The Last Exam

Under ANSWER THREE QUESTIONS, at the top of the first page, in the plain grey type the university used for everything from final examinations to the notice in the laundry room about scorpions, there was a second line.

Candidates may not cite themselves.

Frederick read it, and laughed out loud.

It was not a large laugh. It was the small involuntary kind that gets out before it can be stopped, at five past nine in the morning in a lecture theatre that held four hundred, in which three hundred and sixty people were turning over the first page at the same time; and it went up the rows and came back, and somebody in front of him turned round, and two rows further down, on the far side of the aisle, he saw Sam’s shoulders go, once, very slightly, the way a column of figures goes when it agrees.

At the front, on the bench, under the clock, Brennan did not look up.

---

The Charter’s sections sat the final together in the big lecture theatre on the north side of the mall, as they had in December; and in December they had sat in it in coats.

They sat in it now in shorts. The boy in the front row who had wound a scarf round his face in December like a man crossing a glacier was in a vest with the arms cut off. The girl from Yuma had a frozen bottle of water against the side of her neck, under the ear, where the blood goes past, and was writing left-handed so as not to move it. All down the long curved rows there were flip-flops, and caps on backwards, and arms, brown arms, everywhere; and outside the tall windows, beyond the palms on the mall, it was ninety degrees at nine in the morning and climbing towards ninety-nine, and the Abernathy box outside Old Main, which he had passed at a quarter to, with two pens in his pocket because he had been told to bring two, had said 78 against its threshold of 82, in red, with a boy in front of it photographing it.

He looked down the paper.

1. Article XI. “Two accounts is where you hide things.” Discuss the Charter’s provision for public money, with reference to XI.1, XI.3 and XI.5.

He looked at that for some time. Somebody in Tolliver 104 had said that, on a Wednesday at a quarter past nine, with a pencil in the air, on the morning a woman in Stockholm had stood up from a silver chair; and Brennan had told eighty people to write it down, and they had, and here it was, in grey type, in quotation marks, with no name after it.

2. Article IX. What does it leave out?

3. Article XV.4. “The Crown may be one in person, yet distinct in right.” Discuss, with reference to the commentary and to the events of this year.

4. “And upon no other advice.” Whose advice is it?

He read the third question twice.

Then he went past it, as Brennan’s eyes had gone past the aisle seat two from the back on the first of February, not avoiding it, simply knowing what was there and looking at the next thing; and he picked up the pen, and turned to the first side of the booklet, and wrote 1, and under it, There is one account because two is where you hide things, and stopped, and crossed it out, because it was Sam’s, and he could not cite Sam either. He would have to say it in his own words.

He found that he wanted to.

---

He wrote about money for fifty minutes, and it was the happiest fifty minutes he had spent in a room all year.

He wrote about the eighteen words of XI.1 that had cost the delegates two years. He wrote that a House which could not stop the money could not stop anything, which was Brennan’s, and he said so, and put the lecture and the date in brackets after it, which was allowed, because Brennan was a source and he was not. He wrote about the one account, and why it was one, and the officer that Parliament appointed to examine it, who could not be dismissed by the government he examined, which he had found in the commentary in small type in March, at Sam’s desk, at midnight, and had not been able to stop reading. He wrote that the Household’s accounts were audited and published every year, and that you could find out to the pound what a garden party cost, and that this was the whole of the answer to anybody who asked what the Crown cost, and he did not say how he knew, because he knew it from the commentary, chapter nine, paragraphs four to eleven, and from nowhere else at all.

It was not about him. That was the thing he kept noticing, with the pen going, the way a man notices the sun on his back. It was a question about money, and the money was not his, and none of the people in it were people he had met, and nobody in the whole of Article XI had ever stood up from a chair in front of him or sat down on a stair; and he could write it from the beginning to the end without once being in the room.

He was on the second side when he felt Brennan behind him.

It was the radiator again, the pressure of attention at his shoulder, steady and warm and not going away. Brennan walked the aisles in examinations as he had in December, slowly, with his hands behind his back and a copy of the paper rolled into a tube in one of them, and stopped where he liked; and he had stopped. In the seat to the left, Diego Salcido took the end of the pen out of his mouth and watched the two of them out of the side of his eye.

