“Sitting on your asses is more like it,” mumbled a sweater behind me. The second Mother—taller, leaner—stood up and the sweater looked down at his shoes.
“We don’t think the problem is with the pages themselves. Our tests suggest strong fibers; the glue is holding; the spine is intact. The problem,” said the muscled Mother, “is that the pages of Appleseed itself are infested.”
The crowd began to murmur. “The pages?” said someone behind me.
“Which pages?” someone else said. “This one?”
Cone Johnson leaned toward the microphone. “Infested with what?” he said.
One of my thoughts coughed.
The male Mother stood up and turned on the slide projector. An image of a worm appeared on the white screen.
“What you see there probably looks like your standard garden-variety pest,” said the muscled Mother, and the male Mother took a stack of brochures off the table and started handing them around. “But these guys are different,” the muscled Mother said. “These worms—we call them ‘bookworms’—are thoughts. In the form of sentences.”
“So it’s not a worm, then,” asked Select Cone Miles.
“Technically? It’s a literaficidae,” said the tall Mother.
“Pardon?”
“It has a printed body. They burrow and hide just like any other worm.”
I took a brochure—What’s So Bad About a Bookworm?—and passed the stack on.
“And the sentences change at will,” the muscled Mother said. The male Mother pushed a button on the projector and a new image appeared: a worm in the shape of the letter e. Then another image: a worm in the shape of an s.
“Are these all the—same worm?” said Cone O’Martian.
“This is bullshit,” said the sweater, standing up and pointing. “That one’s not even a woman!” he shouted. The tall Mother went over to the sweater, picked him up, threw him over her shoulder, and carried him out. “It’s bullshit!” the sweater shouted.
Cone Johnson raised his hand.
“Don’t need to raise your hand, Cal,” said the male Mother.
“So what if they change?”
“So what?” the male Mother repeated.
“Yeah,” said Cone Johnson. “Why is that a big deal? I think it’d be kind of cool to see a sentence change right in front of me.”
“It’s what killed the apples,” said the muscled Mother. “Appleseed is the story of happiness, soil fertility, and meaning. But now all that’s changing. It won’t stop with the trees. If we don’t stop the bookworms, they’ll erase all of Appleseed, destroy everything meaningful.”
“Or carry it away,” said the male Mother.
“Carry it away?” said Cone O’Martian.
The muscled Mother turned back to the screen. “What we don’t know yet,” she said, pointing to the pictures of the holes in the page, “is where those channels lead.”
“We don’t want to overreact and cause panic,” said the male Mother. “All we’re asking for right now is vigilance. You see a strange sentence? One that seems like it’s not from Appleseed? Pray to us about it.”
“In the meantime,” said the muscled Mother, “we’re doubling our reads and recruiting new Mothers.”
My Mom sat up in her seat.
“We’ll be trying out Mothers in O’Shady Groves next Friday at eight a.m.,” the male Mother announced.
Looking back, that was the moment I lost her—the moment that she became a Mother to the world, but the Memory of a Mom to me.
MOTHERS’ DAY
I didn’t attend the tryouts—I had school that day. I’d started at Appleseed High—a bigger, more dangerous place—the previous fall, and I was really struggling. It was easy to get lost in that school—to walk down a corridor toward your next class, take a wrong turn, and find yourself in a class on death or loss that you could never get out of. I know a scoom named Kyle who walked into a class on Aging? He emerged forty years later with wrinkles on his face and a curve in his spine.
I took the standard list of classes: Complicated World, Days of Joy, What to Be Most Frightened Of, the History of Depression, and Gym. I was failing almost all of them—it was like something was wrong with my brain. In Complicated World, Ms. Colton kept me after school to discuss my grades. “I don’t understand it, ,” she said. “The quizzes are open-book. Why is this giving you so much trouble?”
I shrugged.
“Don’t you find this interesting? The complicated world?”
“I guess I just don’t think it’s all that complicated,” I said.
“Are there problems at home, ?” said Ms. Colton. “Or with your friends?”
“My only friend besides ‘I am.’,” I told her, “is the Reader.”
“The who?” she said.
“Me,” said the Reader.
“The Reader,” I said.
“Is that a real person?” she said.
“Of course,” I said. “She’s right over there.”
“Jokes aren’t going to get you anywhere,” she said. “I’m trying to help you.”
“I’m trying to help me, too,” I said.
The only class I did OK in was Depression. I never studied for the exams in that class and still I got the best grades. In his comments on one of my papers, my teacher—a lizard named Dr. O’Rich—said that I had promise. “I seriously think that you should consider a career in depression,” he wrote.
In all of my other classes, though, my teachers gave up on me. In What to Be Most Frightened Of, the teacher even moved my desk into the corner. The weather in my school was generally pretty good—mild sun, a few clouds—but those corners were often cold and sometimes inclement. That day, in fact—the day of the tryouts—it had started snowing in my corner, right in the middle of class. We were supposed to be creating fear hierarchies, but the snow made it difficult to concentrate. I got up from my desk and approached the teacher, a cardboard cutout, and said, “It’s snowing in my corner.”
