Джош Малерман - Inspection

“But whose life?” Warren asked himself, still staring at the blank white cover page. “This isn’t your life.”

Oh, but it was.

I’ll tell you how to write, he used to stammer in his gruff and short way, speaking blunt to the rest of the Gangsters. You got the way you write and you got the way you want to write. And then you got what you think is too crazy for you to be writing. What you need to do is embarrass yourself…get crazy. In the end the embarrassing shit is what you wanted to be writing all along.

Oh, so full of soul. So full of art.

So full of shit.

The Gangsters ate it up. Warren’s gothic minions, an ex-girlfriend had called them. His personal fan club. The only people in all of Wisconsin who’d brave a winter storm to go listen to a drunk Warren Bratt define what real writing was. He looked the part, too, and certainly drank it. The stocky, angry author going on about the heart of art and the purpose of a good book. Books were his religion, he’d said. His Jesus, his God. His maker.

But despite his claims that he wasn’t interested in money, he sure believed he was worth a lot of it.

Countless rows in Don Don’s. So many fights with the Gangsters. Always always always about money.

Always.

“You were a pig,” he told himself now. “Fucking Christ, Bratt. You were a pig.”

A stuck pig, no less. Perfectly fixed for a visit from Richard.

Warren used to tell anybody in earshot how much he was worth. How much a sentence of his was worth. How much even a conversation about how much he was worth was worth. Once he asked a fellow Gangster for payment, for having been sanctified with Warren’s advice.

“You used to call yourself a seer, ” he said now, finally lowering himself into his writing chair. He had no recollection of picking the pencil up, but there it was. Between his fingers. “Oh God. How fucking embarrassing.”

Why now? Why realize this now ? Was it the natural arc of an asshole? An inevitable day of retribution?

Or was it the look of adulthood in the eyes of the Alphabet Boys? The moment when he could no longer say, Well, what do kids know anyway.

He tried to slink back into the hollows of his own smoky parlors, his troubled mind, the rooms he’d occupied for so long, making his role at the Parenthood bearable. But he couldn’t find them anymore. Like the Nursery that once harbored twenty-six cribs, those rooms had been cemented over.

“What have you done?”

He looked up, actually expecting to see someone else standing on the other side of his desk. Surely it wasn’t his voice he’d heard ask the question? Surely he didn’t sound like that? And there was simply no way the man who asked that question was the same one who had agreed to write books for two dozen boys gaslighted and locked into an experiment of ungodly dynamics…

…for life.

He felt something unnatural move in his gut. As if a very bad thing had gotten inside him and there was no way to get it out. No surgery to remove the barbarity he’d been a part of.

The Parenthood was no longer bearable. On any level and in any way. That was certain now.

“Oh fuck,” he said. “You’re gonna do it, aren’t you?” It wasn’t a motivational thing to say. It didn’t feel good at all.

It scared him to death.

He looked to the office door, perhaps considering unlocking it. Putting the white pages away.

But he knew he’d just passed that option, as if it were a deep-space mile marker, one Warren saw as he floated, without gravity, beyond it.

The Gangsters had warned him about his obsession with money. Bald Bill O’Brien said it would grow on him like mold. One day it would swallow his art. And the next day it would swallow him . Warren denied it all. Punched O’Brien for saying so. Broke up with Trish Newton for saying the same thing.

When the Cocky from Milwaukee got rolling about money, it was like standing inches from a lit Civil War cannon, and there wasn’t much one could do but duck.

The top page of the white legal pad looked lit, too.

Ready to blow.

Warren told them the art was in an untouchable place, that that wasn’t what he meant when he said he was worth something, when he drunkenly charged his friends for wisdom. Money was not something to be afraid of. Not something to avoid. And he proved it, too, or thought he did; with his first published story, he used the sweet reward to buy the Gangsters a round at Don Don’s.

But the night didn’t go the way Warren wanted it to.

“Urges” appeared in a punk magazine, The Hips and Lips Trip, and when the Gangsters actually read the work he’d gotten published, they had a lot to say.

What are you gonna write next, Bratt? A fuckin’ western?

This was Arlene, the pockmarked cigarette-smoking blimp that Warren could hardly stand to look at let alone accept a critique from.

You don’t like it? Warren told Arlene, his eyes two slits of pompous paid-writer. You know what you call a guy who puts pen to paper and doesn’t get paid? A camper. Dear Mom, I’m so sad and lonely…and broke. Please send money so I can buy a goddamn drink. Fuck you, Arlene. I’m a professional now.

But if getting paid to write constituted “professional,” Warren Bratt was much closer than he realized.

On a warm summer evening, home alone, wearing only his underwear and seated at the typewriter upon his kitchen table, Warren received a phone call. Assuming it was one of the Gangsters calling, he didn’t answer. He’d already begun typing when the answering machine announced it was no friend. No magazine, either. The crackly little speaker delivered a voice Warren didn’t recognize at all.

Warren, hello. My name is Gordon Fink.

Warren cocked an ear toward the machine.

We’re very big fans of your story and we have an opportunity for you. A job, if you will. A career in writing.

Was this how it worked, then? Finally make enough money to buy a round and it all starts rolling in from there? In the mind situated beneath his thinning hair and behind his wrinkled brow, Warren imagined more money slipping in through the vents, stopping up the toilet, falling like snow outside.

Whoever Gordon Fink was, his voice sounded like he had more money than the editors of Hips.

It’s my employer’s preference that I do not leave our number, but I will try again soon.

CLICK.

When the phone rang again, an hour later, Warren leapt from the kitchen table, his troll’s body moving faster than it had in years.

“Warren Bratt here.”

Static popped at the other end. Sounded like the guy was calling from Aruba.

“Can you meet us tomorrow evening, Mr. Bratt?”

The word scam crossed Warren’s mind.

“I don’t know. I’ve got shit to do. Another story.”

“I don’t mean to make light of your plans, but this is a significant offer.”

Warren took in the dimensions of his crappy apartment. He saw men’s magazines scattered on the lumpy wood floor. He saw an unmade bed illuminated by the light of a crappy television set. He saw empty pizza boxes and no whiskey. No wine. No women.

No wonder.

“I can make it,” he said. “What time? Where?”

“That’ll do for now. Thank you, Mr. Bratt.”

The man hung up.

Warren lowered the phone from his ear and stared at it. A shiver parachuted down his neck, landing somewhere on his back. The call had felt more like a death threat than a writing opportunity.

That’ll do for now. Thank you.

Scam, he thought. He hung up.

A prick who bought Hips got his number from the publisher and lived for pranking writers. That’s what it was and all it could be. But later, much later, Warren struggled to fall asleep, beset with images of Gordon Fink sneaking into his apartment through holes in the water-damaged ceiling. A scam. A prank. A kook.