Rim

The programme was on the desk by the door at nine on Saturday night, two pages, squared to the edge, with the pencil laid beside it.

Frederick saw it when he came in from the lounge, and stopped in the doorway.

It was typed, on the printer in the lounge, because it had the grey streak down the left-hand side of both pages; and it had not been typed by him. It was set out the way Alexander set out every programme he had ever written: the time on the left, four figures with a full stop in the middle, then the item, then whatever was in brackets, and nothing else.

It was the first one he had typed since November.

Frederick had seen the programmes stop on the sixth of November, and had written one himself on the thirteenth in biro, and had seen them come back in December, short, in Alexander’s own hand, on whatever paper was nearest. He had not seen one typed. Not for the twenty-first, which Frederick had typed himself. Not for anything.

He did not say so. He looked at the pencil, which was parallel to the edge of the desk, and at the programme, and went and sat on the bed by the window.

---

“Two forty,” said Jack.

He was on the camp bed, on his back, with the programme held up over his face in both hands. He had landed at three in the red sweatshirt and a woollen bobble hat that said NEW INN DARTS, and he was reading the programme for the third time, aloud, in a voice of mounting disbelief.

“Oh two forty. Depart (Palo Verde).” He lowered it. “That’s in the morning.”

“Yes,” said Alexander, from the desk.

“That’s not the morning. That’s the night. That’s when you go home from the morning.”

“Sunrise at the rim is at six fifty-eight. I have allowed fuel at Flagstaff, the entrance, and the walk to the rail in the dark, which I am told takes nine minutes, and to which I have added four, because it will be icy and Tyler will stop to look at things.” Alexander did not look round. “Two forty is correct.”

Jack held the programme up again.

“Oh four thirty-five. Flagstaff (fuel; coffee). Oh five fifty. Park entrance. Oh six twenty. Mather Point. Oh six fifty-eight. Sunrise (Mather Point).” He stopped. He read the next line, and lowered the programme slowly onto his chest, and turned his head on the pillow and looked at Frederick.

“Oh seven thirty,” said Jack. “Breakfast. Eat it.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“That’s yours,” said Jack. “That’s your one. From November. You told me.”

“Yes.”

On the desk by the door the pencil did not move.

“He’s copied you,” said Jack.

“It is not copying,” said Alexander, to the desk, “if it is correct.”

---

On the floor between the camp bed and the wardrobe, on a sleeping mat he had brought from Hamburg rolled up on the bottom of a rucksack, Lukas lay on his back with his hands folded on his chest and his eyes shut.

He had come through the doors at Terminal Four at one with the rucksack and nothing else, and seen Alexander at the barrier, and held up three fingers, crooked; and Alexander had held up three back, correctly; and that had been the whole of it. He had said nothing in the car, or in the lounge, where Rhys had asked him whether he wanted to play whist and he had inclined his head and sat down and won.

Jack had watched him all evening with the face of a man watching a kettle.

“Has he said anything?” said Jack, now, quietly, to Frederick. “At all? Since he landed?”

“No.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s fine.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he’s not saying anything,” said Frederick.

On the floor, with his eyes shut, Lukas lifted one hand off his chest an inch, three fingers crooked, and put it back.

---

At two thirty-two in the morning the lobby was dim and cold, and Mr Luna was at the desk under the lamp with the radio off, because there was no ball game at half past two in the morning anywhere he cared about, and the crossword, and the clipboard.

He looked at them over his glasses as they came down the last flight: Alexander first, in the linen jacket, with the grey hat in one hand and the maroon fleece over the other arm; then Frederick in the jumper; Jack with his eyes shut, steered by Rhys; Sam, and Lukas with the flask, and Kessler last.

“Where you going, son?”

“The Grand Canyon,” said Alexander. “It is on the programme.”

Mr Luna considered this, and wrote on the clipboard, 2 a.m. 66.

“It’s cold up there.”

“Twenty-seven degrees at dawn. I have looked.”

Mr Luna looked at the fleece over Alexander’s arm.

“Wear it,” he said.

There was a silence in the lobby.

