The Parenthood was no longer bearable. On any level and in any way. That was certain now.
“Oh fuck,” he said. “You’re gonna do it, aren’t you?” It wasn’t a motivational thing to say. It didn’t feel good at all.
It scared him to death.
He looked to the office door, perhaps considering unlocking it. Putting the white pages away.
But he knew he’d just passed that option, as if it were a deep-space mile marker, one Warren saw as he floated, without gravity, beyond it.
The Gangsters had warned him about his obsession with money. Bald Bill O’Brien said it would grow on him like mold. One day it would swallow his art. And the next day it would swallow him. Warren denied it all. Punched O’Brien for saying so. Broke up with Trish Newton for saying the same thing.
When the Cocky from Milwaukee got rolling about money, it was like standing inches from a lit Civil War cannon, and there wasn’t much one could do but duck.
The top page of the white legal pad looked lit, too.
Ready to blow.
Warren told them the art was in an untouchable place, that that wasn’t what he meant when he said he was worth something, when he drunkenly charged his friends for wisdom. Money was not something to be afraid of. Not something to avoid. And he proved it, too, or thought he did; with his first published story, he used the sweet reward to buy the Gangsters a round at Don Don’s.
But the night didn’t go the way Warren wanted it to.
“Urges” appeared in a punk magazine, The Hips and Lips Trip, and when the Gangsters actually read the work he’d gotten published, they had a lot to say.
What are you gonna write next, Bratt? A fuckin’ western?
This was Arlene, the pockmarked cigarette-smoking blimp that Warren could hardly stand to look at let alone accept a critique from.
You don’t like it? Warren told Arlene, his eyes two slits of pompous paid-writer. You know what you call a guy who puts pen to paper and doesn’t get paid? A camper. Dear Mom, I’m so sad and lonely…and broke. Please send money so I can buy a goddamn drink. Fuck you, Arlene. I’m a professional now.
But if getting paid to write constituted “professional,” Warren Bratt was much closer than he realized.
On a warm summer evening, home alone, wearing only his underwear and seated at the typewriter upon his kitchen table, Warren received a phone call. Assuming it was one of the Gangsters calling, he didn’t answer. He’d already begun typing when the answering machine announced it was no friend. No magazine, either. The crackly little speaker delivered a voice Warren didn’t recognize at all.
Warren, hello. My name is Gordon Fink.
Warren cocked an ear toward the machine.
We’re very big fans of your story and we have an opportunity for you. A job, if you will. A career in writing.
Was this how it worked, then? Finally make enough money to buy a round and it all starts rolling in from there? In the mind situated beneath his thinning hair and behind his wrinkled brow, Warren imagined more money slipping in through the vents, stopping up the toilet, falling like snow outside.
Whoever Gordon Fink was, his voice sounded like he had more money than the editors of Hips.
It’s my employer’s preference that I do not leave our number, but I will try again soon.
CLICK.
When the phone rang again, an hour later, Warren leapt from the kitchen table, his troll’s body moving faster than it had in years.
“Warren Bratt here.”
Static popped at the other end. Sounded like the guy was calling from Aruba.
“Can you meet us tomorrow evening, Mr. Bratt?”
The word scam crossed Warren’s mind.
“I don’t know. I’ve got shit to do. Another story.”
“I don’t mean to make light of your plans, but this is a significant offer.”
Warren took in the dimensions of his crappy apartment. He saw men’s magazines scattered on the lumpy wood floor. He saw an unmade bed illuminated by the light of a crappy television set. He saw empty pizza boxes and no whiskey. No wine. No women.
No wonder.
“I can make it,” he said. “What time? Where?”
“That’ll do for now. Thank you, Mr. Bratt.”
The man hung up.
Warren lowered the phone from his ear and stared at it. A shiver parachuted down his neck, landing somewhere on his back. The call had felt more like a death threat than a writing opportunity.
That’ll do for now. Thank you.
Scam, he thought. He hung up.
A prick who bought Hips got his number from the publisher and lived for pranking writers. That’s what it was and all it could be. But later, much later, Warren struggled to fall asleep, beset with images of Gordon Fink sneaking into his apartment through holes in the water-damaged ceiling. A scam. A prank. A kook.
When he woke the next morning, he had to consider the reality of those dreams. A folded note upon his chest forced him to.
He leapt from his bed and searched every cupboard and closet in the cramped apartment. The front door was locked. Had it been all night? The windows still down. The alley below was empty. The note read:
7 P.M.
The Brewer
313
Warren shook his head and laughed harder than he’d laughed in weeks. Gordon Fink and his boss were out of their fucking minds if they thought he was going to show up to a hotel like the Brewer now. After a call like that and a note like this.
Phoning the police was more like it.
But he didn’t do that. And he didn’t tell the Writing Gangsters about it, either. No. Rather, Warren spent the afternoon seated at his kitchen table, rereading the note, replaying the original answering-machine message, over and over again.
