Джош Малерман - Inspection

“Right now,” Gordon said. “Give the window washer a name.”

Warren didn’t have to think hard. He had a long list of trite masculine names.

“Jerry . ”

“Great. Jerry it is. And what does Jerry do?”

“You said yourself he washes windows.”

“Where? What building?”

Warren wanted to grab Gordon’s smug face by the perfectly shaved chin.

“How about the Turret.”

“Great. Yes. The very building we’re in. So?”

“So?”

“So what happens in your next book? No women, of course.”

“Gordon—”

“We could all use a gentle reminder. The boys have reached the Delicate Years, after all. Their fresh needs will be…in the air. Let’s be careful what we breathe, Bratt.”

Warren felt cold fingers up and down his arms. What was Gordon actually after down here? Had Richard grown…paranoid? Was it possible that, after all this time, Richard had begun questioning the foundation of his darling experiment?

That’s all you, buddy, Warren thought. Alllll you.

The Guilts.

Indeed.

“Stop it,” Warren said, not meaning to. The office lights exposed his thinning curly hair, anxious eyes behind his black-rimmed glasses, and a belly the Writing Gangsters would’ve thrown pencils at.

Oh, how he missed those friends.

“Tell me more about this window washer.”

Warren was glad for the return of the subject.

“Okay. One day, while washing the windows of the Turret—”

“Yes.”

“Jerry sees a naked blonde bent over a writer’s desk.”

“Warren.” The temperature in Gordon’s eyes dropped to none.

“While washing the windows of the Turret, Jerry sees something curious happen inside one of the boys’ bedrooms.”

“Now I’m interested. Very.”

“He sees one of the boys cheating at Boats and—”

“Not Boats. Don’t want them analyzing that particular game. How about Panhandle?”

“Panhandle. And—”

“This is very good.”

“—and first he finishes his job—”

“Of course, of course.”

“—and when he gets back down to the ground, he either goes to the head of the Parenthood and informs him of what he saw or he approaches the boy himself.”

Gordon frowned. The angles of his face worked in such accord that it looked, to Warren, as if he were a puppet made of Parenthood wood.

“Hmmm. The problem with approaching the boy himself is that we’d be empowering the window washer. As a profession.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Oh?”

Warren brought a stubby hand to his collar. He tugged on it. It always felt as if the temperature in the office increased incrementally for the duration of his meetings with Gordon. This story (Warren had a hard time calling it a story, calling it anything other than propaganda) was no different from any other leisure book he had written. Yet Gordon nitpicked.

An editor in hell, Warren thought. But it wasn’t funny. And when did jokes like these cease to be funny? When had Warren started feeling this way? Hadn’t he bought in, years ago, when they paid him his first check?

“The boys are young enough that they’ll eventually substitute window washing with the fields of study Richard’s hoping they’re drawn to. For Christ’s sake, Gordon. Do they have a choice?”

Gordon clucked his tongue. Warren stopped talking. He knew he’d come close to saying something he shouldn’t have. A statement like that might reveal the Guilts.

“We’re not raising the right thing to do, Warren. We’re raising the most enlightened, undistracted minds in the history of mankind.”

Gordon rose, got up off the desk. He stood a full five inches taller than Warren. But Warren didn’t attempt to correct his slouch. Let the corporate slave own the room. Warren didn’t want it anymore.

“So tell me,” Gordon said. “Is this idea artistic to you? Is this the sort of thing your younger self would have thought fit to write?”

“No. Not even close.”

He thought of Gordon’s voice on an answering machine, echoing in a shitty apartment, so long ago. He thought of the Writing Gangsters. How they would recoil at what he’d become. How they might kill him, for his own sake.

“You see, then? If ever you find yourself blocked, call for me and we’ll have another little chat. Richard would very much like to see this window-washer book done as quickly as possible. But you are, of course, the writer.”

“I wasn’t blocked.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“I’ll write it.”

Of course he would. He always did. And the money in his bank account swelled.

But, then, so did this new feeling. It used to be he could push the young men from his mind. But the young men weren’t so young anymore.

“Good.” Gordon crossed the stuffy room. His black loafers were silent on the plush carpet Richard had ordered installed not six months back. At the door he turned to face Warren once more. “Now go write a bad book, Warren. For the boys. For the Parenthood. For Richard . For you. ”

As Gordon slipped out of the office, Warren could hear the hum of the Corner from down the cobblestoned hall. He heard Gordon’s shoes, too, clacking a serf’s march. And when the office door clicked closed again, the sounds ceased, mostly, and Warren was left with the shitty vision of a banal window washer teaching a young man one of life’s many morals. But, of course, a lying fable.

Warren Bratt the cool, Warren Bratt the skeptic, Warren Bratt the Cocky from Milwaukee, had fallen as far from artistic grace as he could.

He slouched his way into his chair, his sneakers dragging on that same carpet. And as he sat down to write, to work, to pretend to be a writer, an artist, a man, he tried very hard to shove from his mind the thoughts and feelings that had worked so hard to squeeze their way in.

He tried not to think about the way the Alphabet Boys had ogled him during the morning’s speech. Christ, they looked at him like he was a celebrity.

The Guilts.

Warren opened a desk drawer and pulled forth a fresh yellow legal pad. He lifted a blue pen from the desk and brought it to the paper.

He wrote. He wrote a lot. As if each page, each word, each letter, played a small part in staving off those dangerous new feelings. For if Warren Bratt were to speak of them, even once, or if he were, as Lawrence Luxley, to slip one nugget of truth, even clandestinely, into any page of any book, why, God forbid…

…he’d be sent to the Corner.

Like A had been.

Like Z, too.

Outside the office, the Corner hummed.

Warren sat back quick in his chair. He breathed deep, intentionally, attempting to calm down.

He shouldn’t be thinking this way. Oh no. He shouldn’t even be considering it at all.

“STOP.”

He hadn’t yelled it, but it was certainly firm. Yet, rather than listen to his own wise admonishment, he opened his desk drawer again and eyed an untouched white legal pad that sat, uncluttered, unbent, to the right.

Richard, he thought, don’t make me do it.

But would it be Richard who was making him do it? Or were the words Warren imagined filling those white pages all his own…

He slammed the drawer. Caught a finger in it and yelped.

All of Lawrence Luxley’s books had to be submitted on yellow legal pads. It had been that way since Book 1. And so…

“So stop thinking about the white pad,” he said.

He flipped the bird to his closed office door.

Fuck you, Richard.

He couldn’t have phrased it any better if he’d written it in black Sharpie in a bathroom at Don Don’s in Milwaukee.