The Recount

Mr Vollmer came on Earl’s van.

Frederick did not see him arrive. He was in GUYS, at ten past ten, with the yellow gloves on and the hose, doing number nineteen, BASINS, UNDERNEATH AS WELL, when Bonnie Tackett put her head round the door with the headset round her neck and said, in a voice that had something wrong with it:

“Hon. There’s a man at my window in a bow tie.”

“A bow tie?”

“Red. And a grey suit. In a hundred and one.” Bonnie Tackett looked at the basins. “He came on Earl’s van. Earl dropped him at the gate and said Vollmer plus none, and he got off with a briefcase and a clipboard and a pointer, a pointer, hon, a stick, and he’s been standing at my window for five minutes, very politely, waiting for me to finish on the telephone, and I haven’t been on the telephone, I’ve been watching him.” She paused. “He says he’s from the Census.”

Frederick put down the hose.

“He says,” said Bonnie Tackett, “that he’s here to count.”

---

Mr Vollmer was in the queue.

He was standing at the end of it, behind a family from the cabins, at the pass window, in the sun, exactly as he had stood in the King’s sitting room in New Westminster five weeks ago: small and round and sixty, in the grey suit pressed so thoroughly that it shone at the knees, with the dark red bow tie and the spectacles on a chain, and the pointer under his arm, and a briefcase in one hand and a clipboard in the other; and he was sweating. It was running down his round face from under his hair, which was thin and grey and combed very flat, into his collar, and he did not seem to notice it, the way Mr Lowther had not noticed it on the airstrip; and he was looking at everything. At the pool, and the umbrellas, and the high white chair, and the snack hut, and the sign on the fence, which he was reading, Frederick could see, line by line, with his lips moving.

He saw Frederick come round the corner of the snack hut in his red T-shirt and yellow gloves.

His whole face lit.

He did not bow. Frederick saw him begin to, the whole of his small round body beginning to go down from the waist in the bow somebody had shown him how to do in a corridor, and then stop, halfway, and come up again, because he had seen the T-shirt, and the badge, and the gloves, and understood; and he stood in the queue at the Cove Point pool with his pointer under his arm and his face shining with sweat and delight and said, in a voice that tried very hard to be ordinary and was not:

“Good morning.”

“Good morning, Mr Vollmer,” said Frederick.

“I am in the queue,” said Mr Vollmer.

“I can see.”

“I have been in the queue,” said Mr Vollmer, with tremendous satisfaction, “for six minutes. The median queue time at a public pool in the Realm in August, from the survey of 2024, is eleven minutes. This queue,” he looked along it, “is below the median.” He looked back at Frederick. “That is measure twelve.”

---

He paid his five pounds. Bonnie Tackett put the orange wristband on his wrist herself, the way she did for the children, and he looked at it, on his wrist, with the expression of a man who has been given a decoration; and then he came to the towel hut, and Frederick told him that towels were for resort guests, and he said of course, of course, and wrote something on his clipboard, and said measure nineteen, local adherence to posted regulations, and went and sat on a lounger under an umbrella in his grey suit with his briefcase on his knees and did not swim.

He did not swim all day. He sat on the lounger and counted.

Frederick watched him do it, between the towels and the skimmer and the till. He counted everything. He counted the people in the pool, every hour, on the hour, standing up from the lounger with his clipboard and moving his lips, and sat down again and wrote the figure. He counted the cars in the car park. He counted the boats on the cove, with a small pair of binoculars that he took out of the briefcase, which made Kimura, on her own lounger at the shallow end with her straw hat over her face, lift the hat an inch and look at him and put it back. He counted the snow cones Frederick sold between eleven and twelve, from the lounger, without getting up, and came to the hatch at twelve and said forty-one and Frederick said forty-three and Mr Vollmer looked stricken and Frederick said two were for Tucker and Mr Vollmer said ah, a repeat purchaser and wrote it down with enormous relief.

At one o’clock, when Kaylee came down off the chair to test the water, he went and knelt beside her on the hot concrete at the deep end in his grey suit, with his trousers shining at the knees, and watched her fill the tubes and put in the drops; and when the water in the pH tube went red, the colour of Darlene’s wild plum jelly with the light through it, he leaned forward and looked at it very closely through his spectacles.

“Seven point four,” said Kaylee.

“Seven point four,” said Mr Vollmer, reverently. “That is the national standard.”

