Inspection

Good Morning at the Parenthood!

No boy had ever failed an Inspection.

For this, J felt no anxiety as the steel door creaked open before him, as the faces of the Parenthood looked out, as the Inspectors stood against the far wall, each with a hand on the magnifying glasses hooked to their belts. J had done this every morning of his life, every morning he could remember, and, despite Q’s theories on likelihoods and probabilities (his idea that eventually someone must fail in order to justify a lifetime of Inspections), J felt no doubt, no dread, no fear.

“Enter, J,” Collins called. Collins, the stuffiest, oldest, burliest Inspector of all. The man smelled of old textbooks. His belly hung so far over his belt D joked he kept an Alphabet Boy hidden in there. That’s where we come from, D had said. But all the Alphabet Boys knew they came from the Orchard, having grown on the Living Trees.

“Come on, then,” Collins said. It was a wonder any words at all made it through the man’s bushy brown mustache.

J knew the Inspector did not speak for himself.

D.A.D. must’ve given the signal it was time to begin.

To the snickers of L, D, and Q behind him, J entered and removed his pajamas, folding them and placing them in a neat pile upon the steel end table by the Check-Up room door. As the door was closing behind J, D called, “Shoulda showered, J!” And J pointed at him, the Alphabet Boys’ gesture that meant, You’re a jerk, brother.

The door locked into place, his clothes nicely piled, J stepped to the pair of rubber footprints on the cold steel floor. Winter was close, arriving perhaps as soon as tomorrow. And while J enjoyed the Effigy Meet as much as his brothers, he liked to keep the cold outside. The Check-Up room was as frigid as any he knew in the Turret.

“Turn,” Inspector Collins said. He and Jeffrey observed from a distance, always the first step of the morning’s Inspection. The dogs breathed heavy behind the glass door beyond the men. J turned to his left. He heard the leather of D.A.D.’s red jacket stretching. The man, as of yet out of sight, must have crossed his arms or sat back in his chair.

Winter outside the Turret could be brutal. Some years were worse than others. J, nearing his thirteenth birthday along with his twenty-three brothers, had experienced twelve winters. And with each one, Professor Gulch warned the boys about depression. The sense of loneliness that came from being stuck inside a ten-story tower, when the Orchard and the Yard froze over, when even the pines looked too cold to survive.

Hysteria, J thought. He shook his head, trying to roll the idea out his ear. It was a word he didn’t like anywhere inside his head. As if the four syllables had the same properties as Rotts and Moldus, Vees and Placasores. The very diseases the Inspectors searched him for now.

“Turn.”

Collins again. His gruff voice part and parcel of the Check-Up room. Like the sound of clacking dishes in the cafeteria. Or the choral voices of his brothers in the Body Hall.

“Cold,” J said, turning his back to the Inspectors, facing now the locked door.

It was often chilly in the Check-Up room; unseen breezes, as if the solid-steel walls were only an illusion, and the distorted reflections unstable drawings on the wind. J imagined a slit somewhere, a crack in those walls, allowing pre-winter inside. It was similar, J thought, to the veterinarian’s office in Lawrence Luxley’s book Dogs and Dog Days. The brilliant leisure writer had described the poor animals’ reactions so well:

J had memorized all of Lawrence Luxley’s books. Many of the Alphabet Boys had.

“Turn.”

J did as he was told. Always had. The routine of the Inspections was as ingrained in his being as chewing before swallowing.

And with this third turn, he faced D.A.D.

A thrill ran through him, as it always had, twelve years running, to see D.A.D. for the first time in the day.

The bright-red jacket and pants were like a warm fire in the cold Check-Up room. Or the sun coming up. “Did you sleep well, J?”

D.A.D.’s voice. Always direct, always athletic. J wasn’t the only Alphabet Boy who equated the man’s voice with strength. Comfort. Security. Knowledge.

“I actually did not,” J said, his twelve-year-old voice an octave deeper than it was only a year ago. “I dreamt something terrible.”

“Is that right?” D.A.D.’s hazel eyes shone above his black beard, his hair black, too. J had black hair. Just like his D.A.D. “I’m intrigued. Tell me all about it.”

“Turn,” Collins said. And J turned to face the Inspectors and the dogs all over again.

No longer facing D.A.D., the color red like a nosebleed out of the corner of his eye now, J recounted his unconscious struggle. He’d been lost in a Yard four hundred times the size of the one he enjoyed every day. He described the horror of not being able to find his way back to the Turret.

“Lost?” D.A.D. echoed. The obvious interest in his voice was as clear to J as the subtle sound of his leather gloves folding around his pencil.

Yes, J told him, yes, he’d felt lost in the dream. He’d somehow strayed too far from the Turret and the Parenthood within. He couldn’t remember how exactly—the actual pines framing the Yard were not present in this dream. But he was certainly very anxious to get back. He could hear his floor mates Q, D, and L calling from a distance but could not see the orange bricks of the tower. He couldn’t make out the iron spires that framed the roof’s ledge like a lonely bottom row of teeth. Teeth J and the other Alphabet Boys had looked through many nights, having found the nerve to sneak up to the roof. Nor could he see the tallest of the spires, the single iron tooth that pointed to the sky like a fang. Gone were the finite acres of the Yard, the expanse of green lawn between himself and the Turret. So were the reflections in the many elongated windows of the many floors. In their stead was endless green grass.

And fog.

“Well, winter is upon us,” D.A.D. said. His voice was control. Always. Direction. Solution. Order. “Couldn’t even see the fang, hmm? No sign of the Parenthood at all. No sign of home.”

J thought of the yellow door on the roof, visible all the way from the Yard below. He thought of the solid orange bricks and how, on a summer day, the Turret resembled a sunrise.

“No,” he said, shaking his head, looking to the silent faces of the Inspectors, who quietly fingered the magnifying glasses at their belts. J understood now, as a twelve-year-old boy, something he hadn’t at eleven: The Inspections didn’t begin when the Inspectors used their glasses. It began the second you walked through the door.

“You must have been so scared,” D.A.D. continued. His voice was fatherhood. Administration. Always. “But, tell me, did you eventually find the Turret before waking?”

J was quiet a moment. He scratched at his right elbow with his left hand. He yawned a second time.

Hysteria, he thought again. He actually made fists, as if to knock the thought out of his head. Professor Gulch taught psychology and often stressed the many ways a boy’s mind might turn on itself: mania, attention deficit, persecution, dissociation from reality, depression, and hysteria. For J, it had all sounded like distant impossibilities. Conditions to be studied for the purpose of study alone. Certainly J wasn’t afraid of one day experiencing these states of mind himself. Yet here he was…twelve years old…and how else could he explain the new, unknown feelings he’d been having of late? What would Gulch call the sense of isolation, of being incomplete, when he looked out across the Yard, toward the entrance to the many rows of the Orchard? To where the Living Trees grew?

The boy recalled his childhood as though through a glass with residue of milk upon it. Unable to answer the simple question: Where do I come from?

Another Lawrence Luxley line. A real zinger, as Q would say.

But no, J thought, there in the Check-Up room. He wasn’t trying to answer that question at all. No boy had ever determined which of the cherry trees in the Orchard were the ones they had grown on. And as far as J knew, they were fine with that.

Weren’t they?

“No,” J finally said. “I never found my way home.” He heard the pencil against paper again, could easily imagine D.A.D.’s bright science eyes reading the words he wrote.

Like all the Alphabet Boys, J felt honored whenever D.A.D. noted what he said.

“And when you woke?” D.A.D. said. He didn’t need to finish his sentence. It was clear what he was asking for.

“I thought it was real. I thought I was still out there. Like I’d woken in the Yard, on my bed. I looked up, must have seen the ceiling, but I mistook it for more of that fog. It took me a minute to understand I was just in my bedroom.” He paused. Imagined D.A.D. stroking his black beard with a gloved hand. “This all happened moments ago, of course, as the call for Inspection woke me.”

“Of course,” D.A.D. said. “Now tell me,” he began, and J knew the question he was about to be asked, before D.A.D. asked it. “Do you have a theory on what prompted this dream?”

While J had experienced a wide range of emotions in this room before, he wasn’t prepared for the one he felt then.

Fear.

And where had it come from? Surely he knew this question was coming. Had he not had time to prepare for it? Was that it? Or was it something Q would call “deeper”?

Of course J knew the right answer to D.A.D.’s question. But for the first time in his life, he didn’t feel like telling the truth.

The shock of this realization didn’t strike him as hard as the one that immediately followed: a sense that he had decided to lie before entering this room and had simply not told himself about it.

Why? Why lie?

Because, just prior to going to bed the night before, long after his studies were done, J had seen someone crouched behind Mister Tree, the lone willow that denoted the end of the Yard and the beginning of the Orchard. It was a figure, he believed. Perhaps it was the way certain branches reached down to the forest floor as others united across it, but in J’s mind’s eye, the sight he’d seen was a person.

Crouched.

By Mister Tree.

At the time, J thought it was A or Z. He couldn’t say why.

And maybe that was good enough reason to lie, J told himself. D.A.D. and the Inspectors would think he was crazy for suggesting such a thing!

A dead brother hiding behind a tree at night.

As if!

He looked from Jeffrey to Collins and thought maybe the two Inspectors could detect the hidden story. Jeffrey adjusted his cap. Collins the gold sash that ran from over his shoulder to his waist. J looked to their belts, as if that glass could penetrate his very skin, could determine the purity of his heart. Even the shepherds started breathing heavy, and one, Max, tilted his head to the side, the way dogs do when they hear a curious sound.

Hysteria. J didn’t want to sound crazy. He didn’t want to be crazy. It was branches and shadows and nothing more. Surely.

Yet, lying was a betrayal of sorts. J knew that. Perhaps, as kids, he and D had fibbed about who spilled the cherry juice on the hall carpet. Maybe once or twice, as a toddler, he’d shaken his head no when asked if he had gone to the bathroom in his pants. But these brief (and harmless, J believed, despite what lying could lead to) fabrications were easily washed clean with a single slap of that red-leathered hand. D.A.D. was very good at getting the real story out of his boys, as if he owned unseen shovels that always dug for the truth.

“J?”

J thought of Lawrence Luxley’s book about soldiers, Great Horses. Thought about one soldier in particular, a general named Sam. Sam, Q had pointed out, dressed much like the Inspectors did. A gray wool uniform that always looked too warm, no matter that the temperature seemed to gradually lower during an Inspection. A gray kepi. A gold sash and a brown belt. Black boots. All throughout Great Horses, Sam felt a similar feeling to the one J had now: Sam had information he wasn’t sure he should tell his troops. Luxley did a masterful job of highlighting this, a near twenty-page interior monologue where Sam weighed lying and lies and the right and wrong time to use them. In the end, he’d determined that no time was a good one and that his troops deserved to know the truth, even if it hurt them. But J read something deeper into that monologue than simply the merits of honesty: General Sam was scared. Not scared in the way the Parenthood had lovingly taught the Alphabet Boys to be afraid—that is, of themselves and what they were capable of doing to themselves if they did not adhere to the laws of the Turret. But rather…scared for himself.

“Why?’ he asked out loud. Both Inspectors tilted their heads like the dog had just done.

“What’s that?” D.A.D. asked.

Again, Professor Gulch’s lectures on psychology rose up like birds in J’s suddenly troubled mind.

Sam, J knew, was torn. J felt the same way, exposed beneath the bright fluorescent lights of the Check-Up room. After all, the harsh illumination showed every crevasse in the faces of the Inspectors, lines that told the boys how old these men truly were even if the sun in the Yard could not. And the reverse held true for the boys. Their youth was never as obvious as when they removed their pajamas and folded them in a pile on the end table by the door. A boy could see much more of his body in here than when he was in the shower…revelations that often alarmed him. Holding out his arm, looking down at his belly, lifting a knee, a boy could almost make out the very tunnel-and-bridge system of veins and arteries traveling beneath his skin. A pimple, normal in the hall light, could be Placasores in the Check-Up room. The light hairs on the arms looked sewn into the skin. Knuckles and toes resembled old weathered leather. Belly buttons looked like holes. Fingernails like dead wood.

And sometimes J felt like he could see even more than the unflattering details of his body. Sometimes it felt like he could see motivations in the Check-Up room, fast fleeting glimpses of the truth, whatever that might be.

“J,” D.A.D. repeated. His voice was impatience. As loving as he was to his twenty-four boys, D.A.D. was without question the most impatient man within the Turret walls. “Come now. Out with it. You have a theory for what prompted this dream.”

J recoiled at the sudden volume of his voice, as if the man had silently transported across the cold floor, his lips less than an inch from J’s ear. “Tell me.”

It was true; J indeed had a theory for D.A.D. It’s what the Alphabet Boys were raised to do.

Think.

But J was thinking of A or Z, impossibly mobile, crouched and unmoving.

Tell him, J thought. But a deeper voice argued. One that sounded like it belonged to a wise brother.

A dead one?

“I’m thinking,” J said. “I want to articulate this the right way.”

He should’ve woken Q last night is what he should have done. He’d considered doing it, of course. The boys on Floor 8 had long crept into one another’s rooms when a particularly powerful storm came through. Or a nightmare of equal measure. J had knocked on Q’s door as recently as a month ago, feeling sick and hoping Q had some soup remaining from dinner. But last night, despite wanting confirmation, he remained by his large window overlooking the Yard, a window almost as wide as the wall. He knew Q would have something intelligent to say, would perhaps even be able to prove the form as an unfortunate combination of branches, leaves, and moonlight. Because it was probable that what J had seen was no more than a combination of inert, non-sentient pieces. And yet…J felt knowledge coming from those woods.

J felt life. Or something like it.

Felt like you were being watched is what it was.

“I think it’s because of the coming floor shift,” J said. “I’ve grown up with D and L and Q. To be moved, in the shuffle…I don’t know. I agree that it’s a good thing for the Parenthood to do, to promote fresh experiences, to forge new bonds, but it’s also a little…”

J felt cold leather upon his shoulder.

“A little like being lost?” D.A.D. asked. Gently, D.A.D. turned J to face him. The bulb hung directly over the man’s head, and parts of his face were obscured by shadow. J thought how D.A.D.’s entire face looked to be covered in hair, as if the shadows cast were actually his beard growing, rising up to his shining eyes, climbing higher yet to his thick, fur-like pompadour.

“Yes.” J swallowed. “A lot like being lost.” He glanced past D.A.D., to the notepaper upon the steel desk. There was a lot of activity on the page. Many notes.

The Inspection begins, J thought again, the moment you walk through the door.

D.A.D. did not nod. He did not smile. He simply stared. It felt, to J, as if the man were using those shovels indeed, searching J’s mind for a better dream-prompt than the coming floor shift.

Then D.A.D.’s face changed, a little bit. Both eyes squinted and the right side of his mouth lifted. Just enough to suggest warmth.

“I get it,” D.A.D. said. “And I’m sure I’ll run into more stories like yours today, as we make our morning Inspections.” He did not pat J on the shoulder and then walk back to his desk. He did not say anything else on the topic at all. Instead, he remained, staring. “I’ve just had a wonderful idea,” he said. “How about if I manufacture a means by which you can tell me your thoughts, your feelings, directly. Something we can share, just you and I. A notebook perhaps. You take notes and…deliver them to me. Why, we could be pen pals in that way.”

There was never a feeling so bright as being singled out by D.A.D.

“That would be…really nice,” J said.

“It would, yes. Excellent.”

Yet, as D.A.D. continued to stare, continued to study, the usual list of horrifying diseases crossed J’s mind. The reason, the boys had long been told, for the Inspections in the first place.

Vees. Rotts. Placasores.

Was D.A.D. looking for these? And could he spot them in J’s eyes? Could he spot them in a notebook, too?

