Seated six a table at four large round tops, most of the Alphabet Boys appeared charged by D.A.D.’s speech in the Body Hall. F, funny F, joked as freely as if the Parenthood had outlawed studying for the day. His large front teeth looked especially white in contrast to his black button-down shirt and the black blazer that hung over his seat back. J and D had long, privately, joked that F looked like a “living cartoon.” They watched him talk, now, as they once smiled at drawings scribbled into the margins of their textbooks.
“Hey, W,” F said. “Don’t eat my breakfast today. I know you’re gonna want to and I know you’re gonna ask for my leftovers, but there simply won’t be any. So the only way you’re gonna get at my food is by eating your way through my stomach.” He paused, feigned seriousness with his overweight friend. “I shouldn’t have given you that idea, huh.”
J eyed the two boys. F and W were very close. They’d shared a floor with P and T their whole lives. And would J be sharing a floor with any of them when the day of the floor shift came? And how many years would it be that way?
“And what’s with you?” F asked, pointing two fingers directly at J. “You look like you just got sent to the Corner.”
“Oh, come now,” L said. Conservative, proper L.
F snorted. “Oh, stop it, L,” he said. “It’s good to talk about scary things. Makes them less so. But I’m not gonna let J here get off the hook just because you don’t like the way I speak.” He smiled at J. Eyes wide. It was F’s way: exaggeration.
“Nothing’s wrong,” J said. But it was clear something was.
“Is something the matter?” Q asked. Q’s glasses magnified his eyes as the Inspectors’ glasses might.
“No…it’s just…”
“Ah-ha!” F said. “I knew it! I told you! Am I good, or am I good?” He nudged W, and W nodded a yes. “Come on, then, J. Out with it.”
J thought fast. He couldn’t and wouldn’t tell them that he’d hidden information in the morning’s Inspection. He would not look hysterical in front of his brothers any more than he would the Parenthood.
“The notebooks,” J said. And as the words left his mouth, he understood that he was more upset about it than he’d realized.
“And what about them?” F asked, his big teeth wrinkling his lower lip.
“Well, in my Inspection this morning, D.A.D. told me he had an idea, just for me. He mentioned a notebook. Something I could write in. Fill…just for him.”
W smiled and his fat cheeks turned a rosy shade of red. “You mean this one?” He pulled one out from under the table. A large black W was printed on its cover.
“You sneak!” F said. “You already went up to your room and nabbed it!”
“I move well for a large boy, F.”
The friends laughed heartily. Then W turned his focus on J. Like Q, W had especially intelligent eyes. Quiet as he was, he often gave off the impression that he knew something the other boys did not. But whereas Q’s intelligence seemed to flow from an inquisitive place, W’s was more rooted in the Constitution of the Parenthood. D.A.D. himself had said W would make an excellent lawyer one day.
“Either way, what you’re saying isn’t true,” W said. J felt a quiet jolt. Had W just suggested J hid something in his Inspection?
But no. He had not.
“What do you mean?” J asked.
W hid the notebook back under the table. “Three days ago, in Professor Kinney’s class, K’s calculator stopped working. Kinney sent me to the office to fetch him a new one.”
“No doubt to encourage a little exercise, friend,” F poked.
W waved his brother off. “While I was there?” He leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms. “I saw a stack of twenty-four blue notebooks, each with one of our names printed bold upon its cover.”
“I don’t follow,” L said.
“You never do,” F said.
“What W is saying,” Q kindly said, “is that D.A.D. couldn’t have told J he had an idea planned just for him, when three days ago he’d already carried out the same idea for us all.”
Silence at the table. The voices of the other boys in the cafeteria filled the space.
They all looked to J for some sort of rebuttal. But J was at a loss for words. D.A.D. had told him he’d thought of the notebook just for him. And the way he’d said it…like he’d just thought of it…
Suddenly, as if a fan had been turned on in a very hot room, J felt some of his own guilt cool off. But the cool air brought cold.
Had J and D.A.D. lied to one another on the same day?
It was almost too frightening to imagine.
“You must’ve misunderstood him,” L said. “Simple as that.”
“But I didn’t.”
“Poor J,” F said. “Thought he had a little special attention and, in the end, he did not.”
“Obviously you’re not suggesting D.A.D. lied to you, J,” Q said.
J thought of the Corner. What little he knew of it. A door in the basement of the tower. A basement none of the boys knew how to get to.
“I didn’t say he lied,” J said.
“Of course you didn’t,” Q said. “That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“But you are saying he got something wrong,” W added. “And that’s perhaps just as egregious.”
Before J could defend himself, the bell rang and the cooks appeared with trays of waffles, eggs, fruits, and vegetables. As each boy was served, Q spoke of the merits of fruit in the morning and F pretended to hide his food from W. But J didn’t feel hungry anymore.
J was thinking about lies.
The train of thought was so profound that he found himself replaying exactly what D.A.D. had said in the Check-Up room. I’ve just had a wonderful idea. How about if I manufacture a means by which you can tell me your thoughts, your feelings, directly. Something we can share, just you and I. A notebook perhaps. You take notes and…deliver them to me. Why, we could be pen pals in that way.
