A Programme for Him

The pad on the lounge noticeboard said TAKE ONE on a card pinned above it, and had been there since Family Weekend.

It was notepaper from a hotel on the Avenue, cream, with the hotel’s name across the top in maroon and a small drawing of the butte, and at the bottom of every sheet, ASK ABOUT OUR FAMILY WEEKEND RATES. Nobody had taken one. Nobody under forty had written on paper since about the third grade.

Frederick took three.

It was twenty past five in the morning. He sat down at the card table under the scorpion poster in his sweatshirt, with the three sheets in front of him and the biro from the post-room hatch on its string, which reached, just.

He had two hands. There was the good one, which four tutors and a Swedish court had spent eleven years on, the one that went at the foot of Acts of the parliament of Hanover. And there was his own, the one he had had at seven before anybody got to it, which leaned forward as if it were late for something and made its sevens with a line through them for no reason anybody had ever discovered.

He used the worse one. He did not decide to. It was the hand he wrote lists in, and this was a list.

He wrote the date at the top. Then he sat and looked at the sheet for a long time.

Then he wrote it.

---

MONDAY 13 NOVEMBER

06.30. Wake.

06.45. Water (Mr Luna’s rule).

07.00. Box: do NOT open; give it to Kessler.

07.05. Kessler: say yes.

07.15. Breakfast (eat it).

08.40. Walk to Tolliver. (F. walks too. It is not on his way.)

09.00. Brennan.

10.00. Back here. Lie down if you want. That counts.

10.30. Mercer.

12.00 to 14.00. (Kessler)

14.00. Lunch (eat it).

16.00. Tyler. Quiet.

17.00. Mill Avenue. (F.)

18.30. Dinner (eat it).

20.00. Read, if you want. Not the Charter.

22.00. Teeth.

22.30. Light off. Tick.

---

He read it through.

It was a very bad programme. It had no minutes in it that were not round. It said eat it three times. It had a gap in the middle of the day with nothing in it but a man’s name in brackets, and it was in a hand that looked as though it had been written on a moving train.

He folded it once, along the middle, and went up.

---

At half past six he laid it on the desk by the door.

He laid it where the programmes used to lie, square to the edge, on the Neues Palais paper’s place, with the maroon hotel name at the top and the butte, and beside it the pencil, the soft one, very sharp. He put the pencil down beside the sheet, and then he looked at it, lying at its angle, which was nothing in particular; and his hand went to it, to put it parallel; and he stopped his hand, and took it away.

It was not his to do.

Alexander was on his back on the bed by the door with his hands folded on the blanket. He had heard him come in. He had heard the sheet go down on the desk.

“It is half past six,” said Alexander.

“Yes.”

“There is something on the desk.”

“Yes.”

Alexander turned his head and looked at it. Then he sat up, slowly, in the order in which he did it now, each part separately; and swung his feet down; and reached for the sheet, and picked it up, and read it.

He read it through once, from the top to the bottom, without any expression at all. Then he went back to the top and read it again, more slowly, with his finger beside each line, the way he read a document that he was going to sign.

Frederick stood by the window and did not watch.

“This is your hand,” said Alexander.

“It’s my worse one.”

“Yes. I can see that.” He looked at the sheet. “Your sevens have a line through them.”

“I know.”

“Why?”

“Nobody knows.”

Alexander looked at the sheet for some time longer. Then he put it down on the desk, square to the edge, and picked up the pencil, and looked at the first line, and at the clock on Frederick’s telephone, which Frederick was holding out without having been asked to, and which said 06.31.

He made a tick beside 06.30. Wake.

It was a very small tick, in the square hand he had been taught at six, and it went in exactly the right place, and Frederick turned round and looked out of the window at the butte for a moment, at the A, and did not turn back until he could.

“A tick is for the time you were told,” said Alexander, to the sheet. “Not the time it happened.”

“I know. You said.”

“I am saying it again,” said Alexander, “because I have done it,” and put the pencil down.

---

At a quarter to seven he drank a glass of water.

He drank it standing by the desk, the whole of it, without stopping, the way he had once drunk a glass of water at a bar on the Avenue in a linen jacket; and put the glass down; and ticked.

“Mr Luna’s rule,” said Alexander.

“The first one.”

“The other two are to call one’s mother,” said Alexander, “and not to go up the butte in August.” He considered the programme. “Neither is on it.”

“It’s November.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “I had noticed that.”

