Citizen and Sovereign, Again

The email had come on Monday night, at eleven minutes past eleven, which Alexander said was the time a man writes when he has decided to say yes and has been putting it off.

Mr Hanover.

You may sit in the back row on Wednesday. Three conditions. You may not speak. You may not take notes for anybody who is enrolled. You may not cite yourself, which you will say does not arise, and which I am putting in writing anyway, because with your family it always arises.

H.B.

“That is four conditions,” said Alexander, reading it over his shoulder at the desk by the window.

“He said three.”

“The last sentence is a condition.” Alexander straightened up. “He has hidden it in the reasoning. It is what he does in the small type.” He considered the screen. “He has also not said that I may not speak.”

“You’re enrolled.”

“Yes,” said Alexander, with satisfaction. “That is what I mean.”

---

They walked to Tolliver at a quarter past eight, along the arcade, from shade to shade, in eighty-five degrees that would be ninety-two by noon; and Kessler walked behind them at eleven yards, with a music folder under his arm, and was not there.

The girl at the coffee cart under the arcade by the library wrote FRED on one cup in purple marker, and then, on the other, without asking, ALEX. She had done it since October. She had asked, in October, the first morning after the Devil’s Advocate ran the story, whether it was still ALEX, and Alexander had said that it was, and she had said okay, cool, and had not asked again.

“Iced,” said Frederick.

“Hot,” said Alexander.

“It’s eighty-five.”

“I have had a hot coffee before the Charter every morning since August.” He took it. “I am not going to change on the last Wednesday.”

Across the mall the Abernathy box outside Old Main said 76, in green, under its strip of paper that said THRESHOLD 82. Nobody was photographing it. It was April, and it had another week.

---

Tolliver 104 was full when they came in, and the back wall was full as well.

There were people standing along it under the clock, about twenty of them, the way there had been thirty a year ago, from other sections and other years; and Frederick recognised four from his own section of last spring, and a boy from the second floor of Palo Verde who was not enrolled in anything at nine in the morning, and, at the end of the row, by the door, with her back against the wall and a pencil behind her ear, the girl from the Devil’s Advocate.

She saw him. She looked at him for about a second, and then at Alexander, and took the pencil from behind her ear, and put it back.

The back row was the back row. Alexander’s seat was the second from the aisle, as it had been since August, and the one on the aisle beside it was empty; and Alexander went along to his and sat down and laid the pencil beside his notebook, exactly parallel to the edge, and put the hot coffee at the top corner of the desk, and looked at the seat on the aisle.

“He has kept it,” said Alexander. “For you. There was a notice on it at a quarter to nine. A boy told me in the corridor.”

Frederick looked. There was a square of paper on the seat, folded once, and on it in large rapid capitals in black marker, RESERVED. VISITOR. NO SPEAKING.

He sat on it.

On the board, at the left-hand end, in the same capitals, there was one line, and nothing else at all.

CAN A MAN BE A CITIZEN AND A SOVEREIGN AT ONCE?

---

Brennan came in at one minute to nine with the leather bag and the cardboard cup and the little blue Charter rolled up under his arm, in the crumpled linen jacket and the tie with the fish on it, and put the bag and the cup down on the bench, and turned round, and looked up the rows at the twenty along the back wall, and sighed.

“It’s not a review,” he said. “Friday’s a review. Friday I will actually review. I want that understood by the people along the wall.” He looked at them. “Some of you have been here before.”

Nobody along the wall moved.

“Fine,” said Brennan.

He looked up the rows, slowly, from the front to the back. He looked at the back row last. He looked at the seat on the aisle and at the man on it, briefly, the way a man checks that a door is shut; and then he looked at the seat beside it, and his face did something small and quick that Frederick had seen it do in November, on the mall, at noon, and had not seen since.

Then he picked up the chalk.

“In August,” said Brennan, “I wrote that.” He tapped the board under the question, once, with the chalk. “On the first morning, in this room, to a section of first-years, one of whom had come back. I told you that I’d spend nine months asking it, and that in the last week of April I’d tell you the answer.” He turned the chalk over in his fingers. “Mr Oyelaran isn’t here this year to tell me how long it’s been. Somebody.”

“Eight months and four days,” said Alexander, from the back row.

The room turned round.

