We ended up buying dry dog food and a cage intended for a rabbit. Then we put it all in the truck and drove home.
That night, I put the cage in the basement and “I am.” curled up in the corner and went to sleep. In the middle of the night, though, I woke up to a howling and rattling. I turned on the light and “I am.” was ramming his head into the cage.
“ ‘I am.’,” I said. “Stop.”
My Dad walked in, his hair exclaiming, and stared down at the cage.
“Stop, ‘I am.’!” I shouted.
“This is what I was talking about, ,” my Dad said. “You’re lucky your Mom’s working an overnight.”
“What’s going on?” said Bri from the top stair.
“I am.” howled.
“Why’s it doing that?” Bri said.
I picked up the sentence. It was whimpering and shivering. “It’s just scared,” I said.
“You’re going to spoil it, and then it won’t listen to a thing you say,” my Dad said.
Around five that morning, “I am.” finally fell asleep. It woke up three hours later, which was right before my Mom usually got home from her overnight shifts. I fed it and took it for a walk. When I saw the Cloudy Fart—my Mom’s crappy, sky-blue station wagon—ambling down Converse, I picked “I am.” up and ran inside. My Dad met us in the breezeway. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he said.
My Mom walked in wearing her nurse’s uniform and smoking a six-foot cigarette. “Hey,” she said. She put down her purse and took off her coat. Then she saw us standing there. “What?” she said.
“Your son here has something to show you,” my Dad said.
“Now what?” she said.
I held Sentence out to her.
“Wait—what is that?” my Mom said. She walked closer. “Is that language?” Smoke poured out of her face. “What’s it doing in the house, Ralph?”
“ found it at the building and fed it,” my Dad said.
“You fed it?” said my Mom. She looked down at the cage by my feet. “Get it out of here. Get it out of here right now.”
My Dad bowed his head. “I told him—”
“Wait a minute,” my Mom said, looking at Sentence’s collar. “No. You didn’t, Ralph. You didn’t.”
“His name is Sentence,” I said, “but he’s called ‘I am.’ ”
“ promises it won’t be any trouble,” said my Dad. “We bought it a cage to sleep in, a leash, the whole nine yards.”
My Mom stormed toward my father, grabbed him by the chin, and pushed him against the wall. “How dare you. After all the work I’ve done? You bring infested words inside—invite bookworms into our house?”
“What’s a bookworm?” I said.
“I figured,” my Dad said, rubbing his elbow, “it’s just two words—”
“ ‘I am.’ is not infested,” I said.
“Into our house?” my Mom said.
“It’s positive, though,” my Dad stammered.
Sentence smiled.
“See?” my Dad said. “It’s not a bookworm.”
My Mom shoved my Dad backward and looked him up and down. “You wouldn’t know it if it was,” she hissed.
THE MARGINALS
HOWGATE WONDER
Ever since my days in the Vox my thoughts had wandered. During the day, they’d open up the top of my head, slip off my ears, vault off my shoulders, and hop away; at night, they’d sleepthink without bound, all through Appleseed: they’d roil out to the Hu Ke Lau, where ex-Cones sat at the bar husking regrets; jump the fence at the Appleseed Recycling Center to rummage through Memories; climb up Appleseed Mountain in the dark and get lost in paragraphs of wilderness; skateboard down Old Highway Five; vault forward into the future, back into the past, into the margin and beyond into the ifs: what might be, what could be, what should be but won’t. They’d bring back stories of their travels—adventures, struggles, strange characters and unnamed objects (machines that grew hair!, chatterglass!, an underground cone society!)—from places and worlds I never heard of.
Once, one of my thoughts fought in a war and returned with a bullet in its knee. I woke up my parents in the middle of the night. When I shook my Mom, she sat up in bed and punched the air. “What is it?” she volted.
“I think we need to go to the emergency room,” I told her.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“One of my thoughts has a gunshot wound,” I told her.
“One of—what?”
“My thoughts,” I said. “Just back from the war.”
My Mom turned over and went back to sleep.