“Is it literal snow,” said the cutout, “or metaphorical snow?”
We’d studied metaphors the previous week.
“Real snow,” I said.
“Are you sure your thoughts don’t seem as snow?”
I went back to my desk, pushed the snow off my paper, and kept working.
I was even more distracted than usual that day, though—all I could think about was how my Mom was doing. That and what the Mothers had said about the bookworms. Was Sentence, I wondered, a bookworm?
No. “I am.” acted fierce sometimes, but his “bark” was way worse than his “bite.” My sentence wasn’t like the wild language you read about in The Daily Core—the sentences that had been seen slithering up storm grates, making holes in our stories. The previous month, someone had been killed by a sentence, even, when she mistakenly came between the clause and its mother-sentence while hiking in the margin. “I am.” wasn’t capable of that kind of cruelty—he was just a sweet, innocent statement!
That afternoon, though, I rode right home after school. My Mom wasn’t back from the tryouts yet, so I found the pamphlet from the meeting and sat down on the couch with Sentence.
WHAT’S SO BAD ABOUT A BOOKWORM?
BROUGHT TO YOU BY
THE MOTHERS OF AMERICA
In many ways, bookworms are similar to the common earthworm—the oligochaeta—except that the bookworm, which is known as the literaficidae, has a printed skeleton. This print-based body allows it to morph from one character or idea to another, shifting its appearance and meaning on a whim.
Diet
Literaficidae survive most readily in narrative, stories, or other text. They crave stories: predicaments, conflicts, crescendos, denouements. They digest the tension and secrete the rest. This results in a “trail”—a telltale pathway of inconsistencies or red herrings left by a passing sentence.
Font
Bookworms can change font and style at will, quickly emboldening and italicizing, shrinking to hide, und
erlining or enlarging to scare predators. The most common literaficidae fonts, incidentally, are Cambria and Palatino. Courier New is frequently seen as well.
Plot Transference
Reports of recent bookworm incidents suggest that they can carry elements of plot or premise in their stomachs. In other words, they transport settings and moments in order to ensure their survival. If they can contain the story, that is, they save their place in it.
Metaphor
Metaphoring is another word for meaning simultaneously. The bookworms’ ability to metaphor is unparalleled. They can represent literally any number of ideas, motifs, or themes. Literary scientists suggest that this metaphoring is the result of evolution over hundreds of thousands of years on the page.
Regeneration
Like the common oligochaeta, the literaficidae can regenerate if injured. Say that a sentence, prior to injury, represented the threat of nature. If a group of them were attacked and unable to regenerate as nature, they might opt for another syntactically similar comparison—the threat of the future, say.
Frequently asked questions about Living with Bookworms
Q. My community has been infested with strange words! What do I do if I see one?
A. Pray to the Mothers! Send them the page number and locale. Then stop reading in that direction and read the other away as fast as you can.
Q. Is metaphoring contagious?
A. Not that we know of, no. Metaphoring is not an illness or virus; rather, it’s the bookworms’ way of making themselves seen and known. Human beings show no tendency toward metaphoring.
Q. What have we done to deserve this invasion?
A. Nothing. The bookworms have chosen your story at random, in the same way that termites infest a house or typewriters attack smaller typewriters. It’s a question of narrative survival—nothing more.
Q. Do the bookworms have anything to do with the disappearance of apples (the blight)?
A. The current theory says yes, that the apple trees—which draw nutrients from the page—were not able to sustain the growth of appletree groves because of bookworm-inspired page-rot. This is one of the reasons that we’re aiming to stop, or at least curb, bookworm infestations. And with your help, we will!
Thanks for doing your part to help save Appleseed from bookworms!
I heard the Fart in the driveway and I put down the brochure. A minute later, my Mom walked in with her reading goggles over one shoulder and her nunchucks over the other.
“How’d it go?” I said.
“OK,” she huffed, but I knew it went great; her face was as happy as I’d ever seen it. And just two days later, I came home after school and saw two duffel bags by the door.
“?” my Mom hollered.
“Yeah,” I said, staring at the bags.
“We’re in here,” she said.
I walked into the kitchen and saw my father, mother, and sister sitting at the table. “Sit down, ,” my Mom said.
I sat in one chair and the Reader sat in the other. “No,” said my Mom to the Reader. “This is for family only.”
“Mom,” I said, embarrassed.
“She can go sit in the TV room,” said my Mom. Then my Mom looked at you.
“Go,” she said.
You got up and went into the TV room. The TV stared at you. “What do you think they’re talking about?” the TV asked.
“I don’t know,” you said, even though you did.
The TV made a face. “What’s the luggage for?”
Then you heard crying in the kitchen. That was me—I was the one crying. “This isn’t fair!” you heard me say.
“,” said my Dad.
“It’s not, Dad!” I shouted.
Then you heard the slam of someone’s fist on the table, followed by Diane’s voice. “There are bigger problems in the world than what you’re going to have for dinner, ! Appleseed needs me more than you do.”
