Golden Delicious (8 page)

“I have some seconds for it,” I said.

“Don’t even think about it,” said my Dad. “What have I told you about feeding wild sentences?”

This was in 1987, when stray language was everywhere in Appleseed. I know that’s hard to believe now—now that every word is counted, and counted on, and counted toward—but in those days it wasn’t strange to see verbing on Epstein Street, infinitives running through the deadgroves. Growing up in Appleseed, you were taught how to respond to wild language. If you saw a semicolon, you paused for a second. If you saw a preposition, you let it pass by you—to the left, or to the right, or over your head.

My Dad couldn’t come with me to Belmont the next day—he had to go see Fox, a master welder in the western margin—so I went back to Belmont myself. When I got there, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed was cutting the grass using an old manual mower. My Dad had a gas-powered one in the basement, but the Memory liked this one. For a while, I could hear the swishy blades of the mower as the Memory shoved it forward. Then he finished, put the mower away, and walked off.

I was adding a third coat of stucco, though, when I felt the breath of words on my ankle. I turned and saw the sentence looking up at me.

“Hey there,” I said. I petted the sentence, and it made
a sound. I could tell from its words and its eyes that it meant me no harm. Hark, it was only a newborn—just a subject and a verb: “I am.” That was the whole sentence!

I reached into my pocket and found some seconds and minutes—timecrumbs I carried with me just in case I was late or my thoughts wandered. The sentence leaned in and ate right out of my palm. The poor thing was starving! It finished the seconds and sort of stumbled toward me. Suddenly, I was holding the sentence in my arms.

What was I supposed to do—push it away? Abandon it? These words would die out here. Who would feed them and read them if not for me?

I held “I am.” in my arms while I packed up my tools. Then I sat the sentence on the handlebars of my Bicycle Built for Two and started pedaling home. “Hold on tight!” I told the sentence, and it did—it squinted its eyes as the wind ran through its “I” and “a.”

I got back to 577 just as my Dad’s pickup was turning into the driveway. I hopped off the bike and wrapped the sentence in my coat. My Dad stepped out of the truck and slammed the door. “Well?” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

The sentence was making noises: whimpers and nouns.

“Djou finish?” my Dad said.

“Yup,” I said.

“It doesn’t need another layer?”

“I don’t—” The sentence started bucking and kicking. “Don’t think so,” I said.

“It either does or it doesn’t,” my Dad said.

Just then, the sentence kicked me in the stomach and I
lost my grip on it. The words leapt out of my coat and ran across the driveway and onto the grass.

“Whoa!” my Dad said, leaping back. He stepped into the grass and leaned over the quivering words. “Goddammit,
,” he said. “What did I say?”

“I know,” I said.

“
What
did I say?”

“It was hungry!”

“You
fed
it?” my Dad said. “You
never
feed stray language. It won’t leave you alone now!”

The sentence looked up at my father, and then at me.

“I’ll take care of it,” I said.

“What do you mean?” said my Dad. “As a
pet
? No.
. No.”

“I’ll walk it and feed it.”

“Feed it what?”

“Minutes,” I said.

“And keep it where?”

“I’ll keep it in the basement.”

“It’ll shit and piss all over the place,” my Dad said.

“I’ll make sure that it doesn’t.”

“You know your mother has a strict no-language-in-the-house policy,” said my Dad.

“It won’t make a
sound
—I promise.”

My Dad sighed. “What about the smell?”

“It doesn’t
have
a smell,” I said.

“All language smells,” he said. “I can smell that thing from here—it
stinks
of adjectives.”

“I’ll keep it clean,” I said.

The sentence read over to me and stopped at my heel.

“Shee-it,” my Dad said, and shook his head.

That afternoon he took me to Brightwood Hardware, which had a pet store in the basement, to buy some supplies for the sentence: a cage, a collar, a leash. When we browsed the aisles for food, though, we didn’t see anything. My Dad found a clip-on tie stocking shelves and asked him if the store carried any food for words.

“For
what
?” said the tie. He was old and faded.

“Food for sentences?” my Dad said, and I held up “I am.”

“I don’t think we—” the tie looked confused. “Let me—I’ll check.” He disappeared behind a curtain and never came back.

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.

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.”