A Programme, Typed

The message came at seven, on the step, from London, where it was two in the afternoon.

He has eaten toast. Two slices. He held the second one in his right hand, which he was not able to do on Sunday, and he looked at the nurse while he did it so that she would see. The doctors are pleased. He is cross with the doctors for being pleased, because he says it is only toast.

And then, a minute after:

He does not say says it is only toast. He says Toast. But it is clear what he means. He said Good to me at lunch, and Good to Brannigan, and Good to the toast. M.

He read it twice, on the step under the narrow window on the landing, with the thermometer at seventy-nine beside his head and the window open an inch and the morning coming in cold off the car park.

Then he went back up the half flight and along the corridor to 312, where the box from Berlin had come at seven and was open on the desk by the door, and Alexander was reading the first paper with the pencil in his hand, and under the bed by the window, against the wall, beside the camp bed, there was a cardboard box with a word crossed out on its label, which had come back on Sunday morning, unopened, and had not been touched since.

“Toast,” said Frederick.

Alexander looked up.

“Two slices. With his right hand.”

Alexander considered this, with the pencil.

“Good,” he said, and went back to the paper; and Frederick sat on the bed by the window and found that he did not mind at all that his cousin had said it in exactly the voice his father used.

---

He thought about the programme all day.

He thought about it in Spanish, at ten, while the instructor did the subjunctive on the board, which he had been told in the fall was a mood and still believed was a punishment. He thought about it at lunch, on the mall, under the palms, with a toastie from the cart. He thought about it at two, in Geology, where the man with the hammer on his belt drew another layer under the butte and said it had taken longer to lie down than anything in the Valley had taken to happen.

He had written one before. He had written it on the thirteenth of November, on a sheet of hotel paper from the take-one pad on the lounge noticeboard, in his worse hand, in biro, with 06.30. Wake at the top and 22.30. Light off. Tick. at the bottom and eat it in brackets after breakfast; and Alexander had read it twice, and kept it, item by item, every day for four weeks, ticking, and Frederick had lain in the dark on the first night and heard him tick the last one, and had had to go out to the landing.

He did not want to write that one again.

He did not want a programme for a man who could not get up in the morning. He wanted one for a man who could, and was going to be twenty-one, five thousand miles from the guns.

At the Neues Palais, he knew, there was a programme every year for the eighteenth of January, prepared by the Hofmarschall’s office in November and printed on stiff cream card with the arms at the head, in a run of four hundred, with Nachtruhe at the foot in a Gothic hand. He had seen one, in a glass case by the stairs. And there was the other kind, in pencil, on a single sheet of Neues Palais paper folded in four, with one copy in the world, that ended at the top of a hill in Berlin at ten past eight in the morning with Sonnenaufgang and a tick.

The first was printed. The second was in pencil.

This one would be typed, which was neither. It would be his.

---

The printer in the lounge left a grey line down everything.

It had done it since the break. Somewhere inside it, Sam said, there was a drum with a scratch on it, and the scratch went round, and came out on the left-hand side of every page in a thin straight grey stripe, about an inch from the edge, from top to bottom, like a margin somebody had ruled in a hurry; and Lena had written to Residence Life about it on the ninth, and Doug had replied on the tenth that there was no budget for a drum until the new financial year, and Lena had replied to the reply.

At nine in the evening Frederick sat at the table under the scorpion poster with the laptop open, and the printer beside him, warming up.

Sam was in the armchair with his notebook and the pencil. Rhys was on the sofa with a red pen. Tyler was lying on the floor in the middle of the lounge, on his back, on the carpet of no colour, with his hood down for once and his headphones round his neck, not on, with a bottle of Glacier balanced on his chest that went up and down when he breathed.

“Read me the first one,” said Sam.

“00.00,” said Frederick.

Sam waited.

“Silence,” said Frederick. “One minute. Eight o’clock in Potsdam. The steps.”

Nobody said anything.

Rhys looked at the red pen. Sam looked at the notebook. On the floor, Tyler stopped moving the bottle of Glacier up and down, and lay still, looking at the ceiling, where there was a stain in the shape of nothing in particular, and Frederick could not see his face.

“The guns,” said Rhys, after a while, quietly.

“The guns are at eight. In the morning. At Potsdam.” Frederick looked at the line on the screen. “That’s midnight here. That’s when he’s twenty-one. And he’s not going to be there. So.” He did not know how to finish it. “So there’s a minute.”

“That’s right,” said Sam.