---

Kessler knocked at seven.

He came in with the box, grey, with the red seal, flat in both hands; and stopped, because Alexander was standing by the desk with Saturday’s and Sunday’s boxes already in his arms, one on top of the other, held out.

“Please take them,” said Alexander. “All three. Thank you.”

Kessler looked at the boxes, and at the sheet on the desk with the maroon hotel name at the top, and at the line that said 07.00. Box: do NOT open; give it to Kessler., which he could read from where he stood, upside down, because Kessler could read anything from anywhere. He put the new box on top of the other two in Alexander’s arms, and then took all three, together, out of Alexander’s arms into his own.

Alexander picked up the pencil and ticked 07.00.

Then he looked at the next line.

“Kessler,” he said.

Kessler, at the door with the three boxes, turned round.

Alexander looked at him, and at the line, and at Kessler again. It took him some time. Frederick, by the window, saw him read the two words more than once, say yes, and saw his hand, the one without the pencil, close on the edge of the desk.

“Yes,” said Alexander.

Kessler did not say anything.

“To the doctor,” said Alexander. “Yes. Please.”

Kessler stood in the doorway with the three grey boxes from Berlin in his arms, which had never been late, and his face did not change at all. He inclined his head, perhaps a quarter of an inch less than a quarter of an inch.

Then he went out, and the door closed, and did not click.

Alexander ticked 07.05. His hand was perfectly steady. He ticked it, and looked at the tick, and put the pencil down, and sat down on the edge of the bed by the door rather suddenly, as though his legs had sat down and he had gone with them.

“Breakfast is at a quarter past,” said Frederick.

“Yes,” said Alexander. “I can read.”

---

The dining hall was a third full and smelled of waffles.

They had the table by the window, with the butte a mile off through the glass, and the ABC on the television above the waffle iron with the sound off. Frederick brought two trays. On Alexander’s he had put a slice of toast, already buttered, and a banana, and a glass of orange juice, and nothing else, because Theo had said to make it easy, and a slice of toast was the easiest thing he could think of.

Alexander looked at the tray.

“It says eat it,” said Frederick.

“I know what it says.”

He ate the toast. He ate it slowly, in small exact pieces, from the corner, as he had been taught; and he ate the whole of it, every piece, down to the last corner, and put the last corner in his mouth, and chewed it, and swallowed it, and then sat for a moment with his hands on either side of the empty plate.

He did not eat the banana. Frederick did not say anything about the banana.

Rhys and Sam came in at twenty past with their trays, and sat down, and Rhys began at once to say something about the Executive and a quiz and Mercer, and stopped, because Sam had put his hand flat on the table.

Sam was looking at the sheet.

It was on the table beside Alexander’s tray, square to the edge, where Alexander had laid it. Sam read it upside down. He read it all the way down without moving anything but his eyes, the way he read a column of figures; and then he looked up.

“Seventeen items,” said Sam.

“Sixteen,” said Frederick. “The gap’s not an item.”

“It’s got a time.” Sam looked at it again. “It’s an item.”

Rhys was looking at it too now, with his head on one side.

“Is that your writing, sir?” said Rhys. “Fred. Sorry.”

“Yes.”

“Is that Tolliver,” said Rhys, “or toilet?”

Alexander looked at the line. Then he took the pencil out of his jacket pocket and, beside 08.40, very small, in the square hand, wrote Tolliver, in brackets, correctly, as a gloss; and Rhys went pink from the ears inwards and said “Right. Sorry. Great,” and ate his waffle, and Sam wrote something down in the notebook, and closed it, and did not tell anybody what.

At twenty-eight minutes to eight, by the clock over the waffle iron, Alexander ticked 07.15.

---

At twenty to nine they walked to Tolliver.

It was not on Frederick’s way. It had not been on his way in August, either. They walked along the mall in the shade of the arcades, with Kessler a pace behind and a pace to the left, not there.

At the door of Tolliver 104 Brennan was standing with his cardboard cup.

He saw Alexander first. Then he saw Frederick, and stopped with the cup halfway to his beard.

“Mr Hohenzollern.”

“Professor.”

“Mr Hanover.” Brennan looked at him over the cup. “You’re not in this section. You passed it. I have the paperwork.”

“I’m walking.”

Brennan looked at him for a moment. Then at Alexander, in the linen jacket, buttoned, with a folded sheet of hotel notepaper showing at the top of his breast pocket, maroon, with a small drawing of a butte on it. Then at Frederick again.

