Revision

The programme on the desk by the door was for the whole week.

It was typed, on two sheets from the lounge printer, stapled at the corner with the stapler from Alexander’s drawer, and it began on Monday and ended on Friday, and every day of it had its own heading in capitals, and under each heading the times went down the left-hand side to the minute, with a space beside each for the tick.

Frederick read it from the bed by the window at two minutes to six, in the grey light, with the blind up an inch.

MO 30.IV.

06.00 316. (F. habit.)

06.40. F. to Sam’s desk. A. to 312.

07.00. Box.

07.45. Breakfast. (Eat it.)

09.00. The Charter. Final. Big theatre, north side of the mall. Two pens.

He stopped at the fourth line, and read it again.

(Eat it.)

It was in brackets, in the same type as everything else, as though it had always been there. It had been on the programme for the Canyon too, and Jack had read it out on the camp bed; and the first time Frederick had seen it, it had been in his own handwriting, in November, on hotel paper stolen from the lounge noticeboard, in his worse hand, and Alexander had read it twice and kept it.

“That’s mine,” said Frederick.

“It was yours.” Alexander was sitting on the end of his bed in the linen jacket, buttoned, putting on his shoes, the left and then the right. “I have adopted it. It is a good instruction. It applies to everybody.” He tied the right shoe. “You have not eaten breakfast on the morning of an examination since I have known you.”

“You’ve known me since you were born.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “It is a long record.”

---

Sam was at his desk under the poster of the federal tax brackets at six, with the lamp on and the notebook open and a pencil in his hand, and in the chair beside him, which was the chair Frederick had sat in at six from September to December, there was Felix.

Felix did not fit the chair. He was six feet and four inches of quiet fair engineer from Kiel, and he sat in a student desk chair the way a heron sits in a bucket, with his knees up and his elbows in and his whole attention on a page of numbers in Sam’s hand, which said at the top, in capitals, ACCRUALS.

“You’re not in statistics,” said Sam, without looking up.

“I know.”

“You passed.”

“With a D.”

“A D is a pass.” Sam made a small mark in a column. “It’s in the handbook. I checked. I checked twice.” He looked up at last, over his round glasses. “Sit on the bed.”

Frederick sat on the end of Sam’s bed, which was made so tightly that it looked like a parcel, and which did not give when he sat on it. Across the room, on the other bed, under the window, there was a long shape under a sheet with a pillow over its head, and a hand coming out from under the pillow, holding a yellow highlighter, uncapped.

“He’s got Comparative Government at eight,” said Sam. “He went to sleep at four. With the highlighter.” He turned back to Felix. “Again. In your own words. What’s an accrual?”

Felix considered the page.

“It is money,” he said slowly, in his careful English, “that has happened. But has not arrived.”

“Yes.”

“Like a train.” Felix looked at the ceiling, at the idea. “The train has left. It is on the line. It is certain. You put it on the board at the station before it comes.” He considered. “But you cannot get on it yet.”

Sam looked at him for some time.

“That’s not in the textbook,” said Sam.

“No?”

“No.” Sam wrote something in the notebook, small, and underlined it. “It’s better.” He turned the page. “Prepayments. Same thing the other way round. Go.”

Frederick sat on the parcel of the bed and listened to it, the six o’clock, the lamp and the pencil and Sam’s voice going down a column of numbers one at a time without ever hurrying, and the poster of the tax brackets on the wall above them, and the window going from grey to white; and he did not have anything to do, and had not had anything to do at six in this room since December, and he had come anyway, and he could not have said why, except that it was six o’clock and this was where six o’clock was.

“You can go back to bed,” said Sam, without looking up.

“I know.”

“You won’t.”

“No.”

“I know,” said Sam, and went on.

---

At twenty to seven Sam looked at his watch, and said “Box,” to the column of figures, in the same voice; and Felix stood up.

He did not ask anything. He unfolded himself out of the chair, and put the page of accruals in his folder, and said “Thank you, Sam,” and nodded to Frederick, once, the nod of one officer to the officer of another service, which Felix always did and nobody had taught him; and went out, and shut the door behind him, and Frederick heard his feet go along the corridor to 314.

Sam took the grey backpack with the broken zip off the hook behind the door, and held it shut with two fingers, and went down the forty-five steps and across the road, as he had done at a quarter to seven every morning since August of the year before; and came back up them at six fifty-three, with the red box in the backpack, and put it on the desk under the poster of the tax brackets, and turned the key the right way for Frederick’s hand.

