The A

The programme was on the desk by the door when he went to sleep.

It had been written at ten the night before, after the forecast, in ink on a sheet of Neues Palais paper with the eagle at the top, and laid square to the edge of the desk with the pencil beside it, and Frederick had read it from the window bed upside down by the light of the corridor under the door, because Alexander had left it where it could be read.

06.00. Bell. 06.05. Dress. 06.12. Desk (Mr Luna). 06.20. Gate. 06.31. Paint issued. 06.32. Sunrise (west face: not observed). 06.40. Left leg, lower third. 07.15. Cracks. 07.50. Descend. 08.00. Breakfast. The mill.

“How do you know it’s tomorrow?” Frederick had said, into the dark.

“The Heat Office has published the overnight forecast. The Index will be below the threshold at the site from about four.” Alexander’s voice came from the bed by the door, level, as it came from everywhere. “Sam has confirmed it.”

“Sam’s not the Heat Office.”

“No. Sam is more careful.”

---

The bell rang at six.

It came across the town as it had come last year, from the roof of the town hall, slowly, a single flat note and a pause and the note again, rung by somebody who had been told how many times and was counting. And then every telephone in Palo Verde Hall went off at once, the two rising notes all down the corridor through the walls, and the sound of three hundred people sitting up.

UNIVERSITY OF THE MARCH. FIRST COOL MORNING. HEAT OFFICE DECLARES INDEX BELOW THRESHOLD. FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS: THE A. GATE 6.20.

Both of them had been awake since a quarter to, and neither had said so.

The lamp by the door went on at six exactly.

Alexander was already sitting up. He took the pencil from beside the programme and made a small tick beside 06.00. Bell., and laid the pencil down again, parallel.

“It was a minute late,” said Frederick. “The bell.”

“A tick is for the time I was told,” said Alexander. “Not the time it happened.”

Somebody in the corridor shouted, with enormous joy, “IT’S COLD,” and somebody else shouted “SHUT THE FUCK UP,” and they both laughed.

---

It was sixty-three.

Sam was outside 316 with the thermometer on its lanyard round his neck and the notebook open, in a hooded sweatshirt with the hood up, which Frederick had not seen him do before, and Rhys beside him in a fleece zipped to the chin and a scarf, a real scarf, red, wound twice.

“Sixty-three,” said Sam. “Two up on last year.”

“It feels like the Arctic,” said Rhys. “It feels like Wilmington.” He looked at Frederick. “You’re wearing it.”

Frederick looked down. He had taken the jumper off the shelf at five past six without deciding to, as he had a year ago, and put it on, and only now, in the corridor, with the weight of it on his shoulders, did he know he had done it. Maroon, and the gold at the cuffs and the neck. The note had stayed on the shelf, in its place beside the cricket hat. For October. M.

“It’s October,” he said.

The door of 312 opened behind him and Alexander came out.

He was in grey trousers and a white shirt, a cotton shirt of the plain kind he wore for the gym, buttoned to the neck and at both cuffs, with the cuffs buttoned twice, Frederick saw, on the second button, so that they sat close on the wrist. He had his hat in his left hand. He had the programme folded in four in his shirt pocket, and the pencil clipped beside it.

Rhys looked at the shirt with the face of a man calculating how much paint there would be on a hill.

“It’s white,” said Rhys.

“Yes.”

“The whitewash is maroon.”

“I know,” said Alexander. He looked at his watch. “It is six minutes past. We are a minute ahead.”

Down the corridor the door of 314 opened and Kessler came out, in a black polo shirt and black trousers, with a lanyard round his neck on which his student card hung in the middle of his chest, and on the card, Frederick knew without seeing it, a photograph of a face like the end of a wardrobe and the words FIRST-YEAR. He looked at nobody. He went to the head of the stairs and stood there, and was not there.

“Is Kessler painting?” said Rhys, very low.

“Kessler is a first-year,” said Alexander.

---

Mr Luna was at the desk at the end of his shift, with the cardigan buttoned to the top and the clipboard in front of him. He watched them come down the forty-five steps, or the forty-four, and said nothing until they reached him.

“That’s the bell, son.”

“Yes,” said Frederick.

“Sixty-three.” He wrote it on the clipboard, 6 a.m. 63, outside, and underlined it, once. “Two up on last year.” He looked at the jumper. “You’re not painting.”

“I’m a sophomore.”

“I know you’re a sophomore. I said it so you’d hear it.” Mr Luna looked past him at Alexander, at the white shirt buttoned at the cuffs, and at the hat in his hand, and back at the shirt. He looked at it for a long time. “Son.”

“Good morning, Mr Luna.”

“You want to keep that shirt?”

