The House of Tomorrow (3 page)

“Oh!” said Mrs. Whitcomb, looking down immediately. “Oh my God! Are you all right?”

She bent over Nana. Nana said nothing. She seemed to be holding her breath. I stood completely frozen. Next to me, Jared very slowly removed his headphones.

“Oh God!” Mrs. Whitcomb yelled. “Is there a phone in this place? Where’s the telephone?”

I pointed her toward the cordless phone, and she sprinted toward it in her heels. A bit of spit was forming at the corners of Nana’s mouth. Suddenly, I felt a bony hand clap down on my shoulder. I turned around, and it was Jared. He had a grave expression on his face. “Hey,” he said. “Hold her hand.”

His voice was oddly calm. I didn’t question him. I got down on my knees and grabbed Nana’s palm. It was warm and I held it tightly. I was unable to think at all. I just looked over her anguished face, and massaged the hard nubs of the knuckles. I couldn’t remember the last time I had even seen her resting. She was always up. Always in motion. Jared got down on the floor across from me. He picked up the other hand and pressed it tight. We looked at each other.

“Sebastian, right?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“This is fucked,” he said.

Behind us in the kitchen, Janice Whitcomb was starting to cry into the phone.

“We just came to tour the bubble!” she yelled. “I don’t know anything about her condition.”

Meanwhile Jared and I held tight to Nana’s hands, and I thought for a moment that maybe, somehow, we were allowing life energy to course through her spindly frame. Like she was the middle link between our two life-energy links, and if we could just hold on, everything else would be fine. I listened intently for a signal from the universe. But all was quiet.

“Jared,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“You were right.”

“About what?”

His enormous fish eyes blinked twice.

“There’s a sock in that picture.”

BUCKMINSTER FULLER ONCE SAID THAT THE BIGGEST problem with Spaceship Earth is that it came with no instruction booklet. No directions whatsoever. We have to figure it all out by ourselves and that is some incredibly grueling work. Where do we begin? What methods do we use? How do we know when we’ve arrived at the right answers? I thought about all this while I waited in the dome, looking frequently into the wide eyes of my barely conscious Nana. There was no manual for her, either, I realized. There was no manual for any of this. All I could do was wait and see how the forces would respond.

They took approximately fourteen minutes to arrive. They came in the form of a blaring ambulance. When it pulled up, I watched as the uniformed men fanned out and then stopped to look up at my home with stupefied expressions on their faces. They were hypnotized by standing so close to something they must have seen often from the highway. But they remembered their duties shortly and gathered in the dome, loading my grandmother onto a neon orange stretcher.

Nana was motionless for the duration, but her absent gaze remained steadily focused on me. I stayed as close as I could, and gripped her hand as long as possible. Eventually I was forced to let go. The men in jumpsuits gave her short pulls from an oxygen cylinder and rushed her across the lawn and toward the open jaws of the emergency transport. They ushered me inside to a padded bench. The Whitcombs, Janice shouted, would trail in their van.

I sat unmoving for the first moments of the ride, my palms slick on my denim-covered knees. I could only watch Nana’s sallow face. Her closed eyes. Her slack mouth. But she was respiring. I watched her frail chest rise and fall. She sucked air through the clear mask and pushed it back out. Finally, I reached out and clutched her pointer finger in the grip of my left hand.

I was too shocked to cry. And I also knew it would not please Nana. Crying is nearly all I had done when I first moved into the dome after my parents’ death. It pained Nana greatly, and she immediately took measures to make it cease. At first I wept all through the night, and wet my new bed too many times to count. Eventually, Nana stayed the night with me to keep me calm. She slept next to me on a single mattress for the entire first two months. And every night she told me a different reason why it was completely normal to live in our globe.

“The dome structure has been used since humans first began building homes,” she’d say. “And there’s a reason why, Sebastian. Sailors landing in foreign countries would turn their ships upside down and stay the night under there to be safe. They realized how much space it provided with such few materials. The people of Afghanistan have lived in circular tents called yurts for years. And of course, you know about igloos. But did you know the strongest shape in all of geometry is the triangle? Our house is made of equilateral triangles, Sebastian. We have the strongest house on earth.”

These had been my bedtime stories, along with anecdotes from Buckminster Fuller’s life. And in time, I came to believe that the dome was a secure place. I even took a shine to it. The acoustics, for example, continually roused my childhood imagination. There were places in the dome where you could whisper, and someone else would hear you clearly on the opposite side. Nana and I knew all the echo spots, and we used this feature as our personal intercom system. Eventually, this new habitat, full of peculiarities (a misting “Fog Gun” shower! A toilet that packed waste for fertilizer!) became as ordinary to me as anything else. So when it came time to start school, Nana fashioned a small classroom upstairs, across from my bedroom. And that’s the way things had operated since. Work, play, and school, all under one great pellucid roof.

After a short time riding, the ambulance hit a small bump, and Nana nearly toppled off her gurney onto the floor. I jumped from my seat, but a paramedic grabbed her roughly in order to keep her steady. I saw, though, that she was not able to secure herself. If the man hadn’t steadied her, she would have flopped to the ground like a giant fish. It was at that moment that everything began to take hold. The veil of shock lifted and I wondered, plainly, if I would ever spend a night in the dome with Nana again.

