Come on, !
I’ve got my bike, though.
COMMUNITY THEATER
No problem. Get in and I’ll drop you back here afterward.
gets in the Jeep. The Jeep drives off the pagestage.
We drove out to the deadgroves, me in the passenger seat and the Chorus—a singular mass with twelve sets of torsos, arms, shoulders, necks, and heads—in the backseat. The Community Theater lit a cigarette and blew smoke out the window. The Chorus tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around. “Really great job, . You were awesome as the Old Man.”
“Thanks,” I said. I remember that moment—the thrill in my chest. On my way to an actual party! And then, to make things even better, the UCs’ “Paying Customers” came on the radio. After my sister left for auction school, I raided her tape collection. Whenever I missed her or felt lonely, I’d pick out one of her tapes—the UCs, usually—and listen to it on my orange headphones.
“Nice,” I said now. “I love this song.”
The Community Theater looked over at me and smirked. “You don’t know this song,” she said.
“ ’Course I do,” I said. “This is my favorite band.”
“Who is it?” asked the Chorus.
“I want to see if knows,” said the Community Theater.
“It’s the Ulcerative Colitises,” I said. “The album Tenesmus.”
“What’s the name of the song?”
“ ‘The Bathroom Is for Paying Customers Only,’ ” I said. “Fourth song on side A.”
The theater looked at me. “Wow,” she said. “I’m impressed.”
When we reached the deadgroves, the theater parked and we stepped out into the night. Most of the cast and crew was there, standing around a bonfire, and someone had brought a keg.
The wig’s wife, Ellen, gave me a hug—it had been so long since I’d hugged anyone—and told me that she hoped I’d work with them again in the future. Then the theater walked up to me and handed me a red plastic cup.
Scene: The deadgroves
COMMUNITY THEATER
Here.
looks into the cup, then takes a sip.
COMMUNITY THEATER
So how do you know the UCs?
Best band in Appleseed! Their zitherer, Oppenhowser? Is—like—the shit.
COMMUNITY THEATER
How about Yosa Ron?
She’s good.
COMMUNITY THEATER
Good? She’s the best hurdy-gurdy player in the history of—
Not as good as Ross Nary.
COMMUNITY THEATER
Who?
Gurdyer for the Porches.
COMMUNITY THEATER
I don’t know them.
Check out the album Overanda.
COMMUNITY THEATER
I don’t know a single other person who likes the UCs. My friend-theaters are mostly into show tunes.
I’ve got every tape they’ve recorded.
COMMUNITY THEATER
You know they’re coming to Appleseed.
No, they are not.
COMMUNITY THEATER
Appleseed Amphitheatre.
Holy crap.
COMMUNITY THEATER
You ever seen them?
Live? No.
COMMUNITY THEATER
(Pauses.) We should go.
(Looks into his cup.) Yeah. (Drinks.) That would be—
CHORUS wanders over, cups in every hand.
CHORUS
We are, like, so wasted.
(to COMMUNITY THEATER)
We should go. That’d be really fun.
COMMUNITY THEATER
Great.
CHORUS
Go where?
COMMUNITY THEATER
Nowhere.
We went to the show the following week. I wasn’t sure whether it was a date or not, but when the theater picked me up in her Jeep she smelled like a garden and her hair was contorted into this strange shape above her roof.
We got there in the middle of the opening set, by this new band called the OCDs. I might have heard one of their songs on WAPL—“Check, Check Again”—but I didn’t realize that it was them. The song had a catchy chorus, though:
Check the SINK
Check the SINK
Check the SINK
Check the SINK
Check the STOVE
Check the STOVE
Check the STOVE
Check the STOVE
Check the DOOR
Check the DOOR
Check the DOOR
Check the DOOR
Check it again
Check it again
Check it AGAIN
CHECK IT AGAIN
“They’re pretty good!” shouted the Community Theater.
Then the Colitises took the stage. The Community Theater screamed in a high voice, and I jumped up and down in my chair. “Good evening, Appleseed!” shouted Yosa Ron. Then she hit the tympani and rocked into “Urgency.”
I sang every word of every song; so did the Community Theater. Halfway through “Ultimate Flora,” she put her brick hand in mine. “Holy shit!” said one of my thoughts, and two other thoughts started jumping up and down manically on the carpeted floor of my mind.
The next song, “You’ll Have This Disease for the Rest of Your Life,” was a dirge. Halfway through it, the Community Theater put her head on my shoulder. When I turned to her, she leaned up and kissed me. Her mouth tasted like smoke and audience.
Pages flipped forward in my mind. When I looked back at the stage, the UCs were playing their biggest hit, “Bathroom.”
I can’t go to the movies
Cuz I have to go to the BATHROOM!
I can’t go to the bar
Cuz I have to go to the BATHROOM!
I can’t go in to work today
Cuz I have to go to the BATHROOM!
Where Oh where is the BATHROOM!
I need one right now
“BathROOM!” shouted the crowd. “BathROOM!”
