Tell me. Relive.
(even if the Inspectors don’—)
“Hey, J,” F said. “Who said bark to the tree?”
Can you still feel her skin?
Yes.
The feel of it under your fingers?
(even if the Inspectors don’t smell it—)
yes yes yes yes yes
“Come on, J. Who said bark to the tree?”
She came from the planet of snow. She knocked on my window. I let her in. We met, we spoke, we touched.
Tell me. Because I want you to remember every detail.
There’s more of us than them.
Every detail.
We’re strong. We’re young. They’re old.
Tell me.
We have to do it soon. Before they change how they do things. Before they make it harder for us to get to them.
Describe her…
We have to send M.O.M. to the Corner.
We have to send D.A.D. to the Corner.
Tell me…
We have to kill them.
Her nose was smaller than mine…her shoulders curved, became her arms, sooner than mine…her chest was soft, soft as her legs…
Kill them all.
(even if the Inspectors don’t smell it on you—)
“A dog,” F said. “Come on, J. Wake up.”
(even if the Inspectors don’t smell it on you, the dogs will)
The Check-Up room door opened. X walked out.
“Next.”
F walked in. The door closed.
J alone in line now. Alone in the hall.
Run?
But no. The drawings. The blueprints. K. The plan.
The tunnel in the basement.
This might be our only chance, she’d whispered at some point in the vague, overwhelming night.
Do you believe in her?
Yes.
Why?
Because she’s truth.
Truth? Look at you. K is dripping from your fingertips. You’re drenched in her…SHE. You feel the muck of her? The Parenthood protects you, J. The Parenthood protects you from the likes of HER. The Parenthood lied to you because her’ll make you sick. Her’ll make you mad. And here you’ve brought her with you to the Check-Up room door.
He heard the word clean through the closed door. Any second now.
Excellent Inspection, J.
(CLEAN!)
Wonderful Inspection, J.
(CLEAN!)
We love you, J.
(CLEAN!)
Wait. What’s that smell, J?
J smelled his wrists. Smelled her on him.
The Check-Up room door opened. F came out. A big-toothed smile across his face.
“Wake up, pal. You’re up.”
Collins stood in the doorway. “Next.”
“Need me to slap you?” F said.
Drawings of a second Turret.
(I’m a girl)
It doesn’t matter what they’re looking for…it’s worth it.
The Parenthood is here to protect you, J.
It doesn’t matter what they’re looking for…it’s worth it.
They’re gonna smell it on you. I can smell it on you right now.
(there are twenty-five of us Letter Girls)
The Parenthood is here to protect you.
From?
From…
From?
From Vees.
No.
Rotts.
No.
Moldus.
LIES!
From K.
(I’m a girl)
The Parenthood is here to protect you.
I’ve changed.
You’re wrong.
I’m scared.
You’ve always been scared.
Have I?
Yes.
I have.
Yes.
There are no Placasores, J.
No.
D.A.D. is your disease.
EXCELLENT INSPECTION, J!
Collins cleared his throat. J stepped into the room. The door closed behind him.
Under the lights he thought he could see her handprints on his. Disrobing, he could see her everywhere.
The two Inspectors looked from his feet to his face.
They know.
“Ready?” he asked. His voice was not his own. Changed.
The Parenthood is here to protect you.
“Begin.” A voice from behind him. Also changed. Different now.
D.A.D.
His name is Richard.
Don’t say his name.
Inspector Collins brought his magnifying glass to J’s chest.
Could he see K with it? She was so big. She was everywhere.
Collins leaned forward, smelled the air around J. The dogs whined behind him.
“D.A.D.?” Collins said.
J felt the tunnel receding. It didn’t matter to him then that what Collins was about to say to D.A.D. might result in his death. He wanted to see K in that tunnel. It’s all he wanted. Ever again.
To see K.
Collins pointed to J’s fingers. J hadn’t even noticed the Inspector examining his hands.
D.A.D., beside him now, lifted J’s left hand to his eyes.
“Charcoal,” he said. Then, without looking J in the eye, as if J were already gone, unclean, removed from the Parenthood, “Been drawing pictures lately, J?”
The mood in the Check-Up room was horribly different from Inspections of old. J noticed it now. And not just because D.A.D. had found charcoal on his fingertips. If the Inspectors were to pull a two-foot worm from J’s ear, he’d say he understood the mood; now the mood made sense. If they peeled the flesh from his face with their fingers, he’d understand the apprehensive look in their eyes as they examined him, head to toe, magnifying glasses in hand.
“Some of the ink in the textbooks runs,” J said.
“Yeah?” D.A.D. asked. His voice different now. J thought maybe it was changed forever. “Which book?”
“Most of them.”
“Which one were you reading last night?”
J tried to think quick, but it wasn’t easy. Exams were coming up. Which exams?
“Math,” he said.
Outright lying. No way to rationalize it. Not now.
D.A.D. did not respond, and in the steel wall J saw a distorted reflection of the Check-Up room at large. Himself made extra thin, D.A.D. and the Inspectors so big.
