The House of Tomorrow Page 14

  “Lucky for us, she’s been acting like a suicide case all day,” said Jared. “Usually when Janice is gone she goes into ultrabitch mode. But I knocked on her door earlier and she was just lying on her bed looking out the window like some abused puppy. It was pathetic.”

  “Maybe she’s in love,” I said, and instantly regretted it.

  “Yeah,” said Jared, “and maybe I have a fifteen-inch wiener.”

  We both looked at her door. Then we walked up the stairs and into Jared’s room. Once we were settled, Jared made multiple trips to the closet for tangled cords and little boxes he called “Effects Pedals.” He produced his amplifier and then another small one for me. The humidifier puffed and burbled in the corner, but the room smelled better this time. He worked quietly, plugging things in, flipping switches, tuning his guitar, and then tuning my bass. When he was finished, we both sat on his unmade bed, our instruments buzzing like enormous cicadas.

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “Give me a minute to think,” said Jared. “Why do you always have to ask things?”

  Jared coughed. We were close enough to touch elbows.

  “How did you begin practices with your other bands?” I asked.

  “What other bands?”

  “I thought you had performed in other bands.”

  “When the hell did I ever say that?”

  “I assumed,” I said.

  “Don’t ever assume things,” he said. “You don’t know anything.”

  Jared looked at his guitar. I looked at my bass. We met eyes again.

  “I can play an A minor chord,” I said.

  Jared seemed to think about this a minute.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s hear your A minor chord.”

  I took some time to carefully adjust my fingers into the correct positions. D string. A string. E string. I strummed with my thumb, and there it was again, that perfect deep dulcet tone. It poured from the baby amplifier. I felt it in my toes. And as if answering an alarm, Jared immediately stomped on one of his pedals and put his fingers in position. Before the sound of my chord disappeared, he answered it with a growling riff from his guitar. The two sounds met and clapped together like waves. Then they blended and left the air of the room altogether. Synergy.

  “Do that again,” said Jared.

  I slammed my hand onto the strings and the sound blasted back at me. Jared played his chord again, breaking it up into three choppy down strums. He looked at me again and nodded his head. I hit the strings. He strummed three times.

  “Do it twice,” he barked. “Play that twice in a row before I play.”

  I complied the best I could. My fingers were slipping a little from position but the note was almost right. I pounded. Boom. Boom. Jared came back. Duh, duh, duhhhhh.

  “Keep doing it!” he yelled.

  I looked closely at my fingers. I held the strings down as tight as I could.

  Boom. Boom. Duh, duh, duhhhhh. Boom. Boom. Duh, duh, duhhhhh. Boom. Boommmm. Duh. Duh. Duhhhhhhhhh.

  We stopped at the same time and listened as the sound died out. Jared looked at me. “That was almost cool,” he said. “Kind of like Gang of Four or something.”

  “What’s Gang of Four?” I asked.

  “Just do it again,” he said. “I’ll educate you later.”

  We spent the next half hour or so playing those two chords. Over and over. We tried to get the timing right. My part remained the same, but Jared added some flourishes to his until it nearly sounded like the beginning of a song. We were both sweating from the humidity of the room. And by the time we could play it how Jared wanted it, his face was pale and dripping. He tossed his guitar down on the bed and sat down against the wall on the other side of the room. He ran his hands through his knotty black hair.

  “I’m actually supposed to do a warm-up before any physical activity,” he said. “That was probably too fast.”

  I listened to him breathe. He put his hand over his chest.

  “That’s the only chord you know,” he said, panting, “isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  He took a deep breath. “That’s okay,” he said. “We gotta start somewhere.”

  It took about ten minutes of rest before Jared looked normal again. I was worried for a while that he may have overtaxed himself. I had a series of quick visions of myself in the back of an ambulance again looking at a respirator. But when he opened his eyes again, he seemed somewhat refreshed. Like all he required was a brief recharge.

  “You ever catch a buzz?” he asked, still leaning against the wall.

  I looked back at him, expressionless.

  “You ever drink a beer or some schnapps or something?”

  “I inebriated myself once on some Canadian ice wine,” I said.

  “Right on,” said Jared.

  He got to his feet and pulled a small box off the shelf above his stereo. He opened it up, and inside were stacks of guitar magazines. He tossed them aside and revealed a small collection of miniature alcohol bottles. “My dad steals these from hotels,” he said. “He has a whole briefcase full in his closet.”

  He carefully selected two clear ones and then he lined up our grape drinks on his window ledge. Poised over our tumblers, his hair hung over his glasses and his lips were curled in a grimace. He unscrewed the caps of the bottles and dumped one in each of our drinks. Then he stuck a finger in both glasses and swirled them around.

  “What did you put in there?” I asked.

  Jared picked up one of the bottles and squinted.

  “Bombay Sapphire,” he said.

  He held out my tumbler. I set the bass guitar on the bed and joined him at the window. When I took the glass, he clinked his against mine.

  “Drink it fast and you won’t even taste it,” he said.

