“Here,” Warren said, rising from one of the lower bunks. “Take mine. I’m checking out.”
“Yeah? Where you going?”
Warren studied the man’s eyes. Why did he want to know?
“Greece.”
The man laughed the way most men laughed in this place: true but harsh. Warren picked up his case and coat and exited the room. Then the shelter soon after.
It was evening. He hadn’t noticed. Hadn’t been outside in two days. With the money he had on him he could take a bus to Florida. Take a bus to Wyoming. Hop a train somewhere, anywhere. Get a job at a local paper. Get a job flipping grilled cheese.
But first…
He’d seen the bar the morning he arrived at the shelter. And oh what a morning that was. Drenched and cold, out of breath and invigorated, righteous and free. But still caged, too. Institutionalized. He’d wanted to enter the bar, but even if it was open, he couldn’t. He simply didn’t have the nerve. Couldn’t find it.
Now he believed he did.
He looked up and down the street. To the windows of the apartments across the street. To the alleys. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was worried he might see. Richard crouching in red? Marilyn hiding behind a lamppost? Back when he was offered the job, there wasn’t any mention of how he might be tracked down if he ever wrote a book about women, printed it off himself, and left a copy for each of the Alphabet Boys. Nope. No word on that front. So…what? What might he see and how would they come after him?
Warren shuffled up the sidewalk. A homeless man, indeed. As he slipped inside the bar, he gave the street, the buildings, the windows, the roofs, one last look.
Inside, warmer, he cleaned the fog from his glasses and eyed the small room. Two unoccupied booths to his left. Two unoccupied booths to his right. Two women sitting at the bar, their backs to him. A young man behind the bar. My God did the young man look clean. Uncluttered. Happy.
“What can I get you, sir?” the guy asked.
Warren took an open stool. “Bourbon,” he said. “Please.”
The word please escaped him in such a genuine way that he almost felt like crying.
It had been a long time.
The bartender served him. Warren sipped. He looked down the bar. Of the two women, the one facing him smiled.
At him.
It had been a long time for that, too.
The woman was close to what he once would’ve called his type. Smart eyes behind kitschy big glasses. Brown hair. An old-school dress. Was this what people considered hip these days? He wouldn’t know. He’d been away for a decade.
Institutionalized.
Warren finished his drink. Considered his next move. Out of the country? It was probably the right thing to do. Leave. Get out entirely. Shave his head. Grow a beard. Devote his life to helping young people know the real ways of the world.
He ordered a second bourbon. The two women down the bar cracked up laughing, and Warren thought what a great sound it was. Oh, how many great sounds had he missed back when all he cared about was being the big fish in whatever body of water he swam in. Oh, what trouble that angry ego had gotten him into. Oh, how distorted the last ten years had been.
Oh boy.
He sipped. He thought of heading south. East. West. Anywhere but back north. Right? Yes. Anywhere but back north.
Yet…
The boys. They were going to need help. Weren’t they? How many of them were spoiled rotten by his book by now? How many young lives had he taken by deciding for them what they should and should not know?
Why hadn’t he pulled each aside? Why hadn’t he talked to the boys directly? He could’ve told them the truth, then told them to be quiet.
Why hadn’t he taken them with him?
Surely, given his state of mind, Warren could’ve killed an Inspector or two. Whoever was on duty that night. It made sound moral sense in hindsight. The murder of an ex-con hiding in the woods, in the name of rescuing two dozen boys from a life of slavery.
He sipped. The women erupted again and Warren looked over at them. Tried to get into the jolly mood. As if he might siphon some of what they were feeling.
Good God, these women. They had no idea what the man down the bar had been capable of. No more so than if he’d been a cult leader. A doctor who prescribed unnecessary medicine. A false prophet, a false author. Here to hurt, not help.
The woman smiled at him again, and Warren understood then that if he was going to begin a life outside the Parenthood, he was going to have to eventually tell someone what he’d done. Probably. Or…if he could just erase the ten previous years, start from there, pick up where he left off…
Could he?
As he smiled back at the woman and raised his glass, as she raised hers in return then blushed for the silliness of it, Warren understood that he couldn’t erase his part in what went on. Not only because a man wasn’t able to turn back time but because the man he had been then was the man who had decided to end up where he was now.
The two women got up and put their coats on, and Warren ordered a third drink and wished he could erase every year he’d lived, erase them all. Start the whole thing over. Identify with being an overly kind person this time around. Eschew a life of darkness. Bury the intellectually superior cloak he’d worn for so many years before agreeing to toss any and all of his soul into a fiery pit for profit.
The women had gone. Warren thought of the roads he’d taken once he fled the Parenthood. Imagined himself taking them again. In the opposite direction. Saw himself approaching the tower with a rifle in hand. Saw Inspectors falling in pools of blood, ex-cons shot in the back. Richard with a barrel to his chest.
The bartender looked over Warren’s shoulder.
Who’s there?