Collins and Jeffrey exchanged a glance. Did they know J saw them? Did they know he saw the unknown in their eyes?
No boy had ever failed an Inspection.
Would he today?
“Raise your arms, J.”
D.A.D. in the reflection. D.A.D. taking the glass from Collins. D.A.D. wielding the magnifying glass himself.
J had never seen him do that before.
“Arms, J.”
J raised his arms and felt the cold metal rim against his skin. Then his ears, his nostrils, his lips.
D.A.D. paused at his lips.
He sniffed the air so close to J’s face, it felt like he was sucking the air from J’s lungs.
Did the Inspectors know about girls? Had they ever done what J did last night?
Had D.A.D.?
J heard dark wind out in the hall, heavy breathing through the silver square speaker high on the Turret wall.
But no. Just the dogs behind the glass.
The Inspectors moved nervously, their reflection betraying much weaker men than the ones J had believed to be so strong.
Why hadn’t he noticed all this before?
The cold magnifying glass pressed to his penis.
/> J closed his eyes and saw the drawings taped to the bottom of his Boats board. Drawings of the two Turrets, the halls and the bathroom stalls, the basements, the tunnel.
Meet me in the tunnel after dark.
Yes, J thought. I’ll be there.
The glass came quick to his face again. J didn’t want to open his mouth, but D.A.D. forced the thing against his teeth and his lips parted. The Inspectors moved in closer.
Could they see a kiss in there? Did they know how good it felt? How true?
The Parenthood has been lying to us.
Oh yes, indeed.
A puppy will turn on its master, D.A.D. once said, once it thinks it knows what’s best. But the master always arrives at what’s best first.
The dogs scratched against the door that kept them in.
The Parenthood protects you.
“Anything you want to tell me?” D.A.D. asked.
J’s mind’s eye saw a figure crouched behind Mister Tree. Saw D reading all of Warren Bratt’s insane book. Saw K at his window, her fingers numb with winter. Saw her drawings of other Letter Girls, patrolling a second Turret’s hallways with rusty tools in their hands. Saw K’s M.O.M. Heard the name Richard.
Anything you want to tell me?
Yet, despite this unfathomable wash of confusion and new information, despite the fact that he trusted K, entirely, and believed the reality-cracking tales she’d told him, there was only one thing in the world he felt he could still hold on to. One buoy in the scarlet-mad waters of this new worldview.
D.A.D.’s ever-caring face.
And how those eyes had watched over J and the other Alphabet Boys all their lives.
Madly, J found he was able to wholly believe what K had told him while trusting the Parenthood in full.
Still.
Tears pooled in a tunnel in the basement of his eyes.
Yes, there was something he wanted to tell, D.A.D. Something he wanted so badly to say.
“I saw a girl out my window.”
The words seemed to crawl out of his mouth, fingers first, a new J emerging into the Check-Up room. A boy he didn’t recognize at all. The beginning of a much bigger story, only a piece of what felt like a huge truth. But he felt great relief for having cracked that truth open for his D.A.D.
“Say that again,” D.A.D. said.
Behind the man, the eyes of the Inspectors seemed to grow too wide for their faces.
J smiled nervously. Surely D.A.D. was already thinking how to protect the boys from another visit from another girl. Right? Surely D.A.D. was employing all his powers of protection, summoning answers from places J would never have to fathom for himself.
The Parenthood protects you.
Right?
“What?” J asked, attempting, insanely, to make light of a mood he’d added one thousand pounds to with a single sentence. “I saw a girl outside my window.”
J saw something colder than winter in D.A.D.’s eyes. As if, for a flash, the man were made of ice, standing forever still in the Yard below. Then, a second flash, horrible life, followed by a question J wasn’t prepared for.
“How do you know the word for what you saw?”
“Oh no,” J said. Because they were the first words that came to mind. Because he hadn’t realized he’d told more of the truth by only telling part of it.
What else might he accidentally reveal?
Despite wanting to say her name, wanting to hear himself speak it, he felt like he was sinking, like the Check-Up room had always been an elevator, descending now to the Corner.
Don’t say her name.
No, don’t say anything else at all.
“You told me you didn’t start that naughty little book, J. How do you know the word for what you saw?”
When had D.A.D. moved closer? J hadn’t seen it happen. But there he was, gripping J’s shoulders, spitting crazed words in his face.
“HOW DO YOU KNOW THE WORD GIRL?”
The impossible balancing act almost broke then; J was momentarily incapable of seeing D.A.D. in both the light by which he’d always viewed him and the new illumination cast by…
He couldn’t even think her name. Didn’t even want to use a word that contained her letter. As if he might put her in the Check-Up room, her, magnified by the glass D.A.D. gripped so hard.
But hadn’t D.A.D. given him a way out? A lie?
“I read some of the book,” J said. “I read the word girl.”
D.A.D. turned so fast, his reflection in the wall looked like a man with a permanently blurred face, no longer definable at all.
“Unclean,” he said. The two syllables like knives suddenly stabbing the soles of J’s feet, telling him to run. Run. RUN.
