“This book,” J said, “is good.”
He looked to the shadows of his new living room, where the light did not reach. Did similar adventures await him there?
J didn’t think so.
Professor Willis, professor of psychics, often discussed art with the Alphabet Boys. He stressed how necessary the imagination was to a big thinker, no matter what that thinker wanted to do with his mind. He spoke of the music D.A.D. loved and Lawrence Luxley’s books. But other things, too. Willis talked about the art in the sky, in the pines framing the Yard, the Yard itself. He told the boys that it was important to slow down, to notice the craftsmanship in the bricks of the Turret, the spires upon its roof. He said the Orchard was an excellent place to experience living art, the rows of cherry trees, one facing another, like an endless reflection, but which was real and which the mirror?
Professor Willis said that was art. J liked that.
The art in J’s everyday life. The art in the couch he lay upon. The clothes he wore. The book he read.
Oh, it wasn’t hard discovering it in the book. The book was dripping with it, as if Warren Bratt, this totally new and unknown author, had accidentally dropped his pages into a vat of great meaning, the kind of deeper instinct that Q often talked about over Boats.
J read on.
Robert slowly walked toward the wooden counter, where so many men drank the liquid J had smelled on D.A.D.’s breath on the days D.A.D. seemed unlike himself. But Robert seemed fixated on one man, the lithe one who wore his hair long (J thought of the pictures of the Alphabet Boys as toddlers, back when some of them wore their hair to their chins). J noticed something. Warren hadn’t called the man a man yet. He kept saying person, in a way that had J questioning what exactly was sitting at the bar, tapping painted fingernails against the wood.
A monster?
The wind took Q’s ladder again and set it back hard against the glass. J actually gasped. But he didn’t stop reading. Didn’t look away from the book. Robert was halfway across the bar now. Passing men in booths who sneered and leered, who laughed so deeply they coughed. Smoke rose from these same booths and from the shadows at the corners of the bar, creating a mist, not unlike the storm outside J’s window.
The person’s face at the bar was entirely obscured by hair and shadows. Those nails kept clacking the wood. It drank.
J was scared to see his face.
A stranger, of course, but not for long. A person Robert had to speak to, had to meet, no matter what deflating rejection might be returned. No matter what feelings of inadequacy he might walk away from the experience with. Because, as Robert knew, there was legitimate power seated there at the bar. A power Robert had been covering up for many years.
How entirely weird, J thought, the way Warren Bratt described people! Luxley always started with a man and a task. In Another Tower, Jacob set out to build…another tower…brick by brick. On his own. And did he succeed? You bet he did. And Jonathan Ford harvested the entire Orchard on his own in Luxley’s Orchard Plans. See? Even the titles made sense with the stories being told!
But this book?
“He’s got a lot of nerve,” J said, struggling to focus on the words, trying (and failing) to resist the incredible energy that poured forth from the pages. In his nearly thirteen years of life, J had never experienced anything like it. It was impossible to ignore. In the same way it would be impossible to ignore an Inspector standing inside his living room, reading the same pages over his shoulder.
J shivered. The storm increased outside. Had it gotten colder within?
He read on. He simply had no choice. Because whether or not Warren Bratt wrote as well or plotted as well or knew how to tell a story as well as Lawrence Luxley just didn’t…didn’t…
“MATTER!” J cried out.
It didn’t matter! A book, J suddenly believed, didn’t have to tell any story at all.
“Freedom,” J said.
The word resonated in a way it never had before.
Warren Bratt, J realized, was, to use a Q phrase, disrupting his mind.
And he liked it.
He read on.
Robert reached the bar. Okay. He hadn’t said anything to the person he’d followed inside. Okay. He ordered a drink.
Okay.
He needed a minute to think, Bratt wrote. What he was going to say and how he was going to say it. Though it was all he’d thought about on his way to the city, he still wasn’t exactly sure how to word his confession.
Robert ordered a vodka. The word sounded an awful lot like Vees to J, and he shuddered at the idea of consciously ordering a disease. Would the Inspectors be able to check for vodka in the Check-Up room? J looked to his arms, to the fingers that held the book. Did he see vodka there?
Robert drank. The man who gave him the drink nodded and Robert nodded back, and J steeled himself because, however Bratt had done it, he’d made it clear as day that the moment he’d been building toward had arrived.
Robert wiped his lips dry with the back of his hand. But he was surprised to find his lips were already dry, despite the drink. He was nervous. Not because he didn’t know what to say or how to say it anymore but because it had been a long time. Too long. And any man will tell you that time plays a very important part in the game. The man you are when you meet someone and who they are then in return. But sometimes, prepared or not, scared or not, a man simply has to pivot, to face the person next to him, to face himself in her.
“Her,” J said. He scrunched his brow.
Her.
A typo. Of course. A funny one at that.
So Robert turned and saw he was not alone in his idea. She had turned, too.
She. Bratt was getting sloppy. An extra S.
The woman.
