Джош Малерман - Inspection

He wrote. He wrote a lot. And as the yellow pages were filled, in rapid, uncaring succession, Warren imagined a stack of white beside them, growing at the same rate.

It was a downright scary place to be: writing the book he should be writing, while imagining the one he shouldn’t.

After ten pages about the window washer, he opened the drawer again. The white pages shone like a spotlight. His desk the stage on which he wanted to perform.

He closed the drawer. Lest someone in the basement hall open his office door. Lest the bright white of those pages creep out under that door, illuminate the winding halls, reach the Corner.

What was he thinking of doing? Really? What?

But Warren didn’t want to answer that. Couldn’t begin to. And as he tried to eliminate the images of the boys, now twelve, from his mind, he found it wasn’t any easier replacing them with his old writing friends.

So who, then? Who to think of when thinking of the present was as troubling as the past?

Warren stopped writing. Stared at the desk as though it were a stage after all.

He looked to the door.

Then, sweating, opened the drawer.

He thought of the incinerator square down the hall, embedded in the stones. He could always torch whatever he wrote.

Yes. But could he ever burn the idea to write it?

Overly full and lazy, the four boys ignored their studies for an hour and sat by the window in J’s living room. Many years ago they had determined it was the Floor 8 window with the best view of the Yard. D and L sat on the couch near one another, L with his legs crossed as D leaned forward on his bony knees. D was the skinniest of all the Alphabet Boys, and compared to W, he was downright skeletal. His hair, long and black, was tucked behind both ears, in direct contrast to L’s curly brown mop, which shadowed his ears and gave the impression that he was never quite listening to what the other boys had to say.

Q and J sat upon the window’s ledge. Q not only scored the highest on every engineer exam and mathematical quiz, but he also had what D.A.D. once called itness, a term the other boys good-naturedly teased him about, until they realized they agreed with D.A.D. completely. A lot of the Alphabet Boys were smart, very smart, they knew, but Q’s particular brand of intelligence appeared effortless.

“I think I speak for us all,” L said, finally broaching the topic, “when I say I knew exactly what he was referring to.”

D knew what D.A.D. was referring to, too.

“I didn’t like it,” D said.

“No? What was there not to like?” L asked.

“It sounded to me like D.A.D. is getting…nervous.”

The boys shifted uncomfortably.

“Nervous?” J asked. “About what?”

“You heard him,” D said. “All that garbage about us coming into our own…as if we weren’t there already.”

“Garbage!” L said. “Goodness. First J accuses him of lying and now you’re calling his speech garbage. Times are certainly changing! Maybe he has a right to be nervous!”

“I didn’t say he lied,” J said again. But his voice came out quieter than he’d meant for it to.

“Well, where does he think we’ve been?” D went on. “Sometimes I think he doesn’t know a thing about us.”

L lifted his blue notebook. He wrote something down. “He will, D, so long as we write our thoughts down.”

D frowned.

“But what if I don’t want to do that? What if I want to keep my thoughts”—his hair swung down in front of his eyes—“to myself?”

“D,” Q said, shaking his head no. “What a strange thing to say.” He opened his blue notebook and set his eraserless pen to the paper. “Have you felt this way before?”

D looked to the notebook, then to J. In that moment J wondered why D had looked to him. Did he know J was feeling the same way? At breakfast, J hadn’t outright called D.A.D. a liar. But still, he had insinuated something.

“You going to Inspect me, Q?” D asked. “That notebook is for your thoughts. Not mine.”

Q smiled.

“But what of my reaction to your thoughts? That’s certainly my jurisdiction.”

D flailed his hands and fell back into the couch.

“Whatever. Go ahead. Write all about me.”

J looked out the window, across the manicured acres of the Yard to the wall of pines that signified the boundaries of his world. He thought of the shape he’d seen crouched there. He almost spoke of it.

“Wild as his words may have been,” he said, “they articulated a feeling I gotta admit I’ve been having.”

“And what’s that?” L asked.

J turned to face the others. “I feel…new.”

“Yes.” Q said. His glasses slipped to the end of his nose. “Me, too.”

“Really?” D asked. “Because I don’t feel new at all. I feel like my old wonderful self. And to be honest, I’d like to stay that way.”

“Scared of change?” L asked.

“Not scared, nitwit. Happy. Already content. Sorry if I’m the only one in this room who doesn’t mind being the boy he’s always been.”

“Is this about the shuffle?” Q asked. “Because I’ll agree with you there. Who wants to change rooms? Not me. And yet…”

“And yet,” D mocked. “Always and yet with you.”

Q held up his pen. “And yet…change is good. It must be natural. Otherwise, why would D.A.D. spend so much time thinking about it? Obviously he has. So one can only surmise that, there being no option but to change, D.A.D. is graciously preparing us for our internal growth with a little external one. That’s balance, boys. Homeostasis.”

J turned to him. “What have you been thinking?”

“Me?” Q asked.

“Yeah. You said, Me, too, a minute ago.”

Q pondered this. The shadow of the snowflakes falling outside the window made brief, ever-changing patterns on his face.

“I’ve been thinking of locating the Living Trees, for one.”

The four boys were quiet. J felt words trying to squirm their way up his throat. A vague description of a figure. The way the branches and leaves met in the moonlight. The ghost of a dead brother. Or a hysterical vision at midnight.

“Then you should write about that in your journal,” L finally said, breaking the loaded silence.

“Right,” Q said. “I plan to.”

“This conversation is weighing on me,” D said.

“Why?” J wanted to know.

“I mean…come on! Listen to us. Are we changing? I sincerely hope not.”

L smiled, leaned over, and patted D on the shoulder.

“Right before our very eyes.”

Another block of silence. J thought of the morning’s Inspection. The fact that he wasn’t entirely honest with D.A.D.

“And if you feel like keeping secrets,” L said to D, “you should write that down, too.”

“But first,” Q said, wiggling his eyebrows, “tell us what those secrets are.”

The boys laughed, but there was some nervousness to it. J heard it in his own voice, too.

“While it’s true that some thoughts are probably best kept until we really understand them,” Q said, more seriously now, “we don’t want to ignore the Recasting Years, either.”

“Recasting,” D echoed. “So now it’s just…official. We heard the phrase this morning and now it’s just…recasting.”

“Well, of course, ” L laughed condescendingly. “That’s how it goes! D.A.D. said so.”

“But what does that mean?” J asked suddenly. He got down from the window ledge and stood before his brothers on the couch.

“What does what mean?” L asked. “And don’t fly into that lying bit again.”