Golden Delicious

by Christopher Boucher

  Then, one afternoon that November, I was walking with Sentence in the worryfields and he pulled me right to one of the holes. “Come on, ‘I am.’,” I said.

  He wouldn’t budge—he was fixed on the bookwormhole. It was starting to drizzle, so I tugged on his leash. “ ‘I am.’,” I said.

  But the words didn’t move. By then, “I am.” was strong—three times the size he’d been when I found him.

  The rain started falling harder. I picked “I am.” up and ran across the street as the sky opened its mouth and bared its sharp teeth.

  Two days later, I realized that I was out of music pills and rode my bike to the pharmacy for a refill. I asked you to come along and help me pedal, but—

  Reader: We’d been jumping over bookwormholes that whole week prior. I was exhausted!

  So I took Sentence instead; he rode both ways perched on the handlebars, and held the bag of music pills in the teeth of his “i” on the way home.

  As we were riding down Converse Street, just a few hundred feet from our driveway, Sentence suddenly looked out at the worryfields and capitalized.

  “ ‘I am.’? You OK?” I said.

  But “I AM.” was already moving, leaping off the Bicycle Built for Two and bolting across the street. Blue music pills spilled everywhere; I almost crashed! By the time I stopped and skimmed the page, Sentence had already reached the worryfields—he startled a couple of pacers as he shot past them.

  “ ‘I am.’!” I shouted.

  I waited for traffic to pass, rolled my Bicycle Built for Two across the street, dropped the tandem by the roadside, and ran through the tall white grass, calling out for Sentence. “ ‘I am.’!” I shouted. About fifty yards into the fields, I came to a hole in the page—the same bookwormhole that Sentence had been fixated on a few days before. I looked around. “ ‘I am.’!” I shouted.

  “Are what?” said a worrier. I looked over at her. She was clearly a professional fretter; she was wringing her hands expertly, and her long gray hair was all thin and patchy.

  “Did you see any language run through here?” I said.

  “Language?” Her face lost color.

  “A sentence called—”

  “Why? Is that a possibility? Are you telling me there’s—wild language on these pages?”

  “He’s my pet,” I said.

  The worrier held up her hands. “You are totally freaking me out,” she said.

  I leaned over the hole and looked down into it. I saw nothing but darkness. “ ‘I am.’!” I shouted, stupidly. My voice just bounced back at me: “I am.! I am.! I am.!”

  Inside my mind my thoughts bumped into each other, fell down, stood up, and ran in circles. “Who can help?” one shouted.

  “My Mom!” another shouted.

  “She won’t answer your prayers!” shouted the first thought.

  “Dad?” shouted a third thought.

  “Too busy,” I told the third.

  “What about the Reader!” shouted the first thought. “Where’s the Reader?”

  I straightened up, ran across the street and burst into the house. “Reader!” I called.

  You weren’t in the living room or the kitchen. I ran out to the backyard. “Reader?” I shouted.

  I found you in the basement, sitting at my desk and writing in one of my yellow pads. “Hey!” I said.

  You looked up from the desk.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “No—nothing,” she said, and quickly turned the pad over.

  “I need your help,” I said. I told her what had happened to Sentence. “I think he went down one of the bookwormholes.”

  “You’re kidding,” you said.

  I shook my head.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure,” I said.

  You stood up, found your shoes, and followed me back up the stairs and across the street. When we reached the fields I led you over to the hole in the page closest to where Sentence had disappeared.

  “You sure he went this way?” you said.

  “No,” I said. “But this is where I lost sight of him.”

  “What was he doing off the leash in the first place?”

  “We were riding on the Bicycle Built for Two—he leapt off the handlebars,” I said.

  The Reader squinted and looked around.

  “Should we go after him?” I said.

  “What do you mean?” The Reader looked into the hole. “Down there?”

  I shrugged.

  “Absolutely not!” the Reader said. “We don’t have any idea—”

  “ ‘I am.’ is down there,” I said.

