Every Screen

At a quarter past six in the morning, for the first time in the history of room 312, Tyler was hungry.

“Dude,” said Tyler, in the dark. “Are you awake?”

“Yes.”

“I’m starving.”

He was sitting up in the bed by the window with the blanket round his shoulders and his eyes open, like a man who has heard a noise downstairs and is ready to go down with a bat. The two screens over the desk were dark. Frederick had not known that they could be.

“It’s a quarter past six.”

“It’s a quarter past eight,” said Tyler. “In Ohio. I went to sleep at eleven, like a person, and I woke up at five, like a farmer, and I lay here, and I was like, what is this, and it was hunger.” He pulled the blanket tighter. “My grandma does breakfast at seven. Kielbasa. Three weeks of that. My body thinks I’m still there.” He considered the room. “Is there breakfast here?”

“There’s been breakfast here every day since August.”

“I know there’s breakfast. I’ve just never, like, been.”

Frederick lay and looked at the ceiling.

He had been awake since three, doing sums. Three in Tempe was eleven in Stockholm. Five was one in the afternoon, when she would be at the lunch she would not eat. It was to be at four o’clock in Stockholm, which was eight here. She had chosen the hour, she said, so that he could have his breakfast first.

“I’ll take you,” he said.

---

At a quarter to seven he put on his shoes, and Tyler, who was dressed, which had also never happened, watched him from the end of the bed with his hands between his knees.

“Where are you going?”

“Sam’s.”

“At six forty-five?”

“Every morning. Since August.”

“Huh,” said Tyler. “I’m usually asleep.” He seemed to find a great deal in the sentence. “That’s a lot of mornings.”

Sam was coming along the corridor from the stairs with the grey backpack over his shoulder and the zip that did not close held shut with two fingers. He stopped when he saw Tyler in the doorway of 312, upright, dressed, and looking at him.

“Morning,” said Tyler. “What’s in the backpack?”

“Laundry,” said Sam, and went into 316.

There was nothing in the box about Sweden, because Sweden was not in the box and never would be. There was an order about a harbour in the Carolinas and a letter from the Governor-General about a bridge, and he initialled them at Sam’s desk in pencil under the poster of the federal tax brackets while Rhys ironed a shirt on a towel on the floor, because it was the first class of a semester, and first impressions.

“The sergeant’s put two in the dining hall,” said Rhys, ironing a cuff. “In fleeces. By the dish return. You won’t know them.” He considered. “You’ll know them.”

Sam put the box in the backpack and looked at Frederick over his round glasses for a moment longer than he needed to.

“Did you sleep?”

“No.”

Sam wrote something in the notebook, small, and did not say what.

---

The dining hall had the television on.

It was the one high up in the corner over the coffee, which in the mornings showed the ABC with the sound off, and the line along the bottom of it said QUEEN OF SWEDEN TO SPEAK FROM STOCKHOLM AT 8 A.M. ARIZONA, and then the weather. The papers had spent the weekend guessing why, and one in Ohio had decided that it was about a dog. Most of the dining hall had not read the papers. It was the first day of the semester.

Tyler had found the waffle iron.

It stood at the end of the counter, a heavy black thing on a swivel with a handle on each side and a card beside it that said POUR, CLOSE, FLIP, and Tyler poured, and closed it, and took hold of the handle, and turned the whole iron over on its swivel with both hands, slowly, the way a man turns the wheel of a ship.

“You flip it,” said Tyler.

“Yes.”

“It’s been here the whole time?” He turned round to the queue behind him, which was four people holding trays. “Did you guys know you flip it?”

A girl in a bobble hat said that she did, and Tyler looked at her as though she had kept something from him for five months; and the little light went red, and he opened the iron, and lifted out the waffle on a fork, golden, in squares, and looked at it, and put it on Frederick’s tray.

“You have that one,” said Tyler. “I’ll do another one.”

---

They sat at the table by the window, where they always sat, with the butte a mile off across the palms, brown and small in the morning. Sam had the notebook beside his tray among the cost of the eggs. Tyler had three waffles and was cutting them along the lines the iron had made, which he said was the only way. By the dish return two young men in fleeces were eating cereal with the concentration of men who had been told to look as though they liked cereal.