Thing was, the money in Gordon Fink’s voice really did sound genuine. It was as if it were made of the sounds of checks being signed, handshakes over legitimate book deals, the respectful greetings of familiar bank tellers and hosts seating him at what they knew to be his favorite tables.
By six-thirty, Warren was dressed. He told himself he was just going to the bar. Don Don’s. And he believed it. He’d do some research. Find a new story. Detective Bratt. Maybe in a bottle of whiskey. Maybe gin.
He tied his boots, ran a handful of water across his face, and made to leave. But as he reached for the doorknob, he saw that the note was still in his hand.
Nope, he thought, stepping out his front door and locking it for the last time.
“It was never about the money,” Warren said now, seated at his desk in his basement office of the Parenthood. The Corner crooned.
But it was. Always.
Then, with enough sweat on his face to consider it a shower, he brought the tip of his pencil to the white pad. He looked to the yellow pad beside it, relegated to the far corner of his desk. He read the title page of the book he’d already begun.
The Window Washer
By Lawrence Luxley
He turned his attention to the white pad and wrote, for the first time since showing up at the Brewer Hotel and agreeing to a job, a second title page.
Needs
(a novel of reality and what’s real)
By Warren Bratt
He did not look to the office door. And once he started writing, really writing, he forgot the Luxley book was there beside him at all. And for the first time in more than a decade, Warren Bratt felt like a writer, a man with a story to tell.
While the themes, the meat, and the message would be unrecognizable to a Luxley fan, the intended audience remained the same.
The Alphabet Boys. Growing up.
With new feelings to address.
Now. Today.
With needs.
J
>
J slept.
He’d wrapped up his day’s studies, reread close to forty pages in Luxley’s most recent book, and put himself to bed. But it wasn’t easy.
He tossed and turned, the blanket long discarded to the carpeted floor, the single sheet suddenly too hot even with the window open halfway.
He didn’t dream often, but he did this night, and because he was in and out of sleep, the dream meshed with his reality, and the result was a strange, uneasy sensation of finding himself living in an approximate world, one he couldn’t trust. Reality…or not?
At the height of the difficult night, a boy called to him from outside his bedroom window. Not from the Yard below, but from right outside the glass. Because J lived on the eighth floor (and surely nobody could float that high), he knew he was dreaming. Yes. But the knowledge somehow wasn’t strong enough and came without as much confidence as he’d have liked. At the window there was, indeed, a boy. He wore one-piece spotted pajamas like all the Alphabet Boys once wore, and his bare feet looked red from the winter air.
J sat up.
“A?” he asked. A because, while it was many years ago, J retained some memory of the brothers they’d lost.
“J!” A called back, his voice like the sound the steady heat made coming out of the vents. “Get out of bed, J! Go into the pines!”
J decided no. No, he would not go into the woods. He would not leave the tower in this cold, the first of winter, and search the same woods in which he’d seen a person crouched the night before.
Or had he?
“I didn’t see anyone,” J said. But talking only made it worse. “It was a tree!”
A shook his head. Snowflakes rose from his hair. Or perhaps it was dust.
“Not a tree!”
J got up and went to the window. The cold air there outfought the heat from his bedroom. It felt good against his naked chest.
“You were sent to the Corner,” J said, unexpected tears accompanying his sleepy voice. “You were spoiled rotten. D.A.D. said so!”
A wintry mist passed over A, and his eyes flashed green and his skin crinkled, too. Then the mist passed, and J saw the young boy again, still hovering so high above the Yard. Red-faced and alive.
Or not?
“Go into the pines, J. Someone is waiting for you there. Someone you want to meet!”
J looked down to the trees lining the Yard and saw a second figure standing in the middle of the white expanse. At first, he thought it was Q. The glasses fooled him. But the figure was too young to be Q, wore no coat, and the clothes he did wear were the very sort J wore himself as a six-year-old boy.
“Z!” J cried out. Below, the boy pointed to the woods. When he spoke, his voice sounded impossibly close, as though his lips stretched high into the winter sky.
“You want to see who’s in the woods. You want to meet him.”
A descended, as though lowered by stage wire strung to the Turret spires. J had seen a trick like that in the tower theater. When B played a bird.
A landed softly near Z. The long-dead brothers held hands.
“Z!” J called into the open cold. “You were spoiled rotten, too!”
Mist rose from the Yard, like blue smoke. Behind it Z’s eyes flashed green, his skin cracked and parted, revealing dark bones and tissue beneath.
Dirt on his hands and feet.
Then A seemed to glide to the border of the pines. J couldn’t see where his bare feet met the lawn. And as A moved away from the tower, his head turned slowly, impossibly back, until it was at a hundred-and-eighty-degree angle to the way it should be.
He looked up at J.
“Right here,” A said. “Right here!”
J climbed up onto his window ledge, opened it fully, and stood, gripping the sides of the frame. Something inside him said he could fly if he really wanted to. Just like A. Just a leap from the Turret window and he’d glide across the Yard, meeting up with his dead brothers at the pines.
