The House of Tomorrow Page 9

  I woke hourly in tizzies.

  And when I woke up for good that morning, newly disoriented after a sleep-burst, my room was sun-filled. A sparse overnight snowfall was melting off the dome, and sunlight was reflecting directly into my eyes. It took me a few moments to remember the events of the day before, but it wasn’t until I rose that I became entirely certain it hadn’t all been a dream. My main evidence was the e-mail from Jared.

  It read as follows: Sebastian,

  If you try to touch me again, I will beat your ass. I have an idea. Call me.

  J.

  I read the message five or six times before wandering downstairs for breakfast. I went through the motions of preparing my meal with the muscle memory of an old man. My hands poured and dumped, independent of conscious thought. It took me a few minutes before I realized that Nana was not hovering around me. She was absent. I assumed, at first, as I sat munching my bland cereal, that she was still resting. I had heard her flipping sketchbook pages and generally rummaging around her bedroom until well past midnight. But I was shocked, when I finally got up to investigate, to find the door to her room standing wide open and absolutely no Nana inside.

  “Hello?” I shouted.

  I looked up, half expecting to find her atop the dome already transforming it into her Geoscope, but she was not there. I strode through the living room and right outside, still in my blue sateen pajamas. I walked around to the back side of the dome where I would have a fully unobstructed view of our property. I searched the trees as far as my tired eyes would let me. But no tuft of uncombed white hair poked over the hill. No neon tracksuit lay immobile in the light snow.

  I waited an hour or so, unmoving on the couch, visualizing Nana’s safe return. When she didn’t materialize, I walked over to our old telephone and considered notifying the police. Instead, I picked up the phone book and turned to a rumpled page sticking out of the middle. There was the Whitcombs’ address and number where I’d found it the day before. I dialed the number and Jared picked up on the second ring.

  “What took you so long?”

  “Jared?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I’m Jared.”

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “Nobody calls my family,” he said. “They’re all a bunch of losers. Meredith’s prostitution hotline is the only one that gets any action.”

  At the utterance of his sister’s name, I pictured an amputated Baby Dill and my neck tingled. “I received your e-mail this morning,” I said.

  “I thought that might happen when I sent it to you,” he said.

  I could hear the quick puff of his breath. He was excited about something. I decided not to mention Nana’s disappearance.

  “So Janice said you scampered into the woods like a goddamn squirrel last night. Do you secretly live out there, and crap in the dirt?”

  “No.”

  “Were you camping in a pup tent?”

  “Is this what you wanted to speak to me about?” I asked.

  “We’ll get to that, Mr. McFeely,” he said. “You’re lucky I’m even speaking to you today.”

  “Mr. Mc . . . ?”

  “Actually, you’re lucky you’re alive. If your stupid fingertip had even grazed my chest, I would have bitten it off.”

  “Jared,” I said. “Why do you have to talk to me like this?”

  “I think we should start a band,” he said.

  “What?”

  As usual, he had slipped the most important words into a tiny space.

  “Okay,” he said, “okay. I know I’m taking a giant fucking risk here. I’m going to have to teach you everything, and you’re obviously going to do it all wrong. But I’m not looking for a Sid Vicious, you know. I just need somebody to do what I say. Not somebody with a real personality. I get to have the ideas. Don’t argue.”

  I tried to wade through his babble, but it was that first question that lingered.

  “I don’t know how to be in a band,” I said.

  “You don’t know anything. You probably can’t pee by yourself. But I’m going to mold you. That’s the whole idea. I’m the front man. You’ll play bass.”

  “Bass guitar,” I said.

  “Don’t call it that,” he said.

  “But Nana won’t . . .”

  “Sebastian, don’t start with all that,” he interrupted. “C’mon and just listen to me for a second. I’m not done with my pitch.”

  “Jared.”

  “Do you know who Napoleon was?” he asked.

  “The emperor of France,” I said.

  “Wrong,” said Jared. “He was the first punk rocker.”

  “He was the emperor of France,” I said.

  “ ‘Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily,’ ” said Jared. “You know who said that?”

  “Napoleon?”

  “Yes. And do you know what, Sebastian?”

  “What?”

  “We are dying daily.”

  I could hear him breathing in short gasps. I imagined humidified air pouring into his lungs, swirling around in there.

  “We are dying,” he said, “and we are defeated and we are motherfucking inglorious. And Sebastian, Napoleon was right!”

  I heard the flint of a lighter, and the sound of Jared’s inhalation. I didn’t know what to say, and Jared seemed content to enjoy the silence after his speech. I watched out the front for any sign of Nana.

  “Where am I going to obtain a bass?” I asked.

  “Church,” said Jared. “We’ll borrow it and tell Janice that we’re practicing for a Youth Group performance or something. Jesus songs.”

  “Jared,” I said, slowly and carefully. “Nana doesn’t allow me to absent myself from the dome whenever I want. And she has just come up with a new project for me. She needs my aid. She needs me. It might be the next stage in my life.”