It was eleven papers. Frederick read them all to the end, including the parts in small type, and initialled each, small, in pencil, in the top right-hand corner, and laid the pencil down beside each one parallel to the edge, which he had begun to do at some point last spring and now did without noticing; and on the bed under the window, at five past seven, under the pillow, Rhys’s alarm went off, and the hand with the highlighter came out and turned it off and went back under.

Across the road, over the dentist’s, the blind was halfway down.

It went down another inch.

---

On the fire door at the end of the third floor there was a sign.

QUIET HOURS 24/7 UNTIL FRIDAY. THIS MEANS YOU.

And under it, smaller:

THIS MEANS EVERYBODY. I AM NOT JOKING. (RESIDENCE LIFE HANDBOOK, 7.3.) C. (RA)

Somebody had drawn a small sun in the corner, with a face. The face was crying.

“Did you write that?” said Frederick, on the landing.

Callum Reyes was coming up the stairs from the second floor with a roll of tape on his wrist like a bracelet and an armful of the same sign for the fourth and fifth floors, in his maroon lanyard, with the expression he had worn since August, which was that of a man carrying something that might go off.

“Priya gave me hers,” said Callum. “From last year. She had a photo of it. She said it worked.” He looked at the sign on the fire door. “I added the section. So if anybody asks, it’s in the handbook.” He swallowed. “It is in the handbook. I checked.”

“Did you draw the sun?”

“No,” said Callum. “That was there when I came back from the toilet.” He looked at it. “I don’t know who does the sun.”

---

Alexander came back from the Charter at a quarter past twelve.

He came up the forty-five steps in the linen jacket in ninety-four degrees, with a pen in each inside pocket, and stopped on the landing at the seventy-nine, under the thermometer, and looked at it, as he did every time, as though checking that the law was still in force; and then came along the corridor to 312, where Frederick was at the desk by the window doing nothing with a Spanish verb table, and put the two pens down on the desk by the door, side by side, parallel, and sat.

“Well?”

“There was a second line in the rubric.” Alexander took the programme off the desk and ticked 09.00. “Under Answer three questions.”

“Candidates may not cite themselves.”

“Candidates may not cite themselves,” said Alexander, “or each other.”

Frederick put down the verb table.

“He’s put each other?”

“He has put each other.” Alexander considered the programme. “I believe it was for me. I had been intending to cite you. You said a thing on the step in November about the box that I wished to use in the question on Article Fifteen.” He laid the pencil down. “I used the commentary instead. It said the same thing at more length and with three footnotes.”

“Did you find it?”

“Find what?”

“The respect you were wrong in.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “In the second question.” He looked at the window. “I am not going to tell you which. It is his to tell. He will tell me on Thursday, in an email, and I will mind it.”

“How much?”

Alexander considered this honestly.

“Less,” he said, “than in December.”

---

The last of the eight o’clocks was not at eight, because finals were not at eight; it was at one, in the music building, in the room with twenty-four chairs and the piano by the window, and Dr Pike had put two chairs out in the middle of the floor, facing the piano, and folded the other twenty-two against the wall.

“A final,” said Dr Pike, at the piano, “is a thing you do once, so that I can write a letter on a form.” She had her small black book open on the music stand and her glasses on the end of her nose. “In Music II the letter is for the voice. So you are each going to sing me something you learned this year. One verse. Your choice.” She looked at them over the glasses. “Mr Hanover first, because Mr Kessler is going to make you sound worse, and it’s kinder to get it over.”

Frederick sang the chorale from September, the one from the Passion. He sang the tenor line, one verse, from the music, with Pike playing the other three parts on the piano under him; and he got through it, and only came in early once, at the place where everybody comes in early, and Pike did not stop.

“Good,” said Dr Pike, and wrote in the book. “You came in early at the fermata. Everybody comes in early at the fermata. Bach knew that and did it anyway.” She looked at the chair by the wall. “Mr Kessler.”

Kessler stood up.

He did not take the music. He stood in the middle of the floor of the music room in his dark suit with his hands at his sides, forty-six years old, the oldest freshman in Palo Verde Hall, with a face like the end of a wardrobe; and Pike played the first chord, and waited, and he sang the bass.

He sang the Easter hymn. Frederick knew it from the first note, because he had heard it come up through a pew five weeks ago and through a stairwell the same night, and he felt it come up now through the floor of the music room and the legs of the chair and the soles of his shoes; and Pike, at the piano, played the tune over it, the top line only, quite softly, so that there was nothing in the room at all but the tune and the bottom of the world.

At the end of the verse she stopped playing.