“Thank you, Mr Hohenzollern.” Brennan did not look surprised. “I’m early again. I’m always early. It’s the only vice I’ve got left.” He put the chalk down on the bench. “I’ve had the answer since August. I wrote it down. It’s on a card, in my bag, and it’s been in my bag every day since, in case anybody asked.” He looked at the bag. “Nobody asked. You were all very well brought up.”

The room laughed.

“So I’m not going to give it.” Brennan picked up the Charter and unrolled it and did not look at it. “I’m going to ask you. Can a man be a citizen and a sovereign at once?” He waited. “Anybody.”

---

A boy in the third row said no.

He said it the way people say the thing they have decided to say before they came in, quickly, a little loud, in a Sun Devils cap the right way round: that a sovereign was above the law and a citizen was under it, and that you couldn’t be above and under at the same time, because that was physics.

“Is he?” said Brennan.

“Is he what?”

“Above the law.” Brennan found it in the Charter without looking for it. “Article Nine. The people of the United Kingdom of America enjoy the ancient liberties of free subjects under law. Under law. Is the King one of the people?”

The boy opened his mouth, and shut it.

“Write that down,” said Brennan. “Not the answer. The question. It’s better than the one on the board.” He turned. “Somebody else.”

A girl in the front row said yes. Frederick knew her from the back of her head: the girl who had stood between Brennan and the door in January and told him it was a birthday. She said that everybody was a citizen of somewhere, that you couldn’t not be, it was on your passport, and that the King had to have one, didn’t he, so he must be a citizen of something, so yes.

“The King hasn’t got a passport,” said Brennan. “They’re all issued in his name. Neither has the German Emperor, I’m told, for the same reason.” He did not look at the back row. “Nice try, though. You’ve found the word citizen. The Charter never uses it. Free subjects. Not citizens. That’s not an accident, and it’s on the final.” He put the Charter down. “So. A boy who says the King’s above the law, and a girl who says he’s on a passport, and neither of you is right, and both of you have found the right word, and they’re different words.” He picked up the cup. “Anybody else?”

Nobody else.

Brennan stood at the bench with the cup in his hand and looked up the rows, all the way, to the back row; and Frederick, on the aisle, saw him decide not to ask, and then decide that it was the last Wednesday.

“Mr Hohenzollern,” said Brennan.

---

“Three parts,” said Alexander.

“Of course it is.”

“First, the law.” Alexander did not stand up. He sat in the back row with his hands folded on the notebook beside the pencil, upright, in the linen jacket, buttoned, the way he had sat in this row since August, and spoke at the volume at which a man speaks to a room he knows is listening. “The question cannot be answered from the Charter, because the Charter does not say. It tells you in Article Nine what the people are. It tells you in Article Fifteen that the Crown may be one in person, yet distinct in right. It does not tell you what the person is, when he is not being the Crown. No constitution I have read tells you that. They describe the office and leave the man to the commentary.”

“In small type,” said Brennan.

“In small type. And so the first answer is that nobody has decided, and that this is deliberate, because it is safer for a constitution to describe a chair than a man.” He paused, exactly, the length of a comma. “Second, the fact.”

“Go on.”

“Since August I have been governed by the March of Arizona.” Alexander looked at the board. “I have signed for my guests, three nights in a room and no more. I have had an orange band put on my wrist at a door because I asked for one, and cut off with a pair of scissors because I was twenty-one. I have asked for water under the Travellers’ Act, which does not ask who you are, and I was given it. My room has been kept below a temperature fixed by a law I did not vote for and could not have voted for, in a dwelling, and a man writes the temperature down every hour of the night because the law says so.” He was quiet for a moment. “Nobody asked my consent to any of it. I have not minded any of it. If a citizen is a man who is governed, and does not mind, then for eight months and four days I have been one, here. I was not one at home.”

The room was very quiet. Along the back wall the girl from the Devil’s Advocate had taken the pencil from behind her ear and was holding it, and was not writing.

“Third,” said Alexander.

He looked down at the notebook, and at the pencil beside it, parallel, and then up again.

“At once.” He said the two words as though he were setting them on the desk. “That is the part of your question that is doing the work, and you put it there on purpose. At seven in the morning a box comes to the day desk of Palo Verde Hall, and a man signs for it and carries it up the stairs, and for an hour I am the other thing. I read what my ministers have decided and I put my name to it. And then at a quarter past eight I walk here, and buy a coffee with my name on it, and sit in this row, and you tell me that I am wrong.” He paused. “A man can be both in a day. I do not think he can be both in the same minute. And I think the minute is where a sovereign is dangerous, and the day is where he is safe.”

