Nothing

At ten past eight Alexander sat down at the desk by the door with the dust of the butte still on his shoes, took the pencil out of his shirt pocket, and ticked 07.33.

He did it the way he did everything with a pencil, small and exact, a short stroke down and a long one up. Then he laid the pencil beside the programme, parallel to the edge of the desk, and read the next line.

It was two pages, typed on Tuesday on the printer in the lounge, which left a grey streak down the side of everything, so that the twenty-first birthday of the German Emperor had a faint line down it like a margin. Sam had checked the times. Rhys had removed four commas and added one.

“There is an item at nine,” said Alexander. “It says eat it.”

“It said that in November.”

“Yes. I remember.” He looked at the line a moment longer. “I thought you might have taken it out.”

“Why would I take it out?”

Alexander did not answer that, and put the pencil back in his pocket.

On the camp bed between the beds Jack lay on his back with his arm over his eyes and his trainers on, where he had fallen at eight minutes to eight, having landed at ten the night before, stood on the steps of the hall at midnight in a red sweatshirt in forty-four degrees, slept four hours, and been taken up a hill in the dark. He had said at the top that it was very nice, twice, with his hands in his armpits.

“Is it nine?” said Jack, from under the arm.

“It is twelve minutes past eight.”

“Wake me at nine.”

“You are not on the programme,” said Alexander.

“I’m on the floor,” said Jack. “That’s my programme.”

---

The dining hall had the ABC on, as it always did, on the television above the waffle iron, with the sound low and the captions on.

They had the table by the window, with the butte a mile off in the clear January light. Kessler was at the next table with a coffee, not there. Alexander had a waffle, which he had made himself after reading the instructions on the lid of the iron twice, and lifting the lid at exactly the moment the light went green.

“Eat it,” said Frederick.

“I am about to.”

“That’s what you said in November.”

“In November,” said Alexander, cutting it into squares, “I was lying.”

Sam did not look up from his cereal. Rhys looked at the window.

On the television the picture changed to a parade ground, grey, under a grey sky, with bare trees behind it and a row of guns, and as Frederick looked up the first of them went off, silently, a white puff and a jump. The caption came along the bottom a beat behind.

POTSDAM: A SALUTE WAS FIRED THIS MORNING FOR THE GERMAN EMPEROR’S 21ST BIRTHDAY. THE EMPEROR, WHO IS STUDYING IN ARIZONA, DID NOT ATTEND.

It lasted about twenty seconds. Then it was the weather.

At the table behind them, which was freshmen from the second floor, a fork went down on a plate. Frederick did not turn round. He could feel them look at the television, and then at the young man in the buttoned shirt by the window with a waffle cut into sixteen squares.

“You watched it at midnight,” said Frederick.

“Yes. I wanted to see whether it looked different in daylight.” Alexander ate a square. “It does not.”

A girl from the table behind leaned over the back of her chair. She was one of the freshmen who had borrowed his pencil sharpener in September and gone on borrowing it in October, when she knew.

“Is it your birthday?”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “Thank you.”

“Did they really do that? The guns? For you?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re here?”

“Yes,” said Alexander, and looked out of the window at the butte. “I had a waffle.”

---

Brennan was crossing the mall at noon with the leather bag on his shoulder and a cardboard cup in his hand, in the crumpled linen jacket, which in January he wore over a jumper.

He saw them from some way off. Frederick watched the slight check in the walk, the cup lowered an inch. Then he came on, and stopped under the palms, and looked at Alexander.

“Mr Hohenzollern.”

“Professor.”

“Happy birthday.”

Alexander stood quite still.

“Thank you. May I ask how you knew?”

“The front row.” Brennan drank from the cup. “Yesterday, at ten. I was trying to leave, and a young woman stood up between me and the door and told me it was your birthday on Thursday, and that you’d be twenty-one, and that it was on her phone, and that I was to be nice to you.” He considered the cup. “I said I’m always nice to you. She said that wasn’t what she’d heard.”

“It is not what she has seen,” said Alexander. “On Monday you called my reading ingenious.”

“It was ingenious.”

“You said it the way people say brave.”

“I’ll say it again on Friday. Bring the same reading. I want to see it fall over in daylight.” He looked at Frederick, briefly, over the cup. “Mr Hanover.”

“Professor.”

That was all. He went on towards the library, three steps and a turn of the head at a pigeon, and did not look back.

“He has never said happy birthday to me,” said Alexander.

“You’ve never had a birthday here.”

