Inspection

by Josh Malerman

  If so, what?

  Richard watched them carefully, swimming below. Their voices and their splashes echoed high off the white brick walls.

  Spying on the boys was often more revealing than the Inspections.

  It was true the boys, like all near-teenagers, could be deceitful and, yes, they were growing up fast, but Richard had never prized their innocence like he did now. To him, it was clear the experiment was working; any toddler had the strength to carry the weight of his purity, but in the real world most lost sight of it by thirteen.

  The boys were right there. Right there. Yet…so different from boys in the real world. So different from who Richard had been himself.

  Still, a side effect of such chastity was how obvious a blemish was; they’d been polite with him today. Too rigid perhaps. Already, now, they seemed looser, unaware of the shadow he cast.

  He wanted to tell them to stop. Stop growing. Stop growing up.

  You are perfect, he longed to tell them. You are blameless. Your perspective is as pure as that of the caveman, who knows nothing beyond his daily tasks, but your intellect surpasses my own.

  Stop growing out from under his control.

  Richard held his head in his hands and massaged his temples. He’d been doing this a lot lately. He attempted to allow his mind passage, over water and sky, empty, uncluttered fields. But it was ever so hard to remain calm; the Parenthood was always one event from toppling.

  “Come on, E!” R howled. “To the lip!”

  Free Swim always ended with a handful of the Alphabet Boys congregating by the lip of the shallow end. Some were already there. D leaned against the steel railing of the shallow steps, his arms crossed, his eyes affirming a ponderous state of mind. Q floated nearby.

  Richard continued to massage his temples.

  Q spoke.

  “Strange night,” he said.

  D agreed, yes, strange indeed. R and E joined them. L, too. All agreed. Strange night.

  Had J’s midnight stroll affected them so deeply?

  “I’ve never read anything like it,” Q went on. “None of us have.”

  Burt had long given the boys the benefit of the doubt, explicitly underscoring the fact that they were always only aging. There is no such thing as an unnatural occurrence, Burt once wrote, if a natural being makes it happen. But the mood in the pool bothered Richard deeply.

  So had the morning Inspections.

  Thing was, they were too good. Too clean. As if the boys had mutually agreed to keep a secret.

  Don’t get paranoid, Burt wrote more than once. You’ll see secrets in everything they say.

  “It scared me,” L said. “Really really scared me.”

  In a world such as the Parenthood, how was a secret possible? Who would have taught them to lie?

  “I think that was the point,” Q said. “To scare us. To get us thinking in a new way.”

  None of the boys looked to the balcony. Did this suggest preoccupation?

  What exactly was on their minds?

  “Hang on,” L said. “Has everybody read it? To the end?”

  Richard did not move. Snake-like still in the balcony shadows.

  Read what?

  “If anybody has, don’t spoil it for me,” Q said.

  Spoil what?

  The boys seemed to intentionally talk about something else. An effort to change the subject. They brought up their studies. L discussed the density of the water they stood in. Q and U discussed Boats. The game, U contested, was supposed to be played as freely as the mind thinks, complete with tangents, second-guessing, and self-doubt. But there was a catch.

  “But by virtue of it being a game, and therefore having rules,” he said, “Boats is incomplete and doesn’t do what it professes to.”

  Q couldn’t disagree more. He believed Boats was perfectly crafted.

  “No two people play Boats the same way,” he said. “Therefore, it succeeds. There are rules to our communally agreed-upon reality, too.”

  In this way, Q suggested, Boats was a better representation of reality than the one U hoped for. U countered again, citing that the rules of their agreed-upon reality were self-inflicted and therefore could change at any moment.

  “But your mind isn’t as free as you think it is,” Q said. “You would come to the same rules, every time, every day.”

  Richard breathed a semi-sigh of relief. The boys were talking Boats. And they sounded well beyond their years while doing so.

  They must have been discussing a Luxley earlier. Oh, how the boys loved their leisure books.

  Do you remember when you hired Burt? he thought. Do you remember why? You wanted somebody to check you. To remind you of your priorities. To ensure you didn’t get drunk on progress. But here you are, distrustful of your own boys. Who is checking you now? They’re discussing topics far superior to those you discussed at their age, yet here you are, searching for a problem, determined to find something wrong. Burt would tell you there was nothing to fear. Yet you fear. So did you hire Burt because it would look like you wanted to remain honest through all of this?

  Or did you actually want to remain true?

  He had no desire to examine himself in the balcony. He should feel good, should feel great. About the progress of things. About the way his boys talked. And the things they talked about.

  “The book,” D said. “Can we please talk about the book?”

  “When everybody’s read it,” Q said.

  But that didn’t stop D from talking. “Warren Bratt writes like a person who needs to say something. I guess reading it has made me feel the same.”

  Richard exhaled and smiled. He gripped the balcony rail and rose. Good God, how close was he to thinking there was a conspiracy in the Turret when, in the end, all the boys had been referring to was a leisure book?

