Not My Algorithm

At six Alexander took the questionnaire out of the second box.

He had unpacked the first box in the two hours before it, in silence, into the wardrobe by the door and the shelf over the desk by the door: four shirts, white, folded; two pairs of dark trousers; the linen jacket, which he had taken off at ten to five and hung up on a hanger he had brought with him, a wooden one; a stack of books with their spines all one way; a box of pencils; a reading lamp; a small framed photograph that he stood on the desk and turned a little towards the wall, so that Frederick could not see it from the window bed and was not, he understood, meant to. He had made no remark about any of it. Frederick had sat on the window bed with the book about the Four-Year War open on his knees at the same page for two hours and made no remark either.

The questionnaire was in a clear plastic folder. Alexander took it out of the folder and unfolded it and held it so that Frederick could read the top of it across the room.

UNIVERSITY OF THE MARCH. RESIDENCE LIFE. ROOMMATE MATCHING QUESTIONNAIRE. CONFIDENTIAL.

“I printed it,” said Alexander. “Before I submitted it. I always keep a copy of what I have said.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“Did you complete one?”

“In April.”

“Then we may compare.” Alexander looked down at the sheet. “Question one. What time do you usually get up?”

There was a pause in 312.

“Before six,” said Frederick.

“Before six,” said Alexander, reading. “Question two. Do you read in bed?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.” He moved his finger down the sheet. “Question three. What temperature do you prefer the room to be?”

Frederick looked at the beige box on the wall by the door, with the dial and the little window in it, which said, at that moment, 68.

“Sixty-eight.”

“Sixty-eight,” said Alexander. “Question four. How often do you expect to have overnight guests? The choices are often, sometimes, rarely and never.”

“Never.”

“Never,” said Alexander. He looked at the rest of the sheet. “There are seven more. Are you a morning person. Do you study with music. Are you tidy. Do you smoke. Do you intend to cook in the room. Do you mind a roommate who prays. And Is there anything else your roommate should know?”

“What did you put?”

“Yes, no, yes, no, no, no,” said Alexander. “And no.”

Frederick looked at the window.

“Yes, no, yes, no, no, no,” he said. “And no.”

Alexander folded the questionnaire along its creases and put it back in the plastic folder and laid the folder on the desk by the door, beside the pencil, with its edge to the edge of the desk.

“It is a very good algorithm,” he said.

---

“I didn’t know you’d applied,” said Frederick.

“No.”

“Nobody told me.”

“No. I told nobody.” Alexander sat down on the chair at the desk by the door, upright, with his hands on his knees. “Three people knew that I had enrolled. Kessler, because he had to enrol with me. The Chancellor, because he approves the arrangements for the boxes. And Mama, because I cannot keep anything from Mama, and have stopped trying.” He considered. “None of them knew the room.”

“How could they not know the room?”

“Because I did not.” Alexander took a letter out of the plastic folder, behind the questionnaire, and held it up. “Palo Verde Hall, room 312. Your roommate has asked that their name be withheld until move-in under the privacy provision. We hope you understand.” He put the letter back. “I understood. I assumed it was a person of a nervous disposition.”

Frederick looked at him.

“It’s Kimura’s,” he said. “The privacy provision. She had it put on my file. It means the housing office never sends my name to anybody.”

“Then it worked,” said Alexander.

“You chose Palo Verde.”

“I put it first. It was the only hall I had seen.” He looked round the room, at the breeze-block walls, at the window. “I saw it in March. With you in it.”

“And you didn’t think I’d be in it in August.”

“I did not know you would be in the hall,” said Alexander. “Sophomores move. Tyler moved. The literature says that sophomores move to halls with a lift that works and a café in the bottom of them.” He paused. “I read the literature.”

“Kimura’s arrangement,” said Frederick. “The same hall is safest. They kept me where I was.”

Alexander did not say anything for a moment.

“Ah,” he said.

It was a small sound, and Frederick, who had known him all his life, heard in it something that he could not at first name, and then could. It was the sound his cousin made in the observatory at Potsdam when he had calculated something correctly and found the answer was not the one he wanted.

