Quiet

Tyler knocked at eleven.

He knocked the way he did everything, once, with the side of his hand, low down on the door, at about the height of the handle, as though he were not sure the door would want to be bothered; and when Frederick opened it he was standing in the corridor in the dark blue hooded sweatshirt with the hood up, in a hundred and seven degrees, with a laptop under one arm and a controller hanging from his hand by its cable, and a large bottle of something blue in the other.

“Hey,” said Tyler.

“Hello, Tyler.”

“Can I come in?” Tyler looked past him into the room. “It’s quiet, right? It’s quiet in here.”

“It’s quiet.”

“Okay.” Tyler came in. He came in the way a man comes in out of a storm, and stopped in the middle of the floor, between the two beds, and stood there with his eyes shut and the bottle in his hand and the controller hanging, breathing, for perhaps four seconds.

Then he opened them.

“He hasn’t stopped,” said Tyler.

“Who?”

“Brayden.” He said the name the way people say the name of a weather system. “Brayden Kish. From Mesa. My roommate. He hasn’t stopped talking since Thursday.” He looked at Frederick with something close to despair. “Since Thursday, dude. Since he came in the door. He came in the door talking. He was talking in the car park. I could hear him from the sixth floor. With the window shut.”

“About what?”

“Everything.” Tyler sat down on the floor, suddenly, with his back against the side of the window bed, as though his legs had made the decision. “His mom. His truck. His other truck. His mom’s truck. This guy he knows who knows a guy who played for the Sun Devils. How Mesa is better than Tempe. How Mesa is better than Chandler. How Mesa is better than Gilbert, which, he said for like an hour, is basically Mesa anyway.” He unscrewed the blue bottle and drank a third of it. “He talked in his sleep, dude. Last night. I woke up at like three, and he was asleep, and he was talking.” He put the top back on. “About Mesa.”

“What about Mesa?”

“I don’t know,” said Tyler. “I put my headphones on.”

---

He did put his headphones on.

He opened the laptop on his knees on the floor, and plugged the controller into it, and put on the large black headphones that he had worn every day of the year before, and pulled the hood up over them, so that only the front of his face showed, lit blue from below by the screen; and Frederick, sitting on the window bed above him with the book about the Four-Year War, could see, if he leaned, the top corner of the screen and his game on it.

It was the first time Tyler had been in 312 since May. He had been in it every day of a year, at the desk under the window, and he had not once in that year sat on the floor; and now there was nobody at the desk under the window, and a bed made by somebody else, and he sat on the floor beside it with his back against the frame, as though the floor had always been his and the bed had only ever been on loan.

Tyler looked up at the window over his head, from under the hood.

The blind was up. It had been up since Wednesday. The light came in white and flat and enormous through the narrow window and lay across the floor and across Tyler’s knees and the laptop, so that the screen went pale in it.

Tyler looked at the blind. Then at Frederick.

“Can we…” said Tyler, and made a small downward motion with one finger.

“No,” said Frederick.

Tyler considered this.

“Cool,” he said, and shifted along the floor eighteen inches, out of the light, into the shadow of the window bed, and went back to his game.

---

It was some time before he saw Alexander.

Alexander was at the desk by the door, where he had been since a quarter past seven, when Kessler had knocked with a grey box and gone; the box had been worked and closed and taken away again at nine, and since nine he had been reading, in the white shirt buttoned to the neck, in silence, with the little blue Charter open in front of him and the notebook beside it and the pencil beside the notebook, parallel to its edge. He had not looked up when Tyler came in. He had not looked up when Tyler said Brayden, or Mesa, or his other truck. He had turned a page at the word Gilbert, which Frederick suspected was a coincidence.

At about a quarter to twelve Tyler took one side of the headphones off, to drink, and looked round the room for the first time, properly, in the way he looked at things that were not on a screen; and saw the back of the white shirt at the desk by the door.

He looked at it for some time.

“Oh,” said Tyler. “Hey.”

Alexander turned round on the chair.

“Good morning,” he said. “Tyler.”

“The German,” said Tyler.

“Yes.”

