“People have died in this room!” I announced.
“Wash off your arm,” my Mom said. Then she slammed the door.
As I was rinsing my arm off in the sink, I noticed a supply cabinet underneath. When I opened the drawers I found cotton balls, wooden sticks, bandages, and a pair of scissors. I pulled out the scissors; they blinked their eyes in the light. “What year is it?” they asked me.
“Nineteen eighty-six,” I told them.
“Eighty-six?” they said.
“Can you help me?” I said.
“Help you how?” the scissors said.
“I want you to cut me,” I told them.
The scissors studied my face. “Why?” they said.
“Just do it. Cut me,” I told them.
Two minutes later I walked out of the room again. This time there was blood on my wrist, dripping down my hand. “I’m injured,” I said. I held out my arm.
None of the nurses responded. My Mom was sitting with a patient—a heavy woman with gray toiled skin—and wrapping a blood-pressure cuff around her arm.
“I’m bleeding,” I said.
“Go back to the room, ,” said my Mom.
“I’m injured,” I said.
“Sal,” my Mom said to another nurse. “Can you check on him?”
“You do it,” I said to my Mom. “You check on me.”
“Sal?”
Another nurse came over to me, crouched down, and saw my wrist. “Jesus, ,” she said. She called my Mom over. When she saw the blood, her face norsed and all of the color drained from it. “What did you do, ?” my Mom said. I remember how her hands shook as she wrapped the bandages around my arm and said, “How did this happen?”
SENTENCE THE SENTENCE
GLOCKENAPFEL
One night when I was eleven, though, one of my thoughts—a thought of green—thought over to the Hu Ke Lau (“Puke-E-Lau,” we called it) while I slept. At last call my thought hopped off his bar stool, pushed through the heavy doors, dropped his skateboard on the sidewalk and thought across the parking lot. He waved goodbye to some friendthoughts at the bike rack and then coasted past the snoring stores—the Big Why, Bagel Beagle—when car headlights suddenly grazed his shoulder. The thought of green turned around and studied the car: an old, brown Plymouth Duster with a number 8 behind the wheel. As my thought was watching, the number 8 changed into a B.
The thought darkened to a deeper shade of green. At home in my basement bedroom, I turned over in my sleep.
Shrugging off the worry, my thought turned around and pushed the skateboard toward home—down Grassy Gutter Boulevard and onto Apple Hill Road. When he looked back over his shoulder, though, he saw the round lights of the Duster still behind him. Was that car following him? He stopped his skateboard and stared into the windshield. He saw a flash in the B’s eye.
The thought custom-swore and sped up, skating down Apple Hill and then a quick left onto Coventry—a shortcut. When he looked back again, he didn’t see the Duster. He took a few deep breaths and slowed down, coasting down Coventry and back toward its intersection with Apple Hill. When he hit the corner, though, the thought saw the Duster’s lights again. The driver gunned the engine. The thought bore down, hauling toward the intersection with Converse, the car’s bumper inches from the skateboard’s tail. Emerald green. Military green. When he saw the backyard of my house through the trees, the thought jumped off the board and sprinted—through the grass, over the bushes, into the yard. The driver stopped the car, jumped out, stretched into a single line—a —and slithered after the thought.
The thought slid across the hatchway and dove through the open basement window. Then he turned and looked back at the figure on the lawn. Standing upright at the edge of the patio, the figure changed shape from an ! to a ? to an &. Then it grinned, straightened out, and dove into the ground.
The thought shut the window and thought across the room, back into my ear. I sniffed in my sleep—I was dreaming of green.
NEWTON WONDER
Once I began to talk I wouldn’t shut up. It was like my thoughts had stored all of those words I’d heard in the Vox, and now that I’d figured out how to translate them from my ears to my mouth, I couldn’t stop making language. At four or five, even, I’d walk around all week repeating one word. “One week it was sundry,” my sister told me once. “Sundry Sunday and sundry Monday and sundry Friday. Sundry socks and sundry macaroni and cheese. It was so annoying.”
