Inspection

THE BURT REPORT: DECEMBER 1, 2019

NOT HAVING QUITE finished reading the pages, Richard reached for the black telephone on his desk.

“Gordon.”

“Richard.”

“Please inform Burt that I’m excited for the changes detailed in the newest report. I do not fear them.”

Richard hung up and read again.

Warren at Work

The Guilts.

That’s what Richard ought to have been inspecting for. The GUILTS. Of all the things to contract…

See Warren walk. See Warren walk the halls of the basement. See Warren wipe his slippery hands on his increasingly stained button-down shirt. See Warren unraveling. See Warren freeing himself. See Warren pushing back.

See Warren writing.

See Warren putting his life in danger. Real danger.

Cowered over a white legal pad, Warren Bratt was in the midst of another word marathon, pumping out two books at once, one for the Parenthood, one for himself, one for the Parenthood, one for himself, one for the—

Bootheels outside his office door, and Warren furiously slid the white pad onto his lap, eyes wide and fixed on the doorknob. He could feel the sweat drip from his thinning hair to his ears.

Things change things change people change things change people change things change I don’t have time to think about how things change people change I’m writing people change I’m writing things change I’m writing two fucking books at once.

Who was outside his office door? And, more important, who was he inside his office?

People change.

Things had changed, indeed. The once-flippant antisocial self-aggrandizing author rose from his desk chair and waited. Listened for those boots. Hadn’t heard them pass yet.

You’ll write your way out of this.

But that phrase fell horribly flat in light of what his imagination could conjure: the door exploding inward, a pair of Parenthood ex-cons entering, grabbing him by the shirt, Richard emerging from the dust in the hall.

What do you think about writing in the Corner for a change, Warren?

Still, he tried to hang on to the concept. Writing his way out of this. The ink of the words rising, creating a set of stairs that could lead him out of the basement to the first-floor hall. There the words from the white pad might become a skateboard, a boat on wheels, anything to carry him out of the Parenthood, across the Yard, through the pines.

Get out of here. Get out of the state. Get out of the country. Get anywhere, but just write enough words to get there.

Warren, once so pompous, once so above the daily rules and riddles of the Parenthood, didn’t move. He kept his eye on that knob. Someone was in the hall. There was no doubt of this.

What’s the matter, Warren? Going soft?

Gone. Yes.

Suddenly you care about the Alphabet Boys? Suddenly you care about their education?

Warren recalled Richard, a little drunk, confiding in him the reason he’d hired him: You care about nobody but yourself, Warren Bratt. You are guilt-free.

And now, the Guilts.

People change.

Warren couldn’t look the boys in the eye at this morning’s breakfast. Couldn’t wait to get out of the cafeteria. Did anybody else feel this way? Any of the teachers, the cooks, the Inspectors?

Mutiny.

That was one of the words he wasn’t allowed to include in his books.

He stepped out from behind his desk at last, quietly took the carpet toward the door. Stopped halfway. It struck him that if the door were to open he wouldn’t have an explanation for what he was doing, standing in the middle of his office. He looked to the coffeemaker on the counter. Looked to his desk. Thought of the white paper on the chair there. Thought of the yellow pages, too. Can’t write the white without the yellow. Gotta have the yellow to show them, to show them a book, to say, Hey, yes, I’ve been writing, writing a book, what of it?

Silence from the hall.

Who goes there?

His mouth half-open; he didn’t know he was baring his teeth.

Slow, he went to the door. If it opened now he’d simply say he was on his way out, out into the hall, out for some fresh—

Fresh what, Warren?

He could almost hear Richard say it. Could hear the condescension in the man’s vexatious voice.

His ear to the wood, Warren heard the boiler, hissing, and beyond it, the rumble of the Corner.

He opened the door.

“Hello?”

His voice sounded very small out there in the hall. Like the voice of someone afraid to answer their phone, afraid of the news it might bring.

The hall was empty and Warren frowned. It was one thing to have decided to go against the Parenthood. It was another to live in complete, abject horror of that decision.

Yet…

“That’s where you’re at, asshole. Utter horror.”

He shut the door, returned to his desk.

Instantly he got back to work, the pencil moving slower at first, a word or two, half the idea, the small bones of the story connecting.

In a way, writing this book, this terribly dangerous book, was like teaching himself to write all over again. Like he was reading the book he was writing, wishing he could write just like it. At times, it moved quicker than Warren could speak. The feeling then the idea, the bones then the flesh. The letters then the words.

Oh, how these particular words thrilled him. Almost as much as the vision of the Alphabet Boys reading them, their faces scrunched with confusion, their gasps, their voices as they spoke of it with one another.

So many questions. Big ones. Like how to explain the characters the author called women.

Warren finished a page, got up, set the pad on his chair, and went to the small office refrigerator. He removed a carton of milk and drank straight from the lip. He heard another soft click from the hall and turned.

Gordon was standing silent in the open doorway.

Warren looked to his chair. From here, the seat was hidden by the desk. The pages upon it, unseen. Just.

“Mind if I come in?” Gordon asked.

Warren took another swig of milk, wanting the extra beat of time.

“You don’t knock, Gordon? Richard never taught you that?”

Gordon smiled. “I gotta say, Warren, at this hour, you gave me a little scare yourself. Worried you might have collapsed in here. It’s not like you to work so hard.”

Warren looked to the clock. Midnight. How?

Gordon stepped inside and shut the door behind him. He walked straight to the desk. Warren did, too. And because he was closer, Warren got there first. He sat upon the white pad on his chair. Gordon flipped through the yellow pages on his desk.

“Is this it?”

“Don’t touch those.”

“Seriously? Have you always been so protective of your work?”

“Just don’t want your notes.”

“You must feel awfully strong about this one.” Gordon craned his neck, read the title. “The Window Washer. Ah, to the point. You always work this late? I ask in earnest. In all our time together I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten to know your…process.”

“You usually walk basement halls looking for children’s books this late at night, Gordon?”

Gordon looked up quick. Warren counted four, five meanings in the glance.

“Well,” Gordon said, “there’s no reason to be sassy. I’m as curious as the Alphabet Boys. You know I’m a huge fan of Luxley.”

Warren took it to mean Gordon was a fan of anybody but Warren Bratt.

“Be my guest,” Warren said. “But I won’t tell you how it ends. Even when you beg.”

Gordon lifted the yellow pages. Warren tried not to move, tried not to ruffle the white ones beneath him.

“You write so small,” Gordon said. “It’s awful for your eyes, and it’s no wonder you squint like you do.”

Gordon’s back to him, Warren slowly slid open the top drawer of his desk. He gripped a fresh, sharp pencil the way he would a knife.

Gordon read a paragraph, looked over his shoulder.

“Relax,” he said. “I’m no editor.”

Warren felt like he had no gravity to hold him in place. Like he might suddenly float to the ceiling, revealing the second book on his chair. He thought of the Corner. Imagined Inspectors rushing in now, taking hold of him, thanking Gordon for keeping him occupied.

He gripped the pencil harder.

“Wow,” Gordon said, nodding. “This is very good, Warren.”

Warren watched him, his face bathed in shadow.

The pencil broke. He broke it.

“I love it, Warren.” Gordon set the pages down on the desk. “As he washed the windows he wiped clean his past. How in the world did you come up with that?”

“Don’t you know that’s the worst thing you can ask a writer?”

Gordon clucked his tongue. “Oh yes. You are an arteest, after all.”

“Haven’t been that in a long time.”

Gordon smiled, and in the smile Warren saw that the man had found what he’d come looking for: self-loathing in the writer.

“I’ll tell Richard all about it,” he said. “He’ll be happy to know how hard you’ve been working on this book.”

“No harder than any other.”

“No? That’s not what we’ve been told.”

“Told?”

“No.” Gordon shook his head slow. “People hear scribbling through your office door all night. Odd hours, they say.” He paused, stared long.

Warren made a show of scoffing. Felt like he was acting. He was.

“I’d like to get back to work now.”

“By all means.”

Gordon tapped the desk once with a clean fingertip. As if to tag it like cattle. As if those Inspectors were coming for the desk soon. And the writer who sat at it.

Gordon left, closing the door behind him.

Warren slunk deep into his chair, heard the irreverent pages crinkle under his ass.

What are you doing? he asked himself. Seriously. What are you doing?

An eye on the office door, he pulled the white pages halfway out from under him, then tucked them back again. He would address them soon. In a minute maybe. But he needed that minute, a solid minute or two. To think this over. To think about what he was doing. To think about the danger he was putting himself in. There was still time to put a stop to this. There was still time to do right by himself. After all, what did he owe the Alphabet Boys? Weren’t they tragedies either way? What could he do to change that?

He looked to his desk and saw a droplet of blood there. His hand; he hadn’t noticed the pencil had cut into his hand as it snapped.

Warren held open his palm, inspected the thin line of blood there.

In its way, the wound felt as good and as bad as writing Needs did. Bad because the blood was like a signal, a light, an alarm: DOWN HERE! A MAN BARING HIS SOUL! BLOOD AND SWEAT! COME GET HIM! COME TAKE HIM TO THE COOOOOOORNER!

But good, too.

Yes.

Good because the split skin signified a crack in the Parenthood.

Things had begun to unravel. People had begun to bleed. Begun to change.

And whether or not the Alphabet Boys were tragic beyond repair, wasn’t Warren more interested in slicing the Parenthood open? And wasn’t it sliced open already?

And who was Warren Bratt, lowly writer…to stop the flow of blood?

Black Math

Professor Hall wrote with especially squeaky chalk as the eight Alphabet Boys sat quiet, absorbing the day’s lesson. But only seven of them were truly engaged, as J struggled to focus on the morning following yet another night of seeing a figure crouched by Mister Tree. He hadn’t told D.A.D. or the Inspectors about it, hadn’t found either the strength or even the motivation, despite the fact that the longer he kept it hidden, the more trying the experience was becoming.

“In the end,” Professor Hall said, his back to the class still, “the answer is the same. But what a difficult way of getting there this route has become!”

E raised his hand just as Hall smiled over his shoulder. The teacher called on the boy, and J looked out the window to the pines at the far side of the Yard. The white expanse between the Turret and the tall trees looked welcoming. All it would take was a single lunge out the first-floor window, and the momentum, the slide, ought to take him all the way to the border and the name of the stranger who lurked there.

Was he there now? Was anyone there, ever, at all?

J leaned toward the window, squinting. The way the sun hit them, the leafless trees looked almost branchless, but the space between them was hazy at best. J leaned closer.

Was someone there?

“Get off me, J!”

J saw that his hand was planted firmly on G’s shoulder. The latter boy struggled to remove it.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing!” J sat up quick. He looked to Professor Hall, but it was too late. The teacher, along with the rest of the class, was staring at him.

“Yard dreams?” Hall asked. He fingered the chalk, making it disappear in his palm, reappear again.

“Yes,” J said. “Sorry. I was…I was thinking about…”

“About the Effigy Meet, of course,” Hall said. He smiled smug and nodded. “But that isn’t here yet, certainly not today, and we can’t have you boys distracted by games or they’re not doing what they’re designed to do. Can anybody tell me what they’re designed to do?”

“We’re not ten-year-olds,” F said. He only half-laughed, but it was half-laughing at a professor; the other boys felt it in full.

“Okay, F,” Hall said. “Go on, then, tell me.”

F shrugged. “Obviously it’s a systems check.”

“Oh? In what way?” Hall smiled the way professors did when they believed they knew something a boy did not.

The partial smile left F’s face. A rare serious expression replaced it. “It’s the Parenthood’s way of seeing how far we’ve come. How advanced we are.” He looked around the classroom. Nobody spoke. “What?” he asked. “That’s obvious, isn’t it?”

Professor Hall responded, “That makes it all sound a bit clinical, don’t you think, F?”

F shook his head. “No. I don’t think so at all. I think it sounds like the truth.”

The teacher set his chalk on the blackboard sill and wiped his palms together. A white cloud rose up. “The Effigy Meet is supposed to be fun. A challenge. Is it neither of those things to you anymore?”

“What is this?” F asked, turning a bit red. “An Inspection?”

The other boys murmured. J watched F close. The boys had, of course, rebelled in the past. They’d each been escorted out of a class for disruptive behavior before. But most of those cases were many years ago now. And the way F was speaking, it was as if the boys were on the same level as the professor. As if the boys had the answers to the questions now.

Professor Hall was not pleased.

“How dare you,” he said, expressing hurt and disappointment in those few words. “And how do you think D.A.D. would feel if he heard you’d disrespected your daily Inspections?”

“What? I didn’t do that!”

“But you did, F. You most definitely did.” Professor Hall made a show of stepping to his desk and writing something down. Done, he looked up to F again, his eyes flat and cold. “Do you have any idea how valuable the Inspections are for you? Do you have any idea how safe they keep you?” The boys sat very still. Not a word from one. What would come next? “How would you like the Parenthood to abandon you, F?”

“What?”

“You heard me.” Louder now. “How would you feel if the Parenthood and all its staff simply…left you here alone? Who would write your books? Who would teach your classes? Cook your food? Who would get your movies and fix your Boats boards and sew your clothes and teach you?”

“Professor Hall—”

“I am not finished.” He stepped out from behind his desk, stepped to the blackboard, and took the chalk again. With the sleeve of his plaid button-down, he erased the formula he’d written. He drew a tall rectangle. “Can you tell me what this is, F? Can any of you boys tell me what this is?”

The boys studied the simple shape for a long time.