Tyler looked at him for a while longer, from the floor, from inside the hood, with the bottle halfway to his mouth; and then at Frederick on the window bed; and then at the bed by the door with its regulation sheets and the grey blanket folded square and, on the pillow, a black silk mask laid out flat, with a small grey crown on one corner.

“You live here?” said Tyler.

“Since Thursday.”

“In my,” Tyler stopped, and looked at the bed by the door, and at the window bed, and at the bed by the door again, and Frederick watched him work out which bed had been his, and which had been Frederick’s, and who was in which now, and give up, “in this room.”

“Yes.”

“Huh.” Tyler drank. He screwed the top back on. “Is he quiet?” he said, to Frederick.

“Very.”

“Like, quiet quiet?”

“He hasn’t said anything since nine,” said Frederick.

Tyler turned back to Alexander with a new kind of interest, the frank complete interest he gave to things that were not on a screen, which lasted, in Frederick’s experience, about a minute; and which, Frederick saw, he had decided to extend.

“Dude,” said Tyler, with great respect. “Sick.”

---

“Okay,” said Tyler, at about noon. “So.”

He had taken the headphones off altogether and put them round his neck, and put the laptop on the floor beside him with the game still going on it, and the controller on top of the laptop; and he was sitting on the floor of 312 with his back against the window bed and both hands flat on his knees, which Frederick had seen him do perhaps three times in a year, and each time before a question.

“In March,” said Tyler, “you told me what an emperor does.”

“Yes,” said Alexander.

“It was long.”

“It was about a minute.”

“It was long,” said Tyler, “for me.” He looked at his hands on his knees. “I got the start. The box. And I got the end. Standing places. And I told my grandma, and she said that’s the same as a king, and I said no, it’s a different shape, because you said that, and she said what shape, and I didn’t know.” He looked up. “I forgot the middle.”

Alexander did not say anything for a moment.

He turned the chair a little, the way he had turned it in the lounge in March, so that he was facing the floor, and Tyler, square; and put the pencil down on the notebook behind him without looking, and Frederick, from the window bed, saw his hand find the edge of the notebook and lay the pencil along it.

“What does an emperor actually do?” said Tyler. “Like. Actually.”

Frederick watched his cousin.

He had heard the long answer in March from the doorway of the lounge: the box from Berlin every morning, and reading every paper twice, once for what it said and once for the mistakes, and signing what the Chancellor asked, because the Chancellor must answer for it and the Emperor need not, and the places where the Empire needed somebody to be standing. It had been the whole of it, to the end, the best answer to the question he had ever heard anybody give, and Tyler had heard it to the end too, which was rarer.

Alexander looked at Tyler on the floor with his hands on his knees.

“Mostly,” said Alexander, “he reads.”

There was a silence in 312.

Tyler sat on the floor and looked at him, with his mouth a little open, as though he had been braced for a minute of something and had been given three words and did not yet know what to do with the rest of the minute.

Then he turned his head, slowly, and looked up at Frederick on the window bed.

“That’s what he said,” said Tyler.

“Yes,” said Alexander.

“In the Wright. Last year. The first day. He said mostly he reads.” Tyler looked back at Alexander. “Exactly that.”

“I know,” said Alexander. “He wrote to me.”

Tyler did not say anything.

He sat on the floor, with his hands on his knees, and looked from one of them to the other, the young man in the white shirt on the chair by the door and the young man on the window bed with the blind up behind him, one and then the other and then the first again; and his face did a slow complicated thing, and Frederick watched it, and could not, for once, tell what it was.

Nobody said anything else.

The silence went on. It went on in 312 for a long time, a full silence, with the noise of the chillers on the roof in it and somebody’s music very faint at the end of the corridor and the light lying white across the floor; and nobody filled it. Frederick did not fill it, though he could feel the long answer standing just behind his teeth, the boxes and the assent and the three rights and the reserve powers, and Alexander did not fill it, because Alexander never filled a silence in his life that had not asked to be filled; and Tyler, on the floor, did not fill it either. He sat in it. He listened to it, Frederick realised, the way you listen to the end of a piece of music when the last note has stopped and the hall has not yet decided to clap.

