“This is most of my childhood right here,” I said.
“I’m not sure I can even lift that many stories,” you said.
No, no—you can store them in your mind. Here: I’ll—open the top of your head, move some thoughts around—
Reader: Ow.
—and we’ll stuff as many stories as we can in there.
Reader: They smell like cigarettes.
Those are my Mom’s. Don’t smoke them! They’re special MotherSmokes, six feet long and strong as Baz. Once I tried one and my mind started coughing and hacking and it almost puked into my skull.
Reader: That all of them?
Just—one more. There. Now we’ll just close up your skull good and tight, and you’re good to go. Hey—what page are we on?
Reader: 17.
OK—let’s go. We’re late already.
Reader: Go where?
Forward. To try to fix this. We’ve got to try to save Appleseed.
FIESTA
Turn the page, step onto the margin, and you’re at the edge of Appleseed, Massachusetts, standing right on the Connecticut-Massachusetts border, next to the Connecticut River. See? You can see Appleseed City—the smokestacks of Bondy’s Island, the Meaning District—off behind you. To your right is the town: the Amphitheatre, the Town Hall, the Appleseed Free Library, the Shoppes. Back behind them, but before you reach Appleseed Mountain, are the Prison and the Mental Hospital.
I wasn’t born here in Appleseed. We lived off the northwest margin until I was three, and moseyed here the way most of my friends’ families did, as part of the Housing Boom of ’77. That year, droves of houses—two-stories, ranches, Victorian mansions, cottages—stumbled across New England, looking for a space to settle. The boom began as a murmur in Vermont and bombasted into New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Houses started crossing the Connecticut River in March of ’77, marching through Greenfield, Easthampton, and Agawam. Our house walked that entire summer, carrying my family inside it every step. My parents spent all day steering from the porch while my sister Briana, who was four at the time, sat in front of the TV and I slept in my steel case.
By the time the houses reached Massachusetts, my Dad said, every major road was blocked. “The old highways were literally clogged with houses,” he told me once, on a drive out to visit The Ear. The Ear was a handyman, like my Dad, except he always had much better tools. “What’s sad is?” my Dad said. “Some of those houses—”
“Died right there on the road,” said a thought lying on the couch in my mind. I’d heard this story a hundred times before.
“Died!” my Dad said. “Right on the road! Their foundations cracked from all that idling!”
“Those are the suburbs now,” said the thought, shoving some crackers into its mouth.
“And they closed down the roads and made those the new suburbs!” my Dad said.
By the time my parents made it into the Pioneer Valley, most of the towns along Old Route Five had closed their exits. You’d see signs, my Dad said, reading NO PLOTS AVAILABLE.
“It was nervewracking,” said my Dad, driving us through the Meadows. “You know how your Mom gets. And the TV antenna broke somewhere around West Springfield, so your sister was so bored.”
“What about me?”
“You were,” he said, “you. Quiet. Thinking in the Vox.”
At three, I had not yet made a single sound—not a gurgle, not a bleep, not a screech. I used to just sit still and stare like a reader, my Mom said, with a terrified look on my face. Sometimes tears would run down my cheeks, my Dad said, but no sound would accompany them. My parents thought that I might never speak, that I was mute, that I might not have been born with a voice. My thoughts kept repeating the same words, over and over: “You won’t,” they’d say.
Reader: Won’t what?
Won’t anything—won’t talk; won’t be. My parents took me to see a doctorcoat who specialized in early speech, and he sent us home with something called “the Vox”—an iron-lung-type case which was designed to help with vocal development.
I remember that box—the hours, days, years lying awake inside it. Speakers inside the box filled it with sounds: squawks, yipes, zoops, words, and sentences. “The capital of North Dakota is Bismarck,” the speakers would say. “B-I-S-M-A-R-C-K.”
“I’m not,” I thought to the Vox.
“Water freezes at thirty-two words per second.
“You live in America. A-M-E-R-I-C-A.
“You have one nose and two ears. Ears rhymes with years. Years rhymes with fears.”