“Nobody? How about now.” Professor Hall drew a small circle about halfway up the rectangle’s right side. “Anybody?”

Nobody. Almost.

“It’s a door,” E finally said.

“Yes,” Professor Hall said. “Of course it’s a door. But not just any. What is behind this particular door, boys?”

J knew the answer but didn’t want to say so out loud.

“Anybody?” Professor Hall was yelling now. For no specific reason, J imagined the man had seen something outside as well. No. Not that. He imagined the man had something deeper than this classroom on his mind. Thicker than the pines. “No,” the man said. “Of course you don’t.” He brought his hand hard to the board. The chalk squawked with each line of each letter. He wrote:

There was no audible gasp from the Alphabet Boys. Rather, the inverse happened. The silence somehow deepened. As if all the power in the Turret had been cut with the last letter, the R, the very name of the boy who sat stunned in the first seat of the far right row. And in that moment, each of the boys imagined the Corner below them, just as they’d imagined it all their lives.

For R it was complete darkness.

For E, walls of needles.

For F, a piercing sound, mist, then…nothing.

And for J…

J looked out the window again, having seen movement out of the corner of his eye. He squinted at the pines.

Someone there?

Hall tapped the chalk in the space between himself and the boys. Knocking, it seemed, on an unseen door. “None of you have ever been to the Corner before.” He paused. He looked each boy in the eye. “Dishonor the Parenthood again and you will. All of you. You will.”

The buzzer on Professor Hall’s desk went off. Class was over. But nobody moved. Nobody even slid their papers into their folders. Eight Alphabet Boys, their black turtlenecks flat to the backs of their chairs.

“Go on,” Professor Hall finally said. As though he was disgusted. “Leave.”

J was the last to exit the room. As he did, he looked back, once, to the blackboard, and to Professor Hall who sat at his desk, staring ahead at the empty chairs. He, too, wore an expression of warring emotions. Of inner turmoil. J thought of D.A.D.’s speech from a month ago. About change. About the blue notebooks.

J walked quick across the classroom to Professor Hall and said, “F knows better, Professor Hall. We all do.”

But when the teacher looked up at him, J didn’t see in his eyes what he imagined he’d see. Compassion. Or understanding.

“Do you?” Hall asked. And the defeat in the man’s eyes was equal to the pain in his voice. J recognized both as the qualities of a man who had begun questioning.

Everything.

The Floor Shift

The harrowing day had come. At the morning’s Inspections, the boys were instructed to pack all their belongings; they would be changing floors. J, Q, L, and D were not unique in how the news made them feel; the entire Parenthood was unbalanced. L, having delivered the floor notebooks to the office on the first floor, returned to tell the others that he’d heard “crying in the halls.” His current floor mates didn’t doubt it. Sitting around J’s living room, they all felt like crying as well.

“It’s not right,” D said. “We’ve spent a decade on Floor Eight. How would D.A.D. feel if we moved his office to the roof?”

“Not likely,” L said. His support of the floor shift had bothered the others for some time. Now it had become unbearable.

“Can you at least pretend you recognize this as a significant event?” J asked.

“But I do! Of course I do. Only I, unlike you, think it’s for the best.”

“Shut up,” D said.

“Really? You wanna hate me over it? Listen, D…listen all of you: This is life. This is what we’ve been taught life is. Growing, changing, branching out. Do you want to stay on the eighth floor forever?”

Without hesitation the other three responded with a unified “YES!”

L shook his head. His curly hair bobbed like a wig.

“That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. And you all know it is.”

“Yeah?” D said. “Well, maybe that’s because you were never really part of this floor, L. Maybe it’s because you’ve always been the outsider up here.”

Some silence. But Q addressed it before it became something worse.

“Oh, come, L. D is just flustered about the shift. We all are.” D made to say something, but a look from Q kept him quiet. L wasn’t satisfied yet.

“No no,” he said. “Please, D. Go on.”

“Guys,” J said. “If you wanna fight—”

“You never agree with us on anything,” D said, digging in. “You’ve intentionally taken the ‘other side’ for years now. We noticed it a long time ago, and every time you do it, it’s as clear as day! You constantly contradict yourself in the name of always contradicting us. Yes, L. You are a contrarian. And you know what? Sometimes it’s nice to be around someone who sees the world the same way we do.”

L looked to the other boys. Again, Q tried to squelch the moment.

“How about a game of Boats?” he asked.

Then L dug in. “So I find a lot of your theories to be juvenile, D. Even bordering on conspiratorial. My goodness, sometimes you sound as if you think the Parenthood is out to get us!” L laughed, harsh. “You do realize we can’t exist without them, don’t you? You do realize that D.A.D. has taken care of us and taught us literally everything we know, don’t you?”

D brushed his black hair from his eyes. “That’s exactly what worries me, L. What you just said. And the only thing worse than receiving all your information from one source is believing it entirely.”

L gasped. “Exactly what are you saying? As if there’s another source to get it from! You sound…insane!”

“Yes, D,” Q said. “What are you saying?”

J and D met eyes. Again. The still-unspoken bond. Two Alphabet Boys who had begun questioning the Parenthood that raised them. In that moment, J decided to tell D about the figure outside. How he’d hid it from D.A.D. in the Inspections.

D stood up. He paced to the window and back. “Let’s play Boats,” he said.

“No way,” L said. “Tell us what you mean first.”

“I’m not saying anything,” he said. But he was. “And I wanna play Boats. Okay?”

Silence. Finally Q went and got the boards from J’s closet. He set them on the living room table. Arranged the chairs on opposite sides. Two games for four boys. One on one.

“Me versus D,” Q said, smiling. “J and L.” The boys took their seats. “And when we’re done? We’ll finally pack our stuff.” He removed the plastic boats from the boxes. He plugged the boards into the floor beneath the table. All four boys placed the nodes on their necks and forearms. Their chests and wrists.

Q took the line switches, turned on the games.

The painted waves of each board began to ebb and flow, rise and crash. The white surf looked like it could spill over onto the table but never quite did. The variations of blue alternately calmed and overwhelmed the boys: The apparent depth was always a bit uneasy to fathom. As little ones, each of the Alphabet Boys had looked under the tables they played upon, sure to see more water, flowing, getting darker, the deeper it went. But, of course, there never was any. An optical illusion, a source of endless fascination.

Boats.

The plastic crafts bobbed on the waves. The boys felt a slight current of electricity, dual in nature; the current calmed, the current concerned. D closed his eyes. L closed his eyes. Q smiled at J, and J knew it was because Q had quieted the bad feelings, the argument, before D had said anything irrevocable. Yet J wanted to hear it. And a part of him wanted L to have heard it, too. The dimensions of his room on the eighth floor were no different from the dimensions of the room he’d be moving to, mere hours from now, down on the third floor. He’d have another window overlooking the Yard, a lucky break, as most boys were placed in new corners of their floors. And how long would they remain in their new rooms? How long would J share a floor with G, F, and X? D.A.D. didn’t seem to know, as the boys had asked him throughout their daily Inspections. The best D.A.D. offered was, Time will tell. Well, J thought now, it always did and it always does. But what else might time tell?

“Look!” L said, wide-eyed, staring at his boat upon the board, watching the small piece rock upon rough waters. One of the two of them wasn’t feeling at ease. It was their job, and the object of the game, to expose which one it was.

But J knew he was a goner in this particular game of Boats. Q was a master at it for being more “emotionally composed” than his fellow Alphabet Boys. D.A.D. had long praised him for his “natural proclivity” with the game. And the others couldn’t deny it. Nobody “beat” Q at Boats. Yet that was half the fun of playing him. As if Q were a machine, the game itself, a benchmark by which the other boys could measure their own progress. And it was Q who suggested the game most often. Not because he was a superior player, but because he knew the real merits of the game: the always soothing resolve of confronting troubled waters head-on.

J stared long at the waves crashing against the boundaries of the board between himself and L. L always looked something like a stuffed doll when he played. His big curly hair and wide eyes hadn’t changed much since they were little boys. For that, J felt a sudden deep longing for the days when he and L, D, and Q, would race one another out in the eighth-floor hall. When they played hide-and-seek with all four of their doors open, anywhere but the Check-Up room fair game. J had strong memories of himself and L laughing, crying, eating, studying, discussing, debating, hoping, espousing, choosing, wanting, and growing up.

“Look!” L said.

J was looking. He saw waves reach heights he’d never seen before. One appeared to come close to his face, and J actually moved out of the way to avoid it. L laughed. Of course it was only more illusion. But oh how real Boats felt!

J thought of the Parenthood. The Turret. The Inspections.

He thought of illusions.

“My goodness,” L said. “Quite a tumultuous day on the water! My notebook is going to be full of theories on this.”

“It’s the floor shift,” J lied. “Nothing more.”

L shrugged, his eyes still on the board. “Might be. Might be. But I’m gonna have to write it—”

“It’s the floor shift,” J said again. The waters turned dark blue upon the board. J’s boat was leaning so far to its side he could almost make out the entire bottom.

“Okay, that might be your take, but—”

“IT’S THE FLOOR SHIFT, YOU IDIOT!”

J tore the nodes from his body and hurled the board from the table. Because it was still connected to L, it swung back and cracked against the table legs.

The world seemed to go white for J. Then black. And as the details of his room (no longer…his room no longer) returned, J saw that Q and D were staring at him.

“Oh, you’re gonna get it,” L said, rising and removing the nodes. “What is wrong with you, J?” L stormed toward the door. “Nice living with you,” he said. “You…you fool.”

When he’d gone, Q and D removed their nodes as well.

“Shaky game of Boats?” Q asked. He and D had been locked into one of their own.

J shrugged, but he was as red-faced as L had been. “I guess we don’t have to pretend to relate to L anymore.”

Q smiled softly. “We’re just growing up is all. This is change. And change is scary.”

“Change in what?” J asked, still piqued. “Change in exactly what?”

Q considered this. “If perspective is everything and our perspectives are changing, then I suppose this is change in…everything.” Q sat quiet a beat before getting up. “All right,” he said. “Don’t worry about L. I’ll talk to him. You should, too. But for now?” He looked sadly around the room. “Now we pack.”

Once Q was gone, J turned to D. “I’ve seen someone hiding behind Mister Tree,” he said.

“What?”

“I’ve seen someone out there and I want to know who it is.”

D looked to the window. He did something J wasn’t expecting him to do at all. He smiled. “Well…why didn’t you say so? Let’s go see who it is. Tomorrow night.”

J stared back, stunned.

“Really?”

“Why not? You’re sure you saw someone?”

“Maybe.”

D seemed to study his one-word response. “Maybe is good enough for me. And you know what?”

“What?”

“You’ve finally given me something to look forward to today.” He winked. “Thank you.”

D left. And as J packed his belongings and prepared himself, mentally, for living five floors closer to the ground, he thought how good it was to be able to speak to someone. Someone he’d shared his whole life with.

But should it feel so strange? he thought. So strange to speak the truth?

And stranger yet: Should it be such a relief to feel it, the truth, in the room with him? Within the confines of the Turret…should the truth feel so rare?

Needs

The fuel burned steady, mocking the pace at which he worked. The Alphabet Boys themselves might’ve said there couldn’t be enough gas to support the endless run of energy. But the Alphabet Boys had yet to know passion.

Oh, two books, such different stories, such different souls! One the result of another man’s delusion, the other all the author’s own.

White heat. Felt like white heat emanating from the pages.

Warren wondered if the pace had gotten…dangerous.

It’d been a while since he’d stopped for water. Food was a distant annoyance. To get up and go to the sink wasn’t possible at the moment. The cold sweat, the muscle pain, the headache, the wrist that felt made of wood (Pinocchio was made of wood! Pinocchio had to learn to stop lying, too!), the madness of plumbing his own gutted depths.

Gotta write them both. Gotta look the part while being something else.

And finishing them together was, for Warren, the greatest trick he could pull on the Parenthood.

I finished the new book, Richard. Truly.

Warren hadn’t had a session this good in years.

Warren hadn’t had a session this good in…ever.

When was the last time he felt the current of the rushing words? When was the last time he could not stop?

He sneered as he wrote; he smiled as he wrote—incongruous visages for incongruous tales. Flames cooked his skull for one book and were put out by the other. But even the bad book added to the accomplishment, the session, the feat. Periods of time passed in which he watched his fingers moving, pen to paper, writing, pen to paper, writing, across the page. The motion was silly. It made him laugh. Hyena laugh. Witch cackle. Surely these hands could not be his own?

So fluid, so forceful, so unbelievably assured.

Could they be? His own?

As he approached (cannon shot) the two finales, he wondered how many words might he get done today. Fifteen thousand? Twenty? Twenty-five?

He didn’t know. Didn’t care to know.

Half of it meant so much, the other so little. And the movement of his hand across the page was all that mattered.

After a while his hand looked like a plastic boat, bobbing on the white waters of the page.

And wasn’t that what Boats was, in truth? Wasn’t it, in essence, the same as what Warren did now?

The truth?

When the muscles in his writing wrist cramped, Warren massaged it with his other hand. And when his right hand froze, he wrote with his left. One book was laughter. The other a scream.

“Fuck the money.”

Ooh, did it feel good to say that.

No money. No more.

On the run now. Very soon. Running. On the.

He’d written so many words they seemed to no longer fit on the pages. They floated about his office, settling in the corners, at the coffee machine, on the couch.

Look! It was the window washer himself! Dunking his rags in fresh water!