At five to eight a woman came out of the kitchen in a hairnet with a remote control, stood under the television and turned the sound up, the way somebody turns up the radio in a kitchen when the news comes on, and went back in without looking round. A minute later the long screens over the hot counter, which said EGGS and GRITS in maroon on gold, went black one after another and came back as Stockholm.

Then it was every screen. A boy at the next table propped his telephone against the salt, and a girl further down, and the table behind them, until all down the long room there were small bright rectangles leaning against things, each with the same white room in it and each a little out of step with the others, so that it came at him from every side at once, the way a sound comes in a church.

He knew the room. It was the small white drawing room on the south side of the Palace, with the tiled stove in the corner that he had been told not to touch at the age of three, and touched. In front of the stove was a table with a paper on it, and beside the table a plain chair with a straight back and no arms.

His mother came in from the left and sat down in it.

---

“Hey,” said Tyler, with his mouth full. “That’s Christina.”

Rhys made a sound into his coffee.

“Yes,” said Frederick.

“Christina’s on TV.” Tyler pointed at the screen with his fork, the way a person points at a friend across a car park. “She drank my Glacier. She sat on the stairs.” He chewed. “She looks better than when she sat on the stairs.”

She did not look better. She looked as she had in October, in dark blue with the sapphire at her shoulder, the face gone a little further back towards its bones. She took off the reading glasses and let them hang on their chain, and did not look at the paper.

Along the bottom of every screen in the room it said QUEEN CHRISTINA OF SWEDEN.

Frederick watched Tyler read it. He read it once, quickly, the way you read a sign you assume says what it always says; and then he read it again, slowly, with a square of waffle on the end of his fork, halfway to his mouth, and stopped there.

“Wait,” said Tyler.

“God eftermiddag,” said his mother, from every screen in the room.

A second later, in white letters on a black band: Good afternoon.

Somebody at the far end laughed, because it was eight o’clock in the morning; and stopped.

---

He heard each sentence twice: once in Swedish, low and unhurried, from Stockholm, and a breath later in the white letters, from all round him, as the dining hall caught up.

I have been ill since the summer. It is my heart. One of its valves no longer does its work, and in February I will have an operation in London to repair it. My doctors expect that it will be repaired.

I have been your Queen for twenty-three years. I have decided that twenty-three is the right number.

The room went quiet from the front, in a wave, as people stopped talking to read; and by the time the white letters said On the first of February, at half past three in the afternoon, I will abdicate, and my son will be King, there was nothing in the long room but her voice coming out of forty small loudspeakers, a little out of step, and the clink of a single spoon somewhere that had not heard.

My son is at university. He is at the University of the March, in Tempe, in the United Kingdom of America, in his first year.

The room did not turn round. He felt it not turn round, the way a theatre does not turn round when everybody in the stalls has seen the same man come in late.

He chose it himself, on a hill, at sunrise, and told me afterwards. He is at university, and he will stay there. I am proud of where he chose.

She looked down at the paper for the first time, though she did not read from it. She looked at it the way she looked at a hand of cards, to see what was left.

Sweden has waited for him patiently, and I have asked it to wait a little longer. I am doing this in good time.

He was the only person in the room who knew that it was her motto. I god tid: on her cypher and her standard, a joke about being early that she had made into a promise at eighteen. The white letters said it to four hundred people a breath behind her, and they did not know, and it did not matter.

Thank you.

She stood up with one hand on the table, and he watched the hand, and so, he saw, did the two officers by the dish return; and she went out to the left, without looking back, because she never did.

---

The ABC came back to two presenters on a sofa in New Westminster, who were not laughing. Behind them, enormous, was the photograph: a young man on a hill in October, maroon to the elbows, with his mouth open. And along the bottom of every screen in the room, QUEEN CHRISTINA TO ABDICATE 1 FEBRUARY: GEORGE V TO BE KING OF SWEDEN.

Tyler put his fork down.

He looked at the screen over the coffee, at the young man on the hill. He looked at the screens over the hot counter, where the same young man was a fraction of a second further on. He looked at the telephone against the salt at the next table, where he was smaller, and the boy who owned it was not looking at it but at them.