  Adjusting the towel on his shoulders, he took the stone steps to the balcony exit. He was quiet about it. No need to alert the boys they’d been watched. No need to make them feel violated in any way. He took the steps down to the first floor. His sandaled feet clopped on the cool black tiles as winter continued beyond the hall windows. At the door to his quarters, he paused. He removed his swim cap.

  A drink? Why not. A celebratory gin to acknowledge the progress of his boys. Oh, how worried he’d been. How suspicious.

  J had taken a walk. So what? Long live J.

  The telephone rang on the other side of his door. Richard entered and answered it.

  “He’s not saying any more than what he first told us,” Gordon said.

  “Do you believe him?”

  “Do I, Richard? Well, yes, I suppose I do.”

  Richard hung up. He went to the bar and fixed a gin martini. Already drunk on the intellectual momentum of his boys, he recounted some of the key things he’d overheard them say in the water.

  Boats is unrealistic in this way.

  The water we stand in asks nothing physical in return. It only makes room.

  The job is dependent entirely upon the tools. The Yard will always only look as good as the tools.

  There was more. So much more. Richard stood in the semi-darkness, stirring the drink, relishing the calming sound. Like the arms and legs of the Alphabet Boys through the water of the pool.

  Oh, the Alphabet Boys. Oh, the things they say…

  —whole idea of a swimming pool is fascinating because—

  —wood doesn’t burn unless we ask it to—

  —a good idea but also flawed—

  —because one boy’s motivation for enjoying a film might—

  —his book…his book…his book—

  —careful not to spill it on the way to the Turret—

  —doesn’t matter how you enter it, once you are submerged�
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  —his book—

  Who was it that had enjoyed Warren’s book so deeply? Was it D?

  Yes, D had said, Warren Bratt writes like a person who needs to say something. I guess reading it has made me feel the same.

  Good ol’ Warren Bratt. How many books had he written for the Parenthood now? Close to thirty? A fine career by any standards, one that would make any writer in the real world proud. Only this was even better. No matter how sullen or stodgy, cynical or insane Warren Bratt might be, he was contributing to the single greatest experiment in the history of mankind.

  In a rare moment of sentimentality, Richard picked up the phone again.

  “Go get me Warren,” he said. Then he hung up.

  Warren, Warren, Warren. Might not be writing the sort of books he wanted to, but Richard would bet on the leisure books being a lot better than anything Warren would’ve worked out back home.

  Richard laughed. Not because it was so easy to poke fun at Warren Bratt, but because the overweight troll with the bad posture (Quasimodo in the basement, he’d dubbed him for Gordon’s pleasure) had no idea how much Richard had done for him. How much he’d supported the arts after all.

  Would Warren like a drink, too? Yes. Maybe he would. Maybe Richard should share a drink with the Parenthood’s prized writer and tell him, Yes yes, good job, the boys love you, Warren. They love you so.

  At the bar, inspired, fixing the second drink, he again replayed a handful of highlights, words and ideas expressed by his boys when they believed themselves to be unwatched.

  —we’re made up of so much water we might swim in ourselves!

  —could we make a film of our own? Starring…us?

  —I’ve counted the Turret bricks and there are many more than that—

  —Warren Bratt writes like a person who needs to say something. I guess reading it has made me feel the same.

  Richard looked over his shoulder to the phone. Maybe it was the gin, but he felt a brief wave of sickness. Something deeper than the need to throw up. It passed. But its echo remained.

  Something one of his boys said had worried him after all?

  Maybe.

  “Nope,” he said. “Today we celebrate.”

  But, stirring the second drink, he didn’t feel like celebrating was the right thing to do. Not quite. No.

  Why not?

  —we’re made up of so much water we might swim in ourselves!

  —could we make a film of our own? Starring…us?

  —I’ve counted the Turret bricks and there are many more than that—

  —Warren Bratt writes like a person who needs to say something. I guess reading it has made me feel the same.

  Warren, Warren, Warren. Always made him feel a little sickly, Richard supposed. Maybe he should call off the drink.

  —whole idea of a swimming pool is fascinating because—

  —wood doesn’t burn unless we ask it to—

  —a good idea but also flawed—

  —because one boy’s motivation for enjoying a film might—

  —Warren Bratt writes like a person who needs to say something. I guess reading it has made me feel the same.

  Warren who lived so well here. Warren who’d written more in the basement than he ever would’ve in Wisconsin. Warren who, as Lawrence Luxley, had written himself into the annals of literary history. If only for what he’d been a part of.

  “Lawrence Luxley,” Richard said, absently lifting the second drink to his lips, as if it were fixed for him. “Lawrence…Luxley…”

  The name sounded so fresh. As if he hadn’t spoken it in a long time. As if he hadn’t thought it, either.

  —we’re made up of so much water we might swim in ourselves!

  —could we make a film of our own? Starring…us?

  —I’ve counted the Turret bricks and there are many more than that—

  —Warren Bratt writes like a person who needs to say something. I guess reading it has made me feel the same.

