Closing

Tyler’s coat came out from under the bed at nine in the morning, the way a dead thing comes out from under a porch.

He lay on his front on the floor with his arm under the bed to the shoulder and felt about, and said, “Oh, God,” and pulled, and it came: a vast black quilted thing with a hood trimmed in grey fur that had spent four months pressed flat against the underside of a crate of energy drinks and had taken the shape of a small animal that had given up. Tyler knelt and held it out at arm’s length.

“Fourteen inches,” said Tyler.

“Of what?”

“Snow.” He turned round the phone on the floor beside him. On the screen was a photograph, sent at six that morning Ohio time, of a driveway under snow with a car in it that was only a white hump, and in the foreground a small figure in a pink hat holding a yardstick against the side of the hump like a fisherman with his catch. Under it, it said 14!!!!! cant wait to see you baby. “My mom,” said Tyler. “She measures it. She’s measured it every time since I was born. She’s got a notebook.” He looked at the photograph with the face of a man reading a summons. “There’s another one coming Sunday.”

“Another notebook?”

“Another storm.” Tyler laid the coat on the bed by the window and looked down at it. “I came three thousand miles,” he said, to the coat.

“I know.”

“Three thousand miles. And it’s waiting. It’s just been sitting there in Parma since August, waiting.” He sat down on the bed beside it, heavily. “It knows my flight number.”

---

The third floor of Palo Verde Hall emptied itself down the stairs all morning, like a bath.

It went in the loud way and then the quiet way. In the loud way it went with suitcases on wheels that did not like the lino, and laundry bags, and parents, who had arrived from Scottsdale and Flagstaff and Yuma and stood in the doorways of rooms they had last seen in August with the expressions of people at an exhibition that had been rehung without asking them. A father from Prescott carried a mini-fridge on his shoulder down three flights without stopping and said at the bottom, to nobody, “Same as I carried it up.” The girl from Yuma who had photographed the frost went past with her grandmother’s quilt over her arm and a cactus in a mug. And the boy from the second floor who had carried an electric fan to the Tolliver Gymnasium in August, in its box, for after, came down the stairwell with the same fan in the same box, still sealed, under the same arm, and Frederick held the door for him.

“Never opened it,” said the boy, without being asked. He looked at the box. “The air came back.”

“I know.”

“I’m taking it home,” said the boy, with dignity. “In case.”

In the quiet way it went by doors. All along the corridor, through the morning, doors that had stood open since August with music coming out of them were shut, one after another, and stayed shut, and by noon there were four open, and then three.

---

Doug came at one, with a clipboard.

He was the same Doug, large and slow and patient in a polo shirt, with the lanyard that said DOUG, and he came along the corridor knocking on the doors that were still open and reading from a sheet, in the voice of a man who has read the same sheet at the end of thirty semesters and has stopped expecting it to say anything new.

“Sorry, folks,” said Doug, in the doorway. “Closing checklist. Won’t be a minute.”

Tyler, who was trying to fit a second pair of shoes into a bag that had been full before the first, looked up.

“Fridge unplugged,” said Doug. “Door propped open, so it doesn’t grow anything.”

Tyler unplugged the fridge, which contained a lemon and a single energy drink, and propped the door open with the energy drink.

“Trash out. Windows locked. Blinds down, so the sun doesn’t get in.” He looked at the sheet. “Thermostat. Leave it. It’s on a schedule. Building goes to unoccupied at six.” He looked up. “Sixty-two at night. Sixty-five days. Thereabouts.”

“Sixty-two?” said Frederick.

“There’s no law says it has to be warm,” said Doug. “Just that it can’t be hot.” He made a tick. “Any questions.”

Tyler said that he had none, and went back to the shoes, and Doug turned the sheet over and looked at the back of it, where there was a second, shorter list, typed, with a signature at the bottom; and then he looked at Frederick, for a little longer than at Tyler, as he had looked at him in August over the pillow, with no expression at all.

“You’re the in situ,” said Doug.

“Sorry?”

“Winter break housing. In situ.” He read it off the sheet. “Rooms 312 and 316 to remain occupied, per arrangement. Heating as building. Desk staffed nights.” He lowered the sheet. “Normally we move the break kids. Put ‘em all in one building over by the stadium, one desk, save on the porters. Never had an in situ.” He considered the word. “Somebody across the road wrote half of this,” he said, “I’m guessing.”

