Bringing Back the Apple

The Le Guin did nothing. Neither did the Brontë, on a second careful attempt, nor a Pratchett she'd been saving for a bad day, nor — somewhat insultingly — the Antarctic book, which she had thought might at least give her a shiver. By Saturday morning she had filled six pages of her notebook with negative results and was beginning to feel the particular grumpiness of a scientist whose phenomenon refuses to come to the lab. Hypothesis one: refuted, she wrote. Hypothesis two: refuted. Hypothesis three: refuted, possibly with prejudice. In the margin she added, or: the thing knows it's being watched. She crossed that out. Then she uncrossed it. Then she drew a small box around it and labeled the box unfalsifiable — ignore — but noted.

She slept badly Saturday night, which she logged with grim approval as a return to baseline conditions, and on Sunday afternoon she did the thing she had been pointedly not doing, which was to go back to the same book at the same page. Jane Eyre, page two hundred and something, the blue lake of her own ink still drying at the corner. She made herself a cup of tea she did not intend to drink. She sat where she had sat. She read, and tried not to read for the wind; tried, instead, to read the way she had been reading the first time, which was to say while arguing in the margin about Charlotte's weather and Charlotte's plotting and the specific honesty of damp.

Nothing happened. She turned the page. Nothing happened. She turned back. She read the calling of the name aloud, very quietly, into the kitchen — Jane. Jane. — and felt, distantly and with some embarrassment, like a person trying to summon a ghost by saying its name in a mirror. Nothing happened. She closed the book.

It was the closing that did it. She had been, she realized later, holding the door shut from her side. The instant she stopped trying — the instant her attention slumped, the way attention slumps when you give up on a thing and reach for your tea — the room thinned. Not the room: the space between her and the page thinned, the small accustomed distance over which a reader looks down at print, which one normally does not notice having, the way one does not notice having a tongue until one bites it. The distance went, and her face was very close to something that was not paper.

She was in an orchard. Not the moors; she registered this with a kind of professional irritation, as though the phenomenon had been told to repeat the experiment and had gone off-script. Apples. Low, crooked trees, the kind that have been pruned for a hundred years by people who did not particularly like each other but agreed about apples. Late afternoon light coming through the leaves at the slant that makes everything look like an oil painting nobody can afford. A book — she knew, somehow, with the indoor part of her mind that was still in the kitchen — a children's book she had loved at nine, the sort of book in which an orchard appeared for a page and a half and then was never mentioned again, because the plot had business elsewhere. She had not been reading it. She had not been near it. The orchard had simply been the nearest open door, apparently, and she had walked through it without checking the address.

She did not panic this time. That was the small clean thing she could later be proud of: she did not panic. She had written do not lose this. the wanting is also data, and she remembered writing it, and she held very still inside the wanting and let her eyes do their work.

The grass was damp at the ankle. There was a low stone wall to her left, and a wooden ladder leaning against the nearest tree, and on the ground beneath the ladder a wicker basket half-filled with apples, small and green and freckled, the kind of apple that promises to be sour and then surprises you. Somewhere out of sight a dog was barking, the unhurried bark of a dog who has been doing this for an hour and is mostly doing it now for the principle of the thing. There was no person. The orchard, like the moor, had given her a setting and declined, politely, to populate it.

The brake, she thought. Test the brake.

She thought oh, deliberately, the way you might press a pedal to see if the car has one. The orchard did not go transparent. It wobbled, faintly, the way the surface of a pond wobbles when something has passed under it, and then settled. Interesting, she thought, with the cool small click. Oh was not the brake. Oh had been the surprise. The brake was something else, then, and she did not, at this exact moment, standing in an orchard she had not asked for, want to find out what it was by accident.

She looked at the basket.

It was, she would think later, the most morally clarifying moment of her life to date, and it lasted about half a second. She knew — she knew, the way you know you should not read other people's letters, the way you know which forks are not yours — that you did not take things from inside a book. There were no rules posted, because there was no one to post them, but there were rules; there are always rules; the rules existed in her gut the way grammar existed in her mouth, and her gut said, not yours. And then, immediately afterward, her gut said something else, which was but how else will you know.