---

The telephones rang at a quarter past six, in the same minute.

Frederick’s was on the window desk, and it said NEW WESTMINSTER, which meant the Private Secretary, at a quarter past nine in the evening there, in his office in Columbia Palace, at a time when he was usually at home. Alexander’s was in the inside pocket of the linen jacket on its wooden hanger, and it rang with a small old-fashioned double tone, like a telephone in a film, and Alexander took it out of the jacket and looked at it and said, “The Hofmarschall.”

They answered at the same moment.

There was nowhere to go. The room was twelve feet wide. Frederick turned to face the window, and Alexander, at the other end of the room, turned to face the door, and they stood with their backs to each other and their telephones to their ears, like two men in a duel who have been told to walk ten paces and have found the wall at five.

“Sir,” said the Private Secretary, in New Westminster, in a voice Frederick had heard him use perhaps twice, “I have just had a telephone call from Sergeant Kimura.”

“Yes.”

“Is it true?”

“He’s standing behind me.”

There was a silence on the line, two thousand miles long.

Behind him, at the door, he could hear his cousin saying, in German, in the voice he used for the boxes, “Ja. Ja, Herr Hofmarschall. Nein. Nein, das war nicht vorgesehen. Ja. Das Zimmer ist sehr klein.”

“Sir,” said the Private Secretary. “Did you know?”

“No.”

“Did anybody know?”

“His mother. The Chancellor. Kessler.” Frederick looked through the window at the butte, which was going gold in the low sun, and at the A on its flank. “Not the room. Nobody knew the room.”

“The Household did not know,” said the Private Secretary. “The Household was not consulted. The Household has a protocol for a visit by the German Emperor that runs to forty pages and it begins with an exchange of notes at the level of the two Foreign Offices. It does not contemplate,” his voice went up, very slightly, which Frederick had never heard it do, “a shared bathroom.”

“It’s down the corridor.”

“I’m aware of where it is, sir.”

Behind him Alexander said, “Nein. Er schnarcht nicht. Nein. Ich weiss es nicht. Ich frage ihn nicht.”

“What does Berlin say?” said the Private Secretary.

“Berlin’s asking whether I snore.”

“Do you?”

“No,” said Frederick, and heard behind him, at the same moment, in German, the same word.

---

When it was over they put the telephones down on their two desks, at either end of the room, and turned round, and looked at each other.

“The Hofmarschall has asked for a plan of the room,” said Alexander. “With measurements.”

“Mine’s writing a memorandum.”

“To whom?”

“I don’t know. He said he’d know by the end of it.”

Alexander considered this.

“The Hofmarschall wept,” he said. “A little. On the telephone. He weeps when a thing has been done properly and nobody asked him.” He sat down again at the desk by the door. “I think he will recover.”

---

There was a knock at half past six: twice, flat, with the side of a fist.

Sam was in the corridor with his hands in his pockets, and Rhys behind him with his telephone, and Rhys was pink. He was pink from the ears inwards, as he went, slowly, like a man being filled with something from the top; and he was looking past Frederick into the room, at the young man in the white shirt buttoned to the neck sitting at the desk by the door.

“Sir,” said Rhys, very quietly.

“Fred.”

“Fred. Sir.” Rhys did not take his eyes off the desk. “That’s the German Emperor.”

“Yes.”

“In your room.”

“Yes.”

“Good evening,” said Alexander, from the desk. “Mr Whitfield. Mr Oyelaran.”

Rhys made a sound like a man who has had his name read out in church.

Sam had looked into the room once, the way he looked into rooms, at the window and the door and the two beds and the boxes and the beige box on the wall, and then back at Frederick, and he did not say anything about the Emperor at all.

“Two boxes,” said Sam.

“I counted them,” said Alexander.

---

Kessler was in the corridor.

He had been in the corridor, Frederick realised, since four. He was standing outside 314 with his back to the wall and his hands folded in front of him, in the dark polo shirt, with a face like the end of a wardrobe, and when Frederick came out of 312 he inclined his head exactly one inch.

“Sir.”

“Kessler.”