“No.” Alexander took the programme out of his pocket and looked at it. There was nothing on it about Brennan. He wrote in the margin by 12.00, very small, Brennan (mall), and ticked it. “That is not the time I was told,” he said. “But I was not told. So it is the time it happened.”

“That’s not the rule.”

“No,” said Alexander, and folded it up again. “I am twenty-one. I am allowed one.”

---

The item at three said Nothing.

It had been Tyler’s. On Tuesday night in the lounge, with Frederick at the printer and Sam reading out the times, Tyler had been lying on the floor with his headphones round his neck, and had said, without looking up, “Put a nothing in it. Like, an hour. Where it says nothing. He’s got stuff in every single bit,” and put the headphones back on.

Sam had found the hour. Dr Sato had moved Thursday to Wednesday that week, herself, when she saw the date, and told Kessler it was not a favour, it was scheduling.

At two minutes to three Alexander came into 312, where Frederick was on the bed by the window and Jack had been sent to 316 with the camp bed, and shut the door and stood in the middle of the room.

“What do I do?” said Alexander.

“Nothing.”

“I understand the word.”

“Then do it.”

“Where?”

“On the bed. Anywhere. It doesn’t matter.”

“It is on the programme,” said Alexander. “Everything on the programme matters.” But he took his shoes off and put them side by side under the desk with the toes to the wall, and lay down on the bed by the door, on his back, on top of the blanket, with his hands folded on his chest; and then he looked at his hands, and put them at his sides, and then on his chest again.

It was three o’clock.

---

At four minutes past he said, “How is it going?”

“You’re doing it.”

“I do not think I am. I think I am waiting.” He was looking at the ceiling. “Waiting is not nothing. It has a direction.”

“Then stop waiting.”

“For what?”

Frederick turned his head on the pillow. Alexander was lying very straight, as though he had been laid out, with his chin up, reading the ceiling tiles.

“Alex. It isn’t a test.”

“Everything is a test,” said Alexander, “until somebody tells you the pass mark.”

---

At twenty past three he said, “There are forty-eight tiles.”

“You counted.”

“I did not mean to. It happened. Six by eight. One is cracked, the third from the window in the fifth row.” A pause. “That is something.”

“It’s a very small something.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “I thought you would say that.”

Then he did not say anything, and nor did Frederick. An aeroplane went very slowly across the strip of sky over the butte towards Sky Harbor. The building hummed.

He heard Alexander breathe.

It was not the breathing of a man lying awake at three in the morning with his hands folded on a blanket, which Frederick had listened to in November until he knew every kind of it. It was slower. It went out further and came back without hurrying.

He did not look.

---

“Frederick.”

“Mm.”

“Is it four?”

He looked at his watch. “Eight minutes to.”

The silence from the bed by the door went on long enough that he turned his head. Alexander was lying with his hands at his sides now, not folded, and his eyes on the window, on the strip of sky.

“I had not looked,” said Alexander.

“At what?”

“At my watch.” He said it slowly, as a man reports a thing found where he did not expect it. “Since twenty past three. I had not looked at it at all.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“Forty minutes,” said Alexander. “I do not know what was in them.”

“That’s the nothing.”

“Yes,” said Alexander, after a while. “I see.” And he did not get up, and lay and looked at the window for the other eight minutes, until somebody knocked at two minutes to four, twice, softly, in the way only one person on the campus knocked.

Tyler came in with his hood up and a bottle of Glacier in his hand, and looked at the two of them on the two beds, and stopped.

“Is this the nothing?”

“Yes.”

“Sick.” He shut the door with his foot, very quietly, and sat down on the floor with his back against the wardrobe, and put his headphones on. Frederick could tell from across the room that there was nothing in them. He sat with his knees up and his hands in his sleeves, doing nothing completely, with no effort whatsoever, the way water lies in a trough.

Alexander turned his head and watched him.

“He is very good at it.”

Tyler lifted one side of the headphones an inch.

“It’s not hard, dude,” he said. “You just don’t.”

---

The telephone went at four exactly, on Frederick’s bed, and the screen said M.

“It’s eleven at night in London,” he said.

“I know,” said his mother. “I have been sitting in the kitchen in my dressing gown since a quarter to, with the programme you sent me, and I saw there was an hour in it with nothing in, and I was not going to ring in the nothing.” A pause. “Ebba says I looked at the clock eleven times. Is he there?”

“He’s on the bed.”

“Then put me on the loudspeaker, and hold me near him, and tell him to lie still.”

Frederick crossed the room, over Tyler’s feet, and held the telephone out over the bed by the door.

