The House of Tomorrow (9 page)

We ate in mutual silence, both of us concentrating on our food. Mrs. Whitcomb stood at the sink, washing out her skillet, listening to talk radio. Every few minutes, she turned around to glance at us. More than once, she winked at me. My plan had been to eat the food as fast as possible and leave. But I actually started to relax at the table. I took long gulps of grape drink. It was so sweet and cold. It made my mouth tingle. By the time my food was finished, I had almost forgotten about Jared altogether. He ate steadily at the other side of the table, paying me no attention.

I looked around the kitchen, taking inventory of the bright-colored snack foods on the counter. Neon wafers and lurid orange chips cut in perfect triangles. Mrs. Whitcomb walked to the giant avocado-colored fridge and brought out the jug of grape drink. She refilled our glasses and then walked back. I caught a glimpse of the refrigerator door before she closed it, and saw what appeared to be a picture of Jared in the newspaper. It was clipped to the door. The headline said, “On the Mend.” I only saw the picture for a moment, but Jared was lying in a bed. He looked even thinner than he was now.

“What are you staring at?” he said.

I looked over at him and found him glaring right at me.

“Jared,” said Mrs. Whitcomb. “Have you played your electric guitar for Sebastian?”

“No,
Mommy
,” he said, “I haven’t.”

He narrowed his eyes at me.

“I finally gave in and got it for him, Sebastian, after he promised he’d play it at Youth Group meetings. He’s always been musical. He used to have a beautiful singing voice before the surgery.”

“God,” said Jared. “No one wants to hear about the shitty songs I used to sing. I sang like a girl. Mrs. Huron told you so.”

Mrs. Whitcomb flinched at his profanity. “You sang beautifully,” she said.

Then she turned to me. “He never sings anymore.”

“A real travesty for the world,” said Jared. “How will mankind ever recover?”

Then a familiar voice came from the doorway.

“Shut up, already,” it said. “I can hear your whining from down the hall.”

“Don’t start with him, Meredith,” Janice said.

I looked up and Meredith Whitcomb rushed into the room, moving in a beeline toward Jared. She was taller than he was. I noticed that first. And her hair was light yellow (almost white), the exact opposite of Jared’s. It got darker when it reached her scalp. Her thin lips were covered in a sticky glistening gloss, and her cheeks looked so soft. Her nose was small, and her eyes were a severe grayish blue. She looked at me, and I felt my neck redden. She was magnificent.

“Who is this guy?” she asked, taking a pickle right from Jared’s hand.

“This is Sebastian,” said Mrs. Whitcomb. “Remember we told you about that dome and the unfortunate woman who had the stroke.”

Meredith shrugged, tossing the pickle in her mouth.

“Kind of funny-looking,” she said.

She sat down next to me and chomped noisily on the pickle. She looked from Jared to me. “You two make the perfect little pair, don’t you?” she said. “Two little wieners.”

“Meredith,” said Jared, “could you please have your period somewhere else in the house where it won’t bother anyone.”

“Could you please stop stinking up your room,” she said. “It smells like piss again. I can smell it through the floorboards.”

Jared had been ready to say something else, but at that last comment he closed his mouth tight. His head sank a few inches. He was quiet for a moment, then scooted out his chair. “C’mon, Sebastian,” he said. “I don’t want to be infected by the PMS rays in this room.”

“Please, just leave each other alone!” said Janice.

For a moment, she sounded on the verge of tears. She placed a frying pan on a rack, clanging some pots together in the process. Jared was already walking out of the room.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Without looking back at Meredith, I stood and followed Jared’s path out of the room. When I found him, he was already halfway up the stairs.

“I should really go, Jared,” I said from below. “You told me to . . .”

He wasn’t listening to me. He was mumbling something to himself. He paused and looked down the stairs at me. It looked like he wanted to tell me something.

“Have you ever played a guitar before?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“I can teach you a chord.”

He looked at me intensely.

“You’ll show me your guitar?” I asked.