Not quite a lie after all. Technically, D.A.D. hadn’t said it was just for him.
Yet, just you and I…
Surely J had it wrong. A word here, a word there, and the meaning of a thing could change so much. Luxley talked about that in one of his books. J couldn’t tell if he felt relief at the idea of D.A.D. blurring the truth or if it scared him more deeply than the idea of that vague door in the basement. Was that door below him now? Below the very chair in which he sat?
“Eat up, J,” F said. “Or W is gonna leap across the table.”
“I just might,” W said. The way he said it, J couldn’t help but feel like W was angry with him. As if the large boy was reminding him that he’d implied something wrong. Terribly wrong.
J poked at his food until he ate it. Until he realized, for the first time in his young life, that it was possible to carry on, to eat and to sleep, to talk and perhaps to even study, as the world around him…changed.
“Heck of a speech,” F said. “Luxley must have written it.”
“Luxley doesn’t write the speeches,” D said.
“Oh? How do you know that?” J asked.
D shrugged. “You can tell. They don’t have the same energy.”
F flailed his hands in the air. “Would you listen to you two? One implies D.A.D. lied to him and the other says Lawrence Luxley has more energy than our father! Maybe the coming floor shift is a good thing. You guys could use splitting up.”
He laughed, but J and D looked at one another across the table.
“I didn’t say he lied,” J reiterated. “Don’t even say something like that. I’m sure I just…” He paused. “I had it wrong. He didn’t say what I thought he said.”
“No kidding!” L said. “Now, can we move on?”
They did. J ate to the rhythm of the other boys discussing Lawrence Luxl
ey and Professors Gulch and Kinney. Yellow Ball and Film Night. He ate to the uneven beat of his own thoughts as well, as his own words played out—I didn’t say he lied, I didn’t say he lied—at odds with the equally rhythmic rebuttal:
But I think he might have.
Warren Bratt and Lawrence Luxley
Richard could do everything in his power to make the basement more comfortable for Warren, but in the end it would still be a basement. And the truth was, Richard had. He’d ordered the carpenters to swap out the carpet, hang better pictures on the walls, renovate the storage rooms, realign the shelves, and muffle the boiler, repaint the doors, install a new toilet. Hell, Richard had even sent him flowers. They stood now in murky water upon Warren’s writing desk, equidistant between Gordon and Warren, as the writer received his weekly earful on how to write a book from a man who certainly didn’t know how.
“Richard isn’t asking for anything from your soul, Warren. I think you know that.” Gordon wore his trademark fine suit. The way he sat half upon Warren’s desk drove him insane. “He’s not interested in the tangle of emotion and epiphany that no doubt swirls in your belly. To be brutally honest with you, Warren, he’s not interested in your artistry at all.”
Warren, hefty and sweating, standing beside his chair, tried to maintain a look of professional ambiguity. But it was hard. Gordon spoke to him on Richard’s behalf like he spoke to all the Parenthood staff: as if Warren Bratt, a.k.a. Lawrence Luxley, were a child. Younger somehow than even the boys. “If you ever find that you are blocked, just remind yourself that he’s not looking for the great American novel. He’s not even looking for the great Antarctic novel. He’s looking for a book. A bad book will do. In fact, a bad book will do better than a good one. You know this. You’ve written twenty-nine of them already.”
“Thank you, Gordon. Thank you very much.”
For a decade, Warren had considered these meetings to be the most difficult part of his job. But recently something much worse had come up.
The Guilts, he’d called it.
It was a dangerous emotion for a staff member of the Parenthood to experience. He could hardly admit to himself what it was for. But really, there was no hiding it, as the source operated above him in the many floors of the Turret, day in, day out.
Guilt, yes, for how they were raising these boys.
Shut up, Warren thought now, Gordon so close. He half-imagined an Inspector bringing a magnifying glass to his ear, proclaiming him unclean.
The Guilts.
The feeling was only a splinter now, but not long ago it had only been a sliver.
Gordon smiled and Warren felt the familiar rush of rage in his chest, his blood, his bones. Gordon had a way of smiling that suggested you agreed with him in the end, no matter how ridiculous a thing he had proposed. And Warren, like the rest of the Parenthood, complied. Smiled back. Beyond the white door of Warren’s basement office, the subterranean halls of the Parenthood wound like catacombs. And while the boiler had been quieted some, Richard had no plans to turn down the volume of the Corner.
“What are you thinking for the next book?” The way Gordon asked it was nothing like Warren’s old pals, the Writing Gangsters, used to ask it at Don Don’s pub in Milwaukee. In those days, Warren’s equally idealistic cohorts had to blow their purple-dyed bangs from their eyes before they could look into his, usually flexing a tattoo or two for good measure. And if ever they asked after a book idea, it was with genuine artistic concern. Oh, how Warren Bratt missed his pretentious, holier-than-thou, degenerate former friends.
But those days were ten years past. And Warren’s gut wasn’t the only thing that had grown in that time. The Alphabet Boys were almost teenagers now. He’d watched them grow up in real time. Knowing what they knew. And what they didn’t.
The Guilts, indeed.