“It’s the pH of your eyes,” said Kaylee. “Your tears. If the water’s the same as your eyes, they don’t sting.”

Mr Vollmer looked at her.

He looked at her for a long time, kneeling on the hot concrete in his grey suit, with the sweat running down into his bow tie; and Frederick, at the deep end with the skimmer, saw his round face go through several things, and come out at the end looking the way Felix’s had looked in front of the pie with the red ribbon.

“I did not know that,” said Mr Vollmer.

“Nobody knows it,” said Kaylee. “Everything’s chemistry. People just never got taught.” She put the tubes away and stood up. “Are you going to swim?”

“No,” said Mr Vollmer. “I am counting.”

Kaylee looked at him over her sunglasses, for exactly one second.

“Huh,” she said, and went back up the chair.

---

He asked Frederick at half past three, on the crates behind the snack hut, during the break.

He had come round the corner of the hut with his clipboard and his briefcase and had stood there, waiting, until Frederick looked up from his hot dog; and then he had sat down on the other crate, the one Lord Whitlock had sat on, and put the briefcase on his knees, and the clipboard on the briefcase, and taken off his spectacles and wiped them on his handkerchief and put them back on; and looked at Frederick; and had not said anything for some time.

“Sir,” he said at last. “May I explain why I have come?”

“Yes.”

“When the Private Secretary telephoned the Census Office on the thirteenth of July,” said Mr Vollmer, “and asked for the most ordinary town in the Realm, I gave him an answer. To three decimal places. Ketchum.” He looked at the clipboard. “And I was proud of it, sir. I was prouder of it than of anything I have done in thirty-one years at the Office. It was a beautiful answer. It was the right answer.”

“It was.”

“It was,” said Mr Vollmer. “It was the right answer, sir. On the thirteenth of July.” He looked at the snack hut wall. “But a measure is a measure of a moment. That is the first thing they teach you at the Office. You count the Realm on a night in April every ten years, and the next morning it is wrong. A child is born. A man dies. A family moves to Kansas.” He looked at his clipboard. “And on the twenty-first of July, sir, you came to Ketchum.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“I have been reading the newspapers,” said Mr Vollmer, unhappily. “I have been reading them every morning at my desk since the fifth of August, when the first one came. A photograph of some swings. A radio programme, on which nine residents of a town of four hundred and seventy-one telephoned a station in Tulsa in a single morning. A Prime Minister on a bus. A storm, and a television report which said that nothing happens here, which in my professional experience is a thing that is only ever said of a place where something is happening.” He took off his spectacles again. “Measure thirty-one, sir. Mentions in the national press in the last ten years. On the thirteenth of July, Ketchum had two. One was a boat. One was a pie.” He put his spectacles back on. “This morning, by my count, it has had a hundred and fourteen.”

He looked at Frederick.

“And so I asked myself,” said Mr Vollmer, “whether a town with a King in it can still be the most ordinary town in the Realm. Whether the answer I gave was still the answer. And I found that I could not sleep.” A pause. “I have not taken a day’s leave in nine years. I took three. I came on an aeroplane to Tulsa, which I do not like, and on a coach to Vinita, and on the van this morning with a very kind man called Earl, who asked me if I was any relation.” He looked at the clipboard. “To come and count again.”

---

“Count what?” said Frederick.

“All of it,” said Mr Vollmer. “All thirty-seven.” He turned the clipboard round, so that Frederick could see it, and it was a list, in a small careful hand, numbered, with a figure beside each number and a second figure beside the first, and some of the second figures circled. “I have been in the town since seven. I have been to the café, and the post office, and the church, and the fire station, and the school, which is shut. I have spoken to forty-one residents.” He looked at the list. “It has been very difficult, sir.”

“Why?”

“Because they will not tell me anything,” said Mr Vollmer.

He said it with a sort of baffled admiration.

“I asked the woman at the café, Mrs Shaw, measure fourteen, visitors to the town in the last thirty days. She said, hon, I heard he’s in Alaska.” Mr Vollmer looked at the list. “I had not mentioned anybody. I asked the postmistress, measure twenty-two, volume of mail received at the local office, July to August, year on year. She said that it was against the regulations of the American Postal Service to disclose the name of any sender or addressee, which I had not asked her to do, and that it had been against the regulations since Franklin, which is very nearly true.” He turned a page. “I asked a gentleman at the end of the counter in a tractor cap, measure twenty-seven, proportion of residents who fish. He said fishing, and left.” He turned another page. “I asked a woman at a blue door, measure eight, median household size, and she told me that she had taught the fourth grade in this county for forty-one years and that I had my bow tie on crooked, and shut the door.” He touched the bow tie. “It was.”

