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Window Boy

by Thomas Ha

The tenth time Jakey broke the rules, he put a sandwich in the mailbox where the window boy could get it. Mom had taken her sleep-quick pills and gone to bed after dinner, on account of her headaches. And Dad was dozing in front of the TV, chin on his chest and a half-empty glass clutched in his hand. It got still enough that the only sounds were Dad’s shows and the hum of the house filters, so Jakey slipped into the kitchen and put together a ham and cheddar on a plate, then placed it in the parcel chamber near the front door. He sat by the parlor window for a good long while after, curled up at the bench cushions, and his eyelids drooped now and again until he began to see the shadows move.

The window boy showed up, just like all the other times.

Out from behind the telephone pole across the street and then through the moonlit front yard. He crawled on his hands and knees across the wet grass to the edge of Mom’s miniature garden, careful to avoid the lawn sensors, then pulled himself to the window frame to peer through.

“Folks passed out?”

“Yep.”

The window boy snickered.

“Got you something. In the mailbox.”

The window boy crawled through the garden and up the steps. He gave Jakey a wary look before touching the hatch.

“You can grab anything in the outer chamber. Won’t hurt you if you don’t press the far side and try to bust through to where the incoming packages and stuff get pulled in,” Jakey reassured him.

So the window boy unlatched the outer seal, and Jakey barely saw the first half of the sandwich leave the chamber with how fast the window boy snapped it up, shivering while he ate. They’d never talked much about what went on outside, but the boy’s bony wrists and hollow cheeks told Jakey enough.

After a minute or two of chomping away, the window boy seemed to remember himself, and that he was being watched. So he took a breath and straightened himself out.

“Thanks, Jakey.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Gonna miss this when they send you out.” The window boy scratched behind his ear. “They tell you where yet?”

“Nah. They don’t tell me anything.”

In truth, Mom and Dad had decided on Pacifica, one of the ocean schools, away from the cities—where all kids like Jakey with fathers like Dad went, and where Dad himself went years ago. But the window boy didn’t know anything about that, which is why Jakey liked talking to him to begin with. So he wasn’t about to get into it with him now.

“Burning season’s wrapping up.” The window boy scratched behind his ear. “Can’t smell much of the smoke tonight.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“Nah. End of fire is when the animals get restless.”

“Oh.”

“The charred mountains. The ash water. Drives the old and the ugly right to the houses. Grackles. Raccoon tails. Boar cats. You know.” He looked up and around, like he’d just remembered to be watchful, and pressed his chest low to the brick landing. “Been meaning to talk to you about that, Jakey.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just . . . that I’ve been meaning to ask something.”

Jakey’s chest tightened. He’d been worried something like this might be coming. These weeks he’d spent talking to the window boy late at night, when he couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to think about Pacifica, he had the worries there, in the back of his mind—that the window boy was working up the courage for an ask.

All those lessons, the speeches from Dad, were still there buried in Jakey, somewhere. Not to give them things, no matter how small. Not to talk to them the way that Jakey had been doing. You think when they smile and wave that they want to be your friend? You think when they tap at the window or ring the doorbell they just want a little favor? They hate you, Jakey. That’s why we have rules, about not talking, not sharing. Because to share is to show. And you don’t ever show them what you got, Jakey. Understand?

The window boy must have seen something of those fears in Jakey’s eyes because he looked sheepish and turned away. “Forget it.”

“What?”

“Nah. It’s not—it’s not your problem. I’ll figure it out.”

Jakey bristled and felt hot in his cheeks. “Well, now it feels like my problem.”

It reminded him of when Mom did things like this. When she’d stop before taking her sleep-quicks and say something about Dad or the house, then hush like there were secrets too juicy to share. You should either keep it locked in the whole way or get out with it—that was the way Jakey did it and would always do it as far as he was concerned.

But before the window boy could speak, bright lights flashed on the street.

“Get behind something,” Jakey hissed, watching the window boy trip and skitter to the nearby retaining wall, then ball up his body as best he could.

