The House of Tomorrow Read online

  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.”

  9.

  The Greater Intellect Speaks!

  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.

  After she said this, she reached her hand down and popped the latch to the back of the van. The cold evening air rushed through in an instant and cooled the interior. Janice got out of the car, but it took me a second or two to do the same. She helped me unload my Voyager, and set it gently against the back bumper. Then she wrapped me in another of her hugs. It took me by surprise, but it didn’t bother me once it was occurring. I had only met Janice Whitcomb twice, and both times she had embraced me. It made me wonder how often most families touched.

  “I really hope you’ll come to a Youth Group meeting, Sebastian,” she said. “I think you’d like it.”

  She released me, and I grabbed a hold of my handlebars. I steadied the bike against my side.

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  She nodded her head once and then got back into the van. She fastened her seat belt and pulled a great circling U-turn. She sped off, back the way she came, leaving me bewildered at the side of the empty road. I looked at the spot in the gravel where her tires had been. I could still feel the warmth of her coat. I turned and entered the woods.

  My heart was beating quickly as I jogged with my bike. Without a second thought, I stopped and removed the spray cans from the basket and tore off the caps. I pressed the triggers and activated them until they were both half empty. In the process, I purposefully let a mist of ivory paint land on my wrists and the tips of my hair to make it appear that I had spent the day working.

  And now, in the moonlit dome, the spray paint gleamed in my tiny blond arm hairs like ice crystals. I shook the cans again, knocking the ball bearing around, trying to alert Nana that I was home. She did not stir. The place was soundless. So I knocked on Nana’s door with the end of a paint cylinder. Then I pushed it open without invitation and entered. “Hello, Nana,” I said. “The signs have been altered as you asked.”

  Nana was sitting on the floor, a circle of books and papers around her. It took her a moment to realize where she was in the room. She looked outside first, and then spied my reflection in the glass and turned around.

  “Sebastian,” she said. “Oh. I’m so glad you’ve returned.”

  “You are?”

  “Something has happened,” she said.

  I noticed now how vacant her eyes appeared. She was looking right past me.

  “I have experienced a moment,” she said, and stopped to think. “A moment of prescience.”

  “A vision?”

  She nodded slowly. “I fell asleep this afternoon,” she said, “and I slept for . . . so long. I thought I had slept for a day. Or a week! All the while I thought that I was dreaming. But, you see, I was not.”

  She paused, and I could see her moving her lips, trying to articulate the next part in her head. “I was not dreaming at all,” she said. “I was attuned to the signals of a Greater Intellect.”

  She coughed then, and her poise temporarily faltered. “I’m so thirsty,” she said. “Please . . . a glass of filtered water.”

  I set down the spray cans and walked, half conscious, out of her room and to the tap where we had long had a state-of-the-art filtration system installed. I rubbed a palm over my painted left wrist. My hairs were stuck together. I recalled the feeling of holding Jared’s electric guitar and how my thin muscles had felt full of some kind of current. But the sensation withered in a moment, and I filled a glass with water. I walked back to Nana’s room. She was lying in her bed now, looking out into the trees. I moved to the side of the bed and held the water out to her.

  “Put it to my lips,” she said. “Please. Dispense it.”

  I rested the glass on her thin lips and tipped it slightly.

  “Nana, do you feel okay?” I asked.

  She swallowed huge mouthfuls of water before stopping for a breath.

  “From now on,” she gasped, “I think the truth! The Greater Intellect told me that today, just like he told Bucky.”

  She drank the rest of the water and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “I was in this room,” she said, carefully selecting each word, “when the Greater Intellect spoke. It was a low voice. Very quiet. And it told me my life was drawing to a close. It said, ‘Josephine, your time is fleeting, but you must devote the last moments to the highest advantage of others. You must act with great
ambition!’ ”

  “This happened here?” I asked.

  I looked around the room.

  “Then I saw an image,” she continued. “Perfectly clear. It was our dome from a great height, Sebastian. I saw it. And it was not the home we live in now. It was not the present version, but . . . a future dome.”

  An odd smile formed on her lips.

  “What did it look like?” I asked.

  “It was a marvelous Geoscope,” she said.