“Gentlemen,” D.A.D. said. He snapped his gloved fingers. A sound that was almost as familiar as the word Inspection itself, as it came shrill through the floor’s one steel-meshed speaker in the hall.

Collins and Jeffrey removed their magnifying glasses and advanced. D.A.D. retreated, but not all the way to his desk. J, turning back to face the Inspectors, could feel D.A.D. crowding him still, standing close behind with his arms crossed, his leather gloves gripping the sleeves of his red jacket. Both Collins and Jeffrey looked to D.A.D. with the same expression J imagined himself to be wearing. A tick past confusion. A few ticks shy of fear.

D.A.D. had never watched an Inspection from so close.

Why this one?

Hysteria, J thought, and decided it was the last time he was going to think it. It was only Mister Tree’s low-hanging branches. Natural as cherries in the Orchard. And a dead brother crouching at midnight was…was…hysterical.

No. He was hiding nothing because there was nothing to hide.

“Go on,” D.A.D. said, his voice like flowing water over J’s shoulder. That water became a wave, and in that wave J imagined a figure crouched behind Mister Tree. “I want to make sure J understands that, in light of his bad dream, he is in the care of the Parenthood and that the Parenthood will always be here to protect him. By way of Inspection.” The Inspectors held their magnifying glasses up to J’s naked body. D.A.D. continued to talk. Close. Too close. “I want you to know, J, that if something like what happened in your dream should ever occur in waking life…impossible as that scenario is…you needn’t worry about finding your way back to the Turret.”

“Lift,” Collins said. J lifted both arms and the Inspectors brought the magnifying glasses to his armpits.

“If ever you stray so far, J, my J,” D.A.D. said, “the Parenthood will find you.”

THE BURT REPORT: NOVEMBER 1, 2019

The Body Hall before Breakfast

Just before breakfast, the boys were informed D.A.D. was going to make a speech. This, of course, would take place in the Body Hall, named so, J assumed, because of how many bodies they fit into the high-ceilinged, echoey, wood-paneled concert hall whenever D.A.D. had something important to say.

All of them. All of the bodies. From the Alphabet Boys to the Inspectors, Professor Gulch to the cooks. Even Lawrence Luxley himself, always a highlight for J and the others to see in person. The nurses, the cleaners, the health aides, and the plumbers.

The Parenthood.

Speech, the word, like Inspection, had changed over the years. It invoked a much different feeling now than it had when the boys were just children and would, presumably, spark something else years from now. When the boys were kids, D.A.D.’s speeches meant hardly anything at all; J mostly recalled the back of other boys’ heads, the back of their benches, and the dark sonorous syllables of D.A.D.’s words echoing off the walls that seemed to reach the sky. In those days, it took a simple glance across the hall to D or F and it was all J could do to stifle a bout of uncontrollable laughter.

But things had changed.

RICHARD UNDERSTOOD THIS more than anyone. He had planned for it.

It matters not, an early Burt Report stated, whether the boys take in what Richard says. The point is to instill a sense of wonder, a plan that is no doubt working, based upon the sincerely awed visages observing him as he delivers his speeches.

The Alphabet Boys had not been taught God. For Richard, obedience trumped religion.

This morning, the Inspections over, Richard held the day’s Burt Report in one hand, a glass of scotch in the other. He read half of the first sentence his personal psychiatrist had penned one more time:

I’ll cut right to it: If it’s order Richard cherishes most in what he himself has dubbed “the Delicate Years”—

He set the papers upon his desk. Despite the light snowfall outside his first-floor window, he felt warm. He rose from his desk and stepped to the full-sized mirror on the back of his front door.

“You look good,” he said. “Hardly the parent of twenty-four twelve-year-old boys.”

The number was once twenty-six and, having flipped through the report, he’d seen Burt had mentioned A and Z, despite Richard’s personal orders not to.

…we’ve already lost A and Z to much more gruesome ends…

He removed his red coat, exposing a simple tank top beneath. The muscles in his shoulders and arms looked strong beneath the soft overhead light. His beard as dark as misinformation.

In the beginning, following the successful launch of the Parenthood, Richard was very aware that he had to fill the tower with a profound sense of character. It was his duty to deliver the philosophy of the Parenthood. His duty to make good on all that he claimed the place could be. In those days, it wasn’t uncommon for him to feel the pressure of the Inspectors he’d hired, simple convicts only a year prior, to feel them and the cooks and the teachers and the academic-book writers, ex-cons all, watching him as he gave his speeches to the (then) twenty-six toddlers in the Body Hall. The Alphabet Boys, Burt had come to call them (a name Richard, as their D.A.D., was rather fond of). A name for each letter of the alphabet.

Yes, in those days Richard gave his speeches for the benefit of the staff, whether he directed his voice at them or not. It was exciting indeed when, five years into the experiment, Richard first spotted comprehension in the eyes of his boys, knowledge transferred, from the pulpit to P, from the speech to each.

And now…The Delicate Years were close. No longer could Richard come at the boys subconsciously, through feel, a vague but powerful sense of rules and why not to break them. With the Delicate Years came the full attention of discerning boys. Intelligent boys. Boys who could, and would, now analyze each and every word Richard used.

He smiled in the mirror. It wasn’t the first instance of his boys breaking stereotype: In the world beyond the Parenthood, teenagers stopped listening to their parents.

Richard flexed his aging biceps, frowned at their appearance in the glass, and put his jacket back on. He’d read the Burt Report later. The staff psychiatrist broke more rules on one page of paper than other staff were permitted over a decade.

Addressing Richard directly. Mentioning A and Z.

He left his quarters and was greeted by two guards in plainclothes outside his door. Both armed. Richard recognized the awe in their eyes—as if he were a celebrity, the pastor in their church.

He still had them, he knew. Twelve years in.

“Just get up there and spread some excitement, right?” Richard said for their ears as they followed him up the black-tiled walkway to the Body Hall. “Show them it’s okay for a man to be overwhelmed by his passions, dangerous as some may be. The time of radiant men has arrived.” Here Richard paused and turned to face Bobby, the thin-haired guard who once stole cars and spent three years in jail for theft. Sometimes Richard wondered if the staff hadn’t simply traded drugs and drink, incarceration, for the Parenthood. “God is sweating, Bobby. Can you feel it?”

Beyond the glass walls of the hall, snow fell. Richard stepped to it and looked out upon the Yard. In the now-hazy distance, the pines stood guard.

“It’s time to usher in the new father,” he said. “And his new sons.”

Greatness, Richard once told a former guard, with one hand on the shoulder of the man’s plaid short-sleeved wholesome shirt, just before sending him to the Corner, is not pretty to look at. Study the faces of the world’s biggest thinkers and you’ll note an optimistic dismay. Exhaustion. May this be the last thing you ever learn, Brad: Exhaustion isn’t brought about by sitting still. You gotta move to get it. And motion will give you those worry lines, that thinning hair, that shell-shocked glaze over your once-bright eyes. Tell me, Brad, which would you rather have? A simple, easily read face or the bloody knuckles of a man who has knocked on his inner sanctum’s door?

The guard Brad had experienced doors locking on him before. Four years in Jackson for assault. But he’d never seen anything like the Corner.

“Welcome to the Parenthood,” Richard said now, still watching the early-morning snow fall through the hall glass. The sudden swell of choral voices, Alphabet Boys singing in the Body Hall, broke his reverie. In blond Bobby’s eyes he saw the dark side of the Parenthood, the closing of the Corner door. Richard thought maybe he could hear the door creaking.

Richard smiled. It was not the Corner at all but rather Gordon emerging from his own quarters on the first floor. The Parenthood’s chief assistant to D.A.D. looked as wonderfully infallible as he always did. His black hair like a shining singular piece, the face and hair of a plastic toy soldier in a thousand-dollar suit.

“Richard,” Gordon said. “Did you read the Burt Report?”

“Some.”

“Well, I have a lot to say about the five suggested alternatives to the floor shift. And seriously, where does Burt get the nerve? I’m sorry the two boys were named.”

“A and Z,” Richard said. He was quiet a beat. “And here I’ve just said their names again.”

The six-part harmony of Voices seemed to emerge from one holy throat. A minor chord as sad as the death of their brothers A and Z.

Spoiled boys. Spoiled rotten.

Richard closed his eyes. He turned his back on the falling flakes and walked toward the Body Hall, toward the sound of his boys singing.

“Yes,” Gordon agreed, writing Richard’s words down on a clipboard. “But you shouldn’t have to think about them just prior to delivering a speech. It was egregious, as Burt often is.”

“Have I changed, Gordon?” Richard asked, his eyes open again, his black boots clacking against the black tiles. Ahead, the last of the boys—H, in all black—could be seen hurrying through the Body Hall doors.

“Changed how, sir?”

“Do I value now what I valued then?”

“You’ve remained staunch in your vision, sir.”

“I have. And yet…”

“The Burt Report is getting to you. That’s all.”

“I fear, Gordon.”

From the Body Hall, the voices rose, swelled to a weeping peak. Richard paused at the door. He eyed the alternating choir, the six boys who sang today. In their black slacks and black turtlenecks only their faces shone, floating visages hovering in the shadows under the arches of the Body Hall. The echo of their song added ghosts to their small number.

Richard relished the sight. The Parenthood choir, Voices. The other boys, too, dressed in black, seated in the pews. The white carpet of the aisle. The shadowed podium on the stage. The staff lined up against the walls like watchers.

Or perhaps like the victims of a firing squad.

Richard spotted Warren Bratt, sloppy and overweight, slouched and frowning.

“What do you fear?” Gordon asked.

The Body Hall lights reflected off Bratt’s glasses, and Richard couldn’t tell if the cynical author was looking at him or not.

“Surprises,” Richard said.

One deep breath and he entered the hall. Gordon followed.

As Richard walked the white carpet, his red jacket and slacks like spilt blood upon it, he was engulfed in the morbid tones of Voices, today the boys from Floor 8 with F and W accompanying. Despite Richard’s total ban of religion in the Parenthood, the boys sang Barber’s Agnus Dei. Aesthetic gibberish to them all; they had no way of knowing Latin.

His boys. His Alphabet Boys.

Oh, how they stared. Flat admiration in their eyes. Even those who sang: J and D, L and Q, F and W. As their voices rose to the Mural of Ambition upon the Body Hall’s high ceiling, they did so in one unified chord, seemingly adding dimension to the image of the shirtless man raising the boulder with his mind. The boys in black, the boys in the pews, some whispering, some elbowing, all fixated on the man in red leather, a moving wound now upon the white carpet toward the stage. As Richard climbed the steps, as Gordon and the guards shuffled to the sides of the stage to join the other staff, many of the boys inhaled deeply. They’d been with him only moments ago at their individual Inspections, yet seeing their D.A.D. at the podium in the Body Hall was a sight each and every time. Looking right, Richard smiled Warren Bratt’s way, showing nothing of his opinion of the unkempt, balding author’s particularly rumpled appearance. Then Richard signaled the boys of Voices to cease singing, and their final chord rang out long after they took his cue.

The boys of Voices took their seats.

Richard leaned toward the mic till he felt the cold metal touch his beard.

He delivered his speech.

“BOYS! I won’t take up too much of your time. I expect you’re hungry and can smell breakfast from where you sit. I thank you, each of you, for congregating on such short notice. These Body Hall events are, as you well know, rare enough that my calling them must mean something or must mean, at the very least, I’ve got something to get off my chest.”

Richard paused. He’d opened with “plain speak.” Gordon’s suggestion, many years ago: Relax them with something casual, Richard, then Trojan-horse the real message in.

“First I’d like to congratulate you all on some of the best Inspections we’ve had in years. Your frankness, your honesty, and your transparency are valued above all things. You’ve brought a tear to your D.A.D.’s eyes.”

“We love you, D.A.D.!”

F called it out. Funny F. Richard smiled and held up an open palm to quiet the rumbling the boy had inspired.

“Thank you, F. I love you, too. I love all of you boys and I feel particularly proud of you today.” He looked to J directly. J’s eyes were partially hidden by his black bangs. Richard could barely make out the innocent spheres that had looked to him for everything in this life. “But I wouldn’t be honest with myself if I claimed that it was only through the Inspections that I’ve concluded you are all, indeed, on the right path in life. I’ve observed you boys very closely, perhaps in ways you don’t even know.” Here, E and O looked to one another and Richard saw hope in their eyes. Has D.A.D. been watching us? Isn’t that exciting? “Why, before Inspection this very morning I overheard a wonderful conversation brewing between two of you regarding a possible alternative to gasoline, and I couldn’t help but smile. My boys. My boys! Oh, how I enjoy eavesdropping as two of my boys employ the powers of their blooming intellect, toying with the concepts of cures, alternatives, of process and progress, the same. Do you see? Are you able to recognize the virtue of such an exchange, no doubt considered flippant by the two participants, and how much more meaningful it was than the subject matter boys your age could be engaged in?”

Richard inhaled. That last line was what Burt called a thin-icer. Possibly too close to the truth of things. But Richard didn’t think so. His boys knew as much as he wanted them to know. And who cared how thin the ice was when the truth was twice frozen so far below?

“Can you believe we’ve all reached the point we have? It seems like yesterday little Y was asking…why?” Some laughter from the boys. “And now? Now I ask him. Why? And he might just tell me.” The laughter gave way to awe. It usually did. “We’ve accomplished so much, yet we have so very far to go! And, boys, my beautiful boys, this is what troubles me, this is what has brought me to call upon you…today.”

Richard thought of the losses mentioned in the morning’s Burt Report. A and Z. The bookends of the Alphabet Boys. A coincidence (of all the boys to lose, those two?) that nearly tore Richard’s stomach lining out with worry. It took many hours with the staff doctors, many days in the bowels of the Turret, the boiler thrumming near, the sound of two dozen toddlers a floor above, for Richard to be convinced of the probability, the likelihood, that two boys of twenty-six must meet an unhappy end.

The fact that he was responsible for those ends didn’t factor into his thinking.

“I’m going to tell you boys a secret.” Richard paused for effect. It seemed to work. “Long before you reached the age you are now, I had already dubbed these days…the Recasting Years. Just as you fine-tune your visions in the Effigy Meet, so will you recast yourselves here, in the Turret. Why? Why would I consider this age any different from any other? Why would I consider this era any more notable than your budding baby youth, when you couldn’t even lift your own heads? I’ll tell you why: Here…” The Delicate Years to the staff. The Recasting Years to the boys. “You have now officially begun the process of cutting your father-strings, becoming men of your own.” He paused, allowing for the gravity of this to sink in. The fear of being untied, too. “Observing you in the Yard and the Orchard. Observing you at mealtime. Reading over your reports and listening to your reactions to the latest Luxley novel. Your opinions are as sophisticated as mine. The thoughts you casually cast aside are as revealing as those you deem important. Your Inspections prove it. Boys! My boys! You are coming into your own!”

A and Z. A and Z. The bookends are what keep the books standing. But the bookends had been taken away.

Richard adjusted the collar of his coat.

“This is how it goes when it goes right, boys.” The boys in black. Some in turtlenecks and slacks, others in blazers and button-downs. But Richard spotted a dot of white. As he spoke, his eyes traveled to the small spot of color: T’s undershirt showing between the buttons of his shirt. Another omen? Like the coincidence of A and Z? “The mind takes its time, in youth, before it starts acting on its own ideas. Can you remember doing everything your brothers did? Do you recall the days when you would invariably spend the night with your floor mates? Almost incapable of taking some time alone, or simply not wanting to? You boys were inseparable. Why, there were times we had to physically pry you apart and place you back in your own rooms. And look at you now! You have individual interests. Individual theories. You’ve discovered the beauty of intellectual property. The gratifying essence, the root of real genius. You know I am right! Just as those early days were important for the bonds that were built and for the confidence you gained in seeing your ideas and actions approved by your brothers, these new days, now, this molting, has a fresh purpose of its own. Today can be considered tomorrow for how quickly you are growing! Your opinions are yours! They are not mine! Do you see? I taught you when you were small. But you are almost as big as I!”