“Probably.”

“Thought so. It’s got a paragraph about the fire door.” Doug folded the sheet in half. “You’ll have Mr Luna on nights. The whole break. Ten to six.”

“The whole break? Christmas?”

“He asks for it,” said Doug. “Every year since I’ve been here. Christmas, New Year’s, the lot. They tried to give him Christmas off one time, early on, before my time, and he went over to the President’s office.” He tucked the clipboard under his arm. “You can’t make a man take Christmas off, as it turns out. There’s no form for it.”

He knocked on the frame of the door, twice, the way some people touch wood.

“Merry Christmas, folks,” said Doug, and went on along the corridor, knocking.

---

“In situ,” said Tyler, when he had gone.

He was sitting on the bag to close it. It was not closing.

“It means staying where you are.”

“I know what it means.” Tyler bounced. The zip moved half an inch. “I mean, how come? You’re not going home?”

“No.”

“How come?”

Frederick looked at the desk.

“My mother asked me not to.”

Tyler stopped bouncing.

He sat on the bag and looked at him, properly, across the room, which was a thing that happened perhaps once a fortnight and that Frederick had learned to notice, because when it happened it was like a lamp coming on in a house you thought was empty.

“Harsh,” said Tyler.

“It isn’t. She’s got something she has to think about. She says she can’t think about it with me in the house.”

Tyler considered this for some time, sitting on the bag.

“My mom says that,” he said. “About my dad. Then she goes to my aunt Donna’s for like a day and comes back and it’s fine.”

“Is she okay?” he said. “Your mom. When she came that time. She looked kind of…” He made a small movement with one hand, downward, which was the stairs. “You know.”

“She’s tired,” said Frederick.

“Right.” Tyler looked at the zip. “My grandma got tired. Like, sitting down on stuff. Out of breath on the porch. And they did a thing to her heart, a pacemaker thing, they went in through her leg, and now she’s, like.” He searched for it. “A menace. She drives. She shouldn’t drive. She drives to church and back at about four miles an hour in the middle of the road and everybody on Ridge Road just pulls over.” He bounced on the bag again, once, and the zip went the rest of the way all at once with a sound like tearing. “So.”

“So,” said Frederick.

“So that’s what happens,” said Tyler, and stood up off the bag, and that was all.

---

At half past one Tyler stopped packing and lay down on the bed by the window next to the coat and looked at the ceiling, which was what he did, Frederick had come to understand, instead of saying a thing.

“We do the twenty-fourth,” said Tyler, to the ceiling.

“Do what?”

“Christmas. The big one. Christmas Eve. It’s a Polish thing, my grandma’s thing. Wigilia.” He said it the Polish way, vee-GEEL-ya, which Frederick had not known he could. “You can’t eat till the first star comes out. My little brother stands at the front window from like three o’clock like a dog waiting for the mailman, and if it’s cloudy, which in Parma in December it is, always, my grandpa goes out on the porch and looks up and says there and points at nothing, and everybody goes yay and sits down.” He thought about it. “Twelve things to eat. No meat. Pierogi. Beet soup. A fish my grandma keeps in the bathtub.”

“Alive?”

“Till the twenty-third.” Tyler did not elaborate. “And there’s a plate.”

“A plate.”

“An extra one. At the end. Set for nobody.” Tyler moved his hand on the blanket, the way he moved it on the controller. “It’s for whoever shows up. Somebody who’s on their own, or lost, or whatever, a stranger, if they knock, they get the plate. It’s like a rule. You have to.” He looked at the ceiling. “Nobody ever knocks. It’s Parma. Everybody’s already at somebody’s. My grandma sets it anyway. Every year. Knife, fork, the good glass.”

“We do the twenty-fourth too,” said Frederick. “In Sweden.”

Tyler turned his head on the pillow.

“You’re Swedish?”

“Half.”

“Oh, right,” said Tyler. “Your mom.” He looked back at the ceiling, satisfied, as though a small thing on a screen had clicked into place. “Do you have a fish?”

“Herring. In jars. And a ham. And rice pudding with an almond in it, and whoever gets the almond gets married in the year.”