It was the Mailman pulling up, his truck flashing its beams. There was a loud clanging of equipment when he dropped out of the passenger side to the curb and sauntered up the brick pathway. He pulled open his face visor and his eye-lights shone in the dark like the little display parts on their microwave.

“Jakey? Why you got that window turned on, kid? F—k, son. The whole world can see you right now. Lot of filthy worms out tonight. Power down that screen.”

“I—I will.” Jakey tried not to look at the far side of the yard. “Just couldn’t sleep.”

“Couldn’t sleep.” The Mailman laughed. “Sure as sh—t not going to if you look out here.” Then he straightened up and cleared his throat, and there was a clicking sound from the wires weeping around his neck, like they might pop out from the parts of him that were still flesh if he didn’t move a little more carefully. “Your house filters are on, right?” Jakey assured the Mailman that, yes, his cursing was being negated in the house’s audio.

“Good. Good.” The Mailman produced a box from under his arm. “Guessing this is some nice stuff for your daddy.” He scanned the barcode with his glove. “I tell you. If I could do things over, I’d have been an LLC man like him. They’re shipping you to school soon, right?”
Jakey nodded.

“Well, better study hard while you’re out there. Then maybe you’ll join up with a company like your daddy. Won’t get stuck with sh—tty outside work, you know? If I could afford a kid I’d be telling him the same. Holy cr—p.”

Jakey froze.

The Mailman reached into the parcel chamber and pulled out the other half of the ham and cheese the window boy’d left behind. “Really? This is so nice, kid. I mean, kind of dangerous if anyone else peeps this, but, wow. Really nice.”

“Y-yeah,” Jakey nodded. “For you.”

The Mailman had already started eating, grunting. Jakey wasn’t sure the Mailmen were supposed to have people food after all of their modifications. But it seemed to mostly go down, though the Mailman gagged and heaved a couple of times. Meanwhile, the window boy didn’t move an inch in the shadows, covering his ears and trying his best not to breathe too loudly.

“Fan-f—cking-tastic. Wow.” The Mailman wiped his mouth and around the lights where his eyes used to be. “Thanks kindly for that, Jakey. I—” He swerved all of a sudden and drew his revolver. The gun’s laserlight beeped and danced across the retaining wall and then to the dark skies, then somewhere across the street.

“Don’t you f—cking come any closer,” the Mailman said.

He fired a few warning shots, though the sound filters canceled them out. The cameras that generated the window internally for Jakey also wiped the barrel flash, so that it just looked like the gun shaking. Jakey thought he saw the slightest splatter of blood near the telephone pole, but if it had even been there, the cameras deleted that too.

Jakey was tempted to touch the filter panel to the side of the bench. It would just take a little turn of the dial to see what was really going on, who might be out there that the Mailman was yelling at.

Maybe it was something big, one of the animals, like the window boy had said.

Something strange and old, like one of the grackles from the mountains, flying down to visit after the fires and snatch people off the streets—rip them up into the air when they weren’t watching the trees. Maybe throw them into the concrete, so they’d have an easier time getting to the soft parts between the bones.

Part of Jakey wanted to know, since he’d never really seen one with his own eyes, but part of him wasn’t sure if he really wanted to find out. He pulled his hand back from the dial.

“Sh—t. Just nicked him.” The Mailman’s glowing eye-lights turned back to the house, then, as if recalling the rest of his route for the night and what was likely waiting for him, he closed the visor shut again. “I’m serious, bud. Turn off that window, okay?”

Jakey nodded and watched him saunter back down the brick and into the truck, which rose on its clawed legs and proceeded down the street to the next delivery point. Minutes of quiet passed before Jakey dared to whisper out to the yard again.

The window boy crept out to the garden, visibly shaken by the gunshots, and looked like he had trouble swallowing.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Just loud,” he replied. “Just loud.”

And something about the way the window boy said that made Jakey realize that the kid must have been a little younger than he thought. He said he didn’t know his age, and there were times, with what the window boy knew about the world outside, that he felt older, a lot older, in a way that almost made Jakey jealous. But right now, the boy felt so young.

“Think I gotta go, Jakey. I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah . . . yeah. See you around.”

“Thanks again for the meat. Really.”

