ALEX

The bed by the window was his now.

He had taken it on Wednesday afternoon, a day before the freshmen, because Kimura had arranged for him to come back a day early, when the hall was empty and the corridors smelled of new floor polish and nobody’s music; and when he had opened the door of 312 with the new key there had been nothing in the room at all but two stripped mattresses, two desks, two wardrobes and the window, and the bed under the window had been Tyler’s.

Tyler had gone to Ironwood. Ironwood was a sophomore hall on the far side of the campus, nine storeys of glass with a café in the bottom of it, and Tyler had been given a room on the sixth floor, and had written in July, dude it has an elevator, and then a minute later, that works.

So Frederick had put his sheets on the window bed, and his books on the desk under the window, and then he had done a thing that nobody had done in that room for a year. He had put the blind up.

It went up with a long dry rattle, all the way, and the light came in. It came in white and flat and enormous, through the narrow window and past the concrete fin, and lay across the floor and the bare mattress by the door like something that had been waiting on the other side of the glass since last August to be let in. Through the window there was the car park, and the four palo verde trees with their green bark, and the roofs of the campus going away in the heat; and over the roofs, a mile off, brown and bare, the colour of a flowerpot, with the A on its flank, the butte.

He had sat on the window bed for an hour on Wednesday, looking at it.

---

He unpacked the rest on Wednesday night, because there was not much of it.

The jumper went on the shelf over the desk, folded, maroon with the gold bands, with the card still pinned to it in her small upright hand: For October. M. Beside it, the white cricket hat, which had been Jack’s grandfather’s, and was for when he went back up. On the cork board over the desk, at the height of his eyes, the printed sheet from the basement with the cactus, the third of three, which said what the other two said.

Under the bed, side by side, there were two things that had come back from London in his luggage, because a man in London had packed them.

The first was the camp bed, folded in three, which was on the kit list as lost and still, when he pushed it in with his foot, breathing. The second was a cardboard box about the size of a case of wine, with the Household’s label on the top, and a word on the label crossed out by hand, and two others written over it. On the top of the box, inside the flaps, on the tissue, there was a red rubber hot-water bottle in a grey knitted cover with small white stars, and tucked under its stopper a second card in fountain pen, in the same careful square hand as the first.

Sir. Still. B.

He read it again on Wednesday night, on the floor of 312, and put it back under the stopper, and pushed the box under the bed beside the camp bed, and lay down on the window bed with the blind up, and watched the butte go from brown to violet to black.

It was the best night’s sleep he had had since May.

---

Sam knocked at a quarter to seven on Thursday: twice, flat, with the side of his fist.

The box was in 316 on Sam’s desk, under the poster of the federal tax brackets, which Sam had put back up on Wednesday with the same four drawing pins in the same four holes. Frederick did it in Sam’s chair. It was eleven papers, and he read them all to the end and initialled each in pencil, small, in the top right-hand corner, and laid the pencil down parallel to the edge after each one, while Sam ate cereal on the end of his bed and Rhys stood at the window with his telephone and looked at the car park.

“Freshmen from eight, sir,” said Rhys.

“I know.”

Rhys looked down at the car park, where a man in a maroon T-shirt was setting out grey carts in a row along the kerb, very straight, like a man laying a table. “The sergeant says the stairs are going to be bad.”

“The stairs are always bad.”

“She says worse. Last year they didn’t know till they saw you.” Rhys turned round. “This year it’s in the brochure.”

“It isn’t in the brochure.”

“It’s in everybody’s brochure, sir,” said Rhys. “People’s mothers asked the housing office if they could request the third floor.”

Sam put his spoon in the bowl.

“Forty-one,” he said.

“Forty-one what?”

“Requests for the third floor,” said Sam. “The sergeant got the number from the housing office. They said no to all of them. It’s a random algorithm.” He picked the spoon up again. “They were very proud of that.”

---

By nine the hall was full.

It filled the way it had filled the year before, from the car park inwards: open boots, and families, and students in maroon T-shirts that said MOVE-IN CREW pushing grey carts with lamps and rugs and mini-fridges on them, and the noise coming up the stairs in waves, so that from the third floor it sounded like a beach. The lift had a new sign on it, printed, laminated, taped at the corners, that said OUT OF SERVICE. SORRY FOLKS. DOUG. Under it somebody had written in biro, THE STAIRS ARE 79. Under that, in a different pen, in a different hand, somebody had written STILL.