She sat at the piano for a moment with her hands in her lap. Then she took her glasses off.

“Mr Kessler,” said Dr Pike. “I’m seventy-six.”

“Yes, madam.”

“I’ve taught this course for twenty years. I’ve had a hundred and eleven students in it, and most of them were here because it was the only class at eight in the morning that didn’t have a laboratory.” She folded the glasses. “And in the last year of it I’ve had two. And one of them was the King, and couldn’t come in on time at a fermata. And the other one was you.” She looked at him. “Will you sign up for Music III?”

Kessler stood in the middle of the floor and considered it, with no expression at all.

“I will ask,” he said.

“Ask who?”

Kessler looked at the window, and at the door, and at the wall beyond the door, beyond which, across the campus, a man in a buttoned linen jacket was at that moment eating his lunch, because a programme said so.

“Madam,” said Kessler. “Nobody has ever asked me before.”

Dr Pike looked at him for some time. Then she put her glasses back on, and wrote something in the small black book, and underlined it, twice.

---

The landing was occupied.

Frederick came up the stairs at a quarter past three with the telephone in his hand, because his mother had written at three your time I will be in the kitchen, tell me about your music, and the step under the narrow window was where he took her calls, and had been since August of the year before; and on the step under the narrow window, side by side, with a stack of revision cards each and the thermometer on the wall above them at seventy-nine, were Rhys and Alexander.

“Sorry, sir,” said Rhys, not moving.

“Fred.”

“Sorry, Fred.” Rhys held up a card. “It’s the only place in the building that’s quiet and isn’t a room. Callum’s sign. Quiet hours. We can’t do it in 316, Sam’s got Felix, and we can’t do it in 312, you’re in it.” He looked at the card. “And it’s cool.”

“It’s seventy-nine.”

“It’s always seventy-nine,” said Rhys. “That’s what’s cool about it.”

Alexander did not look up from his cards. “We will be finished at four,” he said. “It is on the programme. 15.00 to 16.00, landing, The Executive II, R.W. You will find it on the second sheet.” He turned a card over. “Your mother may be telephoned from the half-landing. It is two steps down and has the same view.”

Frederick sat on the half-landing, two steps down, which had the same view, and rang London, where it was eleven at night now and not ten, and told his mother about the music room, and Kessler, and the Easter hymn, and Dr Pike taking her glasses off; and above him on the step under the narrow window the Executive II went on, in two voices, at the volume of quiet hours.

“Week three,” said Rhys. “Mercer’s claim.”

“Decisiveness is the first virtue of an executive.”

“Source?”

“His own textbook. Chapter two, the second page.” Alexander turned a card. “Week eleven. Where did he withdraw it?”

“He didn’t withdraw it.”

“He withdrew it.”

“He put a footnote in,” said Rhys, pink, “in the reading for week eleven, which says that decisiveness is a virtue within constitutional limits, which is not withdrawing it, it’s qualifying it, which is what you do when you’re right and want to look careful.”

“A footnote,” said Alexander, “is where a man keeps the thing he is ashamed of. Brennan says so. In the small type.”

“Brennan’s not on the Executive II paper.”

“Brennan,” said Alexander, “is on every paper.”

There was a short silence on the step under the narrow window.

“Who’s that?” said his mother, in London, in his ear.

“Rhys and Alexander.”

“What are they doing?”

“Revising,” said Frederick. “Against each other.”

His mother was quiet for a moment, in the kitchen in London, at eleven at night.

“How are they doing?”

Frederick listened. Above him on the step Rhys said something about Article Four, and Alexander said “Article Three, in the margin, in red,” and Rhys said “I know it was Article Three in the margin, I’m saying he was wrong to put it there,” and Alexander said “Yes. So am I,” and then neither of them said anything, and Frederick heard a card being put down on a stack, and another on the other stack, at the same moment.

“Level,” he said.

---

Tyler came at four, for the quiet.

He came along the corridor in the hood, with the sleeves over his hands and a bottle of Glacier and his headphones round his neck, and stopped at the fire door and read Callum’s sign, all of it, including the section, and the crying sun, and came on, and knocked on the door of 312, which he had never done since August, and came in.

“I knocked,” said Tyler. “It’s quiet hours.”

“You can still come in.”

“I know. I’m just saying I knocked.” He sat on the floor between the beds with his back against Frederick’s, where he always sat, and put the Glacier on the floor beside him. “Brayden’s revising out loud. He revises out loud, dude. About Mesa. It’s not even about Mesa. It’s Organic Chemistry. He just does it in a Mesa voice.” He put the headphones on, and then took them off again. “Wednesday’s you, right?”