Then, in the fourth grade, I roykoed this habit—a “nervous tic,” my Mom called it—of repeating anything anyone said. I couldn’t help it—the words I heard mirrored themselves in my mouth and resounded without my even thinking about it. I’d be sitting in Mrs. Trombly’s fourth-grade class when the dialogue would start to form on my tongue. “Turn to page twenty-two,” Mrs. Trombly announced one day, while her white-blond wig pointed to words on the chalkboard, “and you’ll find a study guide for tomorrow’s quiz.”
“Tomorrow’s quiz,” I muttered from my seat.
“I’m sorry, ?”
“?” I said.
“Did you have something to add?”
“Something to add?” I said.
The class laughtracked.
“Stop that,” said Mrs. Trombly.
“Stop that!” I said.
“That’s it. Detention! After school!”
“Detention! After school!” I shouted.
Detention, in our school, was a series of cages. The usual detention terms were two weeks for tardiness and three weeks for an outburst. I got four weeks for mimicking Mrs. Trombly. “Shit, man,” asked the cage during week two of my sentence. “What did you do?”
“Shit, man,” I said.
“Seriously,” said the cage.
“Seriously,” I said.
“Stop it,” said the cage.
“Stop it,” I said.
When detentions didn’t curb the behavior, the school convinced my parents to send me to a special quietschool—Appleseed Silence Academy—three afternoons a week. I was there in Principal Booth’s office when he suggested the idea to my parents. “’s teachers concur,” said the phone booth, “that he’s something of a pest.”
“Excuse me?” said my Mom.
“That was Mrs. Bowe’s word,” said the principal—who was, as his name said, a phone booth. Booth opened up a folder and showed my parents a sheet of paper. “See, ’s creativity scores are very high. But emotionally?” He held up a piece of paper.
My Dad looked at my Mom.
“How dare you,” my Mom said to the phone booth.
I sat there in my chair, drawing on the soles of my Converse hi-tops.
“We don’t advocate total silence as a rule,” said Principal Booth, adjusting his toupee. “But we are trying to teach verbal control.”
“Control,” my Mom said.
“That’s why I’m suggesting Silence School,” said the phone booth.
“ doesn’t need lessons in silence,” my Mom said. “He was in a Vox for the first three years of his life!”
“Which may be why he’s having trouble, actually,” Booth said. “He’s overcompensating.”
“How much meaning is it?” my Dad asked.
“Silence School?” Principal Booth told him the cost.
“Total?” said my Dad.
“Per month,” said the phone booth.
My Dad took off his thick glasses and rubbed his eyes.
The Academy was located up on Homicki Hill. It was built to house a small group of silent bessoffs who supposedly prayed, silently, every moment of the day.
I only ever saw one or two bessoffs my entire time there, though—the classes I attended were in the classrooms toward the front of the building. In a lot of ways it was like regular school—they still chained you to the desk with math, and all the clocks were dead or dying—except that the only lesson was silence. The teacher, a giant feather boa, wrote SHUT UP! in big bold letters on the blackboard, and every day she’d cre
ate new prompts designed to challenge our ability to keep quiet. Once, she brought in an entire pizza from Red Rose, ate one slice, and then asked all of us if we wanted any. If we answered, we were punished with an additional week of classes. Another time she showed us a video disc of Decision Man and stopped it right before the final battle with the Multiple Choices. If you shouted for her to continue the movie—to finish the story? More classes.
I really struggled in Silence School. One day, the boa walked up to my desk and asked me a direct question. “, what is the brightest spot in Appleseed?”
I knew I was supposed to just sit there quietly, so that’s what I did. But when I didn’t respond, the bright purple boa put her hands on her feathery hips. “You live in Appleseed, , and you don’t know the brightest spot?”
Of course I did—it was Fialky’s Worryfields! I rocked back and forth in my seat.
“Wow, ,” said the boa. “And I thought you were smart.”
“It’s Fialky’s Worryfields!” I said. “Everyone knows that!”
