The House of Tomorrow (7 page)

“Are you okay?” asked Nana, stepping inside. “Why do you look like that?”

“Like what?” I said.

She brushed past me and picked up my plate from the sink.

“Nana?” I said.

I looked at her arm then. There was a puncture where they had drawn blood at the hospital. The skin around the small wound was yellow and purple.

“Yes?” she said.

She was sweating, and her hand shook almost imperceptibly while she ran water over my plate.

“I can do that,” I said. “Why don’t you sit down and rest.”

“I’m fine,” she said.

I walked up to her and held out my hand for the dish. She reluctantly handed it over. I began to cover it with our herbal dish soap, and Nana sat down at the table. It took her a moment to relax, but when she leaned back in her chair, I could see she was completely exhausted. In no time, her eyes were closed tight. I watched her closely. Even in repose, her face looked pained.

“Would it be so wrong?” I mumbled. “Just to have someone else . . .”

“What are you saying to me!” Nana said. “Speak up.”

She pushed open her heavy lids to glance at me. I scrubbed at her dish.

“Nothing,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

NEXT WEEK ARRIVED AND NANA LOCKED HERSELF in her room to work on a secret project. I barely heard a noise for two days. And when she came out at sundown of the second, it was just to ask my help with something. I entered her room and only then did I see the fruits of her labor: an enormous banner made from a bedsheet. It read CLOSED TO PUBLIC in greasepaint. She needed me to climb a ladder outside and help her to drape it over the entrance of the dome. She was already gathering up the banner while I tried to make sense of everything.

“Are you sure about this, Nana?” I asked. “You want to close?”

She didn’t answer. She just walked outside and began to set up the ladder for me. I followed and clambered up in a daze. Then I spent an hour in the cold, trying to get the banner to hang straight. When I went back inside, it still seemed crooked. But it was done. Ever since I had lived in the dome we’d given tours. It was simply a part of life there. Now there was a bedsheet rippling in the raw fall wind. A curtain had closed.

On the couch, I tried to thaw my hands with breath. Nana sat nearby, expressionless.

“When do you think we might reopen?” I asked.

Again, no answer. She got up and walked into her bedroom, and I expected her to stay there for the rest of the day. I expected yet another day of silence. But instead she emerged minutes later with some money in her hand, a wad of bills.

“Take your bicycle to town,” she said. “Purchase paint and alter our signs.”

She dropped the money. It landed in my lap with a flutter.

“The highway signs?” I said.

I waited for her to address my question. She did not.

“Where do I buy the paint?” I asked.

“You can access that information in the . . .”

I waited again while she searched for the word.

“The phone book,” I said, finally.

She was expecting me to get up right away, but I sat where I was. The money stayed in my lap, scattered across my thighs.

“What?” she said. “What is it?”

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

She did not respond.

“Can I ask why you don’t just let me administer the tours? We could stay open. I could do it! Until you’re properly . . . rejuvenated.”

She shook her head slowly from side to side.

“I’ve seen you guide them a hundred times,” I said. “I’ve even committed everything you say to memory. It would have been impossible not to. So I . . .”

“Sebastian, please,” she said.

“It’s my duty to operate the gift stand, Nana. I grasp that. And I know each part of our work is important. But the situation is different right now, isn’t it? I’m sixteen years old. And since you’ve come back from the hospital . . .”

“It won’t,” she interrupted, toneless. “It won’t occur.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to discuss.”

“I want to, Nana. I want to
discuss
this.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“Because you do not possess the necessary . . . aptitude!” she said.

“What?”

“It pains me to say this. You barely comprehend what I teach. How can you expect to teach . . . others?” Her strangled speech made the words even sharper. They seemed to puncture the air. I felt my stomach clench.

“I see,” is all I could think to say.

She took a long breath. My face was starting to warm.

“Now go and do what I’ve asked you.”