  But no. No no. The boys (D? Yes, D) hadn’t said that. He’d said Lawrence Luxley writes like a person who needs—

  Richard dropped the drink. The glass exploded at his sandaled feet. A shard cut his ankle, and the blood made a trail from the bar to his desk as he dove for the telephone there.

  “Lock down,” Richard said. Hardly able to believe his own words.

  “Richard?”

  “LOCK DOWN THIS MINUTE!”

  “Richard…what…what’s happened?”

  “The boys, Gordon. The boys used his name. His real name.”

  “Richard, I don’t understand.”

  “THE BOYS REFERRED TO HIM AS WARREN BRATT!” Richard couldn’t focus on anything in the room. The desk, the mirrors, the bar. All of it was a sudden cold blur of winter come inside. “Did you get him for me? DID YOU?”

  “Warren?”

  “WHERE IS HE?”

  “Richard…” But Richard knew what words were coming next. Before they came. And as Gordon spoke them, he gripped the phone until it cracked. “He’s not in his rooms. He’s not in his office. Richard, we don’t know where Warren is.”

  Richard did not hang up. Rather, the phone fell in pieces to the desk.

  * * *

  —

  MINUTES LATER, AS the Alphabet Boys walked the first-floor hall, having left the pool behind, their many conversations about many exciting subjects were shorn to pieces, blackened, then burned by the power of a single word they had never heard spoken after seven o’clock in the morning. Each boy came to a stop because of it. And nobody responded. All only stared at the silver speaker, rattling high in the wall, from the volume, the heat, the anger inherent in the voice that pronounced the word in a way it had never been said before.

  “INSPECTION!”

  Lockdown

  He started crying. He’d never seen D.A.D. this way before. The boy was scared. And the worst part of it, the absolute most grueling part of being in the Check-Up room midday for the first time in his life, was that the Inspectors Collins and Jeffrey looked scared, too….

  * * *

  —

  …“HOW MANY PAGES did you read, Q? I heard you talking about it in the pool. If you lie to me, you will be sent to the Corner this instant. How many pages?”

  Behind his large glasses, Q studied D.A.D.’s crazed face. Sweat drained from D.A.D.’s black hairline all the way to his dark beard, as if the man were an irrigation system, and the sweat, the horror, the anger, were keeping him alive.

  Q could barely find his voice.

  “Thirty,” he finally said.

  “Thirty,” D.A.D. echoed. He’d been pacing since Q walked in, and by the look of him he’d been pacing in every other Inspection, too. The Alphabet Boys were lined up outside the first-floor Check-Up room. All but J. D.A.D. stepped to the steel table and eyed the stack of poorly bound white pages there. “Thirty is a very round number, Q. Very round. I’ll ask you again…”

  “Thirty,” Q said. “On the button.”

  He was telling the truth, but when D.A.D. turned to face him again, it didn’t look like it mattered. It didn’t feel like truth mattered anymore at all….

  * * *

  —

  …D.A.D. HAD T by the neck against one of the Check-Up room’s steel walls. He did not see his distorted reflection in the steel, but the Inspectors did. His eyes were made enormous by the metal, his open mouth a black nest of desperation. His skin looked to be made of stone and his black hair rose like burnt wood to the ceiling.

  The dogs barked hysteria behind the glass.

  “HOW MANY PAGES, T? HOW MANY PAGES DID YOU READ?”…

  * * *

  �
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  …W STARTED CRYING in line outside the Check-Up room door. The sounds that were coming from within were unfathomable. D.A.D. was yelling loud enough that his voice should be broken. But it wasn’t. He went on.

  And on.

  “He didn’t write the note,” X said, farther up the line. More than one boy shushed him immediately. But X had to finish his thought. “He wasn’t the one who wrote the note that came with the book.”…

  * * *

  —

  …L TRIED NOT to look at D.A.D. It was so hard to look right at him. D.A.D. didn’t resemble D.A.D. Not at all. Not anymore. He’d become a monster. The kind of thing he used to be afraid of under his bed, down the hall to the bathroom, in the bathtub behind the curtain. An approximation of D.A.D. That’s what it was. This man in the Check-Up room, no longer wearing the red jacket or gloves (they were long discarded on the steel floor, by the rubber-soled mats), this man was not D.A.D. This man was Vees. This man was Rotts. This man was disease.

  And this man had asked him a question. A question L was unable to answer. Not because he didn’t know the answer but because he couldn’t find the saliva in his mouth to speak.

  “What new words did you learn, L?”

  It was like no question L had ever been asked before. Certainly not by D.A.D. Not by anybody. Never. No. Never. The way he asked it, the look in this man’s eyes, the glare in the eyes of this approximation of D.A.D., it was as if D.A.D. didn’t know who L was. Or like L hadn’t ever known the real D.A.D.

  The Corner, L thought. Did D.A.D. say something about the Corner?

  Then D.A.D. was walking toward him in such a way that L thought the man was going to strike him. Strike him! And L found his voice at last.