They’d reached the rows now, Mister Tree being no more (or less) than a greeter, a solitary outlier between Yard and Orchard. The boys paused. Somewhere out there in the rows of cherry trees were the trees they’d grown upon. The Living Trees D.A.D. had plucked them from twelve years ago.
After a glance at the way the snow fell upon the uniform branches, the boys commenced walking.
“Maybe he just likes white,” D said. “You don’t have to call it a protest just because he likes white.”
“Well,” L said, obviously trying to change the subject. “There’s plenty of white out here!” He held his open palms to the sky. “Maybe he should come outside!”
They had entered the first row of cherry trees, the branches of one nearly touching the next. For the first time in his life, J thought it looked like a fence.
He recalled the days when he and D played hide-and-seek in the Orchard. When they’d look for the Living Trees, too. No boy knew which ones they were. And the Parenthood said it was up to them to find out.
“What was his punishment?” D asked.
L scoffed. “How should I know?”
“You know everything else!”
“Well, I don’t know the answer to that. But I can guess.” Their shoes crunched the fresh snow and grass. Out here, walking the rows of the Orchard, things were less manicured than they were in the Yard. The boys had no doubt that D.A.D. intentionally left it so. A chance for his boys to explore, to feel less tethered to the Turret.
“Probably lost this year’s Film Night privilege,” Q said. “Which is a shame, because I’ve heard good things about it.”
“What have you heard?” D asked.
“C told me it’s the best one yet.”
“Oh, what does C know.”
“Film Night would be a fairly large punishment,” L said. “And yet…T should know better. Wearing white to a speech!”
“An oversight,” D reiterated. J heard the frustration in his voice. But J’s mind was still elsewhere. Still stuck between two places, like Mister Tree between the Orchard and the Yard; between what D.A.D. said in the Check-Up room today and what he’d said onstage in the Body Hall.
They’d reached halfway down the first row of trees, the horizon obscured by a mist of fine snow. The cold wind tousled their hair, and Q bundled himself tighter in his coat. He wiped the fog off his glasses, too.
“It’s official, then,” D said.
“What is?” L asked.
“Q cleaned his glasses. Winter is here.”
Every year, the first snowfall announced the coming Effigy Meet, when the twenty-four Alphabet Boys competed for the best ice sculpture, as judged by the Parenthood. J hadn’t ever come close to winning, but he didn’t mind. The Effigy Meet encouraged creation itself, construction, the angles and necessary math. Temperature and sustainability. When considering the annual event, J couldn’t help thinking of the many rooms of the one building he knew so well. The Turret that grew smaller behind them.
“What do you think the Corner looks like?” J surprised himself by asking. He looked over his shoulder—they all did—for fear that the legendary basement door might have followed them outside, was perhaps suspended between the rows of cherry trees.
“Come on!” L said. “T isn’t going to the Corner for a white shirt, J! My goodness, you’re acting strange today.”
“I’m not saying he will,” J said. “I’m just wondering. What do you think the Corner looks like?”
“We know what it looks like,” Q said. “It’s just a door.”
“How do you know that?” D asked. Again, J felt a bond between himself and D. He wasn’t sure he liked it. It seemed easier to hide dangerous thoughts when you were the only one having them.
“Because I’ve been told so,” Q said. J heard rare embarrassment in Q’s voice. Q was, after all, the one who typically questioned things. “Why are you asking, J?”
J lifted his hand to a leafless tree branch, made to break off a piece, thought better of it.
He stopped walking.
“Aren’t you interested in where A and Z went?”
The other three stopped walking, too. D turned to face J, interest in his eyes. Q pulled out his notebook and wrote in it. L bent at the waist, planting his hands on his knees.
“I think all this walking is limiting the oxygen to your brain,” L said. “And the cold is freezing what remains.”
“Don’t you wonder, L?” J asked.
L rose to his full height again. “No. I don’t. The Corner. So?”
“Where exactly do you think they went? What do you think is on the other side of that door?”
L made to speak but stopped.
“I imagine it’s like the Nursery,” Q said. “The same place we were raised, we die.”
“Come on!” L said. “Lies and death! I’ve had just about enough of this!”
“What do you mean?” J asked.
But Q only shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m working on it. Here’s a new thought: We were made out here in the Orchard. So maybe this is where…we die.”
They were quiet. But J wanted more. “And how do we die? What happens to us? Who…”
“Who takes away our life?” Q asked. “That’s easy. The Parenthood. Who else? It’s part of their responsibility. To see us all the way through birth to death.”
“And how do they know when it’s time?”
“When we’re spoiled,” L said. He said it like he was bored. “You know, guys, you’re making me very excited for the floor shift. I think I need new boys to talk to. Boys who talk about better things!”
Subtle movement on the nearest tree caught D’s eye.
“Look,” he said. “Fighting Bugs.”
It was one of the many things the Alphabet Boys hoped to see in the Orchard. Rarely was a bug found inside the tower and never two at once. Certainly no two like the two small red ones they observed up close, one mounted upon the back of the other.
Fighting Bugs.
“They’re angry,” L said. “And they picked a perfectly fine day to have it out!”