  “I don’t know what that is,” I said.

  “A globe. A world!”

  She sat up and gripped my left shoulder with her long fingers.

  “Every single country! Painted to scale on the side of our house. Spaceship Earth realized. And I knew what it meant!” she said.

  She gripped harder, and her fingernails dug into my skin.

  “It would be a way to remind the people. To remind them about the relationships between human beings and our planet. It would instill a comprehensive worldview in everyone who saw it. And of course, it would be the first location of my institute.”

  She spoke the last part quickly, and I almost didn’t catch it.

  “Your institute?” I said. “You haven’t even been administering tours, Nana. You’ve barely been speaking until today.”

  She was not listening to me, though. She got up off the bed and removed her hand from my shoulder. She sat down in the middle of her papers.

  “I’ve been drawing up plans,” she said. “Of course some of our view will have to be . . . obstructed. But that can’t be helped. This is for the highest advantage.”

  She picked up a pencil and flipped open her sketch pad. The page was covered in graphite-smeared drawings of our future planet-dome, nestled in the middle of a crosshatched section of woods. North America stretched over the living room. Canada blanketed my room. I sat down on the floor across from Nana. She continued drawing, forming the big toe of southern India over her bedroom.

  “Nana,” I said softly, “is it possible that your physician at the hospital might disapprove of this plan?”

  Her eyes shot up and stared into mine. A lucidity returned to her gaze.

  “Sebastian,” she said, “I end this state of inertia today. Do you understand?”

  She held a pencil aloft. It quivered.

  “I must embrace the final act. This is the next stage on our paths. And for me, it will be the last. One last thing I can do before the Greater Intellect reclaims me. Do you see? This is everything we’ve been working toward.”

  Nana returned to her sketching. Her eyes scanned the thin gray lines of continents and islands. She moistened her dry lips.

  “I hope you liked your trip to town today,” she said, her head down. “You’re going to take more of them now. It’s going to be a big responsibility for you. That should make you happy.”

  She looked up at me one last time, a slight smile on her face.

  “Yes,” I said. “Very happy.”

  THAT NIGHT, I WAS NOT ABLE TO SLEEP.

  I twisted myself around in my sheets, and by the predawn hours, it felt like my body had entirely disremembered how to slumber. At first, I thought only of Nana and everything she had told me. There was something extremely disquieting and familiar about her story the more I pondered it. Eventually my memory caught up with me, and I realized why her words had bothered me so much. An occurrence similar to hers had happened to Fuller long ago.

  The year was 1927, and Bucky had just met with one of many business failures early in his career. Ordinarily, commercial failure was just a temporary setback in the life of a man half blind with curiosity and ambition. But this time he had a wife and a new daughter to support, and he had no income at all. He began avoiding his home, numbing himself with liquor. One evening he wandered down to the shore of Lake Michigan in a self-pitying state. He stopped by the water to deliberate about his future. He conjured up his history of failed plans. His wife’s family had made known their dislike for him. They thought he was impractical, a joker. This last debacle would surely bring a new round of recriminations. Some of the family elders had even invested in his venture.

  Bucky decided that the only way out was to end his life. He would simply swim until he could no longer see the land behind him. He would disappear. His insurance money would improve the lives of his family. They would be better off without him.

  He made up his mind to go through with his plan and right when he was about to act, something happened that would profoundly shape the remainder of his years. All at once, Bucky felt himself rising off the ground and floating in what he called a “sparkling sphere of light.” He looked around, and it seemed to him that time as he knew it had come to a complete halt. The earth was standing utterly still. All was quiet. Then a voice, confident and soft, began speaking to him. It seemed to come out of the air itself and find its way to his ear. This voice told him that he did not have the right to kill himself. He could not cease to live yet. This was because he was important to the universe. He would, in fact, be hurting others if he followed through with this grave action. “You think the truth,” the voice told him. “Now go proclaim the truth.”

  Bucky was not told precisely what his role was that day, but at the very least, he knew that he had one. That simple knowledge was enough to change Fuller’s course forever. He could now move forward into uncertainty with at least one small light to guide him.