Because that was the question, wasn't it. That was the question the notebook had been circling. Question 2: can I stop it. Question 3: can I —. The dash. She was on the dash. And the dash had an apple in it.

She crouched. The grass gave under her knees with the small wet sigh of grass that has not been walked on in some time, possibly ever, possibly because nobody walked here unless a nine-year-old reader had once briefly imagined them doing so. She put her hand into the basket. The apples were cool. She picked one — the smallest, because she was, even here, the sort of person who tried to take less than she might be entitled to — and closed her fingers around it. It was solid in the entirely uncomplicated way of fruit. It had a stem. The stem had a leaf. The leaf had a small irregular hole in it where a caterpillar had, at some point in the orchard's brief literary existence, made a living.

She held the apple, and she thought, very clearly, home.

The orchard did not go transparent. It went away — and this was different, she logged with the back of her mind, this was a different exit, the orchard did not dissolve around her but rather she dissolved out of it, the way a word is erased from a sentence and the sentence closes up behind. She felt the leaf against her palm and then she felt the wood of her kitchen chair under her thighs, and the kettle was making the small post-boil clicks of a kettle whose moment has passed, and her tea was cold again, because her tea, she was beginning to understand, was going to be cold for the rest of her life.

Her right hand was closed.

She did not open it immediately. She sat with her fist on the table and looked at it the way you look at a hand you are not sure belongs to you. She thought about the woman on the road who had not been surprised to see her go. She thought about Mr. Behr saying be a good scientist about it, and she thought about how a good scientist, at this particular juncture, would have already opened her hand, and how she was, evidently, not yet a good scientist, because her hand stayed closed for what was probably ten seconds and felt like a small geological era.

She opened it.

The apple sat on her palm. Small. Green. Freckled. The leaf still attached to the stem, and the small irregular hole in the leaf where the caterpillar had, in some orchard that did not exist outside the back half of a children's book she had loved at nine, made a living. A bead of orchard damp on the skin of it, which transferred, as she watched, to the pad of her thumb, and which she touched with the tip of her tongue before she had decided to, and which tasted of nothing in particular except the faintly mineral fact of having been somewhere that her body had not, twenty seconds ago, been.

"Oh," she said. Out loud. To the kitchen. Not as a brake; as the only word available.

She set the apple down on the notebook, beside the wanting is also data, because she wanted to see them in the same frame, the sentence and the object, the hypothesis and the result. They looked, together, like a still life painted by someone who had decided to be funny about it. The apple rocked once on its uneven bottom and settled.

She thought about Mr. Behr. She thought about Footnote. She thought about the four days she had spent pretending. She thought, with a small unkind flash, about every adult who had ever told her that imagination was a fine thing in its place, and about how nobody had ever specified where its place was, and about how its place, evidently, was on her kitchen table, leaving a damp ring on a notebook page.

She picked the apple up again. She turned it. There was, she noted, no bar code, no sticker, no bruise from a supermarket crate, no wax. There was a small brown freckle in the shape, if you were generous, of the letter j. She was generous. She acknowledged this and chose to be generous anyway.

A reasonable person, she thought, would now take this apple to a laboratory. A reasonable person would have it tested for — what, exactly? Fictionality? There was no assay for that. A reasonable person would at the very least photograph it, weigh it, measure it, write down its dimensions in a notebook that already had a column for room temperature. A reasonable person would not, under any circumstances —

She bit the apple.

It was sour, and then it was sweet, and then it was sour again, in the way of an apple that has not been engineered for the convenience of anyone. Juice ran down the side of her thumb. She heard the small clean crack of the skin breaking under her teeth, and she heard, underneath that, in some quieter room of her hearing, a dog still barking the unhurried bark of a dog who had been doing this for an hour and was mostly doing it now for the principle of the thing.

She chewed. She swallowed. She sat in her kitchen with an impossible apple in her hand and the taste of an orchard nobody had ever stood in on her tongue, and she said, quite calmly, to no one, "Well. All right, then."

And she took another bite.