Inspection

by Josh Malerman

  She’d read many paragraphs depicting each of the inhabitants of the second tower, their likes and dislikes, inclinations and sensitivities, a behavior report of sorts. But something was missing.

  Exactly what was a boy?

  Until K knew that, they would be girls.

  There was no mention of the stolen papers at home. No professor mentioned it in class. M.O.M. did not ask about it in the morning Inspections. The daily Turret Times made no mention at all and certainly didn’t allude to any meeting between K, B, and Judith Nancy.

  Judith Nancy. Wow. That conversation played out in K’s head just like the title of one of her favorite Nancy books, Over and Over. Never before had K partaken in a discussion she felt necessary to dissect every letter of. Nancy’s wet eyes, her scratchy voice, her delivery, and her three Ss…

  It all inspired K to reread all the Nancy books on her shelf.

  Maybe the secrets Nancy didn’t want to tell were hidden in those pages.

  B noticed the books. Said she tried reading one, too, but struggled. Couldn’t stop hearing the slurred words. Couldn’t stop thinking that Judith Nancy was a sad person. That’s how she put it. A liar, too.

  K’s investigation of the second tower, the odd and still-frightening women and girls, the Alphabet Boys, seemed to be pitted against the clock, the tick-tocking of B’s back-and-forth regarding whether or not to tell M.O.M. all they’d done and seen. Things may have toned down for the time being, but B looked and sounded like a Jill-in-the-Box about ready to explode in a loud and startling way.

  K didn’t want to think about B at all. The nightly treks weren’t only an enduring unraveling of her former reality; they were also eating into her sleep. She was running on four, four and a half hours a night, and Inspectors Krantz and Rivers had begun asking her about it.

  Bad dreams, K?

  No.

  Insomnia?

  No.

  Then why the dark eyes? Why the yawns?

  I’m a bad morning girl. Always have been.

  Mercifully, this was true. A thing K never dreamed she’d use to her advantage. M.O.M. was curious as well, but, as was her style, she observed silently from across the Check-Up room, her arms folded across her chest, her thin frame in a formfitting white pantsuit, her dark glasses obscuring most of her face.

  Did she know? Could she tell K went out at night? Could she tell K observed the second tower through super glasses, that K had read pages delivered through a glass wall in a dark tunnel she wasn’t supposed to be in? Did she know those pages employed gibberish, code language perhaps, when they inexplicably called it the boys’ tower?

  Did she know?

  Could she tell K had found it easier than expected to cross the Yard over there, to sneak in through the same garbage door she, B, and Q had used on their first journey from this tower? Could she tell K had been inside that tower and had smelled things and heard things and seen things no other Letter Girl had ever imagined? Could she tell K used the stairs in the boys’ tower like she did in her own and that she took those stairs to the eighth floor, where a girl named J still existed, a girl that was not her J but a J all the same? Could M.O.M. tell that K was experiencing feelings she’d never felt before for this second J?

  Did M.O.M. sense that K had entered this J’s rooms and silently crossed her quarters until she’d snuck inside her bedroom and stood beside her bed and watched her sleep for many minutes at a time?

  Could M.O.M. tell K liked drawing J? Liked the shape of her face? The look in her eye? The look on her face when she slept?

  Did she know?

  Could she tell?

  M.O.M. hadn’t given a sign that she knew a thing, and each Inspection had ended with a clean. K thought long on this in her rooms, long after the morning Inspections had passed. Time she once devoted to studying was now divvied up between Judith Nancy books and heavy thought, as K tried to make sense of the fact that, though she’d lied, and though she’d hidden so much, and though she’d been inside places she should never be, she was passing each and every Inspection like she always had.

  What did a Letter Girl need to do to fail one?

  Could one be failed?

  With each clean conclusion, K smiled at M.O.M. on her way out of the Check-Up room, wondering if the woman had any idea that her Letter Girl could deliver a detailed drawing of the kitchen of the second tower in the pines.

  And J’s weren’t the only rooms she’d seen.

  The crazed woman K and B saw delivering the papers in the tunnel slept fitfully most nights and, despite the tossing and turning, was easy to draw. The black hair on her face, the strong shoulders, the sense of aggression, all brought K to draw her from farther away, employing the super glasses from across the room as she worked. The woman snored and snorted, whimpered and howled. K drew it all. Even the open mouth that sometimes cried the names A and Z in her sleep.

  It was in this woman’s living room that K found a bottle that smelled like the one Judith Nancy drank from. It was in this room, by way of many documents, that K determined that this woman was the M.O.M. of the second tower. And it was in this room that K opened a desk drawer and removed a thing called The Burt Report, dated November 1, 2019. And it was in the pages of that report that K found the thing she’d been missing, the missing link, enough of an explanation for the two things that had eluded her so far:

  First, the girls in the second tower were not girls at all. They were boys. And while this seemed a simple deduction, given the name of the second Turret, it still confused K deeply. She understood that she’d been resisting a core reality to the situation she’d been studying.

  A different species? She wasn’t sure. Something they called the opposite sex.