“I am a freshman,” said Kessler. He said it as a man says his rank and number. “In 314. I have Music at eight on Tuesdays.”

“So have I.”

“Yes, sir,” said Kessler. “I know.”

Down the corridor the door of 314 opened, and the tall fair young man came out of it, with a screwdriver in his hand, and the door of 308 opened at the end and the short dark young woman came out of that, with a sheet of paper; and they came along the corridor and stopped beside Kessler, one on each side of him, and stood there, and looked at Frederick and at Rhys and at Sam, in turn, with the particular stillness of people who are looking at the doors as well.

“Felix Hartmann,” said Kessler, of the tall one. “Lena Vogt,” of the short one. He looked at Rhys and Sam. “They are students.”

“We’re students,” said Rhys.

“Yes,” said Kessler. “I know.”

Felix shook hands. He had a large careful hand with a fresh cut across one knuckle, and he looked at Rhys and Sam for a moment longer than he looked at Frederick, the way a man looks at the colleague he is going to be standing next to for a year.

“Engineering,” said Felix. It was very nearly the whole of his introduction.

“Accounting,” said Sam.

Felix nodded, once. Sam nodded, once. Rhys looked from one to the other with the expression of a man who has watched two people reach an agreement in a language he does not speak.

Lena did not shake hands. She held up the sheet of paper, which had small neat handwriting all over both sides of it, in English.

“There is one ring,” she said.

“What?”

“In the kitchen. On the ground floor. There are two rings on the cooker and one of them works.” She looked at the paper. “Six hundred residents. One ring. I have been to look.” She folded the paper in half. “I am writing it down.”

“Nutrition,” said Kessler.

“Nutrition,” said Lena, as though it explained the ring, and went back down the corridor to 308, where a girl with a great deal of blonde hair and a lamp shaped like a cactus was standing in the doorway, staring after her with open admiration.

“Oh my God,” said the girl with the cactus lamp, to Lena, as Lena went past her. “Your accent. Are you, like, an exchange student?”

“Yes,” said Lena, and went in.

---

Rhys’s telephone made a small sound at twenty to seven.

He took it out of his pocket and looked at it and went pinker, which Frederick had not known was available, and then he turned it round, without a word, and held it out so that Frederick could read it.

Across the road, over the dentist’s, on the second floor, through the window at the end of the corridor, there was a blind exactly half down. As he looked at it, it went down another inch.

Not my algorithm. K.

Frederick read it twice.

“She wants you to know that, sir,” said Rhys.

“I know she does.”

“She’s been on the telephone to Phoenix since five. To the German consulate. And to the housing office.” Rhys put the telephone away. “The housing office asked if there was a problem with the match.”

“What did she say?”

“She said the match was perfect,” said Rhys. “She said that was the problem.”

---

His mother rang at half past nine.

He took it on the landing between the second floor and the third, on the step under the narrow window, where he took all her calls; the window was open an inch, and the car park beyond the concrete fin was dark and still ninety-one, and smelled of hot tarmac and the four palo verdes, and somebody’s car door, and somebody’s mother saying goodbye for the fourth time. The thermometer on the wall beside the window said 79.

It was half past five in the morning in London. She was up. She was always up.

“Fredde,” said his mother.

“Mamma.”

“Ebba woke me at five. Ebba was told by the Master of the Household, who was told by New Westminster, who was told, I understand, by the sergeant, who was told by nobody.” He heard her settle, on the sofa in the sitting room, with the small breath that had been easier since February. “Is it true?”

“Yes.”

“He is there?”

“He’s upstairs. In the room. He’s at the desk by the door, reading the Charter.”

“Already?”

“He started at eight. He’s on Article Two.”

There was a silence on the line from London.

Then his mother laughed.

It was the laugh that was rare, and that when it came the room heard; and it came now down five thousand miles of whatever the telephone went through, and out into the stairwell of Palo Verde Hall, so that the landing heard it, and the concrete half-flights above and below, and a freshman going down to the vending machine in socks, who stopped on the step above Frederick and looked at the telephone with deep interest.

“Oh, Fredde,” said his mother, when she could. “Both of you. In one room.”