Had he established an undeniable sense of fatherhood? Or were the boys, brighter than any boys in the world, instinctively aware that he was not blood? That he was not genes?

That he was not father?

“I wish I could reach out to each of you with my mind alone; you’d understand how much I value the time you have before you, you’d see the great open expanse of an infinite Yard that needs great care. For any idea you have in these forthcoming years is worth noting, is worth writing down, is worth talking about with your floor mates or taking a short trip to another floor to partake in discussion with boys you don’t see as often. You might even be inspired to take a longer trip to my very quarters. I cannot stress this point enough, how available I am to you during these years, how interested I am in the smallest thought that may occur to you. Your trivialities are my life’s work.”

Many boys exchanged shocked glances. An invite from D.A.D. to his quarters? This was a big day, indeed.

Richard felt sweat dripping beneath the tank top under his jacket. He relished it. It meant he was working. It meant he was present. It meant he was burning with the things he’d said. Burning in front of the boys.

“You look as though you know what I speak of already. I see some of you are blushing. And do you know why the words I say are sinking in? Do you?” He paused. Tried not to look at the spot of white exposed at T’s chest. Tried not to think of omens. “It’s because what I say is the truth! And every one of you values the truth. A change is upon you! And here, you knew it already. You didn’t need me to tell you that your most recent thoughts are the most fascinating thoughts you’ve ever had. After all, you’re experiencing them on your own.” Then, suddenly, with no segue, “You will find a fresh notebook upon your beds following breakfast. It is blue. I encourage you to write these new thoughts down. The erasers have already been removed from your pens and pencils. I do not want to miss a moment of this, the Recasting Years.” Richard paused. He had them. Rapt. His boys. “Write it all down. Every word. Express your strangest thoughts. Nothing would please your D.A.D. more than to be presented with full blue notebooks, overflowing with your concerns and ambitions, the secrets you keep. Do you understand? I can see by your nodding heads that you do. And so I will leave you with this: Hide nothing. For as your intellects have grown, so has the space in which to hide. From me. From your D.A.D. And who among you would do that? Who here would hide what they know their D.A.D. prizes so deeply?”

“Nobody!” S called. More laughter from the boys. This time charged with excitement.

Richard held up an open hand.

“Now,” he said. The boys shifted in their seats because they knew what was coming next. D.A.D. always closed his speeches the same way. D.A.D. thrummed his fingers on the podium, a drumroll of sorts. All at once the Body Hall erupted into two simple words, as the boys cried out exuberantly with their D.A.D. “Let’s eat!”

Richard acknowledged the choir. Voices. The six boys rose, took their places in the shadows again.

J SAID TO D, “I thought the notebook was for me only. D.A.D. told me it was for me.”

“What?”

But they didn’t have time to discuss this. And despite J’s obvious concern, he and the other five boys began Miserere mei, Deus together.

The other Alphabet Boys made for the Body Hall doors.

RICHARD STEPPED FROM the podium. The staff made to leave, too, but Warren Bratt was easy to catch up with.

“Lawrence,” Richard said, calling Bratt by his nom de plume lest a boy was in earshot. “How hungry are you?”

Bratt turned to face him, and all of Richard’s concerns with the author of the boys’ leisure books were increased. Warren Bratt was a priggish, stuffy, self-centered former punk who once fancied himself a fine writer. Ten years as Lawrence Luxley had done much to squash the snobbery, but Richard was learning that, as Burt once said, you could only tie an artist’s hands together for so long before he began creating with his feet.

Warren’s leisure-book ideas had grown disturbingly original. Not a good thing at all.

“Pretty hungry,” Warren said.

“That’s fine. Gordon will meet you in your office after breakfast.”

“Why?”

Richard did not feign friendliness.

“I think it important that, as the boys’ tastes change, so do the books they enjoy.”

Warren nodded. “I know that, Richard. But I’d like to—”

“Good. Then you won’t mind a chat.” He eyed Warren from head to foot. “And wash your shirt. The sweat stains make it look like you’re working too hard. As if you’re being forced to write something you don’t want to write.” As he stepped by Bratt, guards in tow, he added, “The boys worship Lawrence Luxley. Please, show them how a genius dresses.”

The Alphabet Boys Eat

Seated six a table at four large round tops, most of the Alphabet Boys appeared charged by D.A.D.’s speech in the Body Hall. F, funny F, joked as freely as if the Parenthood had outlawed studying for the day. His large front teeth looked especially white in contrast to his black button-down shirt and the black blazer that hung over his seat back. J and D had long, privately, joked that F looked like a “living cartoon.” They watched him talk, now, as they once smiled at drawings scribbled into the margins of their textbooks.

“Hey, W,” F said. “Don’t eat my breakfast today. I know you’re gonna want to and I know you’re gonna ask for my leftovers, but there simply won’t be any. So the only way you’re gonna get at my food is by eating your way through my stomach.” He paused, feigned seriousness with his overweight friend. “I shouldn’t have given you that idea, huh.”

J eyed the two boys. F and W were very close. They’d shared a floor with P and T their whole lives. And would J be sharing a floor with any of them when the day of the floor shift came? And how many years would it be that way?

“And what’s with you?” F asked, pointing two fingers directly at J. “You look like you just got sent to the Corner.”

“Oh, come now,” L said. Conservative, proper L.

F snorted. “Oh, stop it, L,” he said. “It’s good to talk about scary things. Makes them less so. But I’m not gonna let J here get off the hook just because you don’t like the way I speak.” He smiled at J. Eyes wide. It was F’s way: exaggeration.

“Nothing’s wrong,” J said. But it was clear something was.

“Is something the matter?” Q asked. Q’s glasses magnified his eyes as the Inspectors’ glasses might.

“No…it’s just…”

“Ah-ha!” F said. “I knew it! I told you! Am I good, or am I good?” He nudged W, and W nodded a yes. “Come on, then, J. Out with it.”

J thought fast. He couldn’t and wouldn’t tell them that he’d hidden information in the morning’s Inspection. He would not look hysterical in front of his brothers any more than he would the Parenthood.

“The notebooks,” J said. And as the words left his mouth, he understood that he was more upset about it than he’d realized.

“And what about them?” F asked, his big teeth wrinkling his lower lip.

“Well, in my Inspection this morning, D.A.D. told me he had an idea, just for me. He mentioned a notebook. Something I could write in. Fill…just for him.”

W smiled and his fat cheeks turned a rosy shade of red. “You mean this one?” He pulled one out from under the table. A large black W was printed on its cover.

“You sneak!” F said. “You already went up to your room and nabbed it!”

“I move well for a large boy, F.”

The friends laughed heartily. Then W turned his focus on J. Like Q, W had especially intelligent eyes. Quiet as he was, he often gave off the impression that he knew something the other boys did not. But whereas Q’s intelligence seemed to flow from an inquisitive place, W’s was more rooted in the Constitution of the Parenthood. D.A.D. himself had said W would make an excellent lawyer one day.

“Either way, what you’re saying isn’t true,” W said. J felt a quiet jolt. Had W just suggested J hid something in his Inspection?

But no. He had not.

“What do you mean?” J asked.

W hid the notebook back under the table. “Three days ago, in Professor Kinney’s class, K’s calculator stopped working. Kinney sent me to the office to fetch him a new one.”

“No doubt to encourage a little exercise, friend,” F poked.

W waved his brother off. “While I was there?” He leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms. “I saw a stack of twenty-four blue notebooks, each with one of our names printed bold upon its cover.”

“I don’t follow,” L said.

“You never do,” F said.

“What W is saying,” Q kindly said, “is that D.A.D. couldn’t have told J he had an idea planned just for him, when three days ago he’d already carried out the same idea for us all.”

Silence at the table. The voices of the other boys in the cafeteria filled the space.

They all looked to J for some sort of rebuttal. But J was at a loss for words. D.A.D. had told him he’d thought of the notebook just for him. And the way he’d said it…like he’d just thought of it…

Suddenly, as if a fan had been turned on in a very hot room, J felt some of his own guilt cool off. But the cool air brought cold.

Had J and D.A.D. lied to one another on the same day?

It was almost too frightening to imagine.

“You must’ve misunderstood him,” L said. “Simple as that.”

“But I didn’t.”

“Poor J,” F said. “Thought he had a little special attention and, in the end, he did not.”

“Obviously you’re not suggesting D.A.D. lied to you, J,” Q said.

J thought of the Corner. What little he knew of it. A door in the basement of the tower. A basement none of the boys knew how to get to.

“I didn’t say he lied,” J said.

“Of course you didn’t,” Q said. “That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“But you are saying he got something wrong,” W added. “And that’s perhaps just as egregious.”

Before J could defend himself, the bell rang and the cooks appeared with trays of waffles, eggs, fruits, and vegetables. As each boy was served, Q spoke of the merits of fruit in the morning and F pretended to hide his food from W. But J didn’t feel hungry anymore.

J was thinking about lies.

The train of thought was so profound that he found himself replaying exactly what D.A.D. had said in the Check-Up room. I’ve just had a wonderful idea. How about if I manufacture a means by which you can tell me your thoughts, your feelings, directly. Something we can share, just you and I. A notebook perhaps. You take notes and…deliver them to me. Why, we could be pen pals in that way.

Not quite a lie after all. Technically, D.A.D. hadn’t said it was just for him.

Yet, just you and I…

Surely J had it wrong. A word here, a word there, and the meaning of a thing could change so much. Luxley talked about that in one of his books. J couldn’t tell if he felt relief at the idea of D.A.D. blurring the truth or if it scared him more deeply than the idea of that vague door in the basement. Was that door below him now? Below the very chair in which he sat?

“Eat up, J,” F said. “Or W is gonna leap across the table.”

“I just might,” W said. The way he said it, J couldn’t help but feel like W was angry with him. As if the large boy was reminding him that he’d implied something wrong. Terribly wrong.

J poked at his food until he ate it. Until he realized, for the first time in his young life, that it was possible to carry on, to eat and to sleep, to talk and perhaps to even study, as the world around him…changed.

“Heck of a speech,” F said. “Luxley must have written it.”

“Luxley doesn’t write the speeches,” D said.

“Oh? How do you know that?” J asked.

D shrugged. “You can tell. They don’t have the same energy.”

F flailed his hands in the air. “Would you listen to you two? One implies D.A.D. lied to him and the other says Lawrence Luxley has more energy than our father! Maybe the coming floor shift is a good thing. You guys could use splitting up.”

He laughed, but J and D looked at one another across the table.

“I didn’t say he lied,” J reiterated. “Don’t even say something like that. I’m sure I just…” He paused. “I had it wrong. He didn’t say what I thought he said.”

“No kidding!” L said. “Now, can we move on?”

They did. J ate to the rhythm of the other boys discussing Lawrence Luxley and Professors Gulch and Kinney. Yellow Ball and Film Night. He ate to the uneven beat of his own thoughts as well, as his own words played out—I didn’t say he lied, I didn’t say he lied—at odds with the equally rhythmic rebuttal:

Warren Bratt and Lawrence Luxley

Richard could do everything in his power to make the basement more comfortable for Warren, but in the end it would still be a basement. And the truth was, Richard had. He’d ordered the carpenters to swap out the carpet, hang better pictures on the walls, renovate the storage rooms, realign the shelves, and muffle the boiler, repaint the doors, install a new toilet. Hell, Richard had even sent him flowers. They stood now in murky water upon Warren’s writing desk, equidistant between Gordon and Warren, as the writer received his weekly earful on how to write a book from a man who certainly didn’t know how.

“Richard isn’t asking for anything from your soul, Warren. I think you know that.” Gordon wore his trademark fine suit. The way he sat half upon Warren’s desk drove him insane. “He’s not interested in the tangle of emotion and epiphany that no doubt swirls in your belly. To be brutally honest with you, Warren, he’s not interested in your artistry at all.”

Warren, hefty and sweating, standing beside his chair, tried to maintain a look of professional ambiguity. But it was hard. Gordon spoke to him on Richard’s behalf like he spoke to all the Parenthood staff: as if Warren Bratt, a.k.a. Lawrence Luxley, were a child. Younger somehow than even the boys. “If you ever find that you are blocked, just remind yourself that he’s not looking for the great American novel. He’s not even looking for the great Antarctic novel. He’s looking for a book. A bad book will do. In fact, a bad book will do better than a good one. You know this. You’ve written twenty-nine of them already.”

“Thank you, Gordon. Thank you very much.”

For a decade, Warren had considered these meetings to be the most difficult part of his job. But recently something much worse had come up.

The Guilts, he’d called it.

It was a dangerous emotion for a staff member of the Parenthood to experience. He could hardly admit to himself what it was for. But really, there was no hiding it, as the source operated above him in the many floors of the Turret, day in, day out.

Guilt, yes, for how they were raising these boys.

Shut up, Warren thought now, Gordon so close. He half-imagined an Inspector bringing a magnifying glass to his ear, proclaiming him unclean.

The Guilts.

The feeling was only a splinter now, but not long ago it had only been a sliver.

Gordon smiled and Warren felt the familiar rush of rage in his chest, his blood, his bones. Gordon had a way of smiling that suggested you agreed with him in the end, no matter how ridiculous a thing he had proposed. And Warren, like the rest of the Parenthood, complied. Smiled back. Beyond the white door of Warren’s basement office, the subterranean halls of the Parenthood wound like catacombs. And while the boiler had been quieted some, Richard had no plans to turn down the volume of the Corner.

“What are you thinking for the next book?” The way Gordon asked it was nothing like Warren’s old pals, the Writing Gangsters, used to ask it at Don Don’s pub in Milwaukee. In those days, Warren’s equally idealistic cohorts had to blow their purple-dyed bangs from their eyes before they could look into his, usually flexing a tattoo or two for good measure. And if ever they asked after a book idea, it was with genuine artistic concern. Oh, how Warren Bratt missed his pretentious, holier-than-thou, degenerate former friends.

But those days were ten years past. And Warren’s gut wasn’t the only thing that had grown in that time. The Alphabet Boys were almost teenagers now. He’d watched them grow up in real time. Knowing what they knew. And what they didn’t.

The Guilts, indeed.

“I’m not sure yet,” he said purposefully. It felt good to make the corporate suck-up squirm. Corner hum or not, once a punk always a poker, and Warren Bratt had to stick it to Gordon anytime he could. Of course he had an idea for the next book. He had one thousand ideas for the next one thousand books. Because Richard, the Alphabet Boys’ magnanimous D.A.D., wasn’t looking for, as Gordon just said, a work of art. Most decidedly not. Richard wanted supermarket slop. The kind of books that Warren’s aunts used to slurp up on the beaches of the Wisconsin Dells. The kind of books that showed half-naked men clutching half-naked women, their lust as clearly stated as their loins.

Except…no women in these books. Oh no.

“Let’s do this,” Gordon began. Always an idea for the next book. Always similar to the last one. “Give us something about a man who washes windows.” He snapped his fingers. Warren knew very well where this was going. The plots of the leisure books were more formulaic than the romance novels he wished he was writing instead.

Has it come to that? Warren asked himself.

But no. Not quite that. And though Warren wasn’t able to examine this feeling in whole, as Gordon sat staring at him from across his writing desk, he understood it was something like that. Something like wanting to write the worst thing he’d ever written, if only it meant not writing more of the same.

“Right now,” Gordon said. “Give the window washer a name.”

Warren didn’t have to think hard. He had a long list of trite masculine names.

“Jerry.”

“Great. Jerry it is. And what does Jerry do?”

“You said yourself he washes windows.”

“Where? What building?”

Warren wanted to grab Gordon’s smug face by the perfectly shaved chin.

“How about the Turret.”