Alexander looked at the fleece for some time. Then he gave the hat to Frederick to hold, and unbuttoned the linen jacket, and took it off, and folded it over the back of the plastic chair at the end of the desk, and put on the fleece, and zipped it up to the chin, and put the linen jacket on again over the top of it, and buttoned it.

Mr Luna looked at the result over his glasses for a long moment with no expression whatsoever.

“Okay,” he said, and turned back to the crossword.

---

Tyler was at the glass doors at two thirty-eight.

He was standing in the arcade with the hood up and a backpack on and his hands in the sleeves of his sweatshirt, which was all he had on over a T-shirt, and when Sam opened the door he looked at them all, and said:

“Dude. It’s so early it’s not even early.”

“You came,” said Frederick.

“I set four alarms.” Tyler looked at his phone, as though it might have something to add. “Brayden woke up at the second one and started talking about Mesa.” He considered it. “I left during Mesa.”

“Have you got a coat?”

Tyler looked down at himself.

“This is my coat.”

“It’s twenty-seven at the top.”

Tyler looked at Frederick for a moment from inside the hood, the way he looked at a thing on a screen before deciding whether to go in.

“Twenty-seven what?” he said.

---

The minibus went north out of the Valley in the dark.

It was the same white minibus as November, or its brother, and Kessler drove it as he had driven it to Tucson, at exactly the limit, both hands on the wheel, as though the road had been explained to him in advance and he was checking it against the explanation. Alexander had a window, with the programme on his knee; Lukas beside him with his eyes shut and the flask between his knees. Tyler had the back seat to himself, lying across it, with the hood down over his face.

Jack was asleep on Frederick’s shoulder before the lights of Phoenix had gone.

There was a thermometer on the dashboard, a small green number to the left of the speedometer, and Frederick watched it from the middle of the bus, past Rhys’s shoulder, as the road began to climb.

61.

The road went up in long dark curves, with saguaros along the verge in the headlights, arms up, and then fewer, and then none.

54.

47.

“Juniper,” said Alexander quietly, at the window, of the shapes along the verge, to nobody.

39.

33.

And then the pines.

They came in all at once, out of the dark, tall and black and close on both sides of the road; and between the trunks, in the headlights, white along the ground, there was snow.

---

Flagstaff was twenty-four degrees at four thirty-three.

The petrol station was on the edge of the town, under a mountain that stood up over it in the dark, white to the top. The cold went into Frederick’s chest like a hand. The snow was banked along the edges of the car park in grey heaps as high as the minibus.

Alexander got out, and looked at his watch, and waited, and at four thirty-five he ticked the line.

Tyler got out last.

He got out into twenty-four degrees in the sweatshirt, and stood quite still, and looked at the snow: at the heaps, and the pines, and the mountain, and the windscreen of a pick-up truck by the air hose, where somebody had scraped a hole to see out of, and the snow had begun to come back.

His face, inside the hood, did several things very slowly.

“Oh, come on,” said Tyler.

Jack, who had woken up in the cold, looked at him.

“I came here,” said Tyler, to the snow, with deep personal injury, “because it basically never snows. I looked it up.” He pointed at the pick-up. “That’s on the car. That’s exactly what it does in Parma. You go out and it’s on the car.”

“It’s Flagstaff,” said Rhys. “It’s seven thousand feet.”

“Nobody told me there was a seven thousand feet.”

Sam came back from the shop with a tray of coffees and a plastic bag, and gave Tyler the bag without a word. In it was a sweatshirt, grey, enormous, with FLAGSTAFF on it in white over a picture of a pine tree, and a pair of gloves, and a woollen hat.

Tyler looked into the bag.

“How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing,” said Sam. “It’s on the programme.” He nodded at Alexander, who was at the pump, adding something to a line in pencil. “Oh four thirty-five. Flagstaff (fuel; coffee; Tyler).”

Tyler looked at Alexander for a long moment, in the cold, with the bag in his hands and the snow on the pick-up behind him.

“Sick,” he said quietly, and put the sweatshirt on over the other one, and the hat, and pulled the hood up over the hat.

