Parallel

The pencil was not parallel to the edge of the desk.

Frederick saw it at six, from the window bed, with his head still on the pillow, because he had looked at the desk by the door every morning that week before he looked at anything else, and he had known since Tuesday that he was doing it and had not stopped.

There was no programme. There had been no programme on Wednesday either. That was not what he saw.

He saw the box. Wednesday’s box, grey, the size of a large book, square to the edge of the desk on the left side, where the boxes went, with the red seal across the lid where the lid met the side, whole. And lying across the corner of it, with one end on the lid of the box and the other on the wood of the desk, the pencil.

It lay at an angle. Not a large one. Twenty degrees, perhaps, or twenty-five; Frederick did not have a protractor and would not have used one. It lay as a pencil lies when somebody has put it down without looking where it went, which was how every pencil Frederick had ever owned had lain on every desk he had ever had, and how no pencil on that desk had lain since the seventeenth of August.

He lay and looked at it.

“Christ,” he said, very quietly, to the pillow.

Alexander was sitting on the edge of the bed by the door, dressed, in his shirt with the cuffs buttoned, with his shoes on and laced and his hands on his knees.

“Good morning,” said Alexander.

“Morning.”

“You said something.”

“I said Christ. I’m awake. It’s Thursday.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “It is Thursday.”

---

Frederick thought about Wednesday in the shower, with the water running hot and the queue outside the door and the extractor fan rattling in the ceiling.

He tried to find the box in it. He found the knock at seven, the one knock, and Kessler in the corridor, and Alexander signing the slip and putting the box down on the desk, square, beside the pencil, which had been parallel then; he was almost sure it had been parallel then. He found breakfast, and the coffee, and the banana put in the front pocket of the bag, where the pencils went. He found Alexander going to Brennan at five to nine, and coming back at half past five with the library book, and sitting at the desk, and reading, with the box at his left elbow. He found dinner, a bread roll, torn into four, two quarters eaten. He found the evening. He found Alexander at the desk from seven until twenty-nine minutes past ten, reading the library book, making marks on a sheet of paper beside it, and the box at his left elbow, and at half past ten the light going off.

He did not find the box being opened.

He stood under the water and went through it again, the whole of Wednesday, slowly, as Sam went through a column he had added twice; and it came out the same. He had been in the room from seven until half past ten. He had been on the window bed with the History reader and then with Spanish and then with nothing. He would have heard the knife come out of the drawer. He would have heard the seal.

He turned the water off. Somebody outside the door said finally, dude, and he said sorry, and went out past them with his towel.

---

The knock came at seven. One knock.

Kessler stood in the corridor with Thursday’s box and the courier’s slip on its clipboard, and held them out across the threshold in both hands, as he had held them out every morning since August; and Alexander took the clipboard and signed, in the square hand, the date and 07.00, and gave it back, and took the box.

He turned with it to the desk.

He put it down on top of Wednesday’s. He put it down square, the edges exactly over the edges, so that the two boxes stood one on the other like two volumes of the same book, and he squared them both to the edge of the desk with the flat of his hand, once; and his hand, squaring them, moved the pencil, which slid off the corner of the lid on to the wood, and lay there, at an angle, a different angle, and he did not look at it.

Then he took his hand away.

Frederick was standing by the window with his shirt half buttoned. He saw it. And because he was facing the door, and Kessler was in the door, he saw Kessler see it.

Kessler’s eyes went to the desk. They went to the two boxes, one on the other, and the seal on the lower one, whole, which from the doorway at that height he could see; and to the pencil lying on the wood at its angle. They stayed there for perhaps a second. Nothing else in Kessler’s face moved at all. Then the eyes came up from the desk, past Alexander, who had turned away to pick up his bag, and across the room to the window, to Frederick, standing with his shirt half buttoned, and found him looking.

They looked at each other across 312.