“Great. Yes. The very building we’re in. So?”

“So?”

“So what happens in your next book? No women, of course.”

“Gordon—”

“We could all use a gentle reminder. The boys have reached the Delicate Years, after all. Their fresh needs will be…in the air. Let’s be careful what we breathe, Bratt.”

Warren felt cold fingers up and down his arms. What was Gordon actually after down here? Had Richard grown…paranoid? Was it possible that, after all this time, Richard had begun questioning the foundation of his darling experiment?

That’s all you, buddy, Warren thought. Alllll you.

The Guilts.

Indeed.

“Stop it,” Warren said, not meaning to. The office lights exposed his thinning curly hair, anxious eyes behind his black-rimmed glasses, and a belly the Writing Gangsters would’ve thrown pencils at.

Oh, how he missed those friends.

“Tell me more about this window washer.”

Warren was glad for the return of the subject.

“Okay. One day, while washing the windows of the Turret—”

“Yes.”

“Jerry sees a naked blonde bent over a writer’s desk.”

“Warren.” The temperature in Gordon’s eyes dropped to none.

“While washing the windows of the Turret, Jerry sees something curious happen inside one of the boys’ bedrooms.”

“Now I’m interested. Very.”

“He sees one of the boys cheating at Boats and—”

“Not Boats. Don’t want them analyzing that particular game. How about Panhandle?”

“Panhandle. And—”

“This is very good.”

“—and first he finishes his job—”

“Of course, of course.”

“—and when he gets back down to the ground, he either goes to the head of the Parenthood and informs him of what he saw or he approaches the boy himself.”

Gordon frowned. The angles of his face worked in such accord that it looked, to Warren, as if he were a puppet made of Parenthood wood.

“Hmmm. The problem with approaching the boy himself is that we’d be empowering the window washer. As a profession.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Oh?”

Warren brought a stubby hand to his collar. He tugged on it. It always felt as if the temperature in the office increased incrementally for the duration of his meetings with Gordon. This story (Warren had a hard time calling it a story, calling it anything other than propaganda) was no different from any other leisure book he had written. Yet Gordon nitpicked.

An editor in hell, Warren thought. But it wasn’t funny. And when did jokes like these cease to be funny? When had Warren started feeling this way? Hadn’t he bought in, years ago, when they paid him his first check?

“The boys are young enough that they’ll eventually substitute window washing with the fields of study Richard’s hoping they’re drawn to. For Christ’s sake, Gordon. Do they have a choice?”

Gordon clucked his tongue. Warren stopped talking. He knew he’d come close to saying something he shouldn’t have. A statement like that might reveal the Guilts.

“We’re not raising the right thing to do, Warren. We’re raising the most enlightened, undistracted minds in the history of mankind.”

Gordon rose, got up off the desk. He stood a full five inches taller than Warren. But Warren didn’t attempt to correct his slouch. Let the corporate slave own the room. Warren didn’t want it anymore.

“So tell me,” Gordon said. “Is this idea artistic to you? Is this the sort of thing your younger self would have thought fit to write?”

“No. Not even close.”

He thought of Gordon’s voice on an answering machine, echoing in a shitty apartment, so long ago. He thought of the Writing Gangsters. How they would recoil at what he’d become. How they might kill him, for his own sake.

“You see, then? If ever you find yourself blocked, call for me and we’ll have another little chat. Richard would very much like to see this window-washer book done as quickly as possible. But you are, of course, the writer.”

“I wasn’t blocked.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“I’ll write it.”

Of course he would. He always did. And the money in his bank account swelled.

But, then, so did this new feeling. It used to be he could push the young men from his mind. But the young men weren’t so young anymore.

“Good.” Gordon crossed the stuffy room. His black loafers were silent on the plush carpet Richard had ordered installed not six months back. At the door he turned to face Warren once more. “Now go write a bad book, Warren. For the boys. For the Parenthood. For Richard. For you.”

As Gordon slipped out of the office, Warren could hear the hum of the Corner from down the cobblestoned hall. He heard Gordon’s shoes, too, clacking a serf’s march. And when the office door clicked closed again, the sounds ceased, mostly, and Warren was left with the shitty vision of a banal window washer teaching a young man one of life’s many morals. But, of course, a lying fable.

Warren Bratt the cool, Warren Bratt the skeptic, Warren Bratt the Cocky from Milwaukee, had fallen as far from artistic grace as he could.

He slouched his way into his chair, his sneakers dragging on that same carpet. And as he sat down to write, to work, to pretend to be a writer, an artist, a man, he tried very hard to shove from his mind the thoughts and feelings that had worked so hard to squeeze their way in.

He tried not to think about the way the Alphabet Boys had ogled him during the morning’s speech. Christ, they looked at him like he was a celebrity.

The Guilts.

Warren opened a desk drawer and pulled forth a fresh yellow legal pad. He lifted a blue pen from the desk and brought it to the paper.

He wrote. He wrote a lot. As if each page, each word, each letter, played a small part in staving off those dangerous new feelings. For if Warren Bratt were to speak of them, even once, or if he were, as Lawrence Luxley, to slip one nugget of truth, even clandestinely, into any page of any book, why, God forbid…

…he’d be sent to the Corner.

Like A had been.

Like Z, too.

Outside the office, the Corner hummed.

Warren sat back quick in his chair. He breathed deep, intentionally, attempting to calm down.

He shouldn’t be thinking this way. Oh no. He shouldn’t even be considering it at all.

“STOP.”

He hadn’t yelled it, but it was certainly firm. Yet, rather than listen to his own wise admonishment, he opened his desk drawer again and eyed an untouched white legal pad that sat, uncluttered, unbent, to the right.

Richard, he thought, don’t make me do it.

But would it be Richard who was making him do it? Or were the words Warren imagined filling those white pages all his own…

He slammed the drawer. Caught a finger in it and yelped.

All of Lawrence Luxley’s books had to be submitted on yellow legal pads. It had been that way since Book 1. And so…

“So stop thinking about the white pad,” he said.

He flipped the bird to his closed office door.

Fuck you, Richard.

He couldn’t have phrased it any better if he’d written it in black Sharpie in a bathroom at Don Don’s in Milwaukee.

He wrote. He wrote a lot. And as the yellow pages were filled, in rapid, uncaring succession, Warren imagined a stack of white beside them, growing at the same rate.

It was a downright scary place to be: writing the book he should be writing, while imagining the one he shouldn’t.

After ten pages about the window washer, he opened the drawer again. The white pages shone like a spotlight. His desk the stage on which he wanted to perform.

He closed the drawer. Lest someone in the basement hall open his office door. Lest the bright white of those pages creep out under that door, illuminate the winding halls, reach the Corner.

What was he thinking of doing? Really? What?

But Warren didn’t want to answer that. Couldn’t begin to. And as he tried to eliminate the images of the boys, now twelve, from his mind, he found it wasn’t any easier replacing them with his old writing friends.

So who, then? Who to think of when thinking of the present was as troubling as the past?

Warren stopped writing. Stared at the desk as though it were a stage after all.

He looked to the door.

Then, sweating, opened the drawer.

He thought of the incinerator square down the hall, embedded in the stones. He could always torch whatever he wrote.

Yes. But could he ever burn the idea to write it?

At the Window Overlooking the Yard

Overly full and lazy, the four boys ignored their studies for an hour and sat by the window in J’s living room. Many years ago they had determined it was the Floor 8 window with the best view of the Yard. D and L sat on the couch near one another, L with his legs crossed as D leaned forward on his bony knees. D was the skinniest of all the Alphabet Boys, and compared to W, he was downright skeletal. His hair, long and black, was tucked behind both ears, in direct contrast to L’s curly brown mop, which shadowed his ears and gave the impression that he was never quite listening to what the other boys had to say.

Q and J sat upon the window’s ledge. Q not only scored the highest on every engineer exam and mathematical quiz, but he also had what D.A.D. once called itness, a term the other boys good-naturedly teased him about, until they realized they agreed with D.A.D. completely. A lot of the Alphabet Boys were smart, very smart, they knew, but Q’s particular brand of intelligence appeared effortless.

“I think I speak for us all,” L said, finally broaching the topic, “when I say I knew exactly what he was referring to.”

D knew what D.A.D. was referring to, too.

“I didn’t like it,” D said.

“No? What was there not to like?” L asked.

“It sounded to me like D.A.D. is getting…nervous.”

The boys shifted uncomfortably.

“Nervous?” J asked. “About what?”

“You heard him,” D said. “All that garbage about us coming into our own…as if we weren’t there already.”

“Garbage!” L said. “Goodness. First J accuses him of lying and now you’re calling his speech garbage. Times are certainly changing! Maybe he has a right to be nervous!”

“I didn’t say he lied,” J said again. But his voice came out quieter than he’d meant for it to.

“Well, where does he think we’ve been?” D went on. “Sometimes I think he doesn’t know a thing about us.”

L lifted his blue notebook. He wrote something down. “He will, D, so long as we write our thoughts down.”

D frowned.

“But what if I don’t want to do that? What if I want to keep my thoughts”—his hair swung down in front of his eyes—“to myself?”

“D,” Q said, shaking his head no. “What a strange thing to say.” He opened his blue notebook and set his eraserless pen to the paper. “Have you felt this way before?”

D looked to the notebook, then to J. In that moment J wondered why D had looked to him. Did he know J was feeling the same way? At breakfast, J hadn’t outright called D.A.D. a liar. But still, he had insinuated something.

“You going to Inspect me, Q?” D asked. “That notebook is for your thoughts. Not mine.”

Q smiled.

“But what of my reaction to your thoughts? That’s certainly my jurisdiction.”

D flailed his hands and fell back into the couch.

“Whatever. Go ahead. Write all about me.”

J looked out the window, across the manicured acres of the Yard to the wall of pines that signified the boundaries of his world. He thought of the shape he’d seen crouched there. He almost spoke of it.

“Wild as his words may have been,” he said, “they articulated a feeling I gotta admit I’ve been having.”

“And what’s that?” L asked.

J turned to face the others. “I feel…new.”

“Yes.” Q said. His glasses slipped to the end of his nose. “Me, too.”

“Really?” D asked. “Because I don’t feel new at all. I feel like my old wonderful self. And to be honest, I’d like to stay that way.”

“Scared of change?” L asked.

“Not scared, nitwit. Happy. Already content. Sorry if I’m the only one in this room who doesn’t mind being the boy he’s always been.”

“Is this about the shuffle?” Q asked. “Because I’ll agree with you there. Who wants to change rooms? Not me. And yet…”

“And yet,” D mocked. “Always and yet with you.”

Q held up his pen. “And yet…change is good. It must be natural. Otherwise, why would D.A.D. spend so much time thinking about it? Obviously he has. So one can only surmise that, there being no option but to change, D.A.D. is graciously preparing us for our internal growth with a little external one. That’s balance, boys. Homeostasis.”

J turned to him. “What have you been thinking?”

“Me?” Q asked.

“Yeah. You said, Me, too, a minute ago.”

Q pondered this. The shadow of the snowflakes falling outside the window made brief, ever-changing patterns on his face.

“I’ve been thinking of locating the Living Trees, for one.”

The four boys were quiet. J felt words trying to squirm their way up his throat. A vague description of a figure. The way the branches and leaves met in the moonlight. The ghost of a dead brother. Or a hysterical vision at midnight.

“Then you should write about that in your journal,” L finally said, breaking the loaded silence.

“Right,” Q said. “I plan to.”

“This conversation is weighing on me,” D said.

“Why?” J wanted to know.

“I mean…come on! Listen to us. Are we changing? I sincerely hope not.”

L smiled, leaned over, and patted D on the shoulder.

“Right before our very eyes.”

Another block of silence. J thought of the morning’s Inspection. The fact that he wasn’t entirely honest with D.A.D.

“And if you feel like keeping secrets,” L said to D, “you should write that down, too.”

“But first,” Q said, wiggling his eyebrows, “tell us what those secrets are.”

The boys laughed, but there was some nervousness to it. J heard it in his own voice, too.

“While it’s true that some thoughts are probably best kept until we really understand them,” Q said, more seriously now, “we don’t want to ignore the Recasting Years, either.”

“Recasting,” D echoed. “So now it’s just…official. We heard the phrase this morning and now it’s just…recasting.”

“Well, of course,” L laughed condescendingly. “That’s how it goes! D.A.D. said so.”

“But what does that mean?” J asked suddenly. He got down from the window ledge and stood before his brothers on the couch.

“What does what mean?” L asked. “And don’t fly into that lying bit again.”

“D.A.D. said so and so it is,” J said. “But who told him?”

Q laughed. He wrote something down in his notebook.

“D.A.D. is older than us, J,” he said. “More experienced. All it means is that D.A.D. knows more than we do and for him to organize a speech must mean something. I don’t claim to know all the answers, but I do believe we were warned of something today.”

“And what’ll happen to us if we don’t write everything down?” J asked. “What then?”

Q shrugged. “We’ll have to ask him.”

“Oh, come out with it!” D said. He tossed his blue notebook to the carpet. “Just tell us what’s on your mind, J. If you’re not saying he lied today, you’re still trying to say something.”

J paused. He hadn’t realized how obvious he was being.

“I think…I think I have a disease.”

His brothers looked justifiably surprised.

“What sort?” Q asked, hopping down from the ledge.

“I…don’t know,” J said. “But I don’t think it’s physical. Or…I think it’s invisible.”

“Location!” L said. “J! You definitely need to speak to D.A.D. about that!”

J shook his head. “But I don’t want to do that! And I don’t think Location is what they say it is.”

The others were confused.

“What do you mean?” D asked.

“Are you saying the Parenthood is lying to us, J?” L asked. “Again?”

J could feel his face turning red. He wished it wasn’t.

“Listen, guys,” he said. “Whatever is going on—this…feeling—if it’s Location or if it’s not, it feels…good.”

He looked to D, and D averted his eyes.

“Please,” Q said, “go on.” He spoke like D.A.D. himself, conducting an Inspection. “Tell us what feels good about this confusing, complex, and invisible condition you have.”

“Okay,” J said. He stepped to the window and brought a finger to the condensation. “Here’s the Turret.” He drew a tower. “And here’s a boy.” He drew a boy with long, funny hair. Nobody laughed. “And just like Q said, he wants to locate the Living Trees, the things that birthed us….” He drew a question mark far from the tower. “I’m wondering what’s beyond ourselves.”

“Our minds,” Q clarified.

“Yes! Our minds. I feel as though…” J looked to the ceiling, then out the window. “I feel as though someone is splitting the pines up here.” He pointed to his head. “And through them, I’m seeing something new. Only…only…”

“Only you don’t know what it is yet,” Q said. “That’s exactly the kind of thing you ought to write down. D.A.D. will adore that.”

“This is all making me uncomfortable,” L said. He got up off the couch. “And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” He walked to the door. “I’m off to study. If you guys find yourselves talking about less dangerous things, please let me know. Also, you, J.” He pointed two fingers at J. “You need to talk to D.A.D. right away about any…invisible problem you’re having!”

Then L was out of the room. The door closed behind him.

Q rolled his eyes and said, “L has never been much of a trailblazer. If our talks are getting too advanced for him, well…maybe he’ll like his new floor mates better.”

“Ugh,” D said. “Sounds awful.”

“I’m worried that it’ll show in the next Inspection,” J said. “Nobody’s ever failed an Inspection before.”

“Failed an Inspection?” Q echoed. “Don’t you think you’re being a little…hasty? You’re experiencing new thoughts, just like D.A.D. told us we would. He told us so today. Seriously, don’t give yourself nightmares over it.”

J looked at him quickly, his eyes wide.

“Nightmares,” he said. “I’ve…I’ve…”

He almost told him, almost told them both. The figure behind Mister Tree.

“Why don’t we take a walk through the Orchard?” Q asked, obviously changing the subject for J’s sake. “A nice snowy walk might do us some good.”