  The second thing was much more important and when K read it, the sleeping woman sat up in her bed. Shirtless, her short dark hair ruffled, she stared into the darkness of her doorway for a long time. K, flat to the wall behind the desk, did not move. Except her mind moved, processing what she’d just read.

  The Parenthood had hidden the Letter Girls from the Alphabet Boys. And vice versa. Intentionally. For purposes K hadn’t quite uncovered…

  Listening to the woman (man?), D.A.D., breathe hard following another bad dream, it was the first time K saw her own tower and the second as equals. One as badly treated as the other.

  D.A.D. finally lay back in bed and K, still unmoving, held back tears of embarrassment, tears of rage, held back, too, the desire to rush screaming across the room, to attack the lying thing in its sleep.

  Did M.O.M. know? Could she tell K had smelled men when Inspector Krantz brought her magnifying glass up to K’s naked body?

  As she slipped out of D.A.D.’s room, K was crying. Not for having been scared and not even for the brutal shock of this new information.

  K cried because it was sad. What had been done to the girls. To the boys. To fifty-two minds that had no way of knowing better.

  Article One of the Constitution of the Parenthood: Genius Is Distracted by the Opposite Sex

  The Burt Report’s mention of castration could only mean neutering the boys in the same way Professor Langan tasked the Letter Girls with neutering cells to stop them from multiplying.

  Boys and girls.

  Multiplying.

  Reproduction.

  K thought of the naked parts she’d seen through the windows. The parts of her own body, too.

  She thought of the Living Trees in the Orchard and how not one Letter Girl had ever seen one in person.

  She thought of lies.

  As she snuck out the garbage door, as she hurried across the Yard to the miles of pines that separated the boys’ tower from her own, K could not stop crying, believing she understood what had been done to her, to the Letter Girls, to the Alphabet Boys, to them all. And while it was impossible for her to say
she understood it, she believed she understood enough.

  Halfway home, she again imagined herself rushing across the rooms of the man they called Richard. D.A.D. She saw herself striking him. Stabbing him with a knife from the kitchen. Castrating him like the Burt Report suggested he do to his boys.

  She imagined blood on her hands. Blood on her clothes. Blood on her boots.

  She did not run through the pines toward home. Rather, she walked slowly, her head in her hands, her hands wet, leaving a trail of tears as obvious as the breadcrumbs in Judith Nancy’s This Way to Home. She imagined breadcrumbs of blood. Blood of the man they called Richard. She thought of the Letter Girls. She thought of the Alphabet Boys.

  She thought of the responsibility she now had.

  And she thought, too, of the feelings she had for J. Of the way he made her feel. The things he liked. His worries. His laugh. His voice. His eyes.

  She paused in the pines, infused suddenly with what could only be called inspiration.

  And she wondered, aloud, what kind of cruel people could consider such feelings a distraction.

  Marilyn and Richard

  It can’t be a prison, Richard said. He’d been adamant about this point from the start. When the conversations changed from flippant talk to serious planning. They’d both been overwhelmed throughout the process. Inspired, too. Oh, so inspired.

  Surveillance does not a prison make, Marilyn countered. They’d had this argument before. Had many.

  They ate sandwiches in Glasgow’s, a restaurant downtown, a place where they often met at the end of another distracted day. They ate well, tipped well, and were often seated without a wait. Marilyn was particularly refined, and Max Lowe, Glasgow’s young owner, wanted her there as often as possible. This meant he also wanted her seen just as often. Richard and Marilyn were seated at a table for two in the center of the dark dining room. Always.

  The acoustics, garbled and dim as the lanterns, allowed them privacy despite center stage.

  If we do our job, Richard said, they won’t want to search the woods.

  The woods was a vague idea then. Two towers in…the woods.

  While I agree, Marilyn said, there may come a day when practicality outweighs philosophy.

  The idea is to prove that an undistracted mind will focus on its own. If we force that focus, via cameras and babysitters…what are we proving?

  Richard sucked down a third of his sandwich. Drank some scotch.

  Nothing. You’re right.

  Marilyn’s eyes were partially obscured by her large-framed glasses. The lower half of Richard’s face by his beard. The two had changed much in the fifteen years they’d been married.

  Ex-cons, she said. This had all been discussed before.

  Yes.

  And we buy the babies.

  Richard didn’t look over his shoulders. Didn’t look to the greater part of the restaurant. Who would believe it if they heard it?

  Yes.

  A dozen or so each.

  Maybe more.

  Why more?

  How many chances are we going to have to attempt an experiment like this one?

  One.

  So maybe more.

  Marilyn sipped red wine, leaned back in her chair. The waiter came quickly from the restaurant shadows, a towel over one arm.

  Would you two like another round?

  The answer to that, Richard said, is always yes.

  Alone again, Marilyn said, I’ve found the towers.

  Richard perked up. Where?

  She made the shape of the state with her hand. Here.

  A school? A hospital?

  Neither. She pulled her purse from her chair back onto her lap. From it she removed a photograph. She handed it to him across the table.