And look! By the refrigerator! The Titan of the Turret! The Party of the Parenthood!

Woman.

Oh, to write a woman again. Oh, to simply describe her.

Every she tasted like steak.

But the desk against his belly felt like the tip of a bayonet.

Write, Bratt. And do not stop till you’re done.

He bobbed his head to the uneven rhythms of the opposite books.

How different a single word was, appearing in one story, then the other:

The window washer must do good work.

We knew lying would work.

Shame.

The Parenthood.

The boys.

Fear, too. Fear of that same Parenthood and the humming from down the hall.

But Warren didn’t slow down. Warren couldn’t. Wouldn’t. No.

He shook out his right hand as he wrote with his left. Shook out his left as he wrote with his right. Felt like his back would crack if he were to get up too fast. He was killing himself at his desk. Didn’t mind it at all.

Warren had never been so alive.

Do you look like you’re dying? Or do you look like you’ve just been born?

Both at once. Both at once. The Window Washer and Needs.

He was minutes away now, ma-ma-minutes away.

The everyday terrible sounds of the basement continued beyond his office door. The angry boiler, boots in the hall, the swelling of what thrived in the Corner. Warren feared it all, but he did not falter. It was all a reminder, a slap of his cheek, a voice demanding he

FINISH FINISH FINISH

then go.

Yes, go. That would have to be next. Go had to follow the delivery of the books.

But go where?

Did it matter so long as it was go?

Because of the legitimate purge he was experiencing, Warren thought of his friends. The Writing Gang. Dana the Dude. Arlene the Asshole. He imagined them watching from the other side of his desk.

Were they alive still? It’d been ten years. Did they still write? Did they still roll their eyes? Did they harbor hatred for the way he’d turned his back on them? Did they know that, despite so much writing, he hadn’t written anything in ten years?

Warren laughed, and his laugh mingled with the death-cough of the Corner. Dana and Arlene, still wearing those angry expressions, arms crossed, disappointed in Warren Bratt.

Maybe they were dead?

Warren, Dana’s corpse might say. Why not write on your money? You got a lot of bills for paper now.

Warren laughed, shamed and proud both, the sound of the pen to paper unflagging.

You two died of Art, he thought, raging. But would you, could you, write a book in a place where nobody looked? Would you, could you, tell the truth? To a tower of boys without any proof?

Warren wrote. One book. The other. One book. The other.

What are you writing, Warren? Arlene might ask. A check?

“I’m writing the best thing I’ve ever written, you pretentious fucks. Now leave me alone!”

Wait. Quiet. Hadn’t Gordon said people heard scribbling in his office?

What else had people heard?

He was close now. So close. So so so so so so—

This doesn’t absolve you, Warren. Dana. Still proud. Still righteous. Just because you’re facing the truth now doesn’t mean you didn’t turn your back on it then.

“GET OUT OF MY OFFICE!”

Bootheels in the hall. Warren didn’t care. Not this time. This time Warren wrote.

One book. The other. One.

The other.

One.

What happens, Warren wondered (and wrote it, too, wrote the thought into the one book, not the other), when a man feels so much guilt that he must perform self-surgery, must remove it from his body? And what does that man do with it once it’s gone? And what does he do with the empty space?

Warren wanted Richard to read Needs. Oh, how he wanted Richard to read it. Oh, how he wanted the man in the red jacket to see red.

GET ME WARREN BRATT!

One page to go in each. Oh my.

One page to go in each.

Oh.

My.

Richard. The Corner. Deliver the books and go. Who the fuck cared about the Corner right now?

Half a page in The Window Washer…half a page to go. The electricity was blinding. Felt like madness. True, uneven, unstable madness. As if the colors of the carpet were rising from the floor, filling the air between himself and the door. Like he was surrounded by bright yellow light, hot light, light he could feel, the spirits of A and Z, the spirits of all those mothers and fathers, the ones who agreed to give up their boys in the name of

“MONEY!” Warren cried out. Then he cried tears. Why finish The Window Washer at all? Was he so institutionalized that he felt he must? Still? Did he doubt his own escape after delivering the boys the real book, the real good book?

Did he doubt he would deliver it at all?

As he wrote THE END on The Window Washer and shoved the stack of yellow pages off his desk.

They sailed like jaundice to his office floor.

Made more room for the white.

He sat back, eyes wide, hardly able to comprehend his own scribbling (he actually cared deeply for penmanship throughout the process, as the book for the boys would be copies…printing-press clones of the very draft he was so so so close to wrapping), hardly able to bring his pen to the paper, aware that YES this was it YES this was the greatest YES this was the greatest work of art Warren Bratt had ever done.

And it was…

THE END

Needs

Done.

The boiler went quiet. No noise came from the Corner.

He reread the final words.

Because women do not distract. They inspire.

He pulled the title page from beneath the pile.

“Dana, Arlene,” he said. “Feast your eyes.”

But his own eyes welled up. There was no sense of having righted a wrong as he crossed the finish line. No lessening of the guilt.

He imagined the Writing Gangsters reaching for the manuscript, flipping through its pages.

It’s good, Dana said.

It’s really good, Arlene said.

Warren looked up and saw nobody in his office. Saw how empty the office was.

He slouched. Felt an emptiness within him expanding.

Whatever he experienced upon wrapping Needs, it was much heavier, much colder, than what the Writing Gangsters used to call Post-Write-’em Depression.

Warren felt as if he had nothing. Not a thing in the world but this one shiny object. And even it was not enough.

The Guilts. For ever agreeing to be in a position that would lead him to writing this book at all.

But, forgiven or not, he had two things to do.

Deliver the book.

And GO.

Did he have the strength to do them?

Both palms on the desk, he pushed off from the wood and fell to his knees by his chair. He hadn’t planned on collapsing.

He felt the desk against his belly, though it no longer was. And his wrists were cramped as though still holding a pen. He wept, contorted yet in the posture of the writer.

He didn’t want to let that posture go.

Then, coming to, Warren did get up. He went to the kitchen and removed his briefcase from the counter. He brought it to his desk and carefully placed both manuscripts inside.

The job was done. And there was no point in waiting now.

He dried his face and neck with a towel. He changed his clothes. He did not glance about his office before leaving. This would be his last time standing in this room, breathing the thick air.

Yet, absolved or not, it would forever be the room in which he molted.

He turned off his desk lamp, took his briefcase by the handle, and stepped out into the hall. No guards. No Inspectors. No D.A.D. Not yet.

Warren’s sneakers made no sound at all. He was grateful for that. Had someone rounded the hall ahead, Warren would’ve killed him on the spot.

He did not allow himself to imagine exactly who he might encounter. That no longer mattered. Despite the emptiness inside him, the zenith of expression was alive within him. He did not slouch, that uniquely Warren Bratt troll-walk that long irked his colleagues and once fooled him into thinking he had power in this place.

Today he walked upright. His head held high. And the walk went quick, perhaps too quick, as the door to the editor’s office appeared suddenly by his side. He stepped in, removed The Window Washer from the case, and set it on the unoccupied desk with a note.

When Warren left the room, it struck him how unnecessary this move actually was. There was no doubt now as to the next step he would take. He did not need the security of having written the book for the Parenthood, proof if Richard should come asking. In fact, The Window Washer was the only thing remaining that could stop him from doing what he should. What he must.

Without it, what did he have to show for his marathon session of late? How else to answer any inquiry as to the source of the scribbling heard from the hall?

He looked back to the office he’d just left. Then he entered it again, took his book and his note from the desk, carried them with him.

He didn’t want to be able to answer those questions anymore.

Down the hall, heading in a direction he had no business going, toward the printers’ once again, Warren paused at the incinerator square. Without hesitation, he pulled the door open, felt the brief heat, and tossed his book and note inside.

For the first time since experiencing the Guilts, he felt a fragment of absolution.

But not enough. No no. And now he was balancing very high without a net.

He continued to the printing room, Mark’s and Clarence’s infinitesimal claim on the world.

He was shaking when he reached the door.

Why’d you come here, Warren?

I got another book.

Why’d you come here last time?

Taking a walk.

Why do you got another book?

Because I got two this time.

Why do you got two this time?

Because one is a lie. But in this case, two is not.

But there was nobody inside.

The Parenthood was asleep. But everybody?

Could take seven hours or more. That’s what Mark and Clarence had said. Told him. Taught him.

Warren entered.

He opened the briefcase and removed the manuscript, lining up the pages on the table.

He’d make twenty-four copies of the handwritten novel. One for each of the boys. He didn’t want one for himself. Needs, to him, was more a painting than a book.

Let someone else hang it in their home.

The pages in place, he set the gears in motion and watched as the first words of the most meaningful thing he’d ever done began to duplicate, like the phony viruses the boys so feared.

It took four and a half hours. And not a minute of it was nice.

Not scared to die. But scared of dying before delivering the books to the boys.

The boys would (MUST) wake to the mysterious paperbacks, like a note announcing a speech, in their bedrooms.

Some of them would begin to flip the pages. Some would begin to read.

About the real world.

About real life.

About women.

Could’ve killed him, Warren, he thought. Could’ve just tore Richard’s intestines right out of him.

Warren smiled sadly. That’s exactly what he was doing.

The room smelled of motors pushed past their breaking point. The room smelled of fact.

All done, he put the copies in a box. He carried the box out of the printing room. At the Corner he did not speed up and he did not slow down. He only walked. And walked. One turn. Then another. Eventually his eyes were firmly locked on a door marked STAIRS. The stairs led, of course, up. Up to the first floor. Up to the many floors above it, too.

He scaled the steps. As the Parenthood slept, Warren began the process of waking it up. And as the marked door closed behind him, his overwhelmed mind imagined, momentarily, that it was the door to the Corner.

But by the time Richard demanded his head, Warren Bratt would be so far from the tower he might not know the way back.

And the boys? Where will they be, Warren? Isn’t this a death sentence for them? Knowledge? Spoiling them…rotten?

The questions came muffled. He wouldn’t allow himself to hear them.

“The truth,” he said, climbing the steps. “They deserve the truth.”

He imagined each Alphabet Boy in a cage; twenty-four boys behind bars painted to blend in with the rest of the world.

He reached the first-floor door.

He pushed it open with his shoe.

And he stepped through.

Carrying keys for the locks, delivering reality in a box.

“A Monster in My Rooms”

J and D did not search the pines for the figure the next night. They’d planned to. They wanted to. They were excited to. But then they woke to find a strange book in their rooms, a thing so mysterious it washed their calendars clean.

With the book was a note from D.A.D. ordering them not to discuss it with anyone, even himself, until they were done.

Baffling, indeed.

“Inspection!”

J woke to the word after only two and a half hours of sleep. He’d been up all night, staring out the third-floor window, unable to come to grips with the new view. After all, the third floor was five stories closer than the eighth, and whatever J had seen lurking last night was that much closer, too.

He heard G, F, and X out in the hall. His new floor mates no doubt already standing in line, discussing their studies, the floor shift, breakfast, who knew. J longed for the voices of D, Q, and L. Yes, even L, who, as D rightly pointed out, was always a thorn in the others’ sides. It was astonishing to J how palpable the feeling of loss was. As if the other boys had been connected to him physically, as if D.A.D. had removed more than just proximity in the shift.

J sat up.

“I’m late,” he said, rubbing his eyes until the boxes with all his clothes and books, supplies and tools, came into focus. His bedroom was a mess. And while he knew his new floor mates had unpacked their belongings before going to bed (he’d heard them and seen their open doors), J hadn’t been able to bring himself to do it. He just didn’t want to. It was more than just resisting change; J was struggling with the idea of seeing this change as permanent. There was nothing about the new rooms that felt like they were his own. They may have looked similar but they smelled different. Felt different, too.

And that new view.

Upon a stack of boxes just beyond the foot of his bed, J saw a pile of white papers, bound, in the form of a haphazard journal or poorly constructed textbook. He didn’t think it’d been there the night before, but the Parenthood was no stranger to slipping notes overnight, and J assumed this was something like that.

Pretty big note, though.

He got out of bed.

“INSPECTION!”

J had a little time. Very little. G, F, or X would go first, giving him precious minutes to brush his teeth, comb his hair, shake the uneasy and alien feeling from his shoulders. He crossed his new bedroom and read the cover page of the stack of white paper.

Just below this word, the note from D.A.D.

“Needs, indeeds,” J said, hurrying to the bathroom. He grabbed his toothbrush, put toothpaste on it, then sat down to pee and brush his teeth at once. As he did, he eyed the messily bound papers on the pile of boxes through the open door.

A knock on his outer door caused him to leap from the toilet, flush it, then spit out the toothpaste into the sink.

“Coming! I’m sorry!”

J splashed some water on his face, tore into his bedroom, and realized he was still wearing his clothes from the day before. Hadn’t changed into his pajamas to go to sleep.

J quickly took off his clothes and put the pajamas on. Feigned sleep.

Just as he’d finished, the door opened. X peered in.

“You’re late,” he said.

“I know.” J felt a pang of resentment. This new floor mate telling him what to do. That job ought to be Q’s.

“Well,” X said, his blue eyes and blond hair so different from Q’s, “come on, then.”

J nodded and made for the door, passing the papers again.

Did it say novel?

Still walking, he looked back over his shoulder. Couldn’t read the title page from the door. Didn’t matter. He’d read it when he got back from the Inspection and, besides, he was sure D.A.D. would mention whatever it was in the Check-Up room.

Outside in the hall, X and G waited by the metal Check-Up door.