I got up on what felt like someone else’s legs, and walked directly to the telephone stand. I pulled open the drawer and thumbed through the telephone book. In a moment, I had found Small World Paints in downtown North Branch. I turned around, at that point, to watch for Nana, but she was no longer in the living room. The door to her room was closed again, and presumably she was behind it. I exhaled and almost choked on my breath. I was holding it all in. I flipped to the pages of the residential section. I located the
W
’s. Whisler. Whitaker. Whitby. And finally . . .

 

 

 

 

I copied the information onto a note card and walked briskly out of the dome into the nip of the afternoon. I marched across our property, moving toward a large storage shed about a hundred yards down the hill. This was the building that had once housed Nana’s three-wheel eco-car. It was a curiously small auto, and we had used it to buy groceries in the winter. But now, in the wake of the car’s irreparable breakdown, the storage shed housed my Schwinn Voyager bicycle. My only gift from Nana on my twelfth birthday. I often wondered if she’d only purchased it for me so I could run her errands. It had come equipped with large handlebar-mounted baskets for groceries, and a seat pocket for money. I brought it down from its hooks and checked the tires. I adjusted my seat and mirrors. Then I grabbed my mustard-colored helmet off its peg, and I opened the doors of the shed. I tried to hold back tears.

I launched myself out of the shed and was off, shooting over the dead leaves and clingy brush of the hill. My tires bounced over the uneven slope and my teeth clicked together. I pedaled harder, cranking the chain over its gear, and eventually I hopped the curb onto the sharp decline of Hillsboro Drive. I gripped the handlebars and pedaled away as fast as I possibly could. The wind burned my eyes, and I let them water. I felt the hot streams glance down my cheeks. I watched the blurry road disappear under my tires.

 

 

 

IT TOOK ME A HALF HOUR TO ARRIVE AT SMALL WORLD Paints. The store was packed with merchandise, but I was able to locate the fast-drying spray paint in white. I calmly selected two canisters and walked under the humming fluorescent lights of the store to the shiny counter. A squat balding man was awaiting me. I handed him the paint. He rolled it around in his palm. He looked at my face, raw from crying.

“You aren’t planning on getting up to any kind of vandalism with this Krylon paint, are you?” he asked me.

“No,” I said, “I just have to alter some road signs for my grandmother.”

He looked me over again before hesitantly ringing me up for the paint. He handed me my change, slowly. Then he watched me as I stepped outside and loaded the canisters into my handlebar-mounted basket. I looked around the small square of downtown North Branch. I’d been told it was supposed to be modeled after Dutch architecture. The buildings were brick, tall and narrow, with decorative awnings. It was a bit disorienting. Even the streets were cobbled instead of paved. I looked up and down the road, and eventually my eyes landed on the corner shop across the way and came to an abrupt halt.

“The Record Collector,” read a large sign.

From across the street, I could see the front glass covered in bright wall-sized posters of large men with gold teeth, and women clad in small neon shorts. The performers had one-word names and serious faces. A T-shirt hanging up nearby showed a man in a goat mask brandishing a chain saw. I guided my bike up to the front and put my hand against glass. It throbbed under my palm. I opened the door.

I stood for a moment in the entryway, holding my breath, taking in the environs. It was ill-lit inside, and it smelled like the stinky incense Nana burned sometimes on the eve of Bucky’s death. In front of me were waist-high shelves of compact discs, organized alphabetically. An obese man with a tight stocking cap sat behind a counter, looking at a magazine. He had large black glasses similar to Jared’s. On the stereo, a man said:

I looked up to find the origin of the sound and instead met the stocking-cap man’s spectacled eyes. They were pink and narrow.

“You need something!” he screamed over the song.

He picked up a soggy sandwich of some kind and took an impressive bite.

“I’m on break technically,” he chewed, “but I’m here to help you. Right on.”

“What?” I asked.

“Right on!” he said.

I walked away from him and into the belly of the store, the music playing from tiny speakers all around me. I scanned the categories above the racks. Pop. R&B. Country. Classic. I was the sole patron in the place. It felt as if the store existed only for me. I picked up a few discs and examined them. They were glossy, covered in strange photographs. The beat still thundered through the store. I walked back up to the counter.

