Inspection

by Josh Malerman

  “He’s still dressed in red.”

  “Thin as a blue notebook.”

  “His hair is longer; his nails are longer.”

  “He looks like a statue. Stuck that way.”

  “Reaching.”

  “Reaching for a magnifying glass on the floor.”

  Warren didn’t need to see this, though he understood why the boys and girls did. Their accounts grew more ghastly and, in direct proportion, a sense of justice expanded.

  K and J did not avoid the third-floor Check-Up room. Just like they didn’t avoid the feelings they were experiencing for one another. In a way, it was easy to pinpoint: Their having met was the catalyst for the freedom they were all preparing themselves to enjoy. But in another, it was hard to make sense of the urges, the soft smiles, the endless desire to kiss one another’s lips, to hold hands in the Orchard, to lie beside one another at night.

  Nobody was as scared for the real world as K and J. But if there was one thing the end of the Parenthood taught them, it was that a boy and a girl couldn’t be brave unless they were scared of something to begin with.

  The others noticed this. Their sisters and brothers came to them for reassurance. And K and J tried their best to give it.

  Yet, despite a man slowly perishing in one of the two buildings they temporarily still called home, despite the unfathomable and sudden responsibility of forty-nine twelve-year-olds, Warren Bratt was much more worried about a word that kept coming up.

  And that word was not Inspection.

  “You guys keep saying that,” he’d say to the Alphabet Boys and the Letter Girls. “But you realize we can go anywhere, right? Anywhere in the world?”

  “Yes,” they’d say. “We know,” they’d say.

  “So why?” Warren would ask. Over and over he’d ask, “Why do you want to go there? Of all places…Why there?”

  “Because,” they’d say. “Your book,” they’d say.

  And they continued to say it until the incredible day came that they left the Turrets behind.

  They even said it on that very day.

  “We want to go to Milwaukee.”

  Barbara Burt, M.D.

  65 West Collier Street

  Laramie, WY

  Michael Stowe—

  Thank you again for giving me a chance to represent myself via letter, as I don’t believe I come off quite the same way over the phone and, besides, it’s by the written word that I’d be working with you, if I’m so honored with the chance.

  I’m interested in what you’re doing in Michigan. I have an extensive history with the area, though I’ve been west for a year now, and, as you know, I have over a decade of experience with what we both like to call “Elevated Experiments.” I’ll stop shy of evaluating you here, in a letter aimed at getting me a job, but allow me to say how impressed I am with the fact that you want a personal psychiatrist in the first place. I think it’s a very healthy sign. Perhaps it means you’ll go far. And while the baggage I come with is mostly full of wisdom, there are also warnings in the suitcases I carry.

  For starters: It’s important to allow your vision to grow organically, as the people in your flock will invariably change throughout the years.

  Secondly, it’s wise to incorporate yourself, but I’d avoid anything religious in the process. “Small” religions are guaranteed to elicit the dreaded C word, and where there are cults, authorities will follow.

  If you’re interested in a much lengthier list of wisdoms and warnings, I’d be thrilled to send some along. Simply send me your tenets, in writing, so that I might go through each one, not only revealing my take on how your flock will most likely react to each one but so that I might enlighten you as to why you’ve chosen these particular ideals.

  Finally, on the phone you implied you are single. If I may, I’d advise you to retain that status until you at least get this thing off the ground. In my experience, couples seem to get in one another’s way, each with their own agenda, even when presenting a unified front.

  I witnessed the failure of a very large undertaking that could have easily been avoided had either the man or the woman simply let the other work alone.

  For no matter how large the vision, no matter how big the eyes to see it, relationships, it seems, make the rules and grow in places no seeds were planted at all.

  Thank you and I hope to hear from you very, very soon.

  BARBARA BURT, M.D.