“Sorry,” J said. “I didn’t sleep well.”

“Neither did I,” G said. “Thought there was a monster in my rooms.”

“A what?” X asked.

“I heard someone in my room last night. Moving around. And I think I may have even seen him.”

“What did he look like?” J asked.

X and G eyed him as if J had exposed something. Had he?

“Stubby. Wide. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know,” X echoed, as though to flatten the conversation before it rose any higher.

“Who had your room before you?” J asked.

“I,” G said.

“It was probably him, then,” J said, thinking of the lurker in the pines. Thinking of the fact that he still hadn’t told D.A.D. about it.

“Don’t worry,” X said.

“I’m not worried,” G said. “But I didn’t like it, either. It’s bad enough we had to change rooms, but I can’t even sleep in peace in this one.”

“Had to be the delivery of that new book,” X said.

J looked to his front door, then back to the boys. “New book,” he echoed. “Luxley.”

“Not Luxley,” X said.

“Warren Bratt,” G said.

They both looked to the Check-Up door. J sensed they were hiding something. The name Warren Bratt sounded as exotic as the mental illnesses discussed in psychology.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“The note,” G said. He was very close to whispering.

“I saw it,” J said.

“Yeah, well, let’s not talk about it, then.”

They didn’t. They didn’t talk about anything at all for a minute or more.

J thought of the name they’d said.

Who in the world was Warren Bratt?

“New floors, new floor mates,” G said. “How do they expect me to get any sleep around here?”

X laughed. “They know you’ll be fine is how. And if you really can’t handle it, which of course you can, just write about it in your notebook.”

J felt a drop in his belly. This conversation again. Only new floor mates now. He didn’t want to write anything down in the blue notebook. Not one word.

He thought of the poorly bound book in his bedroom. Looked like a notebook, too.

Warren Bratt.

J knew the book hadn’t been delivered overnight. He’d been awake all night, peering out the window, tossing and turning, feeling entirely confused and out of place.

The Parenthood must have dropped it off early this morning, perhaps minutes before the call for Inspection.

“But you can’t write about the new book in your notebook,” X reminded them. “Not until you’ve read it all.”

“Enough about it,” G said. “Not another word.”

The Check-Up door opened and F walked out, big teeth and messy hair. He yawned and winked at J.

“You always late?” he asked.

“No,” J said. “Only on the mornings when our lives are turned upside down.”

Effigy Meet

J had no time to read the new book following the morning’s Inspection and breakfast. In the cafeteria, the Parenthood announced the coming of an enormous storm. The Alphabet Boys knew what this meant.

Today would be the Effigy Meet.

As J put on his gloves and hat, a blizzard began. It was a profound way to spend the first proper day in his new rooms, and as the pines looked larger from the third floor, so did the snow.

Across the hall, X, G, and F discussed what they were going to build. The Effigy Meet was the annual contest to determine which Alphabet Boy could carve the most original sculpture out of ice. D.A.D. awarded first place to the boy who showed the least derivation in his work. And while each year the twenty-three runners-up momentarily despaired, all respected the winner.

Another look at the snowfall and J opted to wear his long underwear beneath his black slacks that were also beneath his snow pants. Mobility was important in the Yard, but not as much as stamina, and any boy who thought of going back inside the Turret was not going to make it to the finish line, the judgment, at sundown.

J hadn’t considered what he was going to build. Hadn’t been thinking of it at all. His mind was on the pines, notebooks, and lies. This, he knew, put him at a disadvantage: If you wanted to win the Effigy Meet, you had to be prepared. Q, for example, mapped out his ideas in a series of drawings taped to his living room walls. L made blueprints. In past years even D discussed what he’d like to create and why.

It wasn’t just the floor shuffle, for J. It wasn’t just hiding something from the Parenthood.

He’d been questioning everything.

And the uneven stack of pages he’d left behind in his rooms, the new book by a new writer, sounded like a good place to start looking for answers, a response to the emotional bell that had begun tolling.

He’d reread the accompanying note before heading for the Yard:

The mystery of it was unbearable.

“J!”

Outside under the snowfall, J turned to see Q’s unmistakable glasses adorning an otherwise completely covered face.

“The Effigy Meet,” Q said. “And the perfect storm for it.”

“How are your new rooms?” J asked.

“Just like the old ones. Only without you to talk to. In other words…it sucks. Do you know what you’re going to build?”

J attempted to play the part of a boy engaged in the event. He stomped on the ice beneath the falling snow. Looked to the icicles hanging from the branches of the pines. But in the end he couldn’t lie. Not to Q. Never could. “I have no idea what I’m going to do.”

Q laughed. “Well, as you know, some of the greatest designs have been made on the spur of the moment. Don’t worry about it. But at the same time…think fast.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Little ol’ me? I’m thinking of…a ladder.”

“A ladder? Hey, that sounds neat.”

“Indeed. A ladder of ice. How much weight will it support? And much more interesting: How high will it go?”

“You’ll probably win.”

“Oh, you never know. You might win yourself. Idea or not. In fact, I’m a little jealous. A clean slate has always been my favorite way to start something.” He looked up to the falling flakes. “And now I’m off. Good luck, J. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.”

Q nearly vanished into the wind-curtain of falling snow, joining other vague blurs in the Yard.

Like ghosts, J thought. As indeterminate as the shape he’d seen lurking by Mister Tree at night.

Ahead, a taller figure emerged from the wall of mist and snow. J, bundled, idealess, watched him come.

D.A.D.

Without a hat or scarf, his exposed face was pink above his red jacket and gloves.

“J,” he said. “You’re standing still as a statue. Nothing in mind?”

J stared up into the eyes of the man who, for so long, had been the rock by which J navigated. The rudder and the root.

“In mind?”

“For the Effigy Meet!” D.A.D. fanned a hand toward the other boys, his gloved fingers tipped with frost. Then he brought one of those red fingers to his lips. “Wait,” he said. “Don’t tell me. Surprise me.”

J thought how similar it was—what D.A.D. just said and what he’d written on page one of the strange new book in his bedroom.

“I will,” J said.

“Thatta boy, J. Set your imagination free, but make sure it’s backed up by all you’ve learned here.”

All you’ve learned here.

Was there anywhere else to go?

“Thank you, D.A.D.,” J said, already stepping into the white folds of the storm. “I will.”

RICHARD WATCHED HIM go.

He watched them all.

His boys.

The Effigy Meet was as indicative of where the Alphabet Boys were at as any exam or sport they partook in. Richard had long prided himself on the idea: Wait for the first brutal storm of the season and see what the boys can do with it.

Molding nature.

How sweet the sound.

In a way, the Effigy Meet resembled the science fairs of Richard’s youth. But those minor contests always took place in gymnasiums, hotel conference centers, the library. Here, at the Turret in winter, the Yard was majestic. The minds of the boys, with only snow and ice for palettes, created some of the most astonishing accomplishments of their young lives. In winters prior, Richard had walked through perfectly crafted tunnels of ice; ridden in mobile, wheeled sleighs of snow; and even eaten dinner upon a frozen table. The spirit of the event was palpable, and often the boys assisted one another. They worked in tandem, creating frozen pulleys to raise bricks of snow, white wheelbarrows to cart blocks of ice. C once attempted to re-create the Turret itself, a project that proved too ambitious but one D.A.D. very much admired. The Effigy Meet was a busy day for the Parenthood, indeed, as Richard documented every and all conversations, theories, plans, and achievements. Every winter’s first brutal storm had become Richard’s annual way of marking the practical/impractical progress of his boys. How high would they think? How wide? And what skills would they employ to make these dreams come true?

Richard had thought high. He’d thought wide, too.

The Parenthood itself was his eternal contribution to the Effigy Meet. A thing he’d built from frigid emotions, so close to freezing. A boundless ideal, a law of nature…from scratch. Did the Alphabet Boys have this degree of ambition within them? And did they have the gall to pursue it? Some of the ice contributions, year in year out, were simple. Some were quite serious. Some were silly and some were spectacular.

But did any of them…reinvent natural law, as he had?

Richard shook snow from his beard and hair. He had to be patient, he knew; they were only twelve years old. Where had Richard been at twelve?

“Distracted,” he said. He spit in the snow.

This thought, not voiced often, was much too serious for the day. Richard let it vanish into the snowy mist, where it might freeze and break into unexamined pieces.

His boys had no idea how powerful they could be. How focused. The Effigy Meet was meant to reveal their deepest psychologies…not his own.

The Effigy Meet, Burt told Richard, represented the communal understanding of life (creation, by their own hands) and death (even the most spectacular sculptures eventually became puddles). Richard, Burt said, relished this, for it forced the boys to consider their own mortality. Their genius, Richard believed, would inspire the boys to figure out a way to prolong it. Immortality by way of eliminating distractions. For, if a man has no one else to live for but himself, might he not spend his life combating death?

At the Parenthood, snow was good for serious thinking.

Never were the boys as curious about the meaning of existence as they were in the winter. Burt found this fact endlessly fascinating. The Alphabet Boys expressed as much self-analysis as men living in the hub of a big city, surrounded by thousands to bounce themselves off, myriad ways of life, various styles and moods. It was senseless to Burt, impossible to think that the homogenized world of the boys could harvest the same results as those of a child from Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles. Yet annually the winter Inspections showed the boys contemplating metaphysics as complex as that which Richard himself had devoted his life to. More complex in some cases. The emotional questionnaires procured odd answers and fresh questions of their own, ranging from what it meant to be embarrassed to determining the finite number of heartbeats a man has in his lifetime.

Death was a striking topic when discussed by boys who knew nothing of being born.

All this in mind, always, Richard watched them now, his boys, working, carving, creating. But he couldn’t quite stop his train of thought.

Richard knew there were recent whispers among the boys, attempts at trying to understand the purpose of the Parenthood. He equated this with their changing philosophies and expected some degree of tumult and even mutiny along the way. His (now legendary among his staff) absolute dismissal of video cameras, while counterintuitive to his end goal, was proving more right by the year. The boys didn’t need to be spied on. The boys needed to be trained to come clean with their transgressions, their concerns, their worries. For was there really the possibility of a boy being spoiled so long as the Parenthood stood guard over the grounds?

The boys ought not to be watched but watched over.

Here, observing this year’s Effigy Meet, watching the boys cleaving and cutting, the chips of ice collecting like beliefs at their winter boots, Richard felt as confident as the storm.

Hands ever-folded behind his back, his hair white now with winter, he strolled the Yard like a general, the specter lieutenant, his black boots crunching the packed snow, leaving evidence of his having been there, having observed the work of his boys. His boys! Oh, how the air felt crisp against his skin! How the sound of the ice picks danced ballet in his ears! The click click click of so many doors opening! So many minds unlocked!

A curtain of sleet caused him to shield his face, and when he opened his eyes again, Y came storming through the snowfall upon a carriage of ice. W and F pulled him, sled dogs for the moment. Tandem. Teamwork.

His boys.

Richard called to them, encouraging them to ride, ride, ride into the winter.

And never from it.

G worked hard on a road, wide enough to circle the tower, level enough to carry Y’s coach.

S sat upon the early-draft stages of a rocking chair.

P polished a mirror of ice.

“Excellent work!” Richard hollered. “Excellent work!”

X seemed to be working on a stage. What for? Richard would have to wait and see.

I built a room. Four walls and two doors. What for? He’d see.

Q had begun a ladder.

What for?

“Will you help me test how much it holds?” Q asked him. “It could certainly use a dry run.”

Richard eyed the seven rungs, the top leaning flush against the Turret bricks.

“I’d love to,” he said.

He climbed Q’s ladder, finding a perfectly solid base with the first rung. His implicit trust, his faith in Q’s precision and practicality, moved him, and soon Richard was standing above the Yard, looking down upon his pupils, his sons, his boys. A full story high, the wind cut even deeper.

String music flowed from the Turret speakers above him. His boys in perpetual motion below.

“And it’s going to go even higher!” Q called, cupping his mouth against the distance and snow.

“I believe you!” D.A.D. called back. “I believe you could reach the roof!”

After climbing down, Richard continued his Zen trek through the spectacle in snow, applauding each boy he came to.

“This is wonderful, P! Wonderful stuff!”

L had built a cold pendulum of ice. D.A.D. knew well the craftsmanship necessary for executing this task, yet, in the midst of a true storm, the boy had done it single-handedly.

Richard continued, shoulders straight, hands clasped behind his back. Hair bone white. A waltz through his own winter parade.

B showed him the likeness of a man whose frozen organs could be removed, the torso swiveling on ice hinges.

N paved a patio deck for Richard’s quarters.

Still a few steps from D, Richard paused. D, of course, had shown irregular signs in his recent Inspections. Suggestions, Burt claimed, of a boy about to revolt. And here the boy had carved a door of ice into the ground. Down to the knob. As if he might open it and descend into the earth.

Or beneath the Turret.

A simple design?

A thing to make?

A way out?

“Tell me, D. To where does this door lead?”

D did not hesitate when he said, “The Corner. As I’ve always imagined it to look.”

For the first time today, Richard was surprised.

“And why have you decided to make that?”

D weighed his words. “I don’t know. Maybe because I feel that, if I build it here, outside, I’ll never actually see it…in there.”

D.A.D. placed a hand upon D’s shoulder. “Let’s call it a door to the future,” he said. “And let’s hope that you do see it…in there, out here, always.”

He held D’s gaze as falling flakes passed between them.

