Our glasses were still in the air.
“We’ve started small, showing people in town a new way to live with our tours. But gradually, once your education is complete, you can take our operation to the next level. Who better to do it? With no parents, you belong to the universe now. Just like Bucky. You can teach people to be free!”
She clinked her glass against mine. Her cheeks shone with tear lines. I drank quickly and felt a happy dizziness come over me. Nana came around to my side of the table to hold me in a long hug. I could feel the relief in her body at having told me these things. Her sinewy muscles were slack. Her chest heaved in great liberated breaths.
Nana poured us more wine, and I believe I became a little inebriated. We brainstormed the rest of the night, trading ideas about advertising the dome tours. Eventually, Nana fell asleep at the kitchen table, a tired smile on her face. I transferred a large Vellux blanket from our couch to her shoulders. I turned out the light and imagined the dome switching off like a giant lightbulb. I walked upstairs and my body felt weightless the way it did when I was a child. It was exhilarating. I had been chosen for something. I had a path. I fell immediately and heavily into dreamless sleep.
EVER SINCE THAT NIGHT, HOWEVER, NANA HAD pressured me even harder to excel in my studies. She had never repeated the things she told me, but I could tell I was supposed to have reached a new level of understanding. I wasn’t just being raised by Nana; I was being groomed to lead a social revolution. Our dome was not just a house; it was a starting point. Centrally located even. How much more central could you get than Iowa?
But I began to think more and more about her plans, and whether or not I fully understood them. The telepathic bond I’d explained to Jared was, in actuality, a complete mystery to me. It was wholly possible that Nana could sense me and see me wherever I was, but thus far, I only saw Nana when she was in front of me. And I found myself wondering now if she could see me in her mind at all times.
If my father had still been alive, I would have asked him what it was like when he was a boy. Did Nana know he was going to scrape his knee before he scraped it? Did she appear in his doorway with all his secrets on her lips? And most important, was he originally on my path? Was he going to save the world, before he strayed and chose to study archaeology? He had eventually chosen to learn about the past instead of the future. Why? There were so many questions I wanted to ask him.
I had only seen one photograph of him at my age. He was in a house with right-angled walls, in a kitchen. He was looking at the camera, a sanguine smile on his face. His hair was long and he wore a thin T-shirt that frayed at the bottom. He was spreading peanut butter on bread. The flash of the camera reflected in his eye. He looked happy. But it seemed to me that everyone looked happy in faded photos. Family history was written by mothers and grandmothers, and the frowns were clipped away.
In every picture of me taken in the dome, I was laughing, smiling, staring at something in marvel. Surely, there had to be some photos from those first days, when my eyes were always red, and I was wandering around my new home in utter confusion. I wondered where those photos had gone.
5.
The Lone Comprehensivist
THE NEXT DAY PASSED IN A STORM OF RECIPROCALS and inverse functions. I studied trigonometry all day long, and by evening my mind had reached a wall. I could progress no further, and I was thinking only of one thing: Jared had asked me to call him. Nana had always kept our phone line active in case of calls about dome tours. But that was all it was employed for. I had never once attempted a personal phone call, and I was fairly sure that now was not the ideal first time to try. As the clock neared six, I sat on the floor of my upstairs room, rubbing my temples, unable to move.
I thought back to the last line of Jared’s e-mail. The first evidence of real curiosity I had heard from him, “Can you really see from a hundred feet up?” I wanted to call and tell him, “Yes. Yes, I can see from a hundred feet up! I can see your whole town. I’ve probably seen you walking around. You were a speck!” I looked back down at my textbook and tried to clear the thoughts from my head.
Then there was a knock at my door. I looked over and Nana peeked her head in. She looked pale, maybe even frightened. I instinctively held out my completed homework pages, offering them to her. Nana ignored them.
“Listen to me, Sebastian,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I’m taking . . . a cab to the hospital for a check,” she said.
“You are?”
I could barely contain my shock.
“These people,” she said, “they don’t—they are truly the worst kind. One thing. That’s all they know. They learn their thing and the world goes nowhere.”
She looked over at the book open on my lap.
“You are progressing with your lessons?”
“I am,” I said.
She nodded.
“It’s all connected, you know,” she said with perfect lucidity. “You learn these things, then you get closer.”
“Closer to what?”
She opened the door all the way, and my question was lost in the creak. I could see she was already dressed to go out. She wore her long thermal raincoat over a pea green tracksuit, and she toted the small dark leather satchel she used in lieu of a purse.
“There is supper down on the . . .”
“Table.” I said it a bit too quickly.
She repeated the word under her breath. She turned around again.
“I’ll return,” she said.