“I have allowed for it,” said Alexander.

“Roll your sleeves up. Keep ‘em up.”

“Thank you,” said Alexander. “I have considered it. I will keep them down. If they are down I will know where they are.”

Mr Luna thought about this, with no expression whatever, for about as long as he thought about a clue in pen.

“Huh,” he said. He pushed the butterscotch an inch across the desk, towards Alexander, and then, after a moment, towards Kessler, who had come down the stairs behind them without any of them hearing it. “You too, son. You painting?”

“Yes,” said Kessler.

Mr Luna looked at him over his glasses, at the lanyard and the black polo shirt and the face, for some time.

“You want to keep that shirt?”

“It is black,” said Kessler, and took a butterscotch, and put it in his pocket, and went to the doors.

Alexander took the pencil out of his pocket and ticked 06.12. Desk (Mr Luna). It was ten past.

---

The town was going up the hill again.

The Avenue in the grey light, the pavements full from the kerb to the shutters, families and dogs and a brass band, and over all of it the bell; and at the front, where the Avenue met the foot of the butte, the old families in their good shoes and the Lord Mayor in the chain of ferry rope, walking as though the road belonged to them.

Alexander walked through it with his hat in his hand and looked at everything, as a man looks at a cathedral he has studied from plates; and at the gate, when the small woman in the straw hat climbed on to the stone wall with her megaphone and her tablet, he stopped, and stood very still.

“Good morning, Tempe,” said the Heat Officer.

The town said good morning back. Alexander said it too, quietly, a fraction late, in his exact English.

“The overnight low at the site, taken at the foot of Hayden Butte, at five thirty-eight this morning, was…” She let it go on. Somebody shouted come on. “Sixty-three degrees.”

The town cheered. Old men took their hats off, and the brass band played something loud and not together, and beside Frederick, in the crowd, the German Emperor held his own hat against his chest, not quite as a man takes off a hat, and not quite not.

“She waited,” said Alexander, under the cheering.

“She always waits.”

“Eleven seconds.” He did not look away from the woman on the wall. “It is very well done.”

---

The rope was new.

It ran along the path where the path crossed the top of the A, a thick white rope on iron stakes with a sign hung on it in English and Spanish, FIRST-YEARS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT, because last year, Rhys said, reading it off his telephone, four hundred sophomores had come back to do the cracks again for fun and there had not been enough rollers.

Below the rope the first-years were going down on to the face of the letter by halls, to the buckets, hundreds of them in rows on the rock, white plastic with the sun on the side, and the stacks of rollers, and beside every row a sophomore with a clipboard. Palo Verde had the left leg, from the crossbar down, and the cracks. Frederick saw the white shirt go down on to the rock with the column, and the black polo shirt a pace behind it and a pace to the left, and lost them both among the hoods.

And on the flat rock at the top of the crossbar, in a gold wig, with a megaphone, stood Dev.

“Oh no,” said Rhys.

“FIRST YEARS,” said Dev.

The slope said something.

“That was Tucson. FIRST YEARS.”

Louder. Dev held up a sheet of paper. He held it up as though it were heavy.

“Okay. So. This is called the whitewash. It’s maroon. It’s called the whitewash.” He lowered the paper. “And I’m not saying what year it was first painted. I’ve been asked not to.” He looked down the left leg, at a particular place on it, for about a second. “In writing.”

Somewhere on the left leg, among the hoods, a single white sleeve went up and came down again.

“Don’t,” said Dev, to the whole slope.

---

Alexander’s part of the A was the lower third of the left leg, about four yards of it, and Frederick could see it from the rope if he leaned out over the stake.

There was a sophomore at the head of the row, a girl with a clipboard and a maroon band in her hair, and she was handing out rollers; and at the bottom of the row the white shirt stood and waited for one with its hands behind its back, as Frederick had seen it wait on the steps for a guard, and she gave it one and said “Do the flat first,” and Alexander said “Thank you,” and took out his pencil, and ticked something.

Frederick looked at his own watch. It was thirty-one minutes past six.

“He’s ticked paint issued,” he said.

“Was it issued at thirty-one?” said Sam.

“Yes.”

Sam wrote it down.

---

At thirty-two minutes past six, high above them, the town began to cheer, and Frederick heard the sun come up.

He heard it go up, the long rising sound of thousands on the top looking east over the mountains beyond Mesa; and he was on the west face, as he had been last year, in the blue shade of the hill, and did not see it. He did not mind. He did not mind last year either.

Below him on the left leg the white shirt did not look up. It was kneeling on the rock now, square, with the roller in its right hand and the tray beside its right knee, and it was painting.