“I like that,” D said. Were those tears in his eyes? And what for? What feelings had the boy been keeping in? “A door to the future.”

A COLD SMILE and D.A.D. continued. D watched him go. And when he looked down at the door again, when he tried, sincerely, to see it the way D.A.D. had described it, he could not. For, no matter what angle he adopted, no matter how hard he tried to smooth over the cracks and splinters he’d added, the door refused to have anything to do with the future.

“Unless that future is…” D began. But he did not say the Corner.

Time Enough at Last

J hadn’t got the feeling entirely back in his fingers yet. So the book felt a little odd in his hands.

Back in his rooms now. His body thawing out. That book open before his eyes. The warmth of the bedroom, the comfortable black couch beneath him, the snow falling outside.

Page 1.

Written by a man named Warren Bratt (what a name).

This was much better than unpacking.

The tip of Q’s ladder leaned against the glass of his living room window, and J felt as if it was his good friend, his brother’s way of making contact, even with the floors between them.

J read.

From the very first line, the book felt different from any Luxley book J had ever read. It was, in a word, forceful. He wasn’t sure if he liked that. Lawrence Luxley painted gorgeous pictures of the Orchard and the Yard, the tower and its many floors. But this man Bratt was talking about a place called…Milwaukee?

It sounded silly. Too silly. A completely imaginary place the author referred to as a “city.” There were many towers in Milwaukee. Too many to comprehend.

J closed the book.

The wind outside took the ladder, then set it against the glass again. J spun quick at the sound of the tap, half-expecting to see Q at his window.

The wind. The storm. Still going.

He got up off the couch and went to the glass, looked down to the many sculptures below. The Turret lights illuminated the scene and J was able to see details, from this angle, that he hadn’t been able to when down in the Yard.

He looked back to the couch. To the book.

“Milwaukee,” he said. He shook his head. Whatever this book was, it wasn’t very good. It made him feel…weird. Almost as if the one or two pages had actually scared him.

A second strong wind lifted the ladder and set it back again. Tap. Sounded like knuckles.

J looked to the pines. Saw nobody there.

“City,” he said. Again, the idea of so many towers (and how many boys, then, huh? How many boys in so many towers, Mr. Bratt!) overwhelmed him. He looked to the book. He went to it.

Sitting up now, he opened to where he’d left off.

Milwaukee. City. Bar. Cars. Cigars. Alcohol. Some of the words in the book J knew. But he’d never seen them used this way. One word that particularly stuck out, that chilled him, was:

More specifically, J read about men discussing something in an alley. From what he could gather, they were standing between two towers, surrounded by trash bins. Warren Bratt wrote a lot about the smell of trash. The smell of machine exhaust. The smell of the city.

It didn’t sound like a good place to be. J looked to his bedroom door. Should he and his floor mates get together and talk about this? Like…right now?

But no. The note. D.A.D. had expressly told them not to discuss the book until they were done. J was discovering how hard that was going to be.

He closed the book. He got up. Despite the cruel cold outside, his rooms felt hot. Too hot. He took the small hall to the bathroom and washed his hands. His face. He wanted to feel the cool water. Needed a change, any change. That book…

He looked down the hall to the couch.

“That book is not right,” he said.

He thought of D.A.D. and the blue notebooks. Thought of a lot of things. The new feelings he’d been having. The new ideas and fears. Was this book some sort of experiment? Surely D.A.D. would eventually be asking him and his brothers about it in the coming Inspections. What questions might he have?

“You gotta finish it first,” he said.

But could J finish a book like this one? Would he make it through it? Leaning against the sink, as though trying to get as far from the book as possible while still keeping his eye on it, J didn’t think he could.

When the wind took Q’s ladder again, then set it back, J yelped with genuine fright.

He hurried back to the couch. He thought about Q. Q would read it. All of it. And he’d have a hundred brilliant things to say.

“Don’t be so scared! It’s just a book!”

He tried to laugh about it. Tried.

What did D think of it? What did L think? J was sure of one thing: L wasn’t going to talk about it until he was done, because the Parenthood had told him not to. But D? D might. D might say something on purpose just to break the rule.

D had also carved the Corner door out of ice. Certainly a topic of gossip among the Alphabet Boys.

J went to the window and eyed the sculptures below. Y’s carriage. I’s one-room home. D’s door.

J was worried about D. The Corner. Why? Why had D decided to make that?

He looked to Mister Tree. To Q’s ladder.

Back on the couch, he picked the book up and started reading where he’d left off. He had half a mind to skim it, if only to spare himself the weird feelings it gave him. Already. Yet, J had to admit, whatever Bratt was doing, it was effective. Here he was, scared to open a book! Never before had J experienced that kind of power with a pile of pages. Oh, Luxley knew how to thrill. No doubt about that. And the textbooks could be daunting…but this. This was different. This was as if someone was in the room with him. Like Mr. Bratt was crouched behind the couch, listening to J as he read, waiting to pop out, to grab him, to say, DID IT WORK? DID I SCARE YOU?

Yes, J thought. Already.

He read on. Read about a man who drank so much whiskey that he was on his hands and knees in the alley, throwing up blood. He read about another who watched people walking in the street below his studio apartment. The man had bad thoughts about these people. Very bad. He read about another man who had bad thoughts about himself. Very bad.

But the man who interested J most was the one named Robert, who sought inspiration in the form of a person, someone with whom he might build something deeper than a basement with. Someone to love. Someone to tell the truth to.

J looked to the ceiling.

It all sounded so strange, so foreign, so utterly creative.

He read on.

Seemingly against his own will, he started liking it. Partly. Like when one man punched another in the face and blood sprayed out like he’d sneezed red. Or like when one man stepped in a puddle of puke.

It was all completely incredible. Every word. There wasn’t a familiar sentence in the book.

Outside, the wind howled what sounded like an actual word, and J watched the ladder settle against the glass again. He had a sudden shocking vision of Q’s creation smashing the glass, allowing the bad weather in.

And more.

Like Milwaukee. Maybe Milwaukee would get into his rooms.

He imagined the characters of Bratt’s book entering through the broken window. The men with pockmarked faces, red boozer noses, and sad watery eyes. Slack skin and frowns. Bad breath and greasy hair.

Each Bratt grotesquerie filing into his rooms. Crowding him on the couch, forcing him to drink gin. To talk loud. To confess.

Confess what? What did the man Robert want to confess?

What a terrible title for this book! What was Warren Bratt thinking? Using such a title while describing everything a boy didn’t need!

The thought made J smile. As if, by way of dismissing it, he’d somehow gotten the joke. As if, by seeing how ridiculous it was, he somehow understood what Warren Bratt was trying to say.

But did he? Could he or any of his brothers ever understand this book?

He read on.

Robert was walking down one of the many streets of Milwaukee when he saw someone (a slim figure, long hair, sunglasses) enter a corner bar. J could hardy keep up with all the made-up stuff, the imagery, the names of the places, and the way Warren Bratt wrote about it all as if the reader, J, was supposed to get it without an ounce of explanation.

Gibberish.

But what interesting gibberish it was.

After a very long internal monologue in which Robert wondered if the man he saw walking into the bar might be the one he could confess to, Robert entered the bar, too. J wondered if D had read this far. Q, L, X, anybody. Had any of the Alphabet Boys read this far? Had any already finished this book?

The thought made him surprisingly jealous. Like when J had to use the bathroom while the movie was playing on Film Night and he’d missed a scene that D or Q later cited as one they liked.

What did Q think of Robert? What did Q think of the neighborhood bar? And had he already read far enough along to know what happened to Robert when he entered the place?

J read on.

The description of the bar was so Bratt. Smoke and vomit. Stale air and whispers. Round cushioned seats called booths. Stools lined up at a long wooden counter (also called a bar, odd to J). Mirrors and bottles. Lights, but not the bright kind apparently, as Bratt’s description was very dim, gloomy, dark. Music played, but Bratt didn’t describe it the way J knew music to be. J thought of the violins and drums, cellos and flutes, that came through the speakers in the halls of the Turret during school hours. D.A.D. said it was all in the name of enhanced study, but J didn’t think there was any studying going on in this neighborhood bar in Milwaukee. There were a lot of men inside (at least three people to a booth and sometimes two to a stool), but there was no mention of any books. In fact, it was more like an unsettling combination of the Body Hall and the cafeteria; everybody was either making a speech or drinking…something. And what exactly were they drinking? That was hard to say.

Bratt kept using the term booze, and his description of how it smelled (something rancid, something sweet) had J thinking he’d smelled it before on D.A.D. On the few occasions D.A.D. was, as Q said, not himself. L once suggested D.A.D. had endured mild cases of Vees through the years, moments when he smelled like someone else.

Or maybe, J thought now, what they’d smelled was booze.

J was getting excited. The bar, dismal as it was, sounded like an adventure. As if the shadowed booths harbored entire worlds where anything was possible so long as you felt it, spoke it, drank it.

“This book,” J said, “is good.”

He looked to the shadows of his new living room, where the light did not reach. Did similar adventures await him there?

J didn’t think so.

Professor Willis, professor of psychics, often discussed art with the Alphabet Boys. He stressed how necessary the imagination was to a big thinker, no matter what that thinker wanted to do with his mind. He spoke of the music D.A.D. loved and Lawrence Luxley’s books. But other things, too. Willis talked about the art in the sky, in the pines framing the Yard, the Yard itself. He told the boys that it was important to slow down, to notice the craftsmanship in the bricks of the Turret, the spires upon its roof. He said the Orchard was an excellent place to experience living art, the rows of cherry trees, one facing another, like an endless reflection, but which was real and which the mirror?

Professor Willis said that was art. J liked that.

The art in J’s everyday life. The art in the couch he lay upon. The clothes he wore. The book he read.

Oh, it wasn’t hard discovering it in the book. The book was dripping with it, as if Warren Bratt, this totally new and unknown author, had accidentally dropped his pages into a vat of great meaning, the kind of deeper instinct that Q often talked about over Boats.

J read on.

Robert slowly walked toward the wooden counter, where so many men drank the liquid J had smelled on D.A.D.’s breath on the days D.A.D. seemed unlike himself. But Robert seemed fixated on one man, the lithe one who wore his hair long (J thought of the pictures of the Alphabet Boys as toddlers, back when some of them wore their hair to their chins). J noticed something. Warren hadn’t called the man a man yet. He kept saying person, in a way that had J questioning what exactly was sitting at the bar, tapping painted fingernails against the wood.

A monster?

The wind took Q’s ladder again and set it back hard against the glass. J actually gasped. But he didn’t stop reading. Didn’t look away from the book. Robert was halfway across the bar now. Passing men in booths who sneered and leered, who laughed so deeply they coughed. Smoke rose from these same booths and from the shadows at the corners of the bar, creating a mist, not unlike the storm outside J’s window.

The person’s face at the bar was entirely obscured by hair and shadows. Those nails kept clacking the wood. It drank.

J was scared to see his face.

A stranger, of course, but not for long. A person Robert had to speak to, had to meet, no matter what deflating rejection might be returned. No matter what feelings of inadequacy he might walk away from the experience with. Because, as Robert knew, there was legitimate power seated there at the bar. A power Robert had been covering up for many years.

How entirely weird, J thought, the way Warren Bratt described people! Luxley always started with a man and a task. In Another Tower, Jacob set out to build…another tower…brick by brick. On his own. And did he succeed? You bet he did. And Jonathan Ford harvested the entire Orchard on his own in Luxley’s Orchard Plans. See? Even the titles made sense with the stories being told!

But this book?

“He’s got a lot of nerve,” J said, struggling to focus on the words, trying (and failing) to resist the incredible energy that poured forth from the pages. In his nearly thirteen years of life, J had never experienced anything like it. It was impossible to ignore. In the same way it would be impossible to ignore an Inspector standing inside his living room, reading the same pages over his shoulder.

J shivered. The storm increased outside. Had it gotten colder within?

He read on. He simply had no choice. Because whether or not Warren Bratt wrote as well or plotted as well or knew how to tell a story as well as Lawrence Luxley just didn’t…didn’t…

“MATTER!” J cried out.

It didn’t matter! A book, J suddenly believed, didn’t have to tell any story at all.

“Freedom,” J said.

The word resonated in a way it never had before.

Warren Bratt, J realized, was, to use a Q phrase, disrupting his mind.

And he liked it.

He read on.

Robert reached the bar. Okay. He hadn’t said anything to the person he’d followed inside. Okay. He ordered a drink.

Okay.

He needed a minute to think, Bratt wrote. What he was going to say and how he was going to say it. Though it was all he’d thought about on his way to the city, he still wasn’t exactly sure how to word his confession.

Robert ordered a vodka. The word sounded an awful lot like Vees to J, and he shuddered at the idea of consciously ordering a disease. Would the Inspectors be able to check for vodka in the Check-Up room? J looked to his arms, to the fingers that held the book. Did he see vodka there?

Robert drank. The man who gave him the drink nodded and Robert nodded back, and J steeled himself because, however Bratt had done it, he’d made it clear as day that the moment he’d been building toward had arrived.

“Her,” J said. He scrunched his brow.

A typo. Of course. A funny one at that.

She. Bratt was getting sloppy. An extra S.

“The woman,” J echoed.

He set the book on the couch and got up. Outside, the wind seemed to have settled into a consistent humming moan. A soundtrack, it seemed, for the story.

He looked up to the ceiling. As if through the floors he might see which of his brothers had just read the word woman, too.

Kind of like man. But more.

