The House of Tomorrow Page 2

  “Well, they are. They’re down.”

  I avoided her stare, but I could still feel it on me.

  “An education means knowing how to do everything. Including things you don’t have a predilection for. You should have seen the way Bucky made things salable. He could make men salivate over a new kind of winch. A winch!”

  “Bucky” was R. Buckminster Fuller, Nana’s onetime colleague and personal hero. He was the inventor of the Geodesic Dome, among other things, and, according to Nana, “the most unappreciated genius in all of human history.” His life’s work had been dedicated to futurist inventions and ideas, which he thought could eliminate all negative human behavior. Fuller dabbled in everything: architecture, physics, engineering, cosmology, design, and poetry. And he dreamed of creating a “Spaceship Earth” where every human could prosper and grow. Nana had worked with him at Southern Illinois University in her younger days. And by the time she was finished in his company, there wasn’t a single one of his ideas she disagreed with.

  This included his belief that Nana, aka Josephine Prendergast, was the most beautiful and vibrant woman he’d ever met. Nana claims to have been Bucky’s mistress for two years, though it has never been mentioned in the biographies I’ve read. Whatever their relationship, though, I had been homeschooled almost exclusively according to his philosophy. And these were the guiding principles that were tacked directly above my bed: 1. Every day I will give myself wholly to futurist thinking. Not to useless past thinking, which will steer me very far off course.

  2. I will learn all the organizing processes of the universe, so I may use them to accomplish startling feats of triumph.

  3. I will use my mind, not just my regular brain lobes.

  4. I will forge my journey alone to keep accepted and totally boneheaded notions from blinding me to truth.

  I woke up every morning and read this credo. If Nana was in the room, I read it aloud. If she wasn’t, I did not. Either way, it kept my focus sharp for the hours ahead.

  Outside now, a teal minivan passed and we both turned to look west at the top of the hill. This was the place where the road from town passed our drive. The van didn’t stop.

  “I’d better change,” said Nana. “Meeting dismissed.”

  But she didn’t move. She just placed a hand on top of mine. Her palm was cold from gripping the smoothie. She stared at an indistinguishable spot outside. I looked, too, but I couldn’t see anything. I felt her pulse ticking through her palm.

  “Nana?” I said.

  She snapped back and looked at me as if for the first time.

  “You have your father’s eyes,” she said. “Have I informed you of that before?”

  “You have,” I said.

  “They are very striking eyes. They haven’t dulled a bit since your childhood.”

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  She rose from her chair, using my thin shoulder for leverage. Then she walked off toward her bedroom, slower than usual. If I had really been attuned to her patterns that morning, I probably would have noticed something was amiss. She hadn’t mentioned my father in over a year. He had died, along with my mother, in a Cessna crash more than ten years ago. We almost never spoke about it.

  “Can’t I talk about how handsome my boy is?” Nana said over her shoulder. “Is that some kind of unlawful act?”

  She walked out of sight. I looked outside a second time and saw the teal minivan drifting past the dome again. This time it slowed down and idled for a moment in the street. The glass on the windshield was tinted, so I couldn’t view any of the passengers inside. It lurched forward and docked in our semicircular drive.

  I stood up and tucked in my shirt. I forced myself to start thinking about a sale in the gift shop. Nana was right; it would probably have to be a photo. But maybe a Bucky Ball would do. The Bucky Balls were glow-in-the-dark plastic dome balls that you could kick or throw or hang from a ceiling. They retailed at $29.95. But the framed photographs were fifty dollars even, and they featured our dome, lit up from the inside against a scene of night woods. Nana took this photo herself, and if you looked closely at it, you could see my tube-socked foot coming out of a bedroom closet. I had been hiding in there to stay out of the way, but my sock had lurked out at the exact moment of the flash. No customers ever saw it, though, unless I pointed it out.

  I was not allowed to point it out.

  I was not allowed to say much of anything to the visitors, really. Aside from the fragments of conversation I employed for my sales tactics, I was supposed to remain a silent operative. Most of the time this was painless enough; the people from town were often loud and very intent on telling me jokes I didn’t understand. But every once in while, I could hardly contain my impulse to speak up to a boy or girl my age. Someone like me who was also so very much not like me. Those were the moments I could feel my credo slipping to the back of my mind, and something else taking over.

  Outside, the driver’s-side door of the van opened and a short middle-aged woman stepped out in high-heeled shoes and brown kneesocks. She had flushed cheeks and large eyes, and she wore a long tan wool coat with a cyan scarf wrapped around her neck at least three times. Her black hair was tied in a braid. She peered up at the dome, a hand at her forehead like a scout’s. Then, turning on a dime, she walked over to the back door of the van and slid it open. She leaned in and a pale hand took hers. Then she gave a quick tug and a ghostly teenager emerged from the van dressed completely in black.

  He wore a leather jacket with straps, buckles, and snapped epaulets. And under the jacket there was a T-shirt made to resemble the front of a tuxedo. He had skinny black jeans and frayed canvas sneakers. He was even thinner than I was and wore squarish glasses. A thick lock of uncombed dark hair hung over the top of the frames like a dirty wave. Tiny headphones were buried in his ears.