  Nana’s story was not quite as harrowing. She had not mentioned a desire to eliminate herself, as far as I knew. But I wondered if her experience that afternoon had been similarly preceded by a very real dispirit of Bucky’s kind. What exactly had she been thinking and feeling since the hospital? How serious was her anger and humility? I continued to tumble around in my bed.

  I was finally able to drift to sleep by the early morning. But even in a dream state, my mind was filled with the most puzzling images. I watched, for instance, as Jared lay on the floor of his bedroom, trying to keep his beating heart from leaping out of his chest. His face was obscured by his hair, and I could only see his small struggling body, a human heart bouncing like a baby rabbit. In another dream, Janice Whitcomb sat across from me in a room, watching intently my every movement. It seemed like there was something she wanted to tell me, but I didn’t know what it was.

  Then there was the single image I could not shake loose. The most surprising one of all. It kept creeping back into my mind’s eye, in spite of my anguished attempts to suppress it. Strangely enough, the picture was one of Meredith Whitcomb. More accurately, the image was one of Meredith Whitcomb snacking on a pickle, just the way she had been in her kitchen.

  In all my early reading about Fuller, there were most definitely sections about women. But I did not come to realize this until my fourteenth year. This is because portions of his biographies were entirely redacted, crossed out by Nana with a thin black Magic Marker and one of her T squares for drafting. Thus, there were many times over the years when I came upon a paragraph that was stricken from the record. No identifiable words. Not even a participle. Most of these sections seemed to occur in his young adult years.

  His childhood was blackout-free, right up to the teens. Then, at some point near the end of his prep schooling, I always reached a dead end, and my eyes were forced to skate over the black ice of redaction. The sentences were perfectly blocked out. Like so: As you can see, thick flawless lines of black. No stray dots above the i’s. No hovering umlauts. Nothing.

  It wasn’t until I was fourteen that I realized I could read the text under this marker just by holding the pages up to the brightest midday sunlight. Up to this point, I had suspected that Nana was simply removing the out-of-date information from the books. That assumption disappeared when the first rays of sun permeated her editorial smoke screen. The first sentence I read was the one above. It read: “Always searching for a party and a good time, Fuller also spent a great deal of his time in
brothels.”

  I had to spend a large amount of time with a dictionary before I was able to grasp the significance of this detail. And when I understood it, on a surface level, it shed considerable light on other chapters that had also felt the wrath of Nana’s darkening pen. On top of whole paragraphs, there were also images completely encased in a wall of black ink. Now imagine, if you can, the depth of alarm when I held the pages of an anatomy textbook up on a sunny afternoon and saw this:

  It took me days to recover.

  But the fact is that I was already in possession of some facts about puberty and human development. I knew, for example, that the larynx enlarged during puberty and the voice got deeper. I knew that the shoulders broadened. I knew that hair sprouted in the under-arms, and that the sebaceous glands produced sebum, which could cause acne. Finally, I was familiar with the fact that girls were likely to become especially stimulating to boys at this age.

  Some of these things had happened to me, in a limited capacity. My voice, I found, occasionally switched timbre mid-word as if I’d suddenly swallowed a pebble and it had lodged in my throat. I had grown the intermittent blemish on my chin or near my hairline, but it always went away. And, I had noticed the cultivation of hair in surprising places. That being said, I had never been truly inconvenienced by the process of development until the night after my visit to the Whitcombs.

  I had found out Jared’s secret, a disclosure that left me with countless questions. And Nana had succumbed to one of her states of indeterminate wonder. I didn’t know what to do about either of these matters. Yet I found my mind dominated by a single portrait of Meredith Whitcomb, her incisors so sharp, so white, tearing into a Gedney “Baby Dill” pickle. I had never been a tremendous fan of pickles, but the satisfaction of that crunching noise, combined with the way her eyes (that puzzling gray-blue) were squinting almost imperceptibly at the exact moment of the chomp, did something to me that I had not fully acknowledged at the time. That night, I couldn’t seem to forget it. And not only did I see her face in my fleeting dreams, but I heard that crisp crrrrr-unch, played at high volume throughout. It was the sound track to my unconscious. Crrr-runch! ’runch ’runch ’runch!