Then there was more crying, and the sound of running feet and slamming doors.
“Sheesh,” said the TV. “That didn’t sound good.”
You sat in the TV room for a while, being watched, and watching others being watched, and finally you clicked the remote and walked quietly out into the living room. Diane was smoking a six-foot cigarette and looking out the window. You opened the basement door and went downstairs. I was sitting on the floor in the middle of a paragraph.
You wanted to say something to me, but you didn’t know what. You already understood what would happen next—you’d read the story about Diane flying away to join the Mothers and the missing that followed/would follow.
“You OK?” you asked. When I looked up and you read my face, you knew the answer.
AUXERRE
Reeling from a loss of meaning, thunderous debt, and my Mom’s sudden absence, my Dad turned to get-ideas-quick scams: long-shot prospects, wheelsanddeals, outlandish trades. First he tried trapping and selling memories, but no one would buy them. Then The Ear convinced him to invest some socked-away meaning in a new, virtual kind of reading—“People won’t need pages at all!” The Ear promised—but he disappeared two days later with my Dad’s investment. When my uncle heard about The Ear’s scam he came by the house to check on my Dad—he brought my Dad a Kaddish Fruit, and the two of them shared it outside on the back step. I was out there, too, sitting on the lawn with Sentence.
“Found you a job,” said my uncle, biting into the blue fruit.
“Can I have some of that?” I said, meaning the fruit.
“No,” my Dad said. Then he turned to my uncle. “What job?” he asked, spitting out a seed.
Joump just looked at him.
“Not Muir Drop,” my Dad said.
Muir Drop Forge, where my uncle worked, huffed on the Kellogg River a mile or so from our house. Muir Drop made work—most of the labor in western Massachusetts was forged there, in fact. In those days, work was all the rage in America—people couldn’t get enough of it—and so Muir was always looking for people. It was backbreaking work, though—the labor they made was grimy, tar-like, pulled from deep in the page. My uncle worked twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, repairing equipment. The injury rate was high at Muir Drop; there were accidents all the time. One day Joump came over with a big burn across his arm where he’d been splashed with toil. Plus, his hands were permanently black from labor that wouldn’t wash off.
“I can’t think of any place I’d rather not work,” my Dad said.
“No shit,” Joump said. “But somanabitch, Ralph. Look around. Just you and the kids now. The banks aren’t just going to stop calling.”
“Thanks but no thanks,” my Dad said. “I’ve still got a few tricks up my sleeve.”
“Tricks,” Joump said. “Like what?”
We found out two days later, when my Dad rounded up me and my uncle in the ropetruck and drove south across Page Boulevard and over Old Five. “OK, I give up,” said Joump. “Where we going?”
“To find the Memory of Johnny Appleseed,” said my Dad.
“Ah, Christ, Ralph—is it too late to turn around and take me home?”
“Yes,” said my Dad, and he drove on.
Since the blight began six months earlier, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed had become a pariah. The Memory didn’t help his cause, either, by proclaiming to anyone who’d listen—at Town Hall meetings, outside the Why—that salvation was just a harvest away; that he’d had dreams and visions of trees shaped like hands holding giant apples, the biggest fruits Appleseed had ever seen. “The blight is not Appleseed’s, but ours!” he’d preach to passerbys outside the Hu Ke Lau. “It’s a failure of imagination! A blight in our own minds!” Most people would ignore him. “And I have found the way forward,” he’d shout after them. “The new soil. We must shed our fears. Boldly move into the unknown. Only then will the apples return.”
We found the Memory of Johnny Appleseed further down Five, walking with his thumb out. My Dad pulled the truck over beside him and rolled down the window. “Where�
��s your treebike?” he shouted.
“It has—” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed paused, blinked, and sniffed, “—been apprehended.” Then he hoisted his satchel higher on his shoulder.
“What’s in the bag?” said Joump.
“Seeds,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.
“So this new soil,” said my Dad.
“Yes.”
“Can you show us where to find it?” my Dad said.
“There are groves not yet named,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Pages not yet written. On these pages is where we’ll grow the new groves.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Joump.
“Can we go there?” said my Dad.
“Ralph,” said Joump. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I can show you the soil,” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed said.
“Right now?” my Dad asked.
“It’s up on Appleseed Mountain. We can go at first light.”
“Get in,” my Dad said, and nodded to the back of the truck. The Memory of Johnny Appleseed climbed into the bed of the truck and my Dad pulled back onto the old highway.
The Memory of Johnny Appleseed slept at our place that night. My Dad offered him the living-room couch, but he chose to sleep outside instead. Before I went to bed, I looked out the window and saw the Memory, lying on his back in the grass, talking to the stars. He told a joke and all of the stars cracked up laughing.
We were on the road at sunrise. We picked up Joump and drove straight for Appleseed Mountain. That mountain was dangerous: full of haunted memories, false meanings, misfits, bookworms, and wild language of all sorts—rattlesnakes, old drafts, black bears, erased versions, transparent spiders, errors, menasentences, typos, and countless other threats.
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