Frederick went on writing.

He finished a sentence about the Comptroller. He began another. He could feel Brennan reading it, the second side, all of it, from the top; and then go back to the first side, which was visible under his wrist, and read the top of that; and stand there for what felt a long time, and was perhaps ten seconds, without saying anything at all.

Then Brennan bent down.

“Eleven,” said Brennan, very quietly, at his ear.

He said it the way people say the name of somebody they did not expect to meet in a place, a little surprised and a little pleased, and not as a question; and he straightened up, and walked on up the aisle with the paper rolled in his hand, and did not stop at the end of the row, and did not come back.

Diego looked at him.

“Dude,” whispered Diego. “What’s eleven?”

“Money,” said Frederick.

---

He did the fourth question second, the advice, and wrote for forty minutes that the advice was the minister’s, and the yes was in ink at the bottom of the page in the minister’s hand, and that the clause excluded every other kind; and he did not write about a man in a study in London in 1972 picking up a pen and putting it down, because he could not cite his father, and because he did not need to. The commentary said it. It said it worse, and at more length, and with three footnotes, and it was enough.

He did the second question last, on what Article IX left out, which was the small type and the things they were ashamed of, and which he did least well, and knew it, and finished it in the middle of a sentence when the man at the front said pens down, please, because the sentence had been longer than the time, as it had been in December.

He had not answered the third question at all.

He sat with his pen down and looked at it on the paper for a moment, the events of this year, while all round him three hundred and sixty people put their pens down and stretched and the room filled up with the noise of a year ending. Then he closed the booklet and put it on the pile at the end of the row, on top of Diego’s, and went out into the heat.

---

Rhys and Sam were on the bench outside, in the shade of the arcade, with three coffees.

They had finished early. They always finished early. Rhys had handed his booklet in at twenty past eleven and Sam at twenty-five past, folding his reading glasses into his top pocket; and they were sitting on the bench in the shade of the arcade with the coffees on the bench between them, iced now, in plastic, with the ice going, and Rhys held one out without looking.

“Question three,” said Rhys.

“I didn’t do it.”

Rhys turned on the bench and looked at him.

“You didn’t do fifteen?”

“I did eleven.”

“Eleven was Sam’s.” Rhys looked at Sam, and back. “I did fifteen. Fourteen citations. I put the first of February in. I put the Marshal of the Realm in. I put the Swedish Prime Minister’s letter in, the one page, I cited the date.” He looked at the coffee in his hand as if it had let him down. “I thought you’d do fifteen. I thought you’d like fifteen. It’s about you.”

“That’s why,” said Frederick.

Rhys opened his mouth, and shut it.

“I did fifteen as well,” said Sam. He did not look up from the notebook on his knee. “I cited the commentary. All of it. The bits in small type.” He wrote something in a column. “I didn’t cite anybody else.”

“Not even personal communication?”

“Not this time,” said Sam. He considered the column. “It’s a different year.”

Rhys sat on the bench between them with the iced coffee, looking at the mall going past under the palms, the end of the year going everywhere at once with its sunglasses on, and after a while he began, slowly, from the ears inwards, to laugh.

“He’s going to get an A,” said Rhys. “Isn’t he. For money.”

“He’ll get a B,” said Sam.

---

Brennan came out at ten to twelve with the booklets in a cardboard box.

He came down the steps of the lecture theatre into the arcade with the box held in front of him in both arms, three hundred and sixty booklets in it, and the leather bag over his shoulder, and his reading glasses pushed up into the hair that had been red, in the crumpled linen jacket in ninety-six degrees; and he saw the bench, and the three of them on it, and stopped.

He stood there with the box for a moment.

Then he came across, and stood in front of the bench, and looked at Frederick over the top of three hundred and sixty examinations in the Charter of the United Kingdom of America, with the expression Frederick had watched him have every Monday, Wednesday and Friday since August, which was the face of a man who is about to hear himself.

“You didn’t do fifteen,” said Brennan.

“No.”

“Why not?”