“Mom!” I said.
“Go back to sleep, ,” my Dad muttered.
So I dressed the wound myself. As I wrapped the thought’s leg in mental gauze, I thought, “What happened to the other thought?”
“I killed it,” said the thought.
“How?”
“With my bayonet,” he said. And then he held up a mental bayonet, covered in a blue liquid.
What’s that blue stuff? I wondered.
“The thoughtblood of my enemy,” said the thought.
That thought recovered, but it was just one in a legion of thoughts who wandered into—or sometimes went looking for—trouble. Sometimes they made it difficult for me to concentrate; I made mistakes when working with my Dad at the buildings, and I was always getting detention in school. After a while, I didn’t mind it—I’d sit in whatever cage they put me in. I always carried a few deadwords in my pocket for just that occasion. In a cage, I could spend days on a single phrase: I’d take apart the expression, the words, the letters themselves.
Then, in the spring of ’88, something terrible happened. I woke up one morning and a thought of sidewalks was sitting at my desk. His skin was pale and there were rings under his eyes. “What is it?” I said.
“Something—terrible,” he said.
“Show me,” I said.
He led me out the window and down onto the driveway. I unlocked my Bicycle Built for Two and the thought leapt onto the handlebars. I took the front seat and the Reader got on the back. “Where to?” I said.
The thought pointed east. “Heights,” he said.
Appleseed Heights was a new condominium development down by the east edge of town. A year earlier that area had all been wilderness. Now, Orange Traffic Cones were driving yellow bulldozers in there and knocking down the trees. The trees were holding protests, singing songs, fighting back. Every week there was news of another tree/bulldozer scuffle. The week prior, a bulldozer had been jumped by a bunch of trees and a rumble had ensued.
As we approached, I saw Orange Traffic Cones standing in a triangle right off the road. Some of the Cones were holding fluorescent tape; others were kneeling around a thought-shaped chalk outline.
When I rode the Bicycle Built for Two up to them, I saw what they were kneeling over: a dead thought. My dead thought, a thought of the future, bleeding into the sienna dirt.
A dented Cone with a moustache held up his orange rubbery arm. “Nothing to see here,” he said.
“That’s his thought,” said the Reader. “He’s the thinker.”
The Cone’s eyes darkened.
“How did he—” I said. I began to cry. “What happened?”
The Cone crossed his arms. “He was—there was a—”
Another Cone approached. “You the thinker?” he asked me.
I nodded.
“Thought was mauled,” said the Cone.
“By what?” said the thought of sidewalks.
The Cone shook his head. “We’re not sure,” he said. “We’ll know more after the thoughtopsy. Did he have any enemies that you know of?”
I shook my head and wiped my face. “He was such a kind and thoughtful. Into surfing and meditation. He wouldn’t have thought about hurting the thought of a fly.”
“Sometimes a thought leads a double life,” suggested the Cone.
I shook my head again. “Not this one,” I said.
The following week I held a funeral in my mind. All of my available thoughts attended. I held it on a Wednesday morning. The body of the thought was displayed in a coffin, and all my thoughts walked past it and thought about praying.
Outside my skull, meanwhile, I was in algebra class. The teacher, a hairy plus sign, was drawing some bullshit on the board. “This makes Y equal—who knows the answer?”
The thought’s mother ambled up to the coffin and collapsed in tears.
“,” said the hairy plus sign.
“My boy,” said the motherthought. “My son.”
“Y equals?” said the plus sign.
The fatherthought consoled his ex-wife.
“Earth to . What does Y equal?”
But I couldn’t answer, because it was that part of the service where they were lowering the thought into the ground in my mind, throwing mindirt over it and saying goodbye forever. It was so sad. A thought with its whole life ahead of it!
“!”
“What?” I shouted.
“Do you know the answer?” said the plus sign.
“Who cares!” I roared. “Don’t you have any respect for the dead?”