  “We don’t even know that for sure,” the Reader said.

  “He could be hurt! Or killed!”

  The Reader pointed out to the treeline. “What if he went into the margin?”

  “He didn’t—he made a beeline right for this hole.”

  You lay down on your belly and tried to see into the hole. Then you stood up and brushed the page off your hands. “It’s completely dark down there,” you said.

  “He’s getting farther away every second,” I said.

  “For the record, I think this is a terrible idea.”

  “Noted,” I said, and gestured to the hole. “Go for it.”

  You held up your hands. “Age before beauty,” the Reader said.

  “Aren’t you older than me?” I asked.

  “There’s no way I’m going first,” you said.

  I walked over to the bookwormhole, sat down on the page, and put my feet into the hole. Then I slowly lowered myself down. My thoughts were yelping, but when I stretched my body out my feet touched a fiber floor. I stood up and helped the Reader down.

  We looked into the tunnel. I saw dim light ahead.

  We stooped and trotted through the dark channel. “It stinks in here,” the Reader said.

  “That’s the rot,” I said.

  After twenty feet or so, the chute widened; we stood up straight and walked side by side. A string of bare lightbulbs now ran overhead. For the first few hundred yards, I could see the underside of the page above us—the roots and tendrils of printed words. Directly above me was the d in “killed,” and, later, the re of “amphitheatre.” Then the print grew higher and fainter, though, and soon I couldn’t see it at all anymore.

  “ ‘I am.’!” I shouted, but my words just boomeranged back to me.

  We walked for a while in silence. Then the Reader said, “Think we’re still on the same page?”

  “This has to be a different one,” I said. “Doesn’t it?”

  You shook your head.

  “ ‘I am.’!” I shouted again.

  “Please stop that,” said the Reader.

  Soon we saw some light up ahead and an intersection in the channel. It was a crosshole—another pathway burrowing to our left and right. “Should we take one of these?” I said.

  The Reader grimaced. “I say we keep reading forward,” she said.

  We trudged on for another few minutes, until our surroundings changed; the walls became gluey, and we hopped over a synapse and passed what appeared to be giant white ropes.

  Finally we reached the end of the channel, and daylight. When we were almost under the opening, I stopped and knelt down to see what was up there.

  “Well?” whispered the Reader.

  I shook my head. “I see—sky,” I said. “Clouds.”

  A cough of wind passed over the surface and sand scratched our faces. The Reader nodded upward and laced her hands together; I stepped into them and she hoisted me up out of the channel—then I pulled her up behind me. There wasn’t much on this page; just a few rickety wooden buildings and a single donkey tied to a post.

  A gun rode by on a horse. Two more guns sat in wicker chairs on the porch of a shabby building.

  I looked at the Reader. She walked up to the gun. “Excuse me,” she said. “Have you seen a sentence walking through here?”

  “What sentence?” said
the gun.

  “ ‘I am.’,” I said.

  “You’re—what?” said the gun.

  “That’s the sentence,” I said.

  “ ‘I am.’?” said the gun.

  “Not much of a sentence,” said the second gun.

  “You haven’t seen it, then?” the Reader said.

  The gun shook its head.

  “What’s the story here?” asked the Reader.

  “No story at all today,” said the gun. “Story here yesterday. Two guns met their makers.”

  The Reader thanked the guns and we walked back toward the hole. The Reader’s eyes were bright. “You realize what’s happening here,” she said.

  I stared at her.

  “,” she said. “We’re in a different story.”

  I climbed down into the hole.

  “Get it?” said the Reader.

  “No,” I said.

  “The bookwormholes?” said the Reader. “The worms? Go from novel to novel.”

  I still didn’t understand. “We just need to find Sentence,” I said.

  “Are you hearing what I’m saying? All of literature is at our disposal!”

  “Because he can’t have gone that far,” I said.

  The Reader put her hands on my shoulders. “He could be anywhere, —in any one of these books.”

  “I just want to find him and go home,” I said.