“No problem.”

“We’re friends, right?”

Jakey nodded but didn’t answer.

“Yeah,” the window boy spoke for him. “Yeah. We’re friends.”

Then he crawled away.

---

Everyone was tired during the day.

Mom wiped down the kitchen and listened to music on the house speakers. Dad took his video meetings from his office. Jakey sat in the living room with his lesson programs, learning about the city seasons, but he kept thinking about the window boy and what he wanted to ask.

At dinner, Mom and Dad got on each other’s nerves in their quiet way. Something about the house again, always something about that. Jakey couldn’t follow the details, but they were talking about moving away from the city. Dad wouldn’t hear it, no matter how many times Mom tried to ask. Because even though LLC managers did everything from their houses and didn’t go in anymore, he thought it was important to show that he could go into the city if they needed it—pack up and roll in whenever they wanted. Something about morale and tax codes and whatever else he was probably repeating from the people who managed the managers.

Mom whispered into her wine glass that she hoped they called him in, and that pretty much ended things for the night. She took her pills and marched upstairs, and he collapsed in the living room with his drink, his hunched body lit by flashes from the television.

And when it was still and mercifully quiet, Jakey went back to the parlor and sat on those cushions until it was time.

The window boy crept out from the telephone pole across the street and then up to the garden, then the frame. And the first thing Jakey noticed were the bruises along the boy’s jaw and a lump on his forehead. But he knew better than to ask—all the other times he asked the window boy what those were, that just soured things for the both of them.

“Sorry. Didn’t have anything to make a sandwich with. And my folks were more riled than usual, so I didn’t think I could mess around in the kitchen,” Jakey said.

“Nah, it’s—it’s okay. I wasn’t expecting anything again.”

“I know. I know you weren’t.”

The window boy scratched behind his ear, then looked up warily at the sky. “It’s getting not so good. So . . . not sure how long I can stay.”

“What do you mean?” Jakey asked.

The window boy crouched and spoke more softly than usual. “Lots of things, restless in the city. Even the Mailmen aren’t risking routes every night. So.” He stopped and cleared his throat. “Is it true, what they say, about the houses being fake?”

“What?”

“That you’re not in here. This box.” The window boy gestured at the screen. “Someone told me these are just shells now. That you’re actually way down, under the dirt. Little chambers to bring mail down and up. But the rest is just . . . for show. Like this window. Just lights and colors to make it seem like you’re up here with us.”

The cameras in front of the house captured the fear in the window boy, but Jakey also saw a glint of other feelings that he didn’t quite like. And he heard in his ear his father’s voice still: don’t ever show them what you got.

“That’s silly,” Jakey lied. “Never seen anything like that.”

The window boy’s face fell.

“Yeah. Silly.” He shook and scratched the back of his neck. And maybe it was Jakey’s imagination, but there was a steeliness to the window boy now. “But it got me thinking,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Remember how I said I was going to ask something before?”

“Yeah. The thing you said you’d figure out.” Jakey answered.

“Maybe the stories about the houses were dumb. Made up. But you’ve got soft soil here, in your side yard, I noticed.”

“Behind the fence,” Jakey said.

“Right. The fence.” The window boy nodded. “I thought maybe, if I had somewhere to dig down a little, I could sleep safely. Just a little hole, maybe a foot deep, and I could cover it with ply. It’s safer that way with.” He pointed up. “Everything.”

“Uh huh.”

“Your folks won’t even notice it, in the side yard. And it’d only be a night. Maybe two.”

“Uh huh.”

“All you’d have to do is power down the fence, so that I could swing over without getting fried. Then I could dig. And then . . . then I think I’m going soon after, Jakey. So you wouldn’t have to worry. I think a lot of us are getting out of the city. For real.”

“Uh huh.”

“What do you think, Jakey? Only a day or two. And it’d just be me.”

Jakey didn’t know why he felt so cold. He wasn’t sure why the window boy asking him for this made him want to turn the window off and go to bed. But he did know that the way the boy was talking, and especially that last part, made him nauseous.

“Just you.”

“Yeah.”