“Okay,” said Tyler.

He said it quietly. He put the headphones back on, and picked up the controller, and pulled the laptop back onto his knees, into the shadow of the window bed, where his game was still going; and Alexander turned his chair back to the desk, and picked up the pencil, and turned a page.

Frederick looked at the two of them for some time.

It was the quietest room he had been in since the hill in Berlin.

---

At three Tyler took the headphones off again.

“I’ve got to go back,” he said. “Brayden’s mom’s coming at four. She’s bringing a crockpot.” He closed the laptop, and wound the cable of the controller round his hand, slowly, the way a man rolls up a hose at the end of a summer. “He’s going to talk to her about the crockpot.”

“You can stay.”

“She’s going to want to meet me.” Tyler stood up, with some difficulty, in the hood, with the laptop under his arm. “She’s from Mesa too.”

He went to the door. He stopped in it, with one hand on the frame, and looked back at the room: the window bed with the blind up over it, and the bed by the door with the mask on the pillow, and the floor between them, with a ring on the lino where the bottle had stood, and a dent in the shadow where he had sat.

“Can I come back?” said Tyler.

“Yes.”

“Like, tomorrow? Like at four?” He looked at the floor. “He’s got a lab till four. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And Tuesdays and Thursdays he’s got this thing, this club, it’s, like, a club for people from Mesa.” He paused. “I’m not making that up.”

“Four’s fine.”

Tyler looked past him, at the desk by the door.

“Is four fine?” he said, to the back of the white shirt.

Alexander turned round on the chair.

“Four is fine,” said Alexander.

“Okay,” said Tyler, and went. They heard him go down the corridor, and the door to the stairs, and then nothing; and then, from the stairwell, carrying, a long way down, faintly, a voice going past him on the stairs going up, saying dude, is that, wait, was that, like, the room?, and Tyler’s voice, going on down, saying nothing at all.

He came back the next day at four. He came back the day after that at four, and the day after that, and for most of the days of the year, at about four, with the hood up and the bottle and the laptop and the controller, and sat on the floor between the two beds in the shadow of the window bed with the headphones on and said nothing for two hours, and went. It was the first of them.

---

Theo rang at seven, which was ten at night in New Westminster.

Frederick took it on the step, on the landing between the second floor and the third, under the narrow window, with the window open an inch and the car park beyond the fin still a hundred and one at seven in the evening and the light going gold over it. He took it on the laptop, propped on his knees, because Theo did Sundays on the laptop now, so that he could see whether Frederick was eating; and the screen came up, and there was Theo, in a grey T-shirt, in the small room in the medical school’s hall that Frederick had still never seen except through a screen, with a desk lamp and a textbook open on the desk the size of a paving stone, and behind him, in the corner, on his stand, in a maroon and gold scarf, Desmond.

“Freddie,” said Theo.

“Happy birthday. Yesterday.”

“Thank you. I’m twenty-one. Desmond took me out.” Theo looked at him through the screen with the face he used for patients now, the one that was not yet allowed to be used on patients. “You’re on the step.”

“I’m always on the step.”

“You’re on the step at seven on a Sunday in the first week, with the window open, in a hundred degrees.” Theo pushed the textbook away. “Something’s happened.”

“I’ve got a roommate.”

“Obviously you’ve got a roommate. You had a roommate last year. Tyler. With the headphones.”

“Tyler’s in Ironwood,” said Frederick. “With a man from Mesa who talks in his sleep. About Mesa. He was here all afternoon. On the floor.”

“Okay,” said Theo. “So who’s the roommate?”

Frederick looked at the car park through the inch of window.

“Alex,” he said.

There was a silence on the screen.

Theo did not move. He sat at the desk in New Westminster in the grey T-shirt with his hands flat on the textbook, and looked at Frederick through the camera, and his face did nothing at all, for perhaps three seconds, which for Theo was a very long time.

“Alex,” said Theo.

“Yes.”

“Alex Alex.”

“Yes.”

