Once

There was nothing on the desk by the door.

It was the seventh morning. He had not meant to count them, and had counted them anyway, the way you count stairs in a house you know: Monday, nothing; Tuesday, nothing; Wednesday, nothing; and then Thursday, and the pencil. After Thursday he had stopped looking at the desk first thing. He looked at it last, with his eyes still shut.

He opened his eyes.

The desk by the door had the Charter on it, the little blue one, open, face up, at Article Nine. It had been open at Article Nine since Thursday. Beside it there was the grey box from Saturday, with its red seal whole, and the pencil, lying where it had been put down, at an angle to the edge of the desk that was nothing in particular. It was not crooked. It was not anything. It was a pencil that somebody had put down.

On the bed by the door, Alexander was lying on his back with his hands folded on the blanket.

He was awake. He had the look of somebody who had been awake for some time and had arranged himself, at some point in the dark, into the position of a man asleep, and then had not slept.

“Good morning, Frederick.”

“Morning.”

“It is ten past six.”

“I know.”

“You are usually up at six.”

“It’s Sunday.”

Alexander considered this. “Yes,” he said. “It is Sunday.”

---

Kessler came at seven with the box.

He knocked once, which was how Kessler knocked, and came in with it held flat in both hands, grey, with the red seal, and put it on the desk by the door on top of Saturday’s, and squared it to the one below with the side of his thumb. Then he looked at the desk. He looked at the two boxes, and the Charter open at Article Nine, and the pencil. He did not look at the bed by the door.

Then he looked, a quarter of an inch, at Frederick.

Frederick looked back.

“Thank you, Kessler,” said Alexander, from the bed, correctly.

Kessler inclined his head, and went out, and closed the door so quietly that it did not click.

---

The notice was on the kitchen door when he went down.

It had been typed, on the lounge printer, and fixed to the door at the four corners with tape, square, and it said:

SUNDAY LUNCH. 13.00. KITCHEN, GROUND FLOOR. TWO RINGS. ATTENDANCE IS NOT COMPULSORY. IT IS EXPECTED. L. VOGT.

Under it somebody had written in biro, what is it, and under that, in a small hard hand, FOOD.

Makayla was standing in front of it in a dressing gown with a mug, reading it for what was clearly not the first time.

“Is she allowed to do that?”

“Do what?”

“Expect people.” Makayla looked at the notice. “She got Doug to come on a Sunday.”

“She wrote to him,” said Frederick.

“Who writes to Doug?”

In the lounge, Rhys and Felix were at the card table under the scorpion poster, going through last night’s whist hand by hand, with Sam’s notebook open between them as evidence.

“You led it,” Rhys was saying. “You led it. On the fourth trick.”

“Yes,” said Felix. “It was the right card at the wrong time.”

Rhys put his head in his hands, and went pink from the ears inwards.

“Is Alex coming?” he said, through his fingers. “To lunch. Lena said to ask. And we need a fourth after, Lena’s doing the dishes and she won’t play angry.”

“I’ll ask,” said Frederick.

---

He asked.

Alexander was sitting at the desk by the door, dressed, in the linen jacket, buttoned, and the white shirt buttoned to the neck, with the Charter open in front of him at Article Nine and his hands folded on the desk beside it. He had not opened the boxes. He had not moved the pencil.

“Lena’s doing lunch. At one.”

“Yes. I saw the notice.” Alexander looked at the Charter. “Attendance is expected.”

“You don’t have to.”

“It says it is not compulsory,” said Alexander. “It says it is expected. That is a very clear distinction. She has drafted it well.” He looked up. “Yes. Thank you. At one.”

“And whist after. Rhys needs a fourth.”

“Then I shall be the fourth,” said Alexander, and looked back down at the page, and did not turn it.

---

The kitchen was built for perhaps four people and had eleven in it.

It was a narrow room with a strip light and a window onto the arcade, one long counter, a refrigerator that hummed in two notes, and the cooker, on which, since the seventeenth of September and a letter of two pages, both rings worked. Lena stood at them in an apron that said PALO VERDE HALL DINING SERVICES, which she had not been issued, with a wooden spoon in one hand and the other hand on her hip, and stirred a very large pan of something green and orange and pale, and did not look round.

“Sit,” she said.