“Maybe you’ll find the Living Trees,” D said.

Q shrugged.

“You’re humoring me, but…maybe. Maybe I will. Maybe we will. Either way, I’m putting it in the notebook. And don’t worry so much, D. Truly. Change is good. I imagine it might even be fun.”

“A walk sounds good,” J said. “You in, D?”

D looked to the notebook on the floor.

“Sure, but I’m not bringing that with me. It already feels like an invader. Like it can read my mind.”

The boys knew he was referencing Luxley’s The Invaders, the story of a quiet staff member of the Parenthood who clearly wanted what was worst for the boys.

“It’s supposed to,” Q said, crossing the room. “That’s exactly what it’s supposed to do.” He opened the door. “I’ll grab my coat, be right back.”

Then Q was out the door and J and D were left alone. J went to the front closet and removed his blue-plaid winter coat with the lamb’s fur collar. He’d got it as a gift from D.A.D. All the Alphabet Boys had received the same for their communal birthday, January 1.

“We’re growing,” J said, trying to limit the new, frightening feeling.

“Think so? I don’t.”

“Oh, come on. I don’t know how much of this I can handle in one day.”

“I think that, whatever we’re feeling, it’s going to go on for a lot longer than one day,” D said.

J looked to him. It was clear to them both that they’d shared something over the course of the post-breakfast conversation.

“In any event,” J said, opening the door, “D.A.D. may as well have been speaking directly to me. He knows something new is happening inside of us.”

“Sure,” D said, following J into the hall. Above them, the silver Inspection speaker stood inert, not to be heard from again until tomorrow morning, when a new day’s Inspection would be announced. “But one thing about it is bothering me.”

“What’s that?” J asked.

“The feeling that D.A.D. wanted us to talk about these very things upon returning to our rooms.”

“What do you mean? Why does that bother you?”

D took J by the arm, stopped him in the hall. Behind them, the Check-Up door reflected the dull overhead lights.

“He’s always a step ahead of us. Always. Like he knows we’re worried before we have anything to worry about. Like he knows we’re laughing before a joke has been told. And doesn’t that bother you? Is everything so…preordained? Are we so obvious? It bothers me. I want to have my own thoughts, J. Is that so wrong? And I’m certainly not going to do that by writing them all down in that little blue book.”

“This one?” Q had snuck up behind them. He held D’s notebook between two fingers.

“Hey!” D said. “I left that in J’s room! How’d you—”

Q slapped him on the shoulder.

“I’m stealthy. I’m fast. You know that. Now go get your coat, nitwit, and let’s take a walk. L, too. And if you feel like writing anything down? Do it. And if you don’t? Write that down, too.”

Richard

The windows of Richard’s first-floor quarters acted as a two-way mirror, but not in the traditional way. Rather, to those standing outside, the Yard was reflected in the glass, but a hint of a large photograph of an empty apartment could be seen behind it. For this, none of the Alphabet Boys ever saw their D.A.D. as he stood watching from within, often wearing nothing more than a bathrobe. Today, as he watched Q, J, D, and L tramp across the snowy Yard, headed for the Orchard, he wore the tank top that he’d sweated through while giving his speech. He’d sweated more since then, after receiving Gordon’s report on his meeting with Warren Bratt.

He doesn’t believe in the Parenthood like he used to.

Did he ever…used to?

He certainly believed in the money he was making from it.

And now?

Now I’m unsure.

Bad word for the Parenthood.

And how did Gordon know this? What brought him to this conclusion?

He didn’t sit down for the entire meeting.

And?

That’s what you do when you want to appear big, big as you can be. You stand. You stand, too, when you’re close to walking.

Richard watched the boys happily crossing the whitening grass, wearing their newest winter coats.

Almost teenagers now.

Growing up.

Soon to be men.

The Delicate Years.

“You’ve got to clothe your kids,” Richard said, alone in his quarters. “You’ve got to feed them, too. And”—he reached a hand to the glass and cupped the boys, as if their distant smaller forms could fit easily into his palm—“you’ve got to make sure they’re telling the truth.”

As the four boys grew even smaller, walking the long border of pines, Richard’s mind traveled back to the Basic Years. It was a flaw of his, he admitted, that he’d long considered the past with a raven’s eye but often assumed the present was in working order. He knew he had the Inspections to blame. The daily reports that his boys were clean, the daily reminders that things were going according to plan. Had he always leaned too hard on the Inspections? Put too much stock in them? Could they tell him…everything?

They certainly reaffirmed for him the most important thing: the lack of knowledge in the boys…the absolutely vacant and seemingly endless acreage of once-loud distractions, the earth now scorched of…

…woman.

Soft string music played from his antique hi-fi radio, loud enough to mingle with the sound of the winter wind outside and the faint ripple of the Corner below. Richard thought back, not searching, not looking for any mistake now, just back to images of the boys as toddlers and their incredible potential.

In those days, he’d believed he could tell which boys were more apt to shine. Which would develop into the scientists and engineers his experiment promised. But he was never exactly right. And these slight errors in his predictions worried him mercilessly.

One incident from the Basic Years caused him particular concern now: a routine patrol he’d conducted himself one evening, his black boots echoing off the brand-new, shiny floors, the distant clink of dishes in the kitchen. He’d looked to his watch that night and frowned. The rules of the Parenthood had been drilled into the minds of the money-hungry staff, mostly ex-cons happy for the clandestine gig. Yet…someone was up. In a place they weren’t supposed to be. Perhaps sneaking a snack? The kitchen had long since been shut down; dinner was many hours over. He quickened his pace to the beat of an increasingly angry inner monologue—preemptive chastising of the dishwashers and cooks.

The tower’s décor was different then, over a decade ago, and the halls were only partially lit, by English tavern lanterns Richard had foolishly insisted upon. The black-painted doors of the storage and equipment rooms unfortunately resembled open doors (another mistake on Richard’s part), and Richard turned to look at each one, expecting a face to look back, someone who knew more than he did about who was making that racket in the kitchen. Someone who knew the mistakes that Richard had made and the mistakes he would make down the road. Someone who saw, in whole, the failures of the Parenthood long before they came to be.

Now, in his quarters, Richard wondered if he’d lost the paranoia he’d possessed in those early days. And he wondered, too, if he should find it soon.

Paranoia, Burt once said, is probably the only thing that’s going to make this experiment a success.

He remembered…

He’d taken the glass walkway to the Body Hall, through its doors, and arrived at the kitchen’s swivel doors, pausing to compose himself. If he were seen fretting, especially in those early years, who among the staff would still believe in him?

This was paramount then, as it was now: Pay the staff enough money to make them happy, but in the end they had to buy in. Had to think they believed in the Parenthood on their own.

Outside the kitchen that night, he polished the top button of his coat.

He entered.

C, hardly more than a baby, was alone on the kitchen floor, his back to the door, lifting plates from the open drying rack and stacking them on the floor to his right.

Richard stepped back into the shadows created by the wheeled plate racks and watched the small black boy in diapers carry out his task. He didn’t know if he should smile or scream. The boy’s methodology was beyond impressive.

Richard noted the resolve with which the boy studied the greater kitchen, possibly eyeing what else he could arrange. C was expressing key personality traits. Fearlessness: He’d crawled here alone. Productiveness: He’d completed a task. Ambition: He was looking for more to do. Imitation: He’d seen the dishwashers stacking the very same plates.

And free will, to boot. Richard felt proud as a parent.

But there was something terrible about it, too.

If C, as a baby, could so genuinely surprise him…what might happen when he grew up?

Enjoy this, for fuck’s sake, Richard thought. Enjoy the first signs that your experiment is working.

But how could he? C had made it out of his crib and into the kitchen. What would stop him, or any of the Alphabet Boys, from one day…going anywhere they pleased?

Anywhere at all?

Now, his nose to the cold glass of his quarters’ window, Richard stared far, to where the pines gave way to an open snowy path. Beyond that, Q, J, D, and L were walking through the Orchard.

Right?

“Spoiled,” Richard said aloud. But, no, not that. None of his boys were spoiled. And the two that had gone bad had been taken care of.

There was only one solution to spoiled.

Yes, Richard’s last line of defense. His ultimate deterrent for staff and boy alike. Just thinking the name of the room calmed him, reminded him that, if ever a boy learned of the existence of women, the Corner was there to be opened.

Paranoia…

He remembered…

Richard stepped out from the shadows of the plate racks and approached the boy.

C, hearing his D.A.D., looked up at him.

Richard smiled then as Richard smiled now, the sweet sounds of the cellos lubricating his nerves.

Study my face, C, for if ever your curiosity leads you astray, it will be this face that weeps, these lips that send you to the Corner.

He picked C up and brought the boy’s nose close to his own.

You’ve made your father very proud tonight.

But he wondered if the boy could detect his lie. He wondered if all the Alphabet Boys would one day detect his many lies….

But paranoia, Burt had also said, will be the Parenthood’s undoing in the end.

Now Richard made a fist and pounded the glass. He gave it one solid thwack and stepped from the snowy sight of the Yard.

He crossed his quarters, past his large oak desk, went to the bar, and quickly fixed a gin martini.

Burt had also suggested a dry tower. But Richard downed it in two swallows. Energized, he turned to face the windows again, the weather, the world he’d created.

Oh, the Basic Years were such beautiful days!

In Richard’s memory, the early epoch glowed. The illumination in the halls of the Parenthood was softer. The elevators ran quieter. The faces of the boys were the faces of the future. Richard’s vision had come to life.

So what do you do?

Cast the opposite sex out.

And…

…watch…

…the…

…genius…

…sprout.

Do you remember what progress smelled like, Richard? It was as sweet as childhood, yeah?

Yeah.

Do you smell it still?

He fixed himself a second drink, let the alcohol do its job, and recalled the Basic Years.

We could live forever like this! he used to think. As he fell asleep. As he woke. Forever perfect.

Forevolution.

He poured a third drink, could hear Burt advising him to make the Turret dry. No booze around the boys, four of who were no doubt stretching their legs, taking a break between studies, bonding, exploring, growing.

Q, D, L, and J.

Richard carried the drink to the window. Drinking this heavily often led to evaluating his boys, his prized possessions, his masterpiece. And in doing so, two names, two letters, an omen he wanted desperately to avoid, invariably came up. As though someone other than himself had stolen two especially shimmering trophies from the case.

A and Z.

Richard closed his eyes. Wobbling a bit before the glass, he focused on the music, found balance there. The deep tubas mimicked the shadows in the basement that pooled by the Corner’s door. The flutes cried out like children behind it.

A had gone to the Corner.

Richard had sent him.

He opened his eyes to see that the snow had increased outside. He thought maybe he saw the form of the four boys, perhaps just one of them, walking the line of pines.

But no. Only the branches, swaying in the growing wind.

A was the first to die. A was the first letter of the alphabet. How terribly fitting. The perfectly lit match to set a paranoid man’s paper mind aflame…

The boys would die, one by one, following A, in suit, in order, B, C, D, E…

Richard laughed. It was harsh, nervous laughter, which grated against the gorgeous music that no longer carried a tune for him.

The Delicate Years…

No. The other boys were still here. The other boys hadn’t died, and no, they wouldn’t. So long as they weren’t spoiled. Spoiled rotten. And wasn’t that all there was to it? The experiment held so long as the Parenthood’s singular, irrefutable law was upheld.

A man spends all his time building something, Burt once wrote, and that object becomes his everything. His reward, yes, but his panic, his horror, too.

Of course, A hadn’t done anything wrong. A hadn’t done anything at all.

F’s mother did.

A recalcitrant whore. A weeping, second-guessing woman. A fool who let her heart best her mind until she broke the deal she’d made with the Parenthood.

She’d shown up.

Here.

At the Turret.

Richard had been out in the Yard that day, the very same expanse of grass he overlooked now, his third martini sloppily dripping gin to the floor. He’d overseen the disassembly of the enormous Glasgow Plexiglas crib. The boys had outgrown it. The carpenters (ex-cons, all) were carrying the pieces back to the tower when Richard’s placid, proud mood was interrupted by a sound he hadn’t heard in a very long time.

A piercing shriek. A falsetto of pain.

A woman.

She looked terrible, stumbling by the tower’s first-floor windows. A cuckoo wretch. Her clothes hung from her body as though she’d escaped from a hospital and had come running…running here…

The carpenters were upon her before Richard could speak. But Richard spoke.

Cover her mouth, he said calmly, crossing the Yard, already seeing the Corner door closing on her like a coffin lid.

The sky felt too big above him. The windows of the Turret too clean. Sudden sweat soaked the edges of his hair and beads dripped down to his black beard, blue in the summer sun.

At first, upon reaching her, he said nothing. He only stared into her heartbroken eyes: a mother who’d realized how much motherhood meant to her after all. Later that night, one carpenter told another he thought Richard was going to bite her. But Richard didn’t bite her. He did worse.

Go to the Corner, he’d said to her. As if she knew what that room was. As if she had any idea about the door in the basement of the building that harbored her son, the boy she’d come to retrieve. YOU GO TO THE CORNER RIGHT NOW!

The carpenters had made to move, to drag her inside, when Gordon, always present, always a witness, gasped so audibly it rivaled the mother’s lunatic shriek.

Already knowing what was wrong, what had caused his assistant to cry out, but not yet wanting to believe it, Richard turned to where Gordon was pointing a shaking manicured finger.

A boy stood with his face and hands pressed to the first-floor hall glass.

He was looking right at them.

Right at her.

Her.

“It’s A,” Gordon said, trembling.

A at the window. F’s mother in the clutches of the carpenters.

Richard felt the strength flow from his legs. But he did not fall.

Parenthood law was the one and only.

You can’t raise a truly blind man who has already seen the sky.

He’ll remember…he’ll remember…he’ll always remember…and he’ll ask about her…her…HER.

Richard walked past the carpenters, past the mother who had unknowingly sentenced somebody else’s son.

He entered the tower.

He went to the boy and knelt.

He held A’s face in his fingers.

The woman you saw, he said, has spoiled you rotten.

The Corner.

The only room in the Parenthood the boys were raised to fear. A place that existed before even their nurseries were complete. Somewhere in the basement maze not far from where Lawrence Luxley wrote the books they loved; a door at the end of a cobblestone basement corridor; the place where the noises of the night were made.

Over the years, Richard had noted small rips at the shoulders of the uniforms worn by his staff. He knew the fabric had been torn on the stones across the hall from the Corner, as the ex-cons attempted to stay as far away as they could.

The Corner.

An appellation that seemed to reach out into the hall. A door with fingers. And reach.

The Corner.

Where A and F’s mother went.

Together.

“That’s enough,” Richard said now, draining his third martini. “Time to—”

But his sentiment was cut short at the sight of the four boys returning from the Orchard. Snow had painted the shoulders of their new coats white. Their smiles underscored the laughter he heard through the glass, through the snow, through the distance.

Richard smiled, too. Four of his boys, his boys, twelve years old now, returning from a break in their studies. But as they continued to laugh, as they carried on in the way he’d once envisioned they would…as Q, D, L, and J presented the perfectly proud picture of all that Richard imagined they could be, he felt something sour spinning in his gut. A loose screw in his heart.

“What are you laughing at?” he asked them, clinking his glass quietly against the window, in rhythm with his words. “Be…good…boys…now. Tell your D.A.D….what are you laughing at?”

And the boys, reaching the Yard, only saw the snowfall reflected in the glass of the quarters belonging to their D.A.D., a new winter upon them.

In the Orchard

On their walk, the boys talked about many things. But J’s mind continued to return to the discrepancy between what D.A.D. had told him in the Inspection and what he’d said during his speech.