It was painting in strips. Not stripes: strips, a roller’s width, from the inside edge of the leg to the outside edge, each one overlapping the last by exactly an inch, Frederick could see it from the rope, the way you would mow a lawn for a man who was going to measure it. A strip, and the roller back into the tray, and the tray turned a quarter so that the paint did not pool, and the next strip. Beside him, a pace to the left, the black polo shirt was doing the same, at the same speed, with its face looking at nothing; and between them the two strips went down the rock side by side and met in the middle, exactly, like the two halves of a zip.

“Christ,” said Rhys, softly.

On either side of them the rest of Palo Verde was going at the left leg the way a hall goes at a hill, laughing and swearing at the rollers, which dripped, a boy from the second floor on his back with a roller held over his face like a man under a car; and in the middle of it, in four yards of perfect overlapping strips, a white shirt and a black one went down the rock at nine feet a minute.

“He’s going to finish early,” said Sam.

“He’s going to finish at fifteen past.”

“How do you know?”

“Cracks is at fifteen past,” said Frederick.

---

At fifteen minutes past seven the white shirt put the roller down at the end of its last strip, and took out the pencil, and ticked, and put the pencil away, and dipped its fingers in the tray.

The cracks were done by hand. Frederick remembered the cold of the paint going in over his knuckles and up his wrists last year, and stood at the rope and remembered it in his hands.

Alexander did the cracks with two fingers.

He did them the way a man writes in a narrow column, with the first two fingers of his right hand together and the other two folded under, drawing the paint along each crack from the end nearest him to the end furthest, and then wiping the fingers on the rim of the tray, and the next crack. He did them all. Kessler did them all on his side. Nobody on the left leg was as slow, and nobody was as finished.

“There’s a deep one,” said Rhys, leaning on the rope. “Under the ledge. The one you did. You’ll need your whole arm, I said.”

“I know what you said.”

“He won’t use his whole arm.”

“No,” said Frederick.

Alexander looked at the deep crack under the ledge for some time. Then he put his hand into the crack to the wrist, and drew it along, and the paint went in; and he took his hand out, and the old pink line was maroon from end to end, and on the white of his right cuff, where the lip of the rock had touched it, there was a stripe.

One stripe. Maroon, a quarter of an inch wide, straight across the cuff as though it had been ruled.

Alexander looked at it.

He knelt on the face of Hayden Butte at twenty-five to eight in the first cool weather of the year and looked at his cuff, and Frederick saw him decide something, and saw that he had decided not to mind, and that it was costing him nothing at all; and he put his hand down at his side, so that the stripe sat across the outside of his wrist like a rule drawn under a sum.

Somewhere up the slope, very close, a camera went.

---

She was standing on the rock at the edge of the path a few yards above the left leg, outside the rope, on the town’s side of it, a woman of about sixty in a canvas hat, with two cameras on straps round her neck and one of them up to her eye.

She took it down. She looked at Alexander over the top of it. And then she came down the rock, slowly, in good boots, and ducked under the rope as though it were not there, because for her, Frederick supposed, after thirty-two of them, it was not.

Rhys began to stand up from the stake. Sam put a hand flat on his arm.

“City land,” said Sam, very quietly. “It’s the city’s hill.”

“I know it’s the city’s hill.”

“Then sit down.”

The woman stopped at the foot of the left leg with her notebook out, a small one, and a pencil.

“Gazette,” she said. “I do the first cool morning. Thirty-two years.” She looked at the strips, and at the cracks, and at the cuff. “I’ll need a name for the caption.”

Kessler, a pace to the left, did not move. He knelt on the rock with his fingers in the tray and looked at nothing, and Frederick, at the rope, watched him not move with everything he had.

Alexander stood up.

“Hohenzollern,” he said. “A.”

The woman wrote it down. She did not look up.

“First-year?”

“Yes.”

“Hall?”

“Palo Verde.”

“Palo Verde,” said the woman. “Of course. The cracks.” She wrote that too. And then she looked up, at last, at the face, and the shirt buttoned to the neck, and the single stripe across the cuff, for what was probably about four seconds; and then up the slope, past him, at the rope, and at a young man leaning on a stake in a maroon jumper with gold at the cuffs, for about one.

“Thank you, Mr Hohenzollern,” she said.

She closed the notebook and went back under the rope, and up the path with her two cameras, and did not look back.

---

“That’s the Arizona Gazette,” said Rhys.

“I know.”

“She knows who he is.”

“I know,” said Frederick. “She asked for his name. He gave it to her.” He was still holding the rope. He found that he was holding it hard, with both hands, and let go of it. “It’s his name.”