The one woman had come back. Just sat down right next to Warren. Her drunk eyes were huge behind her big frames. Like she was holding two magnifying glasses up to her face. Warren, trying hard to fit into the old world, the real world, ordered a round for them both. They talked, they laughed. Warren caught himself slipping back into old Warren: curt and snobbish. How? How was it possible any vestige of his former persona remained? He saw himself rounding up the Alphabet Boys. He’d answer their questions about the book. He’d tell them everything. They’d learn the truth of the world as the soles of their shoes soaked in Richard’s blood.
Warren was paying his tab suddenly, then leaving the bar with the woman, arm in arm.
It was cold outside, freezing, and she said, Don’t worry, we can go to my place. Warren smiled but he couldn’t stop thinking about the boys. Yes, this was good. A woman. A place to stay. But the Parenthood went on. Did it not? And if the base rule of the constitution was broken…wouldn’t all the boys be sent to the Corner?
And hadn’t he made that happen?
And had it happened already?
He climbed old stairs with the woman. The woman was clearly drunk, laughing, hanging on to him, as Warren held her up, held himself up, too. He hadn’t been quite this drunk in a decade. Good feeling, bad feeling, both. Oh, the boys the boys the boys.
The woman fumbled with her key and Warren helped her. He imagined Richard at the podium in the Body Hall, hands raised, crying out defiantly before his boys. Demanding they tell him who’d read what and how many pages. Surely Richard had to know that much. A simple game of Boats? Surely. The woman half-fell into her apartment and Warren stumbled after her. She turned on the lights and said, This way, more booze. Warren, torn up inside, aware that it was far too soon to make any attempt at lowering himself back into the real world, followed. More booze sounded good. So good.
Nice place, he said. But he didn’t feel nice. Didn’t feel like a good guy at all and definitely didn’t feel like he deserved to be having a good night with, of all things, a woman. And she was holding his hand, leading him through the
apartment, through the living room, into the kitchen, by a stove. She was getting glasses from the cupboard. The bottle was already on the counter. She said how much she liked whiskey and the smell of whiskey and she didn’t care what it did to her and suddenly Warren just wanted to leave. Go. This was way too soon. There were two dozen boys whose lives were no doubt in jeopardy because they weren’t even allowed to read about a woman, and here Warren was in a woman’s apartment, getting drunk, doing the exact thing any one of those boys should be able to do. And here she was talking and pouring the drinks and here Warren, his mind a muddle, his soul torn in so many pieces, some of which were irretrievable, already blown by the black winds that circulated through the basement of the Turret, the breath of the Parenthood, and his fleeing the tower, too, didn’t deserve this. Didn’t deserve this at all.
“Cheers,” the woman said, handing him a glass, clinking it with her own. Her eyes looked great. So big and funny. Warren hadn’t seen eyes like this in so long. It was almost as if the woman looked like an odd man to him, a man in costume, a man who had pulled cheerful features from a Halloween bag and slapped them together before heading to the bar. Warren sipped his drink. Thought of the boys drinking milk in the cafeteria, Richard drinking scotch in his office. Could the boys smell it on him? Surely. How could they not? Warren could smell it on the woman, on himself, on the apartment, too. The woman talked about town, about failed relationships, as Warren, nodding along, eyed the counter behind her, the refrigerator, the archway to the kitchen, the living room beyond, the couch and the pair of shoes behind the couch. The ankles in those shoes, too.
“Hey,” he said, trying to smile, not even sure why. “Who’s that hiding behind the couch?”
The woman mock-frowned and looked to the living room. Then she cracked up laughing, but Warren didn’t join her. No no. Because the moment after he asked it, he saw the full-bodied reflection in the glass of the balcony door as clear as his own thoughts were not.
Warren grabbed the woman’s wrist.
“What’s going on here?”
The cold he felt then was much deeper than the winds that had resisted him as he ran from the Turret, ran through the pines, took the roads he hadn’t seen in years.
“Hey,” the woman said. “You’re hurting me.”
Warren let go. He made for the living room. Behind him the woman said, “What do you wanna cheer? Inspections?”
Warren moved quick through the living room as a man rose from behind the couch and a second one stepped out from a doorway Warren hadn’t noticed at all. A third man came through the apartment’s front door. When Warren looked back to the woman, she had no glass in her hand, and her eyes were no longer funny.
“You were easier to find than a deer at a salt lick. A homeless shelter? A bar? A woman? The Parenthood expected more from their creative writer.”
Warren moved for the front door, despite the man who stood in his way. Something sudden and solid happened at the back of his head, and he fell to the carpeted floor.
Dizzy, fading, he noticed there was hardly any furniture, no pictures on the walls. But he hadn’t seen any of this on his way in. His mind had been on the boys. On possibly, insanely, returning to the Parenthood.
And so, he thought, as the four figures crouched around him, he was. He was heading back to the Parenthood.
Heading back to the boys.
Kill ’Em All
One drink. As the Inspectors held J in quarantine. An hour or two. Two drinks. However long it took to prep himself, to make certain he was asking the right questions when the time came to ask them.
Boats, of course. The Parenthood’s only form of surveillance. You couldn’t win Boats without telling the truth.
A lie detector disguised as a game.
