Inspection

by Josh Malerman

  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 cl
inical, 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:

  THE CORNER

  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 ent
irely.”

  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?