Golden Delicious (22 page)

Soon, Sentence was no longer a single subject and verb. He grew from “I am.” to “I am
here
.”, to “Am I here?”,
to “I
think
I am here.”, to “I think, therefore, right here.”, to “
He
therefores, thinks, and ams.” and on and on. The sentence was constantly revising—every day was a new iteration.

The point of this part of the story—of
these
sentences—though, is that “I am.” was there for me when no one else was. Looking back on it now, I can say—

It was like:

How do I put this into words?

Like, loneliness? It was like, sometimes
I
wasn’t. Wasn’t anything. Wasn’t anyone. I could stop being, and not be, and I didn’t know if anyone would notice. But at least I could turn that thought—that thought of loneliness, of unmeaning—into words, and say those words to Sentence. And “I am.” would just
listen
—he might fart or fall asleep, but he wouldn’t leave me or judge me. And
I
wouldn’t abandon
him
, either: senseless, smelly, whatever—I was just happy for the companionship.

Which isn’t to say that I was a pushover—I raised that language right. I always walked “I am.” on a leash—I had to, in accordance with Appleseed bylaws—and at night, Sentence slept in a cage in the basement. It’s very important to cage your language—otherwise, it can read in its sleep and havoc your whole house. My sentence was usually friendly, but a lot of language is vicious—quick-tempered, impulsive, violent. You know how, when you’re out in Appleseed late at night, you sometimes hear a mawing in the distance—like, a low vumble or a harl? That’s wild language, reading the city for food or a mate or fighting each other over territory.

As well-behaved as he was, “I am.” was wild as well. Sometimes he would run away. Once he disappeared for two days and showed up at the back door, his mouth covered in blood. Another time the Memory of Johnny Appleseed found Sentence wandering in a deadgrove. “I am.” had been gone for about twenty-four hours when the Memory of Johnny Appleseed rode over to my house on his treebike. “Are you?” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

It had only been a month or two since the start of the blight, but Johnny had aged. Instead of wearing his trademark straw hat and overalls, he had on Converse hi-tops, gaudy parachute pants, and a stained green blazer. His eyes were weary.

“Am I—what?” I said.

“Are you?” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re asking me,” I said.

“You’re supposed to say ‘I am,’ ” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed, taking the sentence out from underneath his blazer. “It’s a joke—get it?”

“ ‘I am.’!” I said. “Thank you so much, man.”

“You should train that rambunctious clause,” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed said, and then he put his foot on the wooden pedal, pushed off, and rode away.

To be honest, though, I liked that “I am.” had a wild streak—that he sometimes picked up the scent of language and pulled on the leash. I didn’t want to lose “I am.” but I always wanted him to be who he was—to follow his innate language animal instincts. Those instincts were often really helpful, actually. “I am.” could always tell if someone was wounded, for example; if I had a headache, Sentence
would lead me to the sofa and sit beside me. And once, “I am.” and I got lost on a walk through Wolf Swamp and the wolves started jeering and throwing bottles. After leading us around the swamp in a circle, I asked Sentence to get us out of there. He sniffed the air with his “m” and forged forward; soon, I could see the edge of the parking lot.

Maybe two months into the blight, I was walking Sentence in the backyard one afternoon when he started pulling me toward the shed where my sister stored her items for auction. “I am.” was interested in a tarp-covered pile of junk outside the shed—he kept lunging for the blue vinyl. “What is it, buddy?” I said.

Then the door of the shed opened and my sister stepped out. “Hey,” said the Auctioneer.

“Sorry,” I said. “Sentence was just sniffing around. Is there time under there or something?”

“Don’t-think-so,” she said, and she pulled back the tarp. Underneath was a bunch of moldy old yellow pads of paper and clipboards of different sizes. I recognized them as the same pads my Dad was always writing notes and to-do lists on. “Those Dad’s?” I said.

The Auctioneer nodded. “A-stationery-store-went-out-of-business-and-gave-all-this-stuff-away. Want-one?”

“I am.” was spinning with excitement.

“Maybe just to calm him down,” I said.

My sister handed me a clipboard and a pad of paper. “What time does the auction start?”

“Three,” she said, and she stepped back into the shed.

I led Sentence down the hatchway and into the basement. I dropped the clipboard and pad on the ground and sat
down with some chips. As soon as I opened the bag, though, “I am.” appeared next to me with the yellow pad of paper.

“What is it, ‘I am.’?” I said.

He put the pad in my lap and looked up at me. I put aside the bag of chips. “I am.” looked down at the yellow space—the blank page—as if he could see something I couldn’t.

I reached for a pen and wrote the words “I” and “am” on the page. “That’s your name,” I told him.

He looked at the letters. His eyes lit up. A thought in my mind said, “here,” and I transferred the words from that room in my brain to the pen to the page. “I am
here
,” I wrote.

He looked at me, and back at the page.

“I’m
not
here,” I wrote.

“I am.” frowned.

“I
wasn’t
here,” I wrote.

“I wasn’t born here,” I wrote.

“I wasn’t born in Appleseed,” I wrote.