There were never enough chairs. People sat on the counter and the windowsill and two upturned crates from the post room, and Felix stood in the corner and held the refrigerator shut, because the door no longer stayed shut on its own and he had not yet decided how to make it.

“What is it?” said Makayla.

“The one from September.” Lena turned the spoon over. “From Leipzig. You ate it then and you will eat it again. This time there are dumplings.” She looked round the kitchen at all of them, one at a time. “You will eat them.”

“Are there crabs in it?” said the boy from 305. “My roommate said there’s crabs in it.”

“In Leipzig there are crayfish,” said Lena. “In Tempe there is a budget.”

Alexander came in at one o’clock exactly, in the jacket, and stood in the doorway for a moment, looking for the place where he should be, the way Frederick had seen him look along a line of chairs in the Marble Hall at Potsdam; and Sam got up off his crate without a word and gave it to him, and sat on the floor.

“Thank you,” said Alexander, and sat.

Lena put a plate in front of him. She put a plate in front of everybody, from the pan, with a ladle, with exactly the same amount on each, and then a dumpling on each, from a second pan, with a slotted spoon, in the same place on each plate, at the top, like the twelve on a clock.

“Is there Thanksgiving in Germany?” said Makayla, to Alexander, with her plate on her knee. Since October she had asked him about Germany at every meal, with great kindness, as one might ask an exchange student.

“Not as you have it,” said Alexander. “There are three differences.”

Rhys, on the windowsill, put his fork down to listen.

“First, it is called Erntedankfest, and it is on the first Sunday of October, not the fourth Thursday of November. Second, it is in the churches, not in the houses. People bring the harvest to the altar, the vegetables and the bread, and the church is full of it, and afterwards it is given away.” He looked at his plate, at the peas and the carrots and the dumpling at twelve o’clock. “Third, there is no turkey. There is a crown.”

“A crown?”

“Of wheat. Woven. It is carried in at the front, and hung up, and stays up until the next year.” He considered. “It is not worn.”

“That,” said Makayla, “is so cute.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “I have always thought so.”

He picked up his fork.

Frederick, on the counter by the bread bin with his own plate, watched him eat. He did not mean to. He found that he was doing it the way Sam counted, without deciding to: one forkful, the peas and a piece of carrot, properly, from the edge of the plate, as he had been taught; and a second, from the same edge; and a third, of the dumpling, a small piece cut with the side of the fork. Then he put the fork down on the plate. He put it down at an angle, across the rim, not on it, the way somebody puts a fork down who is going to pick it up again in a moment.

He did not pick it up again.

“It is very good,” said Alexander, to Lena. “Thank you.”

“Yes,” said Lena. “I know.”

She was looking at the plate. She looked at it for about as long as she had looked at the kitchen’s second ring in September, before she went upstairs and typed two pages. Then she looked at the door, where Kessler was not, and at Felix by the refrigerator, who did not look back at her; and then at Frederick, on the counter, who did.

“There is more,” said Lena, to the whole kitchen, in the voice she used for complaints. “There is a great deal more. Nobody will leave this kitchen until it is eaten.”

“Is that expected,” said the boy from 305, “or compulsory?”

“Now it is compulsory,” said Lena.

---

Alexander was the fourth at whist.

He sat opposite Rhys, as Rhys’s partner, under the scorpion poster, with Sam and Felix against them, and held his cards in a neat fan in his left hand, and played them one at a time, laying each down square on the card table with two fingers, the way he signed things. Lena did the dishes, angrily, with the kitchen door open so that she could hear the score.

He played correctly. He played every card the way it should have been played, and said “Yours” when a trick was Sam’s and “Ours” when it was theirs, and on the sixth hand, with three tricks to go, he led a small heart, correctly, and Sam took it with the queen; and then Sam led a club, and Alexander followed with a low one, and Felix took the trick, and Rhys stared at the table.

“You had the ten,” said Sam.

Alexander looked at the cards in his hand.

“Yes,” he said. “I did.”

“Clubs were out. The ten was the best club. You’d have had that trick.”

“Yes.” Alexander looked at the ten of clubs in his fan for a moment, as though it had been put there by somebody else while he was not looking. “I did not count it.”

Sam did not say anything. He wrote the score in the notebook, in pencil, in the column, and drew the line under it, and did not look at Frederick, which was how Frederick knew that Sam had seen it.