  We walked past the gluey walls and toward the crosshole. This time we took a left. Soon I heard a giant pounding: bm-bm; mb-bm; rm-tm; vm-bm.

  “What is that?” I said.

  dm-vm; mb-zm; bm-dm.

  “Whatever it is, it’s big,” the Reader said.

  When we pushed open the next bookwormhole cover we were on a strange page. All we saw were lines of words—row after row of them. None of the words were moving or making any sound.

  “They’re all dead,” I said.

  “Of course they are—it’s a graveyard,” said the Reader.

  I looked around. I’d heard about these places—fields where people buried their deadwords—but I’d never actually seen one. I studied the words. “What language is this?” I said.

  A wind blew across the page.

  “It’s so sad,” I said. “All these words, with so much potential.”

  “What do you mean? These words probably lived good lives.”

  “They died too young,” I said.

  “You didn’t even know them,” said the Reader.

  “They could have been so much more,” I said. Then I lowered myself down into the bookwormhole. The Reader followed and closed the cover above us.

  The Reader and I walked from story to story: into dramas, romances, science fictions, detective stories. Sometimes we were in a quiet scene—a praying river, a prison cell—but other times we climbed up right into the thick of the action. In one novel, I found myself sitting in a steel boat full of soldiers under fire. In another, I crawled into the story between two lovers in a steamy romantic scene. “I want you so badly,” said a gruffy man, and he pressed against me.

  “Me?” I said.

  He opened his eyes. “No,” he said. “Her.”

  Somewhere in a story about 1930s France, though, I lost the Reader. One minute she was there with me, marching through a crowded city square, and the next minute she wasn’t. I thought she was following me, but when I turned around she was gone. I waited for the crowd to disperse and then retraced my steps, but she wasn’t anywhere. I looked for her all day; I prayed to her but received no response. Finally, I turned around and went back to the bookwormhole we’d come in from, on the altar of an old church in the corner of the city. When we’d arrived, we’d crawled out of the hole in the middle of a service; everyone had stood up, shocked. “ ‘I am.’?” I asked the parishioners. Then the Reader led me through a side exit and out onto the street.

  As I was walking into the church, though, I saw a sentence hiding in the doorway. At first I thought it was just a nomadic phrase seeking alms. But no—that word wasn’t “alms”—it was “am.” “ ‘I am.’!” I said. He ran into my arms. Core he was so thin! But I was so happy to see him. I carried him into the dim sanctuary, through the empty pews and toward the dark altar.

  I didn’t have any idea how to get home, but Sentence had a nose for pages; when we came to our first rotary-hole—five or six channels converging—he said, “I am left.”

  “Left, you think?” I said.

  “Left,” said “I am.”.

  A few minutes later we hit a fork in the page. “I am right,” said the sentence.

  I went right.

  Soon I saw familiar textures, and then, two sets of footprints in the fiber. “I am.” must have been able to smell Appleseed, or hear it or something. “Thataboy,” I said. “Good sentence.”

  After another ten pages or so, I saw the underside of words—words about the outskirts of town, sentences about Appleseed Mountain—and then, a bookwormhole. I shuffled to it, pushed Sentence out to the surface, and climbed up after him.

  It was dark. A few hundred feet away, a wolf sat writing at a rolltop desk.

  “I am Wolf Swamp,” said “I am.”. He looked up at me.

  I took a breath of blighty air. “We’re home,” I said.

  But something was different; I knew it from our very first moments back in Appleseed. There was a problem with the sky. It was dark out, but not night-dark. The sky was—how do I say this? Closed. Shut. It was like a lid had fallen over Appleseed.

  Sentence saw it, too. He pointed up and said, “We’re confused.”

  Everyone else seemed to be, too. On Wenonah, we passed a camel in a white T-shirt sitting on a five-gallon bucket and staring at the sky. He looked over at us as we passed. “What the fuck,” he said.

  On the next street over, a hairperson was shouting to anyone who would listen. “Can you see?” she asked us. “Because I can’t even read the page!”

