Snow on His Boots

At six in the morning the building came back on.

It came on the way it had gone off, on a schedule, a floor at a time, except that it went the other way. He heard it from the bed by the window, where he had slept for three weeks: first, very far down, in the basement, a deep hum, like a ship starting its engines in a harbour; and then the ground floor, a series of soft heavy clicks running away along the length of the building under him; and 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, like somebody walking towards them through a house switching it on, until the one outside the door came on too and the yellow line under it went white.

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.

He lay and looked at the butte through the window, with the blind up, in the grey, for what he knew was the last time from this bed.

---

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

He said it in the corridor, outside 316, at the exact moment that the first door on the third floor of Palo Verde Hall opened since December, which was 304, at the far end, where a girl from Flagstaff with a twin was backing in through it with a laundry bag in each hand and a pillow under her chin.

He said it perfectly. He said it in the voice of a political scientist greeting the boy two doors down, with the practised smile, and nothing else in it at all; and Frederick, who had heard him say sir every morning for three weeks, and once, at the end of an empty corridor, under a night light, his name, saw what it cost him, and said “Morning,” and did not look at him while he paid it.

Sam, behind Rhys, with the notebook, said nothing. He wrote 11.00: open, and underlined it.

---

The hall filled all day, like a bath.

It filled the loud way first. It filled with suitcases on wheels that still did not like the lino, and parents from Scottsdale and Prescott and Yuma, who came in through the glass doors with the faces of people returning to an exhibition they had not much liked the first time, and the father from Prescott with the mini-fridge on his shoulder, who carried it up three flights without stopping and said at the top, to nobody, “Same as I carried it down.” And then it filled the quiet way: by doors. All along the corridor, through the afternoon, doors that had been shut since December came open one after another and stayed open, with music coming out of them, until by four there were three shut, and then two, and then only the cupboard where Priya kept her supplies.

The boy from the second floor came up the stairs at two with the electric fan.

It was in its box. The box was still sealed. He had it under the same arm.

“Still haven’t opened it,” said the boy, without being asked.

“No.”

“It’s sixty,” said the boy, with dignity. “I’m keeping it in case.”

Priya came at three, with a roll of tape in one hand and a stack of maroon card in the other, and went straight along the corridor to 312 without stopping at her own door, and looked at the door, at the paper sun that said TYLER, faded, and the small rectangle of old tape beside it.

“Again,” said Priya.

“Since December.”

“That’s the fourth one.” She looked at the tape mark with the face of a nursing junior who has seen a great many wounds and has come to take this one personally. “Who takes them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Somebody has a whole collection,” said Priya darkly. “Somewhere in this hall, somebody’s got a wall.” And she took a new one out of the stack, already cut, already written, FRED, in silver, with straight rays, and pressed it to the door with four pieces of tape, one at each corner, very hard, as if that would help.

Sam brought her the plastic stencil from the lounge, gone soft at the edges, which they had borrowed on Christmas Eve, and gave it back to her without a word; and Priya looked at it, and then at him, and then took it, and went down the stairs to the lobby, and came back up a minute later without it and with an expression Frederick could not read, and went into her room and shut the door.

“She’s seen the desk,” said Sam.

---

The newspapers had spent the weekend guessing.

Rhys read them in the lounge, under the poster about scorpions, on his telephone, quietly, at four, as a man reads the reviews of a play he has already seen and cannot discuss. The Swedish Court had said on Friday, in a single sentence, that the Queen would speak to the country from Stockholm Palace on Monday, and nothing else, and the papers of four countries had spent two days filling the space after the sentence.

“Expressen says health,” said Rhys, not looking up. “It says the cold in August wasn’t a cold.” He scrolled. “The Courier says it’s an engagement.”

“Whose?”

“It doesn’t say.” He scrolled again. “The Times says it’s the succession and won’t say how. A Berlin one says it’s about Prussia. They say that about everything.” He put the telephone face down on his knee. “And a paper in Ohio says it’s about a dog.”

“What dog?”

“There isn’t one,” said Rhys. “That’s what it says. Palace denies dog.”

Sam, at the next table, wrote something in the notebook, and Frederick did not need to read it upside down to know that it was a column with health, engagement, succession, Prussia and dog in it, and against each of them, in pencil, very small, a mark.

---

Tyler came at twenty to five.

He had sent messages all day, from the far side of the country, in the order things had happened to him. at hopkins. 6 degrees. never again. That was at a quarter to five in the morning, Ohio time. boarding. guy next to me has a cat in a bag. its looking at me. somewhere over the middle. everything is white. why do people live there. And at a quarter past four in the afternoon, Arizona time: landed. its 60. i could cry.

Then there was nothing for twenty-five minutes, and then the stairs.

He knew them before he saw them. 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; except that now each step had 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, and his laptop was under his arm and his bag on his shoulder and the long orange lead of the power strip trailing out of the side pocket; and on his feet, where Frederick had only ever seen trainers and socks, there were boots. Big 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.

