Nine O'Clock

The old man in the white cap was coming up as they came down.

He was on the bend below the A, going up at the pace of a man who has been going up the same hill for longer than the people coming down it have been alive, with the thermos in one hand and the other on the rail. He stopped, and looked at Rhys, and at Sam with a telephone flat on his palm, and at Frederick in the maroon jumper with the white cricket hat in his hand.

“Well,” said the old man. “February.”

“You’re late,” said Frederick.

The old man considered this. “Sun’s not going anywhere.” He looked at the hat. “I said October.”

“You did.”

“Then I said November.” He unscrewed the cup off the thermos, and poured, and the steam went up in the cold. “So what’s this?”

Frederick thought about it.

“An exception,” he said.

The old man considered the word over the cup.

“Something happen up there?”

“The sun came up.”

“It does that,” said the old man, and drank his coffee, and screwed the cup back on, and went on up past them with his hand on the rail, one step at a time, towards the top, where there was nothing now but the light.

---

“Seven forty-six,” said Sam, at the bottom.

He put the telephone away at last and took out the notebook and wrote in it, in the long blue shadow of the butte, in the column he had left alone since October.

“Thirty-five,” said Sam.

“Out of how many?”

Sam looked at the column.

“I’d have to redo the denominator,” he said. “It’s a different year now.” He closed the notebook. “For you.”

The gate was empty. The green board said PATH OPEN, and under it SUNRISE 7.26, and under the board there was nobody at all; and on Rhys’s telephone, when he looked at it, there was a message from across the road, two words long.

Noted. K.

---

They walked back across the campus in the ordinary morning.

It looked exactly as it had looked at eight o’clock on every Wednesday since August: the sprinklers ticking on the lawn by Old Main, and the long shadows of the palms laid across the mall like the hands of a clock, and girls in hoodies going to eight o’clocks with their coffee held in both hands against the cold, which was forty-nine degrees and in the Valley an emergency. A boy on a skateboard lifted one hand and said “Hey, Fred,” and was gone.

“Nobody’s looking,” said Rhys, at his shoulder, very low.

“No.”

“They know, though.”

“Yes.”

Rhys walked for a while.

“I don’t understand this place,” he said, with deep respect.

---

Mr Luna was still there.

He was not at the desk. The day porter was at the desk, with her coffee and her hair up in a pencil, writing the eight o’clock on the clipboard. Mr Luna was in the plastic chair at the end of it, the visitor’s chair, in his jacket, with the thermos on his knee and the western open on top of the thermos, like a man who has come in off the street to wait for somebody; and he looked up over his glasses when the three of them came through the glass doors, and closed the western on one finger.

He had been on since ten the night before.

“Well, son?”

“It’s done.”

Mr Luna looked at him for a while over the glasses, the way he looked at the doors.

“Okay,” he said.

He put the western in his jacket pocket and stood up, slowly, with a hand on the end of the desk, and pushed the plastic chair back into its place with his foot, exactly, an inch from the corner.

“Now I go home,” said Mr Luna.

At the doors he said, without turning round, “Drink water,” and went out into the arcade, ten hours and a bit after he had come in; and the day porter watched him go, and then looked at Frederick, and lifted her pen an inch, which was all she ever did, and went back to the clipboard.

---

Tyler was asleep.

He was asleep on the bed by the window with the blind down and the headphones round his neck and the controller rising and falling on his chest, and on the two screens over the desk the snow was falling on the forest and the fire was still burning high and yellow, as Finland had promised, with the figures in furs standing back from it in a wide ring. The room was cold, because Tyler kept it cold.

He had said to wake him.

Frederick put the cricket hat on the shelf and pulled the jumper off over his head, and went and stood by the bed by the window.

“Tyler.”

“Hey,” said Tyler, from under the blanket, without opening his eyes.

“You said to wake you.”

“Did it work?”

“Yes.”

“Did you, like.” Tyler moved his hand on the controller, a little, in his sleep, the way a dog’s legs go. “Level up?”

Frederick stood in the middle of the room with the jumper in his hands.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose I did.”