At the window, his palms to the glass, J laughed at the absurdity, the gall of this author Warren Bratt. The man simply made up words! On the spot, it seemed. One minute the thing at the bar was a person. The next? A woman.

Typos.

Mistakes.

Or…

J headed for the kitchen. He had to do something other than read. Drink some juice. Eat a chip. Anything.

But halfway there he cut for the couch and grabbed the book again.

Woman. Again. It was incredible, truly, the way Warren Bratt made his own rules as he went along.

“Ha!”

J’s eyebrows met in an almost comical expression of confusion. But he didn’t feel funny.

Where was Warren Bratt going with this?

J didn’t like how Robert said the boys. It was almost…too relatable. Here Warren had changed gears too quick. Yes. From absurdity to…things too real.

J threw the book across the room. It smacked against the wall and fell with a thud to the floor. He expected to hear three more thwacks from up and down the hall. More from above and below, as the other Alphabet Boys tossed their books in turn. Surely nobody was going to finish this. What was the Parenthood thinking, giving them this to read? It was awful! Just…terrible!

J got up and paced his living room. Warren Bratt was an awful man who wrote about awful things. He made up his own world, his own words! And he didn’t care one bit what a reader might think of them!

Not one bit!

J slammed his hands against the glass. Hadn’t even realized he was by the window. The ladder rattled and the wind howled and down below, at the base of the partially lit pines, he saw the silhouette of a crouched figure.

He recoiled from the glass.

The figure!

Angry, confused, but emboldened by the book as well, J picked up his winter clothes from the living room floor and got dressed all over again.

“That’s it,” he said. “No more sneaking around!”

There was a line in the book that flat-out haunted him, the words that finished the sentence he’d thrown against the wall.

“That’s it!” he said again, tying his boots in a rush. Put on his gloves and hat.

The window opened easily and the cold air felt surprisingly good. He gripped Q’s ladder.

He’d watched his brother climb it earlier in the day. All the boys saw it. They cheered when Q turned at the top, the third floor, and raised his fists to the snowy sky.

J swung a leg out the window, onto the first rung. He moved fast. Breathed fast. He looked over his shoulder, to the base of the pines. Couldn’t make the figure out with the snow in his eyes. Both boots on the ice, he descended. The warring emotions propelled his muscles, bones, heart, and head. He couldn’t see straight, hear straight, think straight. It made no difference if it was night or day. Warm or cold. All sense had been shaken by that blasted book and the words that finished that cruel sentence that haunted him, yes, scared him too deep.

Down in the Yard, J looked once to the first-floor windows, then walked toward Mister Tree. He weaved between the ice sculptures, evidence of the incandescent minds of his brothers, the Alphabet Boys. He didn’t pause to examine them, didn’t think of his brothers by name. Details were difficult to discern: words, letters, names, ideas, feelings. It was all a rash (INSPECTION!) of overwhelming emotions that came together in a storm of their own, swirling dark colors, black winds of why.

J carried that fiery fear with him to the tree. A feeling so hot it denied the winter.

“No!” J growled, punching his gloved hands together.

There was nobody behind Mister Tree. He turned to face the pines. Where the floodlights reached their limit, J squinted into the woods. “Show yourself!” he cried. And the words of that last sentence he’d read sprang up, as if they were what had been hiding in the pines all along.

“SHOW YOURSELF!”

But nothing stirred. And nothing showed.

J stepped into the pines, cracking frozen sticks with his winter boots.

Those words…that sentence…

“Show yourself, dammit! Be…” The word evaded him. But he found it. “Be contrite!”

Movement in the snow behind him and J whirled, fast. Nothing in the pines, no, but something in the Yard, yes.

The silhouette of a burly man. His features blackened, being lit from behind.

“J,” the man said.

“Who are you?” J asked. “Who are you?”

The man took a step closer and J saw it was Inspector Collins. His mustache white with winter.

“You need to go inside,” Collins said. “Now.”

J looked to the pines, then back to Collins.

“I’m…I’m sorry,” J said.

“Come on. Inside. Now.”

Inspector Collins held out a gloved hand for J to take. But J only stared at it, thinking of the woman’s hand upon Robert’s shoulder in a bar in Milwaukee.

“I…I…”

He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move.

So Collins moved him himself. He took J by the shoulders and forced him toward the Turret. J let him take him but shook his head no, thinking over and over the words that had confused him even more than she, her, and woman:

Free Swim/The Pool

Richard, wearing his red bathing suit and cap, sat in the stone-bleacher balcony, overlooking the boys as they enjoyed Free Swim. But perhaps enjoyed was the wrong word today, as each of them appeared to be completely on edge—freaked out, as Burt would say. Richard believed this was because of the incident with J the night before. J had been caught walking in the pines framing the Yard. Not the worst thing for a boy to be caught doing but certainly alarming. Especially his reason for being out there.

I’m just curious how far they go.

How far they go.

Burt had long warned Richard that this moment would come, and the staff psychiatrist, upon hearing of J’s excursion, expressed surprise that it’d taken this long. Richard understood. Curiosity was not only to be encouraged, it was absolutely necessary to his eventual goal. What sort of scientists, what sort of thinkers, would his boys be if they were taught not to look, listen, and search?

Still, something about the way J said it…And Collins reported a palpable fear in the young man’s eyes. It was enough for Richard to order J quarantined for the day. He wanted to look into this further. Had to.

Yet to allow it to rule the Parenthood would be foolish. Yes, let the other boys know J was caught. Yes, scare them some with J’s mild punishment. But in the end, Burt was right: Boys will be boys. And perhaps J’s midnight sojourn wasn’t as troubling as it first sounded.

Time would tell.

After teaching the remaining Alphabet Boys the butterfly stroke, an hour’s worth of dedicated instruction, Richard had retired to the stone bleachers, a towel draped over his own wet shoulders. Quietly, so as not to miss a word they said, he climbed the steel rungs to the observation deck and settled into a seat near the railing. It felt good to get in the water. Felt good to teach. Felt good, too, to observe his boys from above, as none of them knew he was still in the facility.

The profound, all-encompassing appellation THE PARENTHOOD decorated the front bricks of the balcony in vivid blue and white. Like the name of their team. Which, of course, it was. Richard couldn’t see the letters from where he sat, and the words felt further from his reach than he felt comfortable with.

Something was afoot here.

Sure, J had been caught in the pines. Yes, the boys knew he was being questioned as they swam. But it simply wasn’t enough of an event to cause such…distance in their eyes. To a boy, they appeared to be thinking of something far from the pool, something none of them spoke openly about at the morning’s Inspection and certainly not during their swim lesson, with their D.A.D. present.

Were they hiding something? Did it have something to do with J?

If so, what?

Richard watched them carefully, swimming below. Their voices and their splashes echoed high off the white brick walls.

Spying on the boys was often more revealing than the Inspections.

It was true the boys, like all near-teenagers, could be deceitful and, yes, they were growing up fast, but Richard had never prized their innocence like he did now. To him, it was clear the experiment was working; any toddler had the strength to carry the weight of his purity, but in the real world most lost sight of it by thirteen.

The boys were right there. Right there. Yet…so different from boys in the real world. So different from who Richard had been himself.

Still, a side effect of such chastity was how obvious a blemish was; they’d been polite with him today. Too rigid perhaps. Already, now, they seemed looser, unaware of the shadow he cast.

He wanted to tell them to stop. Stop growing. Stop growing up.

You are perfect, he longed to tell them. You are blameless. Your perspective is as pure as that of the caveman, who knows nothing beyond his daily tasks, but your intellect surpasses my own.

Stop growing out from under his control.

Richard held his head in his hands and massaged his temples. He’d been doing this a lot lately. He attempted to allow his mind passage, over water and sky, empty, uncluttered fields. But it was ever so hard to remain calm; the Parenthood was always one event from toppling.

“Come on, E!” R howled. “To the lip!”

Free Swim always ended with a handful of the Alphabet Boys congregating by the lip of the shallow end. Some were already there. D leaned against the steel railing of the shallow steps, his arms crossed, his eyes affirming a ponderous state of mind. Q floated nearby.

Richard continued to massage his temples.

Q spoke.

“Strange night,” he said.

D agreed, yes, strange indeed. R and E joined them. L, too. All agreed. Strange night.

Had J’s midnight stroll affected them so deeply?

“I’ve never read anything like it,” Q went on. “None of us have.”

Burt had long given the boys the benefit of the doubt, explicitly underscoring the fact that they were always only aging. There is no such thing as an unnatural occurrence, Burt once wrote, if a natural being makes it happen. But the mood in the pool bothered Richard deeply.

So had the morning Inspections.

Thing was, they were too good. Too clean. As if the boys had mutually agreed to keep a secret.

Don’t get paranoid, Burt wrote more than once. You’ll see secrets in everything they say.

“It scared me,” L said. “Really really scared me.”

In a world such as the Parenthood, how was a secret possible? Who would have taught them to lie?

“I think that was the point,” Q said. “To scare us. To get us thinking in a new way.”

None of the boys looked to the balcony. Did this suggest preoccupation?

What exactly was on their minds?

“Hang on,” L said. “Has everybody read it? To the end?”

Richard did not move. Snake-like still in the balcony shadows.

Read what?

“If anybody has, don’t spoil it for me,” Q said.

Spoil what?

The boys seemed to intentionally talk about something else. An effort to change the subject. They brought up their studies. L discussed the density of the water they stood in. Q and U discussed Boats. The game, U contested, was supposed to be played as freely as the mind thinks, complete with tangents, second-guessing, and self-doubt. But there was a catch.

“But by virtue of it being a game, and therefore having rules,” he said, “Boats is incomplete and doesn’t do what it professes to.”

Q couldn’t disagree more. He believed Boats was perfectly crafted.

“No two people play Boats the same way,” he said. “Therefore, it succeeds. There are rules to our communally agreed-upon reality, too.”

In this way, Q suggested, Boats was a better representation of reality than the one U hoped for. U countered again, citing that the rules of their agreed-upon reality were self-inflicted and therefore could change at any moment.

“But your mind isn’t as free as you think it is,” Q said. “You would come to the same rules, every time, every day.”

Richard breathed a semi-sigh of relief. The boys were talking Boats. And they sounded well beyond their years while doing so.

They must have been discussing a Luxley earlier. Oh, how the boys loved their leisure books.

Do you remember when you hired Burt? he thought. Do you remember why? You wanted somebody to check you. To remind you of your priorities. To ensure you didn’t get drunk on progress. But here you are, distrustful of your own boys. Who is checking you now? They’re discussing topics far superior to those you discussed at their age, yet here you are, searching for a problem, determined to find something wrong. Burt would tell you there was nothing to fear. Yet you fear. So did you hire Burt because it would look like you wanted to remain honest through all of this?

Or did you actually want to remain true?

He had no desire to examine himself in the balcony. He should feel good, should feel great. About the progress of things. About the way his boys talked. And the things they talked about.

“The book,” D said. “Can we please talk about the book?”

“When everybody’s read it,” Q said.

But that didn’t stop D from talking. “Warren Bratt writes like a person who needs to say something. I guess reading it has made me feel the same.”

Richard exhaled and smiled. He gripped the balcony rail and rose. Good God, how close was he to thinking there was a conspiracy in the Turret when, in the end, all the boys had been referring to was a leisure book?

Adjusting the towel on his shoulders, he took the stone steps to the balcony exit. He was quiet about it. No need to alert the boys they’d been watched. No need to make them feel violated in any way. He took the steps down to the first floor. His sandaled feet clopped on the cool black tiles as winter continued beyond the hall windows. At the door to his quarters, he paused. He removed his swim cap.

A drink? Why not. A celebratory gin to acknowledge the progress of his boys. Oh, how worried he’d been. How suspicious.

J had taken a walk. So what? Long live J.

The telephone rang on the other side of his door. Richard entered and answered it.

“He’s not saying any more than what he first told us,” Gordon said.

“Do you believe him?”

“Do I, Richard? Well, yes, I suppose I do.”

Richard hung up. He went to the bar and fixed a gin martini. Already drunk on the intellectual momentum of his boys, he recounted some of the key things he’d overheard them say in the water.

Boats is unrealistic in this way.

The water we stand in asks nothing physical in return. It only makes room.

The job is dependent entirely upon the tools. The Yard will always only look as good as the tools.

There was more. So much more. Richard stood in the semi-darkness, stirring the drink, relishing the calming sound. Like the arms and legs of the Alphabet Boys through the water of the pool.

Oh, the Alphabet Boys. Oh, the things they say…

Who was it that had enjoyed Warren’s book so deeply? Was it D?

Yes, D had said, Warren Bratt writes like a person who needs to say something. I guess reading it has made me feel the same.

Good ol’ Warren Bratt. How many books had he written for the Parenthood now? Close to thirty? A fine career by any standards, one that would make any writer in the real world proud. Only this was even better. No matter how sullen or stodgy, cynical or insane Warren Bratt might be, he was contributing to the single greatest experiment in the history of mankind.

In a rare moment of sentimentality, Richard picked up the phone again.

“Go get me Warren,” he said. Then he hung up.

Warren, Warren, Warren. Might not be writing the sort of books he wanted to, but Richard would bet on the leisure books being a lot better than anything Warren would’ve worked out back home.

Richard laughed. Not because it was so easy to poke fun at Warren Bratt, but because the overweight troll with the bad posture (Quasimodo in the basement, he’d dubbed him for Gordon’s pleasure) had no idea how much Richard had done for him. How much he’d supported the arts after all.