The boa slammed her fist down on my desk.
One afternoon a few days later, the boa ordered us to practice writing as quietly as we could. That’s what had landed several of these students in Silence School in the first place: their writing—either the sound of the pen on the page, or the noise of the words themselves—was too loud, and their teachers couldn’t take it anymore. That afternoon, we were focusing on the art of saying nothing, in words, on the page. The boa walked from row to row, looking over everyone’s writing. When she reached my desk she stopped. “Today is nice,” I’d scrawled on the page.
The boa held up a lavender finger. “But nice has some meaning, doesn’t it?”
I stared at her.
“It’s not negative. It’s actually quite positive!” she barked. “These words should say nothing, people!”
A few minutes later, a call came in on the classroom phone and the boa had to go down to the office. She left us writing silent sentences. As soon as she was gone, one of the erasers jumped down from the chalkboard, sidled over to me, and hopped onto my desk. “Ey,” he said.
“You got chalk on my page,” I whispered to him.
“Listen,” said the eraser. “I can’t sit up there watching you fuck up over and over. All she wants is for you to shut up. To just not talk. Why can’t you do that?”
“It’s my thoughts. I don’t even know that I’m saying the words.”
“Just take all the things you want to say and store them.”
I thought about this. “Store them for when?”
The eraser furrowed his brow. “What do you mean?”
“When do I say them?”
“You don’t say them, ever,” said the eraser. “Just keep them in your mind.”
Then we heard the boa’s heels clack-echoing through the halls; the eraser dropped off the desk and scurried back up to the blackboard just as the boa stepped into the room. On her way up to the front of the room, the boa walked past my desk. She looked at my page, where I’d written “Today is the day after yesterday.”
She pointed to the sentence. “That still has meaning!”
I studied the words.
“You’re still saying something about today!” she shouted.
I looked at the eraser. He put his finger to his lips.
I didn’t say a word all the next day. When I walked out to the bike racks after school, I saw Large Odor unlocking his Haro. “Yo,” he said. “That Trombly is a bitch, isn’t she?”
I shrugged.
“You don’t think so?” said Odor.
I shrugged again. When my thoughts made words, I put the words in drawers in cabinets in my mind. When the cabinets were full, I emptied them out into mental plastic garbage bags. Soon my skull was full of garbage bags of words.
I don’t know if this is related, but it was shortly after that—shortly after I started holding my tongue, or “maturing,” as my Mom called it—that I began to lose my hair. It also might have been a long-term effect of the Vox, which was taken off the market in 1980 after it was found to cause numerous side effects (hair loss among them).
Anyway, that was the year—fifth grade—that I went bald. My hair came off in all one clump one day. I was riding my skateboard and my hair—whoosh!—just fell off my head. I hopped off the board, backtracked until I found the hair, and stuck it back on my head. It wouldn’t stay on my skull, though—it just fell right off again. I had to hold the hair in place as I skated home.
I tried everything I could to keep my hair: baseball hats, chin straps, glue. But it just wouldn’t stay. It had made up its mind to leave, and there wasn’t anything I could do to convince it otherwise.
There wasn’t any goodbye party for my hair—it didn’t want one. Two weeks after it fell off my skull, I put it on a small hairboat and pushed it off into the Connecticut River. My hair looked back, waved, and paddled away.
I missed it like crazy. I wrote my hair letters and prayed to it. “I know you’re busy,” I said in my prayer, “but please let me know how you’re doing when you can.”
“I’m good—great, actually,” my hair prayed back. “And you?”
“Just OK,” I said.
“It’s beautiful here,” my hair prayed. “I’m working at a radio station.”
“What radio station?”
My hair prayed the call letters but I didn’t recognize them. “I doubt you can get it where you are,” prayed the hair. “Anyway, I don’t make a lot of meaning, but I really like it. The people are so nice.”
“That sounds so awesome,” I prayed.
“And I’m renting a house near the beach.”
“Cool,” I prayed. “Maybe I could come visit.”