Frederick went down at ten for water, because he was not going to stay in his room all day like a man under siege, and met the freshmen on the stairs.

He met them one family at a time, on the concrete half-flights, coming up with their arms full; and every family did the same thing, in the same order, the way a room full of people all stand up at once for an anthem. The freshman saw him first. Then the freshman stopped dead, with a lamp or a box or a mini-fridge, and the parent behind walked into the freshman; and then the parent saw him too.

“Oh my God,” said a girl with a laundry basket, to the laundry basket.

“Morning, Fred,” said her father, who was carrying a rug over his shoulder like a dead man and was breathing hard, and then went red, all the way up, and said, “Sir. Sorry. Your Majesty. Sorry.”

“Fred’s fine.”

“Fred,” said the father, gratefully. “This your floor?”

“Third.”

“She’s on the second.” The father hitched the rug. “Her mother wanted the third.”

“I know,” said Frederick. “Forty-one people’s mothers did.”

The father laughed, properly, on the stairs, and the girl with the basket said “Dad,” in agony, and they went on up.

---

Priya was on the landing between the second floor and the third.

She was a senior now, in nursing, and the resident adviser of the fourth floor, and she had a clipboard and a lanyard and the face of a woman who had been on the stairs since seven and intended to be on them until six, and when she saw him she stopped with her foot on the step under the narrow window and said, “Fred! Hi!”

“Hello, Priya.”

“You’re back. Did you have a good summer? Don’t tell me. My mom saw all of it.” She looked at the clipboard. “Wait. You’ve got a German.”

“A what?”

“A German. Your roommate.” She ran her pen down the list. “I get the whole hall. I don’t know why. They just send it to me, every floor, I think because I did three last year and they think I’m the one who knows.” The pen stopped. “Here. Three twelve. Hanover, F. That’s you. And…” She frowned at the page. “Hohenzollern. Hohen-zollern? Is that how you say it?”

“Hohenzollern,” said Frederick.

“Hohenzollern,” said Priya, carefully, the way you say a word in a language you are going to be tested on. “A. That’s all it says. Hohenzollern, A. First-year.” She looked up. “Is that German?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it. I said to Callum, that’s a German name.” She clicked the pen. “He’ll be nice. The Germans on four last year were super nice. One of them made bread.” And she went on up the stairs to the fourth floor with her clipboard, at a run, calling over her shoulder, “Welcome back!”, to somebody else.

Frederick stood on the landing.

He stood there for some time, by the step under the narrow window, with the noise of the hall coming up the stairs round him, and the thermometer on the wall beside the window saying 79, as it always said; and he thought, quite clearly and in so many words, that Hohenzollern was a common enough name in Germany. There must be hundreds of them. There were whole villages in Swabia. Half the castle guides on the Rhine were probably Hohenzollerns. A. could be anything. A. was Andreas. A. was Anna.

It was nonsense. He knew afterwards, at about ten past four, that it was nonsense, and that he had known it on the landing, and had stood there and thought it anyway, quite firmly, the way a man pulls a blind down.

He went down and got the water.

---

The new resident adviser of the third floor was called Callum Reyes, and he was putting up suns.

He was a junior in public health, small and anxious, with a lanyard and a handbook under one arm, a fat blue binder with RESIDENCE LIFE STAFF HANDBOOK on the spine and a great many coloured tabs sticking out of the side, and a roll of tape round his wrist like a bracelet. He had a stack of paper suns in his other hand, maroon card with gold rays, a name on each in silver pen, and he was going along the corridor door by door, sticking them on at exactly the same height, and checking the height each time against the door frame with his thumb.

He saw Frederick coming, and dropped the suns.

“Hi,” said Callum Reyes, from the floor, picking them up. “Hi. Sorry. Hi. I’m Callum. I’m your RA. I’m the new RA. Priya’s on four now. I’m three. I’m on three.” He stood up with the suns. “I’ve read the handbook twice.”

“Is it good?”

Callum looked at the binder under his arm as though it might answer for itself.

“It’s very long,” he said. “There’s nothing in it about you.” He went pink. “I mean. Heads of anything. I looked under H, and under S for state.” He looked at the suns in his hand. “I’m going to email somebody.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Callum Reyes.