Then she left, and I listened with disbelief as she took each stair, one at a time. I watched from above as she ventured out onto our semicircular drive and met a yellow cab. Then I watched the cab depart. I closed my eyes and counted to one hundred. I opened them again. She was still gone. Rapidly, I made my way down the stairs and grabbed our old cordless telephone in my sweaty palm. The dial tone droned in my ear. I fished the receipt out of my pocket and entered the telephone number written above Jared’s e-mail address. It rang four times. Then a voice answered. But it was not Jared’s. It was a higher voice.
“What?” it asked me.
I held my breath for a moment.
“Hello,” I said.
“I’m here, big guy,” she said. “Talk to me.”
“Mrs. Whitcomb?” I asked.
There was laughter at that. Not giggling, but a few real hearty laughs.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “Who is this?”
“Sebastian Prendergast,” I said.
“Sebastian who?” she said. “How did you get my number?”
“From Mrs. Whitcomb,” I said.
“Are you a comedian, Sebastian?” she said. “Do your friends think you’re the funny one?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t have any friends.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” she said.
“I think there’s been a misapprehension,” I said.
“A what?”
“I’m calling . . .” I began.
“I know why you’re calling,” she said. “But it doesn’t seem like you’ve got the balls to ask me anything.”
At that point, there was some mumbling in the background, and I heard Jared’s voice, low and loud. Then there was arguing, and I heard a bevy of strange words, which included “hoochie.” After that, his caustic voice was alive on the line.
“Hello?” he said.
“Jared?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Jared, who was that?”
“Oh, that was just Meredith,” he said.
“Who?”
“My sister, Sebastian. This is her private line. My mom must have given you this number by mistake.”
“Oh.”
“I’m in her room now,” he said. “It smells like fucking apricots or something.”
He sniffed so loud I could hear it on the phone.
“What do you mean?”
“Why did you call me? Did you want something?” he asked.
I felt for a moment the urge to start crying.
“No,” I said.
“So you just wanted to chat like a couple of girls?”
“I suppose.”
“Are you in the dome right now?” he added.
“I live here,” I said. “I live in the dome.”
“Wild,” he said.
“Jared, I received your e-mail. You instructed me to call you . . .”
“You got me thinking about the Ramones,” he said. “With your stupid glue question? I’ve been learning some of their songs. Do you know they stole all their equipment?”
I said nothing.
“Yeah, they just realized they wanted to start a band so they stole a bunch of equipment and taught themselves to play. I’ve been learning ‘Beat on the Brat.’ Da-da-da-nuh-nuh-Nuh. Da-da-da-nuh-nuh-Nuh! The bass part is so easy anyone could play it.”
“I’ve been investigating music, too,” I said.
“Say ‘listening,’ ” said Jared. “Jesus. Say, ‘I’ve been listening to some music.’ I honestly want to scream in your fucking ear when you talk like that sometimes.”
I was quiet.
“No offense,” he said.
“I’ve been listening to some music,” I said.
“All right!” he said. “Okay. Anything good?”
“I don’t know what’s good yet.”
“Yeah,” he said. “What’s good, right? That’s the point. That’s the whole point. If I wanted to listen to good music like my sister, I’d just suck on a muffler. Who wants to listen to good music? Maybe we should all listen to the radio and buy everything on TV.”
“An important point,” I said.
Outside it was almost completely dark. Inside, I could see my dinner across the room on the table. Polenta with some kind of greens. I could tell just by looking that it was cold.
“Jared,” I said.
“It’s not apricots, actually,” he said, “it’s mango. I fucking hate mango.”
“Jared,” I repeated.
“What?”
“I want to come over to your house and listen to music.”
I spoke so fast I was amazed he was able to comprehend it. But he was.
“Not right now,” he said. “I can’t right now.”
“I meant at some date in the future,” I said.
“The future,” said Jared.
“Yes,” I said. “The future.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“I’ll let you know agreeable times,” I said. “I can call you again and tell you some times.”
Jared paused for a moment, and I heard him yelling out the doorway.
“Relax, you ho-bag!” he screamed.
Then his voice got so loud I couldn’t tell what he said.
“Jared?”
“Sorry. That was Meredith,” he said. “She wants her phone back.”
“Do you have to terminate the conversation?”
“Yeah,” he said. “In a minute.”
His voice was much quieter now. I was standing in the murky light of the dome. I could see my reflection in the glass, looking back at me.
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “What do you do for fun over there, Sebastian?”
“Fun?” I said.
“I mean, when you’re not telepathically communicating with your grandma.”
“Well . . .” I said.
“C’mon,” he interrupted. “You can’t always be doing weird shit in that globe. You have to have some free time. You have to have a day off.”
“I climb sometimes,” I said. “I climb up on the roof.”
“Really?” he asked. “You scale that mother?”
“I have suction cups. It’s my task to clean the surface of the glass. Nana says it attracts more tourists.”
