Inspection

by Josh Malerman

  “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!
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  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.

  Needs

  (a novel of reality and what’s real)

  By Warren Bratt

  “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 hi
s 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.

  Here you go, Jim. Tear it apart.

  ~WB

  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.