He wrote something in the notebook. Frederick did not need to read it upside down to know that it was 00.00, with a line under it, and a time zone, and the number eight.

“That’s correct,” said Sam. “Midnight’s eight. It’s winter there. It’s eight hours.” He looked up. “Next.”

---

“06.30. Up. Water. Mr Luna’s rule.”

“Full stop after Up?” said Rhys.

“Yes.”

“Then full stop after Water. Then Mr Luna’s rule in brackets, because it’s not an instruction, it’s a citation.” Rhys wrote on the back of his hand with the red pen, a small neat bracket. “You cite your sources. Ashby said.”

“Ashby said to cite fewer of them from my family.”

“Mr Luna isn’t your family,” said Rhys, and then stopped, and thought about it, and went slightly pink, and said, “Brackets.”

“06.50. The gate. Hayden Butte.”

“Is the gate open at ten to seven?” said Sam.

“It’s open at six. In winter. It says on the board.”

“Then that’s fine.” Sam wrote. “Sunrise?”

“07.33. Sunrise.”

Sam looked up from the notebook.

“The tables say seven thirty-two,” said Sam. “For Thursday. I checked.”

“I know.”

“And it comes up behind the Superstitions. It doesn’t come up when the tables say. Last February it was four minutes late. I wrote it down.” He turned back two pages of the notebook, a year back, and showed him: 1 Feb. Tables 7.26. Sun 7.30. Mountains. “So it won’t be seven thirty-three either. It’ll be about seven thirty-six.”

“I know.”

“Then why…?”

“Because he’ll tick it at seven thirty-three,” said Frederick. “Whatever the sun does. A tick’s for the time you were told.” He looked at the screen. “So I’m telling him seven thirty-three.”

Sam considered this for a long moment, with the pencil over the notebook.

“That’s not a time,” said Sam. “That’s a ruling.”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” said Sam, and wrote 07.33 and, beside it, very small, (ruling), and underlined it.

---

“09.00. Breakfast. Dining hall.” Frederick typed it, and then, after a moment, the two words he had put after breakfast in November, in brackets, in biro. “Eat it.”

Rhys looked up from the red pen.

“You’re leaving that in?”

“Yes.”

“It’s his birthday.”

“It’s in,” said Frederick, and Rhys looked at him for a moment and then nodded, and wrote nothing on his hand at all.

“Classes.”

“What time?”

“Whatever’s timetabled. He knows what’s timetabled. He’d know better than me.” He typed As timetabled. “Brennan’s not on Thursdays.”

“Brennan’s Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays,” said Sam, from memory, “at nine.”

“So it’s not Brennan.”

“It’s not Brennan,” Sam agreed, and wrote it down, which was not necessary, and Frederick saw that Sam was writing down everything now, every line, and the punctuation, and the times, so that there would be two copies in the world, the typed one and the notebook.

“12.00. Lunch.”

“Full stop,” said Rhys.

“There’s a full stop.”

“There’s a full stop after Lunch. There isn’t one after 12.00.” Rhys held out the red pen at the screen, as though he could correct it from there. “You’ve got full stops after the times on the first four and not on this one.”

Frederick looked. He had. He put one in.

---

Then there was the afternoon.

He had nothing for it. He had sat in Geology with the man with the hammer and in the lounge at four with Tyler on the floor for quiet and had thought about the afternoon and had come up with nothing that was not a class or a meal or the hill, and he typed 15.00 and stopped, and sat with his hands over the keys.

“What’s at three?” said Sam.

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve got everything else.”

“I know.”

On the floor in the middle of the lounge, Tyler said, without looking up, without moving, to the stain on the ceiling:

“Put a nothing in it.”

They all looked at him.

“Like, an hour,” said Tyler. “Where it says nothing.” He moved the bottle of Glacier on his chest a quarter of an inch. “He’s got stuff in every single bit.”

And he put the headphones back on, and lay looking at the ceiling, and did not say anything else at all for the rest of the evening.

Frederick sat at the laptop and looked at Tyler Kowalczyk of Parma, Ohio, lying on the floor of the lounge of Palo Verde Hall in a hoodie with the sleeves over his hands, who had once spent most of a semester asking what a King does and had been told, in the end, mostly he reads, and had said okay; and who had just, in nine words, written the only item on the programme that Frederick would not have thought of in a hundred years.

He typed it.

15.00. Nothing.

“An hour,” said Sam. He was looking at the notebook, at the line above, and then at the calendar on his telephone. “Three to four. On a Thursday.” He stopped.

“What?”