It was not long. It was about as long as it takes to read a number off a thermometer. Kessler looked at Frederick, and saw that Frederick had seen, and Frederick saw him see it; and neither of them said anything; and then Kessler’s eyes went back to nothing, to the middle distance, to the place a yard in front of him where they always were, and he said “Sir,” to the room in general, and took the clipboard down the corridor to 314, and the door closed.

Alexander put his bag on his shoulder.

“Breakfast?” he said.

“Yes,” said Frederick, and did up the rest of his buttons, and found that his hands were not quite steady doing it, and that he did not want Alexander to see that, and turned to the window to do the last one.

---

At breakfast the boy from 305 sat down at their table with a tray of eggs and said, before he had picked up his fork:

“Dude. Alex. Yesterday.”

Alexander looked up from his coffee.

“Brennan,” said the boy from 305, to Frederick, because Frederick had not been there. “In the Charter. He did the question again, the one on the board, the citizen one. Can a man be a citizen and a sovereign at once. He’s been doing it every Wednesday. And he asks Alex, like he always asks Alex, he goes Mr Hohenzollern, and Alex just…” He put his fork down. “He just took him apart. Like, politely. In three bits. And Brennan stood there with the chalk for like ten seconds and then he goes I’ll need to think about that, and then he goes I’m still a republican, and the whole room clapped.” He picked his fork up again. “It was sick.”

“What did you say?” said Frederick.

Alexander put his coffee down, square to the edge of the tray.

“I said three things,” he said. The pause. Frederick heard it, and heard that it was the same length it had always been. “First, that a citizen is a person who owes the law and is owed by it, and that a sovereign in a constitutional state is such a person, because the law binds him and protects him; so he is a citizen in the first sense. Second, that a citizen is also a person who may take part in making the law, and that a sovereign who acts only on advice takes no part in it, and a sovereign who acts on his own takes too much; so in the second sense he cannot be a citizen in either case. Third, that the question therefore depends on which sense Professor Brennan means, and that he means both, and that this is why it is a good question and why he asks it every Wednesday.” He picked the coffee up again. “He said he would need to think about it. I think he has thought about it for twenty-three years. I think he wished to see whether I would say the third thing.”

“See,” said the boy from 305, to the table. “Sick.”

Rhys had stopped eating. He had the fifth highlighter out, the one in the colour nobody had a name for, and was writing 1. owes / owed 2. makes 3. both on the back of his hand.

“That’s really good,” said Rhys. “That’s an essay. That’s the essay.”

“It is due on the first of December,” said Alexander. “I have not begun it.”

It was a perfect answer. It was clear and exact and in three parts, and it was warm at the end, about Brennan, and it was the kind of thing he said; and he said it in the voice he used for everything, level and correct, with his shirt buttoned to the neck and his hair combed and his cuffs buttoned, and a coffee in front of him and nothing else.

Frederick looked at him across the table and could not find anything wrong with him at all.

That was the thing. He sat with his waffle and looked, as he had looked at the column in the shower, and there was nothing to find. Every answer was correct. Every button was done. The pause in front of every sentence was the length it had always been. If Frederick had not seen the desk, he would have said, if anybody had asked him, that his cousin was perfectly well; and if anybody had asked his cousin, his cousin would have said so too, correctly, in three parts, and been believed.

I was very composed. I was composed for two years.

He put a banana down on the table beside the coffee.

“Thank you,” said Alexander, and put it in the front pocket of his bag. “For later.”

---

At one o’clock Frederick went back to 312.

He did not have to. He had Spanish at two, on the other side of the mall, and he had told Sam he would be in the library between, and he walked out of the dining hall and past the library and across the road and in at the glass doors of Palo Verde Hall and up the forty-five steps and along the corridor, and unlocked the door of 312, and went in, and stood there.

The room was empty. Alexander was in the library, at his table by the window. The blind was down. The bed by the door was made in hospital corners, as it was made every morning, with the blanket turned down at the top the width of a hand.