Frederick put his hot dog down on the crate.

“They’ve been doing it all summer,” he said.

“Doing what, sir?”

“That.” Frederick looked at the white boards of the snack hut wall. “Not seeing. Not telling. On purpose. All of them. The whole town.” He thought about the café on the first Sunday, and the man folding his newspaper over and putting the salt on it, and the girl in the church dress in the booth, and her mother saying sit down and eat your pancake; and the queue at the pool, and Kaylee’s whistle; and nine people ringing Hal Buckner about bears and castles and clocks; and five hundred people in a grandstand laughing at a joke about Alaska without one of them turning round; and the county getting in front of a television camera one at a time, stretching, and looking in handbags, and putting on jackets. “Since the first morning. Nobody’s ever asked them to. They just do it.” He stopped. “It’s the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Mr Vollmer looked at him for a long time.

“Sir,” he said slowly, “that is not a measure the Census has.”

---

He asked Frederick to fill in a form.

It was in the briefcase. A long sheet, blue, folded once, printed on both sides, with the crest at the top and CENSUS OF THE UNITED KINGDOM OF AMERICA - HOUSEHOLD SCHEDULE across it in capitals, and SPECIMEN - NOT FOR RETURN across that in red; and Mr Vollmer unfolded it on the briefcase on his knees and turned it round and held it out.

“It is not real, sir,” he said. “It is a specimen. We use it for training. It will not be returned to anybody and it will not be counted.” He paused. “The sovereign is not enumerated. It is in no statute. He has simply never been, in two hundred years, and nobody in the Office has ever known why. It is assumed that it would be impertinent.” Another pause. “But you are not here as the sovereign, sir. Are you?”

Frederick looked at the form.

“No,” he said. “I’m here as Hanover, F.”

“Then,” said Mr Vollmer, holding out the form, “for the purposes of my recount, and for no other purpose whatever, you are a resident of Ketchum.” He swallowed. “And I would be very much obliged if you would fill in a household schedule. With a pen.”

Frederick took out the bait-shop pen.

He had it in his pocket. He had it in his pocket every day now, against his leg, to keep it warm, because he had found that there was always something, at the pool, or the café, or the post office, that wanted writing with it. He took it out and held it in his fist for a minute while Mr Vollmer watched, and then he filled in the household schedule, on the briefcase, on his knees, on an upturned crate behind the snack hut at the Cove Point pool, in a hundred and one degrees, in the bait-shop pen.

ADDRESS: Mrs Sixkiller’s (the farmhouse on the gravel road), Ketchum.

NUMBER OF PERSONS USUALLY RESIDENT AT THIS ADDRESS ON THE NIGHT OF THE COUNT: 4. (And 2 in the trailer.)

PERSON 1. SURNAME: Hanover. FORENAME: Frederick. RELATIONSHIP TO HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD:

He stopped.

“There isn’t a head of household,” he said. “There’s four of us. And Mrs Sixkiller, but she lives at the blue door.”

Mr Vollmer thought about this very seriously.

“Put friend,” he said.

Friend, wrote Frederick.

AGE: 16. OCCUPATION:

He stopped again. He looked at the word on the form. OCCUPATION. He thought about the things he could write in the space. He thought about what the Household would write, and the Private Secretary, and the Census, if the Census were allowed to count him, which it was not, because it would be impertinent; and what was written about him in books, and on the backs of coins, and in the oaths.

He wrote: Pool attendant.

He looked at it.

EMPLOYER: Cove Point Resort (Mrs B. Tackett).

HOURS WORKED IN THE WEEK BEFORE THE COUNT: 37½.

He gave the form back.

Mr Vollmer took it. He looked at it, through his spectacles, for a long time, on his knees, on the briefcase. He looked at Pool attendant. He looked at 37½.

“Sir,” he said, and his voice had gone very small. “This is the first household schedule in the history of the Census of the United Kingdom of America on which the sovereign has been enumerated.” He looked up. “Even as a specimen.”