---

At ten to six they came to a gate with a lit hut and a ranger in a heavy coat, who looked at something Rhys held out of the window and lifted the barrier, and Alexander ticked 05.50. Then more pines, and a car park, nearly empty, and at the far side of it, beyond a low stone wall and a line of dark trees, nothing.

Frederick got out and looked at the nothing.

The sky had begun, very faintly, in the east, to go from black to the colour of a bruise. But under it, where the land should have been, there was no land. There was an absence, enormous, without a bottom, as though the world had been cut off there with a knife; and it breathed up at them a cold that was not the cold of the car park but of something very large and very far down.

“Is that it?” said Jack, beside him, quietly, in the bobble hat.

“I think so.”

“I can’t see it.”

“No.”

Jack looked at it for a while, at the nothing.

“I can feel it,” he said.

---

The path to the rail was icy, and took thirteen minutes, because Tyler stopped to look at things.

He stopped at a sign about mule deer, and at the stars going out in the east, and at his own breath, which he had never seen in Arizona and blew out four times in the light of Rhys’s torch to make sure. Alexander walked behind him at his pace, and did not hurry him, and at the rail wrote 13 in the margin by 06.20, and ticked it.

The rail was a stone wall and an iron rail on a point of rock that went out over the nothing like the prow of a ship.

They stood along it in a row in the cold: Rhys and Kessler at the ends; Sam with the notebook, not writing; Jack, and Frederick, and Alexander in the fleece with the jacket buttoned over it and the hat in his hand; Tyler in two sweatshirts; and Lukas, a little apart, at the very end of the rail where the rock went furthest out, looking east. There were perhaps twenty other people along it, in coats, and nobody was talking. It was twenty-seven degrees. The cold was in Frederick’s teeth.

And then the light came.

---

It did not come all at once. It came in pieces, the top first. A long way off, at the very edge of the world, a line of rock went from black to grey, and then from grey to a dull dark red, like an ember. And then another below it. And then, one after another, all the way across, as far as Frederick could see to the left and to the right, the tops of things, towers and walls and terraces and long flat shelves of rock standing up out of the dark, catching the light, red and orange and a colour like the inside of a peach, and below each of them the dark still lying in the clefts, black and blue and purple, and below that more dark, and below that more, going down and down, so that he understood for the first time what the nothing had been. It had not been nothing. It had been all of it, there, the whole time, in the dark, waiting.

Nobody said anything.

Along the rail twenty people stood in the cold and did not say anything. Jack, beside him, had taken the bobble hat off without seeming to know he had done it, and was holding it in both hands against his chest. Sam’s notebook had closed. Rhys had stopped stamping his feet.

At six fifty-eight the sun came up over the far rim.

It came up white and small and very sharp, at the very edge of everything, and the light came across the whole of the canyon at once, flat and gold, from one side to the other, and lay on the rock and on the snow on the rim and on the faces of the people along the rail; and on the far side of the canyon, ten miles off, Frederick saw a wall of rock go gold from the top to the bottom, slowly, like a blind going up.

Alexander did not look at his watch.

Frederick saw that. He was standing beside him, and he looked, and Alexander was not looking at his watch, or at the programme, or at the pencil. He was looking at the canyon. The programme was in his gloved hand at his side, folded, with the pencil inside it, and he did not open it, and he did not move.

At the end of the rail Lukas had closed his eyes.

---

It was Tyler who said it, in the end. Somebody had to.

He stood at the rail with his gloved hands on the iron and the gold light on his face, which was round and pale and had seen exactly one sunrise on purpose in its life, from the top of a butte in Tempe, last May.

“Okay,” said Tyler. “That one’s bigger.”

Jack laughed. He could not help it. It came out of him in a single surprised breath, in the silence, and he put the bobble hat over his mouth; and somebody further along the rail, a woman with a camera, laughed too, and then a man; and the silence along the rail broke, gently, all at once, and people began to talk again, quietly, the way people talk coming out of a church.

Alexander opened the programme.

He opened it in his gloved hand, against the iron of the rail, and took the pencil out, and looked at the line, and at his watch, which said seven minutes past seven; and then he ticked 06.58, small and exact, a short stroke down and a long one up.

