People still prayed, but for what? To whom? The Core? I sent some psalms to my sister—“Where are you?” “It sucks here!”—and I watched the words sail high. Like most darkness-era prayers, though, mine bounced off the inside cover of the book and back into Appleseed. I saw them fall somewhere to the west and disappear from view. The next day, The Ear showed up and pulled a prayer out of the back of the truck. “This yours?” he said.
It was my prayer to the Auctioneer. “Yes,” I said, embarrassed.
“Landed on my property. Put a nice fucking dent in my shed,” he said.
I’d either forgotten those words—“dent,” “shed”—or else they’d been removed from the language. “Your what?” I said.
“Shed,” he said.
I shook my head.
“Small house-type thing,” said The Ear.
A few days later I got tired of eating chips—either that, or the chips themselves got tired of being eaten—so I got on my Bicycle Built for Two and rode through the dark streets toward Gus & Paul’s. Pedaling down Converse, you could see how hungry people were for answers: every person’s spine was a question mark; their eyes whatted or whyed. And there were bookwormholes everywhere now: in the street, on the lawns, in the cars, in the clouds—in some of the people, even. On Burbank, a meaninglesser held out his hand to ask me for a spare theory and I saw a hole in his wrist. “A hypothesis?” he said. “A theory, even—anything.”
“Sorry,” I said.
When I got to Gus & Paul’s I found the place empty—it was just me and the deflated hat behind the counter. I walked up to the register and held up my hand in the shape of a “one.”
“One what?” said the hat.
I looked at the menu.
“One what?” he said.
I studied the choices, written in chalk. What did they mean? I couldn’t remember. Then, someone walked by with a square white box. “One of those,” I said. The hat handed me the empty box and I walked out.
Within weeks, those holes took their toll on the town. Houses collapsed; whole fields fell in. It didn’t take a bessoff to see what was happening: Appleseed was rotting.
A lot of families I knew left town. The Lonelies drove to a relative’s home in the western margin, and I heard that the Blueberry River packed a watery suitcase and hitchhiked down Five, vowing never to return.
Like everyone else who stayed, I adapted as best I could. Eventually my eyes adjusted; I learned to read in the dark. Without apples or bagels, some people survived by eating worries grown in the fields; others ate ink right off the page. One day my house went into the margin and killed a poem. He brought it back slung over his shoulder, laid the verse on the grass, removed its skin and vital organs, and handed me an iamb. “Eat,” my house said.
I tried—I smelled the words, put one on my tongue. It tasted rhymey. “I’m not sure I can eat this,” I said.
“Dip it in some melancholy,” he said, and pushed a saucer full of gritty liquid toward me. I dipped the stanza and bit into it. Word juice ran down my chin. “Not bad,” I said.
Every few days, I packed up some poem jerky and went out looking for the Reader. I’d put on my headphones, climb down a bookwormhole, walk to a new novel, and wander that novel until I found a character who seemed reliable. I’d ask them if they’d seen the Reader, if they’d heard of Appleseed, if they knew anything about a blight. I found myself in every setting imaginable—running from a giant golden machine; strapped down to an operating table in a room lit by candles; in a marketplace where people sold organs and teeth—but it was never the right story. One day, I saw someone I thought was you fixing a car in a 1930s service station. I couldn’t see the mechanic’s face, but she had your same build and she was wearing the same combat boots you used to wear—the ones with the flames on the side. I went right up to the car. “Reader?” I said.
A woman shimmied out from behind the front tire. “Help you?” she said.
Her face was a straight line, her eyebrows two exclamation points—it wasn’t you.
In another novel, I found myself in a medieval army, wearing chainmail and carrying a bow, and I thought I saw you sitting on a horse two rows over. I leaned over to the maybe-you. “Psst—hey,” I said.
“Get back in line, McRoy!” shouted the lieutenant.
Then someone yelled “Charge!” and the war began—we all stormed forward across the field, and I lost maybe-you in the fray.
Most of the time, though, I couldn’t even find the story itself—it was somewhere else in the setting, far away from where I’d arrived. And no one I met took any interest in me, or made an effort to help me find the plot. All my life, I’d read stories about people being kind, helping other people. But did anyone, in any one of those worlds, ever try to help me? Take me in? Try to get to know me? No—not one character, ever.
If I’d found you, if I could have talked to you for just a minute or two, I would have apologized. I would have told you how sorry I was that you never had a story—no physical description, no face, not even a—
Not even a name. That wasn’t fair of me. Everyone deserves their own story. If I could have brought you back to Appleseed—if you would have let the light back in—I would have given you a whole history. I would have made you anyone you wanted to be: Johnny Appleseed, a Select Cone, a Mother, even.
Back in Appleseed, meanwhile, the sentences were going absolutely wild. Lavished in darkness, the bookworms no longer needed to hide in the margins: they strutted up and down the dark streets like they owned the place, chalking and sturming, with skomals and fortuous vays, periodical magnavoxing, lopal rikes, uring and salmoning, exclamation. What could the Mothers do against words that could change, and change again, right under your feet?
