PRAISE FOR
The House of Tomorrow
“Unexpectedly pits the teachings of R. Buckminster Fuller, architect, philosopher, and futurist, against the misanthropy of punk. There’s only going to be one winner, but it is a measure of Bognanni’s empathy that his narrator’s decision is never an easy one . . . Sebastian—part Candide, part Christopher Boone from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time—has landed deep inside the world of Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“At its best, Peter Bognanni’s House of Tomorrow is tight and quick enough to pull you into its rhythm. It draws its audience in the way a steady bass line does—to the waxing and waning of the story’s tides . . . Bognanni’s ability to recall the anger, fear, and yearnings of being sixteen as well as the rush of possibilities on the horizon is also what makes the book so engaging.”
—The Boston Globe
“I adore this book, not only for its ability to love our ludicrous hearts but also for the way it makes dividing questions about whether good literature comes from the heart or the mind seem like nonsense.”
—Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances
“A character-driven, funny novel about loneliness and the attitudes we adopt—whether scientific detachment or teen sass—to mask our essential need for one another . . . a beguiling coming-of-age story whose particular, eccentric charm plays true.”
—The Kansas City Star
“The House of Tomorrow, as its title and premise promise, marries the visionary with the everyday, the whiz-bang with the domestic, and does it with beauty, humor, and love for each one of its flawed characters. Peter Bognanni remembers all the romance and awkwardness of teen life and teen music. His first novel is headlong, hilarious, heartbreaking.”
—Elizabeth McCracken
“A young man lives with his grandmother in a geodesic dome in Iowa. No surprise: He’s a total oddball. Yes, surprise: His life makes for a sweet novel.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“The mantra recited every morning by the main character in Peter Bognanni’s novel The House of Tomorrow: ‘I will use my mind, not just my regular brain lobes.’ (I like that more every time I read it.)”
—New York Magazine
“Under the screaming rage of a Misfits or Ramones song, you can hear a heart beating, and that’s where Peter Bognanni gets to work—his wild and tender book reveals how much a couple of scared boys can say to each other with a little hateful noise.”
—Rob Sheffield, author of Love Is a Mix Tape
“In this winningly precocious debut novel, a teenager raised in a geodesic dome by an R. Buckminster Fuller–obsessed grandmother escapes from captivity, discovers the Misfits, and explores the mystical outside world of adolescent rebelling and crap punk rock.”
—Details
“Funny and unique . . . An honest, noisy, and raucous look at friendship and how loud music can make almost everything better.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“It’s sort of like the next Gilbert Grape.”
—Des Moines Register
“This interesting array of characters and emphasis on a first introduction to music make this novel an enjoyable read. If you love music, have ever felt like an outcast, or live in Hobbit Hollow, I highly recommend you pick up this book.”
—Petoskey (MI) News Review
“Explores the unlikely friendship of two social outcasts and their desperation to be heard . . . fun and lively.”
—Booklist
“Peter Bognanni would probably not appreciate the word ‘sweet’ being used to describe his punk-rock-fueled debut novel, The House of Tomorrow, but parts of the story are decidedly so. The House of Tomorrow is a hard-edged but heartrending story of growing up strange in a small Midwestern town. Anyone who’s been there is sure to relate to Sebastian and Jared—and to hope that The Rash lives on beyond its monumental and unforgettable debut.”
—BookPage
“Refreshingly, he is not interested in street cred or the namedropping that can spoil a punk novel—Bognanni is interested in depicting adolescence as it really is . . . The House of Tomorrow isn’t London Calling or Pink Flag—but it is a welcome addition to the recent collection of punk rock bildungsromans . . . as truly pleasurable an achievement as the Misfits’ Collection I.”
—The Rumpus
BOOKS BY PETER BOGNANNI
The House of Tomorrow
Things I’m Seeing Without You
SPEAK
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
First published in the United States of America by Amy Einhorn, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2010
Published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2011
This edition published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2018
Copyright © 2010 by Peter Bognanni
Illustration here by Meighan Cavanaugh
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE AMY EINHORN EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Bognanni, Peter.
The house of tomorrow / Peter Bognanni.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-399-15609-0
1. Young men—Fiction. 2. Grandmothers—Fiction. 3. Fuller, R. Buckminster (Richard Buckminster). 1895–1983—Influence—Fiction. 4. Social isolation—Fiction. 5. Maturation (Psychology)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.O428H68 2010 2009023542
813'.6—dc22
Speak ISBN 9781984835796
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third- party websites or their content.