“Sick,” said Tyler.

There was a pause. The fire burned on the two screens.

“So what does the Sweden one actually…” said Tyler, and was asleep again before the end of it, with his mouth slightly open, and the controller going up and down on his chest; and Frederick folded the jumper and put it on the shelf beside the hat, and went to have a shower, and found that he was laughing, quietly, with nobody to hear it, under the water.

---

Somebody had been at the paving outside Tolliver Hall with chalk.

It was on the flagstones at the bottom of the steps, where everybody going in to a nine o’clock would have to walk round it: a cross, blue on yellow, about the size of a door laid flat, with the cross set a little towards the left the way it was on the flag, by somebody who had looked it up. Under it, in white capitals, was a word.

GRATTIS

And under that, smaller, in a different hand, in pink, as an afterthought:

(that means congrats)

Frederick stopped at the edge of it.

Sam walked round it, looking down, the way he had looked at the eggs in the supermarket.

“Two people,” said Sam. “Different chalk. The first one measured.” He looked at the pink. “The second one didn’t.”

People were going up the steps round it in twos and threes, with their coffee, and not one of them stepped on it, and two of the Furnace in maroon looked at the cross and at him and went up the steps saying nothing at all, very loudly. He walked round it himself, the long way, so as not to smudge the pink, and went in.

---

Tolliver 104 had people standing at the back.

Every one of its eighty seats was always full; and this morning along the back wall under the clock there were perhaps twenty more, standing, from other sections and other courses and in at least one case, Frederick thought, from the Gazette, because she had a pencil behind her ear and was nobody he had ever seen in the room.

He went up to the aisle two from the back and sat down, with Rhys on his left and Sam beyond, and Rhys laid out the four highlighters in a row, and then the spring syllabus, and ran his finger down it to the line for the day, and stopped.

“It’s Fifteen,” said Rhys.

“What is?”

“Today. The syllabus.” He turned it so that Frederick could see. Wed 1 Feb: Art. XV, of foreign and Imperial relations. “The Crown may be one in person, yet distinct in right.” He looked at it. “Fifteen point four.”

“He wrote that in December,” said Sam.

“So?”

“So he didn’t know,” said Sam. “In December.”

At one minute to nine Brennan came in, with the bag and the cup and the little blue Charter and a tie with fish on it, and put them down on the bench, and turned round, and looked up the curved rows at the twenty people standing under the clock.

The room went quiet in the particular way it did. Eighty people not turning round, and twenty who were already round.

“Good morning,” said Brennan. “Some of you are not in this section.”

Nobody at the back moved.

“You’re very welcome,” said Brennan. “I’d only say, in fairness, before you commit, that today is Article Eleven, which is about money.” He picked up the chalk. “Nobody has ever stayed for Article Eleven who did not have to.”

The room laughed, with relief, the way a room laughs when it has been given permission to put something down. At the back two people picked up their bags and went out, quietly, along the wall; and a minute later a third; and the girl with the pencil behind her ear stayed exactly where she was.

Brennan turned to the board and wrote, in large rapid capitals:

XI. OF SUPPLY, TAXATION AND PUBLIC MONEY.

Beside Frederick, Rhys looked at the syllabus, and at the board, and at the syllabus again.

“He’s moved it,” said Rhys, under his breath.

“Yes,” said Sam.

“Why would he…”

Sam looked at him sideways over the round glasses and did not say anything; and Frederick watched Rhys understand it, slowly, from the ears inwards, and put the syllabus away in the back of his notebook, very carefully, as though it were somebody’s letter.

---

Brennan taught the money.

He taught it for fifty minutes without notes, walking, with the little blue Charter rolled up in his fist. He said that the quarrel had been about money and the war had been about money, and that every delegate at Philadelphia had known the settlement would be judged on one question, which was who could take a colonist’s shilling and on whose say. He read XI.1 aloud, no money shall be drawn from the public treasury of the Union save by appropriation made by law, and said that it was eighteen words long and had cost the delegates two years, and that everything the Commons was, it was because of those eighteen words, since a House that could not stop the money could not stop anything.

