“I will not abort.”
“We could begin anew.”
“A new what, Richard?”
Richard didn’t have an answer for this. In the beginning it was easy to contemplate attempting the experiment more than once. But twelve years deep, it was clear this was their only shot.
“Do you feel it, Marilyn?”
“Feel what?”
“Revolt.”
Some silence. But Marilyn rarely allowed silences to grow. “I think it’s time to do a little parenting, Richard.”
“Speaking of parenting…”
“Yes. The man we found in the Orchard is in your Corner now.”
“How many times has he come?”
“Does it matter?”
“To me. It does.”
“He’d been watching your Turret for many months. It appears ‘Mister Tree’ makes for a reasonable hiding spot.”
“Do we know which one he is?”
“He made no effort to hide it. Told us right from the very beginning who he was here to see.”
“Which one?”
“He’s J’s father, dear. Come to assuage the guilt for having sold him.”
Richard stared into his drink. Believed he could see the ice melting.
“J,” he said. He didn’t like that two controversies surrounded one boy. The odds didn’t feel right.
“You’ll get your answers from him by way of Boats.”
“Oh, Marilyn…to hear him use the word girl.”
“Did he?”
“I told you. He saw B outside his window.”
“But did he use the word girl?”
“Yes. I told you, he—”
“No. You did not.” Some silence. A shuffling of papers. “In Warren Bratt’s book titled Needs, he used the word woman seven hundred times. Her four hundred and fifty. She about the same. But girl…”
Richard brought his drink to his lips, already knowing what Marilyn was about to say, already feeling the bricks of the Turret loosen a little more.
“Not once, Richard. He didn’t use the word once.”
“Oh God.”
“Where did J learn the word?”
“Oh God.”
“Who told him the word, Richard? Who knows it other than…my girls?”
Boats
Richard was seven drinks deep by the time the game got under way. The sky was not dark beyond the windows of his first-floor quarters, nor would it be by the conclusion of any average game of Boats.
But this was no average game.
I saw a girl outside my window.
GIRL
Richard knew what questions to ask. Knew he’d have to answer some along the way. But what did it matter, telling the truth to a dead boy walking?
They had all day. After all, no parent was coming to pick up the boy.
“How about a game of Boats?” Richard asked.
* * *
—
UNDER DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES J would have marveled at D.A.D.’s rooms. His private quarters, the place to which the man retired to privately improve the Parenthood. On a different day J would have been proud to be shown this inner sanctum.
But now J only saw D.A.D.’s lips opening and closing, opening and closing, repeating the one unfathomable word:
UNCLEAN
He’s going to explain to you why you’re okay. He’s going to make you better.
Even now he turned to the Parenthood for comfort. J was the one who had failed. Not them.
“Comfortable?” D.A.D. asked.
D.A.D. did not look at him as he spoke. He arranged the Boats on the board, the muscles in his arms slinking under his skin like a buried reality. His voice as icy as Q’s ladder.
“I’m fine,” J said. The Inspectors stood by the door, blocking J’s view of it.
A woman stood against the wall.
M.O.M.? J didn’t think so. But whoever she was, he couldn’t stop looking at her, over D.A.D.’s shoulder, until, visibly uneasy, she crossed out of view, behind him.
“Need anything to drink, J?”
D.A.D. smelled like he’d drunk a bottle of medicine before sitting down. But J didn’t want anything himself. Felt too nervous to lift a glass of water.
“No, thank you.”
Water
D.A.D.’s board was nicer than the ones the boys used. The water on the surface was much bluer and the individual waves were as detailed as if K had drawn them. The boats, made of metal, shone, just polished perhaps, and looked so real they could be carrying passengers, students of the game, here to watch them play.
To J, the deeper waters at the center of the board looked real enough to drown in.
“You like Boats, J?”
“Yes, of course. I love Boats.”
J hardly recognized his own voice. Sounded younger than he was when Z was sent to the Corner.
“You hear that, Burt?” D.A.D. said, acknowledging the woman standing behind J. “He loves Boats.” Then, looking J in the eye without humor, without fatherhood, “Let’s connect the nodes.”
They both did, man and boy, sticking the small rubber ovals to their necks, their chests, their wrists.
D.A.D. gripped the line switch. The board hummed to rattling life.
“How did you learn the word girl, J?” D.A.D. asked calmly, sipping from a glass J hadn’t noticed was on the table. “You can’t win a game of telling the truth if you don’t talk.”
J knew the rules well enough. If you lied, your boat did not advance. And if your boat did not advance, everyone in the room knew you lied.
“The girl outside my window…”
“Yes?”
“Her told me the word.”
“She told you the word.”
J’s boat moved forward. Its wake a white mist. Actual droplets descended to the tabletop.
The water in D.A.D.’s board, J realized, was real.
“Thank you,” D.A.D. said. It was clear he was already waiting for his next turn. But J had turns of his own.
“What’s a girl?”