Would Warren like a drink, too? Yes. Maybe he would. Maybe Richard should share a drink with the Parenthood’s prized writer and tell him, Yes yes, good job, the boys love you, Warren. They love you so.

At the bar, inspired, fixing the second drink, he again replayed a handful of highlights, words and ideas expressed by his boys when they believed themselves to be unwatched.

—Warren Bratt writes like a person who needs to say something. I guess reading it has made me feel the same.

Richard looked over his shoulder to the phone. Maybe it was the gin, but he felt a brief wave of sickness. Something deeper than the need to throw up. It passed. But its echo remained.

Something one of his boys said had worried him after all?

Maybe.

“Nope,” he said. “Today we celebrate.”

But, stirring the second drink, he didn’t feel like celebrating was the right thing to do. Not quite. No.

Why not?

Warren, Warren, Warren. Always made him feel a little sickly, Richard supposed. Maybe he should call off the drink.

Warren who lived so well here. Warren who’d written more in the basement than he ever would’ve in Wisconsin. Warren who, as Lawrence Luxley, had written himself into the annals of literary history. If only for what he’d been a part of.

“Lawrence Luxley,” Richard said, absently lifting the second drink to his lips, as if it were fixed for him. “Lawrence…Luxley…”

The name sounded so fresh. As if he hadn’t spoken it in a long time. As if he hadn’t thought it, either.

But no. No no. The boys (D? Yes, D) hadn’t said that. He’d said Lawrence Luxley writes like a person who needs—

Richard dropped the drink. The glass exploded at his sandaled feet. A shard cut his ankle, and the blood made a trail from the bar to his desk as he dove for the telephone there.

“Lock down,” Richard said. Hardly able to believe his own words.

“Richard?”

“LOCK DOWN THIS MINUTE!”

“Richard…what…what’s happened?”

“The boys, Gordon. The boys used his name. His real name.”

“Richard, I don’t understand.”

“THE BOYS REFERRED TO HIM AS WARREN BRATT!” Richard couldn’t focus on anything in the room. The desk, the mirrors, the bar. All of it was a sudden cold blur of winter come inside. “Did you get him for me? DID YOU?”

“Warren?”

“WHERE IS HE?”

“Richard…” But Richard knew what words were coming next. Before they came. And as Gordon spoke them, he gripped the phone until it cracked. “He’s not in his rooms. He’s not in his office. Richard, we don’t know where Warren is.”

Richard did not hang up. Rather, the phone fell in pieces to the desk.

MINUTES LATER, AS the Alphabet Boys walked the first-floor hall, having left the pool behind, their many conversations about many exciting subjects were shorn to pieces, blackened, then burned by the power of a single word they had never heard spoken after seven o’clock in the morning. Each boy came to a stop because of it. And nobody responded. All only stared at the silver speaker, rattling high in the wall, from the volume, the heat, the anger inherent in the voice that pronounced the word in a way it had never been said before.

“INSPECTION!”

Lockdown

He started crying. He’d never seen D.A.D. this way before. The boy was scared. And the worst part of it, the absolute most grueling part of being in the Check-Up room midday for the first time in his life, was that the Inspectors Collins and Jeffrey looked scared, too….

…“HOW MANY PAGES did you read, Q? I heard you talking about it in the pool. If you lie to me, you will be sent to the Corner this instant. How many pages?”

Behind his large glasses, Q studied D.A.D.’s crazed face. Sweat drained from D.A.D.’s black hairline all the way to his dark beard, as if the man were an irrigation system, and the sweat, the horror, the anger, were keeping him alive.

Q could barely find his voice.

“Thirty,” he finally said.

“Thirty,” D.A.D. echoed. He’d been pacing since Q walked in, and by the look of him he’d been pacing in every other Inspection, too. The Alphabet Boys were lined up outside the first-floor Check-Up room. All but J. D.A.D. stepped to the steel table and eyed the stack of poorly bound white pages there. “Thirty is a very round number, Q. Very round. I’ll ask you again…”

“Thirty,” Q said. “On the button.”

He was telling the truth, but when D.A.D. turned to face him again, it didn’t look like it mattered. It didn’t feel like truth mattered anymore at all….

…D.A.D. HAD T by the neck against one of the Check-Up room’s steel walls. He did not see his distorted reflection in the steel, but the Inspectors did. His eyes were made enormous by the metal, his open mouth a black nest of desperation. His skin looked to be made of stone and his black hair rose like burnt wood to the ceiling.

The dogs barked hysteria behind the glass.

“HOW MANY PAGES, T? HOW MANY PAGES DID YOU READ?”…

…W STARTED CRYING in line outside the Check-Up room door. The sounds that were coming from within were unfathomable. D.A.D. was yelling loud enough that his voice should be broken. But it wasn’t. He went on.

And on.

“He didn’t write the note,” X said, farther up the line. More than one boy shushed him immediately. But X had to finish his thought. “He wasn’t the one who wrote the note that came with the book.”…

…L TRIED NOT to look at D.A.D. It was so hard to look right at him. D.A.D. didn’t resemble D.A.D. Not at all. Not anymore. He’d become a monster. The kind of thing he used to be afraid of under his bed, down the hall to the bathroom, in the bathtub behind the curtain. An approximation of D.A.D. That’s what it was. This man in the Check-Up room, no longer wearing the red jacket or gloves (they were long discarded on the steel floor, by the rubber-soled mats), this man was not D.A.D. This man was Vees. This man was Rotts. This man was disease.

And this man had asked him a question. A question L was unable to answer. Not because he didn’t know the answer but because he couldn’t find the saliva in his mouth to speak.

“What new words did you learn, L?”

It was like no question L had ever been asked before. Certainly not by D.A.D. Not by anybody. Never. No. Never. The way he asked it, the look in this man’s eyes, the glare in the eyes of this approximation of D.A.D., it was as if D.A.D. didn’t know who L was. Or like L hadn’t ever known the real D.A.D.

The Corner, L thought. Did D.A.D. say something about the Corner?

Then D.A.D. was walking toward him in such a way that L thought the man was going to strike him. Strike him! And L found his voice at last.

“Milwaukee,” he said, shaking, rooted to the floor as if his soles had been glued.

D.A.D. stopped. He stared at L’s lips as if L had allowed Rotts to pour forth. L could tell D.A.D. had heard the word before. But that didn’t change the dumb slack-jawed look of the man. As if hearing the word from L’s mouth had hurt him deeply, had done something terrible to his mind….

…“BAR,” N SAID. “Neighborhood bar. Horny. Alley. Milwaukee.”…

…“CAB,” P SAID. “Cabdriver. Milwaukee. Bar. Whiskey.”

“What else?” D.A.D. asked. But he hadn’t really asked it. It was more like a snake made of letters had slid over his teeth.

“America,” P said. “And the U.S. of A.”…

…“I HAVEN’T READ it at all,” B said. “Not one word. I’m sorry. I was studying. I was—”

“Not one word?”

D.A.D. was standing against the glass door that kept the dogs in.

“I’m sorry, D.A.D. I just hadn’t had time yet.”

D.A.D. studied the boy in complete silence for two excruciating minutes. Long enough for Collins and Jeffrey to steal a sideways glance before quickly looking ahead again, fearful lest Richard threaten them with the Corner next….

…“I DIDN’T LIKE it,” E said. “It scared me.”

“What did. What part.”

No question marks at the end of D.A.D.’s questions. Just flat remarks spoken in a voice E did not recognize at all.

“I only made it a page deep. I just didn’t like the voice.”

“What voice.”

D.A.D. looked terrible. Pale. Sweating. Tired. He sat in a chair not two feet from the boy, his bare arms crossed over the chair back.

“You know,” E said. “The author’s voice.”

Something distant sparkled in D.A.D.’s eyes. “You mean…you didn’t appreciate the artistry?”

“No. I didn’t.”

For a flash-beat it appeared that D.A.D. was himself again: strong, intelligent, in control. Then the old him was gone, replaced once again by someone whose eyes betrayed the possibility that the mind behind them had cracked….

…“I DIDN’T ENTER the bar, no,” Q struggled to say. “I just didn’t make it that far.”

D.A.D. was kneeling above the boy. Q was on his back. Blood dripped from his split lip.

D.A.D. had punched him. It was all Q could think, on repeat.

D.A.D. punched me….

…“ENTER THE BAR?” S asked. “Do you mean to ask if Robert entered the bar?”

D.A.D. was upon him so fast that S almost laughed, thinking the madman rushing toward him must be kidding. Must be coming to show kindness, jocularity, affection.

But that’s not what happened. Before S could raise his arms to protect himself, before he could duck, D.A.D. had him by the back of the neck and was pressing his head against the rubber-soled mats.

“Did you enter the bar?”

S couldn’t speak, his lips mashed against the rubber.

“Rich—” Collins began, but D.A.D. looked up at him so quick that his glare seemed to cut the word in half.

“Tell me, S,” D.A.D. said. “Tell us.”

“No,” S finally got out. “I didn’t enter the bar.”

“Why not?”

S was crying. All the Alphabet Boys had cried today. Every one so far.

“I was too scared to see the person up close.”

“What person?”

“The person Robert entered the bar to talk to.”

“Why were you scared?”

S cried. Tears pooled on the mat where the soles of his naked feet should be.

“I didn’t want to know what Robert wanted to confess.”

D.A.D. let him go. S rolled onto his side.

“Is that okay?” S asked. “Am I going to…the Corner?”

Part of S, the majority, expected D.A.D. to smile, to plant a hand on his shoulder, to laugh and to say, Don’t worry, S, of course not the Corner, why would you be sent to the Corner, this is all a misunderstanding and you’ll see, very soon, how sensible it truly is, how much sense it really makes.

But D.A.D. didn’t do that. Instead, he stared back at S questioningly…as if he were saying, I don’t know…are you?…

…“HOW FAR DID you get into the book, J?”

J, who had spent the morning quarantined from the other boys, who had been sent for, who had been marched down the first-floor hall past the other twenty-three Alphabet Boys, hadn’t heard the shouts from within the Check-Up room. But he saw the faces of his brothers. Saw the fear and heard the silence. Saw the blood on more than one of them. Felt a horror swirling in his gut greater than what he’d felt last night upon being found by Collins in the Yard. And he knew that no matter what D.A.D. asked him beyond the metal door, he was not to tell him about Warren Bratt’s book. Not because of the note on page 1 that D.A.D. himself had signed, but because what he’d read in the book resonated more with J than anything D.A.D. had ever taught him.

“Page one,” J said. “Your note. No further.”

D.A.D. stared at him, studied him in a way J had only seen in the faces of the dogs. Like if he smelled something he shouldn’t smell, the man might suddenly bite him.

“Page one,” D.A.D. echoed. “And why did you climb the ladder down to the Yard, J?”

J did not look to Inspector Collins. He knew very well that nobody was going to help him here but himself.

“I wanted to see how far the trees go.”

“That’s what you told us last night. What you told us this morning.”

“Yes, well…”

“I don’t like that, J.”

“Why not?”

“Because you tell it the same way every time.”

J still did not look to the Inspectors. Not to the salivating dogs behind the glass, either.

“Let them out,” D.A.D. said.

Jeffrey unlatched the door. The dogs came forth. They smelled J’s hands. His legs. His feet.

In that moment J told himself it didn’t matter. None of this. Let the dogs say he was lying.

A boy, he thought, has needs.

But the dogs tired of him and trotted back to the Inspectors.

Collins and Jeffrey remained ice-sculpture still and seemed to melt with sweat.

D.A.D. only stared from across the Check-Up room. J thought his eyes might crack. Like eyes made of ice, too…

…“I READ THE whole thing,” D said. “Every single word.”

Collins audibly groaned. D.A.D. exhaled as though he’d found proof, at last, of the affair he’d so long suspected, the lie he hadn’t wanted to be true, but the lie he’d wanted so desperately to prove.

“Every word,” D.A.D. echoed. Loss in his eyes. Pain. A door, too. One D had re-created in the Yard.

The Corner.

“Yes.”

“And why? Why did you read an entire book in one sitting? Was it so…good?”

D smiled. “Because it’s the best book I’ve ever read,” he said. “Because it’s the most honest thing I’ve ever heard.” He paused, eyeing the floor as though looking through it, as though seeing the Corner itself. “Because, D.A.D….” A tear fell from his eye, splashing upon the rubber mat, just like the rubber mats he’d stood upon barefoot and naked, every morning of his life. “Because finally…it sounded like a truth.”

Panic

The Body Hall. Richard in black at the pulpit. Black slacks, black coat, black gloves. Black hair, black beard, black eyes.

Black voice.

Black words.

Almost the entire staff in attendance. Every cook. Both accountants. The men who ran the printing press. Almost all the Alphabet Boys, too.

No Warren Bratt and the men hired to bring him back.

No D.

“Panic,” Richard said, his voice still hoarse from the Inspections but infused with the righteousness that follows a threatened vision.

Prior to entering the Body Hall, as the horrified Alphabet Boys were shuttled into the pews by the staff, Richard had gone to the basement. Past the printing press, Richard eyed the red arrow and letters painted on the cobblestone wall: GLASGOW TUNNEL. RICHARD ONLY.

The letters of his name looked paltry at first glance, as if he’d overlooked the design, as if he’d overlooked every single aspect and element of the Parenthood, as if he’d gotten lazy, as if he’d destroyed his dream, as if he’d—

“FUCK!”