With a steady time diet, shelter, and regular exercise, “I am.” grew and complicated. Soon he was “I am writing.” Then “I am writing words on the page.” Then, “I am writing words on the page about my own life.” And then, “I am going to transform my life through writing. I can do anything.”

Reader: “Transform?” That word is wild,
.

I can do anything on the page.

Not using those words, you can’t!

“Yes,” I wrote. “Yes, I can.”

For the first two months of the blight there was no word at all from the Mothers. You’d just see them overhead, in Reading Formation, scanning the page below. With more time on her hands, my Mom would sometimes drive around in the Fart, looking for a flock to follow. Once she saw some skirts in the sky on the way home from the Big When—“Look!” she said, “Look at them go!”—and she steered us down a side street in pursuit.

“I thought we were going to the When,” I whined.

“
Tsk
,” my Mom spat. “We’ll go where I say, when I say.”

My sister and I exchanged glances but neither of us said anything. We followed the pack of Mothers for almost half an hour, until they reached the southeast margin and swooped into a giant Nest. I think that was my first time actually seeing a Nest—which, I was surprised to see, really
did
look like a nest. Only
this
Nest? Was as big as a football field, and suspended about three hundred feet in the air, and made of twists of cement and dark steel. I could see glass windows in the gaps, and Mothers in goggles standing watch on some of the highest beams.

“Wow,” my mother said. “These woman are heroes.
Heroes
.”

“The-When-closes-in-an-hour,” the Auctioneer said. My Mom stared up at the Nest for another minute or two and then turned the Fart toward East Appleseed. “Heroes,” she said again.

Growing up with my Mom, I knew all about the Mothers—both the Appleseed chapter and the national movement, the Mothers of America. My Mom loved to tell us stories about the history of the brigade: the Mothers’ silent, ever-present support of the Suffragettes, the Anti-Slavery Conventions, the Woman’s Peace Party. Lucretia Mott was secretly a Mother, my Mom told us. So was Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth. Abraham Lincoln. Ida B. Wells! Allen Ginsberg.

Reader: Abraham Lincoln?

Mothers don’t have to be women, nor do they have to have children. They just have to go through the training and take the oath; Mothers pledge to guard and protect a story, or change it when need be. Mothers can kick ass when they have to—they protected Allied planes during Word War II, for example, by deflecting machine-gun fire with their warskirts—but their real talent is revision. Did you know that the Mothers flew back to the pages of WWII after the conflict, for example, and reduced the casualties by thousands?

In those days the Mothers were more visible—you knew their names, and their meetings were open to the public. In the 1970s, though, the Mothers clandestined. The real wars, they realized, were hidden, happening on the everyday pages of the American suburbs: women suffering, in other words, in their very own homes. So that generation
of Mothers changed their tactics. Instead of flying in a pack of thirty, they’d send out a school of four matriarchal vigilantes who’d hover overhead with state-of-the-apple surveillance devices. If they heard a catcall on a downtown Appleseed street, for example, or the sound of a man raising his voice to a woman, they’d swoop in. That’s what happened to Pauline Bramley and her husband Norman. Do you know that story?

Bramley and his wife lived on Derby Dingle. One night, Norman came home kaddished and he and his wife got in an argument. Norman, a rougher who’d already spent some time in Appleseed Prison, punched Pauline in the stomach. The Mothers were listening overhead and they heard Pauline cry out. They dropped through the clouds,
tore the roof completely off
the Bramleys’ house, picked Norman Bramley up by one arm and carried him to a Nest. When they returned him to his home three days later, he had a broken collarbone and nothing but nice things to say to his wife or anyone else. I mean that literally—the only words that he spoke for the rest of his life, over and over, were the words “nice,” “good,” and “fine.”

Word of that story and others like it hurdled through Appleseed. Soon it was clear who ran the book. Men did what they could
—pretending
to work,
pretending
to take care of their houses and cars, growing hair on their faces, baring their teeth—but Appleseed was steered by its women.

As the weeks passed without apples, though, people wondered where the Mothers stood, what they were doing to help.
The Daily Core
ran headline after headline:
MOTHERS SILENT ON APPLE BLIGHT
, one read.
STILL NO WORD FROM THE MOTHERS
, said another. And then, finally:
WHERE THE &*!$ ARE THE MOTHERS?

At last, the Mothers accepted an invitation to attend a meeting of the Board of Select Cones. The Reader and I went with my Mom to Town Hall for the meeting. We arrived early to get good seats. When we walked in I saw three Mothers—two women and one man—seated at the front near a screen and a slide projector. The Mothers were dressed in standard combat issue: goggles, cardigan, warskirt.

Reader: Warskirt?

A Mother’s main resource. Warskirts are just like regular skirts, with a few modifications: they’re bulletproof, they have razor-sharp edges, and they hold knives, artillery, and a variety of small tools.

When everyone was seated, Cone Johnson coughed and leaned into his microphone. “I think we all know why we’re here,” he said. “Mothers? Would you like the floor?”

The Mother who stood up had gigantic muscles, and her face was painted with strange colors: stripes of orange, green, and pink. “Evening,” she said. “We’ve been looking at every angle of this apple shortage—going back into the past, forward into the future, lifting words off the page to look underneath them, trying to get a sense for what’s going on here.”

“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.