Why did it matter so much? Plenty of Alphabet Boys had slipped up, forgotten something said, put something a different way, or simply intentionally delivered a small harmless lie. J had done it himself. With the cherry juice on the carpet. Or how about the thousand times he’d pretended to understand a joke just because the others obviously did? Was that a lie? And if one of those boys had asked him to explain what was so funny about the very joke they were laughing at, how would he have responded? Would he have been caught in a lie?

“T got in trouble,” L said. “Wore white at the speech.”

“This morning?” Q asked.

“How do you hear about these things so fast?” D asked. “It’s like you’re one of the bricks in the Turret walls.”

“Why did he wear white?” J asked.

The snow fell soft upon their coat shoulders, their collars, their hair. As they reached Mister Tree, J felt something like a tether coming loose. A leash unlatched. He thought of the dogs in the Inspection. He hardly remembered he’d asked a question.

But he looked, too. Looked to see if anyone was crouched behind the tree.

“Must have been tired,” L said. “I can’t imagine he was protesting a speech!”

L laughed the way he did whenever the absurdity of defying the Parenthood came up. The snow settled so uniformly upon his curly hair that he looked aged, playing the part of an old man on the stage of the tower theater.

“It’s possible he did protest,” Q said. “As D.A.D. told us today, things are changing.”

They’d reached the rows now, Mister Tree being no more (or less) than a greeter, a solitary outlier between Yard and Orchard. The boys paused. Somewhere out there in the rows of cherry trees were the trees they’d grown upon. The Living Trees D.A.D. had plucked them from twelve years ago.

After a glance at the way the snow fell upon the uniform branches, the boys commenced walking.

“Maybe he just likes white,” D said. “You don’t have to call it a protest just because he likes white.”

“Well,” L said, obviously trying to change the subject. “There’s plenty of white out here!” He held his open palms to the sky. “Maybe he should come outside!”

They had entered the first row of cherry trees, the branches of one nearly touching the next. For the first time in his life, J thought it looked like a fence.

He recalled the days when he and D played hide-and-seek in the Orchard. When they’d look for the Living Trees, too. No boy knew which ones they were. And the Parenthood said it was up to them to find out.

“What was his punishment?” D asked.

L scoffed. “How should I know?”

“You know everything else!”

“Well, I don’t know the answer to that. But I can guess.” Their shoes crunched the fresh snow and grass. Out here, walking the rows of the Orchard, things were less manicured than they were in the Yard. The boys had no doubt that D.A.D. intentionally left it so. A chance for his boys to explore, to feel less tethered to the Turret.

“Probably lost this year’s Film Night privilege,” Q said. “Which is a shame, because I’ve heard good things about it.”

“What have you heard?” D asked.

“C told me it’s the best one yet.”

“Oh, what does C know.”

“Film Night would be a fairly large punishment,” L said. “And yet…T should know better. Wearing white to a speech!”

“An oversight,” D reiterated. J heard the frustration in his voice. But J’s mind was still elsewhere. Still stuck between two places, like Mister Tree between the Orchard and the Yard; between what D.A.D. said in the Check-Up room today and what he’d said onstage in the Body Hall.

They’d reached halfway down the first row of trees, the horizon obscured by a mist of fine snow. The cold wind tousled their hair, and Q bundled himself tighter in his coat. He wiped the fog off his glasses, too.

“It’s official, then,” D said.

“What is?” L asked.

“Q cleaned his glasses. Winter is here.”

Every year, the first snowfall announced the coming Effigy Meet, when the twenty-four Alphabet Boys competed for the best ice sculpture, as judged by the Parenthood. J hadn’t ever come close to winning, but he didn’t mind. The Effigy Meet encouraged creation itself, construction, the angles and necessary math. Temperature and sustainability. When considering the annual event, J couldn’t help thinking of the many rooms of the one building he knew so well. The Turret that grew smaller behind them.

“What do you think the Corner looks like?” J surprised himself by asking. He looked over his shoulder—they all did—for fear that the legendary basement door might have followed them outside, was perhaps suspended between the rows of cherry trees.

“Come on!” L said. “T isn’t going to the Corner for a white shirt, J! My goodness, you’re acting strange today.”

“I’m not saying he will,” J said. “I’m just wondering. What do you think the Corner looks like?”

“We know what it looks like,” Q said. “It’s just a door.”

“How do you know that?” D asked. Again, J felt a bond between himself and D. He wasn’t sure he liked it. It seemed easier to hide dangerous thoughts when you were the only one having them.

“Because I’ve been told so,” Q said. J heard rare embarrassment in Q’s voice. Q was, after all, the one who typically questioned things. “Why are you asking, J?”

J lifted his hand to a leafless tree branch, made to break off a piece, thought better of it.

He stopped walking.

“Aren’t you interested in where A and Z went?”

The other three stopped walking, too. D turned to face J, interest in his eyes. Q pulled out his notebook and wrote in it. L bent at the waist, planting his hands on his knees.

“I think all this walking is limiting the oxygen to your brain,” L said. “And the cold is freezing what remains.”

“Don’t you wonder, L?” J asked.

L rose to his full height again. “No. I don’t. The Corner. So?”

“Where exactly do you think they went? What do you think is on the other side of that door?”

L made to speak but stopped.

“I imagine it’s like the Nursery,” Q said. “The same place we were raised, we die.”

“Come on!” L said. “Lies and death! I’ve had just about enough of this!”

“What do you mean?” J asked.

But Q only shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m working on it. Here’s a new thought: We were made out here in the Orchard. So maybe this is where…we die.”

They were quiet. But J wanted more. “And how do we die? What happens to us? Who…”

“Who takes away our life?” Q asked. “That’s easy. The Parenthood. Who else? It’s part of their responsibility. To see us all the way through birth to death.”

“And how do they know when it’s time?”

“When we’re spoiled,” L said. He said it like he was bored. “You know, guys, you’re making me very excited for the floor shift. I think I need new boys to talk to. Boys who talk about better things!”

Subtle movement on the nearest tree caught D’s eye.

“Look,” he said. “Fighting Bugs.”

It was one of the many things the Alphabet Boys hoped to see in the Orchard. Rarely was a bug found inside the tower and never two at once. Certainly no two like the two small red ones they observed up close, one mounted upon the back of the other.

Fighting Bugs.

“They’re angry,” L said. “And they picked a perfectly fine day to have it out!”

Coat shoulder to coat shoulder, the boys observed the tiny bugs, red with black spots, struggle upon the bark of the cherry tree. They watched for a long time.

“Who do you think will win?” D asked. But the boys knew better. Nobody had ever seen a Fighting Bug win its fight. Rather, these two, like all the others, would simply go their separate ways when it was over.

“I suppose they’re something like us,” Q said.

“How so?” D asked.

“Well, they jockey for position. Speak their minds. Argue about it. Go their own ways.”

They sallied forth and talked this way, this subject and others, until they reached the first turn. Three-quarters of a mile later, the second. The snowfall got heavier. Q, L, and D discussed the number of trees, their height, and how they’d grown. They searched for the Living Trees. Examined many up close. Perhaps a new boy could be found growing on one? By the time they reached the end of the Orchard, Mister Tree in sight again, J was deep within a hole of his own thinking. He imagined a Living Tree at one end of a basement hall, the Corner at the other. He imagined being plucked from the former and stepping into the latter. He imagined being born and dying. Like A and Z.

As they passed Mister Tree, he said, “I’m going to find the Corner. And I’m going to look inside.”

The others stopped walking.

“Okay,” Q said. “Now I’m starting to agree with L. You sure you’re all right?”

“Yes.”

“But you’d like to go look at the Corner?”

“I wanna know what’s in there,” J said.

Only D remained silent. L and Q discussed the anti-Parenthood (and just plain silly) qualities of J’s remark.

“Why don’t you just climb the tower spires and leap to your death?” L asked. “It’d be an equally satisfying end.”

Tired of arguing and exhausted by the day’s bizarre subjects, the four boys went quiet. D and J looked to the ground. Q and L to the snow that fell to it.

“The Recasting Years,” Q finally said. “D.A.D. knew something was coming. And here it is. It was very wise of him to tell us so.”

Slowly, the boys traipsed back into the Yard.

“If you really wanna know what the Corner looks like,” L said, “go stand in one.”

Even J had to laugh at this. As they passed D.A.D.’s first-floor window, as they saw themselves and the pretty snow reflected in the glass, all four floor mates giggled about J standing in a Corner, any old corner, as if it could possibly emulate the horror they could hear humming, all day in the Turret, from below.

It felt good to laugh. Especially for J. And hearing Q’s high laughter and L’s bellowing belly laugh served to root J again, even if momentarily, to the foundation of the Parenthood. And, despite these new thoughts, foreign and overwhelming, he felt safe. He felt protected. He felt warm.

But D’s laughter didn’t last long, and J noticed.

As Q and L walked ahead, D turned to look at J, and J intentionally did not look back. He knew that a simple exchange of unspoken questions would be enough to uproot him all over again.

So when L asked, “Do you think D.A.D. is watching us from in there?” and Q answered, “I think he’s picking his nose,” J laughed with his brothers, as if the laughter might stave off the thoughts he’d been having, might block their way, laughter versus thought, like two Fighting Bugs in his head, stopping it all from multiplying.

Warren Writes

Warren set the yellow legal pad aside and removed the white one from his desk.

And that was all there was to it.

He looked to his office door. It was locked, he’d locked it himself, but that didn’t make him feel any safer. He’d written every Luxley book on yellow legal pads before delivering them to the typesetters and printers down the cobblestoned hall of the Parenthood basement, where the pages went from Warren’s chicken scrawl to the semiprofessional look they adopted by the time they ended up in the hands of the Alphabet Boys.

But the white pad…

Warren hadn’t used the white pad since he was a…a…

Fledgling wasn’t the right word, and Warren would’ve been pissed if he’d heard someone else use it. Fledgling suggested he didn’t know how to write. Even back then. Chick, greenhorn, rookie, novice, tenderfoot. Everybody in Milwaukee could take those words and shove ’em up their ass. Warren liked how he wrote. He always had. He liked what he wrote, thank you, and writing, for Warren, had never had anything to do with money. Nothing to do with toasting vodka in a big-city publishing house. Nothing to do with seeing his novels printed with a professional, glossy Modern Library cover that featured a wise photo of himself readers couldn’t help but look at every time they encountered another well-crafted sentence.

“Nope,” Warren said, tapping his pencil against the white pages on his desk. Beyond his office, the boiler hummed. Or maybe it was the Corner. “I was never in it for the money.”

Yet…here he was, so much richer than his former colleagues, the Writing Gangsters, his Milwaukee crew of pretentious, self-absorbed…

“Artists, my ass,” Warren said. He looked to the door again. Still locked. He eyed the white pad. He thought of the Alphabet Boys, twelve years old now, and wow how time flies when you’re having a terrible time.

He tried, really tried, to imagine not knowing what a woman was.

“It’s criminal,” he said. But that much was obvious. And certainly not the worst of it. Agreeing to be a part of it, ah, now, that was something. The other staff needed the gig—hell, the other staff were like born-again drug addicts, offered the chance of a lifetime by a man who looked like God to them now. Richard had made wealthy men of them all. Made hidden men of them all, too.

But what was Warren’s excuse? No criminal record. No real reason to disappear. To drop out. To hide. Why oh why had he agreed to work here and why oh why had it taken him so long to realize how terrible that decision had been?

Warren was stuck when he met Richard. Yes. He had no illusions about that now.

Oh, how good a drink sounded.

Drinking had never been a social event for the Cocky from Milwaukee. Beer and booze weren’t fun. Rather, they were physical locations, places he went looking for new ideas, bridges between existing ideas, channels he had no access to when sober. When Warren left his crummy apartment and walked into a liquor store, he didn’t consider himself to be scratching an itch. Rather, he saw the bottles as doors, with so many potential stories behind them.

“Remember Detective Bratt?” Warren asked himself, allowing a small sad smile to crawl up his lips. “You used to pretend you were hunting ideas. Holy shit, Detective Bratt. Private Eyesore.”

He thumbed the white pad’s top page. So much potential there, he thought. Any story…any story at all…

“Okay,” Warren said, pushing his chair from the desk. “Enough.” He got up as though prepared to do something specific but only paced the office instead. At the black leather couch he paused, then plopped down, only to get right back up. He adjusted his fogging glasses. Ran his chubby fingers over his big belly. Thought he could smell his own fear.

He thought of the Writing Gangsters, too. Tried not to imagine what they would say now if they’d read the books he’d made so much money from. The shitty Lawrence Luxley adventure stories that always (always!) followed the same arc, the same themes, and certainly featured the same gender over and over and over and over and over and…

Warren glanced at the white pad on the desk. From across the office it looked something like bright evidence. White fire. Like he might want to run and put the legal pad out.

He heard something in the hall, boots on the stone floor.

There were no words on that white pad, but if Richard were to try the door, find it locked, unlock it with his own key, and see that pad…why…wouldn’t he know what was going through Warren’s mind? Wouldn’t he be able to see the shame-inspired story as it slid down Warren’s arms, bringing his fingers to move as if they were already writing the book?

“Book?” Warren whispered to himself. “What book?”

The steps got quieter as they passed his office door. Or maybe they just stopped outside it? No, no. They were gone now. Warren imagined the printers, the pair of ex-cons down the hall who ran off the pamphlets, the textbooks, the announcements, the letters, the report cards, and (yes) all of Lawrence Luxley’s terrible, artless books.

“The Writing Gangsters would lynch you,” he said, half-stammering, walking slowly back to his desk, his eyes on the clean white pad. “They’d call you a fraud, a forger, a sellout.” He staved off slim tears. “And they’d be right.”

Oh, how high and mighty he’d been in Milwaukee, despite the drinking, despite being bone broke…back when the offer of a lifetime came to him by way of a phone call.

“But whose life?” Warren asked himself, still staring at the blank white cover page. “This isn’t your life.”

Oh, but it was.

I’ll tell you how to write, he used to stammer in his gruff and short way, speaking blunt to the rest of the Gangsters. You got the way you write and you got the way you want to write. And then you got what you think is too crazy for you to be writing. What you need to do is embarrass yourself…get crazy. In the end the embarrassing shit is what you wanted to be writing all along.

Oh, so full of soul. So full of art.

So full of shit.

The Gangsters ate it up. Warren’s gothic minions, an ex-girlfriend had called them. His personal fan club. The only people in all of Wisconsin who’d brave a winter storm to go listen to a drunk Warren Bratt define what real writing was. He looked the part, too, and certainly drank it. The stocky, angry author going on about the heart of art and the purpose of a good book. Books were his religion, he’d said. His Jesus, his God. His maker.

But despite his claims that he wasn’t interested in money, he sure believed he was worth a lot of it.

Countless rows in Don Don’s. So many fights with the Gangsters. Always always always about money.

Always.

“You were a pig,” he told himself now. “Fucking Christ, Bratt. You were a pig.”

A stuck pig, no less. Perfectly fixed for a visit from Richard.

Warren used to tell anybody in earshot how much he was worth. How much a sentence of his was worth. How much even a conversation about how much he was worth was worth. Once he asked a fellow Gangster for payment, for having been sanctified with Warren’s advice.

“You used to call yourself a seer,” he said now, finally lowering himself into his writing chair. He had no recollection of picking the pencil up, but there it was. Between his fingers. “Oh God. How fucking embarrassing.”

Why now? Why realize this now? Was it the natural arc of an asshole? An inevitable day of retribution?

Or was it the look of adulthood in the eyes of the Alphabet Boys? The moment when he could no longer say, Well, what do kids know anyway.

He tried to slink back into the hollows of his own smoky parlors, his troubled mind, the rooms he’d occupied for so long, making his role at the Parenthood bearable. But he couldn’t find them anymore. Like the Nursery that once harbored twenty-six cribs, those rooms had been cemented over.

“What have you done?”