Coat shoulder to coat shoulder, the boys observed the tiny bugs, red with black spots, struggle upon the bark of the cherry tree. They watched for a long time.
“Who do you think will win?” D asked. But the boys knew better. Nobody had ever seen a Fighting Bug win its fight. Rather, these two, like all the others, would simply go their separate ways when it was over.
“I suppose they’re something like us,” Q said.
“How so?” D asked.
“Well, they jockey for position. Speak their minds. Argue about it. Go their own ways.”
They sallied forth and talked this way, this subject and others, until they reached the first turn. Three-quarters of a mile later, the second. The snowfall got heavier. Q, L, and D discussed the number of trees, their height, and how they’d grown. They searched for the Living Trees. Examined many up close. Perhaps a new boy could be found growing on one? By the time they reached the end of the Orchard, Mister Tree in sight again, J was deep within a hole of his own thinking. He imagined a Living Tree at one end of a basement hall, the Corner at the other. He imagined being plucked from the former and stepping into the latter. He imagined being born and dying. Like A and Z.
As they passed Mister Tree, he said, “I’m going to find the Corner. And I’m going to look inside.”
The others stopped walking.
“Okay,” Q said. “Now I’m starting to agree with L. You sure you’re all right?”
“Yes.”
“But you’d like to go look at the Corner?”
“I wanna know what’s in there,” J said.
Only D remained silent. L and Q discussed the anti-Parenthood (and just plain silly) qualities of J’s remark.
“Why don’t you just climb the tower spires and leap to your death?” L asked. “It’d be an equally satisfying end.”
Tired of arguing and exhausted by the day’s bizarre subjects, the four boys went quiet. D and J looked to the ground. Q and L to the snow that fell to it.
“The Recasting Years,” Q finally said. “D.A.D. knew something was coming. And here it is. It was very wise of him to tell us so.”
Slowly, the boys traipsed back into the Yard.
“If you really wanna know what the Corner looks like,” L said, “go stand in one.”
Even J had to laugh at this. As they passed D.A.D.’s first-floor window, as they saw themselves and the pretty snow reflected in the glass, all four floor mates giggled about J standing in a Corner, any old corner, as if it could possibly emulate the horror they could hear humming, all day in the Turret, from below.
It felt good to laugh. Especially for J. And hearing Q’s high laughter and L’s bellowing belly laugh served to root J again, even if momentarily, to the foundation of the Parenthood. And, despite these new thoughts, foreign and overwhelming, he felt safe. He felt protected. He felt warm.
But D’s laughter didn’t last long, and J noticed.
As Q and L walked ahead, D turned to look at J, and J intentionally did not look back. He knew that a simple exchange of unspoken questions would be enough to uproot him all over again.
So when L asked, “Do you think D.A.D. is watching us from in there?” and Q answered, “I think he’s picking his nose,” J laughed with his brothers, as if the laughter might stave off the thoughts he’d been having, might block their way, laughter versus thought, like two Fighting Bugs in his head, stopping it all from multiplying.
Warren Writes
Warren set the yellow legal pad aside and removed the white one from his desk.
And that was all there was to it.
He looked to his office door. It was locked, he’d locked it himself, but that didn’t make him feel any safer. He’d written every Luxley book on yellow legal pads before delivering them to the typesetters and printers down the cobblestoned hall of the Parenthood basement, where the pages went from Warren’s chicken scrawl to the semiprofessional look they adopted by the time they ended up in the hands of the Alphabet Boys.
But the white pad…
Warren hadn’t used the white pad since he was a…a…
Fledgling wasn’t the right word, and Warren would’ve been pissed if he’d heard someone else use it. Fledgling suggested he didn’t know how to write. Even back then. Chick, greenhorn, rookie, novice, tenderfoot. Everybody in Milwaukee could take those words and shove ’em up their ass. Warren liked how he wrote. He always had. He liked what he wrote, thank you, and writing, for Warren, had never had anything to do with money. Nothing to do with toasting vodka in a big-city publishing house. Nothing to do with seeing his novels printed with a professional, glossy Modern Library cover that featured a wise photo of himself readers couldn’t help but look at every time they encountered another well-crafted sentence.
“Nope,” Warren said, tapping his pencil against the white pages on his desk. Beyond his office, the boiler hummed. Or maybe it was the Corner. “I was never in it for the money.”
Yet…here he was, so much richer than his former colleagues, the Writing Gangsters, his Milwaukee crew of pretentious, self-absorbed…
“Artists, my ass,” Warren said. He looked to the door again. Still locked. He eyed the white pad. He thought of the Alphabet Boys, twelve years old now, and wow how time flies when you’re having a terrible time.
He tried, really tried, to imagine not knowing what a woman was.
“It’s criminal,” he said. But that much was obvious. And certainly not the worst of it. Agreeing to be a part of it, ah, now, that was something. The other staff needed the gig—hell, the other staff were like born-again drug addicts, offered the chance of a lifetime by a man who looked like God to them now. Richard had made wealthy men of them all. Made hidden men of them all, too.
But what was Warren’s excuse? No criminal record. No real reason to disappear. To drop out. To hide. Why oh why had he agreed to work here and why oh why had it taken him so long to realize how terrible that decision had been?