“It’s twelve feet wide.”

“Both of you,” said his mother, as though he had not spoken. “Caroline knew. Of course Caroline knew. She did not tell me, and I shall speak to her about it this morning, and then I shall thank her.” She was quiet for a moment. “Is he well?”

“He’s correct.”

His mother did not say anything for a moment.

“That is not what I asked,” she said.

“I know.”

“We will come back to it.” Another pause. “And you? You are very quiet.”

“I’m on the stairs.”

“You are always on the stairs. You are quiet on the stairs in a different way.” He heard her turn something over, a cup, a page. “Fredde. Are you cross?”

He looked at the car park through the inch of open window.

“No.”

“That is a very short no.”

“It’s a long day.”

“It is half past nine at night,” said his mother. “Your days end at ten. I know your days.” She let that sit, as she let things sit, and he let it sit too, on the step, with the freshman in socks still above him, who had sat down. “Very well. You may be cross. You may be cross for one week, because it was supposed to be yours, and I know it was supposed to be yours, and so does he, which is why he did not tell you. And then you will stop. Because it is still yours, and now it is his as well, and that is not less.” A breath. “Puss.”

“Puss, Mamma.”

He put the telephone in his pocket.

On the step above him the freshman in socks, who had a can of something from the vending machine in his hand and had not opened it, looked down at him.

“Was that your mom?”

“Yes.”

“She sounds nice,” said the freshman, with great feeling, and went back up the stairs to the third floor, and then stopped, and came back, and said, “Wait. Was that, like, the Queen?”

“Of Sweden,” said Frederick.

“Dude,” said the freshman, and went up.

---

Alexander was at the desk by the door when he came back in, with the Charter open in front of him, the little blue one, and a notebook, and the pencil beside the notebook, parallel to the edge. He had changed into a pair of dark blue pyjamas, the top buttoned to the neck. He did not look up.

Frederick sat on the window bed.

He sat there for some time, with the blind down now, and the lamp on, and the noise of the corridor going on outside the door, and the camp bed under the bed by the window breathing, once, faintly; and across the room his cousin turned a page of the Charter, and made a small mark in the margin of the notebook, and put the pencil back where it went.

“I would not have chosen it,” said Frederick.

Alexander’s hand stopped on the page.

It was the thing he had said at the bottom of the steps of a grey aircraft at Sky Harbor on the twentieth of March, in the heat, with the butte a long way off across the field; and Frederick had heard it, and carried it about with him for five months, all summer, through Stockholm and Solliden and London and New Westminster, without ever once deciding what it meant. He said it now in exactly the voice his cousin had said it in. He had not known he could do the voice.

Alexander did not turn round for a moment. Then he did, on the chair, and looked at him across the room.

“No,” said Alexander. “I said that in March.”

“At the airport.”

“At the foot of the steps. Yes.” He looked at the pencil. “I had had the best day five days before. On the Avenue, with the water. I did not know yet what it meant.” He was quiet for a moment. “I found out on the aeroplane. Somewhere over the Atlantic, at about four in the morning, with Kessler asleep. That I would have chosen it. That I had.” He looked up again. “That is all.”

“That’s all?”

“That is all I am going to say about why,” said Alexander, “tonight.” And he turned back to the Charter.

Frederick sat on the window bed.

He did not say anything. He did not say that it was his, the hall and the hill and the step and the coffee cart and the man at the desk at ten; that he had found it on a map in the frost and come to it alone and made it, slowly, over a year, into the one place in the world where he was not anything in particular; and that he had been told by his mother forty minutes ago that he might be cross for a week, and had already decided, on the stairs, to take all of it. He did not say any of that. He picked up the book about the Four-Year War, and opened it at the same page, and looked at it.

Across the room the pencil moved, and stopped, and was laid down again, parallel.

At a quarter to ten Alexander closed the Charter, and stood up, and took the hat down off the top of the wardrobe, where he had put it, and held it in his hand.

“I should like to go down,” he said, “and see Mr Luna.”

Frederick looked at the hat.

“He’s going to tell you you need one,” he said.

“I have one,” said Alexander.