He stopped.

There was a silence in Tolliver 104 that went on for some time.

“And the King?” said Brennan.

He said it to the back row, but not to the seat on the aisle; he said it to the seat beside it, carefully, as a man puts a cup down near the edge of a table.

“The King is not enrolled in this section,” said Alexander. “He may not speak. It is in writing.”

The room went up.

It laughed the way a room laughs when it has been holding its breath, all at once and longer than the joke, and the boy in the cap turned round in his seat and looked at the back row with his mouth open, and the girl in the front row put both hands over her face; and Brennan stood at the bench with the cardboard cup and did not laugh, quite, but put his head down, so that all Frederick could see of his face was the grey beard and the top of the hair that had been red.

---

“That’s three,” said Brennan, when the room let him.

“Yes.”

“You always do three.”

“Two is an argument,” said Alexander. “Four is a lecture.”

Brennan looked up the rows at him for a long moment.

Then he went to the bench, and opened the leather bag, and took out of the inside pocket of it a white index card, a little soft at the corners, and held it up so that the room could see that it was there, with writing on the side facing him and nothing on the side facing them.

He read it. He read it to himself, without moving his lips, with the room watching him do it.

“That’s what it says,” said Brennan.

He put it back in the bag.

“It says what it said in August. I wrote it in ink. I’m not going to read it to you, because it’s worse than what you’ve just heard, and I’d have to give myself a C.” He did up the buckle on the bag. “I’m going to leave it in there. I’ll read it again next August, to a new section, and see if it’s improved.”

A boy along the back wall said, quite loudly, “What does it say?”

“It says,” said Brennan, “that I’m still a republican.” He looked up the rows at the back. “I’d like that minuted.”

“It was minuted last year,” said Alexander.

Brennan stopped.

“By whom?”

“Mr Whitfield. On the twenty-eighth of April. In pencil.” Alexander considered. “He has five highlighters now. He was not sure which colour a minute should be, so he used the pencil.”

Brennan looked at the back row, and then, for the first time that morning, directly at the seat on the aisle, at the man on it who was not allowed to speak; and Frederick looked back at him and did not say anything, because it was in writing.

“So it was,” said Brennan. “I forgot I had a clerk.” He picked up the cup. “Then I’d like it minuted again. Same wording. By about the same amount less.” He held up his finger and thumb, a little way apart, not quite as far apart as last year. “Friday. A review. Actually a review. Read the commentary.” He picked up the bag. “Go.”

---

They began to clap.

It began along the back wall, with the boy from the second floor of Palo Verde who was not enrolled in anything, and then the four from last spring, and then the rows in front of them; and Brennan, at the bench, with the bag on his shoulder, put the cup down and put up one hand, flat, the way a man stops traffic.

“No,” he said, over it. “Not two years running. People will think it’s a tradition.” He picked the cup up again. “Go.”

They stopped. They went, laughing, in a stream, down the curved rows and out through the door at the front; and Brennan went out with them, before the room had emptied, which he had never done, and was gone.

Alexander picked up the pencil, and looked at it, and put it in his pocket.

“He did not say whether I was right,” he said.

“No.”

“He always says that I am wrong.”

“He didn’t say that either,” said Frederick.

Alexander considered this, sitting in the back row of Tolliver 104 with the room emptying round him and the question still on the board in large rapid capitals; and something happened at the corner of his mouth and went away again, and he stood up and buttoned his jacket, which was already buttoned.

---

Brennan was on the steps of Tolliver.

He was not at the door. He was always at the door, in the corridor that smelled of floor polish, letting the room go past him in its stream; and this morning he had gone out through it and down the steps and was standing at the bottom of them, in the strip of shade under the arcade, with the bag on his shoulder and the empty cup in his hand, looking at the mall, as though he had come out for the air.

He saw them. He waited until they were on the bottom step.

“Mr Hohenzollern,” said Brennan.

“Professor.”

“Good answer.” Brennan looked at the cup. “Wrong in one respect. I’m not going to tell you which. It’s on the final.”

“Then I will find it,” said Alexander, and went on, two steps, to where Kessler was standing under a palm with the music folder, and stopped there, and looked at the mall, and was not listening.

