Well, what started out odd has only gotten odder.

Things began pretty well. This week I bought some decent cowboy boots, a nice ostrich pair, and that was fun. Then later I spotted Dan entering his gate, and he seemed very pleased. Practically glowing. He said he’d made some huge steps very recently, but he wasn’t sure so he wasn’t going to get my hopes or anything. He had wads of tissue paper stuck up his nose, though. I forgot to ask him what that was about. Then later the washing machines were gone, and I took that for a good sign.

Then last night things got a bit worse.

I was out watering the hydrangeas when I noticed that there was a figure sitting in the driveway next to mine in a lawnchair. It was Dan, of course, and he must have been there the entire time. He was very obviously drunk. He looked extremely depressed as well, which was a real turn from the last time I saw him, when he was positively chipper. I haltingly said hello and he mumbled a reply and I came over and asked what was up.

I wasn’t especially surprised to hear that it came down to his packaging device again. I asked if it was working and he sort of stared into the distance for a bit and said, “Yes, in a way,” and then fell silent. I asked if he wanted to tell me what that meant, and he said he would if he understood it himself, which he didn’t really.

Then he stood up a little unsteadily and started to walk back to the shed. He didn’t say to follow but I felt he wanted me to anyway, so I turned off the water and went along in with him.

He sat down at the Macintosh and sort of stared at nothing for a while, and then he asked me if I noticed that last time he marked the apple with a Sharpie. I said I did, and he said that was sort of a control, so he knew exactly what he was getting out and what he was putting in. I said that was clever. Then he took a breath and told me the machine was now finding and unpackaging apples now. In fact, it was finding them with some regularity. “But none of them have any Sharpie marks on them,” he said.

At first I wanted to clap him on the back. This was obviously a triumph. But he didn’t seem cheered at all. The mark was very important, he said. It showed him if what was being unpackaged was what had been packaged. Then he walked to his fridge and took out an apple and tossed it to me. It was the first one that’d been successfully unpackaged, he said, and it had no mark. And he said he didn’t know what to do about that.

I suggested that maybe the machine was unpackaging them differently, just without that ink on the skin. He said that was possible, sure, but he didn’t think so. I asked why. He opened the fridge and pulled out another apple and tossed it to me.

This apple was green.

“I don’t use any green apples,” he said. “All of my apples are red.”

“Maybe it’s messing up the color when it unpackages it?” I said.

“That’s what I thought, too,” he said. “But I decided to try a dry run. To see what would happen if I told it to unpackage an apple, but never put any apple in the machine to start with.”

“And what happened?”

He swallowed and said he would show me. He went in the back and hit some switches and came back out with the lab goggles again. He made a big show of pointing out that the steel box was empty. Then he started the long process of getting the machine started again.

It blew through the first half quickly, presumably because there was no apple to compress, but this time it didn’t freeze on the second half. It went through completely, and there was another click at the end. Then he waited for it to power down. It took much, much longer this time. As we waited I noticed red drops collecting at the tip of Dan’s nose. It was blood. I pointed it out and he shook his head and got some tissue paper and stuffed it into his nostrils. “That’s been happening more and more,” he said. Then he went and hit some switches in the back, and unscrewed the lid of the box.

Inside was a green apple. The greenest green I’ve ever seen in my life. It was so green it hurt to look at it. I’d never seen that shade of color anywhere before, and to be honest I doubt if it even exists, really. Dan nodded and put it in the fridge with the others.

“What does that mean?” I asked. “Is it just making apples?”

“No,” he said.

“Then what?”

He hesitated, then said, “I think it’s finding apples and unpackaging them, but they’re from… somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. But… But when it shuts down the, well, the ‘fields’ in the apple, like you said, it seems to be able to reach… further.”

“How far?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Think of it like a packaging device again, like FedEx, like you said. It’s boxing up the apple and sending it away. But it’s bringing back someone else’s package. It’s not mine.”

“Then whose is it?”

He was quiet for a long while. Then he said he wanted to show me something. He went to his fridge and rooted in the back and took out something in a rubber bag. He put on two thick rubber gloves and pulled it out.

At first I didn’t know what it was. It looked like some kind of preserved organ. But then I realized, after a moment, that I was looking at an apple, but it was black. Black and bulbous and lined with sinews. It was the ugliest, foulest thing I’ve ever seen, and it smelled evilly, like rotting flesh.

“I don’t know where this apple is from,” he said, “but I hope I never see that place. And I hope whoever’s there never comes looking for their damn apples.”

I agreed. Dan replaced the apple in the fridge and walked me out. He said the machine was now acting odd. It was taking longer to shut down. Like it didn’t want to stop. I feebly suggested that maybe it wanted to keep making apples as a solution to world hunger. He didn’t laugh, which was the right response. As he opened his gate for me, he said, “What I really hope is that all it’s unpackaging is apples, and nothing else.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Then I went into my house and watched Letterman.

*          *          *

Odd thing in the local paper. They said that a nearby community of painters and poets had been suffering from terrible nightmares and insomnia. It’d only started in the last week or so. Then on the news apparently some other poets and artists and such said they’d read the article and they’d been suffering the same thing, all at once. I felt sort of left out as a writer, but then all my dreams seem bad. But they do seem worse recently. I wonder what that’s about.