Slowly, I learned more words. “I’m lonely,” I thought to the Vox.
“Everyone is lonely,” the Vox replied. “At least you have the Reader.”
Which was a good point.
“I want to get out of here,” I prayed.
“No, you don’t,” said the Vox. “You wouldn’t survive a year in Appleseed.”
“Why not?” I prayed. “What’s wrong with me?”
The Vox looked me over. “Where to even begin,” it said.
That box became my first cage. Remember looking through the foggy glass and seeing the sunlight shouting through the window?
Reader: Who—me? I just got here. I just now arrived in Appleseed.
How I’d send my thoughts to run around the neighborhood so they could tell me what it looked like? How, sometimes, my sister would peer down through the glass at me, her curly blond hair obstructing almost all of the light?
“Help!” my thoughts would say to her.
“?” she’d say. “Can you hear me?”
“Get me out of here!” I’d think.
I remember my Mom’s visits, too: how she’d open up the Vox to feed me food or vitamins. If there were tears on my face, she’d wipe them away. If I still didn’t stop crying, she’d lift me out of the Vox and cradle me. “This is only temporary,” she’d say. “OK?”
“OK,” my thought would say.
Then she’d put me back into the Vox, lock it, and leave.
“We were getting desperate,” my Dad said, as we neared The Ear’s neighborhood. With the house inching along Five, my parents started to panic: how far would they have to go before finding a plot? “We were starting to think that we might have to live in Connecticut!” my Dad said.
Then, just a few miles from the Connecticut border, my house spoke up. “What about that one?” it said, and pointed to a banged-up sign. I knew that sign—it sang, APPLESEED, EST. 1775, and below it, ALL NEW WORDS MUST REGISTER AT THE TOWN HALL.
My parents had never even heard of Appleseed. Was it a real town? When they checked the map, though, they found the word “Appleseed”—a tiny round quell in the corner of the state.
Just at that moment, my Dad said, he and my Mom heard a sound from the other room—a “chirp,” my Mom called it. They ignored it at first, but then they heard it again. My Mom once told me that it sounded like a baby bird.
They followed the sound through the house—“Chirp! Chirp!”—and into the TV room, where Briana sat next to the Vox. “What’s making that sound?” my Mom asked Briana.
“That’s ,” said Bri, matter-of-factly.
My parents looked at the Vox. They heard the chirp again.
“See?” said Briana.
My Dad opened the steel case. I have a foggy memory of this moment—of everyone standing over me, and of opening my mouth wide to make the biggest sound I could.
“Appa,” I said.
My parents looked at each other.
“See?” said Briana.
“Appa,” I said again.
“He’s saying apple,” my sister announced.
My Mom once told me that tears appeared on my father’s face when I made my first sounds. My Dad, meanwhile, said my Mom ran back out to the porch and steered the house off the winding ramp and into Appleseed. “Your Mom thought it was a signal or something,” my Dad said.
“So it’s my fault we ended up here?” I said.
“It
’s no one’s fault,” my Dad said. “We’d just been praying for so long for you to speak. We took this as the reply.”
It was another two hours of house-traffic before our house actually crossed the line into town. My Dad steered us past sentences about schools, a town hall, a town green, a small downtown, an amphitheatre, and long stretches of wilderness.
“And apple trees everywhere,” my Dad said, turning onto the old dirt road where The Ear’s shack stood. “So many different kinds!”
“There are different kinds of apples?” I said.
“ ’Course there are,” he said. “Dozens. Don’t you remember?”
I shook my head.
As my parents steered the house through the town, though, they became discouraged: there were plots available with FOR SALE signs on the lawns, but all of them cost far more meaning than my parents could borrow. It wasn’t until they drove the house over to the Northeast Side—down Bliss Road, past Laurel Brook, and onto Converse Street—that they started to see houses in their range of meaning. The houses in that corner were shabbier, my Dad said: one had a stain on its pants; another drank from a bottle wrapped in paper.
