sheet of paper about Article Two, and then Brennan let go.

Frederick turned it over.

It had been marked in pencil. Brennan had marked the others in red; Frederick had seen Rhys’s, red ticks all the way down. His was in pencil, soft, small, very neat, in the margins, and he looked at it, and then up at Brennan, who was looking very hard at the clock over the blackboard.

78.

Q.4. Which Article establishes the office of Governor-General? He had written II.3. In the margin, in pencil: II.3 permits a commission. It does not name an office. The answer is none. The office is nowhere in the Charter.

Q.11. Where in the Charter do the words “in right of America” appear? He had written Throughout Article II. In the margin: Once, in a clerk’s hand, in a margin, beside the signatures. Not in the text at all.

Q.17. How often does the Charter require the Prime Minister to see the sovereign? He had written Weekly. In the margin, in pencil, smaller, as if the pencil had hesitated: Never. That is your diary, not the Charter.

And at the bottom, under the mark, in the same soft pencil:

Every mark you lost, you lost by answering from the job. This is a course on the text. H.B.

He read it twice.

When he looked up, Brennan had come back along the row and was standing at the end of it, with the leather bag over his shoulder, as people were getting up round them and zipping their bags, and his face had the look it got at least once in every class, the look of a man with something on a high shelf.

“Mr Hanover.”

“Yes.”

“Question seventeen.” Brennan was looking at the paper in Frederick’s hand, not at Frederick. “Does he actually come? Every week? Or do they…”

He stopped.

“No,” said Brennan. “Never mind. That’s not in the text either.” He hitched the bag. “Next week, Article Three. Parliament. You’ll have to read it like everybody else.” And then, at the door, without turning round, to the room: “Answer from the text.”

Beside Frederick, Rhys was looking at the seventy-eight.

He was trying very hard not to look at it, and could not stop, and his face was going through several things at once, the way the girl’s had at the cart on move-in day, and stopped on the last one, which was a kind of horrified tenderness.

“Sir,” said Rhys, very quietly. “Fred. You got seventy-eight on yourself.”

“I know, Rhys.”

“I got eighty-nine,” said Rhys, “on you.”

“He got ninety-one on me,” said Frederick, “on a tram.”

Sam, beside Rhys, did not look up from his bag. But something happened at the corner of his mouth, very far back, and was put away.

---

The envelope was in his pigeonhole at lunch.

It was small and square and white, and the address was in a hand he knew at once, a small square hand, red, every letter the same size, which had marked his chemistry for four years and his pints for one; and the letters had a slight downhill slope to them now, a little more at the end of each line than at the beginning, as though the line were a gentle hill and the pen were letting itself go down it, carefully, on purpose. Mr F. Hanover, Palo Verde Hall, The University of the March, Tempe.

He opened it in the room. Tyler was on the bed by the window, back from the test, with the headphones round his neck, and the fire on the screens at ninety-two.

There was nothing in the envelope but a beer mat.

It was an Eight Bars mat, the old kind, with the trombone on it, and it had been written on in red, on both sides, in the same hand.

On the front:

No relation. More’s the pity.

On the back, under a line ruled with something straight:

Postcard: B plus.

“Invented the heat”: see me.

He sat on the bed by the door and looked at it for a long time, at see me, in red, in that hand, going a little downhill, from New Westminster, and found that he could not for the moment say anything at all.

“Is that him?” said Tyler. “The teacher?”

“Yes.”

Tyler held out his hand. Frederick gave him the mat. Tyler read the front, and turned it over, and read the back, and turned it over again and read the front, and handed it back.

“He’s lying,” said Tyler.

“He’s not lying.”

“More’s the pity,” said Tyler. “That’s what a guy says when he’s lying.” He looked at the mat for a moment longer. Then he leaned down beside the bed, and opened the small white refrigerator, and took out a bottle of the blue drink, and held it out across the gap between the beds.

Frederick looked at it.

“You said they were related.”

“They are.”

“Then I owe you.”

“You kept the fire,” said Tyler. He went on holding it out. “Aino said. She said you went to eleven on the east side and got it back. Nobody gets it back from eleven.” He shook the bottle slightly, the way he would have shaken it at somebody who was being slow. “Take it.”

Frederick took it.

“How did the test go?”

“Good. I think good. I slept.” Tyler looked at the screens, at the fire at ninety-two, with something on his face that Frederick had not seen there before and did not at once have a name for. “I’ve never slept before a thing.” He put the headphones back on, and then lifted one side off again.

“C plus,” said Tyler.

“What?”

“For the fire. Eleven’s really low, dude.” He thought about it. “But you got it back. C plus.”

And put the headphones on.

---

At ten that night he went down to the lobby. Mr Luna was at the desk in the cardigan, and the column on the clipboard began 10 p.m. 79, and the radio had the ball game on, low.

“Went up this morning, son?”

“No.”

Mr Luna wrote nothing and looked at him over the glasses.

“Tomorrow,” said Frederick.

“Uh-huh,” said Mr Luna, in the voice of a man who had worked nights for thirty years and had heard the word said at that desk, by a great many people, about a great many things, at about this time of night.

Frederick put the beer mat on the desk, face up, No relation. More’s the pity, and the quiz beside it, face up, 78, and the bottle of the blue drink beside that, and Mr Luna looked at the three of them in a row under the lamp, one by one, with great attention, as though they were the night’s readings.

“Who gave you the seventy-eight?”

“The professor of the Charter.”

“And the mat?”

“My chemistry teacher.”

“And that?”

“My roommate. For keeping something going.”

Mr Luna considered the three of them for a while. Then he reached out and, with one finger, moved the bottle of the blue drink to the front of the row, ahead of the other two, and left it there.

“That’s the one,” said Mr Luna, and went back to the crossword.