The phone in Robert Hall’s cardigan pocket had been buzzing since 5:40 that morning, so he ignored it and went for a walk.
He walked the way he had for thirty years, without a plan. At the end of each block he looked at whatever was in front of him and let that decide. A sprinkler ticking across the quad sent him left. A squirrel on the library steps sent him right. The route behind him had no say in the route ahead; the best guess for where Robert Hall would be in a minute was wherever he stood now, plus whatever caught his eye next. He had published that idea in 1978, applied to household spending, and it had made him modestly famous among people who read footnotes. Somewhere in Stockholm, overnight, it had apparently made him more than that.
The money came to a little over half a million dollars once it was split, if the voicemails were right. Robert ran the arithmetic outside the campus creamery. Spread across the years an eighty-three-year-old could reasonably expect, it amounted to a better sandwich on Tuesdays. He resolved to buy the better sandwich and change nothing else.
The creamery’s chalkboard still read SUMMER MENU, with June’s prices. A student in a paper hat was wiping the counter behind it. Someone had meant to update the board in August, and the board had outlasted the intention, as boards do. Robert found this obscurely satisfying. Half his career had gone into explaining why the world did not reprice itself every morning, and here was a sign agreeing with him.
Under the loblolly pines by the chapel he found a pinecone on the sidewalk, fat and closed, and he picked it up for no reason he could defend. Resin came away on his fingers. He wiped them on his trousers, which made it worse, and then on a bench slat, which made it worse again. The stuff would not give. He thought of the colleagues who had spent the eighties insisting that wages fall when demand falls, and of every worker he had ever interviewed who said otherwise. Pay held where it was set, for a season or a contract, and when business dropped off the difference came out of hours and headcount instead. He had written a paper about that too.
The phone buzzed again. He turned toward the arboretum.
Michael Woodford was sitting on the bench by the duck pond with two coffees, and the second one, Robert could see from ten yards off, was black with the lid cracked open, the way Robert took it.
“I was headed for the arboretum,” Robert said.
“You were headed for the arboretum and you’d have ended up here.” Michael did not get up. “I’ve watched you from my office window since 1994. Every step is a coin flip, Robert, and the walks still pile up at this pond like sand in a jar. Four hundred of them, give or take.”
“You can’t forecast a random walk.”
“I can forecast where it piles up. Especially for a man whose cell number every newspaper in Europe has, when this is the only bench on campus with one bar of signal.” Michael tapped the lid of his own cup. “That part’s just expectations.”
Robert lowered himself onto the bench, pinecone still in hand. “Where are the reporters?”
“They were in your hallway until eight-fifteen, running into each other. Then I told them you’d speak at the faculty club at eleven.” Michael tipped his cup toward the far side of the quad. “So now they’re at the faculty club, eating free croissants and behaving themselves. All I did was tell them what was going to happen, and they arranged themselves around it.”
“And if I don’t show at eleven?”
“Then nobody believes the press office next time, and the time after that they camp in your yard.” Michael held out the second coffee. “So you’ll show.”
Robert took it. The cup stuck to his fingers, resin to paper, and he did not try to shake it loose. It occurred to him then that his pocket had gone still. He could not say when the buzzing had stopped. Somewhere between the chapel and this bench, the whole frantic market for his attention had heard a date and a place and settled down to wait.
“They’ll want to know what I’m doing next,” he said.
“They’ll want to know what you’re doing for the rest of your life, and they’ll price it in by lunch.” Michael pulled a folded index card from his jacket and uncapped a pen. “So give me something I can say with a straight face.”
Robert looked at the pond, at the ducks working their small zigzags across it, going nowhere in particular and arriving, as always, at the bread side.
“Walks at seven,” he said. “Most mornings. Same shoes. The better sandwich on Tuesdays.”
Michael wrote it down. “Starting when, and for how long?”
Robert lifted the coffee, which came up with his hand whether he liked it or not.
“Starting tomorrow,” he said. “For an extended period.”