D.A.D. answered without hesitation. “A girl is the opposite sex of a boy. She is necessary in procreation, being the one who carries the baby.”
Ever seen a new boy growing on a Living Tree?
It was D.A.D.’s turn.
“Where did she tell you the word?”
“In my rooms.”
J’s voice trembled as his boat advanced. As a small yellow light turned on outside the captain’s cabin, illuminating the darker waters ahead.
At first, D.A.D. said nothing. Only stared. As if whatever he’d been sipping had turned him to stone. Then, “Your turn.”
J saw red rising in D.A.D.’s face.
“Have you always known what a girl is?”
D.A.D. smiled, but there was nothing happy about it. “Yes. How’d she get in your rooms?”
D.A.D.’s boat advanced. Its light came on, too. J tried to process what D.A.D. had just said. Yes, he’d always known. Then why hadn’t J?
The Parenthood has been lying to us.
Boats had a way of making an Alphabet Boy want to tell the truth, if only to pull it from his opponent sooner.
“She climbed Q’s ice ladder. She came to my window.”
D.A.D. leaned back in his chair. He let out a single clipped syllable of angry laughter.
J’s boat advanced.
“I have so many questions,” J said. “I can barely—”
“Your turn, J.”
J’s mind reeled. A wheel of worries. He took hold of the closest one. “Am I sick?”
D.A.D. did not look him in the eye. “No,” he said. “You’re not sick.”
“But I—”
“O
ne question per turn, J.”
D.A.D.’s boat moved forward, rocking upon bigger waves.
“Which of the other boys did you talk to about her?”
J was still trying to make sense of the last answer. Not sick? Yet…unclean?
Lies. K’s voice in his bedroom in the dark.
“Boats is so much more than a game,” D.A.D. said, a spark of pride in his eye. He ran a finger along the tabletop, the space between himself and the board. When he lifted it, water glistened. “It’s what’s known in the real world as a lie detector. I’ll ask you again. Which of the other boys did you talk to about her?”
The real world, J thought. And what was his own?
“None of them.”
J’s boat moved forward, approaching the increasingly rocky middle of the board.
“Why did you hide the second Turret from us?”
“Because I didn’t want you to know what’s in it.”
D.A.D’s boat advanced. J knew he’d asked a bad question. It was one of the tricks of Boats: asking a question that could be answered halfway.
“How long have you known, J?”
“How long have I known?”
“Play the fucking game, J!”
J leaned back in his seat. His entire body felt bright with panic.
“Her came last night.”
His boat advanced.
“Why did you hide girls from us?”
“I wanted to breed great thinkers, J. The opposite sex gets in the way of this happening. Men waste their lives chasing women.”
D.A.D.’s boat didn’t move. The woman cleared her throat behind J.
D.A.D. said, “I felt my life was a failure. In precisely this way.”
His boat advanced.
“How was your life a failure?”
D.A.D. slammed a closed fist on the table.
“One question!”
D.A.D.’s face went as red as his coat, which hung on the back of his chair. He gulped from his glass. He said, “You say you didn’t mention it to your brothers—”
“No, I didn’t—”
“Do not interrupt me, you little shit.”
J’s mouth snapped shut.
“You say you didn’t mention it to your brothers, but did any of them see the girl?”
J shook his head no.
“Answer the fucking question out loud, J.”
“Not that I know of, no.”
J’s boat reached the rough waters at the middle of the board. He felt water upon his face. The boat sank, momentarily, before rising again.
How deep did D.A.D.’s board go?
“Ask me a question, J.”
“Were you raised, side by side, with girls?”
“Yes.”
D.A.D.’s boat advanced, dipped, stayed down long enough for J to think it had fallen to the floor below, then rose again, level with J’s at center-board.
“How?” J asked. “How did you pass your Inspections growing up?”
“One question, J.”
“But how did you pass?”
D.A.D. rose and slammed both palms on the table. Cold water from the board splashed onto J’s hands.
“The Parenthood is an isolated community, J. In the real world there are millions of children raised without Inspections. You were given the opportunity of a lifetime. And you blew it.”
J only stared.
Millions.
D.A.D. sat again. The table shook. He said, “Did you write down what you know?”
“No.”
J’s boat advanced, but not much. The water pushed back past center-board. Only big truths could deliver a boy to the end.
“Your move.”
“Is my whole life a lie?”
This time D.A.D. did hesitate. He stared long at the two pieces bobbing between them. He sipped his drink. Then, “Do you know there are twenty-year-olds reading at the same level as you right now? That you could pass a university mathematics course? If you’re asking if you’ve been lied to your whole life, the answer is yes. Things have been hidden from you. Many things. But if you’re asking me if the person you are is not real because of this, then I would answer with an emphatic no. I would argue that you and your brothers are more truth than any boy ever was.”
J watched as D.A.D.’s boat advanced. It moved farther than his own had.
“There are no Living Trees?” he asked.