“I’m not the sovereign.”

“No, sir,” said Mr Vollmer. “No. Of course.” He folded the form, very carefully, once, along its fold, and put it in the briefcase, and closed the briefcase, and put both his hands flat on top of it, the way Rae-Ann had put her hand on the bolt. “Hanover, F. Pool attendant. Thirty-seven and a half hours.” He looked at the snack hut wall. “I shall keep it in my desk.”

---

He took the library books back at twenty past six, on the day they were due.

Castellanos drove him, in the cold, with Mr Vollmer in the front seat with his briefcase on his knees, because Mr Vollmer had to go to Vinita for the coach in the morning and had a room at the motel on the highway and Earl did not run on Wednesday evenings; and Mr Vollmer sat in the front seat in his grey suit with the air conditioning blowing on his face and his eyes closed, and did not count anything, all fourteen miles. At the county line, where the road went smooth, he opened his eyes.

“Measure thirty,” he said. “Quality of local roads, by survey.” He closed his eyes again. “I shall have to revise it.”

The librarian was at the desk, in her cardigan, with the pencil through her bun, stamping. She looked at him over her half-moon glasses as he came in out of the heat, in his red T-shirt, with the three books under his arm, the one on birds and the one on the history of the county and the novel; and she looked at the clock on the wall above the door, which said twenty-two minutes past six.

“Today,” she said.

“Today.”

She held out her hand. He gave her the books. She opened each of them at the front, at the little paper pocket inside the cover, and looked at the date stamped on the slip in purple, 22 AUG 2029; and stamped each of them again, thunk, thunk, thunk, with a different stamp, that said RETURNED; and put them on the trolley behind her.

“Did you read them?”

“Yes.”

“All three?”

“All three.” He thought. “The one about birds twice.”

The librarian looked at him over her glasses for a long moment.

“Anything else?” she said.

He looked at the shelves. He thought about the ten days that were left; and about what he would read in them, on the porch, at night, by the light of Theo’s telephone; and that he would not be able to bring them back if he took them, because he was going, and everybody was going, because that was what summer was.

“No,” he said. “Thank you. I’ve got a book.”

“Which?”

“Birds of Oklahoma,” said Frederick. “I bought one. At the shop on the square. With my wages.” He paused. “For a friend. Who looks at birds.”

The librarian looked at him. Then she did something he had not seen her do. She took off the half-moon glasses, and let them hang on their chain, and looked at him without them, with her own eyes, which were grey, and very sharp, and much younger than the rest of her.

“Then keep your card, hon,” she said. “Card four-four-seven-one. It doesn’t expire.” She put the glasses back on. “You never know when you’ll be in Craig County.”

---

Mr Vollmer had biscuits and gravy at the Cove Café at seven.

He did not want to. He had wanted to go to the motel and lie down. But Castellanos had driven back through Ketchum on the way, because it was the only road, and Mr Vollmer had seen the sign from the car, the tall old sign with the coffee cup on it and the arrow of light bulbs, half of them gone, pointing at the door; and had said, in a small voice, measure fourteen, and then, I have not eaten since the van; and Castellanos had stopped the car.

They sat at the counter. Frederick on the end stool, and Mr Vollmer on the one beside it, in his grey suit, with his briefcase on the floor between his feet and his pointer across his knees, and both his hands flat on the counter in front of him, on the pale green with its little gold stars worn white, the way Marcus had put his on the first Sunday, as though it were a seat in church.

Darlene came down the counter with the coffee pot.

She looked at Mr Vollmer. She looked at his bow tie, which was straight now, because Mrs Sixkiller had told him; and at his pointer; and at the orange paper wristband still on his wrist from the pool, which he had not taken off. She turned his cup over with a flick and filled it.

“Don’t have the special,” she said. “It’s liver.”

“Biscuits and gravy,” said Frederick. “Twice. Please.”

Darlene looked at him, and at Mr Vollmer, and went away.

Mr Vollmer looked at the cup of coffee in front of him for a long time.

“Sir,” he said. “May I tell you something?”

“Yes.”

“I have measured four thousand one hundred and six towns,” said Mr Vollmer. “In thirty-one years. Every one of them. Their medians and their means and their distances from the middle. I know the median household size of every town in the Realm with more than two hundred people in it. I know how many of their residents fish.” He looked at the coffee. “I have never sat at a counter in one of them.”

