“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.
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?