He had come to 312. On the door, at the height of a man’s eyes, there was already a sun that said FRED, which Callum must have put up at eight, because it was still there, which by Frederick’s experience of the corridor gave it until about lunchtime. Callum held up the next sun in the stack.

It said ALEX.

“Is it okay if I put this one under yours?” said Callum. “I didn’t know the order. The handbook doesn’t say the order. I thought alphabetical, but then I thought, he was here first, so that’s, like, seniority? Is that a thing?” He looked at Frederick in real distress. “Is that a thing with you?”

“It’s a thing,” said Frederick.

“Okay. Under.” Callum put it under, checking with his thumb, and pressed down the tape at all four corners, and looked at the two suns, FRED and, under it, ALEX, with the expression of a man who has defused something and is not yet sure which wire he cut.

“Alex,” said Frederick.

“Alex,” said Callum. “He put Alex on the form. Under preferred name.” He consulted something in the binder. “First-year. Poli sci, I think. He’s coming at four. They gave everybody a slot, so the stairs don’t, you know.” He made a gesture with the tape that meant the stairs in their present condition.

There were a great many Alexanders in Germany, and every one of them, presumably, was called Alex by somebody. Frederick thought this too, outside his own door, and it was also nonsense, and he did not look at it closely.

“I’ve got spares,” said Callum, and showed him: an envelope inside the front cover of the binder, brown, fat, and in it, when he opened the flap, a stack of maroon suns that all said FRED. “Priya said get spares. Priya said you’d understand.”

“I understand.”

“She said by lunchtime.”

“About lunchtime,” said Frederick.

---

Callum went on down the corridor.

Three hundred and sixteen got RHYS and SAM, which went up exactly where they had been last year, at Rhys’s request, to the inch. Three hundred and fourteen, the room between, got two new ones. The first said FELIX.

The second said K.

“He asked for K.,” said Callum, holding it up for Frederick to see, as though Frederick might be able to rule on it. “On the form. Under preferred name. Just K. With the dot.” He looked at it. “Is that allowed? I didn’t know if that was allowed. I said yes. I thought, it’s his name, you know? It’s what he wants to be called.” He stuck it on. “He’s a freshman. He’s a mature student. He’s like, really mature.”

Frederick looked at the sun that said K.

He was to look at it again, a great deal, at about ten past four. At eleven in the morning he thought that a man who wanted to be called K. on a paper sun was a man of a kind he had known all his life, and that was all he thought.

The last door Callum did before the stairs was 308, across the corridor at the end. LENA, it said. And under it, in larger letters, with a heart over the I that Callum had clearly been asked for and had put on reluctantly, MAKAYLA.

---

The FRED went at a quarter to one.

Frederick came back up from the dining hall and it was gone, leaving a rectangle of tape at the height of a man’s eyes, and under the rectangle, still there, firmly, at all four corners, ALEX.

He looked at it.

Then he went in and sat on the window bed.

---

At about two he was on the stairs again, coming up, with a second bottle of water, and there was a back in front of him.

It was a broad back, in a dark polo shirt that was not a colour anybody in the March wore in August, and it was going up the concrete half-flights ahead of him at an even pace with a cardboard box held in front of it, and above the back there was a neck like a gatepost and a head of short grey hair. Ahead of the back, two steps up, a tall fair young man was carrying two more boxes and a desk lamp, and ahead of him again a short dark young woman with a rucksack and a rolled-up rug under her arm was taking the steps two at a time, as though they had personally offended her.

Frederick went up behind them for a flight and a half.

He thought: somebody’s father. A big quiet man who had driven his children from somewhere a long way off and been told in the car not to embarrass anybody, and who was going up the stairs of a residence hall at a hundred and eight degrees in a polo shirt meant for somewhere else and not sweating at all, which was strange, which he noticed, which he put down to the stairs being seventy-nine.

At the top of the third flight the back went along the corridor and into 314. The tall fair young man went in after it. The short dark young woman went on, to the end, to 308, and kicked the door open with her heel without putting the rug down.

Frederick went into 312 and shut the door, and stood for a moment with his back against it, holding the bottle, without knowing why he had shut it.

The oldest freshmen got older every year, he thought.

---

Rhys and Sam were not on the corridor at two. They were in the car park, getting a sofa from Yuma up the stairs, which Sam had said it would not go up by four inches, and which it went up, at half past two, bumping, with Rhys at the front saying “Pivot” and Sam at the back, quite calmly, at the corner where it stuck, saying “Four.”