Then Tyler looked at him.

Frederick understood only now that it had never happened before: that in five months, across a room eleven feet wide, Tyler had looked at his arms and his coat and the window past his head and the fire on the screens beside him, and had never once looked at him like this, as at a thing that had been there all along, the way you look at a hill you have walked past every day and suddenly see is a hill.

It went on for some time.

The whole dining hall had turned round at last, and it was not looking at Frederick. Four hundred people were looking at Tyler, because every one of them, all year, had thought that Tyler knew.

“Fred,” said Tyler.

“Yes.”

“Are you the king guy?”

“Yes.”

“The actual king guy.” His voice had gone high and careful, like a man walking along the top of a wall. “Jussi’s king guy. With the sign.”

“The A.”

“I saw your arms,” said Tyler. “You said you painted the A. And I said was the king guy there. And you said…” His face did something complicated and arrived somewhere Frederick had never seen it go. “You said he caught a bucket.”

“He did catch a bucket.”

“Holy shit,” said Tyler, quite loudly, into the silence, and at a table near the door somebody laughed out loud and was hit by her friend.

---

“We thought he knew,” said Rhys faintly, to Sam.

“Everybody thought he knew,” said Sam.

“Knew what?”

“That you were rooming with the King.”

“Why would I know that?” said Tyler, with the enormous injury of the innocent. “Nobody said.”

“It was on the front of every paper in the world,” said Sam. “In October.”

“I don’t read papers.”

“There was a banner at the Tucson game,” said Rhys. “Thirty feet long. Even the King took the booby prize.”

“I thought that was about the mascot.” Tyler turned back to Frederick. “You said at orientation he was probably at the back. With guys.”

“You said that.”

“You didn’t say I was wrong!”

“You didn’t wait,” said Frederick.

Tyler opened his mouth and shut it again.

“I asked you,” he said slowly. “What a king does. What he actually does. I asked you like fifty times.”

“Twelve.”

“Fourteen,” said Sam, and turned the notebook round, and there it was, on a page of its own, a column in pencil with dates. 19 Aug. Wright. 30 Aug. Gym. 18 Sep. (To Theo, re doctor. Counted.) “Some of them were in the corridor,” said Sam.

Tyler looked at the column for a long time.

“I asked the King,” he said to it, “what the King does.” He looked up. “And you told me.”

“I tried.”

“And I didn’t listen.”

“No.”

“Dude,” said Tyler. It was not any of the other dudes. It came from a good deal further down.

“She said heart,” said Tyler.

Frederick did not say anything.

“Christina. Your mom. She said a valve thing.” Tyler’s voice had come down off the wall. “Is that why she sat on the stairs?”

“Yes.”

Tyler nodded slowly.

“My grandma had the heart thing,” he said.

“I know.”

“They went in through her leg. And now she’s a menace.” He picked up the fork and looked at the square of waffle on the end of it, and put it down again. “So.”

“So,” said Frederick.

---

The dining hall went back to its breakfast.

It did it with enormous care, the way a room puts down a thing it has been holding up and pretends it was never holding anything. The screens over the counter came back as EGGS and GRITS. The telephones came down off the salt cellars, and the noise of four hundred people eating came back up the room like water into a bath. But people went past the table on the way to the dish return, and some of them said things.

“Hope your mom’s okay,” said a boy in a cap, without stopping.

“Congrats on Sweden,” said another, and then, over his shoulder, uncertainly: “I guess?”

The girl from Yuma put a coffee down beside his tray, black, in a paper cup, and went on without saying anything, because there was nothing, and she was from Yuma and knew it.

“Okay,” said Tyler.

He put his knife and fork together on the plate, side by side, which Frederick had never seen him do either, and laid both hands flat on the table.

“Okay. So what does a king actually do? Like, actually.” The headphones were round his neck, and he left them there. “I’m listening. For real. Go.”

Frederick opened his mouth.

His telephone lit up on the tray, beside the coffee from Yuma. Mamma.

He looked at it. He looked at Tyler, who was waiting with his hands on the table and his whole face, listening, for the first time in five months.

“Hang on,” said Frederick.