“Do you have any discs by the Misfits?” I asked.

The man chewed and swallowed. “Metal,” he said.

“What?”

“They’re in Metal!”

I looked up at him. He sighed and slapped his magazine down on the counter.

“It helps if you can read,” he said, more to himself.

He grumbled as I followed him to the back of the store. He pointed a meaty finger at the words “Heavy Metal.” Then he pointed at the discs housed under that label.

“I thought the Misfits played punk rock music,” I said.

“Listen, man,” he said, “I don’t make up the retarded rules around here. I’m just a wage slave. If you want to take this to the Supreme Court, that’s your decision.”

He waddled away, and I went to the
M
section. I looked through the discs until I saw a picture of a yellow and black skull staring at me. I picked it up. On the opposite side, the song titles were listed. I scanned down the list. “Vampira.” “I Turned into a Martian.” “Green Hell.” “Skulls.” The disc cost seventeen dollars and sixty-eight cents with tax. I chewed a fingernail. That was a third of our weekly grocery bill at the cooperative.

I dug into my pocket, where I had placed the change from the paint. I felt around and pulled out some one-dollar bills, some change, and finally a crumpled twenty. I smoothed the bill on the leg of my blue jeans. I was rarely given any money at all. The cash I earned from the gift stand went right back into sustaining the dome. And, according to Nana, the money that my parents had left me only covered the expenses needed to raise me. Nana was usually very careful with her finances. Maybe this time she had just reached for the money without looking. Maybe she had meant to give it to me. Or maybe it was a test. I looked at the skull. I slowly walked the disc up to the counter.

“I’ve made a selection,” I said.

“Amazing,” he said. “Way to go.”

He surveyed my choice. “Oh,” he said, “you have to be eighteen to buy this one.”

He handed the disc back to me.

“Eighteen years old?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They measure age in years now, man.”

I turned it over in my hands. There was a sticker on the front that warned about explicit content. The man ignored me now, pretending I wasn’t there.

“It’s my first one,” I said.

The man broke his trance. “Your first what?”

“My first compact disc.”

“You’ve never bought an album before?” he asked.

I shook my head. He looked like he was going to choke on his sandwich. And for a minute, he seemed unsure what to do. He looked around the store, his eyes shifting back and forth. Then he looked behind him at a door to the back room.

“Jesus,” he said.

I watched him intently.

“Here!” He spastically waved his hand. “Gimme that damn thing back.”

I handed the disc back to him and he punched a series of buttons on the register. I placed my bill on the counter and watched it disappear into the cash drawer. Twenty dollars. The man shook his head, uttering more profanity to himself. He ripped the explicit-content sticker off the cover and made my change as fast as he could.

“Now get out of here,” he said. “You’ve seriously compromised my job, man.”

I obliged him, walking a straight path out the door. The fact that I possessed no form of disc player did not even occur to me at that moment. I had just known, somehow, that I was supposed to purchase the album. It had been there to be found by me. I held tight to the brown wrapping all the way to my bike.

The disc fit safely beside the paint cans in my basket. I stood looking at it a moment. A small square inside a paper bag. I understood then why I wasn’t concerned about my lack of a stereo. The answer just clicked into my head. I wasn’t buying this album for myself. I never had been. I zipped up my basket cover and angled my bike away from the expressway. I dug my feet into the Dutch cobblestones of historic downtown North Branch, and fastened my helmet. I rode off in search of Whitcombs.

SOMETHING THAT IS EASY TO FORGET ABOUT THE universe when you live in isolation is just how full of motion it is. It’s in a state of perpetual motion, technically. The whole entire thing: going, going, going. Never stopping. At least that’s the way Fuller described it. He said the universe is always transforming. And since every human body is composed of the same elements that compose the physical universe, then people are actually miniature universes in and of themselves. We, too, are in a state of persistent motion. And if the universe has unlimited possibilities, we, too, have unlimited possibilities.