“That’s not when it happened,” said Frederick.

“No,” said Alexander. “It happened at six fifty-eight. I did not tick it at six fifty-eight.” He looked at the tick. “I was not looking.”

---

Breakfast was at seven thirty, at the lodge along the rim, in a long room with a stone fireplace and a fire in it and windows that looked out at the canyon, so that every table had the whole of it outside, gold now, and blue in the shadows, and enormous.

Alexander ate it.

He ate the whole of it, two eggs and toast and something called hash browns that he looked at for some time first, with the programme beside his plate and the pencil on it, parallel to the edge of the table. When he had finished he ticked 07.30. Breakfast (eat it).

Jack watched him do it, from across the table, with his coffee in both hands, and did not say anything, which Frederick had seen him do perhaps four times in his life.

---

At eleven they walked along the rim.

The path ran along the edge in the sun, with the snow melting off it in the light and freezing again in the shade, and the canyon on the right the whole way. Tyler walked at the front, stopping at everything. Jack walked beside Frederick and said nothing for nearly a mile, which was a record.

At the head of a trail Lukas stopped.

It was a wide path that went over the edge of the rim between two stone posts, beside a small stone building with a wooden door, and down; and from the rail you could see it go, a long way down, in tight switchbacks cut into the face of the rock, back and forth, white with snow on the upper turns and red below where the sun had been on it, and very small on it, far down, people. A wooden sign at the top said BRIGHT ANGEL TRAIL, and under it, in smaller letters, the distances to places, and under that a red sign about water and heat, and under that, another, about the descent being optional and the climb out being mandatory.

Lukas stood at the top of it and looked down.

He did not say anything. He stood with his hands in his pockets and watched the people on the trail: a pair going down, briskly, with poles; a man coming up, very slowly, stopping at each turn with his hands on his knees; four going down at a run and laughing, on the red part below the snow. He watched them the way he had watched Jack’s darts and Sam’s pencil, for a long time, without moving, as though he had been set a sum.

Jack stopped beside Frederick and looked at Lukas.

“He’s going to race us,” said Jack. “Isn’t he.”

“Yes.”

“Down that.”

“Yes.”

Jack looked at the trail, and at the man coming up it with his hands on his knees, and at Lukas, and at the sign about the climb out being mandatory.

“Brilliant,” said Jack.

Rhys had come up behind them. He looked at the trail, and at Lukas, and at Jack’s face, and walked back to Kessler, and the two of them stood for a moment with their heads close, in the way officers of two countries confer when they have both seen the same thing coming.

Then Rhys came back.

“Not the bottom,” said Rhys. “Kessler says no. I say no. The sergeant would say no from Tempe, if she knew, and she’ll know.” He looked down the trail. “There’s a rest house. A mile and a half down. Stone hut. You can see it from here, if you look.” He pointed, and far down, at a turn of the switchbacks below the snow, Frederick saw a small square of grey. “To there and back. No further. That’s it.”

Lukas, at the top of the trail, without turning round, inclined his head, exactly.

---

The programme was on the bed in their room at the lodge that night, both pages of it, laid side by side on the blanket.

The first page was Sunday, and every line on it was ticked. The second page was Monday, typed like the first; and it went from 06.00. Wake in the morning down through 08.00. Trailhead (Bright Angel) and the rest house and back, and lunch, and the afternoon, and dusk at the rim at 18.33, and dinner at 19.30.

And then it stopped.

Below 19.30 there was a space, about the height of one line, and then the bottom of the page, and nothing in the space at all. No time. No item. Nothing typed and nothing written.

Frederick looked at it for a while.

He did not say anything about it. Alexander was at the window in his shirtsleeves, with the curtain an inch open, looking out at the dark, where the canyon was, and the stars over it, which at seven thousand feet were more stars than Frederick had known there were.

“Twenty-seven degrees,” said Alexander, to the window, “at six fifty-eight.”

“I know.”

“I had it on the programme,” said Alexander. “It was correct.” He let the curtain fall. “It was not the same thing.”