  He kneeled for a moment on the concrete of the driveway, retying a broken shoelace, a deep scowl on his face, then sprang up and followed the woman, who was already plodding toward our door. I walked outside to my station at the gift stand. The woman clacked up the drive and smiled at me through the little open window in my stand. She paused a moment, then stuck a pink hand right inside.

  “Janice Whitcomb,” she said.

  I shook the hand.

  “Sebastian,” I said. “Welcome to the future.”

  Janice smiled politely. “That’s my son, Jared,” she said.

  The boy stood behind her, adjusting the volume control on a music player of some kind. He looked even smaller and frailer up close. His jacket hung on him like a leather poncho.

  “Don’t bother speaking to him,” she said quickly. “He’s mad at me, so he’s playing his music. He stays inside too much since he got out of the hospital, so I thought I’d get him outside in the elements today. I don’t think he’s pleased.”

  I nodded and smiled at Janice.

  “I passed this place on the way to a conference once,” she said, “and then this morning it just popped back into my head. I got up and I said, ‘Jared, we’re going to see that fascinating bubble on the hill today. And we’re going to learn something from it.’ ”

  I looked at Jared again. His magnified green eyes were like beacons.

  “Here’s admission for both of us,” she said, and handed me a twenty. “Are you the tour guide, Sebastian?”

  “Oh, no,” I said, “my Nana will be happy to . . .”

  I stopped at that point and realized that she wasn’t there. Usually, Nana was outside in her special tour pantsuit at the slightest sound of a muffler. I gave Janice her change. “She’ll be out in sixty seconds,” I said. “Give or take.”

  She looked toward the dome then, studying it anew. I wanted to ask her more about Jared. But I sensed that he had turned down the volume on his music and was listening and observing now. His eyes were locked on the photograph of the dome, sitting in the display window.
He seemed to consider it deeply. I watched his eyes scan every room, moving up from the living room.

  Janice took a deep breath and shivered a little. “Probably the last of the real fall days,” she said.

  “Is that a fucking sock in there?” asked Jared.

  His voice was grating, high-pitched. Janice and I both turned to look at him.

  “What did you just say?” she asked.

  “I see a sock in that picture,” Jared said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Jared!” said his mother. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you have any sense of . . .”

  But Janice was not given time to finish her question. Because, at that moment, Nana burst out of the house dressed completely in her pantsuit, waving her arms over her head, as if signaling for a rescue.

  “Welcome, visitors!” she said. “Greetings. Greetings.”

  Nana’s hair was a bit out of place. But she carried two stickers on her fingertips. They were black-and-white, with a cartoon of Buckminster Fuller’s bespectacled head in the center, a wry grin on his face. Nana fastened one on Janice’s wool lapel. She pressed the other one on Jared’s T-shirt, directly on his left nipple.

  “We’ll start inside right away,” said Nana, immediately shepherding us over the lawn. “Welcome to the future.”

  “I already told them,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, and laughed a little too long.

  “Nana,” I said when she was finished, “maybe you should slow down a little, I . . .”

  She interrupted me with a pinch on the side. Then she gave me a confident grin and tromped ahead of me. We proceeded right into the dome, past the NordicTrack, into the very center of the living room. There was something wrong with Nana’s appearance that I couldn’t put my finger on. As she cleared her throat to begin her speech, I looked down at her arch-supported dress shoes and discovered what it was.

  They were on the wrong feet.

  “In his famous book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,” said Nana, looking up, “R. Buckminster Fuller, the greatest mind of our age, states that in order for mankind to progress, ‘We must first discover where we are now; that is, what our present navigational position in the universal scheme of evolution is.’ ”

  She paused a moment and caught me looking down. She glanced at her feet, and then her eyes met mine. It only took a second, but her face changed entirely. Her eyes unfocused. Her teeth found her bottom lip. The Whitcombs were still gazing skyward.

  “And you see,” she continued, a little slower, “when you stand in the very center of a Geodesic Dome, you have the sensation of being propelled right out into the cosmos. Like the universe is sucking you out. This, as Bucky said, is really one of the most intriguing of paradoxes: in order to expand outward, we must go . . . inward.”

  After “inward,” Nana stopped speaking and stared up at the center point of the dome. We all looked up with her. The few clouds that hung above us were small and gauzy. The wind was blowing, whistling over the dome. A few feet in front of us were our kitchen cabinets, hovering over the counter, hung from the ceiling by tension wires. Nana coughed and tried to speak again. And that was when it happened.

  My name was all that came out. Only she ran it all together so it sounded like “Sebas-yan.” Then she took an uneasy step backward.

  “I think I follow what you were saying,” said Janice, still looking up. “Go on . . .”

  I observed Nana’s face closely. It was becoming partly splotched with red. And her mouth was tightening. Just as I noticed this, she reached out a hand to grab me. It seemed to happen in slow motion, but I couldn’t tell what she was attempting. Her fingers didn’t quite make it to my blue flannel. Before anyone could react, she let out a long breath and then tipped straight backward, crumpling to the thin carpet of the dome floor. The dull thump reverberated through the space.

  “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.”

  2.

  A Metaphysical Connection

  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 fir
st 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.