  Jared exhaled deeply, and I braced myself for his next tirade.

  “Then I guess it’s your choice,” he said instead.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to form a band,” I said.

  “One time,” said Jared.

  This time I just waited for him to explain.

  “One time,” he said. “I’m asking you one time. I understand your situation is effed up. My situation is effed up, too. But this is the one thing that doesn’t make me want to puke. And that seems like a good enough reason to me. So think about it, and figure it out. Get back to me.”

  His dramatic pause was hard to miss.

  “But don’t plan on being my friend if you say no.”

  And again, I was listening to a dial tone.

  10.

  Once I Was Not Such a Fibber

  IN THE END, NANA DID RETURN THAT DAY, BUT NOT until the early afternoon. By the time she came back, the night’s thin layer of flurries had melted completely and the day felt unseasonably warm. But I was inside, on the verge of nervous collapse, when the yellow taxicab pulled up and opened its door. Nana leaped out, very much alive and with a brand of energy I hadn’t seen in some time. She handed a few crumpled bills to her driver, then plowed across the soggy brown yard in her pull-on duck boots, talking to herself, as the mud squished beneath her. Under her arm, she carried a small globe and a thin sleeve of papers. She walked into the dome, kicked off her boots, slick with sludge, and brushed right by me.

  “Nana,” I said, watching her march away from me. “Where have you been?”

  She turned around and grinned. “Risking action,” she said.

  She wandered into the kitchen and immediately began peeling and coring things from a nearby basket. I watched as she eviscerated a quince and shoved it into the Vita-Mix without looking.

  “I was worried,” I said. “What kind of action?”

  She continued preparing her smoothie without looking at me.
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  “I spoke to the . . . the newspaper people. The North Branch Courier. I spoke about our new endeavor. They’re going to cover our progress. A photographer will arrive in a few days.”

  “A photographer?” I said. “You went to the Courier this morning? I don’t understand. I thought you said the Courier was a daily record of glorified navel-gazing.”

  “They provide exposure. Exposure is what we seek.”

  I could only watch her newly dexterous hands with incredulity.

  “This is moving very quickly,” I said. “We haven’t even fully discussed how it will work.”

  She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

  “Everyone discusses,” she spouted. “Everyone has ideas and they discuss and discuss and emit giant amounts of hot gas. The visionaries are the ones with the courage to act. To risk action. How is humanity supposed to improve if no one ever does anything? Can you please enlighten me, Sebastian? The time has passed for gas! It is time for solids. Manifestations. It is time for us to be visionaries.”

  It was the longest continuous speech I’d heard her utter since the hospital. I stood dumbfounded while she turned on the Vita-Mix and poured a pint of soy milk into its churning depths. The digestive sound of sluicing and gurgling filled the kitchen.

  She stopped it again.

  “Action,” she said. “You see?”

  I WAS STARTING TO SEE. ALL AROUND ME THERE WAS action. And I was standing in the midst of the tempest, trying my very best to dodge flying projectiles. I walked upstairs and looked out of my invisible walls at the town below. Chimney smoke from the houses mixed with the low clouds. Miniature cars propelled and whooshed down the expressway. Specks greeted one another. I tried to imagine a scale painting of Saskatchewan blocking my view of all this. The Yukon over my bed, keeping me from the sky. I imagined living inside a miniature Earth. Could this really be the next stage?

  I sat down at my computer and stared at the blinking cursor. I began to tap out a word with my pointer finger. The word was “Sid.” I tapped another word: “Vicious.” Sid Vicious, the bass player that Jared had mentioned. It took me very little time to find information and work out a brief biography.

  Mr. Vicious had played for a band called the Sex Pistols. He was an illegal-substance abuser. He assaulted people and things. He may have stabbed his true love. And he died at the age of twenty-one just after being released from prison. I studied the black-and-white pictures that accompanied the articles. Sid was rail-thin like me, but he had tall bristly hair and a dirty smudge of a mustache. His eyes were slivers, and his thin brows arched over them fiendishly. Also, he seemed to be wearing the same pants in every photo. He looked not dissimilar to a picture of a feral child I’d seen in one of Nana’s books about scientific curiosities. I read on for the better part of an hour before I came across the first nugget of information that actually meant something to me.

  Sid Vicious did not know how to play the bass.

  I had to read the sentence twice just to make sure it was true. But it was. He barely understood how to make the instrument work. Most of his parts on the Sex Pistols’ albums were performed by other musicians. And, in concert, his amplifier was rarely plugged in. He could play a few notes, but his addiction to needle narcotics normally kept him from performing them in the right order. Yet here was his picture on every Web site devoted to punk music. There were posters and mugs and figurines with his sneering face on them. He was a hero. A quote of Bucky’s immediately came to mind, one that Nana had been repeating to me since I was young: “Dare to be naive.”