“Maybe sometime, sure,” said my hair.
I guess I always thought that my hair would come back to its life in Appleseed—that it and I would reunite at some point. But that was an invention on my part. One day I prayed to my hair and the hair didn’t answer. I tried praying again a week later and the prayer channel had been closed—my prayer went right to an operator. “I’m trying to reach my hair,” I prayed to the operator.
“That prayer channel has been shut down,” the operator said.
“Is there a forwarding channel?”
“I’m sorry, there isn’t,” prayed the operator.
So I stopped praying to my hair. When I got older, I understood. That hair had its own life to lead, a whole world to see, while I was stuck here in this tiny town, the sun laughing off my pate.
THE APPLESEED FLEA MARKET
How I miss those Sunday mornings in Appleseed, the applesun rising over Mount Epstein, my father and sister and I already out the door, in my father’s truck, on the hunt: on our way to an estate sale, a tag sale, or the Appleseed Flea Market. I’ve searched every corner of my mind for an unread page with a flea market on it, but with no luck: once a page is read, it can’t be unread; once the past has passed it’s gone. Still, I can go back in my mind to those quiet streets, the morning chatter of my thoughts, the cough of the dashboard and squeal of the struts as we roared down Highway Five.
My father’s truck wasn’t like other trucks—it was a strange metaphor of a vehicle, assembled from pieces and parts of other cars. It was asymmetrical, and it had a porch, a beak, and one eye. And it was controlled entirely by ropes. The steering panel reminded me of the wings of an old theater; it contained pulleys, and lever-locks, and complicated hemp ropes running in every direction. One rope was the go-rope; another rope was for turning. You pulled a rope over your head to beep the horn; the seat belt was a rope; the emergency brake was a rope attached to some sandbags stored above the back axle.
My father might have worked different jobs—insurance, real estate, solitudor—but at his applecore he was a collector. He loved finding old stranges, odd forgottens, hardly-brokens—uncovering life among the dead; going to great lengths to save something that someone else had dismissed; spotting meaning that other peopl
e looked past. He’d carry around a thrown-away clipboard with lists of items he was looking for: Doorknob for 2D, or, Spare casters?, or, BX cable. Every building he worked on was filled with re-remembered lamp fixtures, whitebearded sinks, ghosty carpets, finickal lightswitches that he’d found or traded with someone. My Dad took the same approach to every expense—everything was recontextualized, almost-but-not-quite broken, hanging on by a thread. All my clothes came from Goodwill, which meant that I was perpetually out of fashion: I wore bandannas when bicycling hats were in vogue; parachute pants during the stonewashed-jeans fad; unmatched Converse hi-tops (one yellow, one purple) when my friends were wearing Eastman boat shoes with the laces tied in twisty-knots; jampants and concert T-shirts when everyone wore izods with the collars turned up. At least my Mom took us to the thrift stores, though. My Dad’s clothes? Were the memories of clothes. He wore shoes he’d found in a dumpster, glasses that had belonged to a cousin of his who’d died.
One of my Dad’s many talents, though, was networking. He knew all the wheeler-dealers in Appleseed—The Ear, Glen Ukulele, Don La Valley, Armin LaFlame, Murphy, Jack D’elnero—and he worked with all of them in one way or another. He always knew who to go to for help with a repair, to borrow a tool, to find a used strow or a deal on a belloy. He always talked about one day opening an antique store, a knickknack spot, a trading post. Then every day would be Sunday, he’d say. For all three of us, Sundays felt free.
My sister Briana inherited my Dad’s talents. As far back as I can remember, she was his assistant—my Dad always said she had a great eye for meaning. When she was ten, Briana’s favorite hobby was collecting and refinishing furniture. Then she switched to collecting raw materials—copper tubing and wire, scrap steel—which she’d trade at Appleseed Salvage. Later, she taught herself about electricity: she could repair a light fixture, wire up a three-way switch or a fuse box, fix a garage door opener or the ignition on a heater.
Golden Delicious Page 3