“Does anybody?”

“My father got it once,” said Frederick. “He was already married.”

Tyler laughed at the ceiling, a short surprised sound, the first time Frederick had made him do it on purpose.

There was a pause.

“You could come,” said Tyler.

Frederick looked at him.

“To Parma,” said Tyler, to the ceiling, quite casually, the way a person says a thing he has been carrying round all morning in a pocket. “On the twenty-fourth. My mom’d go insane, but in a good way. You could be the plate.” He considered it. “You’d be the first plate we ever had. Grandma would lose her mind.”

Frederick did not say anything for a moment.

He thought about the plate. A knife and a fork and the good glass, at the end of a table in a house in Parma under fourteen inches of snow, with another storm coming on Sunday, laid every year for whoever knocked, and nobody ever knocking. He thought about the officers who would have to sweep the street before he walked down it, and about Kimura’s face, and about the paragraph about the fire door. And then, because it was not that, really, it was never that, he thought about his mother in a chair in London saying no in the voice there was no door in.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Because your mom said.”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” said Tyler. He did not seem offended. He did not seem anything. He lay on the bed beside the coat and looked at the ceiling. “I’ll tell my grandma it’s yours anyway,” he said. “The plate. She’ll like that. She likes it to be somebody’s.”

---

The car for the airport came at a quarter to three.

Tyler put the coat on in the room, so as not to have to carry it, and stood in the middle of the floor in it at sixty-four degrees, in the vast black quilted thing with the fur hood up round his face, with his bag on one shoulder and his laptop under his arm and the long orange lead of the power strip trailing out of the side pocket, because he was going to Ohio, where the lines iced up, and there was always an old guy.

“You’re going to die in that,” said Frederick.

“It’s nineteen degrees at Hopkins.”

“It’s sixty-four here.”

“I know,” said Tyler, from inside the hood. He was already pink. “I’ve got to get used to it.” He stood a moment longer. Then he said, “Okay. The fire,” and went to the desk under the window, where the tall black computer stood with its lights turning slowly inside it, blue to violet and back, and woke the two screens with one finger.

It was snowing on them, as it had been snowing on them since August: across a dark forest at night, in a wind, on a ring of small huts, and in the middle of the huts on a fire, low and orange, with figures in furs round it.

“Jussi’s in Lapland,” said Tyler. “With his grandma. No wifi. Everybody’s at their grandma’s. There’s nobody on nights till January.” He pointed at the corner of the left-hand screen, at a small brown square. “That’s wood. You click that and then you click the fire. Once a day. Morning’s best, that’s when it burns down. Don’t click anything else. Don’t talk to anybody. If anybody talks to you, say brb.” He looked at the fire. “If it goes out, everybody in the camp dies.”

“Thirty people.”

“Thirty-one. A guy from Leeds joined in October.” Tyler looked at him from inside the hood with complete seriousness, as a man looks at another man to whom he is leaving his dog. “I’ve had it going since June, Fred.”

“I know.”

“Okay,” said Tyler. He looked round the room once, at the two beds and the two desks and the fridge propped open on its energy drink, the way Doug had looked round it in August, and Frederick saw him see the window.

Tyler crossed the room.

He went to the blind, which had been down since the eighteenth of August, all day, every day, because the screens were under the window and the glare was bad; and he took hold of the cord, and stood for a moment with it in his hand, in the coat; and then he pulled it, and the blind went up with a long rattle all the way to the top, and the afternoon came into the room, low and gold and enormous, and in the middle of the window, over the roofs, with the sun full on its face and the A on its flank, was the butte.

They both looked at it.

“Doug said blinds down,” said Frederick.

“Doug’s not here,” said Tyler. He let go of the cord. “You used to go up that thing.”

Frederick looked at him.

“In the mornings. In August.” Tyler was looking at the butte, from inside the fur. “Like five a.m. You thought I was asleep. I wasn’t asleep, I was in a raid with some guys in Korea.” He considered the hill. “And then you stopped.”

“October.”

“Yeah. I know.” Tyler shifted the bag on his shoulder. “I noticed.” He looked at the window a moment longer. “It’s a good window,” he said. “Somebody should use it.”

He went to the door.