YOU CAN’T DO THAT ON TELEVISION
Like most of the kids I knew, we had televisions watching us in every room, recording our movements and prayers, and praying them out as sitcoms and laugh-out-louds to other families in Appleseed. Our sitcom was called The Marginals, about a family that lives really close to the margin. I think back on those times, the times of the show, as some of the best of my childhood. Every day between the ages of five and thirteen I came home from school, looked over my script, and put on my costume: shiny Nike shoes instead of my secondhand unmatching Converse hi-tops, stonewashed jeans instead of vinyl parachute pants, an Ocean Pacific T-shirt over my cigarette shirt from the Salvation Army, a toupee cut in the latest fashion—a tail in the back or pleats shaved into the sides—to cover my bald head. Then I’d open up a closet of smiles in the back room, pick one out, and put it on. Sometimes I’d choose a wide smile, but usually I’d pick a smirk, like this one:
In the story of The Marginals I was Scooter LaFontaine, always getting into trouble that led to valuable lessons. My signature lines were, “Who, me?” and “Nice fine good OK!”
Everyone in my family was part of the show. My sister played Samantha LaFontaine, the town’s tap dancing champion (even though Bri hated tap dancing—her real passion was for collectibles, antiques, and junk). My father played a cambridge and my Mom a really kind nurse. And she was great at it. When she was in costume, I saw kindnesses from her that she rarely showed in person. In one episode, I saw her cradle a dying sentence in her arms as if she were its mother. In another, I was crushed by a last-second loss in a swim meet. In the car, she turned to me and said, “You tried your best, Scoot. Didn’t you?”
My character, Scooter, nodded.
“And wasn’t that your fastest time ever in backstroke?”
I shrugged.
“Then you won. You did better than ever before. What more could you want, honey?”
The show had certain tropes. Like, every show included a dinner scene.
“How was your day today, Scoot?” my Dad would ask.
With that line and almost every other, we’d hear the laughtrack: our cans in the pantry, chuckling and guffawing.
“We learned about photosynthesis,” I said. “How plants transform light into food.”
Haw.
“I wish we could transform this food,” my sister said.
Ha haw haw ha.
“Now, Sam,” said my Mom. “It’s just a pleasure for the four of us to eat together.”
“I think the ham is great,” said my Dad. “Don’t you, Scoot?”
“Nice fine good OK!” I said.
Every episode ended with a moral, delivered to me or my sister from my father or mother while sitting on the back stoop: “If they’re cruel to you,” the mother-character told the Scooter-character once, “then they aren’t really your friends. Friends will watch out for you through thick and thin.”
Or,
“Sometimes we have to put other people’s interests in front of our own,” the father-character told the sister-character. “That’s part of being an adult.”
“But I really wanted to go on the ski trip,” said the sister-character.
“There’ll be other ski trips,” said the father-character.
I look back on that show now—here, in this cramped room, with a head full of doubts—and man, I miss those half-hour arcs: Mr. LaFontaine Gets a New Job. Scooter Gets Lost. Mrs. LaFontaine Meets a Friend for Coffee. Scooter Needs a Hug. Samantha Makes a Friend, and so many others.
We weren’t the only show in town, of course. Every family I knew had a sitcom—their shows were broadcast into our eyes just as ours were broadcast into theirs. With so many shows to choose from, it was difficult to keep your family’s ratings up. You had to say the right things to make people keep watching. After a few seasons on-air, our show became less popular and we needed to make changes. My Mom suggested that we make the show more serious—more dark. In one episode, the father-character’s brother-in-law died and the last scene was Scooter and Mr. LaFontaine on the front stoop. “There’s no sense to the universe,” said Mr. LaFontaine, swigging from a bottle of beer. “The Core? Some central meaning? It’s a fucking joke. Or else how could people suffer so much and die so young?”
“I guess cancer is the Core’s way of saying ‘Screw you,’ ” I said.
“I guess so, sport,” my Dad said.
The mother-character that season was closer to my actual mother: moodier, more unpredictable. “Parents don’t have to love their children,” she said in one moral.
“I thought love was unconditional,” said my sister.
“Not necessarily,” said my Mom. “You have to earn it.”