On the desk the two boxes stood one on the other, square to the edge, both seals whole. Beside them the little blue Charter lay open, face up, at Article Nine, where it had lain since the morning.

And beside them, on the wood, the pencil, at its angle.

Frederick stood over it.

He looked at it for a long time. It was a pencil. It was yellow, with a black end, and it had been sharpened that week in the little steel sharpener from Potsdam with the crank, which the boy from 305 had brought back that morning with a note on it that said THANKS ALEX; it was about two-thirds of its length; and it lay on the desk at about twenty-five degrees to the edge, with its point towards the boxes, as a pencil lies.

He put out his hand.

He did not know he was going to. He put out his right hand, with the first finger and thumb a little apart, the way you would pick up a pencil to move it an inch, and held it there, over the desk, an inch above the wood, an inch from the pencil.

It would take a second. He could lay it square. He could lay it parallel to the edge, exactly, as it had lain every morning since August, and go to Spanish, and Alexander would come back at half past five and sit down and see it lying as it always lay and not know anybody had touched it.

His hand stayed where it was.

Then he took it back. He put it in his pocket, as though it might do it anyway, and stood a moment longer in the empty room with the blind down; and he understood, standing there, that if he straightened the pencil he would be doing it so that he did not have to see it, and that that was what everybody had done for two years, in Potsdam, at the guard and in the Marble Hall and at the regimental reception, the colonel who went home and told his wife that the young Emperor was very composed; they had all straightened the pencil, every one of them, so that they did not have to see it.

He left it where it was.

He locked the door behind him and went to Spanish and was eleven minutes late, and the professor said Señor Hanover in a voice that meant again, and he said lo siento and sat down and did not hear anything for fifty minutes.

---

Tyler came at four.

He sat on the floor between the beds with his back against the window bed and his hood up and his Glacier and his headphones round his neck, and he looked round the room, at the window bed, where Frederick was, and the desk by the door, where nobody was, and the two boxes on it, and the pencil, and he did not look at any of them any longer than he looked at anything else.

“Quiet,” said Tyler, with satisfaction.

“Yes.”

“Brayden’s got a guest. For the podcast. Another guy from Mesa.” Tyler drank some Glacier. “They’re doing an episode about which part of Mesa’s best.” He put the headphones on. “It’s all the same part.”

At half past five Alexander came in with the library book under his arm.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “Good afternoon, Tyler.”

Tyler lifted one side of his headphones. “Hey, Alex.”

Alexander sat down at the desk by the door. He put the library book down in front of him, and opened it at the page where the Mercer quiz was marking his place, and took a fresh sheet of paper from the drawer for his notes, and moved the two boxes six inches to the left so that they were out of the way, and squared them to the edge again with the flat of his hand.

Then he picked up the pencil.

Frederick watched him pick it up. He watched him make a mark in the margin of the sheet of paper, small, and another, and read, and make a third; and then put the pencil down, on the wood, beside the paper, without looking, as a man puts a pencil down when he is reading; and it lay at an angle. A different angle. Thirty degrees, perhaps, the other way.

Alexander read. He turned a page. He did not look at the pencil.

On the floor between the beds Tyler’s thumbs moved on his telephone, and the small sounds came from it of whatever he was doing, and nobody in the room said anything, which was the point of the room; and Frederick sat on the window bed with the Spanish book open on his knees at a page he had not read, and looked at his cousin’s back, straight, in the white shirt, at the desk, under the lamp, and the two sealed boxes at his left elbow, and the pencil, and did not say anything either.

---

At eight Felix came to the door of 312 with a pack of cards.

He stood in the doorway, tall and fair and quiet, with the cards in one hand and a screwdriver in the other, because Felix was always holding a screwdriver, and said, in his careful English, “We play whist in the lounge. Rhys and Sam and Lena and I. Lena has made biscuits.” He looked at Alexander. “If one of us is tired, you could take his hand. Rhys is often tired. He plays badly when he is tired.”