They looked at each other.

“Hey,” said Tyler.

“Hey.”

Frederick looked at the boots.

“There’s snow on your boots.”

Tyler looked down at them, from inside the hood, with an expression of the most profound personal grievance.

“That’s salt,” said Tyler. “They put it on the roads. So it doesn’t freeze. It gets on everything. It gets on the car. It gets in the house.” He lifted one boot and looked at the sole, where a grey wedge of something was packed into the tread. “It gets in your soul.”

“It looks like snow.”

“In Parma,” said Tyler, “it’s the same thing.”

---

He did not take the coat off. He came across the room in it, in the boots, squeaking, and put the laptop down on the bed by the window, and saw that the bed had been slept on, the bare mattress with a dent in it at the window end, and the blind up behind it, and the butte; and he stood for a moment and looked at all three.

“Did you sleep on my bed?”

“Yes.”

“Huh,” said Tyler. He considered the dent. “How come?”

“The window.”

Tyler looked out of the window at the butte, which was standing in the low gold light of a January afternoon at five o’clock with the A on its flank and nobody on it.

“Yeah,” he said. “I said.”

Then he reached into the front of the coat, deep, the way a man reaches for a wallet he has hidden from pickpockets, and brought out a parcel in tin foil, flat, the size of a book, and warm from being against him for two thousand miles, and held it out.

“Grandma,” said Tyler. “For the plate.”

Frederick took it. It was heavy. He opened one end of the foil, and inside there was a cake, a long dark roll of it, sliced, and every slice was a spiral, black and gold, black and gold, round and round to the middle, like a thing drawn by somebody who would not stop.

“Poppy seed,” said Tyler. “Makowiec. She makes it every year. She says it’s for luck and for not having bad dreams, and she says it’s for the plate because the plate didn’t get any dessert, because it wasn’t there.” He thought about it. “She says that’s not the plate’s fault.”

“Tell her thank you.”

“I told her you’d say that.” Tyler sat down on the bed in the coat, heavily, and it sighed. “She says you’re very polite for a plate.”

---

He went to the desk at five past five, still in the coat.

The screens were on. They had been on for twenty-three days. Under the window, against the gold of the afternoon, the forest was dark and the snow was coming down slantwise and the ring of huts stood round the fire, and the fire was burning high, orange and then yellow, because it had been fed at eight that morning, and the figures in furs stood round it a little way back, the way people stand round a fire that is going well.

Tyler stood and looked at it for a long time.

He counted them. Frederick watched him count them, with one finger, not touching the screen, in the hood: thirty-one.

“You kept it,” said Tyler.

“Every day.”

“Dude.” He sat down in the chair, in the coat, and put his hand on the mouse, and there was writing at the bottom of the screen, a great deal of it, a whole column of it going up out of sight, and he scrolled, and read, and scrolled.

TY

TY UR BACK

jussi here. back from lapland. grandma says hi. who is ur roommate

ur roommate kept it 23 days mate, from Leeds. never missed. legend.

we named a hut

Tyler stopped scrolling.

“They named a hut,” he said.

“I didn’t know.”

“There’s a hut.” Tyler moved the mouse, and the view swung round the camp, and stopped on one of the small huts at the edge of the ring, half buried in the snow, with a lamp in its window, and over its door, on a board, in letters cut into the wood the way the game cut letters, it said FREDS. No apostrophe. “That’s a big deal,” said Tyler. “You can only name a hut if everybody votes. Everybody. Jussi voted. Aino voted, and Aino doesn’t vote for anything.” He turned round in the chair and looked at Frederick, in the hood, with the expression of a man revising his whole estimate of somebody. “Dude. You’re famous.”

“In the camp.”

“That’s the only place that counts,” said Tyler, with complete seriousness, and turned back to the screen and scrolled further up, and stopped again.

Tyler is in Ohio. I am his roommate. I am keeping the fire until January. Merry Christmas.

He read that for a while.

Then further up still, at the very end, where the column began:

Sam. Accounting.

“Who’s Sam?”

“Two doors down.”

“Sam’s been in my camp?”

“Once. At one o’clock. It was low.”

Tyler looked at the screen for a long time. Then he took the headphones off the hook on the side of the monitor, and put them on, over the hood, and pulled the little microphone round to his mouth, and said, into it, in the voice of a man taking back his own house:

“I’m back. I’ve got the fire.”

Somewhere in Finland, and Leeds, and Korea, and wherever Aino was, people said things, and he listened, and nodded, and his face, which had been pink with the coat, went pinker for a different reason.

“It’s yours,” said Frederick.

Tyler lifted one side of the headphones an inch.

“What?”

“The fire. It’s yours. I’m giving it back.”

Tyler looked at him for a moment, across the room, with one ear in Finland.

“You didn’t let it go out,” said Tyler, and put the headphone back.

---

He took the coat off at half past 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 bed, and stood them by the door, side by side, where they made two small grey puddles on the carpet of no colour, and looked at them.