“The woman,” J echoed.
He set the book on the couch and got up. Outside, the wind seemed to have settled into a consistent humming moan. A soundtrack, it seemed, for the story.
He looked up to the ceiling. As if through the floors he might see which of his brothers had just read the word woman, too.
Woman.
Kind of like man. But more.
At the window, his palms to the glass, J laughed at the absurdity, the gall of this author Warren Bratt. The man simply made up words! On the spot, it seemed. One minute the thing at the bar was a person. The next? A woman.
Typos.
Mistakes.
Or…
J headed for the kitchen. He had to do something other than read. Drink some juice. Eat a chip. Anything.
But halfway there he cut for the couch and grabbed the book again.
“I saw you walk in,” Robert said. “And I had to follow you.”
“Yeah?” the woman said.
Woman. Again. It was incredible, truly, the way Warren Bratt made his own rules as he went along.
“Ha!”
“I know it’s not the sanest thing to say to a woman the moment you meet her, but it’s the truth. And the truth matters more to me these days than anything else.”
“That’s a good thing,” the woman said. “But I’d have to know you a lot better than I do before I believe that.”
“Well, that’s just what I want us to do. To get to know one another. A lot better.” Then, with real desperation in his voice, “Listen, there’s a place in the middle of nowhere. A place I worked at for far too long. It’s a tower in the woods, so far deep that nobody could find it unless they set out to do just that. It was a terrible place, conducting an experiment of the worst kind. And I was a part of it. I let it go on! Until today.” He paused, not for effect but to catch his breath, to allow his heart to settle into a beat he could live with. “Today I decided to start telling the truth. To myself. To the world. To those boys.”
J’s eyebrows met
in an almost comical expression of confusion. But he didn’t feel funny.
Where was Warren Bratt going with this?
“Their whole lives were a lie! So many lies! Can you imagine the guilt of looking young men in the face, every day, pretending that the world they live in, the reality you helped create, is the truth?”
The bartender slid Robert a second drink without him asking. Robert didn’t acknowledge the gesture other than lifting the glass to his lips.
“I don’t think I want to get to know you,” the woman said.
“No,” Robert said. “I wouldn’t, either. But you must listen to me. For if ever you’ve met a desperate man, you’ve never met one as desperate as me.”
“Go on,” the woman said.
Robert turned to face her in full. Took in the shape of her eyes. The gentle slope of her small nose. Her high cheekbones, her long black hair. It made no difference if this woman was “pretty” or not. They all were, Robert understood clearly. Every single woman on the planet was beautiful.
“I have no choice but to go on,” he said. At last he sat on the stool beside her. “We created a false reality, built entirely of misinformation. If this sounds dramatic, if this, too, sounds like a lie, that’s only because you didn’t live it.”
“Why would you take part in such a thing?”
Her voice. So different from the voices he’d heard for a decade.
“Money!” he said. “What else?” He slammed a fist on the bar, rattling the glasses. The woman reached out, placed a hand on his coat shoulder.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You’re contrite. You’re troubled. Imagine those who were in your position and are not.”
“I am. They’re all I can think about. Them and…the boys.”
J didn’t like how Robert said the boys. It was almost…too relatable. Here Warren had changed gears too quick. Yes. From absurdity to…things too real.
“Tell me,” the woman said. “What exactly did you do?”
She did not look away as tears rose at the bottom of Robert’s eyes. She removed her hand from his shoulder as those same tears rolled down his face.
What had he done? she wondered. But she knew now that whatever it was, it was very bad indeed.
“We raised them without the knowledge of women. We pretended women didn’t exist. All in the name of genius.” This last word came out like a cough. Like it was the most disgusting word in all of language. “All at the behest of a madman we—
J threw the book across the room. It smacked against the wall and fell with a thud to the floor. He expected to hear three more thwacks from up and down the hall. More from above and below, as the other Alphabet Boys tossed their books in turn. Surely nobody was going to finish this. What was the Parenthood thinking, giving them this to read? It was awful! Just…terrible!
J got up and paced his living room. Warren Bratt was an awful man who wrote about awful things. He made up his own world, his own words! And he didn’t care one bit what a reader might think of them!
Not one bit!
J slammed his hands against the glass. Hadn’t even realized he was by the window. The ladder rattled and the wind howled and down below, at the base of the partially lit pines, he saw the silhouette of a crouched figure.
He recoiled from the glass.
The figure!
Angry, confused, but emboldened by the book as well, J picked up his winter clothes from the living room floor and got dressed all over again.
“That’s it,” he said. “No more sneaking around!”
There was a line in the book that flat-out haunted him, the words that finished the sentence he’d thrown against the wall.
“That’s it!” he said again, tying his boots in a rush. Put on his gloves and hat.
The window opened easily and the cold air felt surprisingly good. He gripped Q’s ladder.
He’d watched his brother climb it earlier in the day. All the boys saw it. They cheered when Q turned at the top, the third floor, and raised his fists to the snowy sky.