Down on the left leg Alexander took out the pencil and made a tick, and then, after a moment, a second mark beside it, smaller, which Frederick could not read from the rope.

“What’s he writing?” said Sam.

“I don’t know.”

“Was the photograph on the programme?”

“No,” said Frederick, and looked at his hands, which were dry, and had been dry all morning, and smelled of nothing at all.

---

Breakfast was at the mill.

The town came down off the hill at eight and sat at the long tables on the terrace under the strings of lights in whatever order it sat down, and Palo Verde’s left leg came down with it, maroon from the scalp to the shins, shining, and sat at the end of a table by the old millrace and ate eggs with its hands held out from its sides.

Alexander sat at the end of the bench in his white shirt with his hat on the table beside his plate, square to the edge, and the stripe on his cuff, and was the only person on the terrace who did not need a towel.

At the end of the table, tiny, brown, in a black dress with a gold cross, Mrs Montoya was eating her eggs. She looked down the table at the left leg, at all of it, and at the white shirt, and pushed the dish of butter an inch towards him.

“Butter first,” she said. “Then dish soap. Then you wait.”

Alexander looked at the butter, and at his hands, which were clean, and at his cuff.

“Thank you,” he said. “I think there is nothing to put it on.”

Mrs Montoya looked at the cuff for a long time.

“That’s not paint,” she said. “That’s a signature.” She pulled the butter back. “It won’t come out. Don’t try. It goes by Thanksgiving.” Then she looked up the bench at Frederick, with his dry hands round a coffee cup. “Last year you were to the elbows. Who’s this?”

“My roommate.”

“Hm,” said Mrs Montoya. She went back to her eggs. “You’ll want to watch that one,” she said, to the eggs. “That one’s too tidy.”

Alexander did not hear it. He was writing on the programme.

---

At noon Sam knocked on the door of 312 and came in without waiting to be told.

Alexander was at the desk by the door, at work on the box, which had waited for him at the day desk in Kessler’s keeping and was now nearly done. He had changed the shirt. The white one was on a hanger on the back of the wardrobe door, buttoned, with the stripe on the cuff turned outwards, and nobody had said anything about it.

Frederick was on the window bed with the jumper still on, because it was still October, and the History reader on his knees.

Sam held out his telephone.

It was the front page of the Arizona Gazette’s website, the whole width of it, and the photograph.

It was the moment after the cuff. A young man in a white shirt buttoned to the neck was standing on the face of the A in the blue shade of the butte, upright, with a roller held in his left hand as a man holds a rolled umbrella, and he was looking down at his right wrist, where a single stripe of maroon ran straight across the white, and his face was perfectly grave and perfectly calm; and there was not a drop on him anywhere else, not on the shirt or the grey trousers or his hands or his face, and behind him, out beyond the edge of the hill, was the Valley, lit, gold, to the mountains.

In the corner, a little out of focus, a man in a black polo shirt knelt on the rock with his fingers in a tray, looking at nothing.

Under it, in small type, the caption said: A. Hohenzollern, a first-year of Palo Verde Hall, at the whitewash of the A on Tuesday morning. Palo Verde does the cracks.

Frederick looked at it for a long time.

He remembered his own. He remembered it without wanting to: the jumper pushed up and the arms held up maroon to the elbow and the paint running off them, and his head back and his eyes nearly shut, laughing. It had been a photograph of a man to whom something had happened. This was a photograph of a man to whom nothing had happened except exactly what he had been told would.

“It’s been up forty minutes,” said Sam.

“It’s a good photograph.”

“It’s a very good photograph.” Sam looked at it himself. “I’m not in it.”

“You were at the rope.”

“I know. I was working.” Sam put the telephone away. “The wire’s got it.”

“I know what that means,” said Frederick.

Alexander had stopped writing. He had not turned round. He sat at the desk by the door with the pencil held a quarter of an inch above the paper, quite still, and Frederick could see the side of his face and nothing else.

“May I see it?” said Alexander.

Sam gave him the telephone. Alexander looked at the photograph, at the whole of it, for perhaps ten seconds, as he read a page; and then at the caption, twice.

“It is accurate,” he said, and gave it back.

“It’s going round the world,” said Frederick.

“Yes. I expect it is.” Alexander laid the pencil down beside the box, parallel to the edge of the desk, exactly, and looked at it lying there. Then he took the programme out of his shirt pocket and unfolded it, and Frederick saw, beside 07.15. Cracks., the tick, and beside the tick the second mark he had made on the rock, small, in pencil.

It was a minus sign.

“What’s that for?” said Frederick.

Alexander folded the programme again along its creases.

“The cuff,” he said. “It was not on the programme.” He put it in the drawer and shut the drawer. “I have allowed for it.”