  Richard was expecting an aerial shot, and that’s what he got. Two squares embedded deep in tall pines. The scale told him there wasn’t another building for twenty-six miles north or south, twenty east. Lake Michigan was thirty west.

  Forestry, Marilyn said. A failed experiment of its own.

  Who owns it, then? The state?

  Marilyn nodded.

  No, Richard said. We can’t involve the state. Can’t let them know we’re there.

  Nobody’s going to question what we’re doing…as we’ll buy it from the people who might question us in the first place.

  Marilyn turned and smiled at a couple seated in a booth. Richard recognized the man who smiled back as Senator Evans.

  Marilyn.

  He thinks we’re looking to buy land for a hunting camp. We’re first in line for the sale.

  Richard studied the photo. It’s gorgeous, he said.

  It’s perfect.

  The waiter brought their drinks. Set them down. Richard reached for his quick. He raised it.

  Cheers, he said. To ex-cons and babies.

  And to Inspections, Marilyn said.

  Inspections? I’m intrigued.

  To make sure our little ones haven’t crossed paths.

  And if they do?

  Marilyn shrugged. Then we do what all parents and teachers do. We ground them. We send them to the corner.

  The Corner

  A month.

  No return.

  No pines.

  No further information about the boys’ tower. Or her own.

  A month.

  To think. To consider. To weigh. To grow agitated, to grow nervous. To feel free. To feel trapped. For knowing what she now knew. Some days the tower walls felt thicker. As if the actual space of her rooms was shrinking.

  A month.

  To playact. To attend class and to study. To endure what she now believed were phony Inspections. Phony because everything the Parenthood did was phony. Lies. Misinformation. Judith Nancy called it that. Remember that? When K and B sat across the author’s desk in her basement office? As the writer sucked on a bottle and sank deeper and deeper into her chair? That wasn’t a fond memory anymore. K was able to retroactively make sense of a lot that Nancy said. Once a broken reality. Rewritten in the right way. The memory of Nancy was as monstrous to K as the bearded man they called D.A.D.

  A month.

  To swim in the tower pool, to play Boats with her sisters, to avoid extended eye contact with B. No matter what subject they pretended to talk about, both knew what they were really talking about. Always. And the longer they looked one another in the eye, the longer that quasi-buried, that not-so-hidden truth looked back at them both.

  A month.

  Of being alone. Whether she was physically with her sisters or not, in the Check-Up room or the cafeteria, K was absolutely alone. Q kept to herself. B tried. K tried, too. At moments, it felt like the Parenthood hadn’t changed at all. Inspections in the morning, mealtime to follow, the occasional speech by M.O.M. Class. Study. Winter in the Yard. The Orchard. At times it felt like K could turn her back on the whole thing, everything she’d unearthed. Like she could one day smile for real, talk for real, swim without thinking of what J was doing in his tower and how he needed to know he’d been lied to. So that he could tell the Alphabet Boys. So that everybody knew. So that the Parenthood knew that everybody knew. Sometimes it felt close, the ability to reestablish this false narrative. Sometimes she even stopped thinking of J.

  But something nagged. A big something. A place she hadn’t seen yet. The one room she hadn’t entered in either tower.

  The Letter Girls had been raised to fear the Corner like no other place in their world.

  She wanted to see it.

  A month.

  To get up the nerve. To plan. To lose the nerve. To find it again. K had read the word deprogramming in a Nancy book in which the main character, Ursula Ochs, told her sister that she needed to deprogram herself out of so much self-loathing. The word, the phra
se, had stuck with K.

  The Corner. That was the big one. The image K held in her mind, the door itself, seemed to come to her at terrible times. While laughing with her sisters. While waiting in line for breakfast. While bundling up to head out to the Yard. And always as she took the stairs down to the first floor. Every time.

  Sometimes K worried that her feet were going to keep going no matter what she told them to do. That she was going to step out onto the first floor and walk directly to that staff bathroom, to that false stall, to the basement below.

  A month.

  The Effigy Meet came and went. K thought a lot about her inadvertent spotting of the second tower. The day she rode B’s ice slide around the Turret to the snowy Yard below. In that year she’d also gone from unknowing to knowing and she believed the latter could be seen in every mirror she passed. She tried to give her all to the Effigy Meet. To play the part of a Letter Girl doing good. But she just wasn’t doing good.

  K wanted to go to the Corner.

  Taped to the bottom of her Boats board were drawings, veritable blueprints of both towers and all they had inside. She’d been everywhere, seen it all, taken photos with her memory and mind.

  The Corner.

  Could she do it?

  She felt like she had to do it. Had to know.

  A few days following the Effigy Meet, the afternoon following an Inspection in which M.O.M. asked after the poor quality (lacking vision, dear) of her sculpture, K decided the walls of the Parenthood had gotten too thick, too tight. The space she’d enjoyed for so many years wasn’t close to big enough anymore. It had become harder to breathe, juggling her anxiety, her bravery, and her desire to tell her sisters the truth.

  They lied to us.

  About what?

  About everything.

  But K understood clearly that before she could reveal to her sisters what the Parenthood had taken lunatic pains to withhold, she had to know what the punishment for knowing the truth might be.