  As we were walking up Ellipsis, though, I realized what was happening. It wasn’t as if the sky was closed. The sky was closed: you can’t have a book without a Reader.

  “Oh. Shit,” I said.

  “I am what,” shivered Sentence.

  I didn’t answer him; I didn’t want to frighten him. Inside my brain, though, my thoughts were understanding: that wasn’t a lid over the sky, but a cover—the inside cover of the book itself.

  Just then a prayer came in for me. “?” It was my mother.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Honey,” she prayed again.

  I closed the prayer—I wanted nothing to do with her.

  On Converse Street, all of the traffic had stopped behind an accident by Redfern. Some people stood outside their cars, talking to other drivers; others just stared up at the darkness and the inside cover. In the opposite lane, passing cars were switching on their headlights.

  Another prayer came in—this one from my Dad at Muir Drop. “Hey, ,” he prayed. “Look at the sky, buddy. Something’s going on.”

  In the margins, wild language began howling. I looked across the street in time to see two lunging, drooling sentences—“This is your fault, you piece of shit,” and “These are your sentences!”—step brazenly out of the treeline.

  I picked up “I am.”, ran inside, and locked the door behind us.

  EDWARD VII

  The darkness was complete; it covered Appleseed like silence. For the first few days I just stayed inside, living off chips and melancholy, feeding Sentence scraps of time. Every half hour or so I heard sirens: people prayed about visibility problems, freak accidents, injuries or death. The TV told me that the hospital was full, that there were fires on far pages. “But no one knows where the fire trucks are,” said the TV. “The pages are burning out of control.”

  Soon I lost track of time—it was difficult to know if it was day or night, when one day passed and the next day began. My Mom prayed to me frequently—“I’m concerned about you!” “Just let me know that you’re OK!” “You answer me this instan
t young man!”—but I shut down every one of her prayers. I didn’t want her help—she was someone else’s Mother now. I was almost eighteen by then, and old enough to know how to take care of myself—I knew all I needed to: where to buy the chips, what kinds of chips to buy, and in what order to eat them.

  Once or twice, my father came by to check on me and drop off some meaning. The first time he didn’t even come inside—we just stood in the driveway talking for a few minutes. At one point he said, “This will all get better soon.”

  “How do you figure?” I said.

  He pointed up to the dark sky. “The Mothers are working on a way to lift up that cover,” he said. “Speaking of which—pray back to Mom, will you?”

  “I don’t want to talk to her,” I mumbled.

  “She’s worried about you,” my Dad said. “And she has some business to discuss with you too. Regarding your friend.”

  “Who?”

  “The Reader,” my Dad said. “Everyone’s looking for her.”

  “I don’t know where she is,” I said.

  My Dad checked his watch. “Shoot,” he said. “I’ve got to get back.” Then he punched me softly on the shoulder, got back in his truck, and drove away. Just out of the driveway, his truck stopped short to let a wild sentence pass—I saw the sentence’s eyes flash in the headlights and scoot off.

  Soon, meaning lost all value in Appleseed. The Big Why sold out of most of its questions and couldn’t get more from the distributor; the Big When followed suit. Phrases smashed the window of Small Pear and looted the shelves; a frightened Cordial Carl stood guard outside his restaurant, barking angrily at everyone who approached. A few weeks after the cover closed, a crew of puns walked into Appleseed First National, held up the word “gun” and said, “Give me all your meaning.”

  “I can’t read the word you’re holding,” said the bank teller.

  “It says ‘gun,’ ” said the first pun.

  “It looks like ‘fun,’ ” said the teller.

  “It says ‘gun,’ motherfucker,” said the second pun, “and it’s going to say ‘killed’ if you don’t open the vault.”

  They ran the security-camera footage of the stick-up on the news, and you could see one of the puns suddenly put down the word as if he forgot what it—the meaning, the guns, the heist, any of it—meant. “I’m hungry,” the second pun said to the first pun. By the time the teller opened the vault, the puns were gone.