---

At four he was on the window bed with a book.

It was the reading for a course called The Realm to 1865, which began on Monday in the brick building with the ivy, a fat green paperback about the Four-Year War, and he was not reading it. He was sitting cross-legged on the window bed with the book open on his knees and the blind up behind him and the light on the back of his neck, and the butte over his shoulder, and he was looking at the bed by the door.

It was made up now. He had not made it. Somebody from Residence Life had come at noon with a cart and put sheets on it, white, regulation, tucked hard, and a grey blanket folded square at the foot, and a pillow, and a small card on the pillow that said WELCOME TO PALO VERDE, ALEX! with a drawing of a sun, so that the bed looked like a bed in a hotel that was expecting somebody, which it was.

He had looked at the card for some time.

It was supposed to be his. That was the thing he was not saying, on the window bed at four o’clock, to the card. The hall, and the hill, and the step under the window on the landing, and the coffee cart on the mall that wrote FRED on the cup in marker and spelled it right, and Mr Luna at ten with the clipboard; the one place in all the world he had found for himself, on a map, on a hill in Berlin in the frost, and been laughed at for, and come to anyway, and made, over a year, slowly, into his. He had not been the King in it. He had been a freshman who could not do statistics and went up a rock every morning. It had taken him a year. He had thought, on Wednesday, with the blind going up, that it was finished; that it was his now, and that nobody else’s need be in it.

There was a knock at the door.

It was two knocks, correctly spaced, with a knuckle.

Then the key went in the lock, and turned, and the door opened.

---

His cousin was in the doorway.

He was in a pale linen jacket, buttoned, and a white shirt buttoned to the neck, and dark trousers with a crease in them that had survived the stairs, which was not possible; and he was carrying two cardboard boxes, one on top of the other, held level in front of him, and on top of the top box, laid flat, folded, a hat. It was a pale straw hat with a dark band. It had clearly never been on his head.

He was not sweating. Then Frederick saw that he was: a line of it at his temples, going down into the collar, which he had not touched.

Behind him, in the corridor, at the edge of the door frame, there was a broad back in a dark polo shirt, facing the other way, towards the stairs, with its hands folded in front of it. It was not there. It had been not there, Frederick understood, at a range of about six feet, all afternoon.

Alexander looked at the room.

He looked at it the way he looked at everything, in order: the two beds, the two desks, the window with its blind up, the jumper on the shelf and the cricket hat beside it, the card on the pillow. Then he looked at the bed by the window, and at who was on it, sitting cross-legged with a book about the Four-Year War open on his knees, as Tyler had sat there a year ago with a keyboard, looking up.

“Good afternoon,” said Alexander.

Frederick did not say anything.

He sat on the window bed and looked at his cousin in the doorway, for about a second and a half, which was the length of time Tyler had once looked at him; and in that second and a half he understood about the paper sun, and the K., and the back on the stairs, and a girl taking the stairs two at a time as though they had offended her, and a name that was common enough in Germany. He understood all of it at once, the way you understand a step that is not there in the dark. And under the understanding, coming up from somewhere low and slow, steadily, like water filling a cellar, there was something else, which he did not say either, and which was not surprise.

It was supposed to be his.

Alexander came in.

He put the two boxes down on the bed by the door, beside the card, the top one first and then the bottom, squarely, with their edges to the edge of the mattress. He put the hat on top of them. He looked at the card on the pillow, WELCOME TO PALO VERDE, ALEX!, for a moment, and did not pick it up. Then he turned to the desk by the door, which was bare, and took a pencil out of the inside pocket of the linen jacket, a soft one, kept very sharp, and laid it down on the desk.

He laid it parallel to the edge.

He looked at it. He moved it, with one finger, perhaps a sixteenth of an inch, so that it was exactly parallel; and then he took his finger away, and stood with his hands at his sides in the middle of 312, upright, in the buttoned jacket, with the light from the window on his face, and looked at Frederick across the room.

Frederick looked back.

Neither of them said anything at all. Down the corridor somebody’s music came on, loud, and was turned down. Under the bed by the window the camp bed breathed, once, faintly, as it did. And on the other side of the door, at the height of a man’s eyes, under a rectangle of old tape, there was a paper sun that said ALEX, which nobody, Frederick already knew, was ever going to take.