Everyone Knows

The sun on the door said GEORG.

It was the same size as the others and cut from the same maroon card, from the same soft stencil, but somebody had painted it over in blue, carefully, and laid a yellow cross on the blue, a little to the left, the way it went on the flag, and written the name across the middle in gold pen in capitals. Where FRED had been since Christmas there was a rectangle of old tape. TYLER, beside it, had not been touched.

Priya was standing in front of it at a quarter to eight with a new FRED in one hand and a roll of tape in the other and the expression of a woman who has been called to the same accident for the fifth time.

“I didn’t do it,” said Frederick.

“I know you didn’t do it.” She peeled the blue sun off the door, gently, the way she would have taken a dressing off, and looked at it. “It’s a good one, though. Somebody measured the cross.” She held it out to him. “Do you want it?”

He took it.

“That’s five,” said Priya, and taped FRED up in its place, and pressed the corners flat with her thumb. “Five FREDs since August. Nobody’s ever stolen a TYLER.” She looked at the TYLER. “No offence to Tyler.”

“He’d take it as a compliment.”

“He’d take it as a compliment,” Priya agreed. She put the tape on her wrist like a bracelet. “And people keep coming up. From other halls. They come up the stairs and walk to the end of the corridor and look at the door and walk back. I had six on Saturday. One of them took a picture of the fire extinguisher.” She looked at him with professional detachment. “I’ve put up a sign.”

The sign was on the fire door at the end of the corridor, in black marker on maroon card.

THIS IS A RESIDENCE HALL. PEOPLE LIVE HERE. IF YOU DON’T LIVE HERE, YOU DON’T NEED TO BE HERE. P. (RA)

“Has it worked?”

“No,” said Priya. “But now I can point at it.”

---

It had been a fortnight, and everybody knew.

That was the difference, and it was not the difference he had expected. They had known before. Half of them had known since August, and the other half since the photograph in October, and all of them since the banner at the Tucson game; but they had known it the way you know the name of the man who owns the building, as a fact about somebody else. Now his mother had sat in a plain chair on every screen in the dining hall and said Tempe, and the campus knew it the other way, from the inside, as a thing that had happened to the campus; and it had looked at itself for a fortnight with the faint surprise of a person who finds their own street on the news.

It did not, on the whole, do anything about it. It was the March. It knew how to not do things about the weather, and it treated him in the same way, as a condition of the place that had got slightly worse. But it leaked.

The girl at the coffee cart under the arcade by the library, who had written FRED on his cup every morning since September in purple marker, wrote FRED on his cup, and then stopped with the marker over it, and drew, very small, above the R, a crown; and looked at it; and crossed it out with one firm line, and gave him the cup.

“Sorry,” she said. “Reflex.”

“It’s all right.”

“It’s not going to happen again,” she said, with great firmness, to the cup, and to herself, and to the line behind him.

The Department of Languages had opened a section of Elementary Swedish on the twelfth, in a hurry, taught by a doctoral student in hydrology from Turku who had grown up speaking it at home, and it had filled by lunchtime, and they had opened a second, and that had filled, and there was a list on the door of the department office of a hundred and ninety names waiting for a third. Diego from the second floor was on it, at number sixty-one.

“Why?” said Frederick, on the stairs.

“I don’t know, dude.” Diego thought about it honestly. “It just seems like something you should have. Now.” He went on down. “Like a fire extinguisher.”

---

Tyler had been spoken to by three girls.

He reported it on Saturday night, from the bed by the window, with the headphones round his neck and the controller on his chest, in the voice of a scientist who has observed something in the field that overturns a long-held theory.

“Three,” said Tyler. “This week. In five months before that it was zero. Zero girls.” He thought about it. “One of them was on the fourth floor. She asked what you’re like.”

“What did you say?”

“I said you don’t touch my stuff.” Tyler considered the ceiling. “She said that was really sweet. I don’t know why that was sweet. It’s just true.” He moved his thumb on the controller. “She asked if I wanted to get boba.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know what boba is,” said Tyler, with dignity. “I said I’d look it up.”

The camp knew as well. Jussi had told it. Jussi had read the news in Finnish, in which, Tyler said, it was even bigger, because the Swedish Queen was the Finnish border’s favourite person; and Jussi had put it in the chat at three in the morning, Tempe time, in capitals, that the roommate who had kept the fire over Christmas, the Fred of the hut called FREDS, was the King. The camp had gone quiet for some minutes, which in Rimefall, Tyler said, never happened, because if the chat went quiet it meant nobody was on wood.

Then the man from Leeds had written one line.

Tyler had shown it to him on the screen, on the Saturday, at the bottom, under the fire.

told u. legend

---

Brennan was on Article Nine.