“Thursday’s Phoenix,” said Sam. “Four o’clock. Camelback Road. Kessler drives.” He looked up. “If he’s doing nothing till four he can’t be in Phoenix at four. It’s twenty-five minutes. Thirty with the lights.”

Frederick looked at the line. He had not thought about it. He had thought about the guns and the hill and the toast and the bar on the Avenue and he had not thought about Thursday, and he sat and looked at the word Nothing on the screen and felt himself go cold from the neck down.

“Dr Sato,” said a voice from the lounge doorway, “has moved Thursday to Wednesday.”

---

Kessler was in the doorway.

He was in his dark coat, with a carrier bag from the pharmacy on Mill Avenue in one hand, and he had been standing there, Frederick understood, for some time, not there, because that was where Kessler stood; and now he came one step into the lounge, which he did not often do, and stood by the noticeboard with the bag.

“This week,” said Kessler. “Wednesday at four. Tomorrow.”

“Did you ask her?”

“No.” Kessler’s face did nothing at all. “She saw the date. In December. On the form. She rang me on Friday and said that she had moved it, herself, and that it was not a favour.” He paused. “She said that it was scheduling.”

There was a short silence in the lounge.

“Thank you, Kessler,” said Frederick.

“Sir,” said Kessler. He looked at the laptop, and at the line on the screen, 15.00. Nothing., from across the room, and Frederick could not tell whether he could read it from there; he thought he probably could. “I will be at the gate,” said Kessler. “At ten to seven. At the bottom.” He considered. “With coffee.”

“Three sugars?”

“Three sugars,” said Kessler, and went out, and they heard him on the stairs, going up, a large man on concrete steps, not counting.

Sam looked at the notebook.

“So it’s an hour,” he said. “A whole one.” He wrote 15.00 to 16.00, and then, after a moment’s thought, crossed out 16.00 and wrote it again more neatly. “I found it,” said Sam, to nobody, with quiet satisfaction, as though it had been lost.

---

“16.00,” said Frederick.

“What’s at four?”

“The end of nothing.”

“You can’t put end of nothing,” said Rhys.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not an event. It’s the absence of an event ending. You’d be programming a negative.” Rhys held the red pen up. “And if you put a full stop after Nothing, then the nothing’s finished at the full stop, and the hour’s just sitting there with nothing in it after the nothing’s already over.”

Frederick looked at him.

“Rhys.”

“It’s a real point.”

“It’s a full stop.”

“It’s a very real point,” said Rhys, and went pink, and then laughed, the sudden one, and knocked the bottle of Glacier off Tyler’s chest with his foot, and Tyler, on the floor, without taking the headphones off, put out a hand and caught it and put it back.

In the end there was no line at four. Nothing had a full stop after it. Rhys allowed it, under protest, and wrote the protest on the back of his hand.

“19.00. Dinner (dining hall).”

Rhys looked at it for a long time.

“Brackets,” he said. “Fine.”

---

Lena came in at a quarter to ten with a tin.

She put it down on the table beside the laptop, a round tin with flowers on it that had had Pfefferkuchen in it a week ago and now had something else in it that she did not show anybody, and she looked at the screen over Frederick’s shoulder, at the line at seven, and folded her arms.

“There will be a cake,” said Lena. “On Thursday. It is not on your programme.”

“No.”

“Good.” She did not unfold her arms. “It is not a nutritious cake. I want that understood in advance. It is a cake.”

“Okay.”

“Okay does not count,” said Lena, who had heard it said on the floor so often since August that she had adopted it as house procedure. “Will you stop it?”

Frederick looked at the line at seven, Dinner (dining hall), and at Lena’s folded arms, and at the tin.

“No,” he said. “I won’t stop it.”

“Good,” said Lena again, and took the tin away with her, and at the door of the lounge met Callum Reyes coming in with a clipboard against his chest, and said something to him in a low level voice, and Callum’s face went white and then pink and then determined, and he looked across the lounge at Frederick and said, “There’s going to be a form,” with the air of a man announcing a storm, and went out again.

---

Jack’s message came at a quarter past ten. It was a quarter past five in the morning in Gloucestershire, and he was in the cellar.

BOOKED. WEDS. LANDS 10PM YOUR TIME. TERM 4. GETTING THE TRAM.

And then:

DONT PUT ME ON THE PROGRAMME

And then:

I MEAN IT HANOVER. IM NOT AN ITEM. IM A BLOKE ON A CAMP BED.

Okay, wrote Frederick.