He’d slammed a gloved hand against the stone and turned at the arrow, entering the pitch-black of his private tunnel.

“Panic,” Richard repeated, gripping the podium now. No singing before this speech. No Voices. “I’ve always hated the word. For more reasons than we have time for, but allow me to scratch the surface.”

His voice echoed off the high ceiling the same way his boots had echoed off the tunnel below moments before.

The same way another pair of boots had echoed coming toward him down that same tunnel.

“It implies, of course, that one has lost control. That one has let the world get the best of him. But do you have any idea how unhealthy serenity is? Do you have any idea how much damage it can do?” He paused, wild-eyed. “I don’t mind worry. Worry is very, very good. The problem, boys…” The word boys made him feel temporarily dizzy. Still his? Still his boys? “The problem is when worry becomes panic. For panic is a bad boy. Spoiled all the way through.”

Ahead, in the dark tunnel, a light had come on. By its illumination, Richard could make out the Plexiglas wall at the tunnel’s center point. The shape of a figure standing very still on the other side. Richard knew the disappointed posture well.

“Panic!” Richard yelled now, so loud that all twenty-three Alphabet Boys in black recoiled at the static breakup of the PA. “What do you see when you hear the word? Do you see bricks falling from the Turret like I do? Do you see the spires falling point first into the Yard?”

In the tunnel, he did not speak till he reached the Plexiglas. And even then he did not speak first.

How many are spoiled? the shadowed figure on the other side of the glass wall asked.

One read the entire book.

Then…silence. Not because even losing one was terrible, but because it was clear Richard did not yet know the answer to the question.

“What year is it?” he asked now, his voice booming in the Body Hall. “How far have we traveled into the future, a future we once glimpsed? There are great builders, inventors, thinkers behind us. And did they not experience panic, too? And should we expect the same to destroy us? Why? Why should we be punished by the same thing that propelled so many before us? We have history to warn us, to show us how not to behave, what not to do, how to avoid panic. Yet…here we are. Trying so hard to gain control again. Trying to put bricks back into a falling wall.”

Do you believe the others? the figure had asked. Through the Plexiglas wall, the voice sounded tinny, small, young. But Richard knew better. The explosive force inherent in those syllables was strong enough to topple the tower.

I don’t know.

Shouldn’t you? Shouldn’t you know your boys better than you know anything in the world?

“Between my own foolish youth and the lives of people I’ve known, I’ve learned that panic steals. Panic scars. Once a man feels panic, he will never again face a challenge without some amount of fear. Once a man has known true hot fright, he will forget the fixed face of security. Because panic, real panic, is a state of mind that is larger than the thinker. It shrinks the thinker. It makes the thinker small! And once a man discovers something bigger than himself, he must be awed by it. And what is awe if not reverence? And what is reverence if not respect? And what is respect if not adherence to the laws of that which you respect? Oh, boys. I cannot say we must not panic, because we already have. And in doing so, we have seen the face of fear. But I wonder…does this face teach us something? Can we learn from it? Can we determine when a face like it might come again? Can we predict similar faces?”

I know my boys.

But you can’t tell who is lying?

No. I cannot.

The figure on the other side of the Plexiglas pondered this. Richard waited.

Have you considered—static accompanied the words through the small speaker—that a fictional woman is not the same thing as a real one?

Richard was surprised by the question.

Of course I haven’t. Once a boy has knowledge of a woman in any way, any form, the experiment is void.

Is it, though? Would a snake fail to achieve its potential if it was simply shown a drawing of a mongoose?

“Whether we set out to break the rules intentionally or we do not, once a rule is broken it cannot be glued back together. You did not ask for this book. Yet each of you could sense that it wasn’t right…wasn’t something you should possess. I cannot fault those of you who moved slow through its pages, despite believing it to be diseased. I cannot blame you boys for turning pages the way you might turn corners in this very building, to see what is making the sound down the hall. But I can punish those who did not see the disgusting essence therein. And certainly those who celebrated it.

“D has confessed he’s read the entire book. It remains to be determined if D is spoiled rotten.”

But what of the words her and woman? Richard asked through the glass wall in the tunnel.

Gibberish. To them. But take D away. Weigh what to do. D’s disappearance will reestablish your grip on the Turret. Do you understand?

Of course.

Can you do it?

Of course.

“D told me the truth, and I did the same in return. He described the book, and his thirst for more, in great detail. I asked him, if given the option, knowing what he knows now, knowing that the Parenthood had been deceived, would he read it again? D told me he would. I do not blame him for his curiosity. But I can punish him for his heartless mutiny. He described the book as better than any dinner, better than any shower, better than any sleep. I asked him why he would read the book again if given the option, and he told me, There are things we have to do, even if you told us not to.”

Carry on, then, Richard. And through the Inspections you will discover who else may be hiding something. If there is more to hide. Let’s hope the book is all they’ve encountered.

Is there any question?

“Are any of you spoiled? Any boy in this room?” Richard paused. For effect and nothing besides. He eyed the boys in black. His boys. Yes. Still his boys. Scared to immobility. Their eyes as wide as the biggest cherries in the Orchard.

“Have you told me the truth about this book? All of you? I leave you with a warning.” Richard leaned closer to the microphone, the whiskers of his black beard tickling the mesh head like spider legs. He scanned the young faces. Saw dried blood on Q’s lip. Saw horror in L’s face. Incredulity on J’s. “If something spoils in the Turret, the Parenthood will smell it. And nobody has a better sense of smell than your D.A.D.” Another pause. “If you’ve lied to me today, you will be punished. You will be sent to the Corner. Where you will join your dead brothers, A and Z.”

A communal gasp from the Alphabet Boys. As if D.A.D. had released Placasores into the Body Hall.

“We will know if you’ve lied. No matter where you keep that truth in your mind, no matter how deep you bury it. The Parenthood will know if you’ve lied.”

Don’t we have a more pressing matter? the figure on the other side of the Plexiglas said.

What could be more pressing than the sanctity of the boys, my boys?

Silence from the other half of the Glasgow Tunnel. Strong enough to hear.

You must find Warren Bratt. Before he tells.

I’m on it. Of course. I’ve sent—

Before he tells the world.

It Came from the Land of Snow

J lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking of D.

D was in quarantine. The day after he himself had been. And for what? For having read a book. J had read much more than he’d admitted. Did that make him potentially spoiled rotten, too? What would happen to D? Would D be sent to the Corner? J didn’t feel any different. Did it feel any different to be spoiled rotten? Did it matter?

At all?

The idea of D being sent to the Corner was unfathomable. Both A and Z were sent to the Corner at such a young age that the rest of the Alphabet Boys were hardly capable of processing what it meant. But now, at age twelve, they’d had years to imagine what the Corner was like, years to solidify their idea of the boogeyman, years to become permanently afraid.

J sat up. D.A.D.’s spontaneous speech was horrifying. There was no better word to describe it. The man’s voice sounded different. He looked different. Like a stranger had taken D.A.D.’s place. A man who had been hiding in the Turret for a long time, waiting for his opportunity to emerge.

He had emerged.

Q had been hit. T and S assaulted.

J got out of bed and took the carpeted hall to the living room. Q’s ladder had been taken down the night before, the Parenthood’s way of ensuring J didn’t take another midnight stroll. Why not? No book and now…no walk, either.

He checked his reflection in the window overlooking the Yard. No sores. No scratches. No rash. No changes at all.

Shouldn’t the Inspectors have been able to see that J had read more than he said he did? Shouldn’t D.A.D. have seen it? What did spoiled rotten mean, then, if they couldn’t?

J took the hall back to his bedroom. He lay down and tried to sleep, even succeeded for ten minutes. He was emotionally exhausted from the day. He did not dream, though Q once said that everybody dreams and sometimes they just don’t remember them. Q bled today. Outside J’s bedroom window, the wind sighed, then sobbed; the icy branches of the pines crackled. The ice sculptures in the Yard creaked as they were tested.

It sounded like music down there. A very cold song. Possibly one Warren Bratt would’ve known how to describe.

J got out of bed again, feeling more than a little crazed. More than a little afraid.

The carpet was warm against his feet, contrasting with the world outside his window. In the bathroom it was even warmer, the space being smaller than his bedroom. J basked in the heat rising from the vent. He thought of a person seated at a bar in Milwaukee. Thought of a man named Robert needing to confess something to that person.

Her.

Nonsense. Made-up words.

The relief of peeing was welcome, as though all the bad feelings and fears flowed from him and splashed into the toilet.

He could almost make out D.A.D.’s speech swirling below.

Finished, J stepped to the sink and washed his hands. A palm print, his own, on the mirror glass reminded him of the handprints he, D, Q, and L made as toddlers in the snowy Yard in winters past. He imagined his younger self now. He spoke to him.

J? Where are you? Have you grown up? Have you changed? Let’s do the things we used to do, when we trusted the Parenthood and looked to D.A.D. for guidance. Can you find that place again, J? Can you find me? Where are you?

He dried his hands and stepped from the mirror. Outside the bathroom, the wind beyond the window was much louder. He’d heard this song many times, last winter and the winter before, but now it sounded like it might accompany Warren Bratt’s Robert as he confessed to the woman at the bar.

We created a false reality, built entirely of misinformation…

J was surprised to find he was standing in the hall, staring at a picture of himself as a baby, in the arms of D.A.D.

How innocent J looked. How easy to fool.

“Don’t do that,” he told himself. “Stop thinking like that.”

But what other way was there to think? The Parenthood had lost its collective mind over a book. The author of which D.A.D., in the frightening pop Inspection, had referred to as a fucking troll.

In one of Luxley’s books, a troll granted a boy three wishes.

From the hole in your face to the one in my ear, three wishes you’ll speak and three wishes I’ll hear!

J felt a momentary wave of stability. Luxley’s books were still a place he could go to without wondering why.

In this way, fiction, for J, had become more trustworthy than fact.

Three wishes. From the hole in J’s mouth to the one in Warren’s ear.

First, I want your book back.

Are you sure?

Yes.

Are you sure?

Yes.

Okay.

Secondly, I’d like to know what D.A.D. is so afraid of.

Are you sure? The truth is frightening.

Yes.

Okay.

And thirdly…I’d like to meet you.

Are you sure?

The reflection of J’s face in the glass overlapped the image of his face as a baby.

Oh, how things had changed.

There was no knowledge in the face of that baby. No suspicion at all.

He tore himself from the photo.

Oh, D.A.D.’s voice today. In the first-floor Check-Up room. Blood on his knuckles. In the Body Hall, too.

The sound a man makes when the one thing that could unravel his life’s work shows up at his rooms, knocks on his door.

Someone was knocking on J’s door.

J stopped at the entrance to the living room. Stared across to the door. Who? Who was here so late at night?

A second knock, more forceful than the first, told him it was not the door. It was coming from the wide window to his right.

J looked.

Someone was gripping the top of Q’s ladder with one hand, knocking on the glass with the other. Someone had placed Q’s ladder back up against the window.

“Oh!” J cried, stepping back into the hall, out of view again. He couldn’t breathe right, couldn’t find the strength to stop his legs from shaking.

More knocking. J thought of the long hair he’d seen blown by the winter wind. The pale skin. The small fist that knocked on the glass.

A voice now, added to the cold song.

“Please! I need help!”

It spoke. It spoke! And its voice was like none J knew.

“Who…” He repeated the word many times, still out of view.

“Please! Hurry!”

J flattened himself to the hall wall. He shook his head no. No, whatever this was would go away. No. He was not going to look at the person at his window again.

But after another desperate knock, J peered around the corner.

What he saw at the glass chilled him colder than the ice of the ladder it’d used to reach him.

Long hair, yes. A skinny body, yes. Small hands.

Wide eyes. An unhappy face. Lips in a square, teeth bared.

What kind of boy was this?

The kind that Robert followed into a neighborhood bar in Milwaukee.

“Go away!” J shouted.

But the thing knocked again.

“Please!”

J couldn’t comprehend what he was hearing. The Turret lights that lit the sculptures below lit the thing at his window, too. And the face that spoke to him was like no face J had ever seen.

“Go away!” he cried again.

The wind wailed, the Turret creaked, and the person outside trembled for balance on the ladder.

It’s one thing to read about it in a book, J thought. But to see it…

But what did that mean? Who was this?

Was it death? Was it disease?

“J!” the person said. “LET ME IN!”

J. It knew his name.

Feeling as though nothing was real anymore, that he knew nothing at all, J stepped fully out of the hall and approached the living room window.

“Hurry,” the person said.

J hurried.

“Open the window, please! I’m so cold.”

J went to the glass. The window did not shatter upon him. The person did not break it.

Placasores did not come screeching into his room.

J unlocked the latch.

He thought of Robert walking into that neighborhood bar. He thought of Robert confessing.

J held the side of the window, still too afraid to open it, to let in the storm, to let in the…

“Her,” he said. But he wished he hadn’t.

“Please.”

“She.”

Shivering, crying. “Let me in.”

“Woman.”

“I can tell you the truth about the Parenthood.” Smart eyes. Kind eyes. “The Turret. The Corner. Your D.A.D. I have those answers.”

The words from the book crawled up J’s throat like the many-legged bugs in the Orchard. Crawled all over his mind. Threatened to drive him mad.

“Please,” it said.

J opened the window.

And the person who so resembled Warren Bratt’s mystery in Milwaukee, the long-haired thing at the bar, at his window, at the threshold of his sanity, climbed in.

A woman lowered herself into his living room.

And into his life.