When our ratings didn’t improve, we tried the opposite tack: we made the show light, funny, almost vaudeville. Instead of death or illness there were spit-takes and pratfalls. My Dad’s signature line was “Waaa!,” his eyebrows leaping away from his eyes.
By this time, though, I was tired of changing. My sister and mother complied, but not me—I was rambunctious, remember? Rebellious, a badseed. At a dinner scene one day, my Mom asked me how school was. My line was, “Nice fine good OK!” Instead, though, I said, “Freaking terrible.”
Haw.
My Mom’s eyes were blades, but her smile held. “Why terrible?”
“Chamblis’s Mom has HIV,” I said.
Haw haw haw.
“Cut!” the television in our kitchen yelled. “Let’s keep it lighthearted, Scoot!”
“,” said my Mom.
I didn’t say anything.
“And,” the TV said, “rolling!”
“How was your day, Scoot?” asked my Mom again.
“My brain hurts,” I said. “Like, my skull is too small for my thoughts.” And I slammed my head into my plate of spaghetti.
“Cut!” said the television. “What the fuck, ?”
Our ratings continued dropping. Soon, our TVs lost hope—you could see it in their eyes when they looked at us. When the physical comedy didn’t work, my Dad pushed us even further: we went cartoon. Doing so meant going to the doctor every week for animation injections, and retooling our dynamic again. My Dad’s repetitive gaffe that season was banging his thumb with his hammer. He’d do it over and over. “YeOW!” he’d shout, and run around with his red thumb in the air.
Soon, even our cans stopped laughing. Then one of our TVs quit, and my Mom started flubbing her lines—she’d stare out the window, or pray silently in her seat, or absentmindedly pick up a book on set and start to read, and we’d have to shoot the whole scene over. My Dad didn’t give up; in one last-ditch attempt to stay on the prayer-air, he decided that we’d stop the injections, go back to the original formula, and invite on guest characters: Chamblis’s Mom, the town’s oldest Orange Traffic C
one, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. But by then even our living-room TV wouldn’t watch us for half an hour.
In our last episode, my Dad and sister and I chose our smiles and took our places when we realized that my Mom wasn’t on set. The TV gave the five-minutes-to-places call and Mom still hadn’t shown up for costume or makeup. “Where is your mother?” my Dad asked between cambridges.
“I’ll go find her,” I said. I looked upstairs, in the front yard, in her gym in the garage. I found her in the far corner of the backyard, kneeling in the wet grass.
I ran over to her. “Mom?” I said.
“—and please,” she was saying. “Protect us from doubts. And worries. Protect us from ourselves.”
“Mom, the show’s starting,” I said.
“Take care of them,” she said. “Take care of them while I’m gone.”
“Mom?” I said.
“I’m praying,” she said. “Do the show without me.”
I heard the credits and the music and I ran inside. “And now,” the TV said, “the MARGINALS!”
The three of us stared at each other. My Mom was supposed to deliver the first line.
“How was—” my Dad stumbled, “your day, Sam—?”
“Cut!” said the TV. “We need the whole family! Goddammit!” The TV unplugged itself and stormed out of the room. “Fuck this noise!”
The TV didn’t come back until late that night—it smelled of beer and cigarettes for the whole week afterward. And from that day forward? The screen wouldn’t look at me. All it did was show me things. Maybe to hurt me, it mostly showed me other families, families happier than mine, getting great ratings, raucous laughs, happinesses. Our house, meanwhile? Grew lonelier. Colder. Emptier. And no one even saw it. No one even cared what happened to the Marginals.
THE BICYCLE BUILT FOR TWO
Wait a second. I just realized that I never told you the story about my bicycle, the Bicycle Built for Two. It’s an easy one to pull from the page. Here, grab ahold and pull.
Pull!
Bicycles, in Appleseed, were very meaningful. A good used bicycle—my father’s ’49 Robinson three-speed, say, well-maintained, with chordspokes and a flim—would run you about seven hundred theories. That was more than one month’s rent in an apartment at Woodside!
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