He looked up, actually expecting to see someone else standing on the other side of his desk. Surely it wasn’t his voice he’d heard ask the question? Surely he didn’t sound like that? And there was simply no way the man who asked that question was the same one who had agreed to write books for two dozen boys gaslighted and locked into an experiment of ungodly dynamics…

…for life.

He felt something unnatural move in his gut. As if a very bad thing had gotten inside him and there was no way to get it out. No surgery to remove the barbarity he’d been a part of.

The Parenthood was no longer bearable. On any level and in any way. That was certain now.

“Oh fuck,” he said. “You’re gonna do it, aren’t you?” It wasn’t a motivational thing to say. It didn’t feel good at all.

It scared him to death.

He looked to the office door, perhaps considering unlocking it. Putting the white pages away.

But he knew he’d just passed that option, as if it were a deep-space mile marker, one Warren saw as he floated, without gravity, beyond it.

The Gangsters had warned him about his obsession with money. Bald Bill O’Brien said it would grow on him like mold. One day it would swallow his art. And the next day it would swallow him. Warren denied it all. Punched O’Brien for saying so. Broke up with Trish Newton for saying the same thing.

When the Cocky from Milwaukee got rolling about money, it was like standing inches from a lit Civil War cannon, and there wasn’t much one could do but duck.

The top page of the white legal pad looked lit, too.

Ready to blow.

Warren told them the art was in an untouchable place, that that wasn’t what he meant when he said he was worth something, when he drunkenly charged his friends for wisdom. Money was not something to be afraid of. Not something to avoid. And he proved it, too, or thought he did; with his first published story, he used the sweet reward to buy the Gangsters a round at Don Don’s.

But the night didn’t go the way Warren wanted it to.

“Urges” appeared in a punk magazine, The Hips and Lips Trip, and when the Gangsters actually read the work he’d gotten published, they had a lot to say.

What are you gonna write next, Bratt? A fuckin’ western?

This was Arlene, the pockmarked cigarette-smoking blimp that Warren could hardly stand to look at let alone accept a critique from.

You don’t like it? Warren told Arlene, his eyes two slits of pompous paid-writer. You know what you call a guy who puts pen to paper and doesn’t get paid? A camper. Dear Mom, I’m so sad and lonely…and broke. Please send money so I can buy a goddamn drink. Fuck you, Arlene. I’m a professional now.

But if getting paid to write constituted “professional,” Warren Bratt was much closer than he realized.

On a warm summer evening, home alone, wearing only his underwear and seated at the typewriter upon his kitchen table, Warren received a phone call. Assuming it was one of the Gangsters calling, he didn’t answer. He’d already begun typing when the answering machine announced it was no friend. No magazine, either. The crackly little speaker delivered a voice Warren didn’t recognize at all.

Warren, hello. My name is Gordon Fink.

Warren cocked an ear toward the machine.

We’re very big fans of your story and we have an opportunity for you. A job, if you will. A career in writing.

Was this how it worked, then? Finally make enough money to buy a round and it all starts rolling in from there? In the mind situated beneath his thinning hair and behind his wrinkled brow, Warren imagined more money slipping in through the vents, stopping up the toilet, falling like snow outside.

Whoever Gordon Fink was, his voice sounded like he had more money than the editors of Hips.

It’s my employer’s preference that I do not leave our number, but I will try again soon.

CLICK.

When the phone rang again, an hour later, Warren leapt from the kitchen table, his troll’s body moving faster than it had in years.

“Warren Bratt here.”

Static popped at the other end. Sounded like the guy was calling from Aruba.

“Can you meet us tomorrow evening, Mr. Bratt?”

The word scam crossed Warren’s mind.

“I don’t know. I’ve got shit to do. Another story.”

“I don’t mean to make light of your plans, but this is a significant offer.”

Warren took in the dimensions of his crappy apartment. He saw men’s magazines scattered on the lumpy wood floor. He saw an unmade bed illuminated by the light of a crappy television set. He saw empty pizza boxes and no whiskey. No wine. No women.

No wonder.

“I can make it,” he said. “What time? Where?”

“That’ll do for now. Thank you, Mr. Bratt.”

The man hung up.

Warren lowered the phone from his ear and stared at it. A shiver parachuted down his neck, landing somewhere on his back. The call had felt more like a death threat than a writing opportunity.

That’ll do for now. Thank you.

Scam, he thought. He hung up.

A prick who bought Hips got his number from the publisher and lived for pranking writers. That’s what it was and all it could be. But later, much later, Warren struggled to fall asleep, beset with images of Gordon Fink sneaking into his apartment through holes in the water-damaged ceiling. A scam. A prank. A kook.

When he woke the next morning, he had to consider the reality of those dreams. A folded note upon his chest forced him to.

He leapt from his bed and searched every cupboard and closet in the cramped apartment. The front door was locked. Had it been all night? The windows still down. The alley below was empty. The note read:

Warren shook his head and laughed harder than he’d laughed in weeks. Gordon Fink and his boss were out of their fucking minds if they thought he was going to show up to a hotel like the Brewer now. After a call like that and a note like this.

Phoning the police was more like it.

But he didn’t do that. And he didn’t tell the Writing Gangsters about it, either. No. Rather, Warren spent the afternoon seated at his kitchen table, rereading the note, replaying the original answering-machine message, over and over again.

Thing was, the money in Gordon Fink’s voice really did sound genuine. It was as if it were made of the sounds of checks being signed, handshakes over legitimate book deals, the respectful greetings of familiar bank tellers and hosts seating him at what they knew to be his favorite tables.

By six-thirty, Warren was dressed. He told himself he was just going to the bar. Don Don’s. And he believed it. He’d do some research. Find a new story. Detective Bratt. Maybe in a bottle of whiskey. Maybe gin.

He tied his boots, ran a handful of water across his face, and made to leave. But as he reached for the doorknob, he saw that the note was still in his hand.

Nope, he thought, stepping out his front door and locking it for the last time.

“It was never about the money,” Warren said now, seated at his desk in his basement office of the Parenthood. The Corner crooned.

But it was. Always.

Then, with enough sweat on his face to consider it a shower, he brought the tip of his pencil to the white pad. He looked to the yellow pad beside it, relegated to the far corner of his desk. He read the title page of the book he’d already begun.

He turned his attention to the white pad and wrote, for the first time since showing up at the Brewer Hotel and agreeing to a job, a second title page.

He did not look to the office door. And once he started writing, really writing, he forgot the Luxley book was there beside him at all. And for the first time in more than a decade, Warren Bratt felt like a writer, a man with a story to tell.

While the themes, the meat, and the message would be unrecognizable to a Luxley fan, the intended audience remained the same.

The Alphabet Boys. Growing up.

With new feelings to address.

Now. Today.

With needs.

J

J slept.

He’d wrapped up his day’s studies, reread close to forty pages in Luxley’s most recent book, and put himself to bed. But it wasn’t easy.

He tossed and turned, the blanket long discarded to the carpeted floor, the single sheet suddenly too hot even with the window open halfway.

He didn’t dream often, but he did this night, and because he was in and out of sleep, the dream meshed with his reality, and the result was a strange, uneasy sensation of finding himself living in an approximate world, one he couldn’t trust. Reality…or not?

At the height of the difficult night, a boy called to him from outside his bedroom window. Not from the Yard below, but from right outside the glass. Because J lived on the eighth floor (and surely nobody could float that high), he knew he was dreaming. Yes. But the knowledge somehow wasn’t strong enough and came without as much confidence as he’d have liked. At the window there was, indeed, a boy. He wore one-piece spotted pajamas like all the Alphabet Boys once wore, and his bare feet looked red from the winter air.

J sat up.

“A?” he asked. A because, while it was many years ago, J retained some memory of the brothers they’d lost.

“J!” A called back, his voice like the sound the steady heat made coming out of the vents. “Get out of bed, J! Go into the pines!”

J decided no. No, he would not go into the woods. He would not leave the tower in this cold, the first of winter, and search the same woods in which he’d seen a person crouched the night before.

Or had he?

“I didn’t see anyone,” J said. But talking only made it worse. “It was a tree!”

A shook his head. Snowflakes rose from his hair. Or perhaps it was dust.

“Not a tree!”

J got up and went to the window. The cold air there outfought the heat from his bedroom. It felt good against his naked chest.

“You were sent to the Corner,” J said, unexpected tears accompanying his sleepy voice. “You were spoiled rotten. D.A.D. said so!”

A wintry mist passed over A, and his eyes flashed green and his skin crinkled, too. Then the mist passed, and J saw the young boy again, still hovering so high above the Yard. Red-faced and alive.

Or not?

“Go into the pines, J. Someone is waiting for you there. Someone you want to meet!”

J looked down to the trees lining the Yard and saw a second figure standing in the middle of the white expanse. At first, he thought it was Q. The glasses fooled him. But the figure was too young to be Q, wore no coat, and the clothes he did wear were the very sort J wore himself as a six-year-old boy.

“Z!” J cried out. Below, the boy pointed to the woods. When he spoke, his voice sounded impossibly close, as though his lips stretched high into the winter sky.

“You want to see who’s in the woods. You want to meet him.”

A descended, as though lowered by stage wire strung to the Turret spires. J had seen a trick like that in the tower theater. When B played a bird.

A landed softly near Z. The long-dead brothers held hands.

“Z!” J called into the open cold. “You were spoiled rotten, too!”

Mist rose from the Yard, like blue smoke. Behind it Z’s eyes flashed green, his skin cracked and parted, revealing dark bones and tissue beneath.

Dirt on his hands and feet.

Then A seemed to glide to the border of the pines. J couldn’t see where his bare feet met the lawn. And as A moved away from the tower, his head turned slowly, impossibly back, until it was at a hundred-and-eighty-degree angle to the way it should be.

He looked up at J.

“Right here,” A said. “Right here!”

J climbed up onto his window ledge, opened it fully, and stood, gripping the sides of the frame. Something inside him said he could fly if he really wanted to. Just like A. Just a leap from the Turret window and he’d glide across the Yard, meeting up with his dead brothers at the pines.

Instead, J quickly got down from the ledge and closed the window. The sounds of the waking winter were cut off, and J hurried to the far side of his bedroom. There he turned his face to the wall and shook his head no. No, he hadn’t seen A and Z. No, there was nobody waiting for him in the woods. No, there wasn’t—

Tapping, and J turned to see A at the window again.

“No!” J called out. “You’re trying to spoil me, too!”

A looked through the glass, to the hallway leading to the bathroom in J’s quarters. J looked, too. He saw Z standing in the dark.

“Go down to the Yard,” Z said. “You want to meet him.”

J stood flat to the wall. His legs were paper, it seemed, perhaps the pages of a blue notebook not yet filled.

Half-dressed, shirtless, and barefoot, J sprang for his front door, opened it, and scurried out into the hall. The floor was silent. The silver speaker that announced Inspections reflected the dim hall overheads.

J hurried to D’s door. He knocked.

“D,” he said. “Let me in!”

A sound from behind him, his own rooms, and J looked back to see his door slowly opening. He didn’t wait to see what might come out. Instead, he ran to the far end of the hall, opposite the Check-Up door, to the one marked STAIRS. No way he was taking the elevator at this time of night. No way he was risking waking D.A.D. and the staff, the Inspectors, Lawrence Luxley, anybody who might stop him, ask him what he was doing.

Inspect him.

Why not, J? he asked himself, racing down the stairs, barefoot still, two concrete steps at a time. Why not tell D.A.D. about the figure in the woods and now…now…

“Now what?” he asked, out of breath, already two floors down. “The ghosts of A and Z? Not real!” He shook his head as he descended, no no no, not true, no ghosts, some kind of rotten half dream, an impossible marriage of day and night.

Four floors down and his movements echoed loud enough to wake anyone struggling to sleep. But J pressed on, until he reached the first-floor door and exploded out into the black-tiled hall. There he paused, listening for the Parenthood.

Nobody there. Nobody came.

J had only been alone on the first floor at night a handful of times in his life. The Body Hall’s oak doors were closed. The kitchen’s main doors, too. Offices J had never entered. Broom closets. The locker room that led to the pool. The staff bathroom.

He ran for the hall of windows, where he’d be able to look out upon the Yard.

Why, J? Why aren’t you running from the Yard? Don’t you wanna go away from the Yard? As far as you can go?

NO!

Why, J?

BECAUSE I WANT TO KNOW WHAT I SAW BY MISTER TREE!

This last rebuttal emboldened him. It was true: Impossible visions of dead brothers or not, J had seen someone. Someone crouched. Someone looking up to his very own window.

Dream or not, this admission felt like a big one.

At the glass, J looked. There was no sign of either brother out there. Only the white wind, blowing up frost from the freezing lawn of the enormous Yard.

J waited. He watched. He looked. He looked closely. And he saw…

Perhaps, yes, maybe, yes, a shape that didn’t belong.

Below him, a sudden crashing caused him to recoil from the glass, to look down to his bare feet. D.A.D.’s quarters were down the hall to the right. But that sound had come from the basement.

What do you think the Corner looks like?

J looked through the glass again, to the shape of Mister Tree.

Someone?

It’s A and Z. They want you to join them. They were sent to the Corner and now they’re rotting in the pines. You saw your dead brothers, J. You saw—

But it just didn’t feel true. No. And for the first time since hearing the tapping on his glass, J understood clearly that he was awake now.

Downstairs. Alone.

“Someone you want to see,” J whispered, his nose to the cold glass.

He thought of Luxley’s book Folks and Folklore, and he thought of the myth of a boy who drank some water, found it to be the best water he’d ever drunk, and then drank so much he drowned. It’d frightened J when he’d read it.

Death from quenching a thirst.

It’s how J felt now. Thirsty for knowledge.

Another rattle from below, and J did not take his eyes off Mister Tree. Rather, he thought of what disease he might catch out there, what might show in the morning’s Inspection.

Placasores, he thought. Vees. Rotts.

But what did any of the Alphabet Boys actually know about these diseases? J recalled all he knew in full.

And he discovered he knew nothing more than that those diseases were more likely to be contracted in the pines.

Nothing from the textbooks. Nothing from Luxley’s books, either. The Alphabet Boys had simply always known these diseases were very bad. And all they had to do was break one of the Parenthood’s rules to catch one.

He thought of his own trips to the Parenthood infirmary. The sad way Doctor Previns used to look J over. As if the man was deeply troubled. Deeply sad. J had always assumed it was because he feared what he might find on J’s person. But now…

The shape in the woods moved, just enough, and J gasped.

A shape for sure.

Are you okay, Doctor Previns?

Aren’t I supposed to ask you that, J?

It was always like that in the infirmary. Sure, Doctor Previns examined the boys with the same cold precision of the Inspectors and their magnifying glasses and their eventual declaration of

But there was no joy in the way Previns said it. And Previns had been gone many years now. Where did he go? Did he go the way of A and Z? Was he sent to the—

A third coughing rattle from under his bare feet, and J kept his eyes on Mister Tree. He thought of A and Z sent below.

Spoiled rotten, D.A.D. said.

It’s just a door, Q had said in the Orchard. But Q knew better than that. Q knew J was asking what happened to a boy inside.

Was it Location they searched for in the Inspections? Or was it Vees? The names had changed so many times over the years, and the explanations didn’t stay the same for very long. The boys never asked for one.

Why not?

D.A.D. hardly explained anything at all. What he did say he said in passing, casually, as if suggesting a game of Boats.

Excellent Inspection, J. No signs of Moldus at all.

I’m glad to hear you don’t have Rotts.

No Vees, J. And that, my boy, is a good thing.

Oh, J knew the Inspections were for his own good. He knew the Parenthood was doing all it could to protect him and the others from unfathomably dangerous things. He loved them for it. He loved them for getting him through the years when he was too small to protect himself, too little to follow the rules.

Moldus, Rotts, Vees, Placasores, Vegicks.