J swung a leg out the window, onto the first rung. He moved fast. Breathed fast. He looked over his shoulder, to the base of the pines. Couldn’t make the figure out with the snow in his eyes. Both boots on the ice, he descended. The warring emotions propelled his muscles, bones, heart, and head. He couldn’t see straight, hear straight, think straight. It made no difference if it was night or day. Warm or cold. All sense had been shaken by that blasted book and the words that finished that cruel sentence that haunted him, yes, scared him too deep.
Down in the Yard, J looked once to the first-floor windows, then walked toward Mister Tree. He weaved between the ice sculptures, evidence of the incandescent minds of his brothers, the Alphabet Boys. He didn’t pause to examine them, didn’t think of his brothers by name. Details were difficult to discern: words, letters, names, ideas, feelings. It was all a rash (INSPECTION!) of overwhelming emotions that came together in a storm of their own, swirling dark colors, black winds of why.
J carried that fiery fear with him to the tree. A feeling so hot it denied the winter.
Built entirely of misinformation…
“No!” J growled, punching his gloved hands together.
There was nobody behind Mister Tree. He turned to face the pines. Where the floodlights reached their limit, J squinted into the woods. “Show yourself!” he cried. And the words of that last sentence he’d read sprang up, as if they were what had been hiding in the pines all along.
“SHOW YOURSELF!”
But nothing stirred. And nothing showed.
J stepped into the pines, cracking frozen sticks with his winter boots.
Those words…that sentence…
All at the behest of a madman we—
“Show yourself, dammit! Be…” The word evaded him. But he found it. “Be contrite!”
All at the behest of a madman we called—
Movement in the snow behind him and J whirled, fast. Nothing in the pines, no, but something in the Yard, yes.
The silhouette of a burly man. His features blackened, being lit from behind.
“J,” the man said.
“Who are you?” J asked. “Who are you?”
The man took a step closer and J saw it was Inspector Collins. His mustache white with winter.
“You need to go inside,” Collins said. “Now.”
J looked to the pines, then back to Collins.
All at the behest of a madman we called—
“I’m…I’m sorry,” J said.
“Come on. Inside. Now.”
Inspector Collins held out a gloved hand for J to take. But J only stared at it, thinking of the woman’s hand upon Robert’s shoulder in a bar in Milwaukee.
“I…I…”
He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move.
So Collins moved him himself. He took J by the shoulders and forced him toward the Turret. J let him take him but shook his head no, thinking over and over the words that had confused him even more than she, her, and woman:
All at the behest of a madman we called D.A.D.
Free Swim/The Pool
Richard, wearing his red bathing suit and cap, sat in the stone-bleacher balcony, overlooking the boys as they enjoyed Free Swim. But perhaps enjoyed was the wrong word today, as each of them appeared to be completely on edge—freaked out, as Burt would say. Richard believed this was because of the incident with J the night before. J had been caught walking in the pines framing the Yard. Not the worst thing for a boy to be caught doing but certainly alarming. Especially his reason for being out there.
I’m just curious how far they go.
How far they go.
Burt had long warned Richard that this moment would come, and the staff psychiatrist, upon hearing of J’s e
xcursion, expressed surprise that it’d taken this long. Richard understood. Curiosity was not only to be encouraged, it was absolutely necessary to his eventual goal. What sort of scientists, what sort of thinkers, would his boys be if they were taught not to look, listen, and search?
Still, something about the way J said it…And Collins reported a palpable fear in the young man’s eyes. It was enough for Richard to order J quarantined for the day. He wanted to look into this further. Had to.
Yet to allow it to rule the Parenthood would be foolish. Yes, let the other boys know J was caught. Yes, scare them some with J’s mild punishment. But in the end, Burt was right: Boys will be boys. And perhaps J’s midnight sojourn wasn’t as troubling as it first sounded.
Time would tell.
After teaching the remaining Alphabet Boys the butterfly stroke, an hour’s worth of dedicated instruction, Richard had retired to the stone bleachers, a towel draped over his own wet shoulders. Quietly, so as not to miss a word they said, he climbed the steel rungs to the observation deck and settled into a seat near the railing. It felt good to get in the water. Felt good to teach. Felt good, too, to observe his boys from above, as none of them knew he was still in the facility.
The profound, all-encompassing appellation THE PARENTHOOD decorated the front bricks of the balcony in vivid blue and white. Like the name of their team. Which, of course, it was. Richard couldn’t see the letters from where he sat, and the words felt further from his reach than he felt comfortable with.
Something was afoot here.
Sure, J had been caught in the pines. Yes, the boys knew he was being questioned as they swam. But it simply wasn’t enough of an event to cause such…distance in their eyes. To a boy, they appeared to be thinking of something far from the pool, something none of them spoke openly about at the morning’s Inspection and certainly not during their swim lesson, with their D.A.D. present.
Were they hiding something? Did it have something to do with J?
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