Imagining that—the window boy sleeping up there, nearby, coming out to talk at night every so often. None of that seemed too bad at first. But Jakey couldn’t let go of that cold feeling in his chest. He reached over to the parlor controls and twisted the filter settings down.

And there they were.

Behind the window boy, about five or six grown men, staring at the house.

Their faces and clothes were painted with strange streaks of color, blocky shapes all over their cheeks and torsos. Large yellow spots on different parts of their bodies. Whatever it was allowed them to fool the house cameras into deleting them with the filters. Maybe the house thought they were animals or machinery or something Jakey shouldn’t see.

It took all of Jakey’s self-control not to jerk away from the screen.

“I—I got to think about it, maybe.”

“Oh,” the window boy scratched. “Um. How long you need to think? Like a day?”

“Sure,” Jakey said, trying not to look at the painted faces behind the window boy. “Maybe a day.”

The window boy’s fear spread from his eyes, and it didn’t seem rehearsed. It was unclear if it was still the animals or the men behind him that were more of the cause. “It’s really scary now,” he said. “I think I’d need to dig a hole tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow . . . ”

“Yeah, Jakey. Is that—do you think—can you turn the electricity off in the fence tomorrow?”

Jakey didn’t know what to say, and he was afraid that anything but what the window boy and the others wanted to hear would start something. “Yeah . . . I think . . . tomorrow. Sure. Tomorrow.”

“That’s great.” A grin broke across the boy’s face. “Oh, Jakey. That’s so great. Oh.”

The men behind him didn’t change their expressions.

“You’re a great friend, Jakey. Tomorrow. I’ll see you then.”

“See you.”

Jakey turned off the window.

---

Mom noticed right away that he wasn’t touching his lunch, so she sat at the kitchen table with him. They could hear Dad on some video meeting in the background, and every time he laughed, she rubbed her temples.

“School will be good for you,” she said, assuming that’s what was still troubling him. “I know you’re scared of something so different. But it’ll be good out on the water. You’ll see what’s going on. Maybe get a better sense of what you think. And that’s important. Learning other ways to think, Jakey. Don’t get stuck going one way, the way some of us do.”

He didn’t much understand, but he got the sense that she was still arguing with Dad, even though he wasn’t here.

“You know, when I was your age there was this picture book, when they still printed books. Can’t remember the name, but it was about bugs in the forest, starting out as little eggs in the dirt. And, at the start of the book, some of the baby bugs, especially the ones born closer to the top, got eaten by bigger things, scavengers, hounds, stuff like that. And the baby bugs deeper down, they just kept growing, and they eventually went on to have adventures when they were big enough.

“I keep thinking about that book, for some reason,” She rubbed her temples and ignored the sounds from the other room. “How, where the eggs were laid, what happened or didn’t happen, was just luck. No one’s fault. God. What was the name of it? That book. I used to know, I swear.”

She kept talking that way, over and over, until she got bored and left him alone.

Then later, after dinner was cleared and everyone went off, Jakey stood at the entrance to the parlor for a long while, staring at the closed window screen. He imagined the window boy, crawling out from behind the telephone pole, followed by those men, advancing slowly across the grass. And the thought made him shaky, kept him from going to sit down at the bench cushions like he otherwise would have.

So instead, he found himself wandering through other parts of the house, drawn over to the living room, following the sounds of the television.

“Grack attack! *bang bang bang*”

It was one of Dad’s cartoons—a show from when he was Jakey’s age that was still running all these years later. On the television, Jakey saw a Mailman in a powersuit, pointing at the sky, at a black shape, like a “T,” flying up in the air and cawing. That was usually as much as they dared to depict the grackles in shows like these. Anything more than those “T” shapes and they tended to get complaints from families and local churches that the grackles were too frightening for kids.

The Mailman on the show was a lot cleaner and brighter than the real ones—still had all of his teeth and not a spot of rust or blood anywhere on his cartoon body. He lined up the lasersight from his whirring revolver and pulled the trigger.

A blossoming fire lit up the sky, incinerating the “T” that used to be a grackle, and the Mailman winked one of his glowing light-eyes at the audience.

“Got ’im.”