Warren was stuck when he met Richard. Yes. He had no illusions about that now.
Oh, how good a drink sounded.
Drinking had never been a social event for the Cocky from Milwaukee. Beer and booze weren’t fun. Rather, they were physical locations, places he went looking for new ideas, bridges between existing ideas, channels he had no access to when sober. When Warren left his crummy apartment and walked into a liquor store, he didn’t consider himself to be scratching an itch. Rather, he saw the bottles as doors, with so many potential stories behind them.
“Remember Detective Bratt?” Warren asked himself, allowing a small sad smile to crawl up his lips. “You used to pretend you were hunting ideas. Holy shit, Detective Bratt. Private Eyesore.”
He thumbed the white pad’s top page. So much potential there, he thought. Any story…any story at all…
“Okay,” Warren said, pushing his chair from the desk. “Enough.” He got up as though prepared to do something specific but only paced the office instead. At the black leather couch he paused, then plopped down, only to get right back up. He adjusted his fogging glasses. Ran his chubby fingers over his big belly. Thought he could smell his own fear.
He thought of the Writing Gangsters, too. Tried not to imagine what they would say now if they’d read the books he’d made so much money from. The shitty Lawrence Luxley adventure stories that always (always!) followed the same arc, the same themes, and certainly featured the same gender over and over and over and over and over and…
Warren glanced at the white pad on the desk. From across the office it looked something like bright evidence. White fire. Like he might want to run and put the legal pad out.
He heard something in the hall, boots on the stone floor.
There were no words on that white pad, but if Richard were to try the door, find it locked, unlock it with his own key, and see that pad…why…wouldn’t he know what was going through Warren’s mind? Wouldn’t he be able to see the shame-inspired story as it slid down Warren’s arms, bringing his fingers to move as if they were already writing the book?
“Book?” Warren whispered to himself. “What book?”
The steps got quieter as they passed his office door. Or maybe they just stopped outside it? No, no. They were gone now. Warren imagined the printers, the pair of ex-cons down the hall who ran off the pamphlets, the textbooks, the announcements, the letters, the report cards, and (yes) all of Lawrence Luxley’s terrible, artless books.
“The Writing Gangsters would lynch you,” he said, half-stammering, walking slowly back to his desk, his eyes on the clean white pad. “They’d call you a fraud, a forger, a sellout.” He staved off slim tears. “And they’d be right.”
Oh, how high and mighty he’d been in Milwaukee, despite the drinking, despite being bone broke…back when the offer of a lifetime came to him by way of a phone call.
“But whose life?” Warren asked himself, still staring at the blank white cover page. “This isn’t your life.”
Oh, but it was.
I’ll tell you how to write, he used to stammer in his gruff and short way, speaking blunt to the rest of the Gangsters. You got the way you write and you got the way you want to write. And then you got what you think is too crazy for you to be writing. What you need to do is embarrass yourself…get crazy. In the end the embarrassing shit is what you wanted to be writing all along.
Oh, so full of soul. So full of art.
So full of shit.
The Gangsters ate it up. Warren’s gothic minions, an ex-girlfriend had called them. His personal fan club. The only people in all of Wisconsin who’d brave a
winter storm to go listen to a drunk Warren Bratt define what real writing was. He looked the part, too, and certainly drank it. The stocky, angry author going on about the heart of art and the purpose of a good book. Books were his religion, he’d said. His Jesus, his God. His maker.
But despite his claims that he wasn’t interested in money, he sure believed he was worth a lot of it.
Countless rows in Don Don’s. So many fights with the Gangsters. Always always always about money.
Always.
“You were a pig,” he told himself now. “Fucking Christ, Bratt. You were a pig.”
A stuck pig, no less. Perfectly fixed for a visit from Richard.
Warren used to tell anybody in earshot how much he was worth. How much a sentence of his was worth. How much even a conversation about how much he was worth was worth. Once he asked a fellow Gangster for payment, for having been sanctified with Warren’s advice.
“You used to call yourself a seer,” he said now, finally lowering himself into his writing chair. He had no recollection of picking the pencil up, but there it was. Between his fingers. “Oh God. How fucking embarrassing.”
Why now? Why realize this now? Was it the natural arc of an asshole? An inevitable day of retribution?
Or was it the look of adulthood in the eyes of the Alphabet Boys? The moment when he could no longer say, Well, what do kids know anyway.
He tried to slink back into the hollows of his own smoky parlors, his troubled mind, the rooms he’d occupied for so long, making his role at the Parenthood bearable. But he couldn’t find them anymore. Like the Nursery that once harbored twenty-six cribs, those rooms had been cemented over.
“What have you done?”
He looked up, actually expecting to see someone else standing on the other side of his desk. Surely it wasn’t his voice he’d heard ask the question? Surely he didn’t sound like that? And there was simply no way the man who asked that question was the same one who had agreed to write books for two dozen boys gaslighted and locked into an experiment of ungodly dynamics…
…for life.
He felt something unnatural move in his gut. As if a very bad thing had gotten inside him and there was no way to get it out. No surgery to remove the barbarity he’d been a part of.
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