Version_1
For my family, and of course, Junita
Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.
—R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
Gabba gabba. We accept you. We accept you as one of us!
—THE RAMONES
Contents
Praise for The House of Tomorrow
Also by Peter Boganni
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1. - Welcome to the Future
Chapter 2. - A Metaphysical Connection
Chapter 3. - The Domecoming
Chapter 4. - Guinea Pig S
Chapter 5. - The Lone Comprehensivist
Chapter 6. - The True Path of the Voyager
Chapter 7. - Tensional Forces
Chapter 8. - How Little I K
now
Chapter 9. - The Greater Intellect Speaks!
Chapter 10. - Once I Was Not Such a Fibber
Chapter 11. - In the Supply Closet of the Lord
Chapter 12. - Transmissions
Chapter 13. - A Model World
Chapter 14. - Experiments in Rocking
Chapter 15. - Practice
Chapter 16. - The Complexities of Physical Reality
Chapter 17. - Elements in Motion
Chapter 18. - Divide and Conquer
Chapter 19. - The Architecture of Noise
Chapter 20. - The Mission
Chapter 21. - The Sublime Wonder of Human Physicality
Chapter 22. - Tests of the Will
Chapter 23. - Applied Synergetics
Chapter 24. - Familiar Ghosts
Chapter 25. - Calculations
Chapter 26. - Return of The Rash
Chapter 27. - Weightless on the Ground
Chapter 28. - On the Verge of Something
Chapter 29. - The World’s Forgotten Boys
Chapter 30. - Guitar Gods of North Branch
Chapter 31. - The Intervention
Chapter 32. - Spaceship Rock
Chapter 33. - See You Forever
Acknowledgements
Excerpt from Things I’m Seeing Without You
About the Author
1.
Welcome to the Future
EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING IS PART OF A GRAND universal plan. That’s what my Nana always says. We’re not alive just to lounge around and contemplate our umbilicus. We’re metaphysical beings! Open us up, and there’s more rattling around in there than just brain sacs and fatty tissue. We are full of imperceptible essences. Invisible spectrums. Patterns. Ideas. We’re containers of awesome phenomena! Which is why it’s important to live right. You have to be attuned to what’s around you, and you have to keep from clogging your receptors with crap. According to my Nana, the universe is sending signals every day, and it’s up to us whether or not we want to listen. We can either perk up our ears, or walk around like dead piles of dermis. I always preferred the former. Which is why I found myself up on top of the roof of our dome on that fall Sunday when everything began.
I couldn’t tell you for certain that I’d ever heard messages from space up there, but at the very least I had a tremendous view. Hanging in the brisk October air, Anver heavy-duty suction cups on my hands, and a no-slip rubber guard harness around my chest, I could see the entire town of North Branch arranged with the uniformity of an architectural model. It stretched below me like a wide lake of split-level dwellings, flowing over the small hills and dips in the eastern Iowa landscape. And above the horizon was the endless ice-blue troposphere, nearly unobstructed save for the waving branches of our black walnut trees.
It was this towering group of trees that gave me my official reason for ascending to the top of the dome that Sunday. Every autumn they bombarded our translucent roof with pungent green-shelled nuts the size of tennis balls, and it was my job to climb the walls like a salamander and scrub away the stains. For this purpose, I kept a large squeegee strapped to my back along with a small bucket of orange-scented cleaning solution. And once attached to the glass, I scrubbed each insulated panel, and kept an eye on my Nana inside at the same time. Right beneath me, through a soapy triangle of glass, I could see her on her NordicTrack, grinding away. Click-Clackita Click-Clackita Click-Clackita. The sound was like a distant Zephyr train.
Just the day before, she had told me that most human beings only saw a hundred-thousandth of the world in their lifetime. Maybe a ten-thousandth if they traveled a lot. Only she called the world “Spaceship Earth,” because that’s what Buckminster Fuller called it, and she thought he was humanity’s last real genius. Either way, I was sure I could see my entire portion from this spot. Up on top of the dome, my view was quite possibly someone’s whole lifetime.
“Sebastian!” Nana called from below, her voice echoing off the glass. “Are you watching for visitors up there?”
She stood outside now, squinting up at me.
“Affirmative!” I yelled. “No sightings at present.”