  An improbable truth occurred to me, something I should have known all along. You didn’t have to know how to play the bass to be a bassist. At least, not if you were a practitioner of punk. Artlessness was, perhaps, the main idea. Jared had hinted that this was so. If you dared to be naive, and dove in without guile and accepted notions, you could still be successful. Thus, it was possible that with enough practice I could learn how not-to-play-the-bass, in just the right way. In the spirit of this new endeavor, I decided not to think about it all too much. I simply composed an e-mail. I risked action.

  Dear Jared,

  I accept the offer to play music in your band. When is the next meeting of the “Youth’s Group?”

  I have a plan. It is a naive plan.

  Sincerely,

  Sebastian

  P.S. Did Sid impale Nancy or not? Theories?

  What I did not tell Jared, and what I admitted to myself only later, was that there was another part of Sid’s story that had affected me. It wasn’t so much in the text of the dramatic odes composed to him on the Web. And it certainly wasn’t his later attempts at singing, which I heard in snippets on poorly recorded files. It was the fact that in every other photograph of Vicious, he was standing side by side with a brooding, mysterious blond girl, who appeared entirely devoted to him.

  Granted, her hair was curly, not brushed into straight sheets, and she wore so much dark goo on her eyes it was hard to tell if they were really there. But from the right angle, Nancy Spungen of the infamous Sid and Nancy slightly resembled Meredith Whitcomb. At least the sneer was identical. And the hunched posture. And this man who was skinny and strange and a tad weasel-like had managed to capture her affections. Of course, things had ended very poorly, but just the fact that they had been romantic at all was nothing short of inspiring.

  I didn’t let my imagination wander any further than that. I just took note of the fact that at some point in history, an odd skeletal teen had entranced a beautiful angry woman. Such things were possible. And if this was possible, other things were possible. Like being in a band, for example. I checked my e-mail, to see if Jared had responded. His message was short and to the point.

  Sunday 5:00.

  Come to my house. Wear slacks.

  P.S. Sid was framed.

  I went back downstairs and found Nana in her room, sketching again. She was lying down with her head facing the sky, holding the drawing pad above her. The sounds of male orca whale calls emanated from the small stereo on her dresser. I smelled the aroma of a recently lit scented candle. Sage. Egyptian musk, perhaps. She paid little attention to me when I stepped into her room. Nana had entered these obsessive fugue states before, but this one was the most all-consuming I had seen. I walked slowly up next to her until my shadow was blocking her drawing light.

  “He’s been dead for twenty-five years,” she said. “Did you know that?”

  I thought immediately of my father, but that had been only ten years.

  “Bucky,” she said, anticipating my question. “I . . . somehow. The day passed and I did not remember. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death.”

  She looked up at me, puzzled.

  “He would have been one hundred and thirteen.” Her mouth stretched into a sad smile. “How could I forget? I never forget.”

  “If he were here,” I said, “I’m sure he would have forgiven you already.”

  Nana took a long drink of water from a smudged glass next to her. She closed her eyes and breathed in through her nose. The squawk of a whale brought her back.

  “If he were here,” she said, “I wouldn’t have to remember his death.”

  “Did you go to the funeral?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Not invited.”

  “Why not?”

  “His children never knew me,” she said. “No one close to him really did. But it was better that way. I never had to compete, you see. My time was my time only. And otherwise, I kept him in my thoughts. Like I do now.”

  The flames of the candles shivered as Nana stood up and stretched. She coughed a little, and stood facing me. “Did you need something, Sebastian?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but I can come back if you’re . . .”

  “I’m perfectly fine,” she said. “What is it?”

  �
�I wondered,” I said, a quaver in my voice, “how much paint will we need to begin with?”

  Nana sat down on her bed. She shucked off a pair of slippers, exposing her small white feet. She cracked her toes. “A practical question,” she said.

  Her eyelids dropped closed.

  “I’m imagining a few gallons. Something green. We’ll want to start with Antarctica, the South Pole. It’s always blue or white on maps. But I just don’t envision that. On our Geoscope, it will be verdant.”

  I took a deep breath and then looked down into Nana’s spacey gaze.

  “When I purchased the spray paint, the owner of the shop told me about a sale . . . this upcoming Sunday. I think it would be to our economical advantage to buy the paint then. Is that satisfactory?”

  Nana adjusted herself so she was recumbent with her back leaning against the wall. She picked up a drawing pencil and chewed on the end.

  “Sebastian, Sebastian,” she said.

  I waited silently for her rebuke. From the stereo came another honking shriek of an orca, and I flinched.

  “Of course,” she said. “I’m proud of your business sense. Very shrewd. Bucky would be proud. It took him such a long time to . . . cultivate that talent.”

  “Sunday, then,” I said. “I’ll go for you Sunday.”

  Nana didn’t respond. She just picked up her sketch pad from the floor and began to draw again. As I was leaving, I heard her talking to herself again. “Twenty-five years,” she mumbled. I watched from the doorway as her pencil floated across the pad, her thin hand as steady and guided as always. When I was out of her sight, one last whale scream emerged from the distant stereo as if joining me in a private celebration.

  11.

  In the Supply Closet of the Lord