On the far corner of that street, right across from some worryfields and the margin, was a plot marked forty thousand truths. It was the smallest piece of available land in Appleseed—the house had to scrunch up its elbows to fit on it—and still it was more meaning than my parents could afford. But that was the best option, my Dad said; it was there or back into the month-to-monthing in the margins. So my Dad picked up the FOR SALE sign, drove the house to Appleseed Town Hall and signed a Promise of Truths with an interest rate of thirty percent.
“There—Ear’s abode,” my Dad said, pointing to a wooden shack with a dirt driveway. “Now let’s see if he’s home.”
“What does that mean, thirty percent?” I said.
My Dad pulled into the driveway and honked the horn. “It means,” he said, “that if you borrow ten ideas, you pay back thirteen. If you borrow twenty? Pay back twenty-six.”
“Holy crap,” I said.
The Ear came out of his shack. He looked older than I remembered him; he had lambchop sideburns and some sort of skin irritation. “Ralph,” he said. He peered into the cab. “Bring your assistant with you?”
“Teaching him the business,” my Dad said.
“Oh yeah?” The Ear turned to me. “Going to be a landlord, like your Dad?”
“I’m going to be a movie person,” I told him.
“Hoping I could borrow your steth,” my Dad said to The Ear.
“Two-meter?”
“Four,” said my Dad.
The Ear motioned for us to follow and we stepped out of the truck. The Ear led us into the shack. There was all sorts of recording equipment inside: tape decks, microphones, wires, and dozens of other devices I couldn’t identify.
“Let’s see here,” The Ear said, searching in a closet. “Ah.” He lifted up a black plastic case. “Four-meter steth,” he said.
On the way back home, I asked my Dad more about the debt. “Weren’t you worried about paying all that meaning back?” I said.
“Of course I was,” he said. “I still am—I worry about it every day. But we didn’t want to live on the margin anymore. Don’t you remember what that was like? Moving every few months? Not really ever having a home?”
I shook my head. “I don’t remember that.”
“We just wanted a good place for you and your sister to grow up.”
“How much do you owe on the house now?”
“All told, about a hundred thou,” he said.
“Seriously?” I said.
“At the time, though, I didn’t care about the meaning. I was just happy that you were out of the voice box. You just kept running around the house, saying ‘Appa-seed,’ ‘Appa-seed.’ You sang it like a song! I would have paid any amount of meaning to see you that happy,” my Dad said.
NORTHERN SPY
Because of the Vox, I couldn’t walk correctly for another two years; I had to wear braces on my legs to keep them straight. I remember trying to hobble through the yard, how tired my legs would get. When he had time, my Dad would take me for walks around the block to strengthen my ankles and knees.
If he was at work or busy, my sister and I would play in the yard. She’d run around with her friends on the grass while I sat in the dirt and dug holes in the page. Before we moved to town, I don’t think my parents knew that most of the towns in the county dumped their deadwords in Appleseed, or that the soil was filled with dead language. I’d find all sorts of interesting bugs and deadwords there: commas, semicolons, fragments, wordbones, and other carcasses. My thoughts didn’t know to be worried—they didn’t understand that these vots were once as alive as the wild sentences you’d see across the street in the white woods of the margin, hopping from tree to tree. How was I to know that worry could manifest and worm its way into your mind? I couldn’t even read yet!
One day, I found a deadcomma and took it over to my Mom. It was her day off from work, and she was sitting in a lawn chair, a book on her lap, a six-foot cigarette sticking out of her mouth. My sister was outside, too—sanding a wooden clock on the patio—while my father stood on a ladder, fixing a gutter.
“Appa,” I said to my Mom.
“Shhh, honey,” my Mom said to me, without looking up from her book.
You never knew with my Mom. Some days her eyes held calm seas, but others—like that day—they held storms.
I offered her the muddy comma—I’m sure it smelled terrible. “Appa,” I said again.
“Uh-huh,” my Mom said.
I put the comma on the page of my Mom’s book.
“Oh, shit, ,” my Mom said. “Ralph!”