He went out between the tables with the whole room not looking at him, and heard behind him, as the doors swung, in the voice of a man from Parma who has been wronged in a way he cannot yet put a name to:

“Did he just hang on me?”

---

He took it under the arcade outside, with his back to a pillar, where the palo verdes were dropping their small leaves on the paving and nobody was about.

“Well?” said his mother, in Swedish.

“You said good afternoon.”

“It was the afternoon.”

“It’s eight in the morning here. Somebody laughed.”

“Good. I hoped somebody would.” He heard her sit down, and the small effort of it, and the breath after the effort, a fraction too long. “Did you eat?”

“A waffle. Tyler made it for me. He’d never seen the iron before. You turn it over.”

There was a pause on the line.

“And Tyler?”

“He knows.”

“Who you are?”

“Who you are. He saw you and said, that’s Christina.” He leaned his head back against the pillar. “He said you looked better than when you sat on the stairs.”

His mother laughed, the real one, low and sudden, from a white room where ten minutes before she had given up a Crown without looking at her paper, and went on until she had to stop.

Then the breath, long and careful, and over.

“I do look better,” said his mother. “The man with the clean hands says so. Since Christmas.” A pause. “Since I sat down.”

He did not say anything.

“Go to your republican, Fredde,” said his mother. “You must not be late for a republican on a day like this. It would give him ideas.” And then, more quietly: “I meant it. The last part.”

“Which part?”

“You know which part. Puss.” And she rang off.

---

He went to the Charter at nine. Brennan taught Article Three for fifty minutes and did not once look up the curved rows to the aisle seat two from the back, which in Brennan could be seen from the back of the room. It was sixty-four degrees all day, and across the road over the dentist’s the blind did not move at all.

---

At ten that night Tyler’s mother rang for the fifth time.

Tyler took it lying on the bed by the window with the light off. He said “Yeah,” and “I know, Mom,” and “Because nobody said,” and “He’s right here,” and then, to the ceiling, “She wants to know if you’re eating.”

“Tell her yes.”

“He says yes.” Tyler listened, and said “Love you,” and put the phone down on his chest.

“My grandma got on,” he said.

Frederick waited.

“She’s keeping the card. The one on the plate.” Tyler looked at the ceiling. “My mom asked did she want to do a new one, with your whole, like, title on it. My grandma said no. She said you were Fred at Wigilia, so you’re Fred.”

On the screens the fire was burning high in the forest. Jussi was back from Lapland and had it, and the thirty-one stood round it a little way back, the way people stand round a fire that is going well.

“Okay,” said Tyler, into the dark. “Now.”

“Now what?”

“You hung on me.” He turned on his side towards the bed by the door, and put the headphones on the desk, out of reach, on purpose. “Go.”

So Frederick told him.

He told him lying on his back in the dark with the snow from the screens moving faintly blue on the ceiling. He told him about the box, and the pencil, and the four words at the end of Article Two, section four, which Brennan said were the best joke in the document. He told him what Sam had written in the final, that the King was for there being somebody for the officers to stand next to when it went wrong. He told him about fourteen countries, each with its own seal and its own ministers, none of them allowed to tell him anything about the others, so that he was fourteen people every morning at Sam’s desk, one after another. And then he told him about Sweden, which would make fifteen and was the easiest, because in Sweden the King did less than anywhere in the world: he opened the Riksdag, and saw the Prime Minister on Tuesdays, and listened to the whole of a budget, which his mother said nobody else had ever done.

He got further than he had ever got with anybody, because nobody had ever lain still in the dark and let him go on.

“Tyler,” he said.

There was no answer.

Tyler was asleep on Ohio time, at twenty to eleven, on his side with his mouth a little open and one hand out from under the blanket on the edge of the bed, as though it had been reaching for something and forgotten what; and he was breathing the way he always breathed, all the way down, flat, the way people breathe who can lie down.

Frederick listened to it for a while.

Then he looked back at the ceiling and finished the answer anyway, quietly, to the dark, in the words he had used the first time anybody in Tempe had asked him, in the second tier of the Wright in August, when he had chosen the shortest and truest he had.

“Mostly,” he said, “he reads.”