J had seen B from his window. Okay. This had happened. He’d recognized the girl as a girl from Warren Bratt’s description in his insane fucking book. Okay. This had happened. B might not have seen him. Didn’t matter. The girl had to go. J had to go.
Who else? Who had J told? Who knew?
Richard stood by his desk, eyeing the living room table he’d soon sit at. He saw the event before it happened, himself in one chair, J in the other; man and boy; father and son; a good old-fashioned game of Boats.
Gray area. The expanse between the rules he and Marilyn had made long ago and how many of those rules had been broken now. Had someone asked him ten years ago what he’d do with a boy who read all of Warren Bratt’s sneaky fucking book, Richard would’ve of course said the boy was no good. Spoiled. He’d have sent him to the Corner, no questions asked. Because he’d have to. Because the Parenthood and the rules he and Marilyn established were more important than the number of boys and girls. If through the years Richard had been responsible for sending every boy but one to the Corner, and if, in the end, that one boy rose to become the brightest, most focused, assuredly original scientist, then so be it. The experiment would be a success. Proof that the mind is capable of unfathomable heights once the elements of distraction are removed. But now, three kids, two Alphabet Boys and one Letter Girl, all in quarantine…but all spoiled rotten?
Take D…
Richard read the book, too. He seethed with each paragraph, growing angrier as the letters played across the pages like passengers on a train coming to destroy a man’s lifework. A lot of bad shit in there. Oh, were there slights at Richard; oh, were there innuendos that implied only a monster could do what the Parenthood had done.
Many.
Yet…the mention of a woman…early in the book the woman at the bar…later, during the gruelingly long monologue, in which Warren spelled out the Parenthood’s mission as though it were imagined by a fool…might not it all come off as science fiction to a boy like D? To a boy who not only hadn’t ever heard the word woman, a boy who had come to expect whimsy and the fantastical in his leisure books, what could it mean? What was the difference between Warren Bratt’s Needs and Lawrence Luxley’s One Big Ollie in the Orchard?
Gray area. So much of it. Higher than the Turret, wider than the Yard. Longer, too, than the winding roads through the pines, the four hundred curves that Warren himself must have taken on foot to reach the first sign of civilization, the tackle shop at the corner of county roads 12 and 13.
Richard smiled, but it did not feel good. He wanted very badly to know what Warren did when he got there. Who he talked to. What he said.
He’d get those answers tonight.
Gray area…
Take B…
The girl confessed to crossing the pines and discovering the second tower. She said she was alone. Said she didn’t see anyone inside the tower. Didn’t make contact with anyone at all. Asked if it was used for storage. Why would the girl tell the truth about one thing and not another? She’d been crying during her confession, trembling and unable to get sentences out without a lot of obvious effort.
Burt cited many reasons the girl might tell only a partial truth.
Covering up for a sister?
Ashamed for having seen something she wasn’t supposed to?
Scared for having seen a boy named J?
But how would B know to be afraid?
Gray area.
So much of it.
Marilyn had a game of Boats scheduled with B in quarantine. If there was a bottom to this fathomless fall, Marilyn would get to it.
Richard, still standing, his red jacket upon the carpet before his desk, shirtless and angry, tried to assure himself that the problem, the disease, the ruination, had been quarantined indeed. But how could he know how many Letter Girls B spoke to? Or how many were with her on her journey through the pines?
Marilyn said it was out of character. B wasn’t the type to explore.
Was she the type to lie? To hide? To shatter a psychological masterwork?
And how many boys had read Warre
n’s book? And who had J told about the girl out his window? And what other boy looked out his own window as well?
Oh, the word girl sounded so rancid out of J’s mouth. So foreign. As if Richard hadn’t heard it himself in so long that he’d forgetten it existed.
Boats.
Already on his third drink, Richard imagined knowledge spreading through the towers like Rotts, like Vees, like Placasores. For five hallucinatory minutes, he imagined that these diseases were real and not made up by the Parenthood to explain the Inspections. Staring glassy-eyed, he shuddered, imagining those never defined (and certainly never photographed) Placasores spreading from one Alphabet Boy to another until they fanned out into the Yard, where the Letter Girl B picked them up and carried them with her back to the second tower. He imagined Warren loosening the lid on a jar Richard once thought impossible to open. He imagined bugs, millions, scurrying about the Turrets, hiding in cracks, under pillows, in the windows and walls.
He absently brought a hand to his bare arm, swiped at the Moldus crawling there, plucked Vees from his knuckles.
“Kill ’em all,” he whispered.
If this was what the end looked like, he refused to be embarrassed by it. So long as one boy was still clean (and there were many, right?), the experiment was without stain.
He tried to imagine a clean boy in all that gray area. Tried to recall his magnificent Alphabet Boys only a week back, before Warren Bratt betrayed him.
He crossed to his desk, picked up his phone, and pressed the number 1. He and Marilyn had their limited time together, by appointment, in the Glasgow Tunnel, an effort to respect the philosophy of their own experiment. A Plexiglas wall to separate even themselves from each other.
But sometimes a woman’s touch was crucial.
“No,” Marilyn said when she answered the phone.
“No?”
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