He had said it before he could stop it. Frederick watched him hear it: the colour coming up out of the collar, and the face doing the thing it did, and Brennan shutting his eyes, briefly, over the box, like a man who has walked into a door he has walked into once a week for nine months.

“I’m sorry,” said Brennan. “I asked you two on Friday, in the corridor, and I’d decided that was the end of it. I’d decided that on the way home.” He opened his eyes. “Don’t answer it.”

“I’d have had to cite myself,” said Frederick.

Brennan looked at him for a long moment, over the box.

Then he laughed. He laughed out loud, in the arcade, in front of the lecture theatre, with three hundred and sixty examinations in his arms, a short loud helpless bark that turned two girls on the steps round; and Rhys, on the bench, went pink to the ears; and Sam looked up from the notebook.

“It was on the paper,” said Brennan, when he could. “In the rubric. I put it there for you.” He shifted the box. “And for Mr Oyelaran.”

“I know,” said Sam.

Brennan shifted the box again, and the sweat was beginning to come through the linen at the shoulders, and he looked, for a moment, as though he were going to go.

“Professor,” said Frederick. “The pencil.”

Brennan stood quite still.

“You asked on Friday. You asked in August.” Frederick looked at the box, at three hundred and sixty examinations, one of which had no third question in it. “My father says ink is yes. The minister signs at the bottom of the page, in ink, and that’s the yes, and it’s his. The King’s initial goes in the corner, in pencil, and all it says is that the King has read it.” He thought of a study in London and a clock on a mantelpiece with a loud tick, and a man looking a long way into his house for a word and coming back with it. “So that nobody could ever think the yes was the King’s. He said it was the lightest thing on the page.”

There was a silence in the arcade. Somebody went past along it on a bicycle, ringing the bell, and Brennan did not turn his head.

He put the box down. He put it down on the end of the bench beside Sam, carefully, three hundred and sixty examinations in the Charter, and straightened up, and stood in front of the bench with his hands empty, which Frederick had never once seen.

“The lightest thing on the page,” said Brennan.

“Yes.”

Brennan looked at the mall for some time, at the palms and the end of the year going past under them with its sunglasses on.

“That’s not in the commentary,” he said.

“No.”

“It’s not in anything.” He said it with a kind of wonder, and something under the wonder that was very nearly grief, the face of a man who has wondered professionally about a thing for twenty-two years and been handed it on a bench in the heat, by a student, for nothing. “Can I cite it?”

“Personal communication,” said Sam.

Brennan laughed again, the short helpless one, and picked up the box, and held it against his chest; and then he looked at Frederick over it, and nodded, once, as one man nods to another across a room.

“Thank him for me,” he said. And then, as he turned to go, as one man says it to another at a bus stop, without any weight on it at all: “Drink water.”

He went away along the arcade with the box, towards Tolliver, in the shade, under the arches, and did not turn round.

“Drink water,” said Rhys, after a while, faintly.

“Everybody here says that,” said Frederick.

“He’s never said it before.” Rhys watched the linen jacket go round the corner at the far end of the arcade. “Not in nine months. Not once. I’ve got every word he’s said since August in four colours.” He looked at his coffee. “I’m going to have to get a fifth.”

---

Doug came at four, with a clipboard, in the same polo shirt, with the same lanyard that said DOUG.

“Sorry, folks,” said Doug, in the doorway of 312. “Summer checklist. Won’t be a minute.”

It was the same voice in which he had read the closing checklist in December, of a man who has read the same sheet at the end of thirty semesters and stopped expecting it to say anything new. Hall closes Saturday at noon. Rooms emptied. Fridge unplugged and propped. Blinds down. Keys to the desk. He read it, and made his ticks, and looked up at the window, where the blind was up and the butte stood in the full sun at four in the afternoon with the A on its flank, and looked at the blind for a while.

“Blinds down,” said Doug.

“Saturday,” said Tyler, from the floor.

Tyler was on the floor between the beds, on his knees, with his bag open in front of him, trying to fit into it the vast black quilted coat with the hood trimmed in grey fur that had come out from under the bed in December like a dead thing from under a porch, and that he would not need again, he said, till December.

“I don’t know why I brought it back,” said Tyler, to the coat. “I wore it once. To the airport. In January.”