He had been on it since Wednesday and would be on it until Friday, because it was the one everybody could quote, and therefore, he said, the one nobody had read. He walked up and down in front of the bench in Tolliver 104 at nine o’clock in the crumpled linen jacket with the little blue Charter rolled up in his fist, and the board behind him was white with the clauses, all sixteen, in rapid capitals, and he was at the first one again, because he always went back to the first one.

“The people of the United Kingdom of America enjoy the ancient liberties of free subjects under law.” He tapped it with the Charter. “Free subjects. You are all free subjects. Every one of you is a subject of the Crown in right of America, and every one of you is free, and the Charter doesn’t see any contradiction there, and I want you to sit with that for the length of a coffee.” He looked at the clock. “Speech. Petition. Conscience. Jury. Habeas corpus. A whole list of things you can do and the Crown can’t stop you doing. Mr Salcido. Can the Crown stop you petitioning Parliament?”

“No?” said Diego.

“No. Can the Crown stop you printing a pamphlet saying the Crown is a disgrace?”

“No.”

“No. IX.9. Liberty of speech, of debate, of printing and of publication.” Brennan turned and found it on the board. “I’ve printed several. They’re very good. One of them has a cartoon.” The room laughed. “Who here has the liberty of speech?”

Seventy-nine hands went up.

Frederick did not put his hand up.

He did not decide not to. It was simply that he had been brought up from the age of six by people who had told him, gently and often and in four languages, that a remark that named no capacity was a private word of the man, and that he did not have many of those, and should spend them carefully; and his hand stayed where it was, on the desk, beside Rhys’s four highlighters, without his thinking about it at all.

Brennan saw. He saw it from the bench, the one hand down among eighty, two rows from the back on the aisle; and Frederick watched his face do the thing, the thing it had done every Monday, Wednesday and Friday since August, the hunger coming up into it like a light into a window.

Then he looked away.

“Good,” said Brennan, to the room, quite briskly. “Hands down. IX.10. Conscience.”

---

He went through the rest of it. He did conscience and compensation and local assemblies, and the attainder clause, which he said was the Charter’s way of saying you may not simply decide that a family is guilty, and which the room found less funny than he meant it to. And at ten to ten he came back to the bench and put down the Charter and picked up the chalk.

“Wednesday,” said Brennan. “A question. One. You’ll argue it, and I’ll listen, and then I’ll tell you you’re all wrong, which is my favourite part of the week.”

He turned to the board, to the clear space at the right-hand end of it, beyond IX.16, and wrote, in large rapid capitals, as he always wrote:

CAN AN INHERITED OFFICE BE

And stopped.

He stopped with the chalk on the board at the end of the E, quite still, with his back to the room, and stood there.

It went on for longer than two seconds. The room felt it go on. Eighty people sat and looked at the back of Professor Hal Brennan’s crumpled linen jacket and at six words on a blackboard, and at the chalk not moving, and nobody wrote anything down.

Then Brennan put up his left hand, flat, and rubbed the six words out.

He did it with the side of his hand, the way a man wipes a window, in three strokes, so that what was left was a long pale smear of dust on the board where the words had been; and then he wrote under the smear, in exactly the same rapid capitals, a different question.

WHAT DOES ARTICLE IX LEAVE OUT?

He turned round.

“Wednesday,” he said. “Read the commentary. All of it. It’s in small type, and the small type is where they put the things they’re ashamed of.” He picked up the bag and the cardboard cup. “Go.”

---

“What was it?” said Rhys, on the steps outside.

He said it low, at Frederick’s shoulder, as the section came out round them into the sun and went off in every direction under the palms; and Sam, on the step below, with his hands in his pockets, did not turn round, which meant he was listening.

“What was what?”

“The question. The first one. He rubbed it out.” Rhys looked back at the doors of Tolliver Hall. “Can an inherited office be what?”

Frederick did not answer at once.

He had read it off the board. He had read it before Brennan’s hand came up, the six words and the shape of the seventh that had not been written, because he had known the seventh before the chalk got to it. He had known it since he was four. He had known it since a king on a boat had told his daughter at six that she would be queen, and the daughter, years later, had told him.

“Refused,” he said.

Rhys looked at him.

“Can an inherited office be refused,” said Frederick. “That’s the question. That’s the only one a republican ever wants to ask.” He looked out at the mall. “And he didn’t.”

Sam, on the step below, took one hand out of his pocket and put it back.

“Why not?” said Rhys.

“Because he’s a decent man,” said Frederick, “and it’s a fortnight.”

They stood on the steps. A girl went past with a bag of oranges and said “Hey, Fred,” and went on. Across the mall the Abernathy box outside Old Main said 61 in green, which was not a number anybody photographed.

“Can it?” said Rhys.

Frederick turned his head.

“Be refused.” Rhys had gone pink, the way he went pink at the Charter, from the ears inwards. He did not look away. “Sir. I’m asking. Because he didn’t.” And then, more quietly, because there were people on the steps: “Fred.”