We arrived at the hospital soon after and the men unloaded Nana with unbelievable deftness. They dragged the gurney toward the white double doors headfirst. Before she disappeared through, she opened her eyes for a moment and looked at me again. It seemed like she wanted to say something, but I had no clue what it was. Her lips moved. They formed no discernible words. I stared back, unsure what to do. But by the time I raised my hand to wave, it was too late
.
The soles of her dress shoes (still on the wrong feet) were receding into the well-lit passageway, and the doors were swinging shut.

IN THE LOBBY, THE WHITCOMBS WERE THERE AS promised. They were the only people in the room aside from a hunched security guard watching a TV bolted to the wall, and a tiny woman in a turtleneck murmuring into a telephone. The room was another world entirely from the white tiles of the hospital proper. Here, there was soft light, coral-colored carpeting, and a machine full of nonperishables.

Also, there was cola. Janice handed me one when I sat down between her and Jared, and I triggered the top. I had only drunk soda twice before. Once with my parents when I was young, and once on a hot summer errand by bicycle to pick up an allergy prescription for Nana in town. In the hospital lobby that Sunday, I had my third. A glacially cold can of Royal Crown. The first sip was so sweet I nearly gagged. My tongue burned from the carbonation, and my eyes leaked a few tears. Janice saw them and patted me on the back. After each pat, she rubbed.

Next to me on the other side, Jared sat staring at the bolted television. Sitting down, he looked even smaller and more emaciated. Like a malnourished nestling. There was barely the outline of a body under his voluminous jacket. And his skin was so white it was almost translucent. I could see the washed blue of the veins in his neck and just above his ears. Yet there was something older in his eyes, in his stare. It was difficult to discern his age.

For the first few moments, no one said anything. But eventually, Janice took my hand in hers. Her palms were warm and dry. “How are you holding up, Sebastian?” she asked. “Would it bother you if I said a short prayer for your grandmother?”

“Can it,” said Jared.

Janice whipped her head around. “What was that?”

Jared continued watching television.

“Well?” said Janice. “You always have something to say about the ways I find comfort. So go ahead. What is it?”

“It’s time for my pills,” he said.

Janice sighed and let go of my hand. She opened her purse and withdrew a small airtight pill case. She reached across my lap and handed Jared a large pill. He held it up to the fluorescent light of the lobby.

“Cyclosporine,” he said, “compliments of the chef.”

He swallowed it dry. He was handed another. He swallowed that, then two more. Finally, he was handed the last one. A light orange tablet, smaller than the others.

“This one,” he said, his eyes still on the TV, “this is the one that will give me diarrhea.”

“Jared, please,” said his mother, wincing.

“It’s just a bodily function,” he said. “God created it. God created loose stool. Take it up with him.”

He looked over at me for the first time.

“Well, I can see what kind of mood you’re in today,” she said. Her voice was calm. She looked at me. “I’m going to ask about your grandmother. They must know something by now.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for your consideration.”

She got up and marched up to the receptionist’s desk. Jared gagged a little when she was gone, and coughed up a sour pill smell. He didn’t look my way for the first few minutes. He just kept his eyes on the screen, watching a program about high school students with symmetrical haircuts. But when the program was replaced by an advertisement, he took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose until it began to redden. He shot me a sideways glance.

“You’re not some kind of annoying asshole-genius, are you?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

He wiped the lenses of his glasses with his tuxedo shirt and put them back on.

“Autistic?”

“No.”

“Why do you talk like that then?”

“How do I talk?”

“Not the right way, I’ll tell you that,” he said.

He looked right at me.

“You talk like a jack-off.”

“Well, I’m not . . . I don’t really leave our home very often,” I said. “Maybe that’s what you’re picking up on. I haven’t been out much.”

Jared seemed to take this in a moment. I took another harsh mouthful of RC and tried not to tear up. Jared examined me closely. He looked at my clothes, my worn gray tennis shoes, my blue flannel. I felt like a specimen under the magnifying lenses of those glasses. Somewhere in another part of the hospital, doctors were probably looking at Nana in the same way.

“Have you ever heard the Misfits’ first album?” he asked.

I shook my head, and Jared immediately began searching one of the deep pockets of his jacket. “Janice keeps a close watch on me, too,” he said, “but she has my sister to worry about. She doesn’t open my mail.”

He pulled out his music player, a thin rectangular box with a glowing screen and a circle of buttons. I had seen one advertised in a store window, but I could not remember its name. He began rapidly steering his thumb over the controls.

“I order my albums off the Internet,” he said.

“The World Wide Web?”

He shushed me with a single finger and pressed a final button.

“I want you to hear something, Sebastian. But first you have to prepare yourself.”

“For what?”

“To have your shit rocked,” he said.

He looked at me, altogether serious.

“All right,” I said. “How should I prepare?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Just do it.”

So I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. I thought of North Branch from a bird’s-eye view. I pictured myself floating over the bare trees, the top branches scraping against the tips of my shoes. Then I opened my eyes again, and Jared seemed satisfied. He placed the headphones in my ears and turned the volume up.

“What is this?” I asked.

Jared pressed a button. There was a brief moment of white noise; then it sounded as if someone were running a chain saw inside my head. Only this chain saw made melodies. And a drumbeat pounded along with it. The singing began seconds later, and I tried hard to make it out over the crunch of what I assumed to be a guitar. But the words were too fast to understand. And the singing switched alternately into yelling and whining. Then a series of
whoa
s. Before I knew it, the song was ending and Jared was looking at me for my reaction.

“What was that about maggots?” I asked. It was the only word I’d been able to parse.