“Aunt Christina?” he said, carefully, as a man speaks into a microphone that has been put in front of him without warning.

“Alexander,” said his mother. “Lie still. I am going to sing to you, and then I am going to bed.”

And she sang.

She sang it as she had sung it to Frederick on every second of May of his life, in Swedish, in her low unhurried voice, at her own pace, the first verse and the second, Ja, må han leva, down a telephone from a kitchen in London to a room in Palo Verde Hall with a crack in the third tile from the window in the fifth row. Frederick stood holding it with his arm out. On the floor Tyler took his headphones off and held them in his lap.

Alexander lay quite still, as he had been told.

His face did nothing at all, the whole of the first verse. In the second, Frederick, standing over him, saw his throat move, once, and his hand on the blanket close a little, and open.

She drew breath at the end of the line, where anybody’s goes, and went on to the end.

“Your uncle would do the cheers,” she said. “He is asleep, and I am not going to wake him, because he sat in the garden for ten minutes in his coat today, and the doctor says sleep is the thing. So you will have them from me.” And she did the four of them, in Swedish, one after another, not loud, because Ebba would be asleep too, but perfectly.

There was a silence in 312.

“Aunt Christina,” said Alexander. “Nobody has sung that to me before.”

“I know. Your mother told me, the Christmas you were nine. She said that in Potsdam they sang something else, in German, and that it was very nice, and that nobody did it at the end of the bed at six in the morning because Prussians considered that an ambush.” A pause. “I have been waiting eleven years. I thought twenty-one was a good year to begin.”

His hand on the blanket was quite still now.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You are welcome. Happy birthday. Eat something.” And then, which was for Frederick, though she did not say so: “Puss.”

On the floor Tyler put his headphones back on, slowly, and looked at the blank screen of his own phone with great attention, the way a man looks at something that is not there so as not to look at something that is.

“That was nice,” he said, inside the hood. “Your mom.”

---

The courier came at five. Kessler brought it up himself: a round grey box tied with a black ribbon and a card under the ribbon. He gave it to Alexander in the doorway and went back to 314 without a word, which was how Kessler said that he had known for a week.

It was a hat: grey felt, a narrow black band, very good and very plain, the kind nobody in Tempe had worn since about 1962. The card was in Aunt Caroline’s hand, which Frederick knew from every Christmas of his life, upright and English and very slightly sloped.

As agreed. Mama.

Alexander lifted the hat out by the crown, with his fingers on the dent, the way he had carried every hat she had sent him since August.

“What did you agree?” said Frederick.

“That she would send them, and I would carry them.” He turned it a little in his hand. “She said that when I came home with all of them she would know I had been somewhere where people told me to wear a hat.”

“Mr Luna.”

“Every night.” He put it on the desk, crown down, beside the programme, and squared it with the edge. “It is the fifth. She is keeping count. So is he.”

---

The item at seven said Dinner (dining hall). At five to seven Alexander put on his jacket and buttoned it, and picked up the hat, and they went down the forty-five steps, or forty-four, with Jack behind them in the red sweatshirt.

Callum Reyes was at the bottom of the stairs in a polo shirt that said RESIDENCE LIFE, holding a clipboard against his chest in both arms, and when he saw them he drew himself up, the way he had at the floor meeting in October.

“Hey. Hi. So. Before you go to dinner. There’s a form.”

“There is always a form,” said Alexander, kindly.

“Yes. There is.” Callum held it out. “Event Registration. For any gathering of more than twelve residents in a common area that isn’t a floor meeting. It needs a host and a purpose and an RA signature, which is me, and I’ve put the host as the third floor. There’s no box for a floor. I drew one.”

Frederick read it over Alexander’s shoulder. Under Purpose of event it said Birthday (Alex, 312). Under Expected attendance it said All of them. Under Food and drink it said Cake (Lena). Glacier (Tyler). No alcohol in common areas. No candles indoors (see handbook).

“This was not on the programme,” said Alexander.

“No,” said Callum. “That’s sort of the point.” He looked at Frederick, terrified. “Fred said it was okay.”

“I didn’t write it,” said Frederick. “I said I wouldn’t stop it.”

Alexander looked at the form for a long time, in the lobby, with the hat in his other hand. Then he gave it back.

“It is very well filled in. Thank you. Where do I sign?”

“You don’t,” said Callum. “You’re the purpose.”

---

The lounge was full to the scorpion poster: the third floor and half the second, Priya with a pharmacology textbook, Rhys and Sam by the foosball table, Makayla from Kingman standing on a chair at the back to see. On the card table in the middle there was a cake, square and dark, iced in a pale gold so flat you could have read by it, with ALEX on it in small maroon capitals. A card was taped to the plate in Lena’s hand.