“I’m never wearing those again,” he said.

“Until May.”

“Until May,” Tyler agreed bitterly, and then he looked at the window, at the butte, at the blind that had been up for three weeks, and went to it, and took hold of the cord; and stood for a moment with it in his hand, as he had stood in December; and then pulled it down, because the sun was low and straight into the screens, and the room went back to being the room.

He made the bed with the sheets his mother had washed, in Parma, in the snow. He did it badly, quickly, the way he did everything that was not on a screen, and lay down on it on his back with his phone on his chest and looked at the ceiling.

“My mom asked what you do,” he said.

“What did you say?”

“Undeclared.” Tyler looked at the ceiling. “She said what does his dad do. I said he’s old. You said he’s old.”

“He is old.”

“Then she said what does his mom do. And I said she’s a nice Swedish lady who drinks Glacier.” He thought about it. “My mom liked that.”

Frederick sat at his own desk by the door and did not say anything, and found that he was holding the edge of it.

“Jussi says the king guy’s mom’s going to be on TV tomorrow,” said Tyler, to the ceiling. “In Sweden. Jussi’s dad’s, like, obsessed. Everybody in Lapland’s going to watch it, Jussi says. On a big screen at the school.” He moved his thumb on the phone. “Jussi’s dad asked me what the king guy actually does. All day. And I didn’t know. I said my roommate knows. He did the class.” He turned his head on the pillow. “So what does he do? Like, actually?”

Frederick looked at him.

He looked at Tyler Kowalczyk of Parma, Ohio, lying on a badly made bed by a window with the blind down, with the salt drying on his boots by the door and a hut named after his roommate in a forest on two screens, who had come two thousand miles to get away from snow and had brought some back on his feet, and who did not know, and would know in fifteen hours, and would never not know again.

“He reads,” said Frederick. “Every morning there’s a box. Red. With papers in, from the governments, all fourteen of them, and he reads every one, all the way to the end, and when he’s read one he initials it at the top, in the corner, small, in pencil, because the pencil means…”

“Hang on,” said Tyler.

His telephone had lit up on his chest. There was the small picture of a flame. He was gone, at once, into it, with his thumbs going and his face gone narrow, saying, “No, I’m here, I’m here, Jussi, who’s on wood?”; and the snow on the two screens went on falling.

Frederick sat at his desk.

He had got as far as the pencil. He had never got as far as the pencil.

---

Mr Luna came on at ten.

Tyler went down at five past, for a Glacier, because the fridge had been propped open on an energy drink for twenty-three days and contained a lemon; and Frederick went with him, because he wanted to see it.

Tyler stopped in front of the desk.

He looked at the sun on the front of it, under the lamp, maroon, with straight gold rays, one of them a sixteenth of an inch shorter than it had been, and the silver capitals.

“Who’s Ignacio?”

Mr Luna looked at him over his glasses, from behind the desk, with the pen in his hand and 10 p.m. 68 written on the clipboard in front of him, which was the highest number in that column since December.

“Me,” said Mr Luna.

Tyler looked at the sun, and at Mr Luna, and at the sun.

“Sick,” said Tyler, with deep approval, and went to the vending machine.

Mr Luna watched him go. Then he looked at Frederick, standing by the desk, for a little longer than usual, over the top of the glasses, and pushed the jar of butterscotch an inch across the desk.

“Tomorrow, son,” said Mr Luna. It was not a question.

“Yes.”

Mr Luna considered this for a moment, with the pen.

“Eat breakfast,” he said.

---

Tyler was asleep by eleven.

It had never happened. He lay on his side on the bed by the window with the phone on the blanket and one hand out from under it, breathing all the way down, flat and slow, on Ohio time, with the headphones round his neck; and on the two screens above him the fire burned high in the snow, with Jussi on wood, and the thirty-one stood round it, and beside them, at the edge of the ring, the small hut with the lamp in its window and FREDS over the door.

Frederick lay on his own bed by the door, for the first time in three weeks, and looked at the inch of window at the edge of the blind, where the shoulder of the butte was black against the stars.

The telephone lit on his chest at five past eleven. It was seven in the morning in Stockholm.

I am in Stockholm. It is snowing. Your father went out onto the Slottsbacken in it at six with Brannigan and stood there in the dark for half an hour looking at the Palace, and came in with snow on his boots and will not take them off.

And then:

Tomorrow. Eat breakfast. M.

He read it twice. Then he put the telephone face down on his chest, and lay in the dark of 312 with the snow falling blue on two screens and a boy from Parma asleep across the room, and the inch of hill; and thought about a man of eighty-six on the Slottsbacken at six in the morning in the snow, with a stick, and an envelope in his pocket with his railcard, looking up at a palace where his wife was asleep, on the last morning on which nobody knew; and coming in, and standing in a hall, and refusing, absolutely, with great dignity, in as few words as possible, to take off his boots.

On the bed by the window Tyler turned over in his sleep, and said something into the pillow that might have been I’ve got the fire; and did not wake.