Alexander looked up from the library book.

“Thank you, Felix,” he said. “No. I have the box.”

Felix looked at the desk. Frederick watched him look. He looked at the two boxes, one on the other, and his eyes went across them the way the eyes of a man who fixes things go across a thing that has a fault in it, and for a moment Frederick thought he would say something, and Felix did not; he was a protection officer, and twenty-six, and Kessler’s, and Frederick saw him decide, very quickly, that it was not his to say.

“Of course,” said Felix. “Another time.”

“Another time,” said Alexander, and went back to the library book.

He did not open the box. Frederick sat on the window bed until half past ten and watched him not open it. He read the library book, and made marks on the paper, and put the pencil down at whatever angle it fell, and picked it up again, and at twenty-nine minutes past ten he closed the library book with the Mercer quiz in it and laid it on the right of the desk, square, and stood up, and took off his shoes, the left and then the right, and put them side by side under the end of the bed with the toes exactly level.

At half past ten exactly his light went off.

---

Frederick did not sleep.

He lay on the window bed with the blind down and the inch of orange at the edge of it and the black shoulder of the butte in the inch, and listened to the hall go quiet round him: the last doors, the last voices in the corridor, somebody laughing on the floor above, the boy from 305 practising nothing, the pipes, the hum of the chillers on the roof two floors up, which you only heard after midnight, when everything else had stopped.

He thought about the arrangement.

He had not thought about it for a long time. It had been made in the old observatory at Königsberg, under the slot in the dome, in nine degrees of frost, the night after the crown, when they were sixteen; and it was very simple. Each of them would warn the other once. Once, and not again. Once is enough, Alexander had said. If it is you. And Lukas, on the floor with his back against the iron of the mount, who said one thing an evening, had said his thing, in German, which was that he would have said it more than once; and Alexander had said that he knew, and that that was why he had asked Frederick.

Once. He had not spent it. In nearly five years he had never come near spending it, and he had not thought, until that week, that he ever would.

He lay and thought about what it would be, if he spent it. What he would say. He found that he did not know. He found that every sentence he tried was too long, or had a reason in it, or an argument, or a list of things he had seen, boxes and pencils and halves of salads and four squares of a waffle, and that Alexander would answer every one of them correctly, in three parts, and be right, and nothing would have been warned at all.

The clock over the door had a red second hand, and in the dark he could not see it, but he could hear it, very faintly, if he held his breath.

At three he turned his head.

The corridor light came in under the door in its thin line, across the floor to the leg of the desk, and up the leg, and further than that, at an angle, over the end of the bed by the door, so that there was a faint grey on the blanket there, and on the shape under it.

Alexander was lying on his back.

He was not asleep. Frederick could see that. He was lying perfectly straight under the blanket, which was turned down at the top the width of a hand, as it was every night, with his head in the middle of the pillow and his face towards the ceiling; and his hands were outside the blanket, on top of it, on his chest, folded, the right over the left, the thumbs side by side, as they were folded in his lap at a floor meeting, as they were folded on a seventh step on a staircase in Berlin; and his eyes were open.

They were open, and looking at the ceiling, at nothing, at the painted breeze-block in the dark; and they did not move.

Frederick lay and looked at him across the width of the room.

He did not speak. He did not move. He thought that if he moved Alexander would hear it, and close his eyes, and lie with them closed, correctly, until Frederick was asleep; and he did not want that. He did not want to be one more person in a long line of people who had been given the composed version because they had looked.

So he lay still, and watched, and the red second hand went round in the dark where he could not see it.

At four the hands had not moved. The eyes had not closed.

Neither of them said anything. Across the road, over the dentist’s, a blind was down that would go down an inch in the morning if anybody looked at it. Two floors up, the chillers hummed on the roof for nobody. On the desk by the door, at an angle, the pencil lay where it had fallen, beside two grey boxes that had never been late, with their seals whole.