“Alex,” said Theo, “like, the German Emperor, Alex. Alex who rang Jack twice to ask what you wear in Arizona in March. Alex who counted eleven hundred people. That Alex.”

“He’s at the desk by the door. He’s reading the Charter. He’s on Article Three.”

And Theo laughed.

He laughed the way he had not laughed since the top of Camelback, all at once, with his head going back and his hands coming up off the textbook, a great helpless whoop of a laugh that the laptop’s small speaker could not hold, so that it came out of it in pieces, cracked, and went up the stairwell of Palo Verde Hall in pieces, and came back down. He laughed and stopped and looked at Frederick and laughed again. He put his face in his hands and laughed into them, and took them away, and said “In your room,” and laughed. He leaned back in the chair and laughed at the ceiling of a small room in New Westminster. Frederick looked at the clock in the corner of the screen. He watched it go from 19:01 to 19:02, and Theo was still laughing, with his eyes shut, wiping them, saying “the bed by the door”, and “the questionnaire”, and “oh, Freddie, oh no”; and he did not stop until 19:02 had nearly gone, and then he did, slowly, breathing, with his hand on his chest, the way a man comes down off a high step.

“A full minute,” said Frederick.

“Sorry. Sorry.” Theo wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Sorry. I’m sorry. It’s not funny.”

“It’s quite funny.”

“It’s extremely funny,” said Theo, and nearly went again, and held it. “Does he know? Did he know? He must have known.”

“He didn’t know the room. His mother knew he’d enrolled. And Kessler. And the Chancellor.”

“The Chancellor knew?”

“The Chancellor approves the boxes.”

“The Chancellor of Germany knew,” said Theo, slowly, “and you didn’t.” He looked at Frederick through the screen, and the laugh went out of his face, not all at once, and something else came into it, which was the thing Theo had always had underneath the laughing, since an accident of the alphabet had put them at the same desk, and which he did not usually let into the camera. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re on the step.”

“I’m always on the step,” said Frederick again, and heard it, and so did Theo.

Theo looked at him for a while.

“Okay,” said Theo, gently. “Okay. You can tell me next Sunday.” He reached round behind him, without looking, and got hold of something, and lifted it, carefully, into the camera: a skeleton’s hand, articulated, on its wire, attached to an arm, attached to Desmond, who came forward into the lamplight in his maroon and gold scarf with a grin he could not help, and waved, stiffly, from the elbow, at the step under the narrow window in Tempe.

“Desmond says hi,” said Theo. “Desmond says say hi to Alex.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Tell him Desmond’s a Sun Devil. Tell him he’s got the scarf.” Theo put the arm back. “How’s he sleeping?”

“He wears a mask.”

“A what?”

“A sleeping mask. Black silk. Like on an aeroplane.” Frederick looked at the car park. “It’s got a crown on it.”

Theo looked at him through the screen for a long moment, with his face perfectly still.

Then he went again.

---

Alexander was at the desk by the door when he came back in, at half past ten, with the lamp on and the Charter shut. He had been for his shower, and was in the dark blue pyjamas, buttoned to the neck; and there was a sheet of cream paper on the desk in front of him, with an eagle at the top you could only see from the side, and he was writing on it in ink.

Frederick did not look at it. He went to the window bed and sat on it, and picked up the book about the Four-Year War.

At twenty-eight minutes past ten Alexander put the pen down beside the sheet, parallel to the edge, and stood up, and went to bed, and put out his lamp at half past exactly, and put on the mask.

Frederick read for a while.

Then he got up, quietly, in the light of his own lamp, and went across the room, and looked at the sheet on the desk by the door without touching it. It was the programme for Monday. It said 05.45. Rise, and 07.00. The box, and 09.00. Tolliver 104. The Charter. H. Brennan, and a number of other things, at a number of other times, in the square hand; and near the bottom of it, between 15.00 and 18.00, on a line by itself, in the same ink, the same size as everything else, it said:

16.00. Tyler.

Frederick looked at it for some time.

Then he went back across the room to the window bed, and lay down, and read until he could not, and put out the lamp.