Location.

J studied the shape in the woods.

His mind, however, the track he was on, couldn’t be stopped. He thought back to the infirmary, back to the Check-Up room, back to the thousands of Inspections he’d endured.

Was it all some sort of test? Was Location the kind of thing a boy could fail? Was he supposed to encounter Rotts in the woods and eventually overcome it on his lonesome own?

And if he didn’t, if he failed?

Exactly what would happen if any of the many diseases with the changing names were discovered on him?

No boy had ever failed an Inspection. Not even A and Z.

“So why do Inspections scare you?”

The adult tone of his voice scared him even more than his thoughts, and J looked over his shoulder, half-expecting to see a full-grown man. D.A.D., perhaps, with the answers. Always, D.A.D. over the shoulders of the Alphabet Boys.

But J was alone. Alone with this new voice. A voice that sounded smarter than he believed himself to be.

J almost wanted to see A and Z again, through the glass, as if, in death, they might explain things to him. Luxley had written about a ghost once, the first time any of the Alphabet Boys had ever been exposed to the idea at all. In Luxley’s book, a man died and returned from the dead to instruct a young boy on the right way to live. To study, to focus, to make progress in whatever field he chose to devote his life. But, despite the daunting message, it was the concept of the ghost that shocked J most.

J looked to the pines and was surprised to see the branches and leaves in great detail. The Yard was no longer shadowed with snowfall but rather a blinding, glossing white.

“Oh no,” J said, feeling the unstoppable pinpricks of horror. “The sun.”

J had no idea how long he’d been standing at the window on the first floor and certainly no idea when he’d woken from his dream of A and Z. But the sun was coming up and that meant that, sooner rather than later, the tinny voice from the silver speaker on the eighth-floor hall would announce the day’s Inspection.

Would they catch this on him? Would they find it on his person, the fact that he’d spent the night staring out into the pines that bordered the Yard?

A door clicked open down the black-tiled hall, in the direction of D.A.D.’s quarters.

J ran. Quiet as he could, he ran to the door marked STAIRS and then took them up again, realizing at the fourth floor that he was less afraid of the vision of the dead boys he’d seen tonight than he was of the living grown men who might be patrolling the first floor already. Inspectors. Staff. D.A.D. And by the time J reached the still partially open door to his quarters and slipped inside, his mind was full of madness: the infirmary, Luxley’s books, the names of the many diseases, the Inspectors with their magnifying glasses held close to his naked body, and the endless questions D.A.D. asked in the Check-Up room every morning of every day of J’s suddenly confusing life.

He got into bed fast.

And he realized, too, pulling the covers to his nose, that, despite the fact that two of his brothers had been spoiled rotten and that he’d dreamed of their festering forms, he’d never been so scared in his life as he was just then. Scared to hear the voice in the hall.

Scared of the coming Inspection.

Warren Learns the Printing Press

Half-dazed, the fingertips of his right hand blistered bad, his shirt stained with sweat and cold coffee, Warren walked the dark halls of the basement, headed places he shouldn’t go.

His mind was moving a mile a minute, hadn’t moved this fast in years. Years. In fact, Warren couldn’t remember a writing experience quite like the one he’d had overnight. How many pages did he write? He’d gone through a legal pad and a half, no doubt about that, a seventy-five-page handwritten cannon blast that even smelled a bit like gunpowder. Holy shit it felt good. So good that he wished he was in Milwaukee, could phone up the Gangsters, tell ’em all to come down to Don Don’s, boy did he have a story to tell.

“Seventy-five pages?”

He wanted to smile but his face hurt from keeping a straight one all day, all night, and into the morning, as the sounds of the Parenthood waking slowly dribbled into his office. The truth was, the smile he searched for wasn’t a happy one anyway, hardly even proud. But seventy-five pages was a quarter of a book. This book. And how many pages did he need? Wouldn’t one suffice? One page with a detailed, vivid, living, breathing…

…woman?

Oh, if he were to bump into Richard now. If, turning the corner ahead, Richard were to suddenly pop out of the shadows, his beard rendered snake-hole black by the bright red of his gaudy ever-present jacket and gloves. He’d most likely place one of those hands squarely on Warren’s shoulder and say, Why the sudden interest in the printing press, Warren?

“Who said anything about the pressroom?” Warren said out loud, his voice bizarrely hoarse, as if he’d recorded himself reading seventy-five pages rather than writing them.

“Warren Bratt,” a voice spoke. Warren turned to face it quick. “I was beginning to think you didn’t like us.”

Warren shook his head no, prepared to lie if he had to, no no no, I haven’t begun writing a book I shouldn’t be writing. No no, I wasn’t intentionally heading for the printing press.

But here he was all the same.

It was the printer Mark who spoke to him. The lithe man emerged from the smoke and shadows within the cramped space and extended a hand. Warren took it.

“You remember Clarence, doncha, Warren?” Mark thumbed toward a man hunched by the press. “The grumpiest man in the Parenthood. Be nice, Clarence.”

“I remember Clarence.” Warren’s voice again. Hoarse. As if some part of him had slept and was just waking as the rest of him wrote that book.

“What brings you to this side of the basement?” Mark asked.

“Fresh air.”

Mark laughed. Clarence eyed Warren from behind the machine he was fixing.

“Figured I can relate to you two more than most,” Warren said, attempting to make something of this meeting. The very something he’d come here for, whether he’d admitted it to himself or not. “The kitchen is a fucking maze to me, and good luck squeezing an ounce of entertainment out of accounting.”

Mark laughed again.

“We’re actually setting today’s news right now,” Mark said, wiping ink on his jeans. “Why don’t you come see how it’s done?”

Warren eyed the man as if Mark had just announced to the whole Parenthood his intent.

Richard, Warren could hear the wiry, greasy man saying, Warren stopped by. Pretty interested in the printing press. What do you think inspired him?

Warren felt like it was all over him. A broken egg.

Intrigue.

“Clarence won’t tell you himself, but it took all morning just to fix a smudge on page eighty-five of the new science book. Got it set, anyway.”

Clarence grunted. Warren watched as he traded out one wrench for another.

He heard a bootheel in the hall.

Richard?

Are you happy, Warren?

Do you like the Parenthood, Warren?

What are you doing over here, Warren?

An Inspector tipped his hat to Warren as he passed. It wasn’t Richard. But it was close.

“Come on in,” Mark said. He even motioned with his hand the way drug dealers do with their marks. The way people do when you shouldn’t follow them. This way. Warren followed him. “The paper’s easy,” Mark said, preparing the ink. “But a Luxley book takes about half the day.”

“More ’n that,” Clarence grumbled.

Half the day.

“I’m always a hassle,” Warren said. “One way or another.”

“Aren’t we all?” Mark said, smiling.

“How many hours is half the day?” Warren asked.

It made him nervous, asking questions directly rather than waiting for the information to be offered up.

“A good seven hours,” Mark said.

“More ’n that,” Clarence said, swapping wrenches again.

Mark stepped to where the templates of the news lay spread upon a transparent tabletop. Warren stepped farther into the room. Whether he looked too interested or not, he needed to see this part.

Mercifully, Mark was a show-off.

“Say this was your book,” Mark began.

Yeah, let’s say it was one of my books.

“We don’t need to set every page, but we damn well need to eyeball ’em. Things get stuck all the time. Pages are off a centimeter and the whole thing is shit-city. You’ve probably noticed inconsistencies yourself. It’s the best we can do, using this old heap.”

“It’s a good machine,” Clarence said.

“Sure,” Mark said. “When we’re running the news, it’s a beauty queen. But dammit if those Luxley books don’t make us mean.”

Warren watched everything. Every movement Mark made. He counted the steps of the process, one, two, three, and wished he was able to write them down. Instead, he experienced it like he would a story. Chapters. And tried to retain them the same way.

“What are you fixing?” Warren asked Clarence.

“What Clarence is trying so valiantly to adjust,” Mark said, “is the actual ink vat. Fucker gets clogged all the time. And unless you feel like writing out all thirty copies on your own, Clarence has got to keep it going. Can’t have the news without ink, can you?”

Mark crossed the room, stopping at what looked like big towel-dryer rolls. He nicked his shoulder on the string of the room’s hanging lightbulb and it swung. Warren thought of an interrogation.

“The pages run through these twice,” Mark said. “Once on the way in and once to help dry the ink. But if we’ve got the rollers too tight we can smudge the pages, and if we’ve got them too loose we can end up with the words overlapping on the page above and below it. It’s a delicate business, but I suppose you got your own problems to deal with, Warren.”

A delicate business. The Delicate Years.

Warren wished Mark would stop saying his name.

Who came to visit you today?

Warren.

Who did you show the printing press to today?

Warren.

Who was sweating and looked like he might try to bring down the Parenthood today?

Warren.

Warren pointed to his own head.

“All my problems are up here,” he said.

Mark smiled. “I like that! And that’s why you’re the writer. You do got a way with words.”

“A lot of words,” Clarence muttered.

Mark pointed to the pages of the news, spread out on the table.

“Have you ever seen one of your books laid out like this?”

“No. Didn’t know it happened like this.”

“I imagine it’d be like seeing what the human body looks like for the first time, under all that skin.”

Warren watched him closely.

“The editor, Jim, gives it to us this way. After he’s typed out your chicken scratch. Technically we could run copies of your rough drafts, but who’d read that?”

Yeah, Warren thought. Who, indeed?

Mark went on, “We set it, of course, but we get every page separated, one-sided, formatted just this way. I’d explain to you why, but we’d be here till lunch. Come here, this will interest you.”

Mark flipped a switch on the side of the table and both their faces were lit from below. It worried Warren, being this far into the room. Looked less like a man stopping by and more like one staying.

“Now, you’ve got to keep the pages within these borders or not only will some words get axed from the final pressing but you’ll clog the whole thing and it’ll take Clarence all day to pull the pages out. Trust me. We’ve done it before. Just don’t bring up Allan Prime if you don’t want to make Clarence crazy.”

“I had no idea there’d been an issue with that book,” Warren said.

Clarence peered around the machine.

“Nobody told you the work we had to do on that one?” Mark asked.

“Nobody.”

Clarence huffed and got back to work.

“It’s really pretty neat,” Mark said. “You line them up like so, and when the machine’s running, you flip the green switch and send the pages through and your book comes out like a book. Bound, I mean. It’s no cakewalk. Grumpy Clarence here would run me through the rollers if he heard me say it was.”

Chapters. Warren felt like he’d retained the info as if given to him in chapters. He badly wanted to get back to his office and write it down.

He looked to the wall clock.

“You gotta get back?” Mark asked.

“I should.”

“Breakfast?”

“I should.”

What you should do is sleep. What you should not do is write another seventy-five pages of a book that will get you killed.

“Jeez-o-pizza pie,” Mark said. “I probably talked your ear off and here you are just taking a stroll before breakfast.”

“Oh, it was cool,” Warren said. Then, “It’s nice to see other people have just as much bullshit to deal with as I do.”

Mark nodded. Clarence looked up from the ink vat.

Nobody said, Hey, know what? This is fucking insane, us working in a place where we’re hiding the knowledge of women from twenty-four boys who we call the Alphabet Boys. This is FUCKING CRIMINALLY INSANE.

Warren headed for the door. It seemed to get farther away the closer he got.

“Stop by anytime,” Mark said. “And good luck with this.” He pointed to his head like Warren had earlier.

Warren half-smiled and nodded. Just a couple of coworkers talking shop around the watercooler. Nothing insane here. Nothing at all.

When Warren stepped out of the printing room, he looked both ways down the dark stone corridor. To his right, about a hundred feet away, a red arrow glistened. It had been painted long before Warren arrived at the Parenthood, but he knew what it was. The one hallway in all the Parenthood that only Richard was allowed to walk.

The Glasgow Tunnel.

For reasons Warren couldn’t articulate, that red arrow scared him as deeply as the Corner door.

Heading back to his office, keeping the chapters fresh in his mind, he heard another set of bootheels on the stone floor. A flock of red-leather birds took flight in his imagination, and he realized he had no good excuse prepared.

He thought of the Corner. The Alphabet Boys had reached the Delicate Years, that stupid appellation Richard couldn’t stop using. Warren had never seen Richard quite this…

…piqued.

You’ve been a bad boy, Warren Bratt. Go sit in the Corner.

And every thought of the Corner came with an image of its door opening…just for him.

You’re spoiled, Warren. Spoiled rotten.

The bootheels again, closer.

Warren slipped into a closet, a tool room, he couldn’t be sure. And it wasn’t until he was fully inside, the door closed, that he realized how terrible the decision had been.

Not having a prepared excuse for wandering the basement was one thing, but being caught hiding was suicide.

Worth the money, Bratt? It was Arlene’s voice. Arlene from the Writing Gangsters. Worth making money in a world you can’t leave?

No, Warren thought. No, it’s not. He closed his eyes and imagined the title page of the book he’d written seventy-five scorching pages for.

Working at the Parenthood, every waking (and sleeping) moment came with a bit of fear. But Warren hadn’t been this scared in a long time.

Nobody’s gonna open the door. Calm down. It would be too…too…too fucking terrible. CALM DOWN.

The boots were very close now. Warren heard them as if he wore them himself.

Clack-clack, clack-clack.

He flattened himself to the wall. Almost knocked something over in the process. He tried to keep the chapters quiet in his mind, his knowledge of the printing press like an autopsy of a still-living hyena, messy and loud.

Looks like you could print a book all by your lonesome little self, couldn’t you now, Warren?

The boots stopped outside the closet door, an inch of wood away. Warren could hear dust under one heel.

He balled up a fist. He understood clearly that he was prepared to murder whoever opened that door.

The doorknob turned.

“Dan!”

Warren leaned forward at the sound of a name. His fist up and ready in the dark.

“Dan, hurry up! We’ve got about four minutes here!”

Dan. Who’s Dan?

Maybe you should pay more attention to your coworkers, Warren. Maybe you shoulda made some friends.

“One second!” Dan hollered back. “I’m grabbing some TP!”

Warren held his breath. Other boots. The first voice much closer now.

“That isn’t a TP closet. Come on, let’s get this done.”

“I gotta get this done first.”

A sigh. Movement. Boots on the stony ground.

“That door there,” the first voice instructed.

A door opening. A different door. Movement. Boots. Gravel. A door closing. A different door.

“Thanks. Prick.”

A pause. Silence.

The men walked away in tandem, their boots and voices fading through the cobblestone hallways of the Parenthood’s basement.

Warren stayed inside the closet another ninety seconds, then he quickly slipped out. He hurried, electric, back to his office. Saw nobody on the way.

Once inside, he sat at his desk and simply breathed. Slowly. In and out. Out and in.

After a few minutes he wrote down what he’d learned about the printing press. Wrote it in code on a bookmark. All that he could remember.

He thought of his Luxley books. The many he’d written for the Parenthood. He imagined the pages spread out on the table like Mark showed him. Pages that brought him so much money he could be anywhere in the world he wanted to. Just five more years of this. Fifteen in whole. The contract. Then…paradise. Whatever that meant to Warren.

But how to wait when you can…no longer…wait? The Luxley books. Pages that meant as little to him as they did to the pair of mismatched mechanics who bound them into a book. Books the twenty-four boys above would talk about over meals, talk about by the windows of their rooms, think about as they slept, and (oh merciless God) even use as examples for how to live their lives.

When he was done writing down what he’d learned, he crumpled the bookmark up and tossed it into the garbage can. It made a soft thud when it landed upon the other trash, and Warren imagined the ripple effect of their landing, the way they must have infinitesimally touched the seventy-five pages there at the bottom of the same can. Thinking of those pages encouraged him, brought him the first sliver of peace he’d felt in many years, despite the horrors they implied. Simply put, Needs was the greatest thing Warren Bratt had ever written.

And he was only getting started.