And he asked questions.

He asked them the way he always did, stopping dead in front of the bench and looking up into the rows as though somebody had just said something stupid. He asked Diego what happened if Parliament did not vote supply, and Diego said, “Everybody goes home?” and Brennan said, “Everybody goes home,” with deep satisfaction, “and that is the entire constitution of the Realm, Mr Salcido, and you may leave early on Friday.” He looked up at Sam.

“Mr Oyelaran. You’ll like this. XI.3. All revenues of the Union shall be brought to one account. Why does it matter that it’s one?”

Sam thought about it with his pencil in the air.

“Because two accounts is where you hide things,” said Sam.

Brennan looked at him for a moment.

“Yes,” he said. “That is the whole of public finance. I’ve been trying to say it in under an hour for twenty-two years.” He turned back to the board. “Write that down, everybody. Mr Oyelaran, Wednesday, nine-fifteen. Two accounts is where you hide things.”

And he looked up the rows.

He had not looked up them once on the ninth of January, in fifty minutes; and on the twenty-third he had looked, and the hunger had come up into his face like a light into a window, and he had looked away. This morning he looked up the curved rows to the aisle two from the back as often as he looked anywhere else, and his eyes went past it the way a man’s eyes go past a window in his own house, not avoiding it, simply knowing what is out there, and looking at the next thing; and there was nothing in his face when they did it at all. It was the face he turned on Diego. It was the face he turned on Sam.

The room noticed. It had been waiting since nine o’clock for the lift to begin to move, and it stopped writing at the edges each time his eyes came up, the way grass stops in the half-second before the wind reaches it; and each time the wind did not come. By twenty past the room had begun to be very slightly amused. By half past it had stopped waiting, and was simply listening, which Frederick thought might have been the point.

Brennan asked very nearly everybody else. He asked the row in front and the row behind. He asked a boy at the far end of the aisle whose name he had to look up, and the boy was so surprised that he answered a question about Article Nine. He wrote XI.6 on the board, no public money shall be granted for private reward, court favour or unlawful pension, and turned round, and said, “Which is why the Household’s accounts are audited and published every year, and why I can tell you to the pound what a garden party costs, and why I’m not going to,” and the room laughed, and went on.

---

At ten to ten a boy in the front row with a Sun Devils cap on backwards put his hand up.

“Professor.”

“Mr Pruett.”

“Is it true the Realm pays for…” The boy stopped, and made a small movement with his head, not up the rows exactly, but in their general direction. “For, like. The other ones. Now.”

The room went still again.

Brennan looked at him for a while, with the little blue Charter rolled up in his fist.

“Mr Pruett,” he said, “there is a House of Commons on Charter Hill whose only real power, when you come down to it, is to ask exactly that question of a minister and make him stand up and answer it in front of the cameras. We have just spent fifty minutes on where that power came from.” “If you want to know what something costs the Realm, write to your Member of Parliament. That’s what he’s for.”

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“It’s a constitution,” said Brennan. “Friday. Article Fifteen.” He wrote it in the top corner of the board, XV, and underlined it once, and did not look round.

---

He was at the door.

He was always at the door, at ten, in the corridor that smelled of floor polish, with the bag on his shoulder and the empty cup in his hand, letting the room go past him in its stream: the eighty, and the seventeen from the back, and the girl with the pencil behind her ear, who looked at him as she went as though she had decided, on the evidence of the morning, that she would get nothing out of him either.

Frederick came out with Rhys a pace behind and Sam a pace behind Rhys.

He stopped. He did not know why. He stopped in the corridor in front of Professor Hal Brennan, who was a republican and could not help himself, and waited for it, whatever it was, the way he had waited for it in this corridor since August, because he would rather be asked than wondered about, and had said so.

Brennan looked at him.

He looked at him for a moment, over the empty cup, with his reading glasses pushed up in the hair that had been red, and his face did nothing at all.

“Good morning, Mr Hanover,” said Brennan.

That was all.