He picked up the cup and drank, and it was terrible, and he did not seem to notice.

“I have never been to one,” said Mr Vollmer. “Not one. Not to count. The counting is done by enumerators, sir, on foot, and by post, and by the departments, and it comes to the Office on paper and on discs, and we sit at our desks in New Westminster, in a basement on Ministry Row, with the lights on all day, and we make the medians.” He put the cup down. “I knew Ketchum to three decimal places. I knew it better than anybody in the Realm. And I had never been here.” He looked at the counter, at the little gold stars. “I did not know about the counter.”

Darlene brought the biscuits and gravy. Two thick white plates, two enormous soft biscuits split open on each, drowned in the pale grey gravy with the sausage in it. She put them down without a word and went away.

Mr Vollmer looked at his plate.

“That,” he said, “is not a thing that is in the measures.”

He ate it. All of it. Slowly. And then he wiped the plate with the last piece of biscuit, carefully, all the way round, which he had certainly been told since he was four never to do; and Darlene, passing with the coffee pot, looked at the plate, and at him, and said good boy, and filled his cup.

Mr Vollmer sat very still.

---

The bill came on a slip of green paper, face down, in front of Frederick, because Frederick was on the end.

Frederick paid. Out of the brown wallet. Thirteen seventy, and Darlene counted the change into his hand, thirteen seventy, fourteen, fifteen, twenty, without saying anything; and Mr Vollmer watched him do it, from the next stool, with his round face doing something it could not stop.

“Sir,” said Mr Vollmer. “You cannot…”

“It’s my wages,” said Frederick. “You came on the train. And the coach. And Earl’s van. On your leave.” He put the change in the wallet. “You’ve been counting since seven.”

Mr Vollmer did not say anything for a moment.

Then he took out a pencil, a short one, from the breast pocket of his grey suit, sharpened with a knife; and turned the slip of green paper over, the back of it, the blank side; and wrote on it, in his small careful hand, slowly, with his tongue in the corner of his mouth. Frederick could read it upside down.

38.

And then, after a long pause:

Proportion of residents who, knowing a thing, decide together without being asked not to make it the most interesting thing about their town.

He looked at it. He crossed out the most interesting thing and wrote anything above it. He looked at it again.

“It cannot be measured,” said Mr Vollmer. “I know that. It is not a quantity. There is no survey. I could not put it in a report.” He looked at the slip. “But if it could be, sir, I think Ketchum would be at the very end of the scale. Not the middle. The end.” He put the pencil back in his pocket. “I think it would be the least ordinary town in the Realm.”

“Then it’s not the most ordinary any more.”

“No, sir,” said Mr Vollmer. “No. That is the difficulty.” He looked at the slip of green paper. “On the other thirty-seven, it has moved. In the third decimal place. Measure thirty-one, the press, has gone up a great deal, and measure twenty-two, the post, a little, because of the letters, and measure thirty, the roads, will go down, because of a crane.” He shook his head. “But I have done the sums, sir. On the van, and at the pool, and in the car. Thirty-seven measures, recombined.” He folded the slip of green paper in half, and put it in his breast pocket, behind the pencil. “And it is still Ketchum.”

Frederick looked at him.

“Still the most ordinary?”

“By a hair,” said Mr Vollmer. “To three decimal places. The second town in the index, which is in the State of Nebraska and which I will not name, is four thousandths behind.” He picked up his coffee cup. “On every measure the Census has, sir, a town of four hundred and seventy-one people with a King in it for six weeks is still the most ordinary town in the Realm.” He drank. “And on the one measure it has not got, it is the least.”

He put the cup down.

“I do not know what to do with that,” said Mr Vollmer. “I have been a statistician for thirty-one years, and I do not know what to do with it.”

Frederick thought about it, on the end stool, at the counter, with the coffee going cold in front of him.

“Maybe you don’t have to do anything with it,” he said. “Maybe it’s both.”

Mr Vollmer looked at him for a long time.

“Both,” he said.

Darlene, passing, filled both their cups again, which neither of them had asked for; and Mr Vollmer, in his grey suit, on a stool at the counter of the Cove Café in Ketchum, with an orange paper wristband on his wrist and a slip of green paper in his breast pocket, put both his hands flat on the counter on the pale green with its little gold stars, and looked at them, and did not say anything else at all for a long time.