This cake is not nutritious. It is a cake. L.

“Three layers,” said Lena, behind it, with her arms folded. “Chocolate. In the oven in the kitchen, which nobody on this floor knew was there. Felix held the door shut because the catch is broken. I have reported the catch.”

“In writing,” said Felix.

“Of course in writing.”

Alexander stood in the doorway and looked at the room, and the room looked back at him, quiet for about a second, which is as long as a lounge full of nineteen-year-olds can be quiet. In that second Frederick saw his face do what it did in Brennan’s back row when an argument was going well: the face of complete and private happiness. Then somebody from the second floor shouted “Happy birthday, Alex!” much too loudly, and the room went up.

---

Mr Luna was in the armchair by the noticeboard in his cardigan, with a paper plate on his knee, three hours before he came on.

“I came in early,” said Mr Luna. “Don’t tell Residence Life.”

Callum, at Frederick’s elbow, opened his mouth. “I’m Residence Life.”

Mr Luna looked at him over his glasses.

“Then don’t tell yourself, son,” he said, and Callum closed his mouth, and wrote on the form, under All of them, Mr Luna (guest).

Mr Luna looked up at Alexander, and at the grey felt hat in his hand.

“Twenty-one, son.”

“Yes.”

“You got a hat.”

“My mother sent it.”

“On your head, son. That’s where it works.”

“I know,” said Alexander. “We have an agreement. I carry them.”

Mr Luna considered this, the way he considered the clipboard, and a ruling that would be cited.

“You and your mother.”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s between you and her,” said Mr Luna, and ate the corner of his cake, and nodded at it, slowly, as at a thing that was correct.

---

Tyler came up while it was being cut, with the hood up, and held out a bottle of Glacier, cold from the refrigerator in Ironwood, carried across campus in the front pocket of his sweatshirt so that it had left a wet patch the shape of a bottle over his stomach.

“That’s not from Ohio,” said Frederick.

“Nah. Ohio ran out in March. I buy ‘em now, at the store on University.” Tyler considered it. “That’s the last one this week, though. So.”

Alexander took it in both hands, with the hat under his arm, and looked at it, and then at Tyler, inside the hood.

“Thank you, Tyler.”

“Happy birthday, man.” Tyler looked at the floor. “It’s electrolytes. My mom says.”

---

The candles were in the handbook. Callum read the paragraph aloud in the lobby, open flame, including candles, is not permitted in any residential or common area, and looked up with the face of a man who has found the loophole he went looking for, and said, “It doesn’t say anything about the arcade.”

So they carried it outside, as they had carried another cake outside in May, into the arcade under the concrete fins, where it was sixty degrees and the four palo verdes stood black against the lamps of the car park. Lena put the plate on the low wall. Rhys lit the candles with the matches from his kit, twenty-one, round the edge, and Frederick watched the first one and waited for it to bow.

It did not bow.

None of them did. In May they had gone over slowly in the heat, all together, leaning to the west. Tonight it was January, and they stood up on the cake like a row of soldiers, twenty-one small flames in the dark, perfectly straight, and did not move at all.

“They are very upright,” said Alexander.

“It’s the cold.”

“Yes.” He looked at them longer than anybody needs to look at candles. “I prefer it.”

Then the arcade sang, in five keys, very badly, and he stood in the middle of it with the hat under one arm and the Glacier in the other hand, as a man stands for an anthem; and when it was over he bent and blew them out, all twenty-one, in one breath, from the left, correctly.

Across the road, over the dentist’s, the blind went up an inch.

---

At ten he was at the desk by the door with the lamp on and the programme open at the second page. The hat was on the shelf by the window, beside the jumper and the cricket hat. The Glacier stood on the desk, unopened.

He ticked 15.00. Nothing.

Then, against 19.00. Dinner (dining hall), where there had been no dinner, he drew one short line through the words, so that they could still be read, and wrote above them, very small:

18.55. Party. Told by Callum.

And he ticked that.

“That’s the time you were told,” said Frederick, from the bed by the window.

“Yes. That is the rule.” He laid the pencil down, parallel to the edge of the desk, and looked at the next line, and the time beside it, which was eleven.

“There’s one more,” said Frederick.

“Two,” said Alexander. “There is the one at eleven, and there is the tick.” He sat for a moment with his hands on the desk on either side of the programme, quite still, with the lamp on him. “I shall need my card,” he said.