Not that they rolled over. Spondee told me that the Mothers conducted nighttime paragraph raids; I heard rumors, too, of secret underground laboratories where Mothers cultivated new word viruses and experimented on language to make it talk.
That November, though, the Mothers suffered major losses when jargons organized a simultaneous attack on every Nest in Appleseed, destroying five Nests in a single afternoon. More than a thousand Mothers were killed that day. I heard the ambulances from the basement and stepped outside to see the dark sky filled with smoke.
“Mom?” said one of my thoughts.
As I was standing there a prayer came in from my Dad. “?”
“What,” I said.
“Mom’s OK,” he said. “She was out on assignment. She’s at an undisclosed Nest.”
The Mothers mourned and regrouped; they held a press conference a few days later to denounce the attacks and to promise more security. Every day that winter, you’d see fleets of Mothers trying to repair the town: boarding up broken storefront windows; covering open bookwormholes; transporting people with holes in them to Appleseed Hospital. Orange Traffic Cones, meanwhile, maintained status quo as best they could: they tried to keep the roads open, to protect as many stories as possible from looting or meaningloss, to deliver food to shut-ins and get people to and from work and school. When some hoodlum phrases knocked out the streetlights on Converse early that spring, a Cone even showed up at my door to drive me to school in a Cone-shaped squad car.
By that point, though, school wasn’t really school—it was mostly cages and dark, empty classrooms. Teachers were rare, and if they showed up at all they usually just stood in front of the room, staring back at the students. In Depression IV, the broom teaching the class just posed whats. “What’s the education?” he asked.
Large Odor raised his hand. “The past?” he said.
The broom shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Maybe, maybe not.”
Then Chamblis raised her hand. “What’s our homework?” she said.
“That’s a great question,” the broom said. “What is your home work?”
“The work we do at home?” said Spondee.
I left that room and went to Advanced What to Be Most Frightened Of
. But the teacher in that room didn’t say anything at all—she just kept drawing sad faces on the chalkboard.
A few days later I showed up to that classroom and found it empty. I sat there for a few hours, and then I stood up and left. By then the place was a mess—the hallways were filled with garbage and torn-up books, and everything smelled like old ham and mayonnaise. On the way out the door that day—my very last day of high school ever—my sneaker kicked through a stack of papers near the art room and the pages went flying. I picked up a handful of the scattered pages; there was an old school newspaper, plus two blank diplomas and a hall pass. I kept the hall pass and one of the diplomas and threw the rest of it back on the ground. Then I walked out the heavy front doors.
A FAT, SNORING COMMA
MONARCH
Two years after my mother left us, my childhood home hanged itself from a tree in the yard of our Appleseed home.
This was in the dark summer. My father had full-blown workhosis by then, and I was spending most of my free time tilling in the deadgroves with the Memory of Johnny Appleseed; he’d recently returned to town, his face and clothes smudged with ink, refusing to discuss where he’d been. The schools were closed; so were most of the stores—there was no fresh food anymore. I ate mostly chips: plain chips for breakfast, salt and vinegar for lunch, barbecue for dinner. Then I’d open a bag of sour cream and onion and fall asleep watching the house’s memories—memories of me, sleeping in the Vox or running around in the backyard; of the rows of parked cars during my sister’s auctions; of my mother watering her plants while smoking a six-foot cigarette; of the four of us, being watched by the television—rerun over and over on the walls of the living room.
Watching those memories, I should have known that 577 was in crisis. Plus, the house leaned dangerously to one side; every wall curved with sorrow. Not to mention the house’s dreams, which I can see now were honest-to-lou night terrors: dreams of falling, of being shot, of being chased through dark tunnels. Once I woke up in the middle of a housedream of being buried alive: the building screamed as the dirt was piled onto the house-sized coffin, blocking the last slivers of light through pine boards.
I didn’t just sit by and watch the house suffer, though. I went out to Gilbert’s Bookstore and bought some self-help books: A Room with a View, ReHouse, others. I brought them home and put them on the coffee table.
“What are these?” said the house.
“I really think you should read them,” I said.
“What good are books in a situation like this?”
“These ones have some good ideas,” I said.
“I don’t want good ideas,” said the house. “I just want everything, and everyone, to be quiet.”
A week or two later, I was making a chiplunch when the house asked me if I wanted its collection of old 45s: Gordo and Gordo, The Rabbit, vintage OCDs, The Redirected Flights—some great stuff. “You really don’t want these anymore?” I said.
“I want you to have them,” said 577. “Think of me when you play them.”
I didn’t even own a record player. “OK,” I said.
Right as I started eating my lunch, though, a prayer came in from the Memory of Johnny Appleseed: he’d just traded for some new lightseeds and needed help at the Colton Groves. “I’ll be right there,” I said, and I shoveled some chips into my mouth and ran out the door.
A few minutes later, I was riding over there on my Bicycle Built for Two when I saw the Memory of Johnny Appleseed walking down Inherited Wealth Boulevard. “Where are you going?” I said.
“False alarm,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Deadseeds,” he said.