Instead, J quickly got down from the ledge and closed the window. The sounds of the waking winter were cut off, and J hurried to the far side of his bedroom. There he turned his face to the wall and shook his head no. No, he hadn’t seen A and Z. No, there was nobody waiting for him in the woods. No, there wasn’t—
Tapping, and J turned to see A at the window again.
“No!” J called out. “You’re trying to spoil me, too!”
A looked through the glass, to the hallway leading to the bathroom in J’s quarters. J looked, too. He saw Z standing in the dark.
“Go down to the Yard,” Z said. “You want to meet him.”
J stood flat to the wall. His legs were paper, it seemed, perhaps the pages of a blue notebook not yet filled.
Half-dressed, shirtless, and barefoot, J sprang for his front door, opened it, and scurried out into the hall. The floor was silent. The silver speaker that announced Inspections reflected the dim hall overheads.
J hurried to D’s door. He knocked.
“D,” he said. “Let me in!”
A sound from behind him, his own rooms, and J looked back to see his door slowly opening. He didn’t wait to see what might come out. Instead, he ran to the far end of the hall, opposite the Check-Up door, to the one marked STAIRS. No way he was taking the elevator at this time of night. No way he was risking waking D.A.D. and the staff, the Inspectors, Lawrence Luxley, anybody who might stop him, ask him what he was doing.
Inspect him.
Why not, J? he asked himself, racing down the stairs, barefoot still, two concrete steps at a time. Why not tell D.A.D. about the figure in the woods and now…now…
“Now what?” he asked, out of breath, already two floors down. “The ghosts of A and Z? Not real!” He shook his head as he descended, no no no, not true, no ghosts, some kind of rotten half dream, an impossible marriage of day and night.
Four floors down and his movements echoed loud enough to wake anyone struggling to sleep. But J pressed on, until he reached the first-floor door and exploded out into the black-tiled hall. There he paused, listening for the Parenthood.
Nobody there. Nobody came.
J had only been alone on the first floor at night a handful of times in his life. The Body Hall’s oak doors were closed. The kitchen’s main doors, too. Offices J had never entered. Broom closets. The locker room that led to the pool. The staff bathroom.
He ran for the hall of windows, where he’d be able to look out upon the Yard.
Why, J? Why aren’t you running from the Yard? Don’t you wanna go away from the Yard? As far as you can go?
NO!
Why, J?
BECAUSE I WANT TO KNOW WHAT I SAW BY MISTER TREE!
This last rebuttal emboldened him. It was true: Impossible visions of dead brothers or not, J had seen someone. Someone crouched. Someone looking up to his very own window.
Dream or not, this admission felt like a big one.
At the glass, J looked. There was no sign of either brother out there. Only the white wind, blowing up frost from the freezing lawn of the enormous Yard.
J waited. He watched. He looked. He looked closely. And he saw…
Perhaps, yes, maybe, yes, a shape that didn’t belong.
Below him, a sudden crashing caused him to recoil from the glass, to look down to his bare feet. D.A.D.’s quarters were down the hall to the right. But that sound had come from the basement.
What do you think the Corner looks like?
J looked through the glass again, to the shape of Mister Tree.
Someone?
It’s A and Z. They want you to join them. They were sent to the Corner and now they’re rotting in the pines. You saw your dead brothers, J. You saw—
But it just didn’t feel true. No. And for the first time since hearing the tapping on his glass, J understood cl
early that he was awake now.
Downstairs. Alone.
“Someone you want to see,” J whispered, his nose to the cold glass.
He thought of Luxley’s book Folks and Folklore, and he thought of the myth of a boy who drank some water, found it to be the best water he’d ever drunk, and then drank so much he drowned. It’d frightened J when he’d read it.
Death from quenching a thirst.
It’s how J felt now. Thirsty for knowledge.
Another rattle from below, and J did not take his eyes off Mister Tree. Rather, he thought of what disease he might catch out there, what might show in the morning’s Inspection.
Placasores, he thought. Vees. Rotts.
But what did any of the Alphabet Boys actually know about these diseases? J recalled all he knew in full.
And he discovered he knew nothing more than that those diseases were more likely to be contracted in the pines.
Nothing from the textbooks. Nothing from Luxley’s books, either. The Alphabet Boys had simply always known these diseases were very bad. And all they had to do was break one of the Parenthood’s rules to catch one.
He thought of his own trips to the Parenthood infirmary. The sad way Doctor Previns used to look J over. As if the man was deeply troubled. Deeply sad. J had always assumed it was because he feared what he might find on J’s person. But now…
The shape in the woods moved, just enough, and J gasped.
A shape for sure.
Are you okay, Doctor Previns?
Aren’t I supposed to ask you that, J?
It was always like that in the infirmary. Sure, Doctor Previns examined the boys with the same cold precision of the Inspectors and their magnifying glasses and their eventual declaration of
CLEAN.
But there was no joy in the way Previns said it. And Previns had been gone many years now. Where did he go? Did he go the way of A and Z? Was he sent to the—
A third coughing rattle from under his bare feet, and J kept his eyes on Mister Tree. He thought of A and Z sent below.
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