At twenty to three Alexander laid his cards face down on the table in a square stack.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I think I will go up.”

“We’re one hand off,” said Rhys.

“I know. I am sorry.” Alexander stood. “Felix will take my hand. He will play it better than I have.”

Felix looked at the stack of cards. Then he reached over and turned it face up, and looked at it, and looked at the door through which Alexander had gone, and put the cards down again, face down, square.

“No,” said Felix. “I will not.”

---

He went up at three.

He went up the forty-five steps, slowly, because he wanted them to take longer than they did; and on the landing between the second floor and the third he stopped by the step under the narrow window, where the thermometer said 79, as it always said, and stood there for a while with his hand on the maroon rail.

He had been carrying it for five years.

He had been carrying it since a January night in a cold dome at Königsberg, with the slot open to the stars, and a boy of sixteen standing under it with his hands in his pockets, asking him for it. If I start to become him. If I start to be good at it in that way. I would like you to tell me. And he had said yes, once, I’ll only say it once; and the boy had said, Once is enough. If it is you.

He had thought, for five years, that he knew what he would spend it on. A speech, one day, in Berlin, very good, with a great many people cheering it, and Alexander standing exactly where he should stand for exactly as long as he should stand there; and Frederick finding him afterwards in some corridor, and saying it. He had imagined the corridor more than once.

It was not going to be the corridor.

He went up the second half-flight, and along the corridor, past RHYS and SAM, past FELIX and K., to 312, where the sun on the door said ALEX, and the sun beside it said nothing, because FRED had gone again on Friday; and went in.

---

Alexander was at the desk by the door.

He was sitting upright, in the jacket, with the Charter open in front of him at Article Nine. His hands were on the desk on either side of it. He was not reading. His eyes were on the page, and they were not moving along it; they were resting on it, about a third of the way down, the way eyes rest on a window when the person behind them is looking at nothing outside.

The two boxes were where Kessler had put them. The pencil was where it had been put.

Frederick sat down on the bed by the window.

Outside, through the blind, which was up, the car park was flat and bright in the November sun, and the butte stood up beyond it, brown, with the A on its flank, maroon, very clean, a month old. Somebody was loading a car with laundry. A door slammed. On the desk the telephone in Alexander’s jacket pocket did not ring, because it had been turned off some time in the week, and Frederick had seen it lying dark, and had not said anything about that either.

“Alexander.”

“Yes.”

He looked at the side of his cousin’s face. He looked at the collar, buttoned, and the hands on the desk, and the page that had been Article Nine since Thursday, and the pencil.

“You’re not all right,” said Frederick.

---

Nothing happened.

Alexander did not move. His eyes stayed on the page, a third of the way down. Outside, the car with the laundry started, and went out of the car park and along the road past the dentist’s, and the sound of it went away round the corner and was gone.

The silence went on.

It went on for longer than Frederick had ever heard Alexander be silent, and he had heard him be silent at a funeral, at fourteen, three rows ahead, without once moving his head. It was not his father’s kind of silence, a man going to the shelf for the first word. Nobody was going to a shelf. It was the silence of somebody who has been asked a question in a room and has heard it, all of it, every word, and is standing quite still in the middle of the room with it, because there is nowhere in the room to put it down.

On the desk, Alexander’s right hand moved.

It moved towards the pencil, an inch, and stopped. It stayed there, an inch from the pencil, with the fingers open, for some time.

Then it went back to where it had been.

“No,” said Alexander.

He said it to the page. He said it quite clearly, in the exact English, correctly, with nothing in front of it and nothing after it, the way he answered a question in an audience to which the answer was no.

Frederick did not say anything.

Alexander looked up from the Charter. He did not look at Frederick. He looked at the wall above the desk, the painted breeze-block the colour of a hospital that had given up, where there was nothing at all but a drawing pin that somebody had left in it a year ago, or ten.

“That is the arrangement,” said Alexander.

“It is,” said Frederick.

---

They sat there.

Neither of them said anything else. There was nothing in the arrangement about what you said after; nobody had thought about after, in the dome, at sixteen, with the stars in the slot. It had only ever been about the once.