  For Allison

  The artist, the athlete, the model, the masks

  The spirit I seek when I reach for the flask

  Acknowledgments

  I met the editor of this book for the first time in person at a bar. It was fitting for a number of reasons. For starters, the setting was loose. The music was loud. We were surrounded by book people: writers and agents, editors and more. And just before signing with Del Rey, I’d confided in a friend that the feeling I was looking for in a publishing house was the metaphorical equivalent of an intellectual clubhouse. That I could almost hear, in the distance, the group of people I ought to be working with, as they caroused in a wooden pub, as someone played a live, and sloppy, guitar, as the conversation rose and ebbed on the waves of electric art. It wasn’t until I was actually standing beside Tricia Narwani, discussing (at the time) Unbury Carol and New York City’s Lower East Side, that I realized I’d signed with the editor of my imaginings, a woman whom I could not only talk shop with, but talk anything, truly, at all. Carol was an incredible experience, but the process was surely intensified with Inspection. Tricia’s notes weren’t simply good ideas. They were (and are) observations that encouraged me to give the book another round, and another, to reach for a higher level of performance. All while retaining the joy of the impetus it took to begin with.

  Tricia, thank you so.

  And Allison…

  A quick story here: I was a week out from wrapping the rewrite of Inspection. I got up from my desk with a mind to take our dog, Valo, for a walk. As I was latching the leash to her collar, Allison, from the couch, asked if I’d considered a certain something happening in the book and didn’t I think the book would be better if I did? I brushed the suggestion off, told her it was a good idea but it was also a 150-page idea, and, you know, darling, I’m a week away from finishing this thing. I took Valo outside and made it half a block before I stopped. Valo tugged but I didn’t give because I realized then that I couldn’t turn my back on the idea that was just presented to me. I rushed back inside, told Allison she was a genius (a cruel one at that; the work I had to do!) and phoned my manager, Ryan Lewis, to tell him her idea. He said the same thing I’d thought outside. You gotta do it. And so I did, and so Inspection became richer in a way that almost frightens me now, when I consider what the book was close to being if Allison hadn’t said a word.

  Allison, thank you.

  And thank you to Kristin Nelson, my superagent, who had a feeling Del Rey would be a good home for me. Kristin’s “feelings” are closer to psychic phenomena, as her instincts are the stuff of legend.

  Thanks to Wayne Alexander, who read Inspection’s rough draft. I can’t imagine a more fascinating lawyer than Wayne, nor one so full of stories of his own.

  Thank you to my bandmates in the High Strung who listened to me go on about a megalomaniac who believed genius was distracted by the opposite sex. I can guess how weird this one sounded in its earliest stages.

  Matt Sekedat, thank you.

  David Moench, Mary Moates, Julie Leung, and the rest of the Del Rey crew, thank you. You make the business of publishing books look as exciting as the act of writing them.

  Dave Stevenson, thank you for a cover that made me leap from my office chair.

  Kathy Lord, you’re the copy editor I wish was there in my office every time I sit down to write. Your assistance with the timeline and so many
other things…thank you.

  My mom, Debbie Sullivan, and her husband, Dave, thank you for reading the books when they were just printouts, unindented and all.

  Candace Lake, thank you so.

  And Ryan Lewis: when I tell people my manager is one of my best friends, they justifiably guess Ryan and I had been friends before my books started getting published. But that wasn’t the case. While working together—under what sometimes has felt like arctic-expedition conditions—Ryan and I have reached that spot where we’ve extracted bona fide friendship from a notoriously intense dynamic: the artist and manager. It’s like we’ve traveled two arcs, concurrently, one of work, one of play.

  We’re still traveling them now.

  And Dave Simmer, always and ever, thank you for getting this engine started to begin with.

  BY JOSH MALERMAN

  Bird Box

  Black Mad Wheel

  Goblin

  Unbury Carol

  Inspection

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JOSH MALERMAN is an internationally bestselling, Bram Stoker Award–nominated American author and one of two singer/songwriters for the rock band The High Strung. His debut novel Bird Box was published in the United Kingdom and United States in 2014 to much critical acclaim. His latest novel, Unbury Carol, was published in April 2018. He lives in Ferndale, Michigan, with his best friend/soul mate Allison Laakko and their pets Frankie, Valo, Dewey, Marty, and the fish.

  joshmalerman.com

  Facebook.com/​JoshMalerman

  Twitter: @JoshMalerman

  Instagram: @joshmalerman

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