Frederick had it in his mouth. He had had it since the third of January, in green highlighter in Rhys’s notebook: ink is yes, pencil is read. It was the first question Brennan had ever asked him, in that room, on the first morning, and the only one he had promised to bring back; and he could have given it to him now, in the corridor, unasked.

He did not. Brennan had not asked. It was not the day.

“Good morning,” said Frederick.

Brennan nodded, once, as one man nods to another across a room, and turned, and went away down the corridor, with the bag on his shoulder.

He went three steps.

Frederick watched the place, three steps along, where in August the professor had stopped and turned round and come back with a question he could not keep on a shelf; and Brennan reached it, and walked through it, and went on, past the fire notice and the water fountain, and round the corner, and was gone.

He did not turn round.

Rhys let out a breath that he appeared to have been holding since nine.

“Well,” said Rhys.

---

He sat on the steps of Tolliver Hall in the sun.

It was sixty-one degrees and climbing. The chalk cross was at his feet, scuffed at one corner, and the pink had held. Rhys sat on the step below him. Sam stood, because Sam stood.

He took out his telephone.

It had forty-one messages on it. He had felt it go against his leg all through Article Eleven, like a small animal that wanted to be let out, and had not looked, because his mother had brought him up not to look at a telephone in a room where somebody was talking, and because it did not matter which of them he read first, except for one.

He found the one.

It had come at seventeen minutes past nine, which was seventeen minutes past five in Stockholm. It was in English, correctly punctuated, as everything his cousin had ever written to him was correctly punctuated, and it had no greeting and no signature, because it did not need either.

Done. She was magnificent.

He read it.

He read it again. He thought about a room he had not been in, with a silver throne in it, and a woman in it who had sat down on the stairs of Palo Verde Hall in October and said it is the opposite; and his father, and Lukas; and his cousin, standing for the family, upright, in the place where the family stood, saying nothing at all for however long it had taken, and then going out of the room and choosing, from all the words he had in all the languages he had them in, those four.

He had watched them walk in, and sign, and walk out again, on a screen the size of his hand; and at half past seven, when it happened, he had been looking at the sun, as he had been told. He had seen what there was to see.

Now he had been told the rest.

“Sir,” said Rhys, very quietly, from the step below. And then, because there were people on the steps: “Fred.”

“I’m all right.”

“I know,” said Rhys. “I was going to say it’s ten past.”

He wrote Thank you and looked at it, and it was not enough, and nothing he could think of was more, and he sent it as it was, because Alexander of all people would know to the millimetre how much it was not enough by, and would not mind.

The answer did not come. He had not expected it to. His cousin had said the thing once, and correctly, and would not say it again.

He put the telephone in his pocket with the other forty still unread, and stood up off the step.

---

Sam had the box at his desk at a quarter past ten.

It had come across the road while they were on the butte, in somebody else’s hands for the first time since August, and Sam put it on the desk now, square, and turned the key the right way for Frederick’s hand.

“How many?” said Frederick.

“Fourteen,” said Sam.

“How many on Monday?”

“Fourteen.”

Frederick sat down in Sam’s chair.

“Nothing from Stockholm?”

“Sweden doesn’t send a box,” said Sam. “I asked across the road. In January.” He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt, which was what Sam did instead of having an expression. “The sergeant said Sweden has never sent anybody a box. She said it sends a letter when it wants something.”

“And?”

Sam put the glasses back on.

“It sent one in January,” said Sam. “To say it didn’t.”

Frederick opened the box.

It was the Realm, as it was every morning: a commission for a judge in the Lower Counties, an order in council about a fishery off Maine, and twelve others, each with its slip on top saying on whose advice it came. He read them all to the end, including the parts in small type. And he initialled each one, small, in pencil, in the top right-hand corner, and laid the pencil down after each exactly parallel to the edge of the paper, the way his father had done it for sixty years, because ink was yes and pencil was read.

Then he closed the lid and gave the box back to Sam, who put it in the backpack and did the zip up as far as it went.

Through the window, past the poster of the federal tax brackets, the butte stood in the full sun with the A on its flank, and on the stepped path, from the bottom to the top, there was nobody at all.