I leaned over the handlebars. “Shit.”
“Got a surprise for you, though,” he said. He held up a soda bottle filled with blue liquid.
“What’s that?” I said.
“Kaddish Cider,” he said.
“Absolutely,” I said.
So we sat in the fields and got kaddished. Cidered out, I lay on my back and looked up at the inside cover. The day-night passed and soon it was dusknight. By then I was sober enough to pick up my bike and ride home.
When I got there, though, the house was gone.
Memory of the Reader: Gone?
It wasn’t there. Which wasn’t so strange on its own—my house, like most houses, took occasional strolls or daytrips. 577 was always sure to tell me where it was going, though, and to return to Converse Street by early evening. But when eight o’clock that night approached, waved, and drove off with no house in sight, I started to worry. I prayed to the house’s friends and family—his mother, his condo brother. His brother didn’t reply; his mother hadn’t seen him.
An hour later, though, I received a prayer from an Or that used to trade with my father. They’d had a falling out over a demo job in Appleseed City—my father said that the Or stole some railroad ties from him—and it would be years more before they coffeed. But the Or prayed that he was down at the Glenwood—a whatif in the downtown—and that my house was sitting right across from him. I rode the Bicycle Built for Two over to the bar. When I walked in, the Or was lounging at the video game table in the front. Or nodded to me. “There’s your domicile,” he said. Then he stood up, gave me a friendly shove, and walked out.
The house was sitting on a stool at the bar. I walked up beside him. “And in walks ,” said the house.
I sat down next to him.
“You stink of moon,” he said.
“Why do you think that might be?”
The house shrugged.
“You didn’t tell anyone where you were going.”
“Didn’t want to be found,” said the drunkhouse. “Who told you where I was? The Lamp?”
I shook my head.
“Or?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“It was Or,” said the house. “That fucking option.”
“You have a job to do,” I said. “You can’t just vanish like that.”
The house belched.
“Nice,” I said.
“Bombs away,” said the house.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” I said. “You’re a home.”
“Home is where the heart is,” said the house.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The past is gone, ,” said the house. “And it’s not coming back.”
“I’m not talking about the past—I’m talking about right now. I need a place to stay tonight.”
“Good for you,” said the house.
“And you,” I said, “have an obligation.”
“Obligation?” said the house. His eyes were watery. “Obligation.”
“Yeah,” I said.
He spun in his stool to face me. “We were a family,” he said.
What was I supposed to say to that? “I’m going back to Converse Street now. Are you coming or not?”
The house slugged its beer, put on its coat, and walked out with me. I unlocked the Bicycle Built for Two and hopped onto the front seat. The house sat down on the back and we pedaled home.
And I guess I thought that was it—that the house’s runaway had changed something, solved whatever problem it was having. In retrospect, of course, that was naïve of me—especially since the memories and bad dreams persisted.
A few weeks after the house’s return, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed asked me to help him plant some apologies in the deadgroves on Old Mill Road; I worked all day with him and then rode the Bicycle Built for Two back to Converse Street. I was really looking forward to getting home and ripping open a bag of rippled barbecue DeathChips.
When I turned my bike onto our street, though, I saw a strange sight at the tree belt: something was attached to the tree. At first I couldn’t see what—it was dark, and my vision isn’t so good. I figured it was some sort of tree-based installation art. Our trees, like most trees, were very creative, always painting and sculpting, and sometimes they chose to work
big, beuysing or serraing.
When I got closer, though, I recognized the shape. It wasn’t art—it was my house, 577, hanging by a noose from a tree in the yard.
“Oh. Oh Core,” said the Bicycle Built for Two.
I raced into the yard and dropped the bike. The house was swaying in the wind. Its eyes were closed, its face ghost-white, its roof gray and crushed; houseblood ran down the beige siding and onto the sidewalk.
Then I heard a soft rush of air—a gasp, maybe. Was the house still alive?
I heard the thin wind again—it wasn’t yet dead.
I got down on my knees in the wet earth and I said an emergency prayer. I got an automated response: “Welcome to Appleseed. All Emergency Cones are busy right now. If you pray your name, and the time of your prayer—”
I closed the prayer and stood up. The house was still breathing. I ran through my options in my mind. Could I climb the tree, cut the noose?
There was no way. I was too small.
Could the stars help?
No—they weren’t smart enough.
Then I looked up—way up, past the moon. At your Memory.
Memory of the Reader: Who? Me?
Yes. This house is dying. It’s dying!
Memory of the Reader: I can’t—what can I do?
You need to reach down into the page and lift up the house, loosen the tension on that noose.
“I’m just a Memory,” you said.
Just lift up the page—shift the gravity!
“I’m not the Reader,” said the Memory of the Reader. “I can’t lift anything.”
Where is the Reader?
Memory of the Reader: Reading another book.
Another novel?
Memory of the Reader: Does it matter?
It didn’t—within a few minutes, everything was dead: the house, the words about the house, the noose and the words about the noose. I knelt down on the page and the black houseblood soaked the knees of my white pants.
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