“Sebastian,” he said, “that’s pretty fucking wicked.”
“I asked for the coordinates to your house, remember?”
“You can see my house from up there?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I can see quite a vista.”
There was another silence.
“But you never go anywhere.”
“What do you mean?”
“You never go any of the places that you watch.”
“Not very often, no,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. He started to speak again, but then there was another shout from his end and I couldn’t hear him. I could only hear Meredith, who said, “Get off my phone with that weirdo, already!”
Jared just sighed this time. “Okay, Sebastian,” he said. “I guess I have to go.”
“I’ll call you with possible times,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “You do that. You call me with possible times.”
The line went dead right after he spoke, and I removed the hot phone from my ear. I deposited the device back in its cradle, then looked around the room. The sun was completely gone now, and the woods were dark all around me. All I could see when I pressed my face to the glass were the few boughs extending over the dome like giant skeletal fingers. I suddenly found myself ravenous, faint even. I walked over to my cold dinner and began forking it mechanically into my mouth, shoveling huge bites with my spoon, holding the food down with my thumb. The greens crunched, bitter and fibrous. The polenta was a bursting mouthful of mush. By the time I thought to sit down, everything had been consumed.
My chest ached. But it was not from the food. It had started bothering me soon after I put the phone down. I pressed a hand to my sternum and left it there a moment. I took a few deep breaths and let them out slowly. I walked a slow lap around the room. Improbably, it wasn’t until Nana walked in the door a few minutes later that I realized what was bothering me: I’d forgotten what loneliness felt like. But now it had moved from the far reaches of my mind, where it usually sat, to a cramped place just beneath my ribs. I could feel it swelling in my chest.
“Are you okay?” asked Nana, stepping inside. “Why do you look like that?”
“Like what?” I said.
She brushed past me and picked up my plate from the sink.
“Nana?” I said.
I looked at her arm then. There was a puncture where they had drawn blood at the hospital. The skin around the small wound was yellow and purple.
“Yes?” she said.
She was sweating, and her hand shook almost imperceptibly while she ran water over my plate.
“I can do that,” I said. “Why don’t you sit down and rest.”
“I’m fine,” she said.
I walked up to her and held out my hand for the dish. She reluctantly handed it over. I began to cover it with our herbal dish soap, and Nana sat down at the table. It took her a moment to relax, but when she leaned back in her chair, I could see she was completely exhausted. In no time, her eyes were closed tight. I watched her closely. Even in repose, her face looked pained.
“Would it be so wrong?” I mumbled. “Just to have someone else . . .”
“What are you saying to me!” Nana said. “Speak up.”
She pushed open her heavy lids to glance at me. I scrubbed at her dish.
“Nothing,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”
6.
The True Path of the Voyager
NEXT WEEK ARRIVED AND NANA LOCKED HERSELF in her room to work on a secret project. I barely heard a noise for two days. And when she came out at sundown of the second, it was just to ask my help with something. I entered her room and only then did I see the fruits of her labor: an enormous banner made from a bedsheet. It read CLOSED TO PUBLIC in greasepaint. She needed me to climb a ladder outside and help her to drape it over the en
trance of the dome. She was already gathering up the banner while I tried to make sense of everything.
“Are you sure about this, Nana?” I asked. “You want to close?”
She didn’t answer. She just walked outside and began to set up the ladder for me. I followed and clambered up in a daze. Then I spent an hour in the cold, trying to get the banner to hang straight. When I went back inside, it still seemed crooked. But it was done. Ever since I had lived in the dome we’d given tours. It was simply a part of life there. Now there was a bedsheet rippling in the raw fall wind. A curtain had closed.
On the couch, I tried to thaw my hands with breath. Nana sat nearby, expressionless.
“When do you think we might reopen?” I asked.
Again, no answer. She got up and walked into her bedroom, and I expected her to stay there for the rest of the day. I expected yet another day of silence. But instead she emerged minutes later with some money in her hand, a wad of bills.
“Take your bicycle to town,” she said. “Purchase paint and alter our signs.”
She dropped the money. It landed in my lap with a flutter.
“The highway signs?” I said.
I waited for her to address my question. She did not.
“Where do I buy the paint?” I asked.
“You can access that information in the . . .”
I waited again while she searched for the word.
“The phone book,” I said, finally.
She was expecting me to get up right away, but I sat where I was. The money stayed in my lap, scattered across my thighs.
“What?” she said. “What is it?”
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
She did not respond.
“Can I ask why you don’t just let me administer the tours? We could stay open. I could do it! Until you’re properly . . . rejuvenated.”
She shook her head slowly from side to side.
“I’ve seen you guide them a hundred times,” I said. “I’ve even committed everything you say to memory. It would have been impossible not to. So I . . .”
The House of Tomorrow Page 5