“You’re not allowed to ask me that. You’re an officer.”

“I’m in political science,” said Rhys.

Sam made a small sound on the step below, in his nose.

Frederick looked at Rhys for some time. Then he looked past him, past the palms and the red roofs and the arcade by the library, to where the butte stood at the end of the mall in the full morning sun, brown and ordinary, with the A on its flank and the stepped path up its face and nobody on it at all, from the bottom to the top, as there had been nobody on it, at his hour, since October.

“Not at half past three,” he said.

Rhys waited.

“At half past three it isn’t refused or accepted. It isn’t anything. It just goes where it goes.” He heard his mother’s voice on the stairs on Boxing Day, the law does not need you to hold out your hands. “You don’t get asked. That’s what inherited means.”

“And after?”

Frederick did not say anything.

Rhys waited a little longer. Then he nodded, slowly, once, the way he nodded at a clause in the Charter that he would need to read again, and took the four highlighters out of his shirt pocket and looked at them and put them back.

“That’s a good essay question,” said Rhys.

“It’s a terrible essay question,” said Frederick. “You’d get a C.”

---

The Office of Exploratory Studies was where it had been in August, down the flight of stairs at the side of the building by the library, in the long low corridor of small rooms with glass in their doors, and in the fourth room, under the window at the level of the grass, Ms Ybarra was at her desk in a cardigan with the very small cactus, which had grown, he thought, by about the width of a pencil.

She looked at him over her glasses.

“October,” said Ms Ybarra.

“I know.”

“I said come back in October and tell me what you’d found out.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s January.”

“I know,” said Frederick. “I’ve been busy.”

Ms Ybarra looked at him for about a second, with the expression that told him she knew exactly what he had been busy with and had decided before he came in that it would make no difference to the next twenty minutes; and then she pointed at the chair.

He sat down.

She found him on the screen. “Hanover, F.,” she said. “Palo Verde, 312. Three Bs and a C. Who gave you the C?”

“Brennan.”

“Of course he did,” said Ms Ybarra, with a kind of satisfaction, and scrolled. “Spring. The Charter, still. Geology. Spanish literature, which you didn’t need, because you speak it, which means you took it because you wanted to read something.” She glanced at him. “And something called Introduction to Music. On Tuesdays and Thursdays at eight in the morning.” She looked at him over the glasses. “Who takes a music class at eight in the morning?”

“Nobody else was in it.”

“Ah,” said Ms Ybarra. She came to the box and stopped. Intended major: Undeclared. “So,” she said. “What did you find out?”

He thought about it.

He had thought he would come down the stairs and have to explain the fortnight, and Stockholm, and the chair, and why the cactus had had to wait three months; and he understood, sitting there with the bottoms of the palm trees going past in the window at the level of the grass, that she was not going to ask him about any of it. She had not mentioned Sweden. She was not going to. She was going to ask him the one question in the university that had nothing to do with it, and wait for the answer, which was the thing she was for.

“I found out I like getting up early,” he said. “To climb the hill. And then I stopped.”

“Why?”

“Because it was easy to stop. And nobody minded.”

Ms Ybarra did not write that down.

“I found out I like the Charter. Even with the C. I found out I like the man who gave it me.” He thought. “I found out I like water, still. Where it goes. And rocks, I think, which is new. And I found out I can keep a fire going in a game for three weeks, for thirty-one people I’ve never met, one log a day.” He stopped. “None of that’s a major.”

“No,” said Ms Ybarra. “It’s a person. That’s the bit before.” She took her glasses off and held them by the cord. “You know how long you can be undeclared here?”

“No.”

“Till the end of your second year. It’s allowed. Nobody will write to you about it. Nobody will ask you to come in.” She swung the glasses, gently. “It’s about the only thing in this university that nobody’s in any hurry about.”

He looked at the box on the screen.

“That’s quite a long time,” he said.

“It’s eighteen months.” She put the glasses back on. “In my experience, that’s a long time for most people to be allowed not to know something.” She clicked, and somewhere in the basement the printer began to work, and she reached behind her without looking and took the sheet off it and held it out across the desk, past the cactus.

HANOVER, F. Class of 2037. Palo Verde Hall 312. Intended major: UNDECLARED.

It was the same sheet. It said the same thing. He looked at it for some time.

“Come back in April,” said Ms Ybarra. “Tell me what else.”

He thanked her. He folded the sheet in four and put it in the back of his notebook beside the one from August, and went up the flight of stairs at the side of the building into sixty-eight degrees and the middle of the afternoon, where the campus was going past under the palms in every direction, and everybody knew, and a girl on a bicycle said “Hey, Fred” and went on without stopping; and at the far end of the mall the butte stood in the sun, with the shadows beginning to come out of its folds, and somebody, very small, was coming down the stepped path at four in the afternoon, one step at a time, with what might have been a white cap.