When the concert was over, the theater led me through the parking lot to her Jeep and we drove back to my house. When we pulled into the driveway, she kissed me and said, “I’ll call you, OK?”
“OK,” I said.
My thoughts were dizzy as I walked inside. No one else was home, but that night I didn’t even care. I went down to the basement, found my clipboard, and wrote, “That night was one of the best nights of his life.”
The theater and I dated all fall, through four more shows. I was a walk-on ugly in each one: a strug in Tunic, a worryfielder in Mrs. Rain and Mr. Rain, a spinning in Quagmire! Every night after rehearsal, the Community Theater and I would go somewhere—the Big Why, the deadgroves, the Hu Ke Lau—to hang out and talk. Like me, the Community Theater didn’t have much of a home life. Her father was in New York City, her mother hooked on Kaddish. I told the theater I hadn’t seen my Mom since she’d left to Mother—“Not that I’m not proud of her,” I said. “I mean, she’s probably protecting the story right now.”—and that my father had started taking twenty-four-hour shifts at Muir.
“That sounds like workhosis,” she said.
I shrugged.
Looking back, I think that’s what the theater and I shared: we both knew the echoes of an empty house. So we never made out there—instead, we’d drive into the Dunes and lie down in the backseat of the Jeep. She’d kiss me, dangle her theater hair over my face. We’d take off our shirts and pull a blanket over us.
One night, she reached for the button on my pants. “Is this OK?” she said.
I nodded.
“You sure?”
“Yes,” I said.
The scene happened so quickly; soon it was one spotlight, and then several, and then all the light, bright hot white, and then curtains, and applause, and darkness. Outside, prayers bounced off the roof of the Jeep; memories sang songs in the distance.
Shortly after the closing of Quagmire!, though, something shifted in me. I was sad to see that cast go,
and I wasn’t excited for Holiday Nightmare, the play that Eric had chosen for December. I lost heart, got tired of the whole production—the blocking, the run-throughs, the pressure to bring in an audience. All of that scrimming just to tell a truestory? A thought said, “I could tell a better story with a clipboard and a yellow sheet of paper.”
I said as much to the theater one night while we were parking in the Dunes. “We could just quit the show,” I said. “Tell our own story instead.”
Scene: Theater, post-rehearsal
COMMUNITY THEATER
Why would we do that?
I just don’t think we need an audience to be together.
COMMUNITY THEATER
Of course we do. We’re all in this together—don’t you get that?
But I didn’t get it. “Can we speak in prose?” I said.
COMMUNITY THEATER
How can you even ask me that?
“I’m just saying maybe I want to tell a different story—or this story in a different way,” I said.
COMMUNITY THEATER
Are you breaking up with me? Is that what this is?
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said.
There wasn’t any big dramatic scene; the Community Theater and I went a day or two without talking, and then I prayed and apologized and we made plans for a date. We went to a movie the following Friday, but the whole night was awkward. It was like, we didn’t know how to talk anymore. When she dropped me off, we didn’t even kiss goodnight.
At rehearsal the next day, the Community Theater wouldn’t look at me. The tension between us was so distracting that I went out to the lobby during break to talk with her. When I asked her if she was OK, she didn’t respond. “Are you not even going to acknowledge me?” I said.
The building didn’t say anything.
“Are we not talking now?”
Then Eric shouted for everyone to get back to work. Right before my scene, though, the wig stopped me in the vom and said that Banda was going to do my lines instead.
“How come?” I said.
Eric pursed his lips.
“Do I still do the lines in Act Three?” I asked.
COMMUNITY THEATER (shouting)
I’ll tell you your line. Your line is, “I’m sorry, Community Theater. I’m an asshole, Community Theater. I never should have said that stuff about theater.”
ERIC WIG
Wait—what stuff about theater?
COMMUNITY THEATER
Or asked you to speak in prose.
ERIC WIG
You asked her to speak in prose?
COMMUNITY THEATER
Your line is, “Now I’m leaving to live a sad, lonely life.”
I stood there.
ERIC WIG
Why would you ask her to speak in prose?
I didn’t mean anything by it. I—
ERIC WIG
Maybe you should go, .
COMMUNITY THEATER
No—say your line first, asshole!
I’d never seen the Community Theater like this: so—irate. My thoughts were frightened.
COMMUNITY THEATER
(her voice booming, Mother-like)
Say. Your. Lines.
“I’m leaving,” I said, “to live my sad life.”
COMMUNITY THEATER
My sad, lonely life.
“My sad, lonely life,” I said.
Then I walked out of the theater. And I never went back.
IDARED
All of a sudden, it seemed, my family was broken—my sister in the auctionwind, my Mom up in a Nest somewhere, and my father basically living at the forge. During her first few weeks as a Mother, my Mom kept promising a visit: “Next Tuesday,” she prayed. “The Thursday after this one. I’ll stay overnight.” But two months after her recruitment, we still hadn’t seen her once since she’d left—there was always some excuse, some secret emergency.