Nana called the weekend tourists to our home “visitors,” as if they were alighting on our lawn from other galaxies in blinking mother ships. In reality, most of them made the trip in large automobiles, and it was my job to spot them from my perch. It was early yet for visitors, though. Every Saturday and Sunday we opened our home to the public at nine o’clock sharp, but it was usually ten or ten-thirty before anyone arrived. According to Nana, people in the Midwest had to finish with church before they could seek any leisure. They had to exalt and repent, and perhaps attend potlucks.
We had begun giving tours a few years back because our home was the first Geodesic Dome ever constructed in Iowa, and there seemed to be some interest in that fact. In truth, we were only a moderate-to-marginal tourist attraction, but most years we made enough to supplement Nana’s modest pension, which is all we needed. No matter how much we brought in, though, I was supposed to behave as if we were overrun with business. Negative thinking sent out the wrong kind of messages to the higher powers, Nana said. Each negative thought was like a hemorrhoid to the controlling forces of the universe. It burned them endlessly.
“Make sure to get the northwest side, Sebastian!” Nana shouted now. “I spotted some bird waste over there. Then come down for breakfast. I need to speak with you.”
“Will do,” I said.
I took a deep inhalation of chill air and began pressing and releasing my suction cups, moving over the apex of the dome to tend to the bird stains. At the age of sixteen, I was already the same height my father had been when he passed away, and my lanky frame covered a surprising amount of space on the dome. When I adjusted myself perfectly on the top, every major landmark in town was visible with the naked eye.
If I looked to the east, for example, I could see the slanted water tower that read “North Branch Beavers” in rust-colored lettering. Farther north was the symmetrical row of small businesses in the town square. Then past the businesses, a little to the west, was the giant brick castle of James K. Polk High School, which I was not allowed to attend because Nana said their worldview was myopic and wrong. And finally, to the far west, I could see all four lanes of the expressway, including the exact exit that the tourists took to visit us. I couldn’t see our garish billboards, but I knew they were there, facing the road, imploring every motorist to visit “The House of Tomorrow.”
I scraped my squeegee slowly over the last of the stains, and then pressed and released all the way down to the brittle grass of our lawn. I had seen on the World Wide Web once that a man from France climbed the Empire State Building with just his hands and feet. No cups. No harness. He was arrested, but he claimed it was worth it to know he was really alive. It was a secret goal of mine to one day scale our dome in this fashion, but for now I played it safe. My sneakers touched the ground with a satisfying crunch, and I undid my harness and let it drop to the ground. I walked around to the front yard and turned the knob on our clear front door.
There sat Nana in our open dining room, imbibing one of her signature smoothies. Every day, she performed the morning ritual of dumping things in her Vita-Mix, a machine that pulverized her breakfast. Anything that could fit through the clear plastic shaft was fair game for one of these shakes. This morning, the concoction was the same color fuchsia as her tracksuit. She owned a rainbow of these sleek workout suits, and this particular one was made of pink, sweat-resistant fibers and had a matching headband for her shock of flour-white hair.
“Oh, Sebastian,” she said, glancing up at me. “You look like a cave dweller, or one of those horrible men who collect all the lumber.”
“A lumberjack?”
; “Yes,” she said. “Exactly. One of those.”
I was wearing the same blue flannel shirt and jeans that I always wore. But my dirty-blond hair had gotten a tad shaggy around the ears. I pushed it off my forehead and sat down. Nana leaned over and kissed the top of my head.
“Is your room arranged to specification?” she asked, her mouth hovering back over her straw.
“Affirmative,” I said.
“Have you performed your toilet?”
“With startling success,” I said.
“A yes or no answer would be adequate,” she said.
She sipped again on her smoothie, then frowned and let the straw rest against the lip of the glass. “Well, enough idle chatter,” she said. “We need to have a conference.”
I moved in closer and watched her face. It was inexplicably tight for a woman of her age. You had to stare at it closely before you could begin to find the thin wrinkles, like hairline cracks, in the firm skin around her mouth and eyes. And it was only when she glowered or furrowed her brow in the deepest of concentration that you could tell that she had lived nearly eighty years on this earth.
“I’ll be direct with you, Sebastian,” she said. “The heating bill is going up this month, and we need to maximize all sales efforts in the gift shop. Do you read me?”
“I think so.”
She slurped at her shake.
“Additional capital must be raised. I need you to try to sell a photograph today. That’s your quota,” she said.
I sighed softly.
“What?” she said. “What is that dramatic breathing?”
“The photographs are costly,” I said.
“The photographs are art objects,” she snapped, “and they are priced accordingly.”
I sighed again.
“Would it surprise you to know that your numbers are down since August?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
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