At the door he stopped and turned round, enormous and pink in the coat, and looked at Frederick across the room for the second time that day, which was a record.

“Merry Christmas, man,” said Tyler.

“Merry Christmas.”

“Don’t let it go out,” said Tyler, and went.

---

By five the hall was quiet in a way Frederick had never heard a building be quiet.

He had heard palaces be quiet. Palaces were quiet on purpose, the way a church is, with the quiet laid down on the floor like a carpet and people walking round the edges of it. This was a different thing. This was the quiet of a building made for four hundred people with three in it, the sound of all the rooms being empty at once, of the lifts standing open at the ends of the corridors with their lights on and nobody to take anywhere, of a noticeboard with nobody to read it and a drinking fountain that came on by itself every so often, with a small cough, to keep its pipe clear, and then stopped.

Rhys and Sam stood in the corridor with him outside 316 and listened to it.

“Well,” said Rhys.

Sam took out his notebook, and wrote something, and Frederick did not need to look to know that it was 5.00: closed.

“You should both have gone home,” said Frederick.

Rhys looked at him as if he had said something in a foreign language that he was too polite to point out he did not speak.

“We were never going home,” said Rhys.

“Your families.”

“My mum’s sent a parcel,” said Rhys. “She sent it in November so it’d get here. It’s in the post room. It’s got a pudding in it. I can tell from the shape.” He thought about his mother. “She’s very pleased about it. She’s told the whole street I’m guarding the King at Christmas. She thinks it’s in a palace.”

“It’s not in a palace.”

“I’m not telling her that,” said Rhys.

“Mine sent a list of churches,” said Sam. “Within walking distance. With the times of the services.” He put the notebook away. “And Christmas Day is double time and a day in lieu,” he added, as a man adds the last figure to a column. “So.”

“So.”

“So it’s not a bad shift,” said Sam. “Actuarially.”

At six the lights went.

They went the way Doug had said they would, on a schedule, floor by floor, from the top down. The fourth floor went first; they heard it through the ceiling, a series of soft heavy clicks running away along the length of the building, and then their own corridor went, from the far end, the fire door end, the long tubes over the lino going out one after another towards them in a row, click, click, click, like somebody walking towards them switching off a house, until the one above their heads went too and they stood in the dark with only the green of the exit sign and the yellow line of light under the door of 312; and then, a moment later, with a hum, a single light came back on at each end of the corridor, dim, the night setting, the one the building kept for the people it knew were there.

Below them, floor by floor, they heard the rest of the hall go out.

---

He sat on Tyler’s bed.

He had never sat on it. In four months he had stepped across it to reach the window and stepped across Tyler to reach the window and once, in September, at four in the morning, fallen over Tyler’s foot reaching the window; and he had never once sat on it, because it was Tyler’s, and the window was Tyler’s, and in Palo Verde Hall what was yours was the only thing that was.

The mattress was bare. Tyler had stripped it and taken the sheets home in the bag that would not close, for his mother to wash, in Parma, in the snow.

He sat on the bare mattress by the window with his back to the wall and his knees up and looked out.

The butte was dark against the sky now, and the sky behind it was the colour it went in December at six, a deep clear blue over the mountains going up into black, with one star in it, low, over the hill. There were, he counted, almost no lights in the whole of the view. The roofs of the campus were dark, and the student flats beyond them were dark, from top to bottom, every window, as far as he could see.

He looked at the star.

He thought about a small boy in Parma who would stand at a front window from three o’clock next Saturday like a dog waiting for the mailman. He thought about a grandfather who went out on the porch and pointed at nothing. He thought that it was one in the morning in London, and that his mother would not be asleep, because she slept four hours and never the right four, and that she would be sitting in the chair by the window with the lamp off, or on the green chair on the landing, halfway, with eleven stairs below her and eleven above, and that if he rang her now she would answer before it had rung once.

He did not ring her.

He sat on Tyler’s bed in the empty hall, in the room with the fridge propped open on its energy drink and the blind up and the fire burning low on two screens at his elbow, and looked at the one star over the butte for a long time, until he was quite sure it was a star and not a plane coming down into Sky Harbor, which it was not; and then he said, out loud, to nobody, in the dark, the way a man says it on a porch in Ohio, “There.”