Dad noticed Jakey in the dark at some point and waved for him to sit down, which he almost never did. So Jakey sank into the couch next to his father and listened to the man chuckle and squeal. “This is a good one,” Dad would say every couple of minutes. “Oh, you’re going to like this. Big scene coming up.”

“Beak blasters, get going. Fling your claw scythes up top. We got them on the run! *bang bang bang*”

Dad’s breathing grew heavier and his eyes watery, but it was kind of nice, Jakey thought. Watching the Mailman riding around the city, his armored truck bounding on its metal legs. It made Jakey think about the window screen again, but in a less of a bad way. Like maybe all of it was kind of like this show. Something to be watched, something to be seen, but that would go away on its own at the end.

He didn’t have to think about the window boy or the painted men or anything that might be outside the house. Just let it fade away like the black screen at the end of those episodes. If he didn’t want to, he didn’t have to think about anything at all, he realized, as he floated off to sleep.

---

—You’ve got to call the Mail.

—Four bodies. What a fucking mess.

—Must have been running away. House clocked a bunch of grackles in the neighborhood. Huge ones. I’ve never seen them that big. These guys must not have known where else to go. Tried to scale the fence and got burned alive, probably.

—Goddamn it. Mail pickup has me on hold. Insurance says they’ll cover part of the cost, but Mail is supposed to waive the remainder. They should’ve been picking off grackles anyway. Where the hell were they?

—Not enough anymore maybe. Jakey’s going to wake soon. Go to the office.

—Yeah yeah yeah. Fuck me. What a mess. Jesus.

Jakey opened his eyes but didn’t want to talk to anyone yet, so he closed them again and tried his best to sleep through the words and the noise.

---

Night and quiet moved in like they always did, and Jakey found himself at the parlor bench like before, staring out at the grass and the moonlight and the darkened street. He waited a long time for something he knew wouldn’t happen, for something he knew he’d never see.

No one came to the house that night, or the night after, or the night after that.

And when enough nights passed that Jakey understood there was nothing to wait for, he realized something he probably should’ve realized weeks and weeks earlier.

He didn’t want to be here anymore.

Maybe tomorrow he’d tell his Mom and Dad that he was ready for Pacifica. He could even ask to take an earlier armored car to the shore before the school year began. One of the boats would ferry him out on the open water to the floating compound where he could meet other boys like him, with houses and parents like his, and see what it was like out there in that place.

Mom and Dad wouldn’t fight him going earlier, Jakey knew.

They didn’t really want to be here either.

Always using quiet ways of their own to get out too.

Everybody had been right it turned out, Jakey thought, about the importance of school and the rest. About taking things seriously and finding a way to join one of the companies. Maybe becoming a manager to afford to come back and pick out a house, just like this one. He thought he understood now, why they did what they did, why he had to do what he had to do.

Still, he wasn’t quite sure he could stop watching the window just yet either, even if it was what they probably would have done. And he hesitated but reached for the dial for the auditory and visual filters.

And he turned them all the way down, so low that he started to see new outlines and colors coming into focus. A big shape across the street and right next to the telephone pole.

The thing standing there was just as tall as the pole itself, Jakey realized, with thin legs that went up at least twenty feet in the shadows. A strange little body, and then a bent, beaked head, turned to one side.

The grackle’s eye, like an unbroken yolk, peered through the screen and into Jakey, even though he was buried safely all the way down below. Its wings draped to the sidewalk, almost hiding the long arms and hands, with fleshy fingers that wrapped around part of the telephone pole.

And behind the grackle, in the light-polluted sky, thousands of other grackle-bodies floated like “T”-shaped kites, black lines against the unnatural gray swirls from scattered fires that spread like patches across the city.

Jakey raised his thumb and forefinger into the shape of a gun at the thing by the telephone pole, and at all the things, waiting out there.

“Bang bang bang,” he whispered, imagining a laserlight dancing across the cement.

But the grackle didn’t move.

Jakey thought it probably wouldn’t, even long after he shut off the screen and walked away.

It’d always be there, whether he was inside or out.

There, always there, whether he watched the screen or not.