“Appa,” I said.
“What?” my father said from the ladder.
“Look at what is playing with,” she said, standing up and shaking the comma off the book. She pointed to it on the ground. “He found this in the yard, Ralph. A fucking comma carcass, for Christ’s sake!”
“Can we not swear?” my Dad said, climbing down the ladder.
I picked up the comma and walked over to him on weak legs. “Appa,” I said to him.
“Do you know how many diseases that thing has?” my Mom said.
“Put that down, ,” said my Dad. “Those can make you sick.”
“Wash ’s hands,” my Mom spat, and stormed inside.
My Dad led me over to the spout and held my hands under the freezing cold water. My Mom appeared at the kitchen window. “Did you wash his hands?” she shouted.
“Yes,” he said.
“Are they clean?”
“Yeah,” my Dad said.
Then my Dad led me to the back door. He tried to open it, but it was locked. “Door’s locked,” my Dad said.
Smoke billowed through the screen and up the side of the house.
“Diane,” my Dad said.
My Mom stared out the kitchen window at us.
“Open the door,” my Dad said.
My Mom took a drag on her cigarette.
I was a badseed—I knew that from the very first pages. I just couldn’t be good, no matter how hard I tried. I remember, at six or so, making a trueheart sentence-gift for my Mom on the lawnpage. In the time that it took for me to go get her and bring her outside, though, the sentence changed. She read it and said, “You loaf me?”
“Love,” I said.
“Now it says,” she scanned the lawn, “loathe. You loathe me?”
I was confused. “What the heck?” said a thought. “No,” I told her. “That’s supposed to say—”
“How dare you,” she said. “I’m your mother!”
Those were the years when my Mom worked long hours at the hospital. Sometimes, if my Dad was working, too, I’d have to go with her to work; she’d put me in an empty room in the hospital with some paper and paints and a snack. I wasn’t supposed to leave the room until she came to get me. But my legs would hurt from sitting,
and so sometimes I would step out of the room and go for walks: down the halls, over to the elevators, to other floors. Most of the time I could get back to the room before my Mom returned, but every once in a while I’d get caught. Then my Mom would punish me by giving me double the snack—dumbcrackers and sadcola—and I wasn’t allowed to leave the room until I’d finished every bite.
Once, I was walking the hallways of the hospital when I saw my Mom in a room of doctors and nurses. All of their backs were turned to me, and something was screaming in the room—I didn’t know what or who. When my Mom turned around there was oil on her hands. “!” she yelled. “What are you doing out here?”
Then I saw what was on the table: a motorcycle, its body bent and contorted. Everyone was shouting. The motorcycle screamed and then the screaming died.
“Vocal pressure’s dropping,” said one of the doctors.
My Mom turned to me. “Go, ! I don’t want you to see this. Get back to the room right now.”
I went into the room with new thoughts. “Where did the screaming go?” one of my thoughts asked.
“I’m pretty sure it’s sleeping,” said another thought.
“It’s not sleeping,” said another. “That screaming died, dumbass.”
“Died for how long?” asked the second thought.
“Forever,” said the first thought. “It’s dead.”
I turned to the hospital bed. “Have people died on you?” I asked it.
“What do you mean?” said the bed. “Of course they have.”
“A lot?” I said.
“Hundreds,” said the bed. “That’s my job, to be died on.”
A few days later, I was in my room in the hospital when I rolled up my sleeve, opened the tube of yellow paint, and poured it on my arm. Then I walked out to the nurse’s station. My Mom was smoking a six-foot cigarette and talking with another nurse.
“I’ve had an accident,” I announced.
My Mom looked up at me. “Go back in the room, ,” she said.
I held out my arm. “I’m bleeding.”
“That’s paint,” she said.
“I’m bleeding yellow,” I said.
“You better not have spilled any paint in that room,” she said. “Did you?” She rushed out from behind the desk, grabbed me by my yellow arm, and marched me back to the room. Then she studied the walls and the floor. “I better not see one drop of yellow paint in here.”
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