“No,” D.A.D. said, ignoring the double question. “You were created by a weak father and a murdering mother.”
J wiped water from his face. Boats?
Tears?
“What’s her name, J?”
J shook his head no.
“What’s her name, J?”
“I won’t tell you.”
“You know that I’d never hurt her, right?”
J looked to D.A.D.’s troubled face. The man looked as pained as he felt himself. It sounded so true, those few words. Sounded so much like the man J knew D.A.D. to be.
“You wouldn’t?”
Of course not, J! The Parenthood protects!
“Never.”
“I can’t.” Crying now. Unable to make out anybody in the room. Unable to make out the room.
Even the action on the board was a blur.
“What’s her name? Was it B? I don’t think it was.”
“I can’t, I—”
J wiped his eyes and D.A.D. was beside him. The board shifted as the wires connecting the nodes to D.A.D. were pulled.
“Richard!” the woman behind J yelled.
But it was too late. Through the foggy wall of tears, an open hand. J didn’t realize he was falling until he hit the floor.
“You want Vees, J? You want Placasores? TELL ME HER NAME OR I WILL GIVE YOU ROTTS!”
J didn’t want to get up. Didn’t want to open his eyes. Didn’t want to hear D.A.D.’s voice ever again like he’d just heard it.
And, despite K’s words, despite what he believed to be the truth, that Vees and Placasores did not exist…he thought then that maybe they did.
And that maybe D.A.D. meant it when he said he could give them to him.
“K,” he said quietly. “Her name is K.”
Even then, under unfathomable conditions, speaking her name felt good.
Telling D.A.D. the truth did, too.
And his boat advanced. Far.
“Good move, J.” D.A.D. was seated again, removing the nodes from his body. J sat halfway up, saw water spilling over the edges of the table. “Saving the heavy truth for rocky waters. Gives you more distance. You might have won this game after all.” D.A.D. took his coat from his chair back. “But we’re done here.”
As D.A.D. put his arms into his red jacket, J saw it as blood, real blood. As though K’s ax-wielding girls walking the Turret halls had already been to this room.
“D.A.D.?”
But D.A.D. was lifting the black receiver on his desk.
“What’s going to happen to her?” J asked.
The Inspectors stepped to the table. The woman to D.A.D.’s side.
“J is spoiled rotten,” D.A.D. said into the phone. “Your K is, too. No surprise there. K and B. Thick as thieves.”
He hung up.
“D.A.D.?”
D.A.D. was heading for the door.
“Like cockroaches, you fucking kids. I save you from death before you’re even born and somehow I’m the bad man.”
“You said you wouldn’t hurt her,” J said, up now, stumbling toward D.A.D.
The Inspectors were on him fast.
“You ask what’s going to happen to her,” D.A.D. said, “but you never stop to think what’s going to happen to me.”
The Inspectors dragged J to the door. D.A
.D. opened it, then bent until his nose was touching J’s.
“You ever pay attention to the bread in the cafeteria, J?”
J only stared. Only thought, K.
Meet me in the tunnel after dark.
Beyond the windows of D.A.D.’s quarters, dark was near.
“You ever seen bread when it sours?”
We have to do it soon. Before they change how they do things.
“It grows mold, J. It rots.”
K.
“You’ve gone bad. And the only thing to do with boys who have gone bad is to throw them out.”
D.A.D. gestured, and the Inspectors dragged J out the door.
Meet me in the tunnel…
K would be in the tunnel, too.
…after dark.
Her voice like a door of its own. Not closing. Opening.
J was on his way.
As the Inspectors took him, as he clawed to get loose, as he imagined a wood door with melting blood-red letters, the names of boys and girls, T-H-E C-O-R-N-E-R dripping to the floor, J thought, yes, he would meet her in the basement after dark.
It wasn’t until they were in the staff bathroom, caged momentarily in a nightmare acoustic box, that J accepted the high-pitched wailing that had accompanied them from D.A.D.’s quarters as his own.
“Show Us What You Would Do”
It smelled bad below, something dead, something wet. Having spent his entire life in the clean Turret and the fresh air of the Yard and Orchard, J had nothing to relate it to. The closest association he made was his wet winter clothes on the heater in his rooms, but this thinking didn’t last long, as his reality was unspooling by the second.
The rumbling hum of the boiler brought him to dig his nails into the arms that dragged him through the cobblestoned halls. The Inspectors didn’t seem to mind. Either J’s strength was insignificant or, as he had fleetingly seen in the storm of blurred terror, the men felt too guilty to swat his small fingers aside.
J was certain every door they passed was the Corner, until he could actually read the nameplates, the stencils, the pieces of paper. With his mind’s eye (piqued, cleaved) he saw blood-black letters, the blood of the child, the blood of dead brothers and the Letter Girl J. In his mind’s eye the letters were uneven, the word getting smaller as it was spelled, as though the man responsible for labeling the door did so in a rush to get away from it.
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