“I’m not sure yet,” he said purposefully. It felt good to make the corporate suck-up squirm. Corner hum or not, once a punk always a poker, and Warren Bratt had to stick it to Gordon anytime he could. Of course he had an idea for the next book. He had one thousand ideas for the next one thousand books. Because Richard, the Alphabet Boys’ magnanimous D.A.D., wasn’t looking for, as Gordon just said, a work of art. Most decidedly not. Richard wanted supermarket slop. The kind of books that Warren’s aunts used to slurp up on the beaches of the Wisconsin Dells. The kind of books that showed half-naked men clutching half-naked women, their lust as clearly stated as their loins.
Except…no women in these books. Oh no.
“Let’s do this,” Gordon began. Always an idea for the next book. Always similar to the last one. “Give us something about a man who washes windows.” He snapped his fingers. Warren knew very well where this was going. The plots of the leisure books were more formulaic than the romance novels he wished he was writing instead.
Has it come to that? Warren asked himself.
But no. Not quite that. And though Warren wasn’t able to examine this feeling in whole, as Gordon sat staring at him from across his writing desk, he understood it was something like that. Something like wanting to write the worst thing he’d ever written, if only it meant not writing more of the same.
“Right now,” Gordon said. “Give the window washer a name.”
Warren didn’t have to think hard. He had a long list of trite masculine names.
“Jerry.”
“Great. Jerry it is. And what does Jerry do?”
“You said yourself he washes windows.”
“Where? What building?”
Warren wanted to grab Gordon’s smug face by the perfectly shaved chin.
“How about the Turret.”
“Great. Yes. The very building we’re in. So?”
“So?”
“So what happens in your next book? No women, of course.”
“Gordon—”
“We could all use a gentle reminder. The boys have reached the Delicate Years, after all. Their fresh needs will be…in the air. Let’s be careful what we breathe, Bratt.”
Warren felt cold fingers up and down his arms. What was Gordon actually after down here? Had Richard grown…paranoid? Was it possible that, after all this time, Richard had begun questioning the foundation of his darling experiment?
That’s all you, buddy, Warren thought. Alllll you.
The Guilts.
Indeed.
“Stop it,” Warren said, not meaning to. The office lights exposed his thinning curly hair, anxious eyes behind his black-rimmed glasses, and a belly the Writing Gangsters would’ve thrown pencils at.
Oh, how he missed those friends.
“Tell me more about this window washer.”
Warren was glad for the return of the subject.
“Okay. One day, while washing the windows of the Turret—”
“Yes.”
“Jerry sees a naked blonde bent over a writer’s desk.”
“Warren.” The temperature in Gordon’s eyes dropped to none.
“While washing the windows of the Turret, Jerry sees something curious happen inside one of the boys’ bedrooms.”
“Now I’m interested. Very.”
“He sees one of the boys cheating at Boats and—”
“Not Boats. Don’t want them analyzing that particular game. How about Panhandle?”
“Panhandle. And—”
“This is very good.”
“—and first he finishes his job—”
“Of course, of course.”
“—and when he gets back down to the ground, he either goes to the head of the Parenthood and informs him of what he saw or he approaches the boy himself.”
Gordon frowned. The angles of his face worked in such accord that it looked, to Warren, as if he were a puppet made of Parenthood wood.
“Hmmm. The problem with approaching the boy h
imself is that we’d be empowering the window washer. As a profession.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“Oh?”
Warren brought a stubby hand to his collar. He tugged on it. It always felt as if the temperature in the office increased incrementally for the duration of his meetings with Gordon. This story (Warren had a hard time calling it a story, calling it anything other than propaganda) was no different from any other leisure book he had written. Yet Gordon nitpicked.
An editor in hell, Warren thought. But it wasn’t funny. And when did jokes like these cease to be funny? When had Warren started feeling this way? Hadn’t he bought in, years ago, when they paid him his first check?
“The boys are young enough that they’ll eventually substitute window washing with the fields of study Richard’s hoping they’re drawn to. For Christ’s sake, Gordon. Do they have a choice?”
Gordon clucked his tongue. Warren stopped talking. He knew he’d come close to saying something he shouldn’t have. A statement like that might reveal the Guilts.
“We’re not raising the right thing to do, Warren. We’re raising the most enlightened, undistracted minds in the history of mankind.”
Gordon rose, got up off the desk. He stood a full five inches taller than Warren. But Warren didn’t attempt to correct his slouch. Let the corporate slave own the room. Warren didn’t want it anymore.
“So tell me,” Gordon said. “Is this idea artistic to you? Is this the sort of thing your younger self would have thought fit to write?”
“No. Not even close.”
He thought of Gordon’s voice on an answering machine, echoing in a shitty apartment, so long ago. He thought of the Writing Gangsters. How they would recoil at what he’d become. How they might kill him, for his own sake.
“You see, then? If ever you find yourself blocked, call for me and we’ll have another little chat. Richard would very much like to see this window-washer book done as quickly as possible. But you are, of course, the writer.”
“I wasn’t blocked.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“I’ll write it.”
Of course he would. He always did. And the money in his bank account swelled.
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