“Do you want to learn a chord or not?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

We walked back into his room and this time I didn’t comment on the smell. I pretended not to notice it at all. This time Jared went to his closet and took out a hard black plastic case. He unbuckled it and pulled out a dark blue guitar shaped like an upside-down V. I had never seen anything resembling it. It gleamed. On the side of the strings were thin airbrushed lightning bolts. He set the guitar in my hands.

“Be careful,” he said. “Don’t drop it.”

The plastic was cold in my hands. I gripped the neck and let the V sit across my legs. He went to the closet and pulled out a small amplifier and a cord.

“You are now holding probably the most badass ax ever,” he said.

He plugged everything in and a small hum escaped the amplifier when he flicked it on. “It has dual-fucking-humbuckers,” he continued, “a compound-radius fingerboard, and twenty-four jumbo frets. It will, if played right, melt your face off.”

“Do you play it at church?” I asked.

“Hell no, I do not play it at church,” he said. “It would probably piss off God so much, he’d have to blow up the chapel or something.”

While he spoke he arranged the fingers of my left hand on the hard metal strings. He pressed my fingers down once they were in place, and a pain shot through my hand.

“Strum,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He sighed. Without replying, he ran his thumb fast over all the strings at once and a crunchy blast erupted from the speaker. It took a few seconds for the amplifier to return to its initial low fuzz.

“Ha!” said Jared. “Did you feel that one in your balls?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

He ran his thumb over them again, up and down this time, and out came another wave of music. That same push of noise and harmony. It was a powerful flush of sound.

“That’s E!” he shouted. “It’s the best chord!”

Again, his thumb and forefinger attacked the strings. I pressed my fingers down as hard as I could, and the sound bucked out of the speaker and into the room. I felt an odd pulse in my arms, spreading all the way to my chest. Over and over, he strummed. The sound was deafening. The strings poked into my fingertips. My ears buzzed. And when the sound reached its frenzied peak, Jared waited what felt like minutes before he calmed the strings with his flat palm. I hadn’t been watching him during the last round of noises. I had closed my eyes in deep concentration, pretending I was solely responsible for the sounds. I looked at him now, and noticed his eyes growing red.

“Jared?” I asked.

“What?”

“Are you hurt?”

“No,” he said.

The guitar was still screeching a little in my hands. I tried to settle it, but it kept going, shrieking.

“You were in the newspaper,” I said. “I saw it on the fridge.”

Jared blinked. “I pissed myself, earlier,” he said.

I nearly dropped the guitar, but I caught myself.

“You urinated . . .”

“In my pants,” he said. “That’s what stinks in here. I lied when I said there was no smell. There’s a smell. It’s my pissed pants. They’re in the closet.”

Jared let escape a short laugh, then punctuated it with a sniffle.

“How did this occur?” I asked.

“Meds,” he said. “It’s this new med I’m on. It makes me go to the bathroom all the time. I got tired of it, so I tried to hold it in, you know. And . . . I fucking couldn’t.”

He sat down on the floor now in front of a box of compact discs. He lifted up a few and pulled out a package of cigarettes.

“Would you put a towel at the bottom of the door, Sebastian?” he asked.

I laid the humming guitar on the bed and found a towel, hanging on a hook near the closet. I covered the bottom of the door. Jared lit a cigarette.

“My mom wants me to try going back to school soon,” he said. “How am I supposed to do that when I’m pissing in my pants? How is that going to work?”

He took a long inhalation and spit it back out.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Sixteen.”

“How did you learn to smoke?”

“A kid at the hospital showed me,” he said. “This eighteen-year-old in for back surgery. He was really into the Dead Kennedys. Anyway, he taught me. Any other questions?”

The smoke crept up and gathered around the light.

“Why were you in the hospital?” I asked.

“Do you want to see?” he said.

“See what?”

“I can show you what I was in for.”

“I want to see,” I said.

Jared extinguished his cigarette in a nearby soda can. He rose to his feet and walked to the stereo. He fumbled with the switches again. I watched him push track number five again on his disc.