“So I see,” said Brennan, and stood back from the door, and Alexander went in.

Frederick watched him go up the curved rows to the back, to the seat on the aisle in the last row, and sit, and take out the Charter, and open it, at Article Nine, and then, after a moment, turn the page.

---

When he came back to 312 at half past eleven the sheet was on the desk by the door.

Alexander was lying on the bed by the door, on his back, with his shoes off and his hands folded. 09.00. Brennan. had its tick. 10.00. Back here. Lie down if you want. That counts. had its tick.

And in the gap, in the middle of the day, between 12.00 to 14.00 and the brackets with a man’s name in them, there were three new lines.

They were in pencil. They were in a third hand, neither Frederick’s nor Alexander’s, a German hand, upright and hard and very small, with crossed sevens of its own, the old-fashioned way, as somebody had been taught to make them in a school in Dortmund forty years ago.

12.10. Berlin (the doctors). 314.

14.00. Dr Sato (Phoenix). Telephone. 314.

Thursday 16.00. Dr Sato. Camelback Road. I drive.

Frederick looked at it for a while.

“He wrote on it,” he said.

“Yes.” Alexander did not open his eyes. “He came at eleven and asked if he might. I said it was your programme. He said that in that case he would write small.”

---

He went to his Spanish, and to Statistics at two, and afterwards sat on the low wall outside the library for half an hour with a poem by Machado open on his knee that he was to learn by Wednesday, and did not learn it. At half past three he went back.

The sheet had five more ticks on it. 12.10. 14.00. Lunch (eat it)., which had a tick and, beside the tick, in the square hand, (soup). And 14.00. Dr Sato, which had a tick; and under it, in the square hand, small, two lines more.

Thursdays. 16.00.

21.32.

Alexander was at the desk by the door, sitting upright, with the Charter shut and the sheet in front of him.

“She has spoken to Berlin,” he said, without turning round. “She has read the notes. From before. She asked me some questions, for forty minutes. They were good questions. She did not say with respect once.” He looked at the sheet. “She has sent a prescription to the pharmacy on Mill Avenue. It is the same as before. I am to begin tonight, in the evening, after food. On Thursday at four I go to her. Then every Thursday at four.”

“Is it long? Before it…”

“Four to six weeks, she says, before it is any use.” Alexander picked up the pencil. “I said four. She said she would note my view.”

Frederick sat down on the window bed.

“I liked her,” said Alexander, to the sheet, after a moment, as though it were a finding he wished entered in the record before it was forgotten. “She asked me what I would like to be called.”

“What did you say?”

Alexander considered the question.

“I said Alexander,” he said. “Nobody has asked me that since I was eight. Lukas asked me, at the back of a line, in a school corridor. I said Alex.” He put the pencil down. “It seemed too soon to tell her that.”

---

Tyler came at four, and was quiet, and went at five, and on the way out looked at the sheet on the desk, and at the ticks on it, and read the line that said 16.00. Tyler. Quiet., and stood there for a moment in his hood with his face open and interested and complete.

“I’m on it,” said Tyler.

“Yes,” said Alexander.

“Sick,” said Tyler, with great sincerity, and went.

---

At five they walked down the Avenue to the pharmacy.

It was a small pharmacy between a bookshop and a place that sold bubble tea, with a white counter at the back and a pharmacist of about sixty with a grey ponytail and reading glasses on a chain. Across the road, over the dentist’s, as they came out of the arcade at the front of the hall, the blind on the second floor moved an inch, and was still.

Kessler stood by the door of the pharmacy, inside it, by a rack of sunscreen, and was not there.

“Name?” said the pharmacist.

“Hohenzollern,” said Alexander. “A.”

The pharmacist looked at her screen, and then over her glasses at the young man in the linen jacket buttoned to the neck, and at Frederick behind him, and at the man by the sunscreen; and Frederick watched her face do what faces did, the four pages turning; and then stop, on none of them, and go back to the screen.

“Date of birth?”

Alexander told her.

She went into the back and came out with a white paper bag, folded over at the top and stapled, and talked to him for two minutes across the counter, quietly, about food and the evening and what to do if he missed one and what not to drink with it and that it might make him sleepy for a week or two and that was normal, and that if anything felt wrong he was to ring the number on the bag or the doctor, any time, and that she was here till nine. Alexander listened to all of it and said “Yes” at the end of each part, and “Thank you” at the end of the whole.