We never were told what her mission was, either—whether she was in combat, or renovation, or semiotics, or reconnaissance, or some other secret sect we hadn’t heard about. I always looked for my Mom’s name in the Core—which ran two or three stories a day about the Mothers—but I never once saw it there. Even so, though, I imagined that she was part of those stories: defending bessoffs against a pair of parentheses down by the Quarry; hunting down the sentences that had ripped through a page by Kirkpatrick Circle, or maybe helping to repair the tear itself.
In that story? The newspaper said that the Mothers had flown in a giant piece of masking tape—one as big as a worryfield! I imagined my Mom lifting a whole corner of the tape onto her shoulders, struggling with dozens of other Mothers to move it, slowly lowering it onto the paper.
It was OK that we didn’t see my Mom, my thoughts told me sometimes: she was helping to protect us; she was keeping us safe. But it never met my missing.
I missed my father, too. Once he started working at Muir Drop he didn’t stop—not even when his skin took on a gray tinge and his ears became gears. The Community Theater was right about him; these were sure signs of workhosis, caused by an addiction to work. I hoped he might scale back his hours after he caught up on his meaning payments, but by then it was too late: he ate, breathed, and slept work. The only time I saw him the entire month of March, in fact, was “Bring Your Son to Work Day.” That morning, he marched me through the compound, pointing out complicated machines that took raw need and forged it for demand. “That’s the separator,” he said.
“What does it do?” I said.
“Separates,” he said.
“Separates what?”
“The self from others,” he said, as if I should have known. Then he pointed to a black tube that ran off the machine. “See that vacuum hose? It adds tasks. But it needs negative pressure, and the gaskets always give us trouble.”
I was confused. “Oh,” I said.
At the end of the day, he led me out to the Bicycle Built for Two and shook my hand mechanically. “Are you coming home?” I asked.
I could see him scanning the inquiry. “I’m in the middle of my shift, ,” he said.
I said goodbye to him, got on my bike and rode home. But I didn’t go inside—instead I went over to the worryfields, got down on my knees, and folded my hands. “Mom?” I prayed.
It was quiet for a while.
“Mom?” I prayed. “It’s .”
After ten or fifteen minutes I heard the scratching of an arriving prayer. “Hey,” my Mom prayed. She was out of breath.
I stood up.
“What is it, ?” she prayed.
I didn’t know what to pray. “I’m—” I started. “I—”
“What? Spit it out!”
“I’m hungry,” I blurtprayed.
“So eat,” she prayed. “Have some chips.”
“We don’t have any,” I prayed.
“You ate them all, you mean.”
“Plus I can’t eat chips for dinner again,” I prayed.
“Why don’t you ask your father to make you something?”
“He’s at work.”
No response.
“I’m pretty sure he’s got workhosis, Mom,” I prayed.
My Mom grunted.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. Then she prayed, “There should be some futurebeans in the pantry.”
“When are you coming home?” I prayed.
“After this tour,” she prayed.
“Do you miss us?”
Someone behind her was screaming—howling. “Of course I do,” she said.
“Where are you right now?” I prayed.
“Right above you,” she prayed.
I looked up.
“Right over the house?”
“Yes, but high,” she prayed. “Look up.”
“I am looking up,” I said.
“We’re right above the clouds.”
“I can’t—” I said. “Where?”
“Hold on a second.” I heard the ru
sh of wind. “See us now?”
“No,” I prayed. “I don’t see you.”
“See a peach-colored cloud?”
“Yeah,” I prayed.
“Look to the—” she prayed. Then there was quiet.
“Mom?” I prayed.
But the prayer had gone dark.
“Mom?” I prayed.
“Mom?”
I found the futurebeans in the pantry, poured them into a pot, and heated them up. But they tasted like shit—they were spoiled, or maybe just too old. They were the worst beans that I’d had—that I would have—in my whole entire life.
A few days later a prayer came in from my Mom. “?” it said.
I didn’t answer.
“Sorry our prayer got disconnected the other day,” she prayed.
I didn’t answer.
The next day she tried again. “?” she prayed. “Are you there?”
“Fuck you,” I prayed back.
“Excuse me?” she prayed.
“Fuck,” I prayed, “you.”
FATHERS IN THE FIELD
Eventually, people began to doubt there ever were such things as apples. Our neighbor, Bob Lonely? He started saying that those early chapters of Appleseed were imagined—that they were fictions. “Apples were just an idea,” he told me once, “Nice to think about, but not real.” After a while I had my doubts, too. I couldn’t remember what apples smelled like, what they tasted like. Were they heavy or light? Green or red? Bitter or sweet? Then I heard a rumor in school one day about a group of aardvark importers selling apples for high meaning off the back of a truck in the west margin. Some Cones must have heard the same rumor, though, because those aardvarks were apprehended later the same day. As it turned out they were just selling counterfeits—pears painted red.
The only one who didn’t lose faith in the promise of apples and trees was the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. He tilled every deadgrove in town. When he showed up in the groves across the street with his hoe and satchel of seeds, I walked over to see what he was planting. He opened the bag and I saw seeds of all different shapes and colors; some of them were as big as hearts. “What are they for?”
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