“Take a good look, okay?” he said. “I’m only going to do this once.”

The opening drumbeats of “Teenagers from Mars
”
began again. Jared closed his eyes. I saw his eyeballs fluttering behind his lids. The humidifier was still going in the corner, and I noticed now how the room seemed to be alive with shiny droplets of moisture. It glistened on the front of his music posters. On his disc cases. On the frames of his black glasses. Jared pulled an arm inside his shirt. Then he pulled the other arm in. He wriggled for a moment and then lifted the skeleton shirt over his head.

He held onto his shirt, and I could see his hand shaking. On the stereo the song was in its rollicking chorus again.

Right in the middle of Jared’s chest was a long thin scar. It was purplish and perfectly even. An entirely straight slice.

From downstairs came Mrs. Whitcomb’s voice, scarcely audible over the music.

“Sebastian, I can take you home now if you’re ready!”

I didn’t answer. The stereo kept playing.

“I have someone else’s heart,” said Jared.

I stared at his hunched pale body, his ribs like metal struts. I tried to imagine the heart in there, an enlarged tangle of blue and purple valves. I thought of the scar opening up like an eyelid to show me.

“I’ve only had it for a couple of years,” he said, looking down toward his chest.

I walked over to Jared. He didn’t move. He just watched as I reached out a finger to touch the scar. At the last minute, though, he grabbed my hand. He gripped it for a moment then let it go.

“Jared!” shouted Mrs. Whitcomb. “Did you guys hear me?”

“He’s leaving right now, Mom!” Jared yelled.

He moved away from me and started carefully pulling his shirt back on. I retrieved my helmet from the bed and stood watching Jared for a moment. He did not face me. I could tell he was waiting for me to exit the room. So I just walked out, and he did not follow. We didn’t say good-bye. I made my way down the hallway and back downstairs. Mrs. Whitcomb was waiting by the front door with her van keys in hand. Meredith was nowhere to be seen.

“C’mon,” said Janice. “Let’s get you back home.”

IT WAS DARK AND STARLESS BY THE TIME I GOT back to the dome that evening. The woods were profoundly still and the leaves on the ground were coated in a slick frost. There was only one light on in the dome, the hanging lamp in Nana’s bedroom. I couldn’t see the light itself, only its reflective glow on the tall trunks of the walnut trees. Nana was not waiting for me at the door. I had anticipated a serious face behind the glass. Possibly a vexed one. But she was not there. And she didn’t make a sound when I stepped into our house, holding a thick cylinder of spray paint in each hand.

Moments ago, I had asked Janice Whitcomb to deposit me halfway up the hill with my bicycle so I could walk the rest of the way. She agreed, but when she pulled the van to a stop on the shoulder of the road, she hadn’t unlocked my door. I’d yanked on the handle, but the door wouldn’t slide. I had looked to Janice and found her just watching out her window, taking in the dark woods around her. I lifted the handle once more, and that’s when she looked over at me and began speaking.

“He doesn’t really socialize very well,” she said. “I know that. How could I not know that? He’s my child.”

I tried to maintain a neutral expression.

“He has some challenges with maturity,” she said. “I guess that’s obvious. And then there’s his father . . .”

She gripped the steering wheel hard and then opened her palms and rested them on top of it. “And we don’t get along,” she continued, quietly now. “So there’s that. I don’t know how to talk to him, Sebastian. I’ve read books. I’ve read a whole library of these silly books. But it doesn’t . . . it won’t take. He doesn’t have anything to say to me.”

Her last sentence was nearly a whisper.

“Mrs. Whitcomb?” I said.

She looked at me like she’d forgotten I was in the van.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and laughed a little to herself. “I just wanted to tell you one thing. I didn’t mean to go on.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“What I want to say is . . .”

She closed her eyes.

“I just want to say, I hope you’ll come back.”

“Come back?”

The windshield in front of us was beginning to fog.

“Come back to our house, sometime, to see him,” she said.