Brennan looked at Frederick.

“Mr Hanover.”

“Fred.”

“Mr Hanover.” Brennan turned the cup round in his hand. “You kept the conditions.”

“All four.”

Brennan almost smiled, at the corner of the grey beard, very briefly. Then he looked at the mall again, at the palms and the students going past under them in shorts and the brick building on the far side with the ivy on it that nobody had managed to kill, and Frederick watched him take hold of something, the way he had watched him do it in corridors for a year and a half, and get it down off the shelf where he kept things.

“Did you declare?” said Brennan.

“Friday week.”

“That’s the deadline.”

“Yes.”

Brennan nodded slowly. He looked at the brick building across the mall for some time.

“History?” he said.

Frederick did not answer.

He did not decide not to. He stood on the bottom step of Tolliver in the shade with the empty coffee cup with FRED on it in purple marker, and looked at the brick building with the ivy, and found that the word was there, quite near, the way a word is near when you have carried it about for a month without taking it out; and that he was not going to take it out on a step, in front of a republican, nine days early.

Brennan looked at him, and waited, a little; and then did not wait.

“Drink water, Mr Hanover,” he said.

And went away along the arcade with the bag on his shoulder, towards the library.

He went three steps. Frederick watched the place, three steps along, where Brennan turned round; and Brennan reached it, and went past it, and on, under the arches, and did not turn round, and did not ask again.

---

“He asked you nothing in November,” said Alexander, on the way to the dining hall. “And this morning he asked you one thing, and stopped.”

“Yes.”

“That is two kindnesses.” He considered. “From a republican.”

“He’d say they weren’t.”

“He would say that they were professional,” said Alexander. “He would be wrong in one respect.”

---

Rhys was at the table by the window, with the butte a mile off in the glass and the ABC on the television on the wall with the sound down, and the five highlighters in a row beside his tray, yellow, green, pink, blue and the fifth, in the colour nobody had a name for; and he looked up as they sat down with the face of a man who has been at Comparative Government for an hour and has not been able to think about Comparative Government.

“Well?”

“He didn’t answer it,” said Frederick.

“He didn’t?”

“He’s got it on a card. In his bag. In ink. He read it and put it back.”

Rhys put his fork down.

“And then?”

“And then he said he was still a republican, and he’d like it minuted,” said Frederick, “and Alexander told him you’d minuted it last year.”

Rhys went pink.

He went pink from the ears inwards, slowly, the way he had gone pink at the Charter for a year and a half, until the whole of his face was the colour of the A; and he looked at Alexander across the table, and at the five highlighters, and back.

“You told him it was me?”

“On the twenty-eighth of April,” said Alexander. “In pencil. He did not know he had a clerk.”

Rhys sat for a moment at the table by the window with his face the colour of the A. Then he took his notebook out of his bag, the one from last year, the Charter one, which he still carried, and opened it at a page near the end, and Frederick read it upside down: Still a republican. (Minuted.) in very small pencil, with the date.

Rhys looked at it for a while. Then he took the pencil out of his pocket, and, under it, in the same small letters, wrote: Still. (Minuted again, 25.iv, by about the same less.)

“Which colour?” said Alexander.

“Pencil,” said Rhys, without looking up. “It’s a minute.”

---

At half past ten that night the light by the bed by the door went off, exactly, as it had nearly every night since August; and the room went dark except for the lamp on the desk by the window, where Frederick sat with the History paper finished on the screen, due on Friday, three thousand words on a pardon and a question and what a family remembers, with not one footnote in it that said personal communication.

He opened the notebook. He opened it from the back, where he kept them, and took them out: the sheets from Ms Ybarra’s printer, each of them folded in four, the folds gone soft, each of them the same.

HANOVER, F. Class of 2037. Palo Verde Hall 312. Intended major: UNDECLARED.

He unfolded them on the desk, one beside the other, under the lamp.

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

“Yes.”

“Friday week.”

“I know.”

There was a silence from the bed by the door, the length of a comma.

“Goodnight,” said Alexander.

Frederick folded the sheets back up, one at a time, along their old folds, and put them in the back of the notebook, and closed it, and sat for a while with his hand flat on the cover, in the lamplight, with the butte in the inch of window at the edge of the blind; and then he turned the lamp off too.