  He tipped his up and started guzzling. I watched him for a few gulps, then did the same with mine. I angled the glass skyward and felt the drink flowing down my throat in long swigs. Jared was right; I could barely taste a thing. Just cold. Until I stopped and belched at the end. Then there was a piney taste in my mouth.

  “Gone,” I said.

  Jared looked at me and laughed. His lips were bright purple.

  “Gone,” he said back.

  He pressed play on his stereo and the Ramones burst through the speakers. “I don’t wanna go down to the basement.” Jared started doing a little dance where he shook his fist in the air. I laughed and sat down on the floor. I was already getting a touch light-headed.

  “How do you feel?” he yelled in my face.

  He put his hands on my shoulders.

  “I have to urinate!” I yelled over the song.

  “Downstairs!” he said. “Unless you just want to go in your pants.”

  “I’ll go downstairs,” I said.

  “Hey, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” he said.

  He let go of me and kept singing with his eyes closed. I got up, walked out of the room, and wandered through the hallway and down the stairs. I was feeling warm from my chest up to my cheeks. My head felt light, too. I hummed the tune Jared and I had just played as I walked by Meredith’s room. The door was still shut tight. I kept moving and found the bathroom just off the kitchen by the back door.

  “Wha, wha, wha,” I mouthed while I urinated in the cinnamon-smelling room. “We are in . . . a punk rock baaand!”

  The toilet water was blue for some reason, and it swirled around and around when I flushed. Above the bowl, on the tank, was a row of tiny soaps shaped like seashells. I picked one up and sniffed it. Strawberry. I examined the shower, too, before I left. It seemed to pour out infinite amounts of water, as if there was a never-ending supply. And inside the curtain was a wealth of bathing accessories. All of them foreign to me.

  On my way back, I got all the way to the third step before I noticed the crack of ligh
t coming from Meredith’s door. It was open. I turned around and stepped up to the door. I was nearly face-to-face with the soaking wet muscleman on the poster. I could see the individual sprouts of his chest hairs. I peeked inside the bedroom. Just as Jared had described, Meredith was lying on the bed with her eyes open, looking at nothing in particular. Her feet were hanging off the end of the bed and I could see her toenails were freshly painted pink. The music had been shut off.

  “Get the hell out of here, Jared,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “It’s not Jared,” I said.

  I made sure to speak as much like myself as possible. Meredith craned her neck up from the pillow and looked into the doorway.

  “Here on Earth,” she said, “people knock on doors.”

  She laid her head back down and looked up at the ceiling. She did not tell me to enter. She did not tell me to go away.

  “What are you doing in here?” I said.

  “Masturbating,” she said. “Can’t you see?”

  “I can’t see much,” I said, peering through the opening in the door.

  “Too bad. You’re missing quite a show.”

  I stood there, my head almost in the opening.

  “Okay, Jesus,” she said. “Come in for a minute if you’re just going to stand around out there all pitiful.”

  I stepped into the room. The floor was covered in thick white carpeting. Hanging from the ceiling was a string of lights shaped like chili peppers. And the walls were every bit as crowded as Jared’s only instead of tattooed musicians there were pictures of men in various states of undress. One lean guy seemed to be pouring a bucket of milk on himself. I felt a chilly breeze over my sweaty arms and looked at the window by the bed. It was open a foot or so. The shade rippled in the wind.

  “Did you ever get in trouble with Janice after that night at the church?” I asked.

  “Nope,” she said in a monotone. “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “I guess it’s the fires of hell for us,” she said.

  She sat up in bed and looked me over.

  “What’s the deal with you, anyway?” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. Why are you so weird? Why do you look like that? Do you ever wear anything else?”

  She pointed at my flannel.

  “I suppose I have a lot of similar shirts,” I said.

  She pulled up the shade of the window and looked outside. The neighborhood was quiet as usual. Only the sound of traffic a few streets over came into the room. I could feel the warmth from the alcohol pulsing through me.

  “Are you waiting for someone?” I asked.

  She flipped right around and stared at me.

  “Who told you that?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Why would you say that, then?”

  “I don’t know, you were just looking like . . .”

  “God!” she interrupted. “The word ‘privacy’ means exactly dick around here. I know Jared’s listening to my calls somehow. He probably has some kind of spy kit to ruin my life with.”

  She gave one more glance out the window and then shut the shade again.

  “Why are you so mean to your brother?” I asked.

  “What did you just ask me?”

  “Why are you so mean to him? He’s your family. And he’s . . . sick. Don’t you understand that?”

  I could tell the piney alcohol was loosening my tongue. The words were coming before I properly thought them through. Meredith sprang off the bed and walked slowly across the carpet to me. Then she got so close to me that I could smell her vanilla perfume. She gave me a shove. I wasn’t expecting it, and I almost toppled over.

  “Listen, you chode,” she said. “Maybe if you knew anything about anything you wouldn’t have to ask such stupid questions.”

  “I see the way you treat him,” I said.

  I braced myself for another push, but it didn’t come. Meredith just looked me right in the eyes. “I know you think you’re king of the universe because you have this oddball life and my brother thinks you’re funny, but I’ve lived with him for sixteen years and you’ve known him for weeks.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I piss him off because that’s what he likes,” she said.