“Do you have one of those,” he said, and pointed.

On a rack by the till there were pill boxes on cards: plastic, in a row, seven compartments, each with a hinged lid, in a choice of colours. On the lids, in raised white capitals, the days of the week. S M T W T F S.

Alexander took one down, a clear one, and looked at it for some time.

“It begins on Sunday,” he said.

“They all do,” said the pharmacist.

“The week begins on Monday.”

“Not in this pharmacy, honey,” said the pharmacist, and rang it up.

Frederick paid for the box. He had said, on the walk down, that he would, and Alexander had looked at him and said “Why?”, and Frederick had said “Because I wrote Mill Avenue (F.)”, and Alexander had considered this and accepted it as a ruling. It cost three dollars and forty cents. Frederick paid in coins, from the pocket of his shorts, counting them out onto the white counter, and the pharmacist counted them back into her hand, and looked at him over her glasses, and at the young man with the white paper bag, and at the man by the sunscreen, and decided, visibly, at about the forty cents, to say nothing whatsoever.

“Take care of each other,” she said, and turned away to the next one.

---

He did it at the desk by the door, after dinner, which had a tick, and (rice).

He had a roll of masking tape from somewhere in his desk drawer, and a pair of small scissors, and the fine black pen he used for the margins of the box. He cut seven strips of tape, each exactly the width of a lid, and laid them on the desk in a row. Then he moved the first strip, the Sunday one, to the end of the row, so that it was seventh.

He stuck them on. He stuck them over the raised white letters, one on each lid, pressed flat with the side of his thumb, so that the American days were gone underneath.

Then he wrote on them.

MO. DI. MI. DO. FR. SA. SO.

In German. In the square hand, in capitals, with a full stop after each. And under each, smaller, the same on every lid:

21.32

He held the box up to the lamp, and looked at it, and put it down on the desk, square to the edge, and sat back.

“Why thirty-two?” said Frederick, from the window bed.

“Water at half past.” Alexander looked at the box. “Two minutes to drink it. Then the tablet. Then teeth at ten.” He considered. “It is the first time that makes sense.”

He filled it from the white paper bag, one in each, seven, from MO to SO, with the tip of the scissors; and folded the bag over, and put it in the drawer.

At half past nine he drank a glass of water.

At twenty-eight minutes to ten he opened the lid that said MO, and took out what was in it, and took it, with what was left of the water; and closed the lid. And then he picked up the fine black pen, and on the masking tape under 21.32, very small, he made a tick.

He looked at it.

Then he looked at the six lids after it, in a row, with their times on them, and nothing under the times yet.

“Six,” said Alexander.

“Six,” said Frederick.

---

At ten he went down the corridor to the showers with his towel, and the door of 314 was open.

Kessler was standing in it. He was in the dark suit again, with the tie, as though he had put it back on for the purpose, and he was standing in the doorway of 314 with his hands at his sides, facing the corridor.

Frederick stopped.

Kessler looked at him. It was the look of somebody who has been waiting in a doorway for some time for a particular person to come along a corridor, and has decided what he is going to say, and is now going to say it, and will not say it twice.

“Sir,” said Kessler.

“Kessler.”

“Thank you.”

Frederick stood in the corridor with his towel over his shoulder.

Kessler did not say what for. He did not need to. Frederick had been thanked by Prime Ministers and by mayors, by regiments and by the Riksdag, in four languages. He had never been thanked by Kessler, and he understood, standing there, that he never would be again.

“He said yes,” said Frederick.

“Yes, sir,” said Kessler. “He did,” and went back into 314, and closed the door.

---

At twenty-five past ten Alexander was in bed, on his back, with the lamp over the bed by the door on, and the sheet of hotel notepaper on the blanket on his chest, and the pencil in his hand.

Frederick lay on the window bed in the dark and watched him read it, from 06.30. Wake. to the bottom, with all its ticks, and its glosses, (Tolliver), (soup), (rice), and the third hand in the middle, I drive.

At half past ten exactly Alexander reached up and turned off the lamp.

In the dark, Frederick heard the pencil. It was a very small sound. It was the sound of a soft pencil, very sharp, making a tick on cream paper, beside the last line of a programme in somebody else’s worse hand, which said 22.30. Light off. Tick.

Then he heard the pencil put down on the desk by the door.

He did not hear where. He did not try to.