But he only shook, glued, it seemed, to the rubber mats.
The Inspectors looked to each other, then to the floor. They didn’t know what to do with the word any more than J did.
“Help me,” J pleaded to the Inspectors. Then he cried, as his mind seemed to catch fire.
He turned to D.A.D. just in time to see him gesture to Collins and Jeffrey in a way J didn’t recognize.
Then J was being dragged, naked, yelling, from the Check-Up room, dragged down the hall, as doors opened, as his brothers looked, as visions of K weaved about his body and mind, unable to protect him. He and K were still side by side, in his bed, discussing their stolen lives. As he passed F’s confused face, J thought of K’s lips upon his own, her body in his hands, and how smart she had been for figuring it all out first.
As the elevator doors closed, as he saw the twin silver walls meet beyond a veil of horrid misinformation, as he tried to resist the Inspectors but discovered instead the difference in strength between a man and a boy, J saw the entrance of a tunnel caving in, blocking off his last chance to ever see K again.
Because that’s all that mattered. Life, death, truth, lies…seeing K again was everything.
Yes, J thought, as the elevator doors closed, as he struggled to free himself, as he cried, naked, in the grips of the Turret Inspectors, seeing K again, just seeing her face again, meant more to him than getting out of this building alive.
Cheers to a New Beginning
He hadn’t been out of the shelter for two days. Hadn’t stepped foot outside the actual building itself. It was funny, in a way, because here he’d gone from one building he hardly left to another. And here he was trying to get away from that. Had gotten away from that. But now, always within the same four walls, the two sets of bunk beds his entire world for two days. The other three mattresses were occupied by a total of eight different men already. Men. Always men. No women. Not yet. Despite ten years of limited contact with women, here he’d chosen a hideout that had to, by law, separate the men and the women. A homeless shelter couldn’t allow for men to have access to where the women slept. It was funny, sort of, the way the real world was the answer to the one he’d fled. Back there they studied who the separation benefited more. Out here there was no doubt it was the women.
Was two days long enough? He wasn’t sure. He’d showered twice, which was something, and used the laundry in the basement. He had no other clothes on him—he’d left in a hurry—and so he’d had to stand by the washer and dryer wearing only a towel. Nobody came down to the basement during that time, and after a while it began to feel like its own liberation. Standing by a washing machine in a towel. Just one of ten thousand little things he hadn’t done in what felt like ten thousand years.
So what to do after two days? He’d eaten slop in line with the other homeless men. Ate three times a day. Even when he wasn’t hungry. And he didn’t have much on him. Not much of anything. And there was no way he was going to remove any amount of money from his account. An account that had over a million dollars in it. Was the money still there? Did it matter? Did he want that kind of money anymor
e? Blood money or false money or money earned by lying to two dozen boys for a decade?
No, he didn’t have much. A couple hundred dollars. A wet pair of shoes. A stained T-shirt. A jacket.
What he did have was needs. Not the book. Not even that.
He needed safety. Anonymity. Money. Clothes. A place to stay. A vehicle to keep moving. A friend? Possibly. A phone? Possibly. A new name?
He laughed at this last one, though the laugh was more like an aging cough. A new name. After using a pseudonym for ten years.
He sat alone in the room of bunk beds. He considered his next move. He had to keep moving because he wanted to keep moving, but he wasn’t sure that was the right thing to do. Would they know to look for him here? Would it be easier to find him if he visited more places? More dots on the map? Back in the Parenthood (that word, so ugly to him now, had been ugly for a long time), Richard wielded endless power. But out here? How far was Richard’s reach? How far could Marilyn see? How willing were they to step into the light, to be seen themselves?
Institutionalized, he thought. The word was especially ugly when applied to himself. He’d probably used it in a book before but couldn’t remember it ever sounding so scary. Institutionalized didn’t only mean a man was so used to his environs that he ended up needing them. It also meant that man was changed. And the problem with changed was that he might not be able to change back to the man he was before.
For the first time in a long time, he realized he liked a little of the man he was before. Before the Parenthood. Yes, he saw that man now in a much different way. He’d hated that man so much that he’d agreed to live in a tower, write books for boys who were lied to, lie to the boys himself, all for a pile of money that didn’t look quite as big once he got to sit on it.
Still, he wasn’t sitting on it at all. No. The money was locked up in his not-so-private account the Parenthood had access to. Could they remove the money? Breach of contract? What kind of lawyer would take their case?
Your honor, Warren Bratt broke his contract with the Parenthood. We believe we should be reimbursed the funds allocated him to lie to two dozen boys in the woods. Boys we bought from desperate, often drugged, mothers.
The door to the bunk room opened and Warren looked up quick. He gripped the handle to his mostly empty suitcase.
“This one taken?”
An old man. Once-blond hair. Who knew his actual age? So hard to tell in a place like this. Everybody looked dehumanized. Yet, in a way, they all looked better than Warren. While some had secrets and all had histories, it was unlikely any of them had sold their souls in full.
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