  I watched her closely.

  “I piss him off because that’s how it’s always been and if I started being his best friend he’d know it was because of the operation, and he would hate me even more. You get it? I play my part and it makes him think that something is still normal around here.”

  “He likes to be angry?”

  “Have you ever spent time with him?” she asked.

  “Okay,” I conceded, “maybe sometimes.”

  “So don’t tell me,” she said, “don’t come in here and tell me that I’m making things worse for him because it’s not true. My mom treats him like a five-year-old, and I know that’s not right. My dad is never home, and I know that’s not right. So I’m trying something different. I’m treating him like the irritating little shit that he is.”

  Her face was flushed now, and I could see her eyes were watering a little.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She was still right in front of me. It was the closest we’d ever been, not counting when her mouth was by my ear in the van.

  “It’s okay . . .” she said.

  Then she leaned in closer and my heart suddenly felt like it might explode. But she was only smelling my breath. “Have you been . . . drinking?” she asked, perplexed. “What’s wrong with your lips?”

  “Bombay Sapphire and grape drink,” I said.

  She looked at me in disbelief.

  “Do strangers really come through your window . . . to have experiences with you?” I asked.

  Meredith didn’t speak. She just stood transfixed in front of me. Then we heard Jared clear his throat right behind us.

  “What in the hell is going on here?” he asked.

  I turned around and saw him leaning against the door. His glance bounced back and forth from Meredith to me.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Your friend came in here to bother me,” said Meredith.

  Jared walked out of the room before I had a chance to speak again. Meredith and I both watched out the door as he disappeared from sight. From up the stairs we could barely hear his voice. “Janice is home,” he said.

  There was a short pause.

  “And she doesn’t want you biking home this late. She says you’re staying over.”

  16.

  The Complexities of Physical Reality

  EVERY LOCATION ON THE PLANET MAKES ONE REVOLUTION a day, no matter where you live. Nana taught me that when I was barely old enough to understand it. Whether you reside in Antarctica, North Branch, or somewhere outside town in a dome, the same process applies. One day per revolution. Twenty-three hours, fifty-six minutes, and four seconds, to be exact. Most people talk about this in terms of “sunrise” and “sunset,” but Fuller hated these words. The idea of the sun rising and setting was one left over from a time when we thought the earth was flat. Modern humans, he thought, should recognize that there is no rise and set, no up and down, only the earth revolving in and out of the sun’s light.

  I knew these to be facts. And I knew the days passed the same way everywhere. But I also knew that time seemed to take on different properties at the Whitcombs’ house. It appeared to slow down and speed up at will. It could even stop entirely if Meredith entered a room. And when I finally found myself in Jared’s room that night, I could almost feel the earth slow on its axis.

  The whole room was ink black with only the thinnest lines of moonlight shining through the blinds. I was on a rickety cot across the room from Jared. It smelled of detergent and sweat and it creaked whenever I moved. Jared was in his bed, breath
ing heavily in the darkness. We didn’t speak at first, but I could tell he was awake. He hadn’t said a word to me since he found Meredith and me together.

  “If Nana is waiting up for me,” I spoke, finally, “this whole thing is over.”

  Jared said nothing for a few seconds. Then I heard his disembodied voice, quiet. “Do you want to know why our band has to be awesome?” he asked.

  I looked into the dark, trying to distinguish his facial features. I couldn’t.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said. “It has to be awesome because I’m alive and talking to you right now.”

  “Because you’re alive . . .” I said.

  “Because I’m alive and another kid is dead. He died so I could live,” he said. “You get it now?”

  “I’m not entirely sure.”

  Jared sighed.

  “It’s like this,” he said. “Once they decided I needed the transplant, we got a beeper. Then we had to wait around for them to beep us when they found a heart. I was on a list. They said it would probably be sixty days or so. But it could be as long as a year.”

  My eyes were starting to adjust and I could almost make out his face now. His voice seemed to be coming from all around me.

  “It took me a couple of weeks to realize that they were going to call when some other kid croaked. Then I could be saved. That’s the only way it could work. That’s the only way they could get a heart that was the same size. I was waiting for somebody just like me to die.”

  “When did they contact you?” I asked.

  “It only took a month. They flew the heart in on a plane and drove it to the hospital. It can only be preserved for so many hours.”

  “Was it someone your age?”

  “Almost exactly,” he said.

  “How did he . . . pass away?”

  “An accident. Got hit by a car near his school. It was icy, I think. He died that night, and by the morning, my surgery was over. That’s how fast it all happened.”

  “Do you know anything about him?”

  “A little. He was from Minnesota. And he played soccer. His mom wrote me a letter, but I’ve only read it once.”

  He paused.

  “The thing is, I didn’t think about it much at the time. I was just happy the way it turned out. Some kids wait so long they end up on machines, fighting to live every day until something comes through. I was lucky. But lately, I’ve been thinking about that kid all the time. His name was Matthew. What do I really deserve to have his heart for?”