Джош Малерман - Inspection

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.

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.