Alexander’s hands lay on the desk. After a while he closed the Charter, slowly, on its ribbon, at Article Nine, so that the ribbon kept the place, and put both hands flat on the cover. Frederick sat on the window bed with his elbows on his knees and looked at the floor between the two beds, where there was a strip of carpet the colour of nothing, and a Glacier bottle cap, blue, that Tyler had dropped on Thursday and nobody had picked up.

At ten to four Alexander said, to the wall, “Thank you.”

“Don’t.”

“It was correctly done.” A pause. “You said it once.”

“I know.”

“I would like it noted.” Alexander looked at the closed Charter under his hands. “That it was correctly done.”

“It’s noted,” said Frederick, and found that he could not, for the moment, say anything else, and did not try.

---

Tyler came at four.

He came as he always came, with one knock, with his hood up and his headphones round his neck and a bottle of Glacier in each hand, and stood in the doorway and looked at the room. He looked at Frederick on the window bed, and Alexander at the desk with his hands flat on the shut Charter, and the two grey boxes.

“Hey,” said Tyler.

“Hi, Tyler.”

“Brayden’s still doing the podcast,” said Tyler. “In the room. About Mesa.” He came in and sat down on the floor between the beds, with his back against the window bed, where he always sat, and put the headphones on, and then took one side off again. He held out one of the bottles, up and to the left, towards the desk by the door. “You want a Glacier?”

Alexander turned round in his chair.

He looked at the bottle for a moment, blue, held up to him from the floor by a boy in a hood from Parma, Ohio.

“Yes,” said Alexander. “Thank you.”

He took it. He held it on his knee in both hands, upright, with the label to the front. He did not open it.

Tyler put the headphones back on.

The three of them sat in 312 in the afternoon. The light came in through the blind and moved, very slowly, up the side of the desk by the door, and over the two boxes, and onto the wall. Alexander sat with the bottle on his knee. Frederick lay back on the window bed and watched the light move, and listened to the hall: the foosball in the lounge, which Felix had fixed and which was now louder than it had ever been, and Lena’s voice on the stairs, complaining to somebody out loud as if in writing.

At half past five Tyler took the headphones off.

“It’s real quiet in here today,” he said.

Nobody said anything.

“Like, quieter.” Tyler looked round at the room, with his face open, interested, complete, as it always was for whatever was in front of it. “It’s good quiet, though?”

Frederick did not answer.

“It is quiet,” said Alexander, after a while, from the desk, with the bottle on his knee.

Tyler considered this, for some time, as he had considered the answer about what an Emperor did.

“Okay,” said Tyler, and put the headphones back on, and did not leave until twenty to seven, which was fifty minutes later than he usually left; and when he did he stood up and took the empty bottle from beside him on the floor, and the bottle cap he had dropped on Thursday, and put them both in his hood, and looked at the bottle on Alexander’s knee, unopened, and did not ask for it back.

“Later,” said Tyler.

“Goodbye, Tyler,” said Alexander.

---

At five to seven Frederick took his telephone and went out.

He did not say where he was going. Alexander did not ask. He was still at the desk, with the bottle of Glacier standing on the closed Charter now, exactly in the middle of the cover, where he had put it at some point while Frederick was not watching; and the light had gone off the wall, and the room was blue, and neither of them had turned on a lamp.

The corridor was bright. Callum was outside 308 with the handbook under his arm, having a conversation with Makayla about candles that Makayla appeared to be winning.

At the top of the stairs, his telephone lit up in his hand.

Theo.

It was seven. It was always seven, on a Sunday, to the minute, because Theo had set an alarm for it in August of last year and had never once let it go, not for an anatomy examination, not for a girl.

He looked at it.

He thought about answering it. He thought about Theo’s face on the screen in the small room, and Desmond behind him in his scarf, and how is it, and he ticks things; and about what Theo would see, in the first two seconds, before Frederick had said a word, because Theo always saw it in the first two seconds.

He let it ring.

When it stopped he typed, with his thumb, standing at the top of the stairs:

Later.

He looked at it for a moment, the one word, which he had never sent to Theo in his life, on a Sunday, at seven. Then he sent it, and put the telephone in his pocket, and went down the half-flight to the landing between the third floor and the second, to the step under the narrow window, where the thermometer said 79; and sat down, and took the telephone out again, and looked at the clock on it, and did the sum.