“In case,” said Frederick.

“In case of what? It’s a hundred degrees.” He pushed the coat down into the bag with both hands, and it came up again, slowly, round his wrists, like the camp bed. “It’s like it’s alive.”

Doug watched this for a moment from the doorway with an expression of deep professional sympathy.

“They all bring the coat back,” said Doug. “Every year. Ohio, Minnesota, the Dakotas. Nobody ever wears it. They bring it back in January, and it lives under the bed till May, and then they can’t get it in the bag.” He tucked the clipboard under his arm. “I had a kid from Duluth in 2019 mailed his home.”

“Can you mail a coat?”

“You can mail anything,” said Doug, “if you’ve got the box.” He knocked on the frame of the door, twice. “Have a good summer, folks.”

---

Mr Luna had come on at ten.

He was at the desk under the lamp, in the cardigan, with the radio on low and the ball game on it from somewhere where it was still evening, and the clipboard, on which, Frederick could see from the stairs, he had written 10 p.m. 79, and the jar of butterscotch, and the paper sun on the front of the desk that said IGNACIO, which somebody, Priya probably, had gone over in silver pen at the edges of the rays where it had faded.

Tyler was with him.

Tyler had come down the stairs behind him at eleven in the dark blue hoodie with the sleeves over his hands, which he had done exactly once before, at three in the morning in February; and he stood at the end of the desk beside the plastic chair, not sitting in it, looking at Mr Luna with the uncertain politeness of a man who has been told by his mother to say something to an older person and has forgotten what.

Mr Luna looked at him over his glasses.

“Kowalczyk,” said Mr Luna. “Three-twelve. You only come down after midnight.”

“It’s eleven.”

“I know what time it is.” Mr Luna laid the pen across the crossword. “What do you want, son?”

Tyler looked at Frederick. Frederick looked at the radio.

“We’re going up the butte,” said Tyler. “Tomorrow. For the sun. At five.” He considered it. “I’ve never done it.”

“I know you haven’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve been on that desk at five every morning since August,” said Mr Luna, “and you’ve never come down those stairs before ten at night in your life.” He looked at Tyler a moment longer, at the hoodie and the sleeves and the face, which had gone slightly pink. “And?”

“Will you wake me up?”

Mr Luna looked at him for some time with no expression whatsoever.

“You’ll be awake,” said Mr Luna.

“Yeah, but…”

“You’re awake every morning at five, son. Three-twelve’s the only window on that side of the building with a light in it at five. I see it from the arcade when I go out for the bottles.” He picked up the pen again. “Waking you up is not the problem. The problem is the stairs.”

Tyler stood at the end of the desk and thought about this.

“So you won’t wake me up.”

“No,” said Mr Luna. “I’ll have the bottles.” He looked at the grey box on the wall, and wrote 11 p.m. 79, and blotted it. “Four. Frozen. Under the desk. Go to bed.”

---

Tyler did not go to bed. Tyler had never gone to bed at eleven in his life, except once in January on Ohio time, and he did not do it now.

But at a quarter to one, when Frederick was lying in the bed by the door with the lamp off and the Charter shut and the inch of window at the edge of the blind showing him the shoulder of the butte against the orange of five million people with their lights on, he heard Tyler, at the desk under the window, in the blue light of the two screens, say into the small microphone on his headphones, quite quietly, to somebody in Lapland where it was already the morning:

“Jussi. Hey. Can you do five till like seven, tomorrow? My time.” A pause. “No. I’m going up a hill.” A longer pause. “To see the sun.” Another. “I know it comes up every day. That’s not the…” He stopped. “Just do wood, man. Okay? Thanks.”

Then he took the headphones off. He took them all the way off, and put them on the desk, and picked up his telephone, and Frederick, from the bed by the door, watched the small light of the screen on Tyler’s face as he went into a part of the telephone that Frederick suspected he had never opened before, and found it, and looked at it for some time with deep suspicion, and pressed things.

The telephone made a small sound.

“What’s it called?” said Frederick, in the dark.

Tyler did not turn round.

“What’s what called?”

“The alarm.”

There was a long pause at the desk under the window.

“Sun,” said Tyler.