“Yes.”

“Twenty-two.”

“Yes.”

“Are they doing the camera on the stairs again?”

“Yes.”

“Cool,” said Tyler. “I’ll be asleep.” He considered it. “I was asleep last year. I woke up and it said game over.” He put the headphones back round his neck. “Different thing. My thing.”

“What’s your final?”

“Thursday. It’s a program.” Tyler looked at the ceiling. “Same as last year. A loop and a condition and a user. I’m doing a fire again.” He drank some of the Glacier. “With people in it this time.”

Frederick looked at him.

“Last year you said people were a whole other assignment.”

“Yeah.” Tyler put the bottle down. “So I did the other assignment.” He shrugged, a large slow shrug from deep in the hood. “There’s six of them. They sit round it. If you don’t feed it they get cold and they kind of move closer together. And then if you still don’t feed it…” He stopped. “I haven’t done the end yet.”

“What happens at the end?”

“I don’t know yet.” Tyler put the headphones on. “Thursday,” he said, much too loud, to hear himself, and then nothing for an hour.

At the desk by the door, Alexander, who had come in at four exactly and ticked it, sat with his pencil over 16.00. Tyler and did not tick it at once. He looked at the back of Tyler’s hood for a little while, on the floor between the beds.

Then he ticked it.

---

Callum knocked at half past eight with a form.

He stood in the doorway of 312 with it held in front of him in both hands, the way people hold a thing they are going to have to read aloud, and the handbook under his arm, and his face the colour of the wall.

“The ABC,” said Callum. “Wednesday.”

“Yes.”

“They’ve sent a form. To Residence Life. And Residence Life sent it to me. Because it’s my floor.” He looked at the form. “It says request to film on university premises. It wants an RA signature.” He looked up. “There’s nothing in the handbook about the ABC.”

“There wasn’t last year either.”

“I wasn’t here last year.” Callum opened the handbook, at a page he had marked with a strip of paper. “There’s a paragraph about filming. Section nine. It says filming in stairwells is not permitted for reasons of fire safety and egress.” He looked up, very pale. “It’s a stairwell.”

Frederick looked at Alexander. Alexander looked at the form.

“Read the next paragraph,” said Alexander.

Callum read it.

“Except with the approval of the Hall Director or a designated officer of public safety.” He stopped. He read it again, to himself, moving his lips. “Who’s a designated officer of public safety?”

There was a short silence in 312.

“She’s across the road,” said Frederick.

Callum looked at the window. Across the road, over the dentist’s, the blind was halfway down.

“I can’t go across the road,” said Callum. “She’s a sergeant. She’s not on my floor.”

“Rhys will take it,” said Frederick.

Rhys took it. He took it across the road at a quarter to nine, in his running kit, and came back at eight minutes to, and gave it back to Callum on the landing, and on the line at the bottom that said Designated officer of public safety, there was a single initial, in black pen, small and upright.

K.

Callum looked at it for a long time.

“Is that allowed?” he said. “Just a letter?”

“It’s her whole name,” said Rhys. “In that building.”

---

At half past ten the light by the bed by the door went off, exactly.

Frederick lay on the bed by the window in the dark, with the blind up an inch and the edge of the butte in it against the orange of five million people with their lights on, and did not sleep; and after a while, from the bed by the door, Alexander said:

“Frederick.”

“Yes.”

“Wednesday. The text. Have you written it?”

“Last night. At Sam’s desk.”

“Is it short?”

“Six minutes.”

“Good.” A short silence. “What is in it?”

“Thank you,” said Frederick. “Fourteen times. By name. And that it’s nine in the morning in Tempe, and that I’m on a staircase again, in finals week, in my second year.” He looked at the inch of window. “And that my father, who was ill in January, is well.”

“That is a good text.” Another silence. “Your father told you last year to keep to it.”

“Text. Keep to.” Frederick looked at the ceiling. “Unless.”

“Unless what?”

“You’ll know. He said he’d done it twice in fifty-six years.”

There was a longer silence from the bed by the door.

“And last year,” said Alexander, “was there an unless?”

“No.”

“Then this year,” said Alexander, “you will keep to it, and if there is an unless, you will know.” He was quiet for a moment, in the dark. “And I will be on the landing. It is on the programme.”

“What does the programme say?”

“WE 2.V. 09.00 Landing,” said Alexander, who did not need the light to read it. “A. present.” A pause. “And then a space for the tick.”