OKAY DOESNT COUNT, wrote Jack, who had been told about it in November, and had adopted it too.

Frederick typed the last two lines.

23.00. The Avenue. The band, cut off.

23.59. Tick.

Rhys took the comma out of the first one, and then put it back, and then took out four others, from the lines at the top, that Frederick had not known were there, and then, after a long time looking at the line at six thirty, put one in, after Water, and replaced the full stop, and said that was final; and Sam read the whole thing out from the top, every time, slowly, while Frederick watched the screen, and found no errors in the times, and said so, and wrote that down too.

Then Frederick pressed print.

The printer took in the first sheet, and thought about it, and gave it back, with the grey line down the left-hand side of it from top to bottom, an inch from the edge, like a margin; and then the second.

Two pages.

He sent them to London before he went upstairs, as a photograph, from the lounge, to M., with no message at all.

The answer came before he had reached the landing. It was half past five in the morning there.

I have printed it. I am awake because the hospital is awake. There is an hour with nothing in it. And then: Good.

---

At twenty-nine minutes past ten he put the two pages on the desk by the door.

Alexander had come back from the washroom at twenty-five past. He was in the bed by the door, sitting up, with his book closed on the blanket, and his lamp on, and the pill box on the desk with the lid for DI open and empty and a tick against its time. He looked at the two pages on the desk, and at the grey line down the side of them, and then at Frederick, standing by the desk with his hands in the pockets of the jumper.

“What is it?”

“Thursday.”

Alexander did not move for a moment. Then he put out his hand, and Frederick gave him the pages, and he held them in both hands under the lamp, on the blanket, and read them.

He read them twice. Frederick had known he would. He read them the first time from the top to the bottom, at the pace he read everything, without stopping; and the second time from the top again, more slowly, line by line, with his eyes going along each one and back, the way he read the papers from Berlin, once for the order and once for the errors.

At the end of the second time he did not say anything.

“There’s a line down the side,” said Frederick. “It’s the printer.”

“I know,” said Alexander. “I did not say it was an error.”

“Sam did the times. Rhys did the commas.”

“Rhys has taken out four,” said Alexander, looking at the first page. “And put one in. After Water.” He considered it. “He is correct about the one he put in.”

“And the four?”

“He is correct about three of them,” said Alexander, “and I shall not tell him which.”

He turned to the second page.

He looked at the line at three for a long time.

“What is it for?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“I can read the word.” He looked at it. “What is the hour for?”

“Nothing. That’s what it’s for.”

“One cannot do nothing for an hour,” said Alexander. “There is no procedure.”

“Tyler says there doesn’t have to be one.”

Alexander looked up from the page.

“Tyler,” he said.

“He was on the floor. In the lounge. He said put a nothing in it.” Frederick looked at the line. “He said you’ve got stuff in every single bit.”

Alexander did not say anything. He looked at the word on the page, Nothing, with its full stop, for a long time, under the lamp, with his face doing what it did at the end of a dais three paces from the wall; and then he turned back to the first page, to the top, to the first line.

00.00. Silence. One minute. (Eight o’clock in Potsdam.) The steps.

He read it again. Frederick watched him read it again.

“It is too short,” said Alexander.

“What is?”

“The minute.” He did not look up. “There are forty-one. Twenty-one for the King of Prussia and twenty for the Emperor, because the two offices are legally distinct, and the Ministry of War once proposed in a memorandum to fire them together for economy, and was answered in another memorandum that the Constitution did not permit the Crown to be saluted at a discount.” He paused. “At the pace of the battery, it is about seven minutes. A minute will be over at the ninth gun.”

“Then it’s a minute’s silence,” said Frederick, “and then the rest of the guns.”

Alexander considered this.

“Yes,” he said. “That is correct.”

He folded the two pages in half, along the middle, once, and laid them on the desk by the door, beside the pill box, square to the edge, with the grey line on the left; and then he took the pencil, and laid it beside them, parallel.

It was half past ten.

His lamp went off.

Frederick stood in the dark of 312 by the bed by the window and heard him lie down, and fold his hands on the blanket, and then, which he had not done in November, unfold them again and put them at his sides.

“Goodnight, Frederick,” said Alexander, in the dark by the door.

“Night.”

“Frederick.”

“What?”

There was a silence, of the kind there had been on a stair at Clärchens, and on a roof at New Year, and in this room in December over a stapler; and Frederick waited in it, and did not fill it